EPISODE 432: NOTES FROM DOROTHY'S REFRIGERATOR
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi! Welcome back! Summer is facing an insurgency from autumn, school supply sales and impatient teenagers (and/or parents), but for the moment it's still here. We've had another week. Let's do this.
TECH-NO BABBLE
So this week in which I spontaneously combusted into beachy staycationer (who still has not read his email from the last two weeks, oh God do I have to can't I just start over?) I followed up on some of the stuff I had been writing about social media last week and did a couple experiments in the way I interact with technology.
First of all, for the second week in a row in addition to not checking email I did not use social media other than a few hours of Twitter craziness, which pretty quickly went from “Finally I’m Home!” to “Argh This Place is Filled with Bees!”
Twitter, you can change your look all you want but you remain the social media version of Lucy with a football. Of course, I am the Charlie Brown of social media so I guess I have that coming.
(Half of all sitcoms entail some form of What if Charlie Brown and Lucy got married, and the other half involve Will Charlie Brown ever say hello to the Red Headed Girl: Agree or Disagree.)
I also read some more fascinating stuff on social media from Daniel Harvey, who I mentioned last week. One post suggested this list of things you can do to live more intentionally when it comes to social media and your devices in general. There are some really interesting ideas there, like changing your phone screen from color to grayscale. I tried that this week. Sometimes it really threw me; it can be harder to read the screen.
But at times it definitely also helped me. I don’t know that I ever really appreciated how much the bright Circus Fun Time! colors of the iPhone keep tugging at my attention. We Play Now, Yes? (My iPhone is originally from Eastern Europe and does not fully understand English grammar but is easily bored and wants to see everything.) Turning the colors off is like seeing a friend you generally only see at parties at a deli in sweat pants on a Saturday morning. He’s fine, but waiting for his bagel and cream cheese and way too hung over to try and entertain you.
Reading through that list I also got the idea that if you want you can change the words that appear in the upper righthand corner of your Mac. Those words are meant to tell you who the current user is; but I don’t really need that; I’m the only user and I know who I am.
*suddenly stops; do I really know who I am?*
*station break for existential crisis*
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Revolution in processing! Machines do the work and man looks on! The push-button is out of date! Now we have the buttons that push themselves… Great silent monsters as long as a football field, larger than a house, grinding out products day and night, while men stand by… Behind flashing eyes electronic brains work magnetic fingers! Eniac, Oracle, Univac, Multra, Armatrol, Serva, Tinker-toy! He sees cartoons of galloping factories, gnashing crowbar-like teeth, in pursuit of workmen who have no chance of escape. No wonder man goes to bed and dreams technological nightmares.
[That’s from a 1950s ad for the “benefits” of automation posted on Warren Ellis’ great Orbital Operations last week. Hard to believe there is a single person who read that ad and did not immediately smash their toaster with a bat.]
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*crisis successfully buried until 2am tomorrow morning*
So then I went to System Preferences and Users & Groups, where those different user names are. And if I hit the lock at the bottom to allow me to change things and control-click my name I get the option to change it to whatever I want under the Advanced options. Restart and it’s there.
Right now mine is “You’re Doing Just Fine”. Which sounds a little Who Needs a Hug, I know, and most of the time I still don’t even notice it’s there. But there have been a couple times when things got a little dicey and without thinking I just looked to it and it calmed me down.
The last idea I’ve been trying: hide the clock on your computer. I’ve had mine off the last two weeks now, and I’m not totally sure it’s been necessary, but I think it’s helped me reduce stress a little. Especially when I’m online and trying to read an article that’s a little longer, the presence of a clock seems to make me feel like I need to rush. It’s 1:15! I’ve got Rolf from New Jersey coming down for the Bridger Deal!
Without it, I’m a little more likely to just settle in and read. We have magazines in the lobby, Rolf can fricking wait. Maybe it’ll stop him from always showing up a half hour early.
If you’re interested in all this social media stuff all the cool kids keep talking about, this is a really interesting article about how you might design a better platform (like having a little prompt that points out ‘This tweet you’re about to send calling your grade school science teacher a Frankenstein's Monster who ruined childhoods seems like it could be kind of mean, are you sure you want to post it?’ before you post).
And there’s this little think piece about whether there should be an upper limit to how many people get to read our posts.
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Dorothy's Mom Responds:
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HOW DOES ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD EVEN WORK AS A STORY?
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood has made $114 million domestic in its first three weeks, plus another $50 internationally. It’s predicted to eventually be Quentin Tarantino’s biggest film ever. Which is wonderful and also fascinating, because though the acting is fantastic, I insist we give Brad Pitt’s hair its own Oscar, it isn’t the easiest movie to watch.
[I’m going to go full spoiler here, so if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want me to ruin it feel free to parachute to the break.]
For me it’s a real puzzle of a movie in fact from a storytelling point of view. There is no strong central problem driving the story forward. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton is a middle-aged cowboy actor trying to figure out whether he’s washed up or has another act left in him. And that concern guides his story, particularly in the middle section of the film.
But the other main characters, Brad Pitt’s stunt man Cliff Booth and Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, are on journeys of their own. Cliff serves as Nick’s assistant and cheerleader/shoulder to cry on, but pretty early into Act II his story becomes just driving around LA doing chores for Nick. And Sharon’s story is completely separate from the other two. We just follow her through an ordinary, very sweet night and day of her life.
One could say what unifies them thematically is the question of having a future; Nick fears he’s at the end of his career, Sharon worries whether she’ll have a career and over the course of the film Cliff loses what work he still gets. Except his story is not at all motivated by that concern. Where they worry, Cliff just lives his life.
It’s a structure that shouldn’t work, really. It’s way too diffuse. And yet even as I started to wonder when in God’s name is this movie going to give us some sense of what it’s about, I mostly loved it. How is that possible?
I think the magic trick Tarantino plays is to reverse or inverse or invert story structure. Instead of putting the engine you need at the beginning and watching the protagonist hop on and chase their problem to a solution, Tarantino uses the ending that we know is eventually coming. All these characters are going to get killed by the crazy-as followers of Charles Manson. So rather than the typical protagonist running up hill toward their dream/goal, dodging bricks along the way, the film works by showing us all these characters running downhill toward a cliff without knowing it.
Some have said if you don’t know about those killings you will not be able to enjoy Once…. I can see that, but the lack of a clear narrative thrust, us just watching these characters live their lives, very naturally creates its own compelling anxiety. WHEN IS SOMETHING GOING TO HAPPEN is another way of saying OH GOD SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN ISN’T IT. And given this is Tarantino, of that we’re all the more certain.
He’s so careful with his Manson moments, too. We get only one glimpse of the man himself, wandering around the property, spacey and goofy smiling. Otherwise it’s his girls we see, wandering through the film like characters who got so wasted they lost track of their castmates from Hairand are now out dumpster diving. Tarantino still utilizes a bit of classic structural thinking -- Cliff sees Margaret Qualley’s Pussycat three times on his drives around LA, each beat building our expectation for what happens on that third. But that’s it. And what happens in that third beat comes out of nowhere, and is as taut and scary as any moment in a Tarantino film.
(That sequence is actually the mirror image of the opening of Inglorious Basterds. There we’ve got people hiding in a house as a Nazi arrives to try and flush them out. Here Cliff is in the Nazi role, entering the house looking to flush out the truth about his friend and these crazy chicas. But where the danger in the first film is all with those hiding, here it’s with him entering.
It’s interesting, too, that the parallel to this end of act two sequence is Basterds’ opening scene; again, Tarantino has turned classic structure on its head.)
Maybe thematically what the whole film is really about is the question of mortality. All the worry about careers and future is just a shadow of the big doom approaching. But then instead of offering us the nightmare we know, Tarantino gives the Manson Family the finger.
It’s the same move he made with Hitler in Basterds and slave owners in Django Unchained. A movie is not history, he tells us, it’s a chance to take down history’s monsters. They don’t deserve our awe, they deserve insults and punches in/through the face with cans of vegetables.
Another take: we can’t save Sharon and her baby from what really happened to them, but we can make a movie in which it doesn’t happen that way. And maybe that means in some way she can live on as something other than a victim of drugged up hippies.
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Saw this recently from Anne Helen Petersen on what loving film is about. It seems so true of this movie.
It’s about opening yourself up to wonder, about exposing yourself to things that are alienating and then sitting with that alienation and unpacking it, about cultivating the posture that thinking about something doesn’t destroy pleasure, but refines it.
… [I] taught undergrads who were clearly not as good (or good at football) as all of you. I’d show them Weekend, a 1967 Godard film that is famously, notoriously, deliciously hate-able. It starts with a ten minute tracking shot of a traffic jam in France. But I loved teaching it, because I loved asking students to really think about why the film is so difficult. What does your boredom, or impatience, or disgust say about what you’ve come to expect from a text — and how you react when you don’t get it? Weekend is an absurdist comedy, but it’s also an opportunity, the same way that Beyonce’s Homecoming is an opportunity, or Fleabag is an opportunity, or Old Town Road is an opportunity. An opportunity to think more, not less.
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Triumph of the Human Spirit:
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HOLLYWOOD GHOST STORIES
Every month I meet with my writers’ group. We share pitches that we’re taking out to various producers or managers, or pages from our newest scripts. And this week I was hit by the sheer volume of material we’ve produced this last year. There are five of us in this group, and I bet we’ve easily presented material for 15 different stories, maybe twenty.
That’s just the work of five of us hustling to get work. You think of how many writers there are in Hollywood doing the same thing, how many thousands of worlds and characters are brought into existence in the course of a year, a decade, most of them never to reach an audience of more than just the tiniest handful of people.
Which is, as I’ve written here before, absolutely brutal, especially once you’ve gotten to the point of finishing a script. You have literally midwifed a world into existence and nobody will ever get to play in it; you’ve met and fallen in love with a bunch of characters you want everyone to meet, and nobody will.
But then I was thinking about the ending of Once…and how Tarantino has conjured up this whole other reality out of nothing. And that’s what writing is, a kind of conjuration, a magic spell that makes something out of nothing. And it doesn’t need to reach a screen or eyeballs for that to be true. Certainly when you finish a script it feels like something new and exciting has somehow come into the world.
If you think of human life as existing on multiple levels – there’s the geography we travel through physically, but also other layers that are spiritual or imaginative –maybe all those worlds and people do exist, just a hair out of sync with our own reality, living and striving and struggling and having brilliant adventures.
Hollywood has often been characterized as the place where dreams go to die, a land of lost souls. “There is a sidewalk in California,” lyricist Jon Bucchino writes, “where they put the stars right at your feet. And people delight in stepping on them…”
But listening to all the great ideas in my writers’ group, rather than feeling the pain of all the great stuff that has been produced only to be immediately cast aside I’m kind of filled with wonder at all the cool and crazy things that have been created. Maybe there’s a different kind of ghost story going on here, something more hopeful that you can only see out of the corner of your eye.
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I don’t know how many reading this are into comics, unboxing videos or ASMR, but if you like any of those this is amazing. (Jump to about 7:40 and wait for joy.)
Have you had the experience this summer of an airline using facial recognition instead of asking for ID at airports? It’s kind of disturbing, right? Here’s a story about someone trying to opt out of it.
(From the piece: one study found the recognition software has “a 99 percent accuracy rate for white men, while the error rate for women who have darker skin reached up to 35 percent. This suggests that, for women and people of color, facial recognition could actually cause an increase in the likelihood to be unfairly targeted for additional screening measures.”)
This is the website you need for your next lunch break trapped at work. This is the best story about Kevin Smith I’ve ever heard, and also one of those “Read This to Keep Your Hope in Humanity” pieces. This is a wonderful story about a secret bookstore/hang out in New York that made me wonder if it’s not a lot easier to make your life more interesting than we might think it is.
And from Laura Olin, who finds all the best stuff, this is your redemption arc.
A quote from Toni Morrison I saw somewhere this week:
We have to stop loving our horror stories. Joyce’s Ulysses was rejected fourteen times. I don’t like that story; I hate it. Fitzgerald burned out and could not work. Hemingway despaired and could not work. A went mad, B died in penury, C drank herself to death, D was blacklisted, E committed suicide. I hate those stories. Great works are written in prisons and holding camps. So are stupid books. The misery does not validate the work. It outrages the sensibilities and violates the work.
Misery happens, but it is not a prerequisite for a happy or meaningful life. Maybe Dorothy was spending a little too much time with her tweets, but you gotta love someone who fights for joy the way she sees it. Taking time for beauty and pleasure and peace and quiet is often a radical act.
Forget all the boo birds of despair. Go be a radical.
See you next week.