Right and Wrong

There’s a small online kerfuffle involving the director Quentin Tarantino who was on a podcast recently where he opined that the film There Will Be Blood would have been really special if it weren’t for the performance of Paul Dano, whose acting he referred to as “weak sauce.” Dano’s actor brethren have rushed to his defense, posting here and there about how great they think he is and how Tarantino is just a big dummy. No word yet from Dano, or, to my pretty limited knowledge, Tarantino.

I saw the film in question and thought it was really good, including the aforementioned performance. In fact, I’ve liked Dano in everything I’ve seen him in – but that’s me. I have a theory that there would be no scandal, if it can even be called that, had Tarantino used the words, “In my opinion.” I understand why someone wouldn’t. Your experience of a movie or book doesn’t feel like preference any more than stepping barefoot into the snow is chilling.

Though, come to think of it, without fail, every winter I’ll see some guy wandering to the grocery store in the middle of a cold Seattle rain wearing a wool hat, fleece jacket, and shorts and flipflops. Apparently, he and I have differing opinions about cold. A part of me is always irritated by these fellows, is even tempted to interrogate them about their choice in trousers and footwear. What are they trying to prove? Then again, I did have one friend, also a Seattleite, who would only wear these tropical sandals when not at work. He claimed they helped him relax. He was a good friend, and I simply couldn’t hold the whole flipflops thing against him.

Shoes and stories and acting styles are all aesthetics of one sort or another. Word choices too. When you you’ve been stuck on a sentence for a few minutes or a few hours or a few years, it’s a such a relief when the right ones finally come to you. How maddening to think you could show the finished passage to someone and they could shrug and tell you how they’d have done it differently. It’s hard sometimes to live in a world without right and wrong, where cold isn’t cold and hot isn’t hot, where there’s no such thing as good stories or performances, just whatever this one or that one prefers. Until, of course, you consider the alternative – a land of one right answer to every question, as if we were all stuck forever in elementary school, studying for a test some authority dreamed for us, with nothing to discover but how we scored.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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