CHICAGO: If Hepatitis C Were Attacking Your Face Instead of Your Liver You'd Be Doing Something About It

bland != banal

But why does dialogue have to be banal to be real?

I dunno, are most people not as interested in the aggressively ho-hum as I am? Am I the only one who asks new romantic partners to "tell me a boring story"?

-- Chris Piuma (chri...), February 25th, 2003.

But when real-life banality is applied to art, it automatically becomes more interesting because a) we're not used to seeing banality in art: it becomes the exception rather than the rule, and b) art has the power to make the banal transcendent.

ideally has the same what's-going-on-here? pleasure of eavesdropping.

Bingo. There's an intimate, voyeuristic thrill to it. It feels visceral, somehow.

This thread would be great to have read to you as a bedtime story
-- oops (buttch9...), February 26th, 2003.

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Oops is OTM.
-- Chris Piuma (chri...), February 27th, 2003.

Me: Oh.

Writing about something banal in a non-banal way would be interesting I guess. But I don't hold out much hope for the outcome.

Using that poetry analogy, I think what we're talking about is more of finding the profound in daily life than in being deliberately boring - it's more like Vermeer and Rembrandt painting daily life in Holland (ho hum) instead of the great moments in religious history.

This is a very good question, and the best answer that I can give is that I experience both at the same time, or go back and forth: the pleasure is both in the visceral voyeuristic thrill and the rational appreciation for the uncanniness of the vérité style. (I'm serious, I have like a whole chapter in my senior project about this where I talk about Raymond Carver and Mike Leigh.)

xpost--this is a corollary to what Jenny just said.

I just saw this movie version of his play Edmond on New Years Eve, with WH Macy and Julia Stiles and others, and since someone else directed it the dialogue is less distracting than usually and it's easier to get caught up in the characters instead of thinking about the author. (It's really much better than I'd expected - and a few of the scenes are absolutely perfect as individual scenes.)

xpost- One dramamtic trick, though, Jenny, is to hide the drama in a banal situation. Like - the guy on the cell phone could be talking to the surgeon who is operating on his daughter in an hour - that's dramatic. Or he could be talking with the guy fixing the stucco on his house, and somehow from that "ordinary" conversation, something profound about the guy's life happens. If he doesn't change by the end, that's bad drama - but sometimes our lives change dramatically from a moment that seemed boring.

Aren't there some web comics (or print, I dunno) that put principles more like what John is talking about into practice? I might be thinking of the Itchy and Scratchy lemonade cartoon that someone quoted on the banal conversation thread, but I can totally see a four panel comic in which two characters have a totally pointless and boring conversation.

I don't understand this. I found some of the road shots really interesting, too: the Gordon Lightfoot song soundtracking rain on a windshield is particularly beautiful -- but I don't see how the "context" takes away from the beauty. What is the context, anyway?

The Brown Bunny is an interesting example of seeing a guy do very little for a long, long time, but then at the end you understand the circumstances. If it didn't have the payoff, it would be more like a travelogue than anything else. Which, if the scenery was pretty...

x-post - Jesse beat me to it!

And yes, good call on all of those, Eric. I'd also add Bully, which demonstrated the banality of evil more provocatively than anything else I can think of.