In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.”
That impressed me, because it’s true.
How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies.
I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.
But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.
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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?
These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.
Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.
In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.
One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them.
The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.”
The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.
In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it.
So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities.
In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.
In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.
My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.
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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.
See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
