Someone Else’s Writing

Indeed.

Okey – I like House of Cards, largely because Kevin Spacey’s facial expressions in this NetFlix original are fucking-A priceless. The show itself is fucking-A ridiculous, and suffers from one fatal flaw that makes it almost – almost – an effort to watch. That flaw is simple: Frank never loses. Not only does he never lose, he never convincingly doubts the outcome, ever. Oh, the script pays homage to doubt. It walks doubt through a warm room and buys it a few drinks, flirting, but it never takes doubt home. Spacey’s performance, even when he’s reacting in rage or doubt, always hints that it’s just for show. And the writers always offer up a solution right away – a solution that is always exactly right.

So, you can be entertained by a show like that, but never really affected by it. Frank is a monster, and he always wins. If the final episode of this show in 2033 or whatever shows Frank in an old-age home, hallucinating that he once became President of the United States, that would not surprise me.

Richard the IV

Much has been made of House of Cards and its relationship to Shakespeare, notably its use of the aside as a narrative device and the parallels between several plays, such as Richard III, Macbeth, and Othello. The problem with these discussions is the fact that the plays being cited were tragedies, and while the protagonists did terrible things and often did so with black wit and a saucy lack of guilt, they generally could be said to have suffered for their hubris and power grabs.

Frank Underwood doesn’t suffer much. Now, maybe the next season will be all about Frank’s fall into disgrace and punishment (Ed: LORD I HOPE SO) but so far Frank is simply the smartest man in the room, and his mean-spirited and largely joyless attitude is justified by the fact that his superpower is always being right and never losing. He may be the least Shakespearean character in the modern tradition of using Shakespeare to imbue your characters with classic weight and gravitas.

No Scrubs

And that’s the problem. Frank’s relentless success is fucking boring. The cycle the show goes through roughly every forty minutes is this:

1. Frank reveals sick, twisted plan to manipulate the shit out of everyone. Sneers at camera.
2. Unbelievably complex plan that relies on people doing the stupidest thing possible because Frank planted a hint in their ear about it five minutes of screen time previously succeeds completely.
3. Frank sneers at camera.

The details of the insane scheme are often entertaining, and Spacey is basically having the time of his life playing this character – it’s like going to the Zoo at feeding time to watch some lions devour raw meat in their enclosure. But there are no stakes. Because Frank is going to win, and you know that going in.

Now, plenty of shows require their protagonist to always win – because in TV land we must always have a main character to hang the next season of the show around. So, no points off for Frank actually always winning – but a setback would be nice. A believable threat. Maybe a solid half hour of screen time when it actually seems like Frank might be in actual, real trouble? And then some clever writing. That last bit is the tricky part.

Because, House of Cards is okay at a lot of things. Dialogue. Kevin Spacey Bitchface. Painting everyone in the universe as a sexual pervert and potential serial killer. One thing it is not okay at is plot. It treats plots like a box of feral cats it found on the street which keeps scratching its arms and puking on its feet. Everyone does what Frank wants because it’s the only way the writers on this show can think to keep the plot moving.

In the end, it doesn’t matter: The purpose of the show is to get you to pay Netflix $8 a month, and as far as that goes it works just fine. And there’s always the possibility that in Season 3, Frank will go full on Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone on us, having a threesome with his wife, his secret service agent, and the dead dog from Chapter 1 while he gleefully pounds the LAUNCH button, staring unblinkingly into the camera.

I’d pay to see that.

So, after much cajoling by The Duchess, I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It’s going to be a movie next year starring Ben Affleck and several dozen other people you’ll recognize, produced by Reese Witherspoon and most probably being the talk of the town for a week and then disappearing. As films do.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this book. Because it could be used in a creatve writing class to simultaneously demonstrate how to pull off some writing tricks well while also being used as an example of how to pull off some writing fundamentals really, really poorly. You don’t often find books that are simultaneously clever, well-written in spots, and disastrously bad nonetheless. It’s sort of made me obsessed with the book, frankly: On the one hand I am breathlessly jealous of Flynn for her genius twisty concept. On the other I am angry at the way she frittered it away. Let’s talk about it.

The Good

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

First of all, let’s be positive, the way they teach us in writing workshops. The twist is super clever, and cleverly handled, in my opinion. The creative use of unreliable narrator totally sets you up for the reveal, and it works. The first half of the book is very well observed, with both narrative voices working. I believed the marriage between Nick and Amy, I believed their slow descent into disdain and anger at each other, and I believed the ancillary characters. The mystery of what happened to Amy was intriguing, and overall I was sold.

The reveal itself was great, for a while at least.

What Flynn does very well is create a mystery. A down-home, old fashioned mystery. What happened to Amy? What’s Nick hiding? It’s set up really well and I was sucked in. The problem is that the books is all set up. It’s so much all set up that Flynn herself seems to lose interest in the book after the big reveal.

The Bad

So, spoilers: You know the basic plot, I guess, if you’re reading this. Nick’s wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, after much marital water has gone under the bridge. It looks very much like Amy was abducted violently, and that someone cleaned up the crime scene. Nick falls under immediate suspicion. The story is told in alternating first-person narratives, Nick in the present day and Amy via diary entries that seem to detail a romance and marriage falling apart, and a husband getting angrier and more abusive. Then, it’s revealed that Nick is having an affair, Amy knew of it, and she stages her own kidnapping in order to punish him, by framing him for her murder and watching him rot on Death Row.

Yup, it’s quite a twist. It’s borderline ridiculous, but could have been sold if Flynn had handled it better. The audacity of the twist almost sells the book by sheer power, in fact. The problem is simple: Flynn plays dirty, so dirty that the second you get over your amazement at the reveal you get pissed off.

Using faked diary entries from Amy – written by her but intended to present the police with a totally false depiction of her life with Nick in order to set him up as an angry, abusive husband – totally works because, as with all unreliable narrators, we’re fooled into thinking it’s real. That’s a simple trick. The problem is that while the Fake Amy in the diary makes sense to us, the Real Amy whose distasteful, sociopathic Voice takes over in part two of the novel is so awful you simply cannot believe for one second that anyone likes her, much less marries this monstrous woman.

Yes, she’s pretty. And we’re told a lot of other things about her to explain her ability to lure people into thinking she loves them while simultaneously being horrible to them. But that’s the real problem with the character (all the characters, really): We’re told these things. The characters themselves do not behave in any way that makes sense.

We’re told that Amy is brilliant, yet she acts incredibly foolishly beyond her clever frame-up of Nick. We’re told that Amy is vindictive and dangerous, yet when she is victimized at one point in the second half of the book she takes no revenge and meekly allows two grifters to steal all her money. This is a woman who frames her husband for her own murder in order to punish him, yet when two minor characters rob her she does nothing. We’re told that Amy can charm people and make them feel like they’re special to her, but we don’t actually see how that’s possible because the Amy we see is awful, all the time.

Nick’s an unreliable narrator as well, and that’s where things get stupid, because we’re in Nick’s head. Amy’s diary was a fake, so it’s acceptable that she’s lying – it’s done purposefully. Nick’s narration has no such device. He’s just narrating his life to us. Why in the world would he purposefully not think about the woman he’s having an affair with for the first third or more of the book? No reason, aside from Flynn’s clumsy need to keep his affair as a twist to shock the reader. We’re also told a lot of things about Nick that his actual behavior doesn’t support, like his feelings about his father and his feelings for the woman he’s screwing around with. Nick is a device, Amy is a device. Neither are characters.

The Ugly

Now, all of this would have been gleefully forgiven if the book had ended well. I’ll stipulate. If the book had a great ending I would have mentioned my carping about narrators and show-dont-tell and all that other stuff only after a few drinks and some encouragement.

The ending is not good.

The ending is so not good, you can literally feel Flynn running out of steam. The chapters get shorter. The writing more terse. She’s barely there, just tapping out contractually-obligated words to give the whole mess some sort of form. Characters behave in increasingly ridiculous ways, all justified by the supposedly awesome, unbelievable power of Amy, who is apparently, by book’s end, simply an elemental force. Unstoppable. You have to either believe that Amy is absolute power personified, or the ending become ridiculous and unsupportable. And I don’t use the word unsupportable lightly. The ending is so bad it requires not just a suspension of disblief, but a willing disregard of the concept.

And as I said, the worst part is the perfunctory way Flynn writes these last chapters. We’re called to believe that a) Nick cannot in any way prove Amy’s actions despite having a high-powered lawyer and a pretty good idea of exactly what she did – and a sympathetic police ear, b) Despite knowing how awful she is he would allow himself to be bullied into living in the same house with her, c) Despite knowing how awful she is he would remain married to her and d) when she performs her final repugnant act, impregnating herself with semen culled from masturbatory tissues Nick just left lying around the house (really! REALLY!) Nick would simply roll over and resign himself to spending his life living with a sociopath.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a writer, but Flynn presents these final chapters as brief sketches. There’s so little effort and detail it’s almost surreal. I could literally picture her just grinding out those final few thousands words with her agent or editor’s edit letter on the desk next to her and a half-finished bottle of liquor by her hand.

It’ll make a better movie, I think. And it’s not that the book isn’t enjoyable. It just made me angry.

Despair.

NOTE: Are there spoilers here? OF COURSE THERE ARE.

I’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad. I may have posted about it here before, in fact. At this point I think the only people who don’t think Breaking Bad is easily one of the greatest TV shows ever are those effetes who refuse to own a TV because obviously and those who refuse to watch it out of some sort of weird pride. And, of course, small children.

For the rest of us, it’s been one hell of a ride. An almost perfect show, with very few weak spots. And the last episode, Ozymandias, was one of the few times in my life I’ve sat with my mouth open for an extended period of time. I could have easily been photographed and inserted as the example illustration under the head MIND: BLOWN.

I thought the previous episode, To’hajiilee was just slightly slow. Not bad, mind you, just … somewhat deliberately paced. I enjoyed moments of that episode immensely and overall would give it an 8 or 9 out of 10. But it felt like they held back a little, and it was irritating. And then in Ozymandias, Vine Gilligan and company did the impossible: They made Walter White the hero of the story.

(more…)

SPOILERS: There are many. If you’re foolish enough to fear spoilers, don’t read this. YE BEEN WARNED.

So, Gone Home is a video game. Maybe you’ve heard of it, either because of its shocking nature as a first-person game created by some of the folks who worked on Bioshock that doesn’t have any guns, monsters, or action gameplay of any kind, or because of it’s storyline involving a teenage girl realizing she is gay and finding her first love. Or maybe you haven’t heard of it, because unlike me you have better things to do.

So, if you haven’t heard of it, here’s the basic rundown: It’s first-person, as I said, so you see everything as if you were there walking around. You do have a character, a college-age girl home from a year abroad in Europe only to discover the new house your family moved into is empty, your family missing, and all sorts of mysterious clues scattered everywhere. The point of the game is to figure out where your family is.

Here I will spoil it all for you, because I must: You slowly discover, after wandering the house and finding keys and newspaper clippings and concert tickets and listening to audio journals your kid sister left behind, that your parents are off at couples counseling and your little sister has run away with her girlfriend.

That’s it.

In other words, presumably in the game’s universe your parents return the next morning, y’all call the cops on your sister, and a few hours later she’s being yelled at extensively.

(more…)

I’ve been a loyal fan of Mad Men from the first season. It’s not life-changing or anything but it’s a very well-written show with impeccable set design and attention to detail, and the character of Don Draper continues to fascinate me. He’s a good character.

I also find myself thinking way too hard and long about things, as English Majors do. After watching Season Six of the show, I have a new idea. Mad Men isn’t about Don Draper at all. It’s about power, and the concept that it’s all just an illusion.

(more…)