Mourning in Television

Everybody in my family has a type of scene in television that drives us nuts. It’s the kind that has throwing popcorn and booing if done wrong and pumping fists in the air like the sports fans we aren’t when they get it right. Unfortunately, we do a lot more booing and popcorn throwing than we do fists to the air.

My mom has had four kids. She knows when a birthing scene is inaccurate. Movies have pregnant moms going into labor at the height of trouble, of trauma, at the most stressful and crazy moment available. In real life, a mother's body knows when it is dangerous and it waits. When it does happen, it isn’t short. It isn’t a few screams and three cheers, there’s the baby! Though my mother has not been through a zombie apocalypse or a natural disaster or an alien invasion, she has had children. She knows that a mother's body is built to protect a child as much as it is to feed and create. What she wonders is how the entire film industry can be ignorant on the very topic that begat every one of them in the first place.

My dad is an atheist, a man of science and evolution and believing that if you had utmost control and discipline, you could literally convince two of your fingers they were glued together when they weren’t. Of a mind that you could make yourself forget your own name if you wanted, when my father watches a Sci-Fi movie, he can’t help nitpicking. A space ship exploding in space, causing a tempest of noise? The captain going with the away team on a dangerous mission that borders either on suicide or just plain old stupid? Then there’s the action-packed movies. The bad guy has a hostage. He puts a gun to her head and tells the cops to put down their firearms or she gets a bullet in the noggin. “Don’t put them down!” My dad shouts. “Just shoot him!” In a high-tension car chase, he’s yelling. “slam on the breaks! Take out their carburetor!” When the good guys are running on foot from helicopters, through a cornfield maybe, he’s throwing up his hands with a “Run sideways! Run sideways!” Practical, logical, honest, if it wasn’t for how much love he’s got in him and the lack of pointed ears, he has much in common with the Vulcans.

I was trained by a Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue Unit. I was a babysitter for six years. I staffed at homeschool summer camps. What do these three things have in common? They all taught me CPR and Basic First Aid. In movies, if the heroes best friend get into a car accident and the car flips over, the first thing that hero does is pull him from the wreckage. Hello! If there’s a spinal injury, you just killed him! His neck is twisted to the side and it hurts to turn it back, so you carefully and tenderly make it do so? Guess what? You just killed him again! And CPR, don’t get me started on CPR scenes. The worst ones are the victims of drowning. You do not push air INTO a drowned person’s mouth, as you are pushing water INTO their lungs. And by the way, giving CPR to someone on a bed, on a platform higher than you or on anything with even the slightest amount of give is worthless. You might as well be doing it in water. Also, if you as the hero pull your best friend from an overturned vehicle and start giving him CPR, only to give up and get upset and start screaming, can I just remind you that only 3% percent of humans are revived by CPR alone? It isn’t MEANT for revival. It is meant to circulate blood and stave off brain damage just long enough for the paramedics. So stop your less than heroic wailing and keep giving compressions.

Do I have a point to all this? Indeed I do. While my parents and I all have different things that drive us nuts and make us want to chuck slippers at the TV, (we don’t eat popcorn very often) there is one particular thing we all lean forward to scrutinize.

MOURNING.

When a character is told that a loved one is dead, missing, was a murderer or on the flip side, has been returned to them, the reaction is very rarely done appropriately. If you don’t believe me, take a job over to Criminal Minds, Bones, Law and Order, NCIS or any of those out police procedurals that haunt in every channel of every day. People get teary eyed or maybe they even break down, but once the commercial break has come and gone, they’re sitting in the interrogation room, giving a full report of whether their loved one had any enemies, debts or when they’d last seen them.

This is not how love works.

Here’s another example and one my mother graduates from slippers to socks when throwing things at the TV. When parents are reunited with their children who have been missing or kidnapped. You as the parent do not love in relief. You as the parent do not smile or sigh. You do not say, “oh, I missed you so much.” You do not hug them a moment and then turn to the cops and say “thank you.” What do you do? You do exactly what you should have done when they went missing in the first place.

You scream.

You hit your knees and you scream.

When they’re returned, you still hit your knees and you still scream.

But you hold on as if they were torn out of you and if you let go now, let go again, you’ll bleed out.

When shows or movies or even books do a mourning scene or a reunion scene correctly, we applaud them. There are certain ones that come instantly to mind whenever we discuss this.

1. In the movie Crash, when the mother believes for a split second that her young daughter has just been shot. There is screaming and running and a rending of world’s.
2. In the TV show the Walking Dead, Rick is told that his wife died. A flash of anger turns into ranting turns into hitting his knees turns into lying on the ground screaming at the sky.
3. In the TV show Angel, when Wesley held his lover Fred as she slowly, very consciously died. There is talking with emotions hiding for the sake of both of them, but once she’s passed, there’s heartbreak, but only the loneliness and quiet of an empty room to see it.

I have since discovered a few others that need recording. They gave me pause, had me sitting further forward, had the gears and cogs of my writers brain turning loud enough that I nearly needed subtitles.

1. In the TV show Supernatural, Dean arrives just in time to see that his possessed brother has killed one of their only remaining friends and he did not do it kindly. Little geeky Asian Kevin is lying on the floor with his eyes burned out of his head and when Dean sees him, he backs up against the nearest wall. Then all the sound vanishes. There’s no words, no noises, no crashes, even as Dean destroys the room. He’s screaming and tearing things apart and the audience hears none of it. We only see the man who does not crack shattering all at once.
2. In the Pilot of the TV show Alias, Sydney finds her apartment ransacked and her boyfriend dead in the bathtub. Sydney can’t scream. She can’t cry. Her mouth won’t work. She’s at the edge of the tub, reaching in, arms shaking and white and her throat is making weird catching noises as if her brain says scream, but her shredded heart is in the way.
3. In the book series Cal Leandros, a creature called a Boggle comes back to her pit made of mud to find her children dead. Boggle can speak and looks like a worm with legs and clotted mud on her sides. She is ugly and she isn’t a good guy or a bad guy, but usually an informant to the main characters. She finds her kids cut in half and tries to put them back together. She puts the heads atop the bodies, but they fall off. She brings mud in close to them to hold them up. It is messy and it is heartbreaking, even from something the world would call a monster.

Mourning scenes can have many applications. They can be the initial scene when a character is informed of the loss. They can be the funeral scene or when they’re identifying the body. They can be the hospital bed before or after the official passing. They can be right there in the very instant, body in their arms, bullets in fatal places, blood warming their knees and hands. Mourning scenes should be moving or gut wrenching or tender. What they should never be is brief, skipped or worst of all, insubstantial. Mourning scenes are a tool for deepening character, for building them up or rendering them incomplete. These scenes should be used to intensify police cases and endear post-kidnapping reunions. As a writer myself, I continue to strive to make sure that these experiences are haunting for the reader and character both. I want them both to feel it and if I’ve done my job, to get mad at me for making them feel it so much.

Feeling it like a knife in the ribs, I know it’s a cliche, but that’s what a loss feels like to a human being and likewise, that’s what it should LOOK LIKE to a viewer.

Cal Leandros Backlash

I’ve talked about this in the past. There are some facets of friendships that most writers just never delve into. When you’re with someone long enough, you know their habits. I don’t just mean you know their allergies. I mean they know that a day being social tires you out more than a day at work. They know that when you need to rest, it doesn’t mean they want to sleep, but to flop on the couch and eat pizza and make permanent ass impressions on the cushions. You get to know a person and you yourself develop habits you don’t realize, ones you only really exhibit when THAT friend is around.

Maybe when you call that friend, you listen to their hello, already knowing you’ll know what their day has been like by their tone. If it’s been a shitty one, you know it’s going to call for drinks and you know what kind of drinks. When you call your other friends, you don’t even bother listening to their hello. You know you won’t be able to read it the same.

Maybe when you split a cookie, you always take the bigger piece, not because you’re a sugary glutton. You take it because you know your friend guilts themselves way more than you do and you want to spare them by appearing the glutton.

Maybe you both get milkshakes and your friends milkshake sucks. You want to offer yours, but you know your friend will say no, so you pretend to like yours less or theirs more, just to make sure they end up as happy as you.

Maybe your friend is reading a book. They think a line is funny and snicker. You know they want you to ask about it so that they can share it. With other friends, you wouldn’t bother, not because you care less, but because you don’t know whether they get a kick out of reading aloud, if it’s too much pressure.

Maybe you’re stressed. Maybe your day has sucked. Maybe you’ve been slamming doors all the way home, the front door of your workplace, the car door, the front door of the house and when you hit the couch, you’re angry at the world. Then you feel that gentle hand grasp your shoulder once and there’s a “knowing” in that touch. They knew, without the slamming of doors, what huff you were coming in with. You find a comfort in knowing that they’re totally aware of your sucky day and that they know what mindset you’re in and you appreciate even more that they know you need space just as much as you still need them in the room.

Friends are big things, but what they do is all little things. Writers miss these when they’re creating deep friendships. They focus so much on the words, on the hugs between the girls, the beers between the guys and these little subtleties get lost in the middle.

This is why whenever I do see a friendship justified I have to preserve it.

I stopped in a Cleveland Park today. I sat on a bench and with a breeze just barely reminiscent of the nearby sea, I read from my Kindle. I listened to Shiny Toy Guns, Of Monsters and Men, Mumford and Sons and I read aloud. I know it makes me wacky. I know it doesn’t make it any less weird that I did my own voices or that I laughed aloud at hysterically lecherous lines. The only justification I have (and it is the only one my family would need) is that it was a Cal Leandros book and most of the lecherous lines were, of course, Robin.

There’s a moment I wanted to share though. It’s the one that inspired this post. This book (Slashback) has been 50/50 current day and flashbacks. In one particular flash to the past, an eleven year old Cal is rocking back and forth on his stool. Back and forth, back and forth, over and over again as he and his brother Niko are discussing homework and disagreeing on its importance. He continues to rock until eventually he rocks too far. Does he fall? No. Niko’s leg was already there to catch it and haul the chair legs back onto the floor. Cal has done this a million times. Niko has caught him a million times. It’s never discussed. It just goes on, a fact of their lives.

We all have these routines, with family and with friends, that we don’t even realize we follow. Habits we exhibit only for them, things we go out of our way to do to make them happy, sometimes at the expense of ours or even just the mere lessening. Writers should use this. It’s a tool that in a single scene like the one above, paints a picture of a relationship and its depth.

I have another example, though bear with me. It is slightly older. It is from Cassandra Clare’s book Clockwork Princess. It is also not entirely accurate, as I am changing it to make more sense out of context.

Jem receives a letter that is extremely distressing. He stares at it, angry, pained, and all at once, he doesn’t want another moment with it. He throws it into the nearby fire. Will, his friend and might-as-well-be brother, knows how important that letter will be to Jem later. He knows that Jem will hate himself for burning it, for losing it. Will knows this and so he does what he does without thought. He buries both his hands in the fire to get the letter back. Afterwards, hands well-bandaged and the good drugs administered, Will apologizes for causing such a ruckus. Jem says it should be him who should apologize, for he knew Will and should have known that throwing the letter would have but one outcome.

In the past year, as I have reread Robin Thurman’s books, I have endeavored to use more of these types of details. I think they add power, even if most of them slide under readers radars. The people that do notice them, who do what I did and thumb back the page to absorb the paragraph a second time, those are the people who going to go “wow, that’s how to put the depth of a bond on paper.” Others might look at that and say, “it’s a hell of a lucky person who actually has that, that kind of person in their lives.”

I’m lucky. Not only do I read of these moments and write of these moments. I live of these moments with my mom.