Aaron Sorkins HBO series, The Newsroom (2012–2014), had a pivotal and dramatic episode last Sunday... our beloved Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) suffered a fatal heart attack...as Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) finally gets released following 54 days of incarceration (if you dont know why skip this - not a show you watch) is greeted by his wife MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) and told of his death. Amazing that in the last couple of Sundays important and founding members of this ensemble have met their demise. I have read many negative reviews of late about Aaron Sorkin and his views of life in America. So I wish to show you what a keen mind and exquisite writer he is. Movie audiences get very little dialogue this snappy; they get very little dialogue at all. In movies we are starved for wit, for articulate anger, for extravagant hyperbole—all of which flows like pebbles in a stream...with turbulence of course. The ruling gods of movie screenwriting, at least in American movies, are terseness, elision, functional macho, and heartfelt, fumbled semi-articulateness. Some of the very young micro-budget filmmakers, trying for that old Cassavetes magic achieve a sludgy moodiness with minimal dialogue, or with improvisation—scenes that can be evocative and touching. But the young filmmakers wouldnt dream of wit or rhetoric, especially at par with Mr. Sorkin. It would seem fake to them. Thank heavens the swelling, angry, sarcastic, one-upping talk in The Newsroom is unafraid of embarrassing anyone. Aaron Sorkin writes a highly stylized dialogue which depends on certain conventions that he has made his own. First, there is the convention of perfect articulacy: everyone says exactly what he means, and without hesitation. Second, Sorkin unabashedly reveres high intelligence. Sorkin celebrates the guy who cuts through the crap, gets to the point, sees the patterns and implications buried within some matter. A lot of his writing consists of people questioning each other—sifting, correcting, overturning—as part of a furious drive toward a conclusion. He writes interrogation scenes without pedantry, in a spirit of high gaiety—getting to the truth of something is an adventure. He has also developed a dramatically entertaining idea of how dynamic groups work together. In The West Wing (1999–2006) the product was policy; in The Social Network (2010) it was an entrepreneurial idea. Here, its a good news show. Life may not work this way in the real world, but Sorkins complaint about America is that intelligence is in a semi-apologetic retreat, while emotionalism and stupidity are on the rise—in public policy and in the media. Hes setting up an ideal. He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. Hes neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of the derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defence, any kind of seriousness. Hes a very witty entertainer who believes that theres a social value in truth. I dont think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness. Here is a dazzling panoply to celebrate that and the best of Charlie Skinner. © Frank Borsellino™ * From Where I Sit! fromwhereisit.co December 10, 2014
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 19:18:20 +0000
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