phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest love letter to the movies yesterday, Inglorious Basterds. I very much enjoyed it, although the usual criticisms of QTs work hold true here. One thing I wanted to mention was Roger Ebert’s reaction to the film.

After I saw “Inglourious Basterds” at Cannes, although I was writing a daily blog, I resisted giving an immediate opinion about it. I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I’m glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time. Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.

Therefore, if you’re not a better reviewer / lover of film than Roger (freakin’) Ebert, you might want to see ‘Inglorious Basterds’ more than once before pronouncing it a bad film. Or even a merely good one.

In the process of making an eloquent argument for using fantasy as a way to play with a fictional character based on a real person, author Guy Gavriel Kay makes a fascinating observation. It is a throwaway comment issued on the way to making a larger, and different, point, but it caught my eye:

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace … all these suggest we value exposure rather more.

I wonder if one enjoys privacy at the expense of exposure, or vice versa, or if there is a way to segment one’s experience so that one may have both public and private components to one’s life.

For instance, I wear a wedding ring which is clearly observable in person or in pictures taken of me. That suggests things about me without getting into intimate detail. The current Judd Apatow film Funny People riffs on this same theme about the public and private faces of celebrities.

No, when I think about it, I think ‘exposure’ is the wrong word. I think the better word for public sharing via social networking is ‘community.’ In order for community to be successful, we have to put ourselves out there to a certain extent. That’s different than exposure (which, as a vibe, feels to me like the undesired publication of something private, a hurtful invasion of privacy). Rather, it’s more like ‘external presentation,’ something you put out there which is cleared for public consumption, and which is geared for community with others.

In other words, there is a time for personal privacy, and there is a time for publicly sharing something of yourself of which you decide the limits to, and neither concept is mutually exclusive. We can, indeed, be both public and private beings.

(As writers, I recommend reading the rest of Kay’s article, where he writes about how we can use Fantasy novels to write fictional works loosely based on historical people. He uses the example of how he based one of his characters on Spain’s El Cid figure for The Lions of Al-Rassan, a book I have started but not yet finished.)