Storytelling always runs on conflict. Even so, the martial drumbeat of this year’s Oscars seems loud, chiming with the concussions from Ukraine and the timbre of wider politics
Academy Awards
On Inisherin, the row between Pádraic and Colm flares up in a time of war and mimics its rhythms. Life is too short to waste any more of it in nice-but-dull Pádraic’s company, decides Colm, when he could be composing music for his fiddle. Pádraic disagrees about what matters, what lasts and whether the two are the same. Like many a, theirs seems both foolish and profound. Colm is a grouchy crank—or perhaps has seen life for what it is.
The first German-made adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of 1928, “All Quiet on the Western Front” is plainly about war. But it is also about food. The soldiers talk and sing about it. They snatch it from dying comrades and pilfer it from locals. While the sybaritic top brass toss meat to their dogs, or query the freshness of their croissants, ordinary soldiers wolf down the rations in the trenches they storm.
Storytelling, it is true, always runs on conflict. Man versus fate, or nature, or society, or another man : typologies of it abound online and in creative-writing seminars. As Kurt Vonnegut enjoined, “every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” Someone or something gets in the way, and the ensuing friction forges characters, generates tension and drives the plot.
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