The quest vs. the meander

I listen to a lot of nerd podcasts, including this one, which today included an interesting tangent about Pixar.  You know, the animated film company everyone loves.  The co-host, John Siracusa, had the previous week been comparing Pixar to Hayao Miyazaki, and finding the former inferior, for various reasons: all of them, in my view, very valid.  This week, though, he pointed out that almost all Pixar movies feature male protagonists, and most of Miyazaki's feature female ones.

This in and of itself doesn't really concern me--I think children are perfectly able to identify with the other gender in a narrative, should their parents adequately encourage them to.  But this got me thinking about what I do hate about Pixar: their storylines.

Don't get me wrong--I really quite enjoy these films, particularly The Incredibles and Ratatouille (which, if nothing else, provides the extraordinary spectacle of Patton Oswalt not swearing).  They are visually stunning and often quite funny.  But they depend, by and large, on the same dreary goal/motivation/conflict plotlines that Rhian criticized in this post.  There is always some quest, or some search for self-actualization or self-improvement.  There always has to be a moral, a life lesson.  There always has to be a danger that forces people to embrace their better selves.  The world must always prove, in the end, orderly and sensible.

I find myself thinking of this as a "masculine" storyline, though I'm not particularly eager to defend that characterization; I will say, though, that the primary way girls get to be the heroes of contemporary children's movies is by proving that they can do the same stupid shit boys can.  Miyazaki, on the other hand, makes movies about intense, often directionless exploration.  He is contemplative, and his films often remain movingly unresolved.  Pixar movies look great, but the visuals are illustrative.  In Miyazaki, the images are the movie.  They make the story.  I can't, for the life of me, remember the plot of Howl's Moving Castle--but I will never, never forget the sight of it.  Is this perhaps a feminine ideal--that it is sometimes enough simply to be?  In any event, it is a worthwhile ideal, gendered or not.

Is this "better"?  It is to me.  My middle career (and, I fear, accompanying slump in book sales) has been largely about an effort to abandon the kind of heavily directed plots I love to indulge in as a casual reader, and concentrate more on the enigmatic things that move me.  I certainly haven't abandoned plot, nor have I become remotely experimental.  But my forthcoming (late 2012 I suspect) novel is about a woman who gets horribly lost in an increasingly confusing spiral of impossible domestic events, against a backdrop of impossible sci-fi phenomena, and I had more fun writing it than anything I've done in ten years.  It's the result of an obsession not with story, but with motif, situation, and emotion.

I dunno--I think we're stuck in this country in a plotline that's so familiar we can't even see it.  We keep telling ourselves the same damned stories over and over, are comforted by them, and live our lives by them, when in fact they are bankrupt and getting us nowhere.  We are never going to win the big game, or make people love us at last, or find what we're looking for.  Friendship isn't going to conquer all, we are not going to find the treasure, and we aren't going to land the deal.  If the worst thing that's going to happen to us is that we're just going to keep living for a while, we are in luck.  There are a million ways to write about that experience, many of them profound and beautiful.  Maybe we can do that now.

I'm Jealous of Movies

Reading the comments of the last post, I suddenly endured a wave of jealousy for people who get to make movies. Now, this isn't to say that I actually want to make movies. I think I would be bad at it, despite being a guy who knows how narrative works and likes taking pictures. It seems to me that, if you are going to be a director of films, you either need to find artistic collaboration appealing, or you have to be absolutely arrogant, charismatic, and commanding, so that you don't really need to collaborate. Neither of those scenarios applies to me.

But if I could make movies alone, the way I write novels, that would really be something. For one thing, as we have argued here before, movies now possess the cultural cachet that novels once did. Or rather, that novels once were allowed to cling to a piece of. Film is absolutely the dominant form of narrative in American culture, and perhaps this is as it should be, or as it is inevitably destined to be. The filmmaker equivalent of me--an indie director, say, with a small following--will have many, many times more viewers than I will ever have readers. And if there's one thing a writer wants, it's an audience.

I'm not talking about that so much, though. The joy in writing isn't really in its meager public manifestation--it's in the act of creation. And the filmmaker has access to things the novelist doesn't, things I sometimes desperately want.

Take the movie I discussed in the last post--"Broken Flowers", with its symbolic, metaphoric final image of two identically dressed boys driving past the protagonist in slow motion. This is an image of profound simplicity and elegance, and you can't do it in a novel. You could describe it, certainly, but it wouldn't be the same as simply holding it up before the viewer's eyes. And in a film, such an image is inherently fleeting, at least in the theater. You see it, and it's gone. Its aftereffects are more powerful than its actual manifestation.

Or how about the ending of "The Visitor," with our newly-angry hero working out his emotions by beating his conga drum in the subway station, as trains roar past. In a novel, a description of the scene would seem mawkish, overdetermined. In the movie, you don't even think about how it got there. It's just happening.

And the filmmaker has the advantage of tyranny over the senses. Compromises may have to be made in the creation of a scene, but once it's made, it's made--and every viewer sees the same thing, hears the same thing. The novelist can make her paragraph perfect, but she is doomed never to be understood the way she wishes to be--everyone will imagine different sights, sounds, and emotions as they read. The filmmaker makes iconic images; the novelist makes a map that leads the reader to generate his own images.

Ultimately, the filmmaker collaborates ahead of time, with all those people in the credits, then lords it over the viewer. The novelist works alone--but every reading of his book is a collaboration. A novel is inherently unfinished, inherently imprecise.

Naturally, I'm glad do what I do, or else I wouldn't do it so damned often. But when I'm asked a leading question, or read (God help me) a review, or am asked to explain what I do, I often wish that I had access to the dictatorial power of the image, the soundtrack, and flooding of the senses.

Protagonist

If you think there's going to be a serious post today, you're out of your mind. Rhian is a poll worker and will be spending her day at the Varna Community Center (pictured) making sure all goes smoothly on what may be the last year for New York's wonderful mechanical voting machines. (As a lover of vintage technology, I will be sad to see them go, if they every really do.) We live on the end of town where things begin getting a little bit conservative, but I was shocked, on a Sunday drive up through Genoa and Aurora, to see how many Obama-Biden signs festooned the edges of farms. About half. Anyway, as for me, I'll be teaching my classes, hanging out with the kids, and gnawing my fingernails until they bleed.

You'll need something to keep your mind occupied while you wait for the results to come in, so let me recommend this movie, Protagonist, a 2007 documentary about four men, and the ways in which their life stories resemble the ideals of Euripidean drama. The movie consists mostly of interviews with the men--a gay ex-preacher, a kung-fu-teenager-turned-writer, a bank robber, and a German former terrorist--interspersed with bits of actual Euripidean drama, acted out by large wooden puppets. If this sounds strange, it is. The four men are extremely articulate and engaging, though, and their stories are weirdly similar, implying some universality in our experiences of control, violence, and catharsis. Good writerly food for thought on this very distracting day.

Who Should Review Books? And Where?

Posting has been light lately, as W6HQ has been overwhelmed with scheduling oddities, including one of us (Rhian) working the polls for Super Tuesday. Personally, I threw in for Obama. Hillary looks just as good on paper, if not better (Paul Krugman is very persuasive on the subject of their competing health care plans), but Obama's got the mojo, and America could use a little of that stuff right now. In any event, tonight's result will neither make my day nor break my heart.

What would make my day, though, is the magical appearance of excellent book reviews all across the land. Fat chance of that! I don't think there's any aspect of literary culture that people complain about more than book reviews. The superstar reviewers are routinely disdained, sometimes because their superstar status seems undeserved, mostly because, if you disagree with them, their prominence only serves to remind you how powerless you and your opinion really are. Everyone hates The New York Times Book Review--in part because they're the primary popular book section in the country, but mostly because they let lightweight writers review other lightweight writers, resulting in embarrassing over-praising of work that shouldn't be featured in the first place. And because, ever since McGrath swept through town, they appear to consider fiction and poetry to be less important than nonfiction. And then there are the jacket-blurb factories, Kirkus et al., who review book many months before they're published, and can cause entire publicity departments to give up on a writer in an instant--all under an anonymous catchall that leaves nobody at all responsible. We do, of course, have The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The London Review of Books--genuinely excellent publications that nevertheless are not widely read by the masses of people we hope will want to buy our books. These magazines are about as good as book reviewing gets, but they leave me unsatisfied--not in my reading of them, which is enjoyable, but in the way they make me long for writing that was more succinct but just as intelligent, and widely available.

What do I really want in a critic? I used to think that professional critics were no good--that writers should be judged by other writers. But that's even worse--the whole thing would just be horribly incestuous and overwhelmed by blatant logrolling and the discharging of vendettas.

No, what I want is for smart readers to review books. Intelligent, incisive people who praise reluctantly, criticize respectfully, and take the time to figure out what makes a writer tick. The reviews of my own work which I most treasure are not necessarily positive--indeed, the best one ever went out of its way to observe how undercooked my first couple of novels were--but rigorous, respectful, honest, and even-handed. And these are rare.

The best thing said in recent years about critics was said by a critic: Anton Ego, of the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which I consider to be very nearly a masterpiece of a flick. (You should see it if you haven't--it's a children's picture about artistic integrity!) Over the closing scenes, the dour Frenchman intones:

In many ways the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But, the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things... the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something... and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.

The discovery and defense of the new! That's what book reviewing should be all about--accepting the new and different at face value, and trying to judge it on its own terms. If it falls flat, so be it--but take it seriously.

Rhian might already have said this, but I think she's right--some of the most useful book reviewing of recent years has appeared in the customer comments of Amazon.com. (I don't need to hotlink that, right?) It's true! There are smart people on there, saying what they think, without guile, without preconceptions. Of course, most customer comments are crap, or worse, but it turns out to be very easy to weed these out. The good ones are by readers who are rooting for the new and interesting--they want books to be excellent, because they want to have a good time reading them. They're not getting paid, either--they're offering up their opinions because their opinions mean something to them, and they want them out there.

The internet is not entirely there yet, I think, as an organ of cultural evaluation. It needs to develop a history, a track record. But it's coming along. People bitch about bloggers all the time, but we don't need less of them--we need more. It doesn't matter if most of them suck. Most of everything sucks. What matters is that they're honest. And this is increasingly how I feel about book reviews--excellence would be wonderful, but when you get down to it, shitty honesty is better than brilliant disingenuousness.

Now go Barack the vote!

The Golden Compass

I took the guys to see this movie today. I have never read Pullman's stuff--he started up too late for me to enjoy him as a kid, and our sons are too young to have gotten into him yet (well--the older one could read them now, actually), and so I am at long last one of those people who saw the movie without having bothered to read the book. And all evidence suggests that the book is better. Which of course is inevitable for any decent book, because it's a book, and a movie is never a better book than a book, unless the book was written expressly for the purpose of getting turned into a movie.

But as a movie, The Golden Compass is pretty decent, and the young lead actress is terrific, and Ian MacKellen is very fine as a polar bear (sorry--an ice bear, which is a like a very large polar bear that talks like Ian MacKellen), which the CGI geniuses have actually managed to make look quite a lot like Ian MacKellen when he talks.

I post about it here though because I read a review of it last week in our local Gannett paper, which utterly trashed it, leaving it with an anemic star and a half. Gannett is not in the business of disliking things--liking them is more profitable for everyone--and so this review, which stressed the "emotional coldness" of the film, struck me as a possible right-wing hit piece aimed at the movie's apparent anti-Christian bias. (And let me say that, yes indeed, it does seem to be pretty unsympathetic to religion, a sentiment Pullman has been more than happy to confirm in interviews.)

And so, hit piece it was, I think. Surely word came down from corporate that The Golden Compass must be snuffed out. Because, although the movie is not great, it's thoroughly entertaining, and posits some extremely interesting fantasy what-if's, most remarkable among them the idea of human souls taking the form of animal familiars. I assume this is straight from Pullman, as it's too smart for a movie otherwise--the implications of this arrangement allow for all kinds of fascinating psychological experimentation. Nicole Kidman, for instance, as Cruella DeVil (or somebody like her), actually abuses her own soul, then tearfully mommies up to it as it whimpers on her shoulder. BAD ASS!

I'm no atheist (agnostic to the core, thank you), but it certainly is nice to see this kind of moral rigor (however smarmily presented) thrown onto a big-screen kids' movie. It's thought-provoking, and the bears are way cool. I believe I will try to get Owen into Pullman ASAP.

Your thoughts?

Bookforum: Fiction Into Film

The new Bookforum has a pretty good piece on books that are turned into movies, featuring interviews with novelists, screenwriters, and directors. I was particularly impressed by Alexander Payne's contribution, in which he addresses the question of just how much the filmmaker owes the novelist. Nothing, is the answer. "Adapting often means marauding," he says.

I think he's right. Movies that hew too closely to books are often little more than bad snapshots of books, and who wants that? A good book is already finished. It does not require improvement or enhancement. Go ahead and let a film be inspired by a good book, but make it a good film first and foremost.

This stuff is on my mind because a movie of Mailman is, and has been for some time, in the the works. God only knows if it will ever come to fruition, but there is a script now, and I have read a draft, and it's pretty good. In fact, it's hilarious--and not a single one of the jokes, nor half of the plot, is mine.

For some reason I found the experience of reading this script to be strangely flattering--more so, I think, than if I'd read a more faithful adaptation. The screenwriter had used something I did as a springboard for his own work--but that work remained his own, and my book has remained my own.

It remains to be seen, though, if an actual movie is produced, whether it will wear away at the imaginative process a reader of the book might experience. Ultimately, that's the problem with film adaptations--they implant themselves in your mind. Film is a tyrranical medium; it commands all the major senses, and creates new memories that are sometimes indistinguishable from the truth. (Recall the declining Reagan, reminiscing about the war years he only really experienced on film.) In any event, even if the Mailman movie never makes it to the screen, I now have my own imaginary version in my head, fully cast, shot, and scored--a version that, I'm certain, the actual movie would ruin entirely.

BTW, don't miss, in the same issue of Bookforum, a new book review by W6 chum Paul Maliszewski!