MediaJock appears to have at least one reader. Curt Ellis, maker of "King Corn", liked my analysis....
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Hey Daniel,
Thanks for the nice note and the thoughtful review! Sorry to take so long getting back to you.
We didn't know about the Corn King myth in the edit room, but I'm glad you pointed it out (you're the first!) and I'm sure we were influenced by its derivatives at least. Aaron (my cousin and the director behind the camera) talked about the Butz scene as being a moment where we see the man behind the curtain and realize that he isn't a wizard after all; just some guy's grandfather. That wasn't something we thought about before it happened, though -- Ian and I are who we are (reasonably meek guys not capable of pulling off a Moore-Heston confrontation if we wanted to), and the revelation we had in that moment was genuine: our system for food production sucks, but it's not the fault of evil -- it's just a function of another generation's government policy that we've all been too lazy to fix.
The other idea we talked about some was the notion of Whiteheadian tragedy. For a while we were pursuing this question of "what are we going to do with our corn?" as a central organizing idea for the film. Then we realized that farmers don't have any choice of what to do with their harvest, so we didn't deserve to, either. As Whitehead sees it, what makes Oedipus tragic isn't that the guy kills his father and marries his mother, but that he was fated to do that terrible thing all along. It's inevitability that's the essence of dramatic tragedy. So that informed us to, I think, with the idea that Ian and I (or any farmer in our position) really didn't have a choice other than to play out the scenario as we did: with that acre of land, we were basically predestined to grow corn, sell it to the elevator, and watch it march off to the corn syrup factory. We were characters who were necessarily along for the ride, not heroes charting our own destiny.
I'm sure the smartest filmmakers see the ways their stories are could riff on myth and history well before it happens, but I think a lot of us (and I'd put us in this category) just make the story that feels right in the moment we're working on it. Surprisingly often, we match up with the tropes anyway, because those things just feel so right. It doesn't make the comparison any less valid, just more magical. These models work on us in ways we don't even know.
Best to you,
Curt
___________
Hey Daniel,
Thanks for the nice note and the thoughtful review! Sorry to take so long getting back to you.
We didn't know about the Corn King myth in the edit room, but I'm glad you pointed it out (you're the first!) and I'm sure we were influenced by its derivatives at least. Aaron (my cousin and the director behind the camera) talked about the Butz scene as being a moment where we see the man behind the curtain and realize that he isn't a wizard after all; just some guy's grandfather. That wasn't something we thought about before it happened, though -- Ian and I are who we are (reasonably meek guys not capable of pulling off a Moore-Heston confrontation if we wanted to), and the revelation we had in that moment was genuine: our system for food production sucks, but it's not the fault of evil -- it's just a function of another generation's government policy that we've all been too lazy to fix.
The other idea we talked about some was the notion of Whiteheadian tragedy. For a while we were pursuing this question of "what are we going to do with our corn?" as a central organizing idea for the film. Then we realized that farmers don't have any choice of what to do with their harvest, so we didn't deserve to, either. As Whitehead sees it, what makes Oedipus tragic isn't that the guy kills his father and marries his mother, but that he was fated to do that terrible thing all along. It's inevitability that's the essence of dramatic tragedy. So that informed us to, I think, with the idea that Ian and I (or any farmer in our position) really didn't have a choice other than to play out the scenario as we did: with that acre of land, we were basically predestined to grow corn, sell it to the elevator, and watch it march off to the corn syrup factory. We were characters who were necessarily along for the ride, not heroes charting our own destiny.
I'm sure the smartest filmmakers see the ways their stories are could riff on myth and history well before it happens, but I think a lot of us (and I'd put us in this category) just make the story that feels right in the moment we're working on it. Surprisingly often, we match up with the tropes anyway, because those things just feel so right. It doesn't make the comparison any less valid, just more magical. These models work on us in ways we don't even know.
Best to you,
Curt
that makes at least two readers :)
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