More anachronisms

A few months ago I wrote about the trope often appearing in Patricia Highsmith's work -- that of characters following developments in their cases (be they cases of murder, assault, or disappearance) in the daily newspaper. Last night I went to the film noir festival at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and saw two obscure films which had another kind of mid-20th century narrative trope which has largely disappeared: the insurance investigator.

In both films -- Highway 13, which is about sabotage at a trucking firm, and The Devil's Henchman, which is about thefts of cargo from ships -- the protagonist was not a policeman or a private detective but a secret agent for an insurance company.

This trope reminded me of something I'd read about "Death of a Salesman" -- that the whole reality of life insurance was new to middle class people in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the concept, and the unintended consequences that can result when the death of one person can result in a windfall for another, had to be explained to people. And then when the play was presented to audiences in China for the first time, in 1983, the whole concept had to be explained anew for audiences to understand the plot.

Nowadays you don't see many plots hinging on insurance fraud, and I wonder why. Have the insurance companies simply gotten too good at detecting it? Is it easier these days to scam Medicare, for example?

Dream of secrets

Epic dream in which I got into the habit of breaking and entering expensive houses and lofts in a Noe Valley-like neighborhood. I wouldn't take anything in these invasions, only relaxed among the nice furnishings while the owners were out. But then it happened that in one such burglary I took a sleepy four-year-old, and went for a walk at night around the neighborhood. When it came time to return the child to its home, I couldn't remember which rich house it belonged to, so I simply guessed. I deposited the child in the house I guessed it came from, and got away.

All the while, I was volunteering at a non-profit group run by a conservative woman celebrity, a Palin type. When news of the putative kidnapping came out -- not sure whether I had guessed the wrong house, or whether the child simply told the story to its parents -- even though the culprit was not yet known, the FBI was on the case and I felt they would soon find me out. I felt it was my responsibility to go and warn my employer, so I went and told her about the breaking and entering but not about the kidnapping. And she didn't connect what I had told her to the news at all. At the end of the dream she was called away to other business but gave me a look like "We'll talk about this later."

It's almost like the first half of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- the lonely, aimless man who has a secret life, with much of the tension around whether and how he will be found out. Of course, since all such stories by Highsmith were allegories of closeted homosexuality, I wonder if such a story would still fly today. I suppose it would -- people are still full of secrets.

Natural conflict

Rossellini even said that you shouldn't write scripts -- only swine write scripts -- that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There's no need to invent anything.

-- Francois Truffaut, interviewed in 1984,
just reprinted in the New Yorker

237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.