So long as I’m posting about comic book writing, I’ll transition to this piece I’ve wanted to link to for a while. (Of course, if you read from the top of the blog, is there any way to transition topic to topic?)

Andrew Klavan of Libertas wrote an essay about the “realistic” dialogue in United 93 and it intrigued me because I see a lot of my own writing in it. Maybe I should excerpt it at length and then get back to my thoughts on it.

It’s the scene in which the heroic American rebel Todd Beamer, played by David Alan Basche, utters the words that were to become the battlecry of our society’s ongoing fight for survival: "Let’s roll."

The film, you’ll remember, is a self-consciously "realistic" documentary-style telling of the 9/11 attacks. The uprising on the doomed plane is shown as frantic and chaotic. The now-famous words are buried, almost inaudible under plane noise and a steady stream of frightened weeping and chatter. As the other brave American rebels try to gather their nerve for the assault against the Islamist hijackers, Beamer can just barely be heard muttering a nervous, "C’mon, let’s go, let’s go, let’s roll."

Several people have mentioned this moment to me, always with praise for its "realism." I always knew exactly what they meant. In fact, at first, I shared their feelings. By de-emphasizing the inspiring phrase, the filmmakers underplayed the drama and heroics of the moment. Rather than give us something that seemed to be part of the overblown, melodramatic world of the movies, they gave us instead something that seemed more like the confusion, smallness and helter-skelter of real life.

There’s only one problem with this: the moment in the movie isn’t real at all. In real life, the moment was as big, as overblown and melodramatic as any movie you’ll ever see. Beamer had managed to reach a phone company manager on his cell phone. A Christian family man, Beamer said the Lord’s Prayer with her. Then, setting the phone aside but leaving the line open, he said, "Are you guys ready? Let’s roll." Heartbreakingly, it was a phrase his wife recognized from family outings.

In other words, the makers of United 93 achieved a sense of realism by reworking reality itself.

There was no other way — because what we’ve come to think of as realism in movies and literature is nothing more than a style, a particular way of showing and describing things. When we are confronted with this style, we understand that what we’re being shown is "realistic" whether it has anything to do with reality or not. Like all styles, the style called "realism" has certain recognizable components. For instance, in realistic dramas, people don’t speak eloquently. They hem and haw, talk over each other and leave sentences unfinished. In realism, low motives are always in the foreground and higher ideals are always undercut with irony. Mean streets are realistic, so are unhappy endings. Comfortable homes, loving families, heroism and uplifting faith are not.

This is bizarre when you come to think of it. It means that realism is mute when it comes to describing the best of what we can be, of what life can be. And this partially crippled form of communication is the prevailing style of serious cinema. You could almost say that we know a film is serious by how "realistic" it is. Conversely, when we see true faith and true heroism in movies, we feel we’re in the presence of rank sentimentalism, of powderpuff family entertainment. We feel that it must somehow be "unreal."

This speaks to me because the “realistic” manner of talking is how I tend to write my characters. If word balloon space weren’t at a premium, I’d have really long conversations about minutia, characters interrupting each other, hemming, hawwing, etc. Writing in the Stan Lee style where characters loom at the “camera”, shout at each other, make smackdown threats, etc. just isn’t my line. In real life, such ways of speaking are rare. By cutting down on the incidence of such moments, I think it gives more drama to the rare times when such things do happen.

Of course…when Stan Lee and his compatriots wrote comics like that, comics sold almost a million copies. Whether anyone really wants to read a lot of talking heads going on forever hasn’t proved all that profitable yet.

Your thoughts, folks?