opinion is universal

it is my opinion that stories serve a purpose. they entertain firsthand, but also convey the author's opinions of the world we live in and attempts to express it in a way to convince the reader to follow it. furthermore, the idea can never be interpreted the same way. it is my philosophical opinion that there is never a black and white answer to any circumstance. one person will believe that this is an answer to the problem, while the other thinks that is. when is it appropriate to release the criminal, to help him, imprison him, or execute him?


you may think it is proportionate to the crime over the idea of say, if he's a killer as apposed to a murderer, but even then it is never as simple as that. and what makes us question this more than ever, the story. if the written word or the spoken language of the stage or the mythical spectacle of cinema can teach us anything, we will learn anything. as a writer, you have to be open to the ideology of the individual. this doesn't simply mean whether people think your works are good or bad, but that they may interpret what you have written differently.

there is an Aesop fable about the two men and the donkey, the men follow the opinion of everyone they meet in an attempt to please all, but in the end destroy their donkey and lose what they believed in. in other words, if you try to please everyone, you'll please no one. in this blog, i will use cinema as an example, admittedly because i am most familiar with it as a genre.



controversy is never bad. first of all, it means publicity, and furthermore, it just means your work is being taken seriously. example,  the 1992 film "man bites dog", the story of a documentary team following a round a serial killer as he goes about his crimes, is widely controversial even today due to the graphic violence depicted towards such groups as the elderly and children. some called it a scathing indictment of the media's obsession with violence and the masses ever growing admiration and desensitization to it, while others called it a pointless piece of garbage that reveled in grotesque violence and poor writing. today this little no-budget Belgian film remains banned in several countries. it is also one of my favorites.



more recently, we have the epic, Oscar-nominated "Life of Pi". this is on the surface, a simple shipwreck story about a teenage Indian boy trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. but by the time it ends, we are left with a religious allegory about the nature of belief and reality vs. fiction. those who have seen the movie or even read the book will know of a floating island inhabited by meerkats and dotted with pools of acid.

i myself struggled to understand its meaning. as it turns out, there is more than one. when confronted with a story about what you believe and whether or not it is real, as well as a religious allegory, you can't help but stir up debate. does the island represent Eden, the evil cook from an earlier passage, or something else?


to conclude, this is where it gets interesting. the makers of "dog" claim their movie is about film-making, not violence, and "pi's" author admits the island does not symbolize anything, but is merely a device to make pi's astonishing tale of survival seem more impossible.

as a writer, you give birth to an idea. but that idea spans, changes and reproduces. it is important to remain open to what the world will see, for better or worse. even if it is negative, it just means a person saw, and he was able to breed his own ideology, which in the frightening land of reality, means you inspired a wave of change in someone. who knows, it may be many someones.

that is what i believe. what do you?



Shaun Perrier