EPISODE 212 – WE ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I’ve mentioned more than once in these...pages? newsletters? 1s and 0s? What in God’s name is this thing you’re reading? -- that , as far as I can tell, one of the primary experiences of being a writer in Hollywood is fear. You’re afraid when you don’t have a job that you won’t get one; you’re afraid when you do have a job that you won’t perform well or get renewed; and, most fun, you’re afraid when other people have jobs, even if you do have one and they are your friends and their jobs are not ones you even knew about or wanted, because but what if you did.

Being a writer is also amazing; even just in my limited experience so far both in a TV room and developing a show, I can tell you that when the ideas are coming and you’re in sync with your collaborators, it’s the most intoxicating kind of thrilling.

And hey, it’s not like screenwriting has any lock on anxiety. Oh honey.

But I think it’s safe to say that a goodly number of us olde writers live with a steady supply of feare. (Huzzah...?)

Personally, when I am free enough to step back from it, I think of it as useful, in that it keeps me in touch with my own more-than-occasionally-desperate need for a God who is present and supportive and understands. It keeps me aware of my nasty side, too. Because, as an infinite number of survivors, housewives and bachelors have shown us, there’s nothing like fear to Wonder Twin powers activate Form of Crazy.

Last year I got a taste of my own medicine from another writer. We were in a group talking about some television show or other. And, I know this will surprise you, but I started gushing about the program. (Ultimate parody version of this newsletter: I re-read “Jack and Jill” and argue it’s the world’s most profound treatise on original sin.)

And as I’m gushing this friend looked at me with the sort of #SorryNotSorry warm condescension usually reserved for conversations between Midwesterners and coastal folks -- “Well isn’t the Midwest just WONDERFUL?” I remember a grad school classmate at Harvard saying to me at an opening mixer, after learning that yes, Marquette was a four year university (and just before nearly-patting me on the head as she asked me if I could be a dear and go get a drink for mommy).

(Okay, I’m not sure that last part actually happened. But on another level, it so definitely did.)

Anyway, I’m with these writers, and this one said, beaming: “You know what’s great about you? You’re such a fan.”

First Translation: You belong on Tumblr with the 12 year olds still doing fan art. You are not a writer. You have nothing to say. Leave here and do not come back again ever.

Second Translation: Ouch.

At the time, as is so often the case with me, even as I railed internally against the comment, I also (crazily) accepted it as a problem/flaw/further reason I am all the wrongs. (In the words of Stephen Sondheim, “This is ridiculous what am I doing here I’m in the wrong story.”)

Flash forward to this Monday. After weeks and weeks of grinding through it at odd hours, I was just about done with “It”, Stephen King’s 1986 novel about seven kids in Derry, Maine who try to stop an evil supernatural force that often dresses as a clown from continuing to murder all the children there. (A fun read for parents and uncles alike!)

I’ve mentioned King here before, in passing. In August, jonesing for the next “Game of Thrones” novel – seriously, George, Winter is Coming, and I mean for you -- I started reading King’s “Dark Tower” sequence of novels. And while doing so I discovered that rather than just the eight novels under the banner “Dark Tower”, there are actually some twenty two King novels and short stories that are connected in some way to the series.

A twenty two volume epic, whose length all told has got to be well over thirty thousand pages?

At some point you can count on me putting you through pages and pages on King. I can’t tell you how surprised I’ve been by what I’ve been reading. (A perhaps ridiculous teaser that was running through my head today: Is it possible that Stephen King is the most significant religious writer of fiction of the twentieth century?)

But for the moment, let me just say a word about finishing “It”.

Evil child-murdering clowns (for over one thousand pages) – yeesh, you know? Not my jam. But it was on the list, so I forced myself to start.

Then somewhere about a third of the way through it started to hook me. “It” has a lot of the coming-of-age resonances of “Stand by Me” (which was itself based on King’s short story “The Body”). In fact, at its heart I’d say the story is really about the terror and wonder of that transition from childhood to adolescence, and about the struggle to deal with the unresolved issues of our childhood, the scariness in some ways of that, and the sweet but also sad freedom of release.

(Also, it’s about the power of belief: I’m telling you, when it comes to the kind of lived-in, grounded-in-my-life-not-some-theory spirituality of most of us, King is an incredibly significant figure.)

So I’m coming to the finish line this week, and the book is suddenly hitting me over and over again with these incredibly poignant moments of relationship and finality. Seriously, this novel has more teary endings than the “Lord of the Rings” movies (and I loved each and every one of them every bit as much).

I get to the very end, I close the book (aka shut down my Kindle app –the modern age has lost all sense of drama)...and I’m just sort of speechless. I don’t want to move, or speak, or do anything. It’s that kind of moment like just after the choir finishes singing, and you just sit and listen to the gorgeous fading echoes of their voices off the church walls, and try to allow it to continue to resonate for as long as possible in your heart.

And right then, all of a sudden, I heard my friend’s voice: “You know what I like about you? You’re such a fan.”

AKA: OOF.

As her sweet honeyed words oozed over All The Joy I was transported back to the moment and the group in which she had said that. I imagined mentioning “It” to them, and watched as they shredded King as a hack and discarded “It” as yet another piece of his overwritten crap and then stabbed twelve-year-old-me in front of adult-me with pointy clown shoes while shouting the book’s most-repeated line, “We all float down here.”

(Maybe I should take a break from Stephen King.)

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I can’t speak for why anyone chooses to be a writer, or artist, or anything else for that matter. (Other than paleontologists and astrophysicists: because dinosaurs and stars are so fricking cool.)

But I think for most of us it started with finding a story or stories that spoke to us, and wanting to be a part of that. We want to learn how to do the magic trick and then to dazzle others with it. And we’ve got stuff we’ve got to get out.

But cynicism and dismissal also find their way in. In fact, I don’t know, maybe this is crazy (synonym: just me), but it kind of seem like as we get older the innocent wonder of our childhoods can actually become kind of scary for us, really and truly unsettling, so much so that rather than face anything that might echo our incredibly delicate (and beautiful) childhood selves our impulse is to mock/curb-stomp/bury them alive in root cellars and under kitchens sinks (synonym: run away).

But the truth is at heart we’re all fans down deep, “down here”. There’s a lot of remarkable stuff out there in the world, including in a lot of corners that get ignored or outright dismissed (ask me what I thought of “Iron Fist” again, I dare you), and most of us want to share the buried treasure that we’re lucky enough to find. (Consider, what portion of your time today gets spent in conversations about things you’ve been watching, listening to or reading. Most of which are not really conversations so much as sets of monologues entitled “Things I like and you should see”.)

Put another way, this newsletter doesn’t end in “Wow” for nothing, baby.

I hope there’s a place in the industry for people who have an open and ridiculous amount of love for not just the hottest new thing or the approved masters, “Game of Thrones”, “Breaking Bad” the Stones and Scorsese, but for Stephen King and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Damon Lindelof and super hero movies and super hero comic books and dancing it out and Pop Figures and the Muppets and I guess My Little Pony (though sorry no, that terrifies me), and that old Japanese anime about the battleship with the one big gun that flew through outer space, and Dungeons & Dragons and Popeye and Sailor Moon and Broadway musicals and Skyrim and a hundred other really nerdy things.

I’ve definitely met some who fit that bill, but I think it’s still kind of an open question, too.

In writing we talk a lot about “killing our darlings” – that is, being free enough with our work to let go of moments or characters that we adore, but are holding the story back.

But sometimes maybe we take that all a little too literally. A little too far.

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So there was a kind of massive stir in the comic book world over the weekend. Marvel Comics was giving a talk to retailers about its future projects and also its current sales slump. (While when it comes to superhero comics I tend to find Marvel (X-Men, Avengers, Sam Jackson) usually has a more compelling real-world approach, in the last year or so they’ve been losing a lot of ground to DC Comics (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman), and they’ve seen some major projects really stumble.)

And in that presentation, they seemed to blame their struggles in part on the growing gender and racial diversity of their line up.

Yeah, no. It did not go over well. Note to self: if you're running um, pretty much anything, it's never going to be a good idea to suggest “People don’t just want to read about non-white/male/straight people.”

In large part, by the way, because it's not likely to be true. If you were to ask comic book retailers, what have been the biggest new Marvel books of the last five years, they would almost all star either women or people of color. And just to be clear, by “big books” I don’t mean books that generated a moment's buzz. Stunt casting in panel form. No, I mean stories and characters that have resonated with people, and that have lasted.

Among those who have commented on the furor is G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim woman who co-created the Pakistani-American character Kamala Khan, a nerdy kid from Jersey who gets stretchy powers and uses them to try and help the people of Jersey City as Ms. Marvel.

In a short post “So About That Whole Thing”, she had this to say about the whole current notion of "diversity":

Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*

...Not for nothing, but there is a direct correlation between the quote unquote “diverse” Big 2 properties that have done well (Luke Cage, Black Panther, Ms Marvel, Batgirl) and properties that have A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE. It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.

(She also makes a really interesting comment about religion that I hope I can follow up on (because, in comics as with pretty much everywhere else in pop culture, indications or expressions of religion are usually either tin-eared or a no no):

We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this.)

On Wednesday, io9.com also happened to post this fascinating look at Charles Schulz’s introduction of African-American kid Franklin to his comic strip “Peanuts” in 1968. Reading “Peanuts” now, I don’t even think about Franklin as ever having been a big deal. He’s just another kid in the comic. But at the time, his addition and inclusion was HUGE. And Schulz, to his credit, was very aware of the problematic place that he occupied – a white guy from Minnesota proposing to write about being black.

When after some handwringing he finally did introduce Franklin, he dealt with that issue in part by making Franklin a really stand-up kid. Unlike pretty anyone else in “Peanuts” (except maybe Snoopy), Franklin has no flaws or idiosyncracies. He’s really good at a lot of things, he’s thoughtful and (much like Peppermint Patty) he sees that the Peanut kids are pretty nutty.

(Total aside: Am I the only one who ever wondered if Peppermint Patty was a boy or a girl? Because I did. A lot. And it’s hard to believe Schulz did that intentionally, given the times he was writing in, but now that character’s ambiguity seems pretty valuable. You know?)

I highly recommend reading the piece just to read the first three days of Franklin in the comic. In fact, you know what, here they are (click on them each to make them big):

Franklin meets Charlie Brown at the beach. Charlie Brown is building a sand castle, and it’s a disaster (of course). The two of them talk and get to know each other, and while they do so they rebuild the castle together. And it’s so so much better.

I didn't even notice the sand castle until the article pointed out what a subtle and powerful metaphor for the hope of racial equality it is. Schulz, man. Geniusbro.

The article goes on to follow Franklin through later years, and argues Schulz kind of lost his nerve. His anxieties about not presuming to speak for black people appears to have overwhelmed the good he had done by just allowing Franklin to be a normal, good kid. It’s all super interesting.

I don’t know if you watch any of the Shondaland shows – “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Scandal”, “How To Get Away with Murder”, formerly “Private Practice”, the one about the doctors in the jungle that kind of looked like "Grey's Anatomy: Spring Break". All her shows start with a world in which diversity is understood and also kind of irrelevant – there are characters of every race, gender and sexual orientation to be found here, and (with the exception of some long form storytelling on orientation) it's pretty much never a plot point or even topic of conversation. ”Why would it be?” Shonda’s shows seem to be saying. “The world is diverse." Or in other words: Duh.

Hers is an idealized world in that way; race, gender, orientation all continue to be points of contention and struggle in lots of different ways in lots of different places. But in a way Shonda on diversity is like the current Pope on sex; she refuses to let our culture reduce human lives to "big issues", and in doing so she presents a much broader image of the world we could live in.

I’m not entirely comfortable with Shonda’s take, in that I wonder whether the Shonda shows aren’t sometimes shaving off bits and pieces of stuff that is actually valuable. Recent shows like “Atlanta”, “Master of None”, “Black-ish”, “Insecure” or the just-ended and super great “Big Little Lies” chart a different path, where one’s particular experiences, which include race, gender, orientation, etc., become part of that which makes the characters compellingly rich and relatable.

It’s the same path Wilson and others at Marvel have taken – don’t ignore the specifics, just don’t reduce them to some kind of morality/white guilt tale.

Even so, there’s an underlying and essential hopefulness to a “Grey’s Anatomy”, a refusal to be reduced to talking points, that’s important. (And seriously, "Grey's Anatomy" is in like its 14th season, and I can't believe how much I'm still enjoying it.)

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Okay, so because I have no impulse control I couldn’t leave this newsletter without first rereading the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme. And I don’t know how much you remember it, but some of the versions I found on Wikipedia... whoa.

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot
As fast as he could caper;
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.

Then Jill came in, and she did grin,
To see Jack's paper plaster;
Her mother whipt her, across her knee,
For laughing at Jack's disaster.

Hey, Dame Dob, Jill fell too! And all she did was grin! Maybe her smile was just her way of trying to deal with the fact that you babied her brother but (almost certainly once again) did nothing for her.

Why would you treat your own daughter that way? I don’t know, but it seems pretty clear there’s something being said here about the relative value of men and women in this society, and how those lies end up creating further perpetrators even out of their victims.

Which is kind of sort of what we mean by original sin.

*sigh*

I really am as compulsive as I seem.

++ LINKS ++

“It” is being made into two movies, the first of which is being released this summer. I am not optimistic (he says, in completely disregard for what he just spent a thousand words writing). But the trailer is pretty insane.
(Also, real clowns are pretty angry about it, apparently because no one has told them wearing face paint with big crazy smiles and running at kids is every single kind of wrong. Whatever that is you think you're doing, clowns, you need to put it away. You are the nightmare version of mimes. And that is already a whole scary thing.)

Speaking of dinosaurs and ways that computers are ruining everything, nothing is as we thought it was and everything has changed and if it wasn’t for that comet maybe the world really would look like this.

And lastly, in case I haven't shown it to you already, here's a wonderful little piece about just how much Queen Elizabeth drinks. In short, she is what my Lakota students would have called "profesh".

Yesterday I caught the new Netflix documentary miniseries “Five Came Back”, about five of our best-ever Hollywood directors – John Ford (“The Searchers”), Frank Capra (“It’s a Wonderful Life”), William Wyler (“Ben-Nur”), John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) and George Stevens (“Shane”) – who each spent World War II making films for the war effort. The miniseries documents their careers, the war, and what the war did to them. I really can't believe how much I learned from it (or how much it moved me).

The film ends with this interview with Frank Capra:

The greatest of all emotions that move us is love. The world is not all evil. Yes we do have nightmares, but we also have dreams. We do have villiany, but we also have great compassion.

There’s good in the world. And it’s wonderful.

Good words. Don’t give up. This isn’t over.