The Protagonist: Where Narrative Meets Technicality

                

Considering Jessica Yu’s Protagonist documentary film and a narrative story’s relationship to technical writing, I take a page from Moore’s “Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool.” Moore talks about structure, which I what I feel aids Yu in the process of telling the stories of four mean with disparate upbringings who are all alike in the way they dealt with overwhelming adversities in their lives and their fights to regain balance and self-control. Technical writing, being about the process of structuring a story and not necessarily the content of the story itself, is a huge factor; influencing which story came first, how to weave the narratives together, what editing techniques would yield the best results and bring the viewer to the narrative through the delivery of the protagonists’ stories.

               

 Yu also had to consider how to bring in her Greek dramatist theme and what frames and stories from the Greek playwright, Euripides, made most sense to break the monotony of the interviews’ verbal delivery and the chosen b-roll clips that worked to drive home the points and emphasize the climactic appeal of each interviewer’s storylines. Mitcheson writes in “Allowing the Accidental; the Interplay between Intentionality and Realism and Photographic Art” that a special connection exists between image as symbol and the photograph, or reality, it represents. The photographs, taken from the actual lives of these men, add to the film too and work to provide a bridge between the personal traumas they suffered and the universal feeling of suffering, which breaks the barriers of individual circumstances of pain and leave only the all-around relational effect of pain that everyone can identify with.

Scaredycat Summary

          

  

The piercing tone and simplified text reading only the documentary title starts the film. A shot of filmmaker and the film’s focus, Andrew Blubaugh flashed on the screen. Blubaugh is gesturing with his hand up in a “stop” motion, followed by shots of unidentified black men, not still but moving. Blubaugh’s narrative begins with a conversation with his father where he recalls his own tendency to worry as a child. “The way you talk about it seems a bit more crippling” a woman’s voice plays over b-roll of Blubaugh first straightening a picture on the wall of his apartment before heading out the door; him walking methodically aligned with paved lines in the concrete, and him straightening a piece of paper on a public transit train. The final shot is a workplace/cubicle shot. In this shot, everything is neat and seems to have its place, with Blubaugh right in the center of the shot (actually he is off-center by the slightest margin, but the negative space between him and his desk makes the shot. In the scene he is moving, but after securing everything in the right spot in just the right way, he becomes motionless and the scene turns into a still shot.

            Kirsten Snowden, Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon introduces herself as a prosecutor for Blubaugh’s attack case. She describes the crime as “relatively senseless.” While she is talking, symmetrical shots play as b-roll of Blubaugh riding through various parts of the city and her introduction ends with a shot of Portland Steel Bridge. This shot transitions to an animated reenactment of Blubaugh being attacked by five strangers while a recording of his initial phone call to the police plays in the background. The animation is dark. A highlighted scene is Blubaugh’s bike laying on the ground, the front wheel still in motion, while shadowy, almost silhouette figured legs walk by. Text of some of Blubaugh’s pleadings to his attackers flash across the screen; “Oh God, Please Let Me go,” and “I have money. The animation ends with a back and forth shot-by-shot frame of Blubaugh making direct eye contact with one of his attackers with police physically describing the potential attackers and their directional heading in fleeing the crime before the entire scene fades to black, again with the piercing tone.

             Jan Hawkin, Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Portland State University introduces herself and reveals that her major area of study includes memory, gender and interpersonal violence. She continued that her interest includes the range of responses available to a person that has experience trauma. “All people have the right to be secure and to be free of violence” she says.” While she talks about her area of research, b-roll plays of Blubaugh performing simple household tasks. His face is clearly bruised and bandaged. A quick shot of the animated reenactment flashes across the screen. “We’re offered two very inadequate responses to violent crimes and violent forms of victimization. One is to turn the other way and just feel well ‘this is what you put up with in a society where people are gonna do bad things to others,’ and the other perhaps worse response is a very punitive one.” A shot of a computer screen reading “Are you OK?” flashes across the screen.

Blubaugh then begins talking about the process of actually being courageous enough to leave his home after his attack. In the shots, Blubaugh is performing his rituals as he had at the beginning of the film His voice over plays during the shots; “I told myself that if I’m out on the street, and I see a young Black man, and I’m not feeling right about it, I’m gonna do what I have to do… and that’s okay. I got beat up so I get to do that now.” Hawkin mentions the one-trial learning theory where “an experience is so potent and significant that you overlearn from that experience and that you overgeneralize from it. Victims then tend to overcompensate by “secur[ing] a safety that really promises us nothing in terms of actual safety.” Blubaugh admits that his anxiety toward Black men is wrong and a racial oversight that did not work to address his trauma. A frame-by-frame shot sequence with Blubaugh on a public train sitting across from a Black man, a shot of the animated reenactment, and a single shot of a Black man. “it just felt like something I could do” Blubaugh says “at least I was doing something.” Hawkin’s voice probes Blubaugh, suggesting that he seems to be interested in overcoming his fear and addressing his attacker head on. While this voiceover plays, a shot of Blubaugh writing to Michael Palmer, one of his attackers, flashed across the screen.

The next scene opens with Blubaugh at his home desk on the phone with Palmer. As his attacker corresponds, a shot of his letter agreeing to participate in the interview flashes across the screen. Blubaugh explains the purpose of his documentary and discloses. “In your case, it was just spur of the moment. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Palmer admits cavalierly while the animation plays again. Blubaugh asks if Palmer had experienced any violence in his past. “It’s quite an experience the first time, isn’t it?” Palmer asks. Hawkins says that a common, yet unfulfilling need of victims is to see the perpetrators of that violence punished. Course case docket documents flash across the screen as she speaks. Snowden talks about Measure 11, a citizen-motivated law that was passed instituting mandatory sentencing minimums for violent crimes with no early release possibilities. Victor Bradley, 19, and Pierre Bass, 18, both received 90 months (the lightest of all sentences passed down in this case) through Measure 11. Anthony Mondrut (spelling?) received 160 months. Robert Irazari (spelling?) received 172 months. Michael Palmer, 22, received 144 months. Pictures of each aggressor flashed as their sentences are disclosed.

Palmer’s voice plays as a voiceover while shots focus on Blubaugh and the tape recorder recording his words. Palmer says it is not fair to sentence someone for that long. He reflects how his life is ruined, as he envisions his future, released with no life skills and a record. “Looking at it on paper, I think that’s terrible. But then when I think about that night, I do want you to be in prison,” Blubaugh says as he straightens the phone and tape recorder on his desk. “At least we’re doing something,” he says again. The film ends with Blubaugh having a conversation with a woman and talking about eliminating fear from our lives. A final shot of Blubaugh on a public train roles as a Black man sits across from Blubaugh. Blubaugh takes in a breath, but does not move, while he sits next to an askew newspaper that he does not touch while Hawkin’s voice plays in the background; “people who are very careful and fearful, who have also tried to understand their over-reactiveness and study their fears, often are more equipped to recognize that all of our fears are partly irrational."

Protagonist Reflection

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Jessica’s Yu’s Protagonist. I was almost initially turned off by the Greek drama elements, although the puppet characters played well against the heavy subject matter of each individual’s reflection of their pasts in the film. The opening scene is in Greek with subtitles, and I almost turned it off before it even really began so I didn’t have to struggle through an hour and a half of subtitles. I soon discovered that only the transitional pieces were in Greek, and the more they played, the more I actually enjoyed them. They connect to each character in the film and played a dual role of setting the context at the onset of transitional themes (of which there were 13 total: character, provocation, opportunity, turning point, fever, certainty, threshold, doubt, catharsis, reversal, reflection and resolution).

What stood out to me the most the Joe Loya, a Mexican man whose childhood was so tumultuous despite the fact that he was a good kid who was pious and he suffered abuse at the hands of his father whom he revered. In one particular scene, Loya describes a card he made for his dad. Yu actually included the card (or a reproduction of the card) which moved across the scene as Loya spoke. The card said “I love you even though you hit me.” Loya drew two pictures in the card. One was of a belt and other was a picture of his father walking on top of what looked like a snow globe of the world. I don’t know why it touched me so this dynamic where he worshipped his father who beat him and his brother and blamed the two of them, children, for their mother’s kidney failure. I actually cried as I listened to him talked. I found it tragic that a young boy so full of love and life was stripped of his positive potential and ended up suffering from his own psychoses and inner turmoil that drove him to cast fear into people the way his father did him. He actually took pleasure in having people shaking in fear at his hands.

I do feel too that Yu did a great job at giving a full sense of the lives of each of her character studies. The themes of self-control and taking your life into your own hands are prominent to the viewer in a way that they could never be for each of the protagonists, each of whom were consumed and victimized by the circumstances of their own lives. That being said, it could have been a bit shorter. A couple of questions I have are one, why did a female writer focus only on male character study. I want to know what she might have gotten out of this project. Having asked this question, I also want to point out that I understand the circumstances of abuse and exclusion can happen to anyone. I guess I ultimately want to know how Yu personally related to these men’s stories. I also am intensely curious about Klein’s life. His has the most societal impact and follows a timeline that parallels actually political events. His reflection gave new perspective to the terrorist attacks of the early 80s. I am not versed in the political of that region at that time, but still, the opportunity to fill in gaps, even if his recount is flawed by the lapse of time and biased, has to be an ethnographer’s wet dream. I am also curious as to Loya’s current relationship with his father. It wasn’t until about partway through the film that I realize he had not actually murdered his father. I wanted to know if he has contact with his father now that he has grown and actually recognized that he possessed the same neuroses that his father displayed during his youth.

Protagonist Summary

From left to right: Joe Loya, Mark Pierpont, Hans-Joachim Klein, Mark Salzman

Jessica Yu’s 2007 Protagonist is a documentary that follows the lives of four men, each who experienced a void in their lives, or from an early age either recognized in themselves, or was called out for being different. Each of these men’s lives took a different, almost tragic turn of events, but as their contemporary testimony suggests, they were able to find a way to live through their pain, violence, trauma, rejection and/or dejection they suffered in order to be able to living substantive lives. Yu wrote, directed, and co-produced the film. 

The most interesting part of the film to me was the integration of Greek drama, notably the famous dramatist, Euripides. I do not have extensive (or even a novice) understanding of Greek drama, so I had to look the playwright up. When I did, much of the film was put into perspective. According to Encyclopedia Britannica online, Euripides was known for writing his protagonists as average, flawed human beings with shortcomings that made them susceptible to doubt, chaos, irrationality and immorality (Encyclopedia Britannica). Apparently this method of character creation was innovative for its time. The gods played a large role in the Greek dramas of Euripides’ time. Euripides wrote characters who were not beholden to the gods and story lines that did not follow the formula of moral resolution, but rather left audiences ruminating in the meaningless suffering of the characters. This is obvious in each of the people Yu chose, as well as the way she tied in the classic Greek with the contemporary societal issues her own work deals with.

Mark Pierpont grew up in a strictly religious household, and began being ostracized by his family and schoolmates for being “weird” and “different;” distinctions Pierpont would eventually discover resulted from his homosexuality. Isolated, and unaware of his own sexual orientation at such a young age, Pierpont found solace in bible verses and church hymns. Mark Salzman came from a humble family where his father was a social worker and his mother worked out of their home as a piano instructor. Salzman recalled vividly the angst and anxiety his father would experience in wondering how to support a household. This worry transferred to Salzman, who admitted he worried throughout all his childhood and young adult life about how to fit in. He was bullied often, and actually colluded in the abuse just for the engagements with other children.

Joe Loya also came from an extremely religious background. His mother, who was ill, died when Loya was 11 and his father, stricken with grief, began to blame his children and savagely beat and punish them. Loya revered his father, who he recalls in the documentary, was the youngest elder ever named in the church despite the fact that he was Mexican—the only Mexican family in the entire congregation. In a dramatic climax of his teenage years, Loya tries to murder his father by stabbing him in the neck with a knife. Hans-Joachim Klein was born in post-Holocaust Germany. His mother committed suicide when Klein was one year old. After living with foster parents for about nine years, he moves in with his father, who he comes to discover is a Nazi. He suffers physical and verbal abuse at the hand of his biological father, who was a cop. Klein began to rebel against his father after he finds out his mother’s, and consequently, his own connection to Judaism at the age of 16. He runs away and joins a Marxist political faction.

Pierpont, as he grows older, simultaneously begins to experiment sexually and to renounce the feelings and experiences he is just beginning to explore. He memorizes entire chapters of the bible and repeats them incessantly in order to literally pray the gay away. He begins to minister, and actually gains notoriety for his anti-gay messages and tracts that he would distribute in predominately gay nightlife areas. Loya, who I believe begins experiencing the psychologically termed identification with the aggressor, discovers that the rush he experienced when he stabbed his father is one that he needs to feel repeatedly. He begins robbing banks and recounts the thrill that he got when he saw the fear in people’s faces when he disclosed that he had a weapon and intended to rob them. He says during his interview that since his religious upbringing had no middle ground between good and evil, since he knew he was no longer good, he began envisioning that he was serving evil. He would tell himself that the things he was stealing were his all along in order to overcome the anxiety he experienced prior to committing a robbery. 

Salzman, by pure circumstance, is introduced to Kung Fu, a 1970s American television drama starring David Carradine. Carradine was a student of martial arts, and Salzman recalls how composed and in control of himself Carradine’s character was. Feeling like he finally found a path made just for him, Salzman begins studying at a karate institute with an eccentric man who had unconventional practices that embodied the physicality of martial arts without the philosophy of self-control, which Salzman could not see because his own dire sense of longing to belong was being fulfilled through the brotherhood he was finding at the dojo. Klein, now a comrade, too was enjoying the family he found among fellow student activists. He lived among them, read the communist literature of the time and planned political disruptions to protest the wars, economic disparities and ethnic attacks that were occurring all over the world. Through a series of well-executed political disruptions, particularly his role as bodyguard for Jean-Paul Sartre, Klein gained notoriety… enough to get caught. While in prison, he experience horrid conditions. Many of his fellow comrades went on hunger strikes to protest the inhumane treatment. A close friend died during the hunger strike, which enraged Klein. When he was released, his disruptions turned into violent attacks and he eventually became a guerrilla terrorist.

To be Continued...

Andrew Blubaugh's Scaredycat Puts a Fresh POV on an Old Fear

"I don't remember you saying exactly what you were afraid of, but you had those fears."

Andrew Blubaugh's 2007 independent documentary short, Scaredycat, is a poignant look at fear, trauma, and violence from the filmmaker's perspective. I have watched this film about ten times trying to make sense of my overall attitude toward it. It is well-thought out with stunning sensory stimuli that makes his fear palpable. This is a part of its brilliance. 

What I like about the doc is how clean the shots are. The symmetry matches his admitted compulsions. My three favorite shots of the entire film: 1). 2:45; his workplace/cubicle shot. In this shot, everything is neat and seems to have its place, with Blubaugh right in the center of the shot (actually he is off-center by the slightest margin, but the negative space between him and his desk makes the shot. In the scene he is moving, but after securing everything in the right spot in just the right way, he becomes motionless and the scene turns into a still shot. 2). 3:05 the film cuts to a scene that focuses on a bank of five church windows as a centerpiece. Two cars are parallel parked with an empty space between them as if to support the symmetry of the windows. The visual could almost pass as a single shot, then Blubaugh enters the scene from the left riding his biking. The motion is a nice contrast to the still life around it. 3). 3:25 the shot of Portland's Steel Bridge is perfect. The geometric configuration of the bridge naturally does most of the work, and the symmetrical placement within the shot is dead center. What I also love about this scene is the transition from this shot into the animated reenactment of his attack. It was seamless.

At the same time, there are underlying themes that made me uncomfortable as I watched and tried to pinpoint the distinctions between exactly what this film was saying and what it might be inferring. This discomfort, which I also attribute to the brilliance of the film, is a reaction I presume Blubaugh expects of his audience (perhaps even a reaction he needs to galvanize from his audience in order to make the film "work"), however, something still feels awry.

Blubaugh labels himself a "worrier" at the beginning of the film in a scene with his father as he expresses the origin of his need, as early as six, to perform compulsory "rituals" in order to take control of his perceived safety. Control then becomes a central theme of the documentary as Blubaugh demonstrates how he controls the chaos and randomness of society within his own world. Straightening paper left as trash in public places and walking along the edges of floorboards or the paved concrete lines of streets is initially enough to reconcile the dissonance between society's having "eliminated immediate danger from our lives" yet still feeling the pressure of fear. "Maybe it's built in," is a woman's voiced over response before the film transitions to Blubaugh's trauma.

What I do not like about the doc are the parallels it draws between violence, trauma and Black men. Unpacking why this is problematic for me was by far the most difficult portion of the reflection. The film begins with a constant piercing tone as images of Black men flash on the screen while Blubaugh talks about fear. A shot of a computer screen shows a single question; "are you OK?" The viewer is exposed to these audio-visual elements before Blubaugh's attack is even mentioned. By the time the story unfolds, the viewer has been given a myriad subtle racial queues. Once the attack is outlined, Blubaugh vocalizes how he started to look at Black men differently. The shots then transition to scenes with Blubaugh and various Black men sharing public spaces. Blubaugh's anxiety is evident, even though these men's presences are happenstance. 

Full disclosure, I am trying really hard not to make it all about race. Honestly, the film makes it about race. This documentary could have been about violence and trauma and Blubaugh's personal experience with the two, and race did not have to be prominent at all... but it is. He admits himself in the film that his fears toward Black men are "stupid" because all of his attackers weren't even Black, although he thought they were. As an artist, I understand that what you experience through art in any medium (this does not include interpretation) is exactly what the artist wants you to experience. Nothing happens in a novel or on a screen that someone did not mean to be there. Every single thing we see in this film not only did Blubaugh intend for us to see, I believe he meticulously placed them for us to see. 

So my question is, why take the racial route? These fears, both spoken and unspoken, are already the bedrock of racial anxiety that plagues, not only the United States, but the world at large. Why emphasize feelings that you know are wrong in a film that brings no closure to the issue it addresses? This is the crux of my problem with this documentary. His cavalier handling of such a delicate matter juxtaposed with a traumatic experience--an assault with universal humanistic appeal--is dangerous if the contrast isn't teased out far enough to make sure conflation of the two doesn't occur. My fear is, especially considering who may make up Blubaugh's prime audience demographic, that not enough is done to demarcate the difference between the vulnerability of trauma, something that any person regardless of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnic or religious background, etc. can relate with and racial profiling itself. I searched for reviews, but found nothing more than various synopses.

The Thinking Man's Dilemma

The Thinking Man's Dilemma

I wanted to have something more dynamic to say about my process of creating a blog, but the truth is, it was straight-forward with far less complexity than I originally thought there would be. With anxiety, I agonized--in my mind--at the picture choices, colors schemes, font styles, and backgrounds I would choose that best represents my character and shows balance, while also being colorful, lively, and attention grabbing. In actuality, the set-up took the least amount to time. The preset color schemes and whimsical background choices of Blogspot sat before me, waiting for me to choose, and I couldn't help but feel the slightest bit disappointed. I shortly after realized why. I was left to do with my words what I hoped to accomplished through clever visual choices. And it wasn't so much disappointment as it was a paralyzing fear of how I would communicate rhetorically what I hoped to communicate visually. 

The Art of Storytelling:

The framing of a story is almost as important as the story itself. The context, word choices, emphasis and order of the elements within a story are the foundation that draw people to what is being said. Today, we live in what I call an ADD (attention deficit disorder) global society where something or someone is always vying for our attention and stimuli takes the place of imagination. The storyteller today has to fight through waves of white noise to compete for an audience's attention. That is what I think I understood in my initial drive toward creating a visually compelling blog; one that would stand out and command attention. But that is a mere fraction of the entire process.

As I read through the Blogspot welcome post for this course, I took note of some of the visual elements that grabbed me. Words that were bolded and enlarged in comparison to the rest of the text and the inclusion of hyperlinks were distinguishing choices. Overall though, it was the rhetorical flow of the post that captured me. Though the text is situated prose style, which can be bulky and make the eyes glaze over, in the post, it cascades down in silky layers, folding over itself and revealing a passion for both "rhetorical play and invention." Words like concept, method, frame, practice, and philosophy all work together to reinforce the theme of storytelling as a process; a journey that is just as important as the finished product. This post is most successful to me in the way that it communicates with great fluidity the importance of design without editorializing it. It shows rather than tells; a true sign of a great story because the buy-in from the reader is always highest when the captivation is more David Blaine than cheap, crappy parlor trick.

Regarding the C.R.A.P. principles, the ones I see most evidently are repetition and alignment. Again, the blog does an amazing job of using strategically placed synonymous words that emphasize the importance of the design process without me as the reader feeling beat over the head with the idea. The blog is careful to include tangential story lines that pull in the author's life and warms and personalizes the blog's message, which makes it accessible, another telltale sign of a good story. The alignment works well with the blog. Placement of certain words and the interweaving of the technical aspects of the blog with the personal seems consistent throughout the post and honestly, the choice to bold and enlarge some of the words breaks up the monotony of the prose-style block of text. The two remaining principles, contrast and proximity, I do think appear within the text through "compositional practices" in a way where subtly is part of their brilliance. That is to say, it is not that there is no contrast or proximity within the blog post, however, when I read the article about C.R.A.P. principles, they were being applied to visual components. I am not sure how to make them more prominent using only rhetorical devices, but I guess that gives me even more reason to believe this course is for me. 

Technical Writing Defined:

Below are three definitions I found for technical writing from different websites.

Instructionalsolutions.com

Today technical writing encompasses all documentation of complex technical processes. It includes reports, executive summary statements, briefs. Any time technical information is conveyed in writing at work, it is, by definition, technical writing. This can include high-tech manufacturing, engineering, biotech, energy, aerospace, finance, IT, and global supply chain. The format is no longer bound to lengthy user manuals. Technical information must be distilled and presented unambiguously. This can come in the form of technical reports, emails, policy, briefs, and press releases.

Grammar.yourdictionary.com

Technical writing is a type of writing where the author is writing about a particular subject that requires direction, instruction, or explanation. This style of writing has a very different purpose and different characteristics than other writing styles such as creative writing, academic writing or business writing.

       Techwhirl.com

Technical writing is sometimes defined as simplifying the complex.  Inherent in such a concise and deceptively simple definition is a whole range of skills and characteristics that address nearly every field of human endeavor at some level.  A significant subset of the broader field of technical communication, technical writing involves communicating complex information to those who need it to accomplish some task or goal. Technical writing follows a development lifecycle that often parallels the product development lifecycle of an organization:

• Identification of needs, audience(s), and scope
• Planning
• Research & content development
• Testing / review and revision
• Delivery / production
• Evaluation and feedback
• Disposition (revision, archiving, or destruction)

Although the last two definitions hint at the design process inherent in this course's definition of technical writing, all three seem sterile and lacking in the recognition of human experience. This is the definition I had in my mind when I registered for this course. With these definitions above, the journey of creating a technical piece is presented as prudent; the explanation of things occurs in a way that lists them at you instead of unfolding them to you. It feels like you have no personal stake in the process with these definitions. My favorite line of the the welcome post is "Let's say that this 'design by doing' thing is somehow more 'free' from stodgy rules and lessons; such design practices often work, and many designers come to their aesthetics in a variety of intuitive ways." This course, from the onset, has changed the way I see technical writing. The discipline seems open and limitless, not in a lost world, solipsistic sort of way where you are floating untethered, but in an infinite potential sort of way where one can view technical writing as a creative process where the sky is the limit.