FADE IN…
There is, in screenwriting as in life, a discernible difference between ‘fading out’ and ‘dissolving to’. It is an important distinction and one that I have recently grappled with. The former lends itself to finality. This scene, this episode, this film will end. We ‘fade out’ because there is nothing left to say or think or witness. We ‘fade out’ to black, to the end credits. The latter evokes another moment – fleeting or perennial – that lies in wait beyond the frame. Sometimes a writer may dissolve to an epilogue or a quote or an image, but what is crucial is that a very specific decision has been taken to end (as far as the word ‘end’ can be applied to a deliberate transition) with movement, with action. It is a statement that stories continue and we take them with us into our ordinary lives. Or, as they say in The History Boys: “It’s just one fucking thing after another.”
I like the dissolve. True, my last two screenplays have ended with a hard ‘snap to black’, but both have also included, via the movement of the camera in the first and specific dialogue in the second, allegorical dissolves. In other words: I deliberately cut the action at the exact moment that the story throws out into the ether the suggestion that its characters and themes will continue to exist beyond the narrative device of the script. And this is important. Life, after all, is a series of instants – some frivolous, some significant – and we shift from one to the other. While some writers prefer to frame their stories within the conventional confines of an exact start and a precise end, I like them to be continued…
The idea of dissolving was raised recently by a friend of mine. We were discussing the difference between boys and girls, as twentysomething over-thinkers from North London will tend to do. He coined a phrase that I had not heard before but now consider to be a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental distinction between the birds and the bees. Women fade out. Men dissolve to. When you found your Zone 2 London flat (close to the Tube (probably the Jubilee Line)) you will have perused the catalogues of John Lewis and Next to find your fixtures and fittings and soft furnishings. You will have discoursed on the merits and drawbacks of dimmer switches against conventional flip buttons. Probably you will have ended up with faux chrome to go with the mock granite worktops and off-white walls and it is fair to say that you are unlikely to have considered the link between your lighting system and your love life. Quite conceivably this will be because you are a normal, stable, fully-functioning member of the adult human race and unlikely to ponder with metaphysical whimsy why your choice of illuminative methodology speaks to your philosophy on matters of the heart.
I ponder. This is what I do. I think about what happens once the scene has finished. I imagine characters and circumstances after the credits. I conjure whole conversations and moments and subplots and locations and situations. For want of a better phrase, I am a dimmer switch. If my feelings change it is gradual.
This is what will happen: the moment of realisation that this girl, this time, this situation is the one towards which all the previous heartbreaks, journeys, discoveries and awkward early mornings (unfamiliar apartments; damp on the ceiling; regret on the mind) have led towards will be met with a figurative, imaginary lighting and pyrotechnic display the likes of which Danny Boyle could only dream. Act Two will add further sleights of hand. Across the varilights and neon and yoyo gobos and follow-spots will be strobes and filters and kaleidoscopic carousels of alternating colour and design. A vestibular assault. There won’t be a dry ice in the house; except there willbecause dry ice will soon cloud the collage as we enter Act Three and slowly, incrementally, glacially turn everything down and switch everything off until only the haze of an exhausted smoke machine remains, drifting wispy grey cirrus onto an empty stage filled with neglected lenses and torn confetti. Then, and only then, will the party be over. I am a dimmer switch. It is initially fun and eventually expensive.
My friend has a theory that, give or take exceptions that both he and I are yet to find, the majority of men are dimmers and the majority of women are switches. The female version of the above story contains no sluggish realisation that it is no longer desirable to spend any time or money or emotion on this particular lighting display. Down in the depths below the theatre, in a backstage backroom, a girl with eyes to kill and a smile to make men write folks songs holds her hand above a large red fuse, ready at any given moment to cut the chord. No confused blend of colour. No atonal anguish of refraction. Leave the actors on the stage and the audience in their seats. Cut the scene. Snap to black. Find the next production.
That sounds harsh and perhaps not particularly appropriate to your own personal experiences, be you male or female. Sorry about that. Being a human I will generalise for dramatic effect. There does seem to be a trend however. I also realise now that my references throughout this article to friends of mine make it seem that I am actually referring to myself and attempting to disguise it with a wretched subterfuge that any nascent psychoanalyst could decipher faster than you can utter the title to Bon Iver’s debut album. For now, however, I shall put my faith in the shibboleth between writer and reader and assume you will take me at my word. A friend of mine really did come up with the lighting analogy. And another friend of mine is at the heart of my next story.
First of all, yes, to confirm your surprise thusfar: I do indeed have a minimum of two friends. Secondly, I should like to point out in the interests of full disclosure that this next story has no ending, mainly because in a very literal sense it is happening right now to a person very dear to me. He, like me (and my friend to whom the dimmer/switcher paradigm can be attributed), is an analytical sort:
She said this, but it might mean that.
She didn’t mention that, so presumably she was really saying this.
She said she would phone but used WhatsApp instead to say that she would phone later.
She didn’t phone.
She said she doesn’t have a phone.
She liked a picture of herself on Facebook with four of her seventy eight best friends (big smiles; nameless bar; espresso martinis; iPhones on table) so she must have noticed the unplugged acoustic version of Ryan Adams’ La Cienega Just Smiled that I obviously (but subtly (but obviously)) posted at the optimum time of day to attract her attention based on a quick algorhythmic study of the median time that she engages with the ‘newsfeed’ or ‘timeline’ or ‘morale-sapping sequence of demoralising posts by incontinently happy people that you do not even know anymore’, or whatever it is that Zuckerburg is now calling it.
She didn’t like the song.
She ‘read’ my message at 15:37 on Monday.
It’s now 12:45 on Thursday.
This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know this up front: this is not plagiarised. It is simply one of many examples of female stop and play in what is an otherwise perfect opportunity to segway back into the action via two twenty-first-century popular culture references in the space of two sentences. My friend likes this girl. I have not met her, but everything I know about her indicates that she is what we dimmers like to call a ‘game-changer’. She is smart and funny and inquisitive; vulnerable only in an attractive sense; beautiful, kind, seductive. They began their courtship in November. It continued beyond Christmas and into the New Year. There were late night chats and early morning texts; walks in the park and kisses in the street.
Of course, I cannot tell whether, at some imperceptible point in the future, the fireworks display that every mutual touch and look and feel elicits in my friend’s whirring imagination will ultimately fade for him too, like a sparkler on a winter night, its glow inexorably tracing down from metal ion chlorate to dull, insensitive wire and embers and ash. All I know is that my friend very much occupied a space in Act Two, with Act Three yet to be written, yet to even be conceived. A happy place. In the moment. That was until last weekend when the red fuse box reared its ugly head and kicked and screamed the two of them into Act Three anyway.
A conversation took place between the boy and the girl and the outlook became cloudy. Or, rather, she spoke and he didn’t and the outlook became cloudy. This was a surprise and seemingly out of synch with the previous period of contentedness. My friend was confused. What had he done? What hadn’t he done? And, crucially, what could be done? Drive on, through the soggy soil of England, and let the situation diffuse with time and chance? Or turn around and head back into the city to bend the storyline to a happier conclusion? Many would counsel restraint here. Don’t be weird. Don’t be a stalker. Don’t come across too strong. Give her space. Give her room. Give her time.
Time? What, the very thing we are each running out of? Time: that we each lose our battle with. For, as Shakespeare put it, “Time's the king of men; he's both their parent, and he is their grave, and gives them what he will, not what they crave.” No surrender to serendipity. No acceptance that the light switch is binary. Do not allow the cold and callous snap to black but defend the dissolve: rage, if you will, against the dying of the light. It may yet grow dark but “nothing will come of nothing.” If a man continues his journey without finding the courage to say what he feels and why he feels it, if a man travels on with regret and remorse at not turning back and declaring his love, his hopes, his dreams, then what is the point of the voyage? Why make it at all? And if not now, when?
This has been an illusory piece. Let me cut through the symbolism and make it clear that, in this particular story, the idea of the journey is both literal and metaphorical. There is indeed a ‘journey’ that we each are on. In relation to my friend, there was also an actual, tangible, physical decision to be made: whether to keep on driving away or turn around and travel to where the girl could be found and lend delicate voice to emotional thought.
Well, my friend turned back and I do not know what will happen next. He spoke his truths and she uttered her silences and the pages remain blank, to be filled by the protagonists as their scenes play out. She may yet flip the switch. He may eventually dim the bulbs. Yet in a cynical world there remains a place for bold romantic gestures; there is room still for the dimmers.
We learn at the last that our lives are moments. We transition between them; sometimes sightless, sometimes not, but always moving. Not for me the cut. Not for me the snap. Not for me the switch. Give me the dimmer, for the lights will go up and the lights will go down and the lights will go up again…
DISSOLVE TO…
