COMM 337: Finding Murray's "line" in a TV series

When Don Murray, late author and Boston Globe columnist, speaks of the "line" of a story, he has in mind something like the thesis of a student term paper. But to professional writers, finding the line is much more of an organic process than what Miss Thistlebottom taught us in English class. It's also much harder to describe.

Murray comes close when he says it's "a fragment of language -- sometimes a single word, often a phrase or series of words, rarely a sentence -- that makes me follow it. " But he clear about one thing -- when he finds the line, that's the moment when I know [I] have a column" (65). He also suggests, in the chapter subhead, it has something to do with the tension in a story, "the tension between forces in the world that will produce a story." It's about conflict, he said, but it's subtler than that. "That tension may be between one indiviudal and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). It can be as blatant as a barn burning (a form of political expression in some parts of the South where I used to live) or subtle as a missed appointment.

When I was covering the courthouse beat for daily newspapers, the line of a story was usually my lede. Often it came to me in headline form: "Three charged in drug raid," or whatever. Other times it was in the subtly troubled relationships between politicians in upper Rock Island County and those from Moline and the city of Rock Island. Murray says:

I do not pursue the line as much as put a tail on it. I am the private eye following suspect who may saunter through a shopping mall or race along a mountain road. My job is to stay in sight, out of sight. I follow language to see where it will take me, inluencing the text as little as possible.

Again, the process is intuitive. Murray describes it by analogy because it's not rocket science, it's not a precise series of steps.

In class today, we will watch the Public Broadcasting Service's extended preview of "The War," the 15-hour series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that is airing on PBS stations nationwide this week. It's available on YouTube if you want to see it again at home.

As you watch, ask yourself what was "the line" of this series? What insight -- or insights -- made the show hang together as Burns and Novick researched the show? What were they looking for? (They discuss how they made the series in the trailer. They don't use the word "line," or at least I didn't notice it, but they are clearly ) What were the points of tension they focused on? How did they pursue the line? Please post your thoughts to your blog between now and Wednesday.

Some background: Rick Atkinson, critic for The Washington Post, says in his review of Burns' series "The War," it is a "compelling, flawed gem of a documentary, which enriches our emotional comprehension of an event second only to the Civil War in its enduring resonance in the national character."

Of the reviews I've read of "The War," Atkinson's impressed me for its awareness of its visual impact:

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus; the group portrait of butchered soldiers in the dead of winter, their frozen eyes open and lightly dusted with snow, like macabre Jack Frosts.

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. ...

You don't get many epics on TV.