Thinking Alive

The Man Upstairs

Thursday, May 14th, 2009 by Brian

0 No matter how I try to avoid it, I’ve always been captured by theoretical and ‘conceptual’ concerns. For example, I might begin to outline a story for a movie, then I would inevitably notice a pattern or insight emerging, then that would become the project.

0 Back in 2004 I thought I had a pretty good idea for a movie about a young writer, doing pretty much what I was doing at the time (thinking about the future, trying to answer the big questions). He lives in a basement apartment and finds the man upstairs has been trying to solve the meaning of life once and for all. “The man upstairs” became a teacher and anti-role model for the young man (the old man has devoted too much of his life to his work, he is just realizing his task had always been impossible, that the real meaning of life had always been all around him, and by trying to “solve” it he actually isolated himself from it).

0 It wasn’t a completely terrible idea; it had potential, but also had potential to become a cliche-ridden disaster.

0 I kept working on it.

0 The story could obviously use a feminine element, so I added a third main character: the young man’s girlfriend. But then I thought that it’s old-fashioned and sexist to conceive female characters only in relation to men. I decided she should be more than just “the girlfriend” – more than a set piece or plot device. So I conceived her as a kind of secret protagonist – the real force moving the story: without her there wouldn’t be a story anyways, as the two intellectual men would just talk endlessly about abstract ideas.

0 She would be the source of action in the story, she would be the one to make the man upstairs realize the meaning of life had always been around him – the acts of living – and through her he would get his life back. Meanwhile the young man couldn’t resist following in the man’s footsteps – “He failed, but maybe I…” – while she too was becoming attracted to the man upstairs in a different way: paradoxically gravitating away from the young man because of his silly ambitions and drawing towards the old man because he had been through and overcame them (partly thanks to her). She was drawn not just by his knowledge and mysterious personality, but to his deeply mindful approach to life: through him she found there’s far more to living than riding a stream of actions across the surface; something deeper and more sustainable must be learned and accumulated along the way.

0 And therein was the “message” of the story: life is education, and education is a relationship of mutual development – she learned from him at the same time as he learned from her – and not merely as an exchange but as a process of co-creation, of contributing something shared between them that brings them together while distinguishing their relationship from the rest of the world. This is essentially what happens in any experience, relationship, family, community, project, organization, institution, industry, market…

0 It’s the same old complementarity of complexity and simplicity: the two distinct individuals get involved in a complex relationship – compelling and fulfilling because it’s not simple, it’s alive and ever-changing – which eventually regulates itself into patterns of behaviour that identify the couple (or family, or community, or organization) as a simple we/them, which in turn is a component of a still more complex world… which seems to have a regular pattern that allows us to simplify it as “the world”…

0 I never got around to turning this into a proper screenplay or novel because it was the conceptual and theoretical stuff I was really interested in.

0 Form-wise I also became fascinated by the possibility of using a “geometrical composition” of character relations based on triangles, analogous with Leonardo’s geometric compositions in painting. The characters would be like lines of a triangle; relationships would be the points. When a character became more prominent in the story, the line representing them would be longer and at least one of the angles for that line (their relationships) would become more acute, and as angles became more acute or obtuse, the rest of the triangle would be affected to maintain a 360 degree relationship all around.

0 I hardly need to say that the “geometric” approach caused more problems than it solved, but it was the theoretical challenges that drew me to writing in the first place.

0 At the time I felt guilty and ashamed about it. “I think too much… I never finish anything… I’m too abstract…” In fact, The Man Upstairs was originally intended to be a way to use thinking to overcome thinking – to think my way out of thinking too much. I was trying to send a message to myself about how to live: “You’ll end up like the old man, lonely, with your impossible task incomplete, frustrated…” I wanted to learn his lesson while still young.

0 It was a strategy I learned from Goethe (in fact, The Man Upstairs was deliberately modelled after Faust), who put his life into his characters, composing their stories in order to make himself the author of the story of his own life. Goethe even claimed that one of his characters, Werther, committed suicide so the author could save himself from the same fate.

0 But my strategy had the opposite effect – at least in the short term. My motives and the story itself required me to carry out the old man’s project. Even though the man upstairs realized the meaning of life was all around him, I had to figure out how he realized that, how he formulated the decision to finally let go of the impossible task. I had to actually know what he knew. I had to experience it myself to write about it properly.

0 People who aren’t so inclined have trouble appreciating how hard it is for someone like me to not “think too much.” They would say to me, “You just have to… If there’s something that needs to be done, you have to put your doubts aside and just do it.”

0 But I can’t just teleport myself out of the world of ideas like that. A person can’t just leave a room without finding the door, which means one might have to spend some time – or a few years – looking around to find it; and people who have always been outside can’t be much help. Or to put it in comparison, I could never “just do” what most people are able to, just like those people could never “just understand” what I was trying to explain.

Tags: character development, conceptualization, the man upstairs, theory, writing

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