Johnson's Moving Pictures
“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater”, said Roman Polanski. This quote is saying that when a person goes to the movies he should not only feel like he is watching it but that he is experiencing it. The short story “Moving Pictures” is the perfect example for putting into words what this quote means. “Moving Pictures” is about this writer that just got his big break and a producer asked him to rewrite his book for a movie. The timeline of the story goes back and forth from past to the present. When the speaker is in the present he talks about how is sitting in the theatre watching the movie he has been talking about making the whole time. By the end the speaker ends up figuring out that he isn’t cut out for the movie business.
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The speaker is his own worst enemy because he is self-destructive. The speaker lost his wife because he was sleeping with younger woman. Johnson shows this when he says, “the young woman at work, born in 1960 and unable to recall John Kennedy, who after the Christmas party took you to in her spacious downtown loft” (Johnson 2). The characterization shows that he is self-destructive because he chose to be a cliche and sleep with a younger woman from his work after a Christmas party. Another example, of the speaker’s self destructive character is shown when he goes back the producer’s house. Johnson states, “served you Scotch, and then, from inside the drawer in his desk removed an envelope, dumped it's contents out, and you saw maybe fifty snapshots of beautiful, naked women on his bed” (Johnson 3). This shows his character when he was shown these contents and didn’t say anything or do anything. The final example of the speaker being his own worst enemy through characterization is when he loses himself in the writing and it doesn’t seem like his book at all anymore. Johnson says, “You’d compromised, given up ground, won a few artistic points, but generally you agreed to the producer’s ideas it was his show...watching your script change at each level of interpretation director, actor until it was unrecognizable, a new thing entirely, a celebration of the Crew. Not you.” (Johnson 3). This is showing that the speaker was upset when his work wasn’t showing through anymore and he had been pushed into it throughout time and didn’t realize it until now. Not only is the author using characterization to create the theme but the is also using figurative
The speaker is his own worst enemy because he is self-destructive. The speaker lost his wife because he was sleeping with younger woman. Johnson shows this when he says, “the young woman at work, born in 1960 and unable to recall John Kennedy, who after the Christmas party took you to in her spacious downtown loft” (Johnson 2). The characterization shows that he is self-destructive because he chose to be a cliche and sleep with a younger woman from his work after a Christmas party. Another example, of the speaker’s self destructive character is shown when he goes back the producer’s house. Johnson states, “served you Scotch, and then, from inside the drawer in his desk removed an envelope, dumped it's contents out, and you saw maybe fifty snapshots of beautiful, naked women on his bed” (Johnson 3). This shows his character when he was shown these contents and didn’t say anything or do anything. The final example of the speaker being his own worst enemy through characterization is when he loses himself in the writing and it doesn’t seem like his book at all anymore. Johnson says, “You’d compromised, given up ground, won a few artistic points, but generally you agreed to the producer’s ideas it was his show...watching your script change at each level of interpretation director, actor until it was unrecognizable, a new thing entirely, a celebration of the Crew. Not you.” (Johnson 3). This is showing that the speaker was upset when his work wasn’t showing through anymore and he had been pushed into it throughout time and didn’t realize it until now. Not only is the author using characterization to create the theme but the is also using figurative