Picture the scene:
It’s dark.
Crickets are chirping.
A beautiful school teacher is moving quickly around her empty and isolated prairie house.
She’s undressing after a long day.
She gets down to her white chemise. She turns around from her closet to her bed and— SHRIEK!
She sees there’s a man sitting there in the dark, hands crossed on his chest.
“Keep going teacher lady,” he says with a hint of menace in his voice.
The school teacher stands there, breathing heavily, her hand at her chest, with a look on her face that says, NEVER.
The man slowly reaches over, picks up a gun, and points it at the school teacher.
“Don’t mind me,” he says coldly. “Keep on going.”
The woman looks down at her chemise in shame. She starts to untie the top. Now her face seems to be begging the man to let her stop.
But the man is obviously enjoying the show. He looks the woman up and down while still keeping the gun pointed at her.
The woman continues to undress. She’s now down to just her britches. She holds her chemise against her body to keep some dignity.
The man takes a deep breath.
“Let down your hair,” he says.
She does. The chemise drops to the ground and she’s just left in her one-piece underwear.
“Shake your head,” the man says.
She does. Her hair falls across her face.
The man doesn’t say anything more. Instead, he just gestures with the gun. He wants the woman to do away with the remaining underwear also.
She hesitates. There’s a mixture of fury and resolve on her face. Eventually, with decided movements, she starts to untie and unbutton her underwear.
She stands there, almost naked, with the underwear barely on her shoulders, ready to slip off.
The crickets keep chirping.
The man lowers his gun. Slowly, he takes off his gun belt. He stands up and walks to the woman.
He reaches inside her untied underwear.
The woman can barely control her fury.
“You know what I wish?” she says with her teeth clenched.
“What?”
“That once you’d get here on time!” And she puts her arms around the man and they kiss.
As you might know, that’s a scene from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It’s the first time we see the character played by Katharine Ross, the school teacher who was Sundance’s lover and who accompanied Butch and Sundance all the way down to Bolivia.
I’m using this scene to express an idea by Mark Ford, which is itself an expression of a much older idea:
“Ideas in and of themselves have little value. The value lies in the way they are expressed. New ideas are never new. Nor are they the product of a single mind. Rather, they are the particular articulation of general ideas that are in the common marketplace of ideas, repeated endlessly until one particular articulation catches fire. Remember this when you have a new idea that you are excited about. If you want to have it accepted, you must be willing to express it in dozens of different ways.”
A man and a woman in love. Not new.
A man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. Not new.
An apparent rape, which turns out to be a man and a woman in love, meeting after a long absence and hungrily reaching for each other. That’s something you win an Oscar for, which is what happened to screenwriter William Goldman after he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Whatever. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. And maybe you don’t. If you don’t, then I guess I’ve done my job, and that job ain’t easy. As A-list copywriter Jim Rutz said once:
“You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.”
Do you see where I’m going now? I want to make sure that you do, so let me spell it out:
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