Category: Books and Movies

Posted on by Shelley

Yesterday Jesse and I watched 1408, a horror flick based on a Stephen King short story. It was really good. So good I looked it up, wondering why it hadn’t gotten better reviews. It turns out it got pretty good reviews from critics, but not audiences. I concluded that the audiences wanted to see “Saw” or “Tales from the Crypt” and got an Edgar Allen Poe story, which disappointed. I, on the other hand, after seeing many movies based on Stephen King short stories, am beginning to think he’s a genius. All of his stories are seeds, not ordinary seeds, but seeds that yield strong, flourishing, complex, nuanced plots. Like a person who sniffs coffee beans, I feel like I can tell the difference, between the commonplace, over-used idea and the dark, layered kernels he comes up with. And yet he, like Spielberg, gets little credit for what he has done. Even I am inclined to dismiss it, “just horror,” until I watch the movie and see all its layers.

Jesse and I paused the movie in the middle to look up Dante’s Inferno, coming to understand that this story is based on his nine circles of hell, each level characterized by a different and increasingly personal torment. The evil room sends guests not into a world of impersonal demons, but into the world of demons that belongs uniquely to them, saving the most vicious, difficult demon for last. Hell, which seems at first random, located outside of the self, turns out to have roots in the deepest secrets of your own private suffering. And so the story morphed from one of spooks and things that go bump in the night into one of a man forced to confront, and finally overcome, his greatest loss, the moment when he gave up on God and his own life.

The whole second act pushes the protagonist to confront that moment. He is given a choice, right before the beginning of the final act: a noose. Express Checkout. And that’s when he gets his resolve: no, I am not going to give up. I’m going to fight back. I’m going to fight until it’s over. His decision: it’s better to fight, even if it kills you, than to let despair win.

It’s a beautiful, deliberate structure, a beautiful performance, a beautiful, sad story, and one that went largely unnoticed, some critics allowing that it was a very good movie, but a big chunk of the audience not liking it very much.

People like to be scared. They also like their demons to be simple and external, not painful and private. They like happy endings. They like to be shocked. They like to think, but not too much. These are the entertainments we seek, the way we are drawn to MacDonald’s hamburgers, things that go down easy, fast and cheap.

What’s my point? Realizing, I guess, that some strong, worthy stories don’t succeed, not because they don’t deserve it, but because of their genre, or the tolerance of the audience for the material, or the message. Because of bad luck, or bad timing. In the end, it’s not just how well you tell your story, but also what kind of story people want. All we can do, really, is keep our head down and do the work.

Posted on by Shelley

Finally saw Cinderella—a predictable, paint-by-numbers story, but, far worse, an annihilating message for girls. When the movie ended, the whole theater cheered. I couldn’t understand why women weren’t gathered outside, waving protest posters. My friend said it was about time somebody made a movie that celebrates old-fashioned values. She managed my anger politely, as if I had incontinence. Offering a way out, she suggested that perhaps I disliked the movie because I’m a writer, and I could see the hidden ways the story doesn’t work. But it did work, I wanted to say. The audience cheered.

My friend wondered what could be wrong with liking Cinderella. In the current version, Cinderella is courageous and kind. I’m still trying to answer that question: what is wrong with liking it? I don’t want to write about Cinderella, because I don’t want to stir the embers of my unhappiness, not unless I find an argument that slams the movie back into its seat and shuts it up, the way AO Scott can silence a bad movie with one of his perfect reviews: yes, that’s right, that’s what’s wrong.

We all want love, girls and boys. The most powerful human drives are love and work, connection and purpose. We are moved by stories about identity, like Rocky, and Chariots of Fire, and the Fugitive, stories of mastery and competence and achievement. We are also moved by love stories—Maurice, My Beautiful Laundrette, Kiss of the Spiderwoman—stories where two souls meet and become more than the sum of their parts.

Maybe the problem is that some books and movies offer love (to girls) as a substitute for identity, and/or as if it can forge identity. Which is like foot-binding. In boy movies– Imitation Game, Guardians of the Galaxy— love is a by-product. You learn how to slay the dragon, which might as a by-product make you attractive to some young woman, but your goal is to save the universe. In girl movies the goal is the guy. And the best way to get the guy, it turns out, is to be pretty and kind.

When my daughter says, “I shouldn’t have asked him out, I should have waited until he asked me, because if he were actually interested he would have asked,” I want to scream. Never mind the fact that we’re not talking about a soccer game, or an essay she’s trying to write. If you teach yourself to wait, you set yourself up for a lifetime of waiting. Girls wait. Boys choose. That’s what’s wrong with Cinderella: the story can’t begin until the prince settles his gaze.

When I say Cinderella is bad for girls, people look at me with suspicion, tinged with hostility. Are you saying you want Cinderella to be mean? As if those are the only two alternatives: meek or mean. If Cinderella were a boy, she would organize those mice into a squadron. They’d make a mouse tower and pick the lock, slip down to the stepmother’s room and tie her hair to the bedposts. Then Cinder, boy, would roar down the stairs with ash on his face like war paint, head into the kingdom and free every person chained to a pot in the kitchen. He would raise an army and overthrow the king, who has too much power in the first place.

Posted on by Shelley

I saw the finale of Big Love yesterday. When I tried to tell Jesse about it this morning I cried, talking about the old couple, Frank and Lois, lying together on her bed, with the syringe and vial beside them on the table. What made me cry was the long view I had of their relationship, because I have been watching them not just for two hours, but for five years, long enough to have my own old memories of their marriage. They fought every day, regularly tried to kill each other, and then Frank did end up killing her in the end, not because he hated her, but because he loved her. He held her like a child and told her stories as she died, knowing that after she was gone he would have nothing left in the world. She was his last thing and he let her go, because she asked him to help her, and she was suffering.

Big Love worked for me because in addition to being about family, it was a story about a man with a huge ambition– to make polygamy, that crazy idea, legitimate and legal. In each season Bill took that goal further, raising the stakes– not just to be safe, but to come out of the closet; not just to come out of the closet, but to win a senate race, to wipe out the snake pit of his childhood, to change the law so that other polygamist families could live out in the world without fear. Polygamy is a cool arena. But what gives the series life is the protagonist’s driving goal, to make polygamy legitimate in the world. It’s a story about family, and all the challenges that any family has. But they aren’t just drifting along having their daily struggles. Bill keeps pushing them all forward, towards a more difficult, risky, impossible end.

Posted on by Shelley

Just finished “Wonder,” which was a marvel– a beautiful, simple story about a boy with a horrible affliction. Elephant man was that story, and Mask, which just goes to show that every story has already been told (Cyrano) and no story has ever been told (Hunchback of Notre Dame) the way you will tell it.

What made Wonder a wonder was her voice, her insights about human behavior, her humanity. And her characters, who had longings and secrets, who betrayed each other, and loved each other, who got in trouble and tried. Her voice and her characters kept me reading a familiar story as if I had never heard it before.