stray knives to the imagination

I came up with a super-sad guitar riff last night. I sang over it for a while. But when I tried actual words: they just seemed cheesy.

I encounter this problem quite frequently: this inability to translate my sadness into actual words. Not that I'm sad all the time. I don't consider myself the "tortured" type. But I occasionally do feel an overwhelming sadness and it's frustrating because I can't pinpoint exactly why I feel sad. I just know that I'm sad.

I want to be able to make others feel the full force of this feeling. Not because I want to make people feel sad. I just feel it so profoundly and I feel like: if you feel something that profoundly, it should be expressed.

It's not enough for me to simply say: OK. I'm sad. And this is why. I feel like there's an underlying or a host of underlying reasons for why I feel the way I do. The trick is being able to identify these reasons and do something with them.

On a very fundamental level, I am amazed at how writers and artists and musicians are able to take such complex emotions like sadness or amusement (tragedy/comedy) and shape them into something that people not only enjoy but can feel, too. They're able to recreate these feelings by inspiring the same feelings in their audience primarily through developing relatable characters in relatable situations. But how do you make your audience buy it? Why is a film like the Room laughable when other films aren't?

I want to say it's honesty and that people can detect honesty. They know when something is false because it feels false. But I know that's not true because, even if it sucks, the Room is a very honest film. If I had to guess, I'd say Tommy Wiseau wrote it after a painful break-up--too much of it smacks of real life. Still: I am unable to truly feel for any of the characters. The only thing truly tragic about the Room (and I don't mean this to be snarky) is that you can tell Wiseau invested a lot of time and so much of himself into it. In that sense: it's the epitome of honesty. His heart is in it, in every scene. In every line of dialogue. He cast himself as the lead, I'm guessing, because he felt so attached to the character--he probably based the character on himself (in fact, this seems pretty obvious). But the execution is totally off--and that's why no one takes the movie seriously. That's why there are midnight showings now across the country where people gather in droves to mock the film and yell things at the screen and laugh at every tragically misguided detail. They can tell (it's part of the "joke") what Tommy Wiseau's intentions were: they can tell what emotions he was trying to convey--when a particular scene is supposed to be sad; when a particular line of dialogue is supposed to be visceral or cathartic ("You're tearing me apart, Lisa!") but there's something in the way the film reads that prevents the dramatic spell from ever being properly cast. The audience laughs because they know they're supposed to feel sad but they don't--a sort of nervous laughter. Not an enjoyable laughter, but a legitimate one because, like all good jokes, it thrives on first confusing the brain ("How do I react to this? Is this supposed to be this bad?") then providing relief once the viewer is able to determine that, "Yes--this really is this bad. I recognize what this scene is attempting to make me feel and I don't feel that way."

Oh well.