An orgy of symbols

So I just watched the movie Donnie Darko after hearing about it here and there, and stumbling across some references via the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), which I am addicted to. I had the vague notion that it was a horror flick but once I got it in my DVD player, I just had a sense, a gut feeling that it was something else altogether. I was right. It did for me what some of my favorite books have done for me, the movie equivalent of a great Borges short story. It is chock full of symbols, metaphors and themes that make you lust for understanding. That is the power of the symbol--visual or otherwise--it cannot just stand alone in all its symbolness; it begs to be interpreted. That's one of the deals about being human; we are built to make meaning and derive understanding, and so we do. Albeit, if you ask me, we often get all screwed up with each other over whose meaning is more important/useful/relevant, but nonetheless, there you have it. Humans do this. Butterflies, dogs, goats, and rabbits, apparently, do not.

What is so satisfying about a movie that is heavy on symbolism is the same thing that makes it frustrating...you aren't sure, when the movie is done, if you got it, or what you got, and it leaves you chewing on what you are unresolved about. That, to me, is a beautiful thing. That's art. It's what I've been appreciating about writing lately as I talk to more and more writers for the show. Writers sit down with a certain toolkit of craft elements at their disposal, and unless they're blatantly surrealistic or Beckett-esque, they draw on reality or simulacra thereof. BUT, I think at least 50% of the writing is happening on an unconscious level; that is to say, WHERE exactly ideas come from, how motifs rear their consistent little threads, and from what ether these worlds are drawn, is very, very symbolic, deep, almost primal territory within us. The universe within for lack of a better phrase. I mean the literal cosmic stuff of being that we can neither control nor fully understand.

I love to ask an author about something I think clearly must have been foreshadowing. For instance, in Charles Baxter's novel Saul and Patsy, there are two scenes in which an animal is found dead preceding the death of a major character. I asked him if this was conscious and he laughed and admitted that it was not, that he wasn't even aware he'd done so. And that to me is the pure magic of fiction that keeps me coming back for more.

Interviewing Aimee Bender took this to a whole other level because she writes much less realistically, and her ideas continue to get more magical and even absurd, as if her imagination must reach farther and wider each time she writers a new story. I asked her about one story in particular, a must-read in her new book, called "Fruit and Words" that really left me feeling a mixture of emotions but no clear sense of the truth of the story--though I was okay with that. When I asked what it was about she turned it back on me, and together we wove together a possible explanation of the story and its meaning. I loved so much how unattached to the meaning she was. It could have been this, it could have been that...

So something about watching Donnie Darko (a movie that seems to ride at all times alongside the phrase "cult classic") elicited this same symbolic resonance in me, and reminded me that I write to extract this mystery from inside myself, lay it out on the page, organize it in some fashion, and call what I've made of it meaning. I allow that others will make their own meaning out of it too, and I think that there is nothing better than creating something people will feel compelled to interpet, understand and divine after they've interacted with it.

JPR