Connect Your Audience to the Rich Stream of Meaning
By Pamela Jaye Smith
In our multicultural, instantaneously interconnected global village, we speak hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects with diverse and specific cultural backgrounds. How can we communicate effectively across all these borders?
Symbols and images affect people emotionally – hence their exceptional effectiveness. Because there is no particular rational attachment to them, visuals are a universal language that engages our intuition and imagination.
The more consciously you use symbols, images, and codes in your stories, the more effective your message will be. Using appropriate visuals will heighten the emotional impact of your story and will connect your audience to the rich stream of meaning – conscious and unconscious – that flows through humanity and our arts.
Passion is vitally important in stories. Without it you’ve got a dry old report, not a vibrant lively story. Let’s explore sex, love, and romance and some effective ways to use symbols and imagery in your own media to enhance these aspects of your stories, documentaries, and marketing.
Along with volcanoes and tsunamis, sex and love are among nature’s most powerful, overwhelming, and radically transformative effects. Love, lust, affection, power plays, reproduction, surrender, ecstasy, commerce, degradation, consolation, the mercy boff, persuasion, deception, betrayal, the death of love… the entire gamut of human experience can be reflected in sex. Add love and romance and you have yearning, delight, and poetic inspiration. For the lucky ones, sex, love, and romance can become transformative and enlightening.
As poetry expresses in a few words the numinous potency of our awareness of life, so too can you use symbolic illustrations of sex, love, and romance to create powerful poetry on the screen.
In History, Myth, and Contemporary Times
The creation myths of many cultures begin with sex, typically a father sky and mother earth, though sometimes it’s a solitary act, such as the Milky Way being the result of a deity’s self-pleasuring. Sex, love, and romance are a regular part of many deities’ existence, among themselves and with mere mortals. Sometimes the immortal sex partners aren’t human at all; Greek king-god Zeus surely holds a record for shape-shifting for his romantic trysts: a bull, a swan, a shower of gold, etc.
Fairy tales often have sexual innuendoes hidden throughout: magic kisses that awaken the sleeper (Sleeping Beauty), rings of fire or glass coffins surrounding a maiden (Brunhilde and Snow White), tall towers and long hair (Rapunzel), tempting apples and anatomically suggestive glass slippers (Cinderella).
Bernini’s white marble statue of Saint Teresa of Avila surely depicts romantic if not downright sexual ecstasy. The arrow held by the Cupid-Eros angel standing over her and lifting part of her garment can certainly be read as phallic. The moment is taken from her writings, describing a spiritually transcendent moment. The connection between sexual and spiritual communion and illumination is deeply embedded in many mystical traditions, be it the spring mating of stand-ins for the gods, Krishna and the Gopi cow-girls, or Christ and his bride the Church.
Though in some cultures women and sometimes men as well are almost completely covered head to toe, in others near-naked is everyday attire. Clothing can thus say worlds about a person’s and a culture’s attitudes toward sex and romance. It can also hide attitudes and actions, such as sexy outfits beneath a burka or garter belts under a pinstripe suit.
Depending on the time and culture, same-sex love often has to rely on secret signals, symbols, and codes. Whether a style of clothing, a mannerism, or a phrase, these codes open doors to an otherwise forbidden realm.
In Media
Cultural mores have influenced what gets shown in media since humans began drawing on cave walls. Classical Greco-Roman art is resplendent with nudes. Middle Ages Greek and Italian art featured buttoned-up pious churchgoers. In Victorian England, piano legs were considered too sexy for viewing, much less real women’s ankles; less than a hundred years later Britain led the fashion world with miniskirts. Time isn’t the only divider of what’s appropriate; witness the severe clothing restrictions in many strict religious cultures, even when surrounded by anything-goes modernism.
Watch Mad Men to see how girdles and neckties can be quite sexy in their constraint, holding back all that fire and desire. Then compare it to the dropped-pants muffin-top look of today where nothing is left to the imagination. Which is more tempting and attractive?
In Apocalypse Now Redux, when Captain Willard and the boat crew reach a U.S. military base preparing for a visit by Playboy Bunnies, they find the waterside stage decorated with upright missiles (phallic symbols) and banks of lights in half-circles (breast symbols). In contrast to that rocking, raunchy sexual sequence, when Captain Willard makes love with the French plantation woman, the tone is genteel, romantic, and yearning, filled with classical music, fine furnishings, billowing fabric, and soft lighting. Both sequences are about putting body parts together, but the feel is radically different because of the visuals and pacing.
Two very effective pieces of media that can send people into swoons of desire are Richard Wagner’s Liebestot (love-death) from his opera Tristan and Isolde and Maurice Ravel’s orchestral piece Bolero, which became the theme song for the 1979 movie about erotic desire, 10. Both works use sustained tension and specific pacing to create the mood. Listen to this music for excellent patterns of how to pace your sentences, your camera moves, your editing cuts.
Attitudes about sex are cyclic. For differing uses of symbols, images, and codes to indicate same-sex love and how attitudes change over time, watch Maurice, the wrestling scene in Women in Love, Brideshead Revisited, In and Out,and the director’s cut of Lawrence of Arabia. In the 1920s and 1930s, violets symbolized lesbian love, and the gender preference of women wearing men’s attire was highly suspect. In the 1930s, Paris supposedly forbade Marlene Dietrich to appear in public in slacks — or perhaps it was just a studio publicity stunt. For various treatments of that type of sex and love, watch the progression of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle in the mid-1990s TV series Xena: Warrior Princess versus The L Word series, Boys on the Side, Bound,and The Hunger.
Other examples are Gustav Klimpt’s painting The Kiss;Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Atonement, In Harm’s Way, Secretary, Mrs. Brown, Kama Sutra, Raise the Red Lantern.
Specific Symbols
Underwear: in various stages of presence or absence. Clark Gable and Marlon Brando made undershirts really sexy. Madonna made underwear outerwear. Context matters: Underwear twirling on the ceiling fan says something quite different from underwear neatly folded in a drawer. Different styles of underwear communicate different kinds of sex and love. In Fatal Attraction the good wife wore modest white cotton panties; the dangerous lover wore scanty lace lingerie, if any at all.
Fire: Deepa Mehta’s film Fire has excellent examples of the different types of loving and sexual connections centered around different types of fire. Mythic Norse hero Siegfried must pass through a ring of fire to claim the warrior princess Brunhilde by waking her with a kiss. But first he thoughtfully removes her armor … riiight.
Water: Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott-Thomas sit together in a bathtub after first making love in The English Patient. A rain-drenched kiss in Streets of Fire brings former lovers Diane Lane and Michael Pare back together, for a while. The first romantic kiss in Australia happens during the first rainstorm of the monsoon season. The sheen of perspiration is often a cue for sexual exertion.
Air: In times and cultures where showing physical contact between a couple is forbidden, the camera often swings out a window to the open sky to indicate wider horizons, limitless possibilities, and freedom from old ways. Showing the sun coming up through the same window in the same room says they’ve been in bed together all night, even if they aren’t both still in the room. The balloons in Up are colorful, tender symbols of the old man’s love for both his adored, departed wife and their mutual sense of adventure.
Sensual food: from bubbly champagne, to caviar and oysters, to the blatant fig-eating scene in Women in Love, culinary references can say delicious indulgence on many levels. Lolita’s lollipop oozes nymphet seduction. Ice cubes were never the same after Nine 1/2 Weeks. Chocolate contains oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone, so a babe reclining on a sofa eating bonbons and petting a perfumed Pekingese is probably up to more than just relaxing. The effects of chocolate sustain the entire film Chocolat.
Disheveled hair and clothes: particularly when contrasted to a formerly neat appearance. The popularity of the bedhead look is doubtless its implication of having just risen from a sexual spree.
Use
- To show a deepening intimacy or commitment between characters.
- To show a sexual or sensual connection.
- To show the yearning for some kind of connection.
- To show out-of-control emotions, or emotions too much under control.
- To indicate the crossing of a no-going-back line.
- To show danger, devastation, or destruction via sexual threat or actual assault.
- To parallel the breaking of an individual’s or people’s spirit — rape as a weapon of war.
Cinematic Techniques
To be symbolic rather than explicit as in actual pornography or the likes of Grand Theft Auto, keep in mind what creates sexual and romantic tension: yearning. Move in closer to the “target,” – a pair of luscious lips, a hand, a lock of hair – but stop just short of contact. Sustain that visual pause to raise the tension before completing contact. Or stop before visible contact; it all depends on the style and plot of your story.
To indicate sex about to happen, let the characters move down out of frame, or turn the lens away from the characters. Or send then toward a bedroom like Rhett carrying Scarlet up that grand staircase in Gone with the Wind.
Down with Love is replete with sexual symbolism and spoofs on same, as is Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Both use the placement of props, camera angles, and intercutting to make visual sexual jokes.
Sexual charge and tension are created by friction, literally as well as imaginatively. If you think of a seduction scene like a piece of music, you’ll want it to begin tentatively, then move to slow and languid caresses, then increase the pace of actions-cuts-angles to a crescendo, a pause, and then a relaxation. Listen to the musical pieces suggested above for ideas on pacing.
Be sure to find and show the passion in your projects using symbols and imagery to convey your meanings. It’s what we will all gravitate to and dwell on – unconsciously, instinctively and if you’ve done it well, delightedly.
Make great media and great myths!
Pamela Jaye Smith is a mythologist, writer, story and production consultant, and award-winning producer-director. Credits include Microsoft, Paramount, Disney, Universal, GM, Boeing, and the US Army. Pamela attended UT Austin film school and has taught at UCLA Ext., USC, AFI, RAI-TV Rome, National Film Institute of Denmark, Pepperdine, and many others. Her books for media makers include “Inner Drives,” “Power of the Dark Side,” “Beyond the Hero’s Journey,” and “Symbols. Images. Codes.” www.pamelajayesmith.com
Featured in StudentFilmmakers Magazine, Volume 6 Issue #1.
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