Slapping Horatio Upside the Head:

The Craft of Saying More than You’re Saying

What do two 1999 supernatural Holy-Wood extravaganzas, Steven King, good writing, and the yin and the yang have to do with one another? Well, everything’s connected somehow.

Sometimes the old three-tiered universe perspective wears thin, at least when it’s all image and no substance. Or, uh…vice versa. Take for instance the film End of Days, a rather lame and unimaginative reprise of the old hero-saves-overwrought-damsel-from-rampaging-demon formula. It’s nearly the dawn of the year 2000 in NYC, and the Devil’s set to make hisself a love child. That is, if he can get around Arnold in time. Of course it’s a Schwarzenegger flick—the Big Guy plays Jericho, a suicidal ex-cop turned hired bodyguard. The petite fille he’s supposed to be protecting from Satan’s raging hormones is played adequately by Robin Tunney, but the storyline allows her little more than a hip waif-style haircut and a few charming slack-jawed ingenue close-ups. The only time she shows any gumption is during a scene where she’s doing her best to kick the snot out of some dastardly Knights of Christ who are trying to execute her on behalf of one faction of the Roman Catholic church.

Admittedly the flick features Gabriel Byrne as the owner of the body Old Scratch chooses to inhabit, and that in itself is meritorious. Byrne is a fine actor and sexy as hell. Too bad the script can’t keep up with him. And somehow it just doesn’t suit his dignity to have Satan possess him on a trip to the john. All the same, it must have been fun filming the scene where he gets to beat on Schwarzenegger.

One of the enduring images in End of Days, other than a disembodied Satan rising like a heat wave from the sewer, is the inevitable hoisting of the badly beaten Jericho into a back alley crucifixion tableau. Yes, Arnie’s just hanging out, and those of us who didn’t get it before now have the privilege of being pistol-whipped with messianic imagery. We all know Schwarzy suffers for his art. Mind you, it’s things like this that lend a movie cult potential. The crowning glory of the flick, for instance, is the moment where Jericho bellows at Beelzebub (and I paraphrase—forgive me, but I can’t bear to rent the movie again): "You are a choirboy compared to me! A choirboy!" I mean, Schwarzenegger will be Schwarzenegger, but c’mon… it’s Satan, for flipsakes.

I once read a poem that characterized Bruce Willis as ‘the palooka messiah’, the righteous, pummeled, tough-assed millennial version of the Knight on the White Horse. Demi, the poet posited, daubed Bruce’s bruised and weary brow after another epic day of saving the world.

Maybe Maria does the same thing for Arnie, maybe not; she’s a pretty busy gal. I still like both Arnold and Bruce. As a friend recently pointed out, Bruce’s onscreen persona may come closer to being ‘just a guy’. It’s a little more difficult to accept Arnold as a mere mortal. Main thing is, de boys are both reliable and they don’t make us think too hard. But there’s a point at which going over the top becomes cloying.

The trick that Wholly-Wood rarely pulls off is a deft admixture of substance coupled with image, the finger that points at the moon, so to speak. The moon is like Plato’s ‘true form’ of things. You can’t grasp it, but if you’re good, you can get people to pay attention to it. A little subtlety goes a long way. Let’s get back to Gabriel Byrne for a moment. Great example. The man portrays with an understated grace any character from an aging D’Artagnion to Satan to… name it.

In Stigmata, he’s Andrew Kiernan, a priest who’s pulled in different directions by his shaky sense of faith, his background as a scientist, and his feelings for a young, vital, atheistic woman (played with kickass conviction by Patricia Arquette). Arquette’s character Frankie is possessed by the spirit of a priest, and is suffering from stigmata, the bleeding death wounds of Christ. Kiernan’s sent from the Vatican to verify the authenticity of her marks. He has a miracle before him, and yet it is her very humanity that challenges him to believe, that calls up the best in his nature. While the film may over-villianize the administration of the RC church at times, the Kiernan-Frankie interplay set against that backdrop poses some fascinating ambiguities.

In terms of performance, Byrne himself needn’t thunder—he can do more with a half-smile, an unembellished gesture, than ten armies of Schwarzeneggers (sorry, Big Palooka). When his voice gets quiet, you lean forward to catch every nuance. Action and motion have their place, but so do silence, stillness, equilibrium. Stigmata takes a telling look at the dynamic between the material and the spiritual in the context of the Roman Catholic church. Officially, the Vatican finds the girl, a faithless anomaly, and the ultimate threat (if any a non-believing sinner can receive the marks of Christ, then what’s the need for the Church?). Kiernan begins to understand that she fulfills a suppressed gospel: the kingdom of God exists within each of us, and everywhere. Change versus stagnation. Faith versus religious dogma. Lust versus agape, unconditional love. To all the reviewers who panned Stigmata as overblown and disconnected, well, there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio… Do some comparison shopping, kids. You have a point, up to a point, but you may have missed the, uh…mark.

According to the official Stigmata site, Deepak Chopra, of all people, liked this one. In effect, he saw the moon—he got past the bombastic Whorey-Wood image. Any keen student of oriental philosophy will tell you: dark does not exist without light, nor love without hate. Each principle implies the existence of its opposite: yin and yang give rise to one another, if you like. Sound idiotically simple? Hmm. Maybe, but eastern philosophers have been writing and meditating on the very same thing for thousands of years. That ain’t no negligible track record.

And thus we come round to writing. There’s your meat and potatoes approach, straight forward, action-packed, easy on the brain… and then there’s stuff that’s gravy. Sometimes the gravy will slide right down your gullet before you realize it contained some very succulent lumps you’d like to revisit.

Truly fine prose will bear you along like that, catch you up, dance you in its rhythm, and set you down blinking somewhere you hadn’t planned to be. There’s an essential art to the plot, that pulse that drives a story along, but ahhhhhh…. the craft is in the fine-tuning. And that comes only through education.

It doesn’t matter what you write—horror, romance, fantasy, sci-fi—a writer needs to hit the reference books. What the hell are those, exactly, you ask? Everything. A straight diet of King, Rice, Koontz and company might give you formula, but your writing will grow anemic. Why not read Poe, Maupassant, Cohen, Dumas, The Tao Te Ching, Durrell, Aspirin, The Pentateuch, Angela Carter, Wilde, Ramprasad, Salinger, Plath, Vonnegut, The Bhagavad Gita, Mill, Tillich, Wiesel, Brust, Freud, Gautama… finally a list becomes absurd.

Devour everything from history texts to Chopin scores and Cure lyrics. Sit and stare at people. Take note of what you see. It’s all part of the great and ever-turning wheel of samsara, and no matter what your genre, you’ll be a better writer for it. You’ll know when to murmur and when to shout. And the universe takes on more facets than a disco ball. Three tiers? You’ll never be a choirboy again.