Write Good or Die

show or movie you ever watch. Don’t blame me…blame the Greeks.

    Jonathan Maberry— http://www.jonathanmaberry.com
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20. VISUAL STORYTELLING: IMAGERY
    By Alexandra Sokoloff
    http://www.alexandrasokoloff.com

    In film, every movie has a production designer—one artist (and these people are genius level, let me tell you) who is responsible, in consultation with the director and with the help of sometimes a whole army of production artists) for the entire look of the film – every color, costume, prop, set choice.
    With a book, guess who’s the production designer? YOU are.
    As it happens, Michael brought home the anniversary edition of the ALIEN series recently. I could go on all week about what a perfect movie the first ALIEN is structurally as well, but for today - it’s a perfect example of brilliant production design—the visual image systems are staggering.
    Take a look at those sets (created bySwiss surrealist H.R. Giger). What do you see? Sexual imagery EVERYWHERE. Insect imagery—a classic for horror movies. Machine imagery. Anatomical imagery—the spaceships have very human-looking spines (vertebrae and all), intestinal-looking piping, vulvic doors. And the gorgeous perversity of the design is that the look of the film combines the sexual and the insectoid, the anatomical with the mechanical, throws in some reptilian, serpentine, sea-monsterish under-the-sea-effects—to create a hellish vision that is as much a character in the film as any of the character characters.
    Oh, and did I mention the labyrinth imagery? Yes, once again, my great favorite—you’ve got a monster in a maze.
    Those are very specific choices and combinations. The sexual imagery and water imagery opens us up on a subconscious level and makes us vulnerable to the horrors of insects, machines and death. It also gives us a clear visual picture of a future world in which machines and humans have evolved together into a new species. It’s unique, gorgeous, and powerfully effective.
    Obviously Terminator (the first) is a brilliant use of machine/insect imagery as well.
    I know I’ve just about worked these examples to death, but nobody does image systems better than Thomas Harris. Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon are serial killer novels, but Harris elevates that overworked genre to art, in no small part due to his image systems.
    In Silence , Harris borrows heavily from myth and especially fairy tales. You’ve got the labyrinth/Minotaur. You’ve got a monster in a cage, a troll holding a girl in a pit (and that girl is a princess, remember – her mother is American royalty, a senator). You’ve got a twist on the “lowly peasant boy rescues the princess with the help of supernatural allies” fairy tale – Clarice is the lowly peasant who enlists the help of (one might also say apprentices to) Lecter’s wizardlike perceptions to rescue the princess. You have a twisted wizard in his cave who is trying to turn himself into a woman.
    You have the insect imagery here as well, with the moths, the spiders and mice in the storage unit, and the entomologists with their insect collections in the museum, the theme of change, larva to butterfly.
    In Red Dragon , Harris works the animal imagery to powerful effect. The killer is not a mere man, he’s a beast. When he’s born he’s compared to a bat because of his cleft palate. He kills on a moon cycle, like a werewolf. He uses his grandmother’s false teeth, like a vampire. And let’s not forget—he’s trying to turn into a dragon.
    Now, a lot of authors will just throw in random scary images. How boring and meaningless! What makes what Harris does so effective is that he has an intricate, but extremely specific and limited image system going in his books. And he combines fantastical visual and thematic imagery with very realistic and accurate police procedure.
    I know, all of these examples are horror, sorry, it’s my thing—but look at The Wizard of Oz (just the brilliant contrast of the black and white world of Kansas and the Technicolor world of Oz says volumes). Look at what Barbara Kingsolver does in Prodigal Summer , where images of fecundity and the, well, prodigy of nature overflow off the pages, revealing characters and conflicts and themes. Look at what Robert Towne/Roman Polanski do with water in Chinatown , and also—try watching that movie sometime with Oedipus in mind . . . the very specific parallels will blow you away.
    So how do you create a