Wilderness Interface Zone

Over the last couple of years, my family’s home business has moved into reproducing public domain documents, movies, and other materials to sell on that juggernaut Ebay and, eventually, on our own website.  Recently, I became more involved with writing auction descriptions for old films, some from as far back as the 30s.  To save time (or to employ the illusion of time in a practical manner), I tried writing descriptions from synopses others have written but discovered that many weren’t reliable.  One synopsis writer would seem to have watched an entirely different movie from another writer profiling the same movie.  So to set down the most accurate descriptions I  could, I gave in and started watching the movies I needed to describe.  The job has its ups and downs, but I’m picking up interesting facts and ideas from both the heights, the depths, and the fair-to-middling cinematic ground of Hollywood’s fairest dreams … and unintentional nightmares.

I’m not much at writing advertising copy, such language seeming to me to be one of the most problematic rhetorical zones in human expression.  If I personally find a movie distasteful, I have a hard time keeping my irritation out of my description, let alone sprinkling glitter to make the movie appear attractive.   Such a challenge popped up a few days ago after I watched the 1932 movie Three Wise Girls starring Jean Harlow.   What a cynical movie.   To my eye, there’s not an admirable wrinkle in the brows of any of the male leads.  But Three Wise Girls is an artifact from Hollywood culture during the days that led up to the instituting of the Hays Code and as such has some historical value.  I think.  Anyway, it appears to be a much sought after movie.  For whatever reasons.

Since I’ll be watching these old movies regularly, I thought I’d post some of my description-reviews of films I watch in which nature figures prominently and even offer opinions about the quality of the stories.  While these movies won’t have much direct bearing on the development of Mormon nature writing, they tap into that great aquifer of nature narrative and might prompt thought in aspiring Mormon nature writers about what’s possible as far as stories that take nature as their subject–perhaps even extending to poetry that does the same, à la Robert Service.  Nature has always provided at the very least stunning backdrops for human-centric drama.  In some cases, nature-themed stories whip up whopper adversaries and exotic settings where anything is possible.  Think Moby Dick, life in lush jungles, dinosaurs in hidden valleys.  Are space aliens nature?  Yeah, I think at least some qualify.  Or maybe, by the light of advanced alien behavior and philosophy, it will become more apparent that we are.  However, the dharma of Hollywood aliens cannot exceed the quality of mind of the human scriptwriters who imagine them, so don’t hold your breath for advanced civilization to come soon to a theater near you.

I hope you’ll enjoy these reviews.  I’m not much for telling others what they should or shouldn’t watch, but there might here and there be a long-forgotten treasure  capable of stirring the creative juices for nature writers.  Let’s see, shall we?