I’m officially the unofficial music-editor here at the Son and Foe blog, and I’m going to get right on that in a day or two–you can expect to hear something from me about a new band or musical artist that isn’t quite on the map yet, but oughta be, on a regular basis. But I just finished watching J.S.A. (amazon.com | IMDB), a movie by Chan-Wook Park, and it reminded me of something I think about a lot that relates to the world of story-telling.

Mr. Park is a South-Korean director (IMDB) who’s received some acclaim for the artistic merit of his films. The reviews of his material that I’ve read generally mention violence as being extremely graphic and prominent in his work; this film, however, is not very violent and what there is isn’t graphic at all. Violent or not, it’s still very, very good.

More than anything else, J.S.A. reminded me of something that’s true for all story-tellers, be they involved in film, poetry, prose, or even the visual arts: when you choose to begin and end the story you tell defines the story. J.S.A. is a film about Korea–specifically, it’s the story of certain North and South Korean soldiers who serve on the border between the two. It’s kind of a downer: some people die that you come to like, and no one really ends up happy.

But watching the movie, for the majority of it, you’re going to smile. You’re going to feel good, even though you know that it’s all going to end in tears, because the back-story that takes place before the movie starts (and is portrayed through the middle section of the flick) is very sweet. It’s a beautiful representation of friendship in the face of adversity. It’s not Because of Winn-Dixie sweet, so saccharinely-over-the-top that you cringe and really wish you hadn’t bothered; quite the contrary. It’s genuine, and it engrossing, and it’s heartfelt. When the movie ends, however, that’s not what you’re left with. And when the movie begins, you know that’s not how it’s going to end up.

Had the film begun with a mine-field and ended with a birthday, it would have been the feel-good movie of the year. As it was created by the director, it is instead a thought-provoking piece about the relationship between inter-personal relationships and inter-state relationships.

Artists make a lot of choices, but arguably no choice is as important as where, chronologically, the story will begin and end. All human stories end in death; the best examples are often the most extreme, so I offer you Hitler. It’s entirely possible to tell a story about Adolf Hitler that remains entirely true to fact, and ends on a positive note, with a sympathetic tilt to the character. Many people–myself included–would argue that such a portrayal would be incomplete and misleading due to its incompleteness, but it could be entirely “true” nonetheless.

This works in the opposite way as well. Ulysses S. Grant is a somewhat iconic figure in American history–he “won the war on slavery” as the leading general of the United States in the war with the Confederate States of America. To tell the story of Grant and end it with the surrender of the CSA is to tell an uplifting one where the forces of good, through the efforts of a good man, win out over evil.

Fortunately or not, though, Grant didn’t die right there. He went on to be an amazingly corrupt and incompetent president. We’ve had a lot of corrupt presidents and incompetent administrations, but Grant’s is noteworthy even among that crowd. So depending on where you choose to end his story, and where you choose to begin it, you can leave the audience feeling different things about the characters involved, and perhaps even the very nature of the world in which they live.

Every story is interesting and compelling, or has the opportunity to be. But would the Mona Lisa be a more important painting had it been of a woman 20 years older? Or 20 years younger? Even more interesting, what if he had portrayed her twenty seconds older or younger? It is a painting of a single instant, no more and no less, completed over the course of three to four years. The idea that da Vinci picked that “enigmatic smile” out of a range of facial expressions he encountered while working on the piece is part-and-parcel of what we must understand to appreciate it.

Think about this, then, the next time you read a story, or see a movie, or even look at a piece of art: the artist who created the work is making a conscious choice to tell a story within certain self-imposed limits. Ask yourself: “Is this story undertold? Or overtold?”

And then there is also the question, “Is it told well?”