I’d considered doing another post about LOST today, in honor of the series finale, which I just finished watching. I wanted to talk about how, in the end, the show came back to character and how despite the sci-fi elements, I’m inclined to call it literary. But then I made the mistake of going online to see how other fans had reacted, and I saw a lot of hatred—hatred that I saw mainly stemming from (what I consider to be) a lack of understanding, and I decided I wanted some time to digest the show on my own, without having to explain why the first 120 episodes, each individually, meant more than the finale, but why the finale was still absolutely essential to the closure, and the shape of the show. You’re just going to have to trust me on this, or keep watching over and over until you get it.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, which actually kind of relates, because the criticism that most infuriated me tonight was one where a blogger clearly dissected the entire show to fit an idea she wanted to have about it—that it’s a sexist, racist piece of crap with “plot holes the size of {her} Hyundai,” poor writing, bad dialogue, and the list goes on and on. (I guess the millions of fans are just all stupid, but then again, I can think of some stories I would say similar things about, so maybe I’m just being elitist here.)

Anyway, back to this test. I swear I can stay focused. And that this really isn’t a post about Lost. Not entirely anyway.

This test was created a while back to evaluate gender equality in movies. Take a look below the cut here.

Read more »

Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »