Writing Right with Dmitri: A Failure of Imagination

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Writing Right with Dmitri: A Failure of Imagination

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The Amazon Prime algorithm has been putting body english on my film watching again. You know these algorithms: they record everything you watch, read, and order, and try to sell you more of the same. This can be annoying, since I'm sort of eclectic. Lately, though, Amazon Prime has noticed that I will actually watch movies in a variety of languages that deal with how ordinary people coped with European events between 1933 and 1945. So they keep showing me these films, and I take the bait. It's led to some interesting conclusions on my part.

I watched The Boat Is Full, a 1981 Swiss movie about the refugee problem there during the war. The film is heartbreaking: no matter how hard those villagers tried, they couldn't figure out how to keep the helpless refugees – one a small French boy, another an elderly German man – from being pushed over the border and back into hell. The Swiss made the film as a confession of guilt and a warning to the future. And boy, do we get the message here in 2016: Don't let this happen again.. If you don't have Amazon Prime, do what I ended up doing anyway and find the German-language version with subtitles on Youtube. You'll need the subtitles, even if you're German, because most of the film is in Schwyzerdütsch. (Think about Trainspotting.)

What struck me about that film was that, although many of the people in the story were good-hearted, they lost against the system because of a failure of imagination. They just couldn't think of a sufficiently clever way to beat the system. Then I watched the Italian film Perlasca. I'd never heard of Giorgio Perlasca, the hero of the film. Small wonder: it took grateful survivors years to find him living quietly in Padua. He was the most unassuming hero you've never heard of, but Perlasca saved 5000 people from death at the hands of Nazis. How? He used his special relationship with Franco's Spain (he was an old fighter in the civil war there, on the fascist side) and some good old salesman's moxie. He was unstoppable. And he made me think.

Perlasca had an imagination that wouldn't quit.

When somebody gave him an inch, he took a mile if he could. They said, you can save one, he asked, why not a hundred? He pretended to be an ambassador, and dressed the part in a fine suit and accessories. He claimed his first name was 'Jorge', not Giorgio. When challenged, he reared up and shouted, 'You're insulting the ancient and noble country of España! Those are Sephardic Jews! 'Sepharad' means Spain! They're ours!' I chuckled: what would Torquemada have thought? Oh, bless this man, he makes me love humans again.

In the Czech film Protektor, the main characters lose out because the wife's imagination doesn't reach beyond her dreams of stardom, and the husband's can't cope with the shifting realities of life in wartime Prague. You don't blame either of them, but you feel terribly sad. (You also think, 'Wow, Czech filmmakers are so good…')

Stauffenberg tried to use the German military against its own leader – and darn near pulled it off. Bonhoeffer got on the radio and told the Nazis off. Sophie Scholl and her brother handed out leaflets in classic student style. The Edelweisspiraten beat up Hitler Youth in the backstreets of Cologne. All of them died. But they tried.

I figured something out here. Let's see if I can make a list of what I've learned.

  • To be successful at fighting organised human evil, you have to use what you've got. If you're a salesman, use your sales techniques. If you're an actor, act your way through. Check out this week's quiz. The heroes on that list used an Olympic rowing boat, a partisan camp, an abandoned embassy, a crooked house, social hypocrisy – whatever came to hand. And you feel like cheering every time.
  • To pull it off, you've got to use your imagination. You've got to stop thinking that this is too hard, you can't find your way out of it. Ask: what would Oskar Schindler do?
  • A lack of self-importance helps. If you're not so busy worrying about looking good, you'll think of the solution quicker. Here's where experience in role-playing can come in handy.
  • A sense of humour helps. Why? Because people who are engaged in doing something hateful to other people cannot possibly have a sense of humour. If you have one – and I don't mean what some people around here are praising as 'gallows humour', I mean the real, healthy, life-affirming entity – then you have a weapon they won't see coming.
  • We need to know more about how they did it. And that's where we writers come in. Did you notice something about that Post Quiz list? If you're up on your movies, you knew about three of those people. They've been in the cinema. So, who are you going to research and make accessible to the reading public?

So why do we care? That's always the bottom line, isn't it? After all, I just happened to be watching these films because an online company that likes to sell me last-minute bargains wants to keep me coming back to the website so I'll see the latest must-have item. Why are stories about heroic, life-saving individuals important? Don't they just give you a warm feeling? Aren't they poor box office, way back in the money-making game behind really cool films about glamorous stars and riveting action 'heroes'?

We care because it can happen here, and now. The bottom could fall out of the world faster than you could say Brexit. What if the refugee crisis of 2016 turned into something even more acute? What if, heaven forbid, an otherwise stable country in the developed world went collectively insane and elected a vengeful fool for a leader? What if that leader plunged society into paranoid chaos again? It has happened before.

British airman Eric Williams escaped from a German POW camp during World War II. He credits his ability to help think up the 'wooden horse' escape to the accounts of World War I escapes he read as a child – that, and all the practice he and his siblings got digging tunnels in the garden when he was a kid. He benefited from the knowledge of others.

The essence of human beings is that they can learn from their shared history. But for that to happen, accurate, true stories need to be recorded. That's where writers come in. We get the facts and figure out how to make them interesting.

And before somebody whines at me, 'But that requires so much research,' well, duh. Yes, it's work. If you wanted to do something easy, take up flower pressing, we won't stop you. Writing is real, actual work – but it's worthwhile. You want to see how it's really done? Grab a copy of Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark, as it is also titled) that has Thomas Keneally's introduction in it. The one where he explains how Poldek Pfefferberg harassed him into writing it. The story involves a briefcase, a shop, an airport, and a lot of cajoling. I can't imagine anybody other than Thomas Keneally being qualified to write that book. Now read the book. Notice how the author moves that story away from hagiography and into something so exciting, so immediate, that you become involved with these people? (In fact, Keneally lampshades the whole hagiography bit by claiming to play 'devil's advocate'.)

So yeah. Let's get out the research tools and find out how heroes do that thing. It doesn't have to be the Holocaust they're fighting against. What about other kinds of prejudice or oppression? Lots of enemies to fight out there. What about the people who've used technology to fight dictators? Let's find out before 'They' shut down the internet.

Doing good, useful things is not boring – even if it is unglamorous at times. Let's make sure we're getting that message across.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

25.07.16 Front Page

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