Down with the Theses!

Some of my blog posts are focused -- these are generally the ones that I wrote first as essays for college classes and later realized were pertinent outside the academic sphere.  Many of my posts are not focused.  I start with a troubling or intriguing thought and wriggle my way to some sort of conclusion.  I’ve realized that this is how I write most everything--poems, short stories, novels, screenplays--pretty much everything that I do not have to begin with a thesis statement.   

So I latch on to an idea--say, the world tree,  yggdrasill.  And I absorb as much information about it as I can.  Because I’ve realized that I don’t care about proving something so much as knowing it. I can upcycle that information (and “information” is such a dry word--I really mean that mythology, that story, that fragment of life) into a modern context.  I think that’s why shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time have me so hooked--they are tapping into stories that mesmerize me.  Well, Grimm not so much.  It’s basically an episodic cop show with some Germanic fairy tale characters thrown in for flavor.  And Once is a little hit-or-miss, but when they hit, I’m hooked (I mean honestly, the episodes about Cinderella and Jiminy Cricket were both implausible and boring--but the stuff about Snow White and Prince Charming...that’s gold.  Also, what’s up with bringing King Midas into the mix?  He was ancient Near Eastern mythology, not Western European, which is where most of the other characters are drawn from--keep it consistent, ABC).  

Point is (and yes, I have a point, sort of, somewhere in here), I process by typing.  That’s my point?  I think that’s my point.  And it’s almost to the point where I can’t understand something until I write it down, or say it out loud.  I think this is why I get stuck sometimes in social situations -- a certain moment is reached in the conversation and my Chit-Chat / BS core reactor exceeds its potential limit and fritzes out.  I’m stuck without warp-drive in the vast vacuum of space with no way to limp back to a coherent sentence.  I literally cannot come up with words.  My entire vocabulary has been ripped out of me like the bones of a gutted fish.  Analogy-overload alert!  

This is obviously not one of the focused blogs.

This is my fourth year in college, and my sixteenth year in school, if you don’t count preschool or kindergarten.  And after all this time, I’m beginning to realize that I hate thesis statements.  I hate pointing baldly at some fact and stating, “This, and nothing else, is what is relevant.”  Funny thing is, I like themes.  In movies and books, especially.  Themes about love or growing up or dying or loss--universal stuff.  Theses--they’re so specific, so exclusive.  It’s hard to find a thesis that I give a shit about, even harder to find one that I can defend.  I think that plays a large part in why I am very uninterested in politics.  Everyone’s cramming a thesis down everyone else’s throat and no one really gives a shit about the other person’s thesis.  

It’s also funny, because I’m making my “thesis” project right now.  The final film of my undergraduate career, the film that’s supposed to stand for everything that I am as a filmmaker.  But there’s absolutely no way it stands for everything I am as a filmmaker.  I am just beginning to figure out who I am as a filmmaker.  And that’s the freaking thing--thesis statements come at the beginning of the essay.  They state what the answer is, and then seek to prove that answer.  Thesis statements assume that you already know everything there is to know.  And I don’t know any 22-year-olds that have much of anything figured out.  

So, at least from my perspective, I don’t write films with thesis statements.  I don’t write novels that make bold statements about war or religion or politics.  I cannot possibly know all there is to know about any of those kinds of topics.  What I can do is write a story with a theme.  I have no interest in art that is propaganda or social commentary wrapped up in pretty pictures and music.  I care about stories.  Some people could look at Jay and think that I was trying to “say” something about the educational system, or American poverty, or interracial romance, or whatever.  I would say that has nothing to do with Jay.  Jay is about Jay.  It’s a story about a girl who had to grow up too fast and had to make decisions that she should never have been asked to make.  

So I guess my point is that I have no point.  I have no conscious agenda.  I like to write for the sake of writing.  I like to learn for the sake of learning.  I hate putting effort into things that I know have no practical value in my life (cough, cough, gen. ed. math, cough, ahem).  I am, as my mother before me, a fountain of useless information--because somehow all those tidbits of facts and fictions and stories is all there is.  That is life.  The moments, the minutiae.  Those small, specific things are the difference between a Scooby Doo mystery and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, between Little Miss Sunshine and Toddlers in Tiaras.  

And I guess my point is also not that no one should have theses (my apologies for the double-negatives).  Maybe if you’re the leading world-expert on hermit crabs, you should have a strong opinion about hermit crabs.  It’s just maybe that you shouldn’t be writing screenplays about hermit crabs.  Because when you start with an agenda, and you have it in your head that you need this agenda to reach as many people as possible, you are so often so easily tempted to make things (facts, stories, statistics, whatever) fit the agenda.  This is why we get movies like Fireproof.  This is why we get movies with great comedy or drama ravished by theses (think Happy Feet--loved the set-up and the character and the fuzzy penguin baby and was totally into it until the blatant environmental message smacked me in the face like a wet fish and pulled me completely out of the story).  

It doesn’t matter what side you’re coming from, what your point is, or what you’re trying to accomplish--agendas, in my experience, ruin art.  People from every political, religious, economical, and ethnic side of any particular issue are guilty of this.  

But themes go hand-in-hand with art.  They provide a framework for people to coalesce.  Themes--myths--whatever you want to call them, they, by their very nature, attract people to the shared commonalities of the human experience.  

So as I approach (oh-so-slowly, it seems) the end of my college career, I think I have had enough with writing essays.  Even when I began writing my blog back in high school, I did not save my posts under “essays,” I saved them under “musings.”  I don’t get to a point until the end, until I’ve worked my way through a train of thought.  Theses have their place--I don’t dispute their importance in specific circumstances.  But as far as I can see, they have no pertinence in my work.  They have no place in my stories.  

I will always continue to seek out information, because that’s how I’m wired.  But I’ll probably never go on to get additional advanced degrees, because I just don’t care about things in the sort of way that the academic world would have me care.  And coming to this conclusion (I do have a point after all) relieves an enormous amount of guilt and pressure that I have been carrying with me since childhood.  I’ll continue to try to do well in this last year of school, mostly out of pride, and an ingrained habit of settling for no less than a certain grade.  But I am beginning to see that a GPA has almost no bearing on my present or future success.  The goal is not a grade (or, the thesis).  The goal is the knowing (or, the theme).  

And the great thing about themes is that they can always be adapted to new contexts.  Thesis tend to get outdated, usurped, or disproven.  And I think that’s the difference between a blockbuster and a classic.  One is famous and relevant for a day--the other is relevant for an eternity.  

Those are the kinds of stories I want to write.  Those are the stories in which I want to invest my life.