November 29, 2005
As any good high school English teacher knows, "literature" has a theme. This, in some ways, might go back to Sunday's post on "finding the story." I am aware that my books often have "thematic" material, and that those "themes" tend to run throughout the books, published and unpublished. I'm not sure it's a good idea to go, "here's my theme, now I'm ready to write my book." I do think, however, that very often I will discover I have to answer the question, "what is this book about?" somewhere along the lines in order to focus everything, and I think that's probably what "theme" is.

Often it's father-son relationships. Often it's about how people's livelihoods reflect--or don't--who they are. Sometimes it's, how do I put this, duty over choice, ie., how people sometimes do things they don't want to do, but do them anyway because they think they need to be done.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were others. I don't want to belabor this point, though. I'm not at all sure that popular and/or commercial fiction benefits from too conscious an effort to bring out your themes. Just concentrate on your story and your characters and if you find thematic material, use your skills to enhance those undercurrents, but don't let your theme overwhelm your story.

I think the reason I was thinking about this was I rented two movies over the Thanksgiving weekend, both of which were a disappointment. They were "The Interpreter" starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, and "Man On Fire" starring Denzel Washington and Christopher Walken and Dakota Fanning. Interpreter was probably better, although the movies are so different it's hard to compare. "The Interpreter" was slated as a thriller, but didn't thrill, though it was sort of intellectually promising in a slow, boring, talkie sort of way. "Man On Fire" was a thriller, all right, even if it was a dark, gory, ultra-violent revenge-fest with a downer of an ending.

But they both had the same theme, if you will, which in a word, was "revenge."

The most brilliant line of "The Interpreter" was by Nicole Kidman's character, who said, "Revenge is a lazy form of grief."

"Man on Fire," on the other hand, stuck to the tried and true, "Revenge is a dish best served cold," which if I recall was spoken either after Denzel's character tortured a character by cutting off his fingers and stanching the blood using the car's cigarette lighter, then pushing the car off a cliff, or, after he stripped a guy down, took C4 plastic explosives, jammed it up the guy's ass, and set it to detonate 5 minutes later. There was something cold about it, all right, but that's not, I don't think, the intention of the proverb.

Same theme. Dramatically different aspects of it. Dramatically different stories portrayed in different ways. And that's why, ultimately, I think it's better to leave the bigger issues of "theme" to the literature classes.

Best,
Mark Terry