Showing posts with label Romancing The Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romancing The Stone. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

The Education of an Action Romance Hero

Officially,  the 2005 film titled SAHARA is described thusly:
---
Master explorer Dirk Pitt goes on the adventure of a lifetime of seeking out a lost Civil War battleship known as the "Ship of Death" in the deserts of West Africa while helping a UN doctor being hounded by a ruthless dictator. (124 mins.)
Director: Breck Eisner
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn, William H. Macy
---
There are a lot of DVD's on Amazon titled SAHARA - this is the 2005 movie about treasure hunters looking for a battleship in the desert -- As I was watching ( logging the SAVE THE CAT! "beats" with part of my mind), I was imagining the story I would have written:  LIKE THIS: “ Indiana Jones on Tatooine with McGiver for a sidekick and Captain Kirk in orbit ”


The film SAHARA also reminds me of the Action-Romance film ROMANCING THE STONE -- the two-guys-and-a-tough-gal in a chase/battle for life and limb (with larger stakes beyond themselves) format is now an entrenched classic, though there was a time when the gal was only there to be rescued and do stupid things to get caught again.

Looking at the dates - early 1980's to just before 2008, I think these films hit big because they were hammering away at a stereotype the people of theater-going-age desperately wanted to break (all females are helpless, or if not, are "Evil.")  Power in the hands of a woman turns Dark, or destroys the woman.

Today, (2012) we have NEW STEREOTYPES that the teens of this time will hammer away at.  These are recently born stereotypes, almost too new to be called cliche.  Yet the rate of change in our society has exploded to the point where the brand new stereotype is an old cliche before the movies to challenge it have been shown in theaters.

We're seeing those challenges I think in the "Indie" market - the films made on low budget by the brilliant producers honing their craft on YouTube and Vimeo.

The question the beginning writer must answer is, "What are today's stereotypes?"

I suspect you'll find a lot of answers by examining the condition of "the family" in today's world.

Statistics recently posted indicate that a man and a woman who marry and raise their kids in a structured, family environment, have a much MUCH lower chance of unemployment, poverty, -- and I haven't yet seen the statistic but I suspect someone is crunching numbers on the juvenile delinquency rate.  We do have a "bullying" problem erupting in the early grades of schools, a precursor to real trouble in life (both for the bully and the victim).

One development we have seen between 1980 and 2010 is the advent in the Romance Genre of the novel centering on the divorced or single-parent woman finding true romance the second (or third) time around, despite having attained a sense of total independence -- or perhaps because of it.

The broken family mends, might be the theme of that sub-genre.

The stereotype that may be forming (to be broken soon) would be that seen by the children of these "broken" marriages -- the next generation looking back and seeing "family" and the distaste, strife, and even real hatred between their parents and their grandparents.

"The Family" broke during those decades along two axes -- horizontally via divorce rate, and vertically as children found the "generation gap" (that has always existed) widening beyond comprehension.

It's probably not irrelevant to include the advent of the internet as a household utility between 1980 and 2010.  The cell phone revolution of the 1990's just added fuel to the fire.  Social networking, Web 2.0 and up, ebooks, and a whole new curriculum in the schools widen that vertical gap.

I do hope by now you've all read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, FUTURE SHOCK -- he predicted all this and more.  If you are looking for the next stereotype to break and sell a blockbuster movie, read that book.
Toffler notes that the public school system in the U.S.A. (an innovation that changed the world, PUBLIC schooling) has always been the tool of industry, politically dominated in such a way as to turn out workers suitable for the jobs that industry needs to fill.

The nature of the jobs needing filling has shifted markedly in this 30 year period -- to the point where those educated in the 1980's public schools don't qualify for modern jobs unless they've acquired more certificates or skills, degrees, and resume items in between.

The "covert curriculum" that Toffler points out prevailed in the 1970's actually cripples folks for the workforce today -- it shifted and then shifted again.  But then in the 1990's or so, the covert curriculum in the schools was turned much more "overt" -- saying "on the nose" that the purpose of schooling is to prepare you to work a job rather than to educate you to think for yourself.

Some of this peaked as the Unions became powerful enough to challenge industry's control of the job market, setting the idea that the monetary compensation for a "job" should be determined by what the worker thinks it should be - not what the employer thinks the job actually produces.

And another notion ebbed and flowed all the way into the university level -- that the purpose of education was to learn certain things are true, and others are not true.  That the world "should" be this way, but never "that" way.

I've had some long, deep conversations with teachers retiring from the workforce who have taught at the High School and college levels (and I know some Middle School teachers too) who have felt this shifting wind of philosophy altering the textbooks.

Two rules I've seen imposed that exemplify this shift creating a new stereotype that new films will attack:

A) If one student in a class misbehaves, punish the entire class.  There are no individuals, just the group, and the whole group is responsible for the behavior of individuals.

B) Never allow students to read ahead in the textbook, or ask questions from the "next chapter."  The full weight of Teacher Authority must squash any notion that a student should teach themselves without supervision.

The covert curriculum thus becomes control of the group by authority.

Now this is not yet entirely visible across the nation, not at all.  It turns up here and there, gets dismissed, turns up again, and is tossed out.  Parents get outside tutoring for their children, take them to dance and music classes and all those things that break the grip of the public school authority.

But just anecdotal evidence from teachers I've spoken to indicates it's a rising tide not a receding one.  The children who grew up trained by authority not to teach themselves are almost at the level of being in charge of things.  The main result of having gone through school being punished for the misbehavior of others (over whom we have no control) is to hammer at government to CONTROL the misbehavior of others lest it hurt us.

Safety from the misbehavior of others and a deep seated conviction (irrational as it may be) that we can't solve problems that haven't been solved before, may be creating an even wider generation gap, or a very wide gap between spouses.

In the 1970's, the biggest business and the biggest category of self-help books was the DO-IT-YOURSELF industry (father of Home Depot).  Today, you don't do-it-yourself, you go to Home Depot and ask a clerk how to do it and what to buy.

The oldest joke since the popularization of the automobile is the difference between the husband and wife as they try to find an unfamiliar location.  Ask or read the map?  That's gone now by the GPS!

So, the writer should be asking, "Will the imposition of Authority over Thinking For Yourself bring us together and heal the Family?"

 At one time, "Father Knows Best" -- a man was King of his Castle and the wife had to shut up and take orders.  That let at least half the people in the world vent their frustrations at being bossed around at work on their stay-at-home-do-nothing-but-rest-all-day spouse.

Did we have healthy family dynamics then?  Do we need to go "back" to that?  Or forward into something new that's never been tried before in human history?

In the film SAHARA the characters are on a treasure hunt -- and they find more than they were looking for, but only after harrowing, near-death experiences that only miracles could rescue them from (yes like INDIANA JONES).

Take the beat structure from SAHARA, strip out the subject matter, and replace it with THE FAMILY.  That's the treasure the treasure hunter searches for - the HEA.

Remember in the HEA ending, the Happily Ever After of the Romance story, the result of happiness is children (one way or another).  That means HEA is the equivalent of FOUNDING A FAMILY though "Romance Genre" doesn't usually deal with after the wedding.

Ancestry.com is a very big and growing web-based enterprise now.  People are curious about their distant heritage (even if they hate their parents).

Yes, I know, you don't hate your parents -- nor do I.  But if you watch a few TV series, you'll see the modern "cliche" stereotype when the parents come to visit.  There's always anticipation of strife, and then really serious strife -- sometimes it's resolved in the show, or at least partially, but the RIFT between generations is routinely portrayed as so common it doesn't need explaining to the audience.

The other thing you see mentioned offhandedly with the implication that the audience understands the nature of the strife implied -- that's the phrase "my Ex"  -- everyone has an Ex and knows what meetings with him/her mean.  Strife.  Galore.

The reason Romance Genre doesn't deal with "after the wedding" is that we, as a culture, now expect Family Life to be fraught with strife.  There's me vs. my parents.  There's spouse vs. spouse's parents.  There's me vs. my spouse's parents.  There's my spouse vs. my parents.  Children only make it worse.  Then there's his children from a prior marriage vs. my children from a prior marriage.

Remember THE BRADY BUNCH?  Could you put that on TV today and make it a hit?  Why was it a hit then?  (1969 and a film in 1995)



It was a hit because divorce had become common, but "The Family" was still strong.  An amalgamated family was plausible because despite the inherent strife between generations, Family was plausible in a way it is not today.

Remember The Waltons TV Series?

The Waltons On Amazon

Remember Little House on the Prairie?


If you don't remember them, you can probably get them streaming on Netflix etc.

As a writer, you have to learn to discern the intended audience's characteristics and interests by looking at the piece of fiction with a writer's eye.  But just because you're studying one thing, don't think you are allowed to forget everything else you've studied. 

One of the things with WRITING as a craft, discipline, business, and artform is that you must teach yourself in defiance of most every teacher you've ever had in a formal school setting.

In truth, nobody can teach you.  Honestly.  There are a lot of expensive courses in writing all over the web now, but the truth is none of them will do you any good at all unless you are completely free of the ideas in A) and B) above -- that you get punished if someone else misbehaves and that you must not look ahead in the textbook.

In fact, that trick of looking ahead in the textbook is the one thing that got me through college.  The very first day when I got the syllabus that said what the textbook would be, I'd run to the bookstore and get the books, then while in waiting rooms, around anywhere I was, I'd be reading the textbooks from back to front -- that's right, BACKWARDS, starting with the index and ending with the table of contents, until I understood what the course was about, what the underlying covert-curriculum thrust underneath the material actually was (whether the professor knew it or not, and it was usually NOT).

When I went to college, professors and TA's didn't take role call, didn't know or care whether you were in class (unless there was a pop quiz you needed to score on).  If you knew your stuff, you got the grade commensurate with what you knew.  They did not grade "on the curve" -- everyone in the class could get an A or an F and the administration wouldn't blink.  Everyone had an equal shot at an A because no rule forced the teacher to sort the class by statistics.

All you had to do was take the mid-terms and final.  Sometimes you didn't need to bother with the mid-terms if you aced the Final.  Some courses you could get credit for by just taking the Final before the course was given (History was one of those).  It was called "placing out" of the course to satisfy a pre-requisite for some other course.  Some courses didn't have mid-terms or quizzes.  A term paper and a final was your only chance.  Nobody cared whether you lived or died, and the other students didn't even know your name.  In that environment, you grow up fast or you flunk out.

There was no hand-holding or encouragement.  All that baby-ing of students stopped for me in 12th grade.  And I thought that was fine.  I had known it was coming and was looking forward to it with relish.  As soon as the hand-holding stopped, my grade-point-average shot up. 

The maturity gained from being treated like that is what I see lacking in today's college age people.  It takes them years after college to attain that level of maturity.  I strongly suspect that the cohesiveness of  FAMILY illustrated in those TV Series comes from having been educated in elementary school the way I was educated in college. 

I suspect that because I know that is how my parents were educated in grammar school and that's where they learned how to teach me to go to college and succeed.

That lesson is one of the reasons I love my parents.  They turned me loose in the world with a fully mature sense of self at about age 15 when I got my driver's license.  At that time license-age was 15 1/2, and kids that age had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink of hard liquor, not because it was forbidden but because it was uninteresting and irrelevant.  I'm not kidding, this culture has changed that much that fast.

That environment where you must achieve certain goals without anyone supervising you to force you to do the work creates a sense of individuality -- a sense of Identity.  You don't have to do the 1960's thing of "finding yourself" because your Self emerges strong, very early in life, and can never be threatened by anyone else's behavior or misbehavior.

The key, I think, is that covert curriculum item of "nobody cares whether you live or die" -- what you do doesn't affect whether they succeed so they have no stake in you failing (thus no bullying).  No grading on a curve means how well you do doesn't depend  on how poorly someone else does.  Thus there's no reason to hate, resent, or undermine other students.

It is that strong sense of individual self that is the absolute bedrock requirement for the ability to Pair-Bond, i.e. to experience ROMANCE that leads to the HEA not to just another fling ir at best the HFN (Happily For Now).

Now, go back to the film SAHARA.  Like ROMANCING THE STONE this film has a back-and-forth, rescuing and rescued, between a guy and gal who eventually do get to have their dream-date-on-a-beach.

These films depict the forging of a Pair-Bonded Relationship based on two people having that strong sense of Self.  That kind of educational experience I outlined that produces Heroes (no wonder women were excluded from college, from becoming doctors and Lawyers -- they might then become Heroes.)

Remember the film LEGALLY BLONDE?


Remember we're talking about hammering at stereotypes?  The "dumb blonde" is a big one, and the dumb blonde beauty who's a lawyer?  Think about that in terms of the "nobody cares if you live or die" educational method producing Heroes instead of herds of cattle or nice tractable, obedient soldiers or employees all in a row.

That "nobody cares if you live or die" is the feeling that the street urchin gets, the tough street kid who grows up to be a boss (Mob or otherwise).

Now there's a difference in the effect of receiving that attitude at the age of say, 8, and at the age of 18.

FIRST must come the warmth, coddling, and protection of a strong family environment.  THEN comes being thrown out into the cold, cruel world to fend for yourself.  If you're never thrown out, or are thrown out too late in life, you never develop the ability to fend for yourself.  You remain dependent and in need of protection (read some Regency Romances written prior to say 1980, then some from today which overlay today's woman on the Regency heroine.)

So, given cell phones and social networking peer support groups that parents know nothing about, what kind of pair-bonding potential will this new generation have built into them?  (We're looking for the stereotype that will be popular to attack, don't forget that.)

If family bonds that are both vertical and horizontal are now shattered beyond repair, what next set of bonds are under attack?  And by what tools?

We've seen the advent of the "flash mob."  We've seen it used to attack social order by robbing stores for fun and profit; or even by robbing stories in the name of demanding justice for a kid shot by a Neighborhood Watch fellow.

We've seen flashmobs used to build a strong community (actually coming together to clean garbage off a street or spend time gardening or building houses for the poor.)

The flash-mob by itself is a neutral development, but the purpose a group chooses will be the result of the values of the individuals in the group.

Is the flash-mob itself our next stereotype or cliche to be hammered by a great film?

Remember the film, You've Got Mail?




Is school bullying the stereotype to attack?

Look carefully at this selection of films and TV series and ponder what the current set of 10 year olds (born in 2002) will be 10 years from now.  If you start on a film script today, that's about when it will hit the theaters.  Most original novels take about 5 years from "Idea!" to published book.  10 years for a First Novel isn't out of the ballpark.

Don't dismiss any of this famous-film-based perspective on our fiction market from your mind when you watch the political gyrations and contortions flow out of your TV News or Videos online.  If you can think both these kinds of thoughts at the same time, you'll have the belly-laugh of a lifetime!  "LEGALLY BLONDE indeed!"  Politics is, first and foremost, entertainment.  To understand politics (especially the ads on TV) you must understand the fiction market.

Also scrutinize the political map of the USA vs population density.  Notice how the fiction markets of New York and California differ from those of Kansas and Nebraska, then compare with Florida and Ohio.  A novel has to sell in all those markets, and a film must be a hit in New York and California to survive the first day in the theaters.

For reviews of 5 novels in terms of Tarot cards that represent their plot/theme structure, with a further discussion of  the concept of what is (or is not) "Fair" in our current culture, see my April review column, now archived here:  http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Turning Action Into Romance

You all know that I'm an SF writer and professional reviewer - if not, please look at this post on the inside of a reviewer's life.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/glimpse-of-reviewers-life.html

The subject I've been pursuing here for the last few years is the converging of the SF/F fields and the Romance field, and the problem of how Romance can gain the high regard of the general public that it so richly deserves.

Recently we've seen the release of yet another Romantic Comedy film, SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, March 12, 2010:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815236/

And we ask why is "Romance" only acceptable in Hollywood as a "Comedy?"

OK, there was ROMANCING THE STONE and THE AFRICAN QUEEN, but think about Romance-hybrids and box-office respect. Almost all the recent romance films are hybrid genre.

So we note the commentary on IMDB for SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, and the whole focus on "it's funny" rather than "it's romantic."

The hybrid genre labels as I've pointed out in previous posts are formulated as DECORATION + PLOT-STYLE. SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE is a ROMANTIC COMEDY - a plot structured as a comedy with romance as the decoration. And rom-com is a big seller in Hollywood now, especially in indie films.

Look at the film AVATAR. It's action with relationship as a decoration. At most, Romance is a complication to the action-plot.

But are we seeing a trend gathering toward merging the plot and the decoration into a single, united whole?

What would it take to accomplish that merger?

In a word, CHARACTER.

The essential core of the main character's character has to shift in order to merge the two elements of a hybridized genre. What is considered admirable in a person of solid character has to change. That is, the value, or the standard of admirability has to change from being entirely of one of the genres to being a balance of both genres.

When this kind of shift happens in a culture, new icons emerge, new IMAGES that "tell the story."

Remember what Blake Snyder taught us in SAVE THE CAT! which he learned from his elder mentors - a screenplay is a story in pictures. And remember what I noted about the film AVATAR

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

The requirement for a broad "reach" needed for a high budget film is that the whole story is pictures, not dialogue, and the pictures have to translate across cultural boundaries -- the pictures have to be exportable because the USA market can't support high budget films by itself.

Text-fiction writers have to evoke images with words, and so must choose images just as deliberately as a high budget film writer would.

The audience has become fragmented in the USA because our culture has shattered and is reforming around new icons, new images. The hybrid-genre fiction we're seeing now is a result of the search for new icons as change accelerates.

Here are two images to ponder deeply because they say "it all." These might be blended into a new icon if we can find the common meaning.

The cover of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN by Gini Koch (DAW Books April 2010)
Gini Koch is a pen name of Jeanne Cook
http://eposic.net/blog/archives/196

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51tZtzTeQjL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Note he's holding a gun in his left hand while she's holding a gun in her right.  It's two people turned toward each other, guns in hand but neglected.

Now look at this still from a movie titled FACE/OFF.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2009/5/21/1242924794594/John-Travolta-and-Nicolas-001.jpg

Pay off ... John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount

Two men stand almost arm's length from each other, each holding a gun out straight into the other's face, faced-off.

I ran across this image in an article referenced on twitter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/22/shane-black-12-rounds

The subtitle of the article:
Summer means action at the cinema, so here's Shane Black, the master of the art, giving Sam Delaney a masterclass in thrills

THRILLS???? Romance isn't thrill packed?

Notice the stance in the FACE/OFF photo - the distance - and how the guns are held. The IMAGE is all, the COMPOSITION carries the theme non-verbally.

Now just ponder and ponder that.

TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN (an excellent novel!) back cover copy reads thusly:

---------

IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DAY IN ARIZONA AND THEN THE MONSTER SHOWED UP --

Marketing manager Katherine "Kitty" Katt had just finished a day on jury duty. When she stepped out of the Pueblo Caliente courthouse, all she was thinking about was the work she had to get caught up on. Then her attention was caught by a fight between a couple - a domestic dispute that looked like it was about to turn ugly. But ugly didn't even begin to cover it when the "man" suddenly transformed into a huge, winged monster right out of a grade Z science fiction movie and went on a deadly killing spree. In hindsight, Kitty realized she probably should have panicked and run screaming the way everyone around her was doing. Instead she got mad, searched her purse for a weapon, and, armed with a Mont Blanc pen, sprinted into action to take down the alien.

In the middle of all the screeching and the ensuing chaos, a tall handsome hunk of a guy in an Armani suit suddenly appeared beside her, examined the body, introduced himself as Jeff Martini with "the agency," called out to an Armani-clad colleague to perform crowd control, and then insisted on leading her to a nearby limo to talk to his "boss."

And that was how Kitty's new life among the aliens began ...

-----------

TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN delivers as promised, luscious hunk, complex and progressively sexual relationship, cognitive dissonance, and a heroine modeled after "Mrs. King" of "Scarecrow And Mrs. King" the TV show. Solidly crafted writing with the complex backgrounding handled with a minimum of expository lumping. Highly recommended.

But not recommended just as a good read. This is a book that explains a lot about what's going on in this real world of publishing.

Notice this "science so advanced it seems like magic" novel is published by DAW as Science Fiction, not fantasy - and is styled with all the relationship and sexuality you see in modern Paranormal Romance. The science is only science because we are told it is science not magic, but there are strong "magical" elements there too.

Now study those two images again and think ICON.

Think of the writing styling emerging from the cross-genre trends, especially hybrid-Romance styles, and now holding those images in mind, let's look at the entire field from the point of view of a literary agent.

There's a wonderful blog I've been following for some time by a really good agent who also seems to be a very good hearted person (not an odd combination among agents, mind you, but Rachelle Gardner here is an excellent example of that hybrid combination. Just read some of her other blog entries to see that.)

I found the following blog entry where Rachelle presents a query from a new author seeking representation that grabbed her attention and prompted her to ask to see the manuscript.

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/03/query-critique-dealers-of-light.html

I read the query and the 30 or so responses already posted with great attention, noting it was fraught with passive verbs and passive sentence constructs indicating passive plotting or wrong choice of POV character that would disqualify it from consideration as a screenplay pitch, or as a novel query in SF or Fantasy genres.

I thought about the two iconic images posted above, and about TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN, and about everything marketers, book publicists, agents, editors and most of all film producers have gone to such great lengths to teach me about how to project professionalism into concise pitches.

TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is almost the same novel as the one described in this query Rachelle Gardner posted, except for Kitt's attitude, which is anything but passive. Kitt is not "drawn into" this conflict; she plunges into it bare-fisted!

Note the only passive construction in the back cover copy of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is "her attention was caught." I would have rewritten that to "when she saw" and would have tweaked a lot of the other wording in that copy to sharpen it according to the rules another literary agent, Kristen Nelson illustrated with Linnea Sinclair's back cover copy at Denvention III:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html

But the TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN cover copy gets the point across about this very interesting woman, Kitty, a MANAGER heading toward the peak of her formidable career, who reacts out of the core of her personality to take charge and exercise her innate sense of responsibility and thereby plunges herself into a whole new reality and a new life.

That "reacts out of the core" and "plunges into" phrasing comes from Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series which explains why these attitudes are required in a POV character and this construction is an absolute requirement for a feature film screenplay.

I thought about all the kick-ass heroines leading the charge in Paranormal Romance acceptability to the general audiences and especially about the size of the world-audience for AVATAR.

One of the signatures of the Fantasy-SF-kick-ass-heroine novel is that the male and female leads have to be equals, whether they both know it or not. Very often the conflict is about establishing that equality as a prerequisite for a blazing-hot-romance.

If they are not equals, then any sexual relationship smacks of abuse to some (not all) of our modern sensibilities.

Part of our culture has already adopted this icon of equality as the ideal in relationship, and part has rejected it resoundingly. The interesting thing is that sometimes both parts reside in the same reader. The question then becomes, "Are the proportions of these parts that accept or reject equality still changing? If so, in which direction?"

Remember the 1983 film SCARECROW & MRS. KING, and the 2005 film MR.& MRS. SMITH which I discussed:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

Compare the plot of MR.& MRS. SMITH which starts and ends in a marriage counselor's office with the query chosen by Rachelle Gardner.

We're in the midst of a churning harrowing of our cultural values. The pivot point may have been signified by the film WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, the story of Tina Turner's emergence from abused and neglected child to towering icon of the music scene.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108551/

Compare that with the film of same title about modernizing the dating game
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425645/

Notice the 10 and 20 year intervals and correlate with the generational tastes issues I discussed with respect to Pluto transits:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

And now, something new is happening.

Look again at the images above - the two with guns drawn, facing one another vs. guns hanging neglected in lax hands and the two embracing one another.

I look at that and I see two images of relationship based on equality of power, authority, efficaciousness, fearlessness, self-respect and mutual respect.

What do you see?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com