Can Ebert Be Honest? (Listen to Ken Jacobs...)

I love Roger Ebert. I’ll get that out right at the beginning; I don’t want my post to be misconstrued. I value every one of his reviews that I have read for one reason or another. They’ve been helpful to me not only as critical assessments of films, but also as style guides in terms of writing personable, helpful reviews. That said, I’d be dishonest to say that sometimes I have some misgivings about loving him so much…

Firstly, I should point out that you may take the unsophisticated route out of this whole argument by telling me that no review is ever “wrong”… “How could it be?” you would say. “It’s a review!” But that line of argument shoots out of a silly premise; if every review is “right” in some sense, then why have reviews at all? I’d argue that the mere presence of reviews points to the notion that films, books, and music are either “good” or “bad.” Surely, if films are “good” and bad,” then reviews can be “right” or wrong?” (Or at least some derivative of that…admit to me at least “fair” or “unfair.”)

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In a few of his reviews, Ebert professes to a kind of code by which he tries to rate films. For the review of the horror film The Human Centipede (PLEASE don’t look this up if you’re not already familiar—it’s disgusting and possibly nauseating to think about), he refused to attach any kind of star rating, noting:

“I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.”

Ebert’s review is careful; most of the text describes the plot and the characters, etc. as well as helpfully providing potential moviegoers with a few words of warning. But a straightforward opinion on the film is lrgely absent; if you return to the quote above, he does not define the film as either “good” or “bad.”

“I have long attempted to take a generic approach. In other words, is a film true to its genre and does it deliver what its audiences presumably expect? The Human Centipede scores high on this scale. It is depraved and disgusting enough to satisfy the most demanding midnight movie fan.”

But, I stop and ask, is that the point of criticism? I think that trying to step into the shoes (or eyes or whatever uncomfortable clichéd metaphor you’d like…) of some “midnight movie fan” isn’t quite the right approach. (You would like [blank] film if you are [blank] kind of person.) If a film is vile and doesn’t seem to have any redeeming quality (in Ebert’s not-so-amateur opinion), then why does he hold back?

The fear of overstepping boundaries seems evident to me at least; maybe Ebert isn’t the biggest fan of violent, depraved horror films…I understand that. But while I understand that he might not feel comfortable dismissing the film, not being a midnight movie fanboy himself, but he can still tell us that he thinks it’s crap.

I’ll offer myself as an example: I’m not much of a classical music fan. I can point out a composer here and there and sit down and enjoy some “Carnival of the Animals,” but as soon as you hit the Heitor Villa-Lobos and Bach’s massive back catalogue, I’m out of there. But as uncomfortable as I am with classical music, if I were asked to write a review about it, I’d be willing to stick my head out there and say something. It would silly to pretend myself into the shoes (yes, that metaphor again) of an aged symphony-goer and simply offer that I’m sure they would like it. If I think it’s boring…well…then I should say so!

(I’m afraid I’ve demotec myself a little in some of your eyes with that statement. I’m not sure Bach-bashing is ever the answer…)

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I’m not going to pretend that any of these issues are easy fixes or tell you that Roger Ebert’s job is simple. His job, in fact, is often very difficult. He must balance his personal opinion with the popular opinion. Sometimes his reviews of more popular, “box-office” films can’t help but follow the “generic approach” mentioned above.

For example, his review of The Longest Yard, the 2005 remake of the 1974 film, centers on his thumbs-up reaction to the film on first viewing (back when he was still taping the television show with Richard Roeper). Having been to Cannes in the meantime and seen a whole other side of the film world, he returns to this review of The Longest Yard and struggles with how to justify his thumbs-up reaction. He patiently concludes his way to three stars.

“I do not say that I was wrong about the film. I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to The Longest Yard at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for.

“Yet there are those whose entire lives as moviegoers are spent within the reassuring confines of such entertainments. In many cities and some states, there are few ways for them to get their eyes on movies that can feed their souls. They will have to be content with a movie in which Adam Sandler plays an alcoholic has-been football hero…”

Ebert zeroes in on these “moviegoers” who “can[not] feed their souls.” The end of the review finds him in murky waters as he admits:

“I often practice a generic approach to film criticism, in which the starting point for a review is the question of what a movie sets out to achieve. The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it’s a fair example of what it is.” (my emphasis)

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What I’d like to see is more of the rhetoric that emerges from his “Great Movies” writings. Every week, Ebert returns to a film that he deems “great” and writes a short essay on it. Some of the films collected in this list are obvious, but others are not as well known and intended to break up the notions of canon a little.

A little self-consciously, Ebert admits in an afterword the first 100 “Great Movies,”

“I like to sit in the dark and enjoy movies. I think of old films as a resource of treasures. Movies have been made for 100 years, in color and black and white, in sound and silence, in wide-screen and the classic frame, in English and every other language. To limit yourself to popular hits and recent years is like being Ferris Bueller but staying home all day.

“I believe we are born with our minds open to wonderful experiences, and only slowly learn to limit ourselves to narrow tastes. We are taught to lose our curiosity by the bludgeon-blows of mass marketing, which brainwash us to see ‘hits,’ and discourage exploration.”

And amen to that. Now if only his reviews could pack a little more of that punch! I don’t want to read about how Ebert plays a misguided sort of cinematic detective by trying to fit himself into the intended (or “authorial”) audience of a film. I’ll end with a quote from avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who hits the nail (in my humble opinion) more or less on the head:

“Cinema creates an experience for its viewers and many people come to depend on the experiences provided them by the movies. Most movies are coherent. They are fairy tales that lead to something. Movies have resolutions. Many people live at the movies and tolerate fumbling through their real lives. Life is different; it does not seem to lead to anything. It’s diffuse, yet infinitely penetrable. So, the difference is between a cinema that is a cooked, or organized experience, and one that encourages viewers to reflect and have their own experiences. The difference is between living through the movies and using the movies to enrich your critical engagement with life and the real world. One is an experience that dominates while the other condemns you to be free.” 

See more:

Ebert, Roger. Reviews of The Human Centipede and The Longest Yard, "Great Movies" collection

rogerebert.com

New Malick Film, Looking Back to Days of Heaven

Warming up for the new Terrence Malick film The Tree of Life (which I will hopefully see in theaters next weekend!), I sat down a few hours ago and watched Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven. Gene Siskel once admitted that the film “tests a film critic’s power of description.” I came away from a first viewing with a similar feeling, but buoyed by the naïve thought that all I needed was a second viewing to clear my head. Everything would be crystal clear after a second time through, right? Right!?

Wrong. The film remains (as the more mature parts of me expected it would) fantastically aloof from any attempt of my descriptive powers. And yet I’ll stick my head out there. An outline of the plot: A migrant worker (Richard Gere), his girlfriend (Brooke Adams), and his younger sister (Linda Manz) look for work in the American Midwest of the early twentieth century. They find field hand jobs on the land of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard), who soon enough falls in love with the migrant worker’s girlfriend. Upon learning that the farmer is seriously ill with only a year to live, the worker convinces his girlfriend to marry him for the money…and…well…it’s a tragedy. I’ll say no more.

But (of course!) just putting plot points on the page is the wrong approach (as countless critics have already discovered). The film really isn’t about any of that at all. Rather, the film is an attempt to tell a story using mostly symbolic imagery and the plaintive voiceover of Linda Manz, who plays the worker’s younger sister.

via google.com

The core of the film, as previously mentioned, is image and sound. Malick provides expert twilight views of the plains and sets up eerily suggestive shots: the farmer biting into an apple, the farmer’s lonesome house sitting on hill in the prairie, the worker and his girlfriend huddled against a pile of wheat in a snowstorm. Added to the mix is Manz’s voiceover—a mix of oblique observations about her surroundings, important narrative points, and ideas about human nature (“Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you.”). The result is a beautiful, confusing story that tells the plot described above, but is certainly not limited to it or even really about it. It has the characteristics of a mesmeric dream.

~

But in telling the story this way, the emotions seem to get lost; the jealousy and anger of the tragic love triangle seem subdued by the beautiful imagery and the careful soundtrack. We don’t hear most of the arguments that take place; we hear only snatches of conversation between the main characters. Most of the film concentrates on the careful set pieces of life around the farm.

Writing about the film in his “Great Films” collection, I think Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head when he discusses the so-called “muted emotions” in the film that some writers often criticize:

“Days of Heaven has been praised for its painterly images and evocative score, but criticized for its muted emotions: Although passions erupt in a deadly love triangle, all the feelings are somehow held at arm’s length. This observation is true enough, if you think only about the actions of the adults in the story. But watching this 1978 film again recently, I was struck more than ever with the conviction that this is the story of a teenage girl, told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten down in her heart. We do not feel the full passion of the adults because it is not her passion: It is seen at a distance…”

I think Ebert is sensible to assume that the story belongs to Linda. The film falls into place once we view it through the lens of memory. The story maintains a nostalgic grandeur from the opening credits—shuffling through faded, yellow photos, as if the viewer had found an old family photo album and were thumbing through it. The credits over, Malick plants us firmly in a world characterized by warm colors (sometimes even verging on sepia-toned) and Ennio Morricone’s haunting score, featuring quotations from Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” section of “Carnival of the Animals.”

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While focusing on Linda’s experience is engrossing, I think that such an interpretation is also somewhat limiting. I think something ought to be said for the way in which the characters (besides Linda) are virtual nonentities. The wealthy farmer is never even given a name; when discussed in conversation or in Linda’s voiceover, his presence is always understood implicitly. When I described the plot earlier, I omitted the names “Bill,” “Abby,” and “Linda” because I felt that the names weren’t important. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that they are archetypes, but rather that they are mysteries; we have no idea who they are. Where does Bill go in his time away? Does Abby really love the farmer? But even reduced to mysteries, they are still identifiable by social class.

In one short scene, Bill converses with the farmer and admits to the moment when he realized he wasn’t intelligent like some other people. The farmer says nothing and the gap between them—intellectual, personal, what-have-you—perceptibly widens. The unspoken tension of that moment is echoed in various ways throughout the movie. When Abby first arrives as a field hand, she is not permitted to go near the farmer’s mansion. By the time the migrant workers return for the next year’s harvest, she lives in the mansion as the farmer’s wife. 

via google.com

Is the film then Marxist? The opening scenes of the steel factory in Chicago have a proletariat tinge to them…should we see Bill’s entrance into the life of a migrant worker as a return to serfdom, as if in retrograde motion back to the Middle Ages? What about his subsequent move into the mansion and, later, his abandonment of it?

But regardless of how we choose to read Malick’s masterpiece, it remains both a beautiful and elusive film that asks of the viewer more than does the typical film. I expect The Tree of Life to be much the same.

See more:

Ebert, Roger. “Days of Heaven.” Great Movies.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19971207/REVIEWS08/401010327/1023.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Heaven

A Ghost Fort and Raban's Bad Land

The affluent beach community of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, sits on the westernmost edge of the state at the beginnings of Long Island Sound. The town itself terminates just before a long spit of sand—Napatree Point—stretches a mile and a half out into the ocean. Up until 1938, Fort Road used to run out to the end of the point, summer homes lining it all the way down to Fort Mansfield.

Fort Mansfield, constructed in 1898 as part of an initiative to fortify the East Coast of the United States, was maintained by the Army through a post of at least six men up until the decommission of the batteries in 1926. The luxury homes were built not long afterward. The Hurricane of 1938 came not long after that and made short work of everything on Napatree Point. The houses were washed into the bay and the road disappeared.

Today, all that remains of the fort are two out of the three original batteries. (One has since slid into the ocean due to erosion.) Mostly, the ruins are notable because of their proximity to Watch Hill—only a mile and a half walk along the public beach before you duck up a little path cut into the bluff and emerge onto the top of the old fort.

My brother Manning stands on a part of the old fort; photo by Kayla Safran

I had the luck to visit Fort Mansfield last Friday—a warm, misty day up in Rhode Island. Early season beachgoers dotted the beach as we made the trek out to the end, seemingly oblivious of the ruins lurking in the vegetation at the far end of the point. We crept through the rocks and up the bluff and stood looking down over the ruined fort.

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The truth is that these abandoned places have always been of endless curiosity to me. Some of my favorite adventures include abandoned houses, barns, and dairy farms. It’s not—as might seem the case—simply an interest in history. The history you read above I treat as something more like a prelude or postlude—more like a DVD bonus feature, if you will. I really don’t have much interest in the politics or history behind the fort—more of an interest in the people who were there and what they were like.

My brother and I explore the fort; photo by Kayla Safran

The fort, in that respect, was somewhat of a disappointment. There was not much evidence of the soldiers once stationed there. The bowl carved out by the dunes by the forts was likely the location of the barracks—but everything was being choked out by vegetation. It would have been a wild scramble through poison ivy and other friends to see anything of interest down in the dunes.

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But why that interest? Even I am somewhat at a loss to explain it. It’s not—as I mentioned—merely historical. There’s something very human about an abandoned building; its former residents or workers leave behind not merely a physical presence (in the forms of plates or wheels or tools), but an unnameable, incorporeal presence as well. I guess they call them ghost towns for a reason.

Not that I’m admitting to belief in ghosts, I simply have a fascination with the idea that people were once here and now they are gone. One of the best books I’ve read that delves into the subject ghost towns and the obsession that some people have with them is Jonathan Raban’s nonfiction work Bad Land, about the lonely plains of eastern Montana.

Tomboy, CO (near Telluride); photo by Taylor Coe

The narrative of Raban’s book focuses on the Wollaston family and their difficulties in “homesteading” in Montana during the 1930s and 40s. One of the adventures Raban describes in the book is his trip out into backcountry Montana with the homesteaders’ grandson Mike Wollaston to find the old family property. The description of Wollaston examining the ruins captures the ghost town spirit:

“Here, picking over the scant wreckage of the family farm, he was daydreaming these fragments back to life again; the parlor rising from the grass, new cedar rafters making a grid of the blue sky.

“He stood in a dip, like the crater from a small bomb. ‘This was a fine root cellar they had…’ Near the collapsed cellar a blistered pipe stuck out of the earth. ‘Well-casing,’ Mike said. He flipped a quarter into the pipe. The coin didn’t fall far before it made a hollow, liquid plop. ‘They must have had a little windmill here to pump the water to the house.’ He was building the windmill in his head as he spoke.”

(from Bad Land, by Jonathan Raban, pp. 100-101)

It’s not so much an issue of history; Raban and Wollaston are intrigued partly by the history of people moving across the Great Plains and trying to settle in Montana, but they’re more interested in the details. They’re trying to recreate the lives that played out on the homestead. How did these people live? What would if have been like?

Earlier in the book, Raban makes another interesting observation:

“An emigrant myself, trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West, I took the ruins personally. From the names in the graveyards, I thought I knew the people who had come out here: Europeans, mostly of my grandparents’ generation, for whom belief in America, and its miraculous power of individual redemption, was the last great European religion. Faith in a bright future was written into the carpentry of every house.”

(ibid, pp. 11-12)

~

In some sense, I think we all take these places personally in ways similar to Raban. It’s hard not to do so—these people, despite separations of distance, time, and (possibly) social class, weren’t so different from us. Our lot, so to speak, in the present day, is much the same. They tried very hard to create something that would work and it failed. The reasons differ from place to place, but that dream is still there. The quest to be original and make a place for yourself.

Gilman, CO (near Leadville); photo by Taylor Coe

Visiting these places, I think we all unconsciously think about these things. Of course it was fun to climb around the ruins of the fort…but I couldn’t help but think that men used to march around on top of the same concrete not so long ago, manning the guns and playing war games. What was it like?

See more:

http://www.ghosttowns.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Mansfield

Raban, Jonathan. Bad Land. New York: Vintage, 1997.

The Great Gatsby and Still Life With Woodpecker

Rather than offer any sort of analysis today, I’ll offer two passages about the U.S. for perusal at your pleasure. They come from two novels that I’ve read over the past week. The are totally disparate works and, for that reason, the comparison is interesting.

From The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (this should sound familiar…oh, and I would call for a spoiler alert since it’s the last four paragraphs…but there’s probably no need):

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning—

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

And from Still Life With Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins (a forgotten #1 bestseller from 1980):

“Early in my career as an outlaw, it doesn’t matter when, right after my first jailbreak, I helped hijack an airliner to Havana. Castro, that great fox, granted me sanctuary, but I hadn’t been in Cuba a month before I borrowed a small boat with an outboard motor and putt-putted like hell for the Florida Keys. The sameness of the socialistic system was stifling and boring to me. There was no mystery in Cuba, no variety, no novelty and worse, no options. For all the ugly vices that capitalism encourages, it’s at least interesting, exciting, it offers possibilities. In America, the struggle is at least an individual struggle. And if the individual has strength enough of character, salt enough of wit, the alternatives are thicker than polyesters in a car salesman’s closet. In a socialistic system, you’re no better or worse than anybody else.”

“But that’s equality!”

“Bullshit. Unromantic, unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

Too Big To Fail: Too Important To Fictionalize?

The past Monday night found me sitting down to watch the HBO premiere of Too Big To Fail, a film about the beginnings of the recent financial crisis. Based on the best-selling book by New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, the HBO film boasts an ace cast that includes William Hurt, Paul Giamatti, Billy Crudup, Topher Grace, James Woods, and Ed Asner. Seen largely from the perspective of former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (William Hurt), the story centers on the government’s reaction to the meltdowns of both Lehman Brothers and AIG and the subsequent framing of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program [I had to look that one up]).

via hbo.com

Personally, I found the film immensely informative. Not much of an economics buff, I knew only the rough outlines of the financial crisis. The film, however, is careful to keep the audience informed at each major (financial) plot point. Because it concentrates on so many nitpicky details and was all but bereft of any action, the film felt like a longer, slower version of a West Wing episode (without snappy dialogue from that other famous Sorkin). But while it might have been more entertaining if Ben Bernanke (Giamatti) and Paulson were slinging barbs across the breakfast table at one another, I doubt that it would have been quite as informative.

But beneath the seemingly harmless surface of this film, there is a lurking danger. Often, an issue with adaptations from the nonfiction page to the screen is that some of the truth in the real story is sacrificed for the purpose of entertainment. Something along these lines happened earlier in the past year with Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for David Fincher’s film The Social Network.

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In a great New York Magazine article by Mark Harris, Sorkin is quoted, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Sorkin’s portrait of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is, after all, pretty nasty. Is he so terrible in reality? Accounts differ. I wish I could give you an easy answer. The real-life Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “shafted” co-founder of Facebook, might not waver too much at Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic, angry portrayal of his former friend. The consensus, however, is that Sorkin meant what he said when his “fidelity [is not] to the truth.” 

via imdb.com

As far as I’m concerned, the most accurate portrayal of Zuckerberg in mass media can be found in Lev Grossman’s Time 2010 Person of the Year profile. You can find the whole article here. I quote from it at length below:

“The Social Network is a rich, dramatic portrait of a furious, socially handicapped genius who spits corrosive monologues in a monotone to hide his inner pain. This character bears almost no resemblance to the actual Mark Zuckerberg. The reality is much more complicated.

The Zuckerberg of the movie is a simple creature of clear motivations: he uses his outsize gifts as a programmer to acquire girls, money and party invitations. This is a fiction. In reality, Zuckerberg already had the girl: Priscilla Chan, who is now a third-year med student at University of California, San Francisco. They met at Harvard seven years ago, before he started Facebook. Now they live together in Palo Alto.

As for money, his indifference to it is almost pathological. His lifestyle is modest by most standards but monastic for someone whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion, a number that puts him ahead of his Palo Alto neighbor (and fellow college dropout) Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg lives near his office in a house that he rents. He works constantly; his only current hobby is studying Chinese. He drives a black Acura TSX, which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving break, he took his family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. He bought a wand at Ollivander’s.”

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The question here is no longer whether or not the film fictionalized Zuckerberg’s life (it did), but rather what that means for us as viewers. I know for a fact that many people walked away from the film thinking less of Zuckerberg. (It was hard not to.) But, after reading a few reviews of the film that noted the fictionalized aspects of the story, I came around to the fact that Sorkin and Fincher were having some fun with Zuckerberg’s story.

Can that be dangerous?

One review I found—by Yahoo! Contributor Gretchen Lee Bourquin—was pretty explicit in its judgment of Zuckerberg: “Eisenberg's potrayal of Zuckerberg was spot on and consistent throughout the movie, and kept me thinking how much he really was a jerk, and although his brains may be worth billions, it doesn't mean he can't fall on his face like the rest of us.”

When we watch or read nonfiction, especially those that suggest an “informative edge” (I’m not thinking about historical dramas, e.g. The King’s Speech [although there’s an entirely different discussion to be made about this point]), we’ve got to keep our wits about us. I watched Too Big To Fail because I thought I might gain some insight into what was happening behind the scenes of the crash. Did I? I thought so. I doubt that director Chris Hanson would play with too much of the detail…but you’ve always got to be careful. The thing is...I don’t doubt that HBO wants to entertain us more than it wants to inform us.

See more:

Grossman, Lev. “Person of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg.” Time.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185-1,00.html

Harris, Mark. “Inventing Facebook.” New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/movies/features/68319/

Too Big To Fail homepage: http://www.hbo.com/movies/too-big-to-fail/index.html

Flash Fiction: Amateurs and Why Borges Is Better

The prose literary form probably best suited to our distracting lives, constantly bombarded with information as we are, “flash fiction” has come into style over the past few decades. Known broadly by the terms “flash fiction” and “short short story,” these stories have emerged in a number of distinct forms with the advent of internet competitions, including “55 Fiction” (exactly 55 words), the Drabble (exactly 100 words), and the “69er” (hopefully, you can guess how many words).

The form has no certain origin, although authors have played with extraordinarily short forms for a long time. Some consider Aesop’s Fables as one of the oldest examples of flash fiction. More recently, authors like Julio Cortazar, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, and, according to legend, Ernest Hemingway have dabbled with extremely short fiction.

via timelesshemingway.com

I say legend because the veracity of Hemingway’s story has never been determined. According to universal myth-busters Snopes.com, the truth of the tale is undetermined. The story has been circulated on the Internet for years now and, whether or not its source is actually Hemingway, it is perhaps the best example of extreme flash fiction out there:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

(attributed to Ernest Hemingway)

This example, of course, is the far extreme. Less than six words would hardly tell the reader anything. In the work of an author like Borges, there are a number of very short pieces of fiction, though none of them approach Hemingway’s example in terms of brevity. An oft-cited story by Borges:

“On Exactitude in Science”

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

(from Borges’s Collected Fictions, p. 325)

Clearly, these two stories are very different. Hemingway, far more so than Borges, seems to revel in the brevity. Six words is not much. Borges, on the other hand, seems unconcerned with the length of his story. There is the sense that the success of his story does not depend on how short it is; it depends on the story itself. 

via ebay.com

Is one better than the other? (Yes. The Borges story.) With “On Exactitude,” Borges opens up a whole realm of speculation and thought (What do maps mean? How can precise can a map be before it sacrifices its utility? What happens when maps become “more real” than the territory they catalogue?). What does the Hemingway story do? Mostly, it tells us that it’s short. Yes, it’s also sad—tragic, even—but these traits are notable mostly in light of it being so brief.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the King’s counselor Polonius offers the wisdom “brevity is the soul of wit”—words that have since fallen into common usage. But is “wit” all we look for when we read stories? Should the whipcrack moment of oh! their baby has died! and subsequent sadness in Hemingway really be seen as equal with the consequential ponderings raised by Borges?

And I don’t mean to pose that as a rhetorical question. You already know my answer is in the negative. I’ll shortly show you why.

~

Professional authors are not the only people who have participated in the enthusiasm surrounding flash fiction. There are hundreds of sites looking for flash fiction contributions from amateur authors. While these websites offering open arms to amateur work sound warm and fuzzy, there is often a tough truth to be learned; not everyone can write flash fiction.

What’s so funny about this is that everyone has always known that not all people can write. No one picks up a copy of The Sun Also Rises and claims they could knock something like that off in a few years, much less in a lifetime. Our notions about writing, however, tend to shift the lower we go in word count. Few people attempt to write novels or memoirs. Short stories, though, are within reach. Still, 3,000 or 4,000 words is a rather hefty number of words. What about a page or two? What about a couple of paragraphs? What about a sentence?

The following pieces of flash fiction are six-word stories (inspired by Hemingway’s exercise in ultimate concision). They are drawn from two sources: a pool of submissions from professional authors and the amateur six-word story site Smithmag.net. One story is written by author Margaret Atwood and another by comic book author Stan Lee. The other two are submissions to Smithmag. Can you tell which ones are which? (See end of post for answers.)*

1. Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

2. Couldn’t find needle. Burned down haystack.

3. Handcuffs found. Not police. So embarrassed.

4. Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.

I’m not suggesting that some readers won’t be able to tease out which one is Atwood’s (it is a little more elegant than the rest), but rather that you have to draw a line somewhere. At a certain point concision becomes the only thing in common between these stories. They all depend on a token of realization or irony and that’s it. They don’t go much further or expand on their ideas because there’s no room for that. Some readers may protest: “So what? I like these little stories! What’s the matter with them?”

One issue is that you have to find the good ones. And of course we must also find the good films and the good books and the good music. But this, I would contend, is a different can of worms. On most of these sites, there aren’t any filters. There’s some wheat hiding in there, but there’s also a whole lot of chaff. Let’s look at some of the chaff and how it got that way.

~

A List of Problems in Stories on Onesentence.org:

1. Not Getting It

Some people don’t understand the genre. For a whole bunch of reasons I can’t bother to hypothesize, they think flash fiction or one-sentence stories is a matter of merely saying something interesting. (Their capacity on judging exactly what is interesting is a whole other matter.) Sometimes it seems that they think a “one-sentence story” literally means whatever sentence pops into their heads. Take the story “Jay” from the Onesentence archives:

Whenever I make a homemade pizza on a Saturday night I’m immediately brought back to my grandmother’s house circa 1978.

That’s the whole thing. It’s not a bad sentence (though it might stand some editing…“a Saturday nights”?), but it reads like the start of a longer story or a novel. It sets up a frame for the reader to travel back in time to whatever happened at this grandmother’s house in 1978.

Let’s return to Hemingway’s story. (It’s not a sentence, but it’s still shorter than “Jay.”) Hemingway tells us everything we need to know: someone’s baby died and now they’re moving on. Whether or not they’re being forced to move on or doing it of their own accord is a moot point. Hemingway doesn’t set us up for something that doesn’t happen. Of course we don’t find out if anyone buys the baby shoes, but the story isn’t concerned with the buyer. We’re invested with the seller.

“Jay” is confused because it wants us to be concerned with the man making pizza on Saturday nights, but pulls us away from him and back to this grandmother.

2. Confusion

A hallmark of these one-sentence story pages is that many of the stories are ambiguous or unclear—and no, these are not purposeful ambiguities. Let’s look at “Its Started” (lack of apostrophe is the original punctuation):

It only took one week of kindergarten for my 3-year-old to come home and tell me that he is going to stab me and kill me.

So there you are. Only I’m not sure why the child wants “to stab [his parent] and kill [him/her].” Is it because the child hates having been forced to attend school or because the child has been taught by the school to hate the parent? I’d buy the first explanation over the second one, but the second one cannot be adequately discredited.

You don’t like that example? You need more?

“Contaminated” - The day I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder was the day I chased my best friend down the street with a butterfly knife.

“AwkwardTruths” - Afterwards, I deeply regretted telling my hairdresser that my mother had had a nose job.

“Chad” - My father gave me a glass of milk to help swallow the pages as I was slowly force-fed the forbidden book he discovered hidden under my bed.

“Crystal” - Mom, I never told you what they did to me, because I was ashamed and I was afraid you would think it was my fault. (And she doesn’t tell the Internet either, apparently.)

“Billi” - There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how things could've been between us if we hadn't gotten there too late.

The subset of the “Confusing” stories are those that don’t bother to clarify important points within the title or the text itself, but choose instead to reveal the subject of the story within the tags. See the post below.

via onesentence.org

If the story is the sentence, then surely something is lost once the sentence becomes dependent on its immediate context on the website? You could not, for example, forward “Roller coasters are my biggest fear, which is ironic considering the nature of my disease” in an email without noting "bipolar" and expect your recipients to be moved by it.

3. The Pity Party

This is obvious. Too many (read most) of the stories on Onesentence.org are examples of individuals either broadcasting their suffering to the world or engaging in helpless schadenfreude. The website FMyLife.com (Fuck My Life) exemplifies this attitude; something terrible happens to you so you tell the Internet about it.

But it wouldn’t be fair to say that any story attempting to raise some pity is a bad story. Aristotle, in the eyes of many the father of literary theory, once stated that the purpose of tragedy is “an arousal of pity and fear.” I’m thinking that a careful line needs to be drawn, only I’m not quite sure how. A few that I think cross that not-quite-defined line:

“txmade” - The day after my failed suicide attempt, I was diagnosed with cancer.

“Lauren” - The 4am waitress at Shari's took better care of me during my overdose then my friends ever did the first time.

“buk” - By the time I worked up the courage to IM him and finally reveal my little crush, he had signed off.

(Draw a line here? There are others like the one below—in the vein of Hemingway’s story.)

“Lea” - This morning I went to the vet for the last time.

~

Let’s return to a point I made earlier—before our wanderings through the chaff of Onesentence.org. Why exactly is Borges better than Hemingway?

For me, the answer lies in relative brevity. I mentioned before that there’s only so much six words can say. Can you imagine a five word story? Four? Three? A single word? At a certain point you can’t say anything at all. Borges is better simply because his story is not a flash in the pan. You read Hemingway’s story once and there it is—in all its luminosity—and it will never be any brighter than that. Borges only gets brighter the more you read. If I were you, I’d scroll up and read it again.

* 1. Margaret Atwood; 2. Smithmag.net; 3. Smithmag.net; 4. Stan Lee

See more:

onesentence.org

smithmag.net
snopes.com

fmylife.com

Aristotle, Poetics. 
Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Shakespeare, Hamlet