This weekend, I was back in the small Wisconsin town where I grew up, which currently claims title to both Home and Not-Home. It’s Home because it’s where I spent my first eighteen years on earth, from conception (and believe me, this is information I did NOT need to know) to the summer after high school graduation. My mother still lives in the same house on Main Street, in front of which I learned to ride a bicycle, to rollerskate, to chalk an elaborate hop-scotch course, to hit black walnuts into the street with a wiffle bat. To write: after school I would climb the ash tree, settle on a branch a third of the way up with my back against the trunk, and scribble in my notebook. I liked to spy on people who walked, unknowingly, beneath me. I recorded their conversations and the way they travelled, hurriedly or leisurely, striding or strolling.
And of course, it’s Not-Home, because I haven’t lived there in a decade. Where once it was impossible to run a simple errand without seeing someone I knew – my teenage classmates staffed every store in the strip mall, the grocery store, the Ben Franklin, the video rental store, the Hallmark, the Subway, the Hardees, the hardware store – now I can push my cart around the grocery store for an hour and see no one familiar (aside from a weathered woman who looked like an older, shrunken version of my fourth grade reading teacher). I drive around town and compulsively explain the differences between then and now: “This whole neighborhood is new… when I was a kid this was all cornfield… when I was little these roads didn’t connect… this park was full of wooden equipment and an awesome merry-go-round that they ripped out after the third kid in a year broke her arm….”
I move through town with less ease now, feeling like an outsider. My partner and I made up an imaginary movie in which a long-gone townie returns to find everything different – not an uncommon theme – and kept referencing moments that would go into the movie. Our prodigal townie would be a friendly outsider whose every joke falls flat. The moment in the grocery store where we tried to joke with the guy handing out wine samples and he just stared at us – in the movie. Joking about the notices hanging on a community bulletin board – failing miserably at dog park small talk – navigating bizarre road construction – teasing teenagers at the petting zoo – all in the movie. As we described it, the movie wouldn’t even have a plot, really; it would just be a wild collection of moments, a long montage of homecoming awkwardness.
Film can be such a rich medium for storytelling, because it naturally lends itself to comparison in juxtaposition. You show a scene where a character moves through the grocery store with ease, laughing and chatting with everyone she encounters. In the very next scene she’s older and every attempt at conversation falls flat. You don’t have to explain that something has changed: the juxtaposition speaks for itself. Also, film almost forces you to engage setting in the story. After all, you can’t film a scene in a vacuum. Every scene has to take place somewhere. As such, film is a great medium for evoking place and its impact on character.
When they make the movie of my life, this weekend will probably look like a cross between Grosse Point Blank and The Big Chill, funny and twisted and a little sad, with an 80s soundtrack and a bunch of hilarious cameos. In the meantime, I’m going to use the principles of filmmaking to inform my fiction, focusing on place and juxtaposition to enrich my story.
Interested in Filmmaking? Check out our Screenwriting I class, Thursdays, September 18 to November 13; 6:30pm to 9pm. Call 773.477.7710 or email for more information.
