Surrealism

Surrealism is a movement in literature and art characterised by its use of unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions seeking to transcend logic and habitual thinking to reveal deeper levels of meaning; often related to Freudian and Jungian concepts of the unconscious mind. These are not my own words, but abridged from a definition I came across somewhere.
 
So, surrealist treatment can be as simple as reading something forwards …and then reading it backwards and getting an entirely different meaning from the same words. Months ago my flatmate showed me the first verse of the below that she had come up with. This week I added a second verse.

get out
and
try
now

for what
you
always
wanted

But if you read it backwards it takes on an entirely polar perspective...

wanted
always
you
for what

now
try
and
get out

It reminds me of the alleged use of backmasking and finding subliminal messages by phonetically reversing musical recordings that everyone used to go on about when I was a teenager growing up in 'heavy metaller' Wanganui! And these are quite interesting, even if some seem a wee bit far fetched.

Taking it even further, I've been playing around with completely reversing any scene taken from a script to see what happens. And bizarrely, it kind of works. Sometimes it gives a scene a completely new meaning or context and sometimes the meaning remains very similar - but either way, a piece of script written intentionally to run in a forward sequence can usually be reversed (with a very slight jiggling around of the action cues) to still make for an interesting scene in some sense or another.

Here's an example of a short scene I wrote forwards (before having any idea of giving it this treatment) ...and then backwards. The overall meaning of the scene (being irony) stays pretty much the same, but in a way it's better because it brings out the protagonist's cheeky character even more and the source of the irony is not revealed to the viewer until the end of the scene, which makes it funnier.

That's cool. Imagine doing that to a whole film just to see what sort of story came out?