Haunted.

I had to do a writing exercise for one of my classes. The prompt I went with basically required writing something that is “haunted by cinema”. This phrase “haunted by cinema” sums up an idea that is commonly discussed in writing classes: that movies have had a dramatic effect on the way that narrative writing works. There are things that movies do very well, like convey motion and action and the visual, things which written words do not do as well. Sometimes narrative writing tries to adapt itself to the strictures and functions of film and a lot of people would say that doing so undercuts the things writing can do that movies can’t (interiority, history, examination, etc.). So that is where this phrase “haunted by film” comes from.

The exercise below is not terribly good, but I tried to steer into the skid by invoking the logic of movies while using language that movies normally don’t have access to.

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