More specifically, After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema is "A Paradox Within the Paradox: An Interview with Ben Tanzer" which you may read here. You may also read some excerpt below. Cool? Quite so, I'd say.
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Jeremy T. Wilson
It seems to me that you and Scorsese and the movie itself are answering my previous question in a similar way: art provides a means of exploring the paradox. In the end of After Hours, Paul quite literally has to become art to be saved. This is similar to the ending of your novel The Missing, where Gabriel’s act of creation is what ultimately salvages the family. Do you think this meta-narrative about the role of art is one reason the movie was so significant for you and your father?
Ben Tanzer
I’m going to start with addressing what it means to me to be saved. Is Paul’s life at stake in After Hours? It feels like it is to him, and when he is saved, what happens? He ends up arriving at the office in time for work. Did Scorsese feel After Hours saved his life? Not literally I imagine, yet the movie was made in an effort to save his creative life, and I wonder if he can separate his creative life from normal life. Is there even a normal life for an artist? My life is better because I started writing. Not just the act of writing, but being in it, the community, the dialogue(s), the drinks, and the readings. And I believe this is the true paradox here—can we live the lives we want to live without the art we create? I suspect it’s about having a thing that feels like a gift and not a hobby. A thing you can’t not think about all day long, or marinate in, a frame for your day, week, month, life about how you see the world and want to live in it.
One of the tensions for the protagonists in The Missing is that they don’t have a thing that elevates their lives beyond being parents and suddenly their daughter is missing. A creative act does save their emotional lives, though I also believe it’s something else—they fight through all the things that have left them stuck, trapped, without direction, and seeking out self-destructive alternatives. They surrender to the possibility that maybe something better can happen for them and that there may be hope. I believe that’s what Scorsese was trying to untangle with After Hours. Is there hope? You and I are writers; Scorsese is a filmmaker; my father was a painter. We don’t have a choice about making art, a switch is flipped, we’re in a new head space and we’re not able to leave it. Which is a paradox within the paradox. We’re trapped by something we have chosen to be trapped by. So, did After Hours appeal to my father and I for all the reasons we’re discussing here? It had to. The thing is, while the act of making art allows us to explore the paradox, it also allows us to live in a different, sometimes better, more enriching paradox that exists within the paradox. And sometimes, that’s enough.