This is a long post started by ms-demeanor, but it’s totally worth the read! It’s about literary and film analysis and “blue curtains”, which references the act of finding literary symbolism where there is none. There is a common joke about literature teachers going like this:
Author writes: “The curtains were blue.”
Lit teacher says: “This reflects on the generally depressed state of the protagonist.”
Author meant: “The curtains were blue.”
Source: ms-demeanor
(via: r/CuratedTumblr)
The pink polka-dotted curtains covered in
sequins hung there, shutting out the crimson
sunset basking Jason in darkness. What was
once a heat of the moment design choice
no longer seems so bright and fun. What
little shine they held in their eyes is now dull
matted colors, unable to look at him.
That is an awful piece of writing. Basking him? The curtains have eyes? Go back to school.
So you even know what basking means? It has nothing to do with eyes. Go back to school is good advice though. For yourself.
Those were two separate sentences. One whole thought: “basking” is used so incorrectly that the author is trying to say the opposite of what the word actually means. Second whole thought: curtains do not have eyes. The author could have saved this by implying the sequins are eyes, but since they didn’t, it’s gibberish.
This was just an example to get a point across. If someone’s trying to quickly visualize something for you, they’re not gonna do in by means of a full-blown oil painting on expensive canvas either – they’ll draw a quick pencil sketch. This is the pencil sketch. The ability to understand things in context is another valuable skill people should be taught in school.
Felicity – please get a dictionary.
verb: bask; 3rd person present: basks; past tense: basked; past participle: basked; gerund or present participle: basking
lie exposed to warmth and light, typically from the sun, for relaxation and pleasure.
First comment but I can’t help myself. Your definition is proving Felicity correct.
For starters, if basking is to “lie exposed to warmth and light” then Jason cannot bask in darkness.
Even if we were to fudge the definition a little bit, as if often done in fictional literature, Jason would be the one basking, not the curtains.
“Jason was basking in the darkness” would be correct, one thing cannot bask something else.
The correct term here would be bathing. “…Shutting out the crimson sunset, bathing Jason in darkness.”
The rest of the short piece feels very pretentious and leans way too hard into allegory. Of course, I’m sure the author probably just wrote it in a few seconds, just to elucidate a point, so I wouldn’t criticize them all that much over it.
The much funnier thing to me is how they largely ruin their own point with the story. Their description of the curtains is quite flowery and they spend 3 sentences to evoke the appropriate emotions. This is the literary equivalent of focusing the camera. You’re intentionally drawn to pay attention to and imagine the curtains. You’re effectively told the emotions you’re supposed to be feeling.
Compare that to “The curtains were blue.” Slapped in the middle of a paragraph, or even the beginning or end of one, the line is going to be glossed over by virtually every single reader. Because it is generally irrelevant data and honestly poor writing in most cases. If you simply assign a color and expect it to evoke emotion, it’s not going to work because readers will all have different emotions and thoughts tied to that color.
The red in the Sixth Sense works because the film gives it meaning. You don’t automatically know that red = ghost. Hell you’re not supposed to know until the end of the film and then suddenly you have all the information to put it together. The two photos of a fence do an absolutely wonderful job of conveying different emotions, but it takes a LOT more than just different color pallets. The presence of mist and obscuring of the trees invoke fear and weakness (The unknown and loss of senses.) The trees look much more sparse and dead. The fence looks older and worn, compared to fresh and new in the first photo. And of course, everything is darker.
In the end, we don’t really know if the author specifically picked the color for the emotion, if they threw a dart at a color wheel or simply thought it fit the color scheme pictured in their mind. But if you’ve ever taken literary courses in college, you’ve probably run into the professor that insists the curtains have to be blue for a fucking reason or that the clown costume in Cask of Amontillado means more than the narrator thought that guy was an idiot.
Stephen King talks about this concept in his book “On Writing”…
In the end, it’s one thing to have your interpretation of things, we all will and do. I love it when someone points out something in a book or film and explains what it means to them. It’s a whole other thing to demand everyone see the same symbolism or to assume that’s what the author meant. Hell, it’s not cool to even expect everyone to see any symbolism in specific stuff at all.
Because things don’t always have to mean shit.
While I largely agree with everything you said, it’s a bit off to can someone for using ‘bask’ wrong when you don’t know the difference between ‘pallet’ and ‘palette’…
Sometimes a person is simply using a word wrong and should have picked another word, and sometimes a person is using a word wrong because there is poetry and deeper meaning in doing so, and that isn’t bad writing just because some reader fails to understand it.
Pointless comment first: Had a “the curtains were blue” conversation recently and joked the “curtains were blue because the editor missed that autocorrect changed ‘the curtains blew'”…
The curtains being blue might just be creating a fully realized description. It doesn’t matter that they are blue except that every reader will know they are neither red nor green.
But, more relevant is the subversion of Checkov’s gun. The theory that the gun needs to be fired misses the subtler method of having the gun hanging on the wall because it isn’t necessary to have it on a character’s hip; or it misleads a character to believe it is there as a weapon instead of decor; or a thousand other possibilities. I don’t think Checkov was being literal when he shared his rule.