Get to “I Love You” – Part 3
It doesn’t have to be romantic lovers to make this storytelling principle work. It can be friends. It can be enemies.
After the final bloodbath sequence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Deke Thornton (played by Robert Ryan), who had been pursuing the outlaw band throughout the movie, comes upon the shot-to-hell corpse of the Bunch’s leader, Pike (played by William Holden.) Pike, though dead, clings to the trigger mechanism of the .50-caliber machine gun he’d been firing in the preceding blood-and-guts scene.
Deke had once been a friend of Pike’s and still respects and admires him, even though he’s been chasing him, trying to kill him, throughout the whole picture.
Deke spots Pike’s six-shooter, still in its holster on Pike’s hip. He reaches and takes it.
In other words, “I love you.”
Another great moment between non-lovers is the finish of the movie version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
This is the scene where Randle McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) has been returned to the psychiatric ward, having been lobotomized. His friend, Chief Bromden, played by Will Sampson, stands over the bed, heartbroken at what the hospital powers have done to the man who always believed in him and told him he should be free.
Chief places a pillow over McMurphy’s face and releases him from his shattered life, then uses the physical strength he had possessed all along but had never had the courage to put into play—and breaks through the hospital wall and escapes.
“I love you” doesn’t have to be said in words, and it doesn’t have to be between lovers.
DO THE WORK
Steve shows you the predictable Resistance points that every writer hits in a work-in-progress and then shows you how to deal with each one of these sticking points. This book shows you how to keep going with your work.
THE AUTHENTIC SWING
A short book about the writing of a first novel: for Steve, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Having failed with three earlier attempts at novels, here's how Steve finally succeeded.
NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*T
Steve shares his "lessons learned" from the trenches of the five different writing careers—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, nonfiction, and self-help. This is tradecraft. An MFA in Writing in 197 pages.
TURNING PRO
Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have pro habits. When we turn pro, we give up the comfortable life but we find our power. Steve answers the question, "How do we overcome Resistance?"
Brilliant
I don’t watch movies and don’t know a darn thing about them. But I rabidly read The War of Art and Turning Pro. I take my sage lessons from them. One of the principle lessons I learned was to fall in love with the required work it takes to accomplish your goals!
wow, what a movie clip – speechless – too early in the day for crying – it’s morning here in Ireland – but almost did! great share Steve, thanks!
Dear Steven,
long live the art of screen writing. By the Cuckoos’s Nest is undeniably a master piece. Bless you Milos!
Thank you very much dear Steve. So it is the shining (or darkening) of love, not the specific relation, that is the core.
In the cases of hostility, the love one wants to give another is through changing or eliminating them, so the obstacles of their love are destroyed and… their love shines bright. That is a strange love, a dark love. Hate can be the other side of the coin of love, love by itself, for it is a calling to find through it that strange fulfillment.
Even when we act in automation, it is love: our autonomous-acting system trying to bring love forth, although it’s usually not so effective, because of the natural downwards pulls of life. We are not ideal existences, we are the descenants of life in all its awe, and life was hard as hell for a billion years, and we do not come from a master race that was always and immensely happy. Love in its light-sided shape is a priviledge, not a given. So love then was dark, but still love.
Love can be every act with purpose towards someone or something then. It was always in the air.
Even between animals. I love you, I eat you with love.
Which brings the question, what is love.
Thank you also very much for the book you talked about on IG, “Writing the Block Buster Novel” by Zuckerman. I just ordered it to see another aspect, another side of the multi-sided coin of creating this kind of art.
It takes years to get the power of the writer, it takes damn years. Self, knowledge and experience of the whole life. I want it all to be done in one day. But I can’t.