Séries ManiaTalk29 August 2021
The Bible, the greatest script ever?
58 min
Public lecture at the Séries Mania festival in Lille, facing the TV-series industry. What if the most adapted text in history broke every rule of the trade? A show bible must be clear and short; the Bible is obscure, endless, and that is exactly why it works. From the paradoxical casting of the patriarchs to the founding misunderstanding of Eve's creation, a screenwriting lesson in reverse. Conducted in French.
“If the Bible were clear and concise, I believe it would never have known its planetary success. It would probably have flopped. If the verses were clear, if their meaning left no room for doubt, it would never work: we would lose, among other things, the main spring of every war of religion, that certainty some people have of having understood the texts so much better than everyone else.”
“You and I know that the same text, whether a script or a sacred verse, can give rise to opposite interpretations, can lead to the worst or the best, can produce a turkey or a masterpiece, can create a genocide or hold the greatest promises of humanity.”
“The Hebrew word wrongly translated in most Bibles as "rib" actually means, far more commonly in Hebrew, tsela, "side." So the original script specified that the first woman was born not from Adam's rib, but at Adam's side. And you can see the major, monumental, civilisational difference between those two terms.”
“The Bible begins with a misunderstanding. And this misunderstanding, as in all good scripts, is able to condition the whole rest of the story. And it is up to us, really, to decide whether we want to be spectators or actors of that misunderstanding.”
“Let me give you a scoop: I never left Egypt, I never saw the ten plagues strike Pharaoh. And yet this story speaks to me, because although it does not tell my reality, it tells my truth.”
“The Bible says exactly the opposite: we are who we are because we are no longer who we were, and we are faithful to who we must be because we left our birthplace and we are not going back. It is this setting out that defines identity, that is, precisely, the fact of not being identical to what we were.”
The session
The lecture opens on Woody Allen and the notion of the chosen people, then on a room of potential fans: fundamentalism described as a fandom ready for anything so that no one spoils the ending. First paradox: the Bible breaks every rule of the screenwriting manuals (a show bible must be fifteen pages, clear and short) and that is the condition of its success. Then the text's serial devices: a God with no pronounceable name and no image, the first divinely assisted procreation in history for Sarah, the special effects of the Exodus, and a cast of flawed heroes, from Moses and his speech impediment to David sending Bathsheba's husband off to die at war. The serious pivot: interpretation as the junction between exegesis and writing, the same text able to produce a turkey or a masterpiece. Then the creation of Eve reread through tsela: born not from a rib but at Adam's side, the founding misunderstanding. The Q&A widens out: the prophet Elijah as the series to write, reality versus truth, the hero's journey inverted (you never go home again, the promised land as a betrothed), reading a text within its context, and the Thousand and One Nights: no political appeasement without the women's story, through the voice of Scheherazade.