Breaking the Rules

One of the things I love about starting a new creative pursuit is that it has a way of informing all your other endeavors. For example, I was recently thumbing through my brand-new copy of BEND THE RULES SEWING by Amy Karol, when I came across this little nugget of advice in chapter one:

“You have to be good enough to know when you can bend the rules.”

This reminded me of something I’d read in Molly Wizenberg’s cookbook/memoir A HOMEMADE LIFE a few weeks ago. When trying a new recipe, her mother urges her to follow the instructions to the letter the first time through. After she has prepared the dish the intended way, she is free to improvise the next time. This way, she can have a better understanding of how all the components work together if she should choose to improvise the second time around.

These two anecdotes, of course, made me think of fiction writing. I’m all for breaking the rules, but you need to know what you’re doing in order to break them. I’m sure most people would agree with this statement. But let’s take this thought a bit further…is there a limit to how rules you can break at once?

A few weeks ago, I probably would have said no. It’s kind of silly to have a rule about breaking the rules, right? But then I saw Woody Allen’s VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA and I started to have a change of heart.

(Forgive me on commenting on such an old movie. Long gone are the days when I used to see one or two movies a week. Sadly, the last movie I saw in a theatre was WALL-E. )

The movie, which received excellent reviews and earned Penelope Cruz an Academy Award, starts breaking rules right from the first scene and continues throughout the movie. All along the way, broken rules start to pile-up like roadkill on the highway: the story is propelled by an omniscient voice-over narration rather than by the characters themselves; major events happen off-screen; there is little conflict, and the conflict that exists is short-lived and easily resolved; a major character is introduced late in the story; clichés abound in both story and stereotypes; in the end, the major characters return to their normal lives unchanged…just to name a few.

There were so many broken rules, I started to wonder if Woody Allen had written the movie as an intentional exercise in rule-breaking rather than focusing on making a good story. I mean, the guy knows what he’s doing and he’s broken rules forever, but this time the result felt overwhelmingly shallow. The movie received such glowing praise that I’m in the minority here, but it left me thinking that rules are best broken in moderation. There’s something admirable in going for broke, but sticking to a few rules while breaking others might be necessary to give your experimentation some legitimacy.

Perhaps I’m just generalizing based on a mediocre movie—but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is there a limit to how many rules you should break at the same time?

The Comedy of Delusion

One of my favorite comedic movie scenes of all time is the marching band scene from Woody Allen’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. If you haven’t seen it (or even if you have) check it out.

When I watched the movie recently, I was curious to see if the scene would have the same effect on me as it did when I first saw it ten years ago. Sure enough, I was doubled over, laughing so hard I was crying. We all know that humor is an elusive, subjective thing that is difficult to nail down, but watching the marching band scene again after all these years made me wonder why it still worked.

In thinking about this, it occurred to me that the joke breaks over the audience in several waves. First of all, there is Allen’s masterful stroke of absurdity—a cellist in a marching band. Once the initial surprise of this begins to wear off, we are hit with the realization of the logistical implications of a seated musician playing in a moving group. Then we are hit again as the band passes by Virgil and he has to pick up the chair, move it forward, sit, and start to play again. And if that wasn’t enough, we are hit again and again as the band passes him and he repeats the whole silly routine over and over. Instead of getting tiresome, Virgil’s attempts at keeping up just get funnier and funnier. It’s funny because even though we know his actions are futile, Virgil seems to think he’ll eventually figure out a way to keep up. He’s continually doing the same thing but expecting a different result—a form of insanity.

Perhaps my favorite form of comedic insanity is megalomania, which is the condition of being deluded about one’s power and importance. If I wasn’t afraid of repeating myself, I would write only about megalomaniacs because of their rich comic appeal. Fictional megalomaniacs that most readily come to mind are Barney Fife from the Andy Griffith Show, Don Quixote, and my personal favorite--Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Reilly’s snobbish disdain for nearly everyone and everything becomes hilariously ironic when juxtaposed against his own sloth and social ineptitude.

Delusion is the gap between who a character thinks he is and who we know him to be. Beyond the comedy, there is also enormous potential for self-examination by the audience. Who does he think he is? we ask ourselves. Becoming judge and jury, we are then forced to ask, Who do we think we are?