Stop Kiss

It's another entry sparked by a work someone recommended after reading my screenplay, so if you're tired of reading my musings about those, scroll on down.

For the first time in my life, I'm scared of critics. and I really haven't been so far. What I laughingly refer to as my writing career has been so non-noteworthy so far, I've thought I'd welcome any review, even a bad one, as long as it meant somebody saw something of mine and thought about it.

But now, having spent a few minutes looking up reviews of Diana Son's play Stop Kiss, which I've just read, I find myself feeling really fearful about what people are eventually going to say about my movie/book/play/whateverthehell it grows up to be about those couple of lesbians. Because most of the reviews seem to be seeing different things in it.

Stop Kiss is the story of a couple of women friends who spend a few weeks fighting a mutual attraction and then, the moment they kiss, are the victims of a gay bashing--and find themselves kind of "taken up" by forces from all sides.

It's moving. But it's those "raised stakes" I'm so sensitive about, that thing I don't want to do. It's all very "The Plight Of The Young Lesbians." The world that just doesn't understand, etc, etc.

And it doesn't help me that one of the women is named Callie (for those who don't know, one of my characters is a man named Colley)

I guess I'm just worried whether there is any way for me to tell, or I could mean whether I am going to "allowed" to tell, the story of my characters while keeping them who I want them to be and their story about what I want it to be about.

It's weird, I've been thinking about why I had such a...ambivilent, lukewarm reaction to Kissing Jessica Stein, and I think one of the reasons is that I have no particular interest in seeing (or writing) stories about women who are neurotic about being gay. I don't know why, but as I see them, Annabel never was, I think Keitha was briefly but by the time we meet her in My Girlfriend's Boyfriend she's well over it.

Nor do I have any interest in "ramping up" to the gay stuff for a "straight" audience. In Girlfriend's Boyfriend the first shot of the first scene is of the two women dancing together.

I don't know why this should be, but, I just feel like...I'm already there. I'm with Keitha and Annabel. It's up to the audience to catch up. It's entirely possible this is a foolhardy feeling. I think it was Cocteau who said something along the lines that the artist is in a car and the audience is following behind in a car. The artist is always ahead, but he must not lose sight of the audience or they will be lost.

What's weird is that what's so potentially controversial about my basic premise--the relationships between a lesbian, her straight boy best friend, and her girlfriend--was never intended by me to be so. Maybe it's because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, maybe it's because I'm naive--or both--but to me, in a way, that's only a mild point of interest.

(So why do you expect anyone else to be interested, Ben? You're that good, are you?)

So time will tell, and time's never wrong, so time will tell-but time takes so long...
--The Twins, "Time Will Tell"