When the potential emotional space of an idea has been explored, what then?

[elfs]

In a commentary about using rape as a trigger in film, Drew McWeeny writes:

I think it is absolutely the responsibility of an artist to look into darkness without blinking. I think it is important that we talk about morality and character and the way we dehumanize one another. But I also think the point has been more than made on film that rape is a terrible thing, and at this point, if you're not contributing some new idea to the conversation, then you are literally just using it as a button, something you push to get a response, and that unnerves me.

This is one of the big things that's been bothering me as a writer in recent days. We've seen this problem's manifestation on film, where remakes of remakes are being remade, and we're seeing this problem in literature, where repetitious cozies in all sorts of settings (I've seen cozy mystery series unified by the theme of knitting, crocheting (two different series!), cooking, and even home improvement-- that last one, man, every house they flip has a dead body hiding in it somewhere!) are just that: the same story told time and again by similar people surrounded by slightly different furniture.

Drew McWeeny touches on an important point here: is it illegitimate to use the rape of a character onscreen, or on the page, to make a point about the character's vulnerability? It's a cheap trick, and it can still be turned on its head in our culture by confronting the unexpecting reader with something other than M-on-F and writing out the consequences, but that's a pretty daring thing for a film to do. (To this day, the rape scene in Deliverance is treated jokingly, as if to defuse the scariness of it.)

Once an idea has been taken to its hilt, once we've explored the ideaspace of an idea, be it rape, or true love, or whatever, what is left for writers but to tread over the same old ground again and again, hoping to find one nugget of unexplored truth that might not actually still be there at all?

Comments

[woggie.livejournal.com]

Theoretically, when you run out of ideas for a given show, you have four options.
1. Reinvent the show
2. Stop the show
3. Continue with the same tired BS and hope nobody notices the life has gone out of it
4. Start looking for progressively larger and larger sharks to jump

Option 1 is easier to say than it is to do, but basically comes out to redefining the show. Of course, if you re-define the show too much, that's option 4.

Option 2 is something I only became aware of a decade or so ago, when I found a really cool Canadian show that (unbeknownst to me) had a pre-defined ending point. So the show gets really popular because it has an ending in mind and therefore has all this energy in it. At the height of it's popularity, it ends. WTF??? But it certainly keeps you from getting bored.

Option 3 is purest Hollywood. This is therefore a warning. :)