Theme = Meaning

More than just the moral or premise of the story, theme can best be understood to be about what a story MEANS.

Beginning November 19, I will be teaching the one-week online class Core VII: Theme, one of eight courses in my Core curriculum which focuses on writing theory. On Day One, we consider various takes on how to define theme and end up with my writing principle:

Theme = Meaning.

Here is an excerpt from Lecture 1 in which I analyze the Coen brothers’ remake of the movie True Grit:

Generally, I am not a fan of remakes, but what Joel and Ethan Coen did with True Grit represents powerful filmmaking, not the least of which how they interweave the story’s central theme throughout. Indeed, this theme is revealed in the first few seconds of the movie. Over opening credits in the soundtrack, we hear a piano version of the old hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”.

That melody is repeated over and over again in the movie, underscoring the importance of the emerging dynamic between Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. It is paid off dramatically in the Final Struggle, where Cogburn takes Mattie, who has been bitten by a rattlesnake, on an arduous journey to save her life. On horseback until the horse breaks down, then…

IN HIS ARMS! Carrying her for miles and miles until he finds a house in the wilderness. So she is literally leaning on his (Cogburn’s) everlasting arms.

It’s a beautiful end point of Mattie’s innocence-to-experience journey: She starts off cocksure and assertive, lots of head-learning but minimal knowledge of the ‘real’ world. She leaves the Ordinary World of her family’s Arkansas farm and ventures into the New World, represented by the wilderness of the hunt for her father’s killer. Over time she opens up — slowly — to the assistance of others. In the end, she actually needs help, and help she gets from Cogburn who symbolically becomes her surrogate father.

Here are the lyrics of the hymn, which by the way is the song that’s sung when the end credits roll:

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
leaning on the everlasting arms;
what a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
leaning on the everlasting arms.