Sure enough. But then why did we debate so much about practically anything and everything for so long all those years ago if we weren't, well, pretending, that these were real people with real emotions and real reasons for doing and saying things? We could all have just said, "It's a movie" and had done with it
Even in them days, and even when talking about the characters like they was real people, I asked myself what Annie, Diana, Larry, Ang, etc. might have been trying to do as much as what might have motivated the characters as people. Yes, "it's a movie," but an extraordinarily complex and subtle one, in which characters' thoughts aren't always obvious but are important, so there's plenty to debate. But you can also leverage the idea that if the movie takes the time to show somebody doing something, it's for a reason that serves the objectives of the story/film.
So even in them days it wouldn't have made sense to me to say, oh, they threw in this five minutes of screen time just to give us a glimpse into Junior's mind and understand that she's resentful about having to share time with her dad. The movie is too economical for that. (Heck, even the pavement-spreading scene has at least two or three meaningful things in it!) Obviously, a real life Junior might not know her dad was gay (in fact, that seems far more likely, given the time and place and her lack of direct evidence -- at the very least she probably wouldn't be so tactful and sensitive about it). But a real-life Junior doesn't have a camera following her around recording significant conversations.
So I don't mean "it's a movie" in the sense of, "it's just another installment of
Spiderman, you're reading too much into it, a cigar is a cigar." I mean it in the sense of, how can we understand the characters in terms of what we know about them, how they behave -- but also the film's theme? What is the work of art trying to say by including that bit of dialogue?
I don't suppose I did, because I was never sure how much time was supposed to have elapsed between the two scenes, and I don't remember any dialog about Cassie wanting to go to nursing school.
OK, I'll admit, I'm confused. I can't lay hands on my copy of
Story to Screenplay and I tried to google it but wasn't entirely successful. Does he even mention a nurse in the movie, or is that just in the story?
There is, however, a mention of an unnamed waitress in the story: “Ennis said he's been putting the blocks to a woman who worked part-time at the Wolf Ears bar in Signal where he was working now for Stoutamire's cow and calf outfit, but it wasn't going anywhere and she has some problems he didn't want.”
(Kind of OT, but often I seem to have trouble figuring out/understanding how much time is supposed to have elapsed between scenes in movies and especially scenes in "serial"-type TV shows, especially when the amount of time is not constant. Of course an exception would be when in one scene the characters are young and in the next they've been aged significantly, or the other way 'round when an older character is supposed to be thinking back to something that happened when he or she was young.)
I've been watching
Frankie and Grace, that TV series with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. It's not very good, but it's mildly entertaining. (Jane Fonda, BTW, looks fantastic at 80. Lily's not bad herself.) Anyway, last night one episode skipped forward in time from the previous one. It's not entirely clear how much time has elapsed, but seemingly months rather than years. The characters' situations have changed somewhat. But it would have been much more confusing except that in the second episode Sam Waterston had grown a goatee.