Coherence in Drive

If you haven't seen the film Drive yet, go see it. Here's a trailer:

I hesitated to embed the trailer at first because it doesn't even begin to do the movie justice. If you couldn't tell by my blog posts thus far, I like to read books. I like some movies, and I really like movies when they remind me of reading a book. One of my absolute favorite movies, The Royal Tenenbaums, is actually formatted to feel like you're reading the story of the dysfunctional family of child prodigies, complete with chapters and, at parts, Alec Baldwin narration.

This post isn't about The Royal Tenenbaums though, it's about Drive. Part of the reason I liked drive so much was that it felt like a novel. I'm assuming it was incredibly well adapted from the novel by James Sallis, but since we're all friends here I haven't actually read the novel yet. Within the film though there is incredible pacing and anticipation. The main character, played by Ryan Gosling of Notebook fame, is simply Driver. He has no name (reminiscent of O'Conner's A Good Man is Hard to Find, to some degree) and rarely says much. The beginning of film is about as slow as a movie about a getaway car driver can be, but when the first shot is fired the pace excellerates at a blistering pace. This slower start makes the events that transpire after all that more startling.

While the chapters in Style for today were more about writing persuasive or academic pieces, I think that limiting what can be learned about coherence to that narrow scope would be a mistake. Whether it be a scholarly journal article, a movie with Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver, or a blog post about a movie, coherence is important. And on that note, I will admit to what causes me to lack to coherence most in these often rambling blog posts: what in the chapters was refered to as "Failure to Revise."