writing

Form, Function, and Fiction

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

All art is driven by form, to a certain extent. Deciding to tell a story by writing a novel means a different form, with different strengths and weaknesses, than telling the same story by making a movie (which is why it’s often fruitless to compare adaptations to the source material). But sometimes creators will intentionally confine themselves even more, prioritizing form over traditional storytelling techniques. There’s recently been a couple of really interesting examples of this on TV.

The first to debut (although we came to it late), is The Pitt, the Max medical drama that is absolutely not a reboot of/sequel to ER.

Set in a takes-all-comers trauma center ER in Pittsburgh, the show’s catchy gimmick is that the 15-episode first season follows a single shift in the ER in real time (if you’re thinking such a shift couldn’t really be 15 hours long – it’s not an average day!). Noah Wyle (yes, of ER fame) plays the head doc as he rides herd over a bunch of residents, med students, and other medical professionals through the day.

The second to premier, which it did with a blast, was Adolescence, a British Netflix limited series about the investigation of a teenager’s murder of a teenaged girl.

As with The Pitt, Adolescence has a structural gimmick, too – each of the four episodes is done in one shot, so that it not only plays out in real time (for the hour – the series actually covers months of time in the end) but pretty much in one location. The first episode starts when police raid the suspect’s home, then follows him and others to the police station and the eventual reveal that he did, in fact, kill the girl. Other episodes feel a little more contained, particularly the third, which is basically a pas de deux with the killer and the psychologist trying to understand him.

In both cases, the format of the shows put limitations on how those stories were told. With The Pitt that began early, as they had to build the labyrinthine ER set before they could actually write anything. Given the “real time” framing, they had to know how long it took for people to get from place to place and what would be visible in the background of shots to know how all the pieces fit together. Likewise, in Adolescence the one-shot conceit meant there were no quick cutaways to other locations and other characters. That led to a tight focus on the killer and his family, to the exclusion of the victim or her family. As a public defender I found that focus refreshing, as often not enough attention is paid to the toll that crime takes on the perpetrator’s family. Nonetheless, it did lead to some criticism of the show for that focus.

What does that mean for how the form of these shows impact the viewing experience? I think the one-shot conceit for Adolescence makes a bigger, and more powerful, impact. The first episode expertly hands off from character to character, setting the scene at the station leading up to the killer’s interrogation and eventually admission. There are times when he disappears as the camera follows other characters around, reinforcing his isolation. The final episode, which includes a drive to the UK version of Home Depot after kids vandalize the killer’s father’s van, uses the drive time to supreme effect, giving us genuine human moments that, in other formats, might not land as well. The third episode, which is just the killer and the psychologist, is the least flashy but is intense. Only the second episode, where cops go to the school where the killer and victim went, feels a little hard done by the format, mostly because it’s a pretty big campus and there’s a lot of walking to be done.

The conceit feels less present in The Pitt. The most notable thing about it is that it avoids the typical medical drama pattern of wrapping up particular patients at the end of the hour. Some patients linger (and linger) for several “hours,” giving a better sense of how long ER visits tend to be. That said, aside from the slowly ratcheting up of tension over the hours there wasn’t one point where I was like “and that’s why they did it this way!” And the “one shift” idea drags down the reality of it a bit as no such horrible ER shift has ever existed in the history of the world. I would have liked to have seen a down hour where nothing major happens, people get a chance to breathe, and such. In the end the format works, and it doesn’t get in the way, but I’m not sure how essentially it is to the end result.

Art isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s shaped by the times in which it’s made and by the people who make it (who, themselves, are products of the times in which they’re made). Sometimes, artists will add additional barriers that shape their work and it can produce something really cool.

Sometimes It Just Doesn’t Work

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the third season of The White Lotus, so if you care about that kind of thing come back later.

One of the things about oral argument is that appellate judges love hypotheticals. Even garden variety criminal appeals can present issues that will resound through multiple cases in lower courts, so judges like to use hypos to test the limits of potential holdings or outcomes in any given case. Judges hate it when they ask a hypothetical question and the answer from counsel starts with, “that isn’t this case, Your Honor.” No shit, counsel, now answer the damned question!

I got those kind of vibes reading some of the criticism of the season finale of The White Lotus and the reaction to it of the show’s writer/director/creator, Mike White.

So far, all three seasons of The White Lotus are setup the same way – we initially see a dead body at an outpost of the titular resort, then rewind to a week or so earlier as we see the events that lead up to that death. This season, the finale included a gun battle that ended in a higher-than-usual body count (five dead, by some reckonings).

Some folks (myself included) complained that the swift manner in which the episode and, therefore, season, ended felt rushed, as the main characters (who weren’t dead) departed on schedule and apparently unaffected by the carnage around them. It’s not unreasonable to think the Thai police would sweep down on the place and question these folks or that some of them might be so shattered by the experience that they needed some kind of assistance (a trio of main characters were right in the middle of the firefight!).

White’s response to that criticism doesn’t strike me as particularly compelling:

Mike White, the show’s creator, thought the armchair critics were being too literal, calling them the “logic police” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“This isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows?”

There’s a fine line in criticism between knocking something for failing at what it’s trying to do and for not being what you think it ought to be (see, e.g, this review of Warfare that seems to condemn it for not being something other than it is). I’ve seen authors say they have a hard time reading for fun anymore because they can’t turn their writer-brain off and will try and think of how they’d have told the same story in a better, different way (I’m not casting stones – I can lapse into that mode, too). That seems to be what White is accusing critics of doing, but it doesn’t wash.

Nobody wanted or expected the show to turn into Law & Order: Thailand for the last half hour of the season (although a season arranged so that we know who died from the jump, with cops pushing rich dipshits out of their comfort zone, might be interesting), but it feels off to present not just on screen death but straight up murder (with multiple fatalities) and have it vanish into the atmosphere. Moreover if the show is, as White puts it, a “rumination-type show,” what event can cause more intense ruminations than witnessing a mass shooting? Granted they’re very different shows, but you can bet there’s some “rumination” going on among the characters of The Pitt following their mass shooting event.

Look, endings are hard and I understand that White had a lot of stuff left on the editing room floor due to time restraints, even with an hour-and-a-half finale. Still, sometimes it just doesn’t work or at least leaves people scratching their heads (as Bruce says, “not everything everybody does works all the time, son”). That doesn’t ruin all that came before it (it’s more about the journey than the destination, right?), but that also doesn’t mean people don’t have a point.

Sometimes you just have to accept the thing didn’t work and move on.

Revisiting the Concept of a Heist

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A few years ago I wrote a piece about “heist” stories and what they are (or should be). My concept of the heist is narrower than it is for others (including the OED) and boils down to this:

The distinction, for me at least, comes down to brute force. A robbery can be elaborate and kinetic and exciting – think the beginning of The Dark Knight – but, at the end of the day, it’s “your money or your life.” It’s simple, effective, and brutal. “Heist” conjures up something more clever, more deeply thought out. It’s about getting the object of the robbery without the violence. It’s a better, more elevated, kind of crime, if you will.

The distinction came back to mind recently when the wife and I watched Heist, a 2001 David Mamet film starting Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, and host of others.

As you might expect, it involves thefts gone bad, but do they actually live up to my stickler’s definition of what a heist is?

There are actually two thefts in the movie, the first is more setup and the second the main event (the titular heist, one assumes). The first definitely doesn’t feel much like a heist to me. Yes, there is some subterfuge involved – the thieves drug the morning coffee of the employees of the jewelry store they’re going to hit, but that’s close to the line in terms of brute force (courts would consider the use of poison to be “violent,” in most instances). What clearly is brute force is the way they actually get in to the store – they just break down the door. Literally, it’s a forced entry. So I’d say this job is more a straight up robbery than a heist.

The second job is definitely more like it. The target is a bunch of Swiss gold on a cargo jet that’s about to leave the country. This is a heist, albeit one that doesn’t go off without a hitch. The plan is all subterfuge and distraction. The only violence involved arises because of an unexpected issue. When push comes to shove, Hackman’s character walks right in pretending to be somebody he’s not and walks out with the loot. Hell, the police response is more due to the diversionary explosion the crew uses at another part of the airport (this crew loves them some diversionary explosions) than the theft itself!

Indeed, that’s one of the neat things about the movie – there’s hardly any police presence in it. There are cops about (there’s one tense scene where a state trooper stumbles on their prep and a young hothead nearly turns it into a shootout), but there are no dogged investigators bearing down on the crew after the big score. Rather, they tear themselves apart in a series of betrayals and double-crosses. It’s too much (why care about what’s happening when it’s certain to be upended in a few minutes?), but it gets at another key element in distinguishing a heist from a garden-variety robbery – the ability to get away with the goods.

So, in the end, how heisty is Heist? Fairly heisty, I would say. The initial job is a straight up robbery, but the big set piece definitely has heist vibes. Doesn’t make it inherently more interesting than the first one, but it’s more compelling in different ways. It’s fun, which is a key to a good heist, in my opinion – even if the end result is an awful lot of dead folks.

Storytelling Is Not Lying (Or Is It?)

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Years ago, Ricky Gervais made a movie (with his writing/directing partner Matthew Robinson) called The Invention of Lying.

Gervais starred (along with my high school classmate Jennifer Garner) as a screenwriter in a world where lying doesn’t exist. As a result, he’s limited to only writing movies about historical events since fiction does not exist. He winds up discovering how to lie, part of which is being able to write a fictional screenplay.

The movie itself is fine, but the part about fiction not being able to exist in a world without lying always stuck in my craw. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw this on Facebook:

And that sticking came back with a vengeance (although she was sharing it in a humorous way). Because, you see, the notion that fiction – storytelling – is “lying” is simple-minded bullshit.

George Constanza famously said that a lie isn’t really a lie if you believe it, but that kind of goes both ways – a lie is really only a lie if the people hearing it expect it to be true. This is most evident when you’re talking about lying in court – perjury. Any witness, before they say a word to a jury or answer a single question, either takes an oath to or affirm that they are going to tell the truth. Jurors are primed to believe them.

But the same is true for most everyday interactions. When I ask my wife how her day was I don’t expect her to lie to me, after all. We may not be completely accurate with others all the time (that’s probably beyond the capability of human brains), but, for the most part, we’re not trying to lie to others on a regular basis. There’s an expectation of truth, at the very least.

Fiction, by contrast, announces itself from the start. “This is not real,” it says, “this is made up.” Even if there are close cases on the margins (including, ironically, stories about historical events and figures), nobody would ever say that The Lord of the Rings or 2001 or what have you were anything other than made up stories designed to entertain and enlighten. They are not presented as fact.

Of course, sometimes storytellers lie as part of the fiction. Fargo famously starts with a disclaimer:

This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

Amusingly, the Coen Brothers have changed their own story over the years as to whether the story of Fargo had some basis in real events or was completely made up. Does that make the movie any more of a “lie” either way? No! It’s a work of fiction, a story being told by storytellers. We’re not supposed to take it as truth.

For a certain definition of “truth,” of course. The argument goes that fiction can often get at truths about the human experience that non-fiction can have a hard time grappling with. That’s probably correct in some instances, although I can’t speak from experience. The stories I write are, I hope, entertaining and engaging, but any brush with deeper cosmic truths is probably coincidental.

As a wise man once said:

So, yeah, writers and other storytellers do make stuff up. It’s kind of the business model (the hard part is making up stuff nobody else has come up with yet!). But that’s what people think we do, right? Nobody could ever possibly believe we’re telling the truth.

Or maybe I’m full of shit? You’ll never know!

On the Half-Life of Revenge

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Revenge is a dish best served cold. – Klingon proverb

Revenge is an evergreen character motivation. Everybody, regardless of their station in life or what they do for a living, has gotten pissed off enough by someone to at least contemplate getting revenge. But how far can revenge get you in a story? Does there come a point where even the most righteous revenge starts to curdle?

I thought about this a lot while the wife and I were watching The Glory.

A South Korean drama from Netflix, it sprawls out over 16 hourish-long episodes (apparently originally released in two parts). The further on we got the less invested I was in the main character’s revenge arc – not because it wasn’t well founded, but because I had so much time to think about it.

The main character is Moon Deun-eun, who while in high school is constantly bullied by a group of classmates led by Park Yeon-jin. “Bully” here is really too tame of a term – they tortured the poor girl, which we see in fairly graphic detail (burning with a curling iron, for instance). They get away with it because their parents are rich and connected and Deun-eun is basically fending for herself (her father is absent, her mother worthless). After she drops out, Deun-eun struggles for a while until she dedicates her life to getting back at Yeon-jin and crew.

And she plays a long game. Over the course of years Deun-eun trains to become a teacher, eventually worming her way back into the lives of her tormentors by becoming a teacher in the school of Yeon-jin’s young daughter. From there she unwinds a pretty clever plot in which she does little herself to hurt anyone, but turns the others against one another in a way that leads to a fairly satisfying payoff. But it takes an awful long time to get there and, along the way, you start to wonder if revenge is really that great a deal, even if fully warranted.

To be fair, The Glory doesn’t let Deun-eun go quietly into the sunset when it’s all over. She’s basically stripped of her reason for living and only gets back on track by deciding to help her boyfriend get revenge on the man who killed his father. Nonetheless, your sympathies lie with Deun-eun only so far as the hot coals of revenge keep burning and I didn’t feel it at the end of 16 episodes.

Maybe it’s just the law-talking-guy in me but, in the broad view, revenge is bad. Bad for the soul, probably, but certainly bad for society. The law, in all its manifestations, is largely designed to replace systems of private justice – a.k.a. revenge. If your neighbor steals from you, you don’t break into his house and get your stuff back – you call the police or sue him. If someone kills your loved one, you don’t get to track down the offender and kill them yourself – that’s a job for the police, prosecutors, and the courts.

Emotionally revenge can be very satisfying, at least in fiction.

I mean, who couldn’t get on board with something like this:

On the other hand, being the better person just doesn’t have the same zip to it:

But for that very reason I think revenge works best in movies or a shorter series. There’s enough time to get you fired up and fully behind the main character’s scheme without giving you time to really think if they should be doing it in the first place. Revenge fiction works best when it harnesses that initial “this is bullshit!” reaction to learning about someone being wronged. The more time you have for that to ebb away, the less interesting the ultimate revenge is.

The quote at the top, of course, comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Critically, part of why that works so well is that the revenge seeker is the bad guy.

I Enjoy Making Art (and You Should, Too)

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

A while back I saw this headline:

And let’s just say I had an instant reaction:

My second reaction was hoping this dope wasn’t related to the Shulman brothers of Gentle Giant fame (doesn’t seem like it). I cooled off a bit and figured maybe he was being taken out of context or something.

Reading further didn’t make things any better. I had thought, perhaps, that what Shulman meant when he said people don’t like making music these days was something about how creators have to spend so much time doing other stuff (building brands, being terminally online, etc.) that “making music” in a business sense is not as fun as it once was. He was talking about professionals, in other words.

Nope. He’s just a douche:

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software,” Shulman explained. “And I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

It’s an interesting and arresting angle.

Not really and here’s why – the vast majority of people who make music do so only for their own amusement or the amusement of those few around them. Most musicians aren’t trying to make it big, or even make a living, making music. They’re making music because it stirs something in their soul, fills a need in the way they interact with a world. Put simply – for most musicians being “good” is irrelevant to why they make music in the first place.

Years ago, one of my local writer colleagues made a very good point about making art. When people ask writers if they’ve ever been published or artists whether they’ve had an exhibition, they’re tying the doing of art with the high-level consumption of it, with sales. As a comparison, my colleague suggested, nobody asks a bunch of middle-age guys playing basketball at the Y if they’re training for the NBA. Rather, we recognize the value of doing the thing just for the sake of doing it, not to produce a product for which other people might pay money.

As a writer I like to think of myself as a professional – I work very hard on the text, work with editors and cover designers to produce a polished final product. As a musician, I am very much an amateur. I make noise when the spirit takes me and, if something comes out that makes me particularly happy, I’ll upload it to share with others. But I don’t deceive myself that I’m doing anything other than having fun and, maybe, another person or two might have fun with it, too. Which isn’t to say I don’t have fun writing, too – if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it – but I have different goals in each area.

Doing anything well, much less competently enough for others to pay you money for it, is hard. It takes work, long-term effort, and lots of failure. You know what doesn’t require any of those? Making are because you love it. Your sculptures can be lumpy. Your stories can peter out in the end. Your songs can be stiff and not particularly catchy. Did you enjoy making them? The answer to that question is the only thing that matters in the end.

So I will disagree with Mikey and suggest that the vast majority of people who make music – or any kind of art – enjoy it simply because that’s the whole point of doing it in the first place. Sure it can be frustrating, but the answer is to take a break and take the dog for a walk, not to turn to some soulless piece of AI to do the work for you.

Make art for yourself. And have fun.

Let’s Twist Again

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DISCLAIMER: Again, this post gets into very spoilery details of a couple of recent Apple+ shows, Sugar and Disclaimer. If you’ve not seen either and want to experience them cold, bookmark this and come back later. Otherwise, onward!

There are, at least, two kinds of twists that writers can employ. One simply pulls the rug out from underneath you and changes the game going forward, but doesn’t do much to recontextualized what you’ve already seen. A few weeks ago I talked about the big “Colin Farrell is a blue alien” twist on Sugar, which falls into that category. Whatever the reveal entails for the show’s second season, it doesn’t cause you to look back at what came before and nod knowingly about how things have changed.

Another kind of twist is just the opposite, one that really turns all that came before on its head and makes you seriously rethink all you’ve already seen. Another recent Apple+ endeavor, Disclaimer, does just that.

Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (adapted from a novel of the same name by Renee Knight), Disclaimer is about a celebrated journalist/documentarian and mother, Catherine, (played by Cate Blanchett) whose life is turned upside down by the appearance of a slim work of fiction (no way it’s long enough to be a “novel”) that appears to be based on a traumatic event from her past. The book is self-published by the father, Stephen, (Kevin Kline) of a 19-year-old son, Jonathan, who died in said traumatic event, although the book was written by his deceased wife.

This is all, it turns out, a plot of the Stephen’s to ruin the Catherine’s life, as well of that of her husband and adult son, Nicholas. The book tells the story of a younger Catherine seducing Jonathan who then, in his besotted horniness, drowns rescuing five-year-old Nicholas from dangerous seas. It paints Catherine as not just an adulterous but a bad mother, concerned only with her own hedonistic pleasures rather than taking care of her kid.

But that story is, of course, fiction. You can tell by the way it’s shot and the fade ins/outs used to transition in and out of those scenes. Fiction can get at big truths sometimes in a better way than nonfiction, but in terms of the details of reality it has issues, particularly given the fairly flimsy basis (some apparently-sexy photographs) upon which this fiction is based.

The twist, which finally arrives at in the seventh and final episode but isn’t much of a surprise,* is Catherine’s side of the story: it was not a fling, an affair, or a lost weekend, it was sexual assault. She tells Stephen about how she didn’t actually know Jonathan, but that he managed to get into her unlocked hotel room, threaten her and her son with a knife, and then repeatedly assault her over the course of hours. This, of course, makes all we’ve seen before feel very different as a lot of what Catherine does can be viewed through the lens of her being a survivor of sexual assault, not just a brittle hothead.

Does that mean the twist works? I think it depends on the audience. This review goes into good detail as to why it doesn’t, although it can be summed up fairly succinctly: it’s not really much of a twist. It’s not hidden where the book comes from or what it is (apparently there’s a little bit more mystery in the novel) and you quickly realize that what you’re seeing in the gauzy Italian flashbacks is the product of someone’s imagination. It’s only a matter of figuring out when the other shoe drops, which the show gives away easily. Seriously, there’s a trigger warning before every episode about (among other things) sexual violence, none of which shows up in the first six episodes – guess what happens in the seventh?

But that assumes that the only point of a twist is to shock and surprise, to leave an audience thinking “I did not see that coming!” What if you’re after something else? Interviews with Cuaron (like this one) suggest that he was more interested in luring viewers into the headspace of those who read the book cold – several of whom comment that the Cahterine stand in “got what was coming to her” and that was a good thing – to judge her as a mother and a human being. The twist, then, forces viewers to confront their own biases and assumptions. It should make them feel bad about themselves.

Still, the “this is not exactly a twist” does undercut that idea a bit. So does the fact that Disclaimer is so very much. Cuaron is on record as saying this couldn’t have been done as a movie, but lots of viewers and critics, including yours truly, think otherwise. It would have to choose which movie to be – the serious study of grief, untold truths, and the aftereffects of abuse or the very pulpy revenge story in which Kevin Kline in old man makeup turns into a would-be murderer (the whole time I kind of wanted him to slip it Mr. Fischoeder territory, maybe have a golf cart). Part of the issue with the series is that it whiplashes back and forth in tone.

And then there’s the endless voiceovers (in at least two, if not three, voices and POVs) that mostly exist to make sure anybody who’s never watched a moving picture before doesn’t miss important stuff. There’s one scene, a flashback when Stephen and his wife go to Italy to recover their son’s body, and he finds evidence the kid’s been smoking again in his hotel room. The wife snaps that it was probably due to the girlfriend, and the Kline in voiceover explains that the wife never really liked the girlfriend. No shit!

Which is frustrating, because there are several good stretches in Disclaimer, some good performances, and it looks great (in the sense that sometimes “great” means drab and dingy). And the whole idea of luring viewers into one state of mind about Catherine then pulling a switcheroo has promise, but the whole fails to come together as a whole. And the twist, while vital to what it’s trying to do, doesn’t land like it should given what came before it.

As I said in my other post, twists are hard to get right. They’re also risky. If the point is to change a viewer or reader’s focus on all that came before it risks ruing it. A “gotcha!” twist my land flat, but it doesn’t necessarily blow up the rest of the work. I’m not saying the twist in Disclaimer ruins it, but I think there were much more interesting ways to reach the point it was trying to make.

Some Thoughts on “The Northman”

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. They both ooze atmosphere and can get by on that alone, but they’re also seriously weird, to boot. The kind of movies you walk away from asking, “what did I just see?” So while Viking revenge fantasy isn’t necessarily high on my list of favs, I did take the chance to watch his latest, The Northman when it came along.

The Northman is the story of Amleth, a 10th-century Viking prince who sees his father killed by his uncle, who then promptly carries off his mother. Amleth vows revenge and if you think this sounds a little like Hamlet, you’re right – they both riff on the same legend. His journey involves Viking raids, mysterious seers (one of who is played by Bjork!), a witchy ally, and, eventually, a mano-a-mano battle on an active volcano (shades of Revenge of the Sith? You bet!). It’s worth a watch, even if not up to the same level as Eggers’ prior work.

I do have some thoughts . . .

Can something be too accurate?

Eggers has a reputation for exacting precision in world building, going all in an getting the details right of the world of each particular movie. Not for nothing have all three Eggers films been set in the past (in one interview he laughed at the idea of making a contemporary film). For The Northman he engaged several experts on Viking history, ritual, and the like to create a world that sure feels awfully “real,” even if does involve things like unshakable faith, sorcery, and Valkyries carrying souls to Valhalla (as detailed in this profile).

I dig the detail. The world of The Northman is so gritty and granular that it feels “real,” even if there’s a lot about it that doesn’t exactly jive with reality. But can it go to far? I found a couple of reviews (one here, for example) that suggested that Eggers and crew get so caught up in details and being “right” about all sorts of small things that maybe other important parts of movie making get lost in the shuffle.

There are parts of The Northman that seem to be there solely because Eggers (or Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Amleth and was a producer) found out some cool things about Viking lore and wanted to put them on screen. I have no objection to that, but your mileage may differ. In fact, I can’t think of anything that feels like it could have been done “better” by fudging the details of the setting (most of the dialogue is in English, to be fair), so I don’t think Eggers puts verisimilitude as the highest and only value, but it’s clearly important. The film’s flaws (Amleth is a pretty boring hero with no apparent inner life or ability to reconsider his fate) are more down to the kind of story Eggers wants to tell rather than a fault in how it’s told.

Destiny versus storytelling

As I mentioned above, the legend of Amleth was the basis for Hamlet long before The Northman, but it makes for an interesting point of comparison. As this New Yorker review explains, Eggers’ Amleth is really nothing like Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane:

In regressing to Shakespeare before Shakespeare, Eggers replaces intricate and complex poetry with thudding banalities. He voids Amleth—a muscular warrior raised in crude ways and trained in cruder ones—of any inwardness, as if in fear of rendering him effete or off-putting. Eggers’s action-film Hamlet is neither bookish nor inhibited nor speculative nor plotting with far-reaching imagination of complicated stratagems—nor witty nor, above all, endowed with a sense of humor.

In other words, Hamlet is a tragic figure you can at least sympathize with – Amleth, not so much. Again, I don’t think this is a fault in Eggers’ execution as much as it is the kind of story he’s telling and the kind of world he’s telling it in. In Amleth’s world the constraints of fate are as real and binding on him as the law of gravity. If his destiny is to take revenge on his uncle it matters not that his uncle’s already had his downfall (his kingdom was taken by another king and he was exiled) or that his mother comes clean about who Amleth’s father really was (and her role in his death). Even the promise of a normal life in Orkney with the witch and their children can’t keep him from his destiny.

That’s the problem with destiny or fate or prophecy as a storyteller. Generally, writers and readers/viewers want characters – heroes, at any rate – who have agency. Or if they don’t they at least recognize that fact and rail against it or unsuccessfully avoid their fate. Tragedy is when you can’t stop yourself from doing what you shouldn’t, not when you just shrug your shoulders and go along for the ride. That said, the idea of a life free from moral choice – if I’m fated to die on a volcano, why live a moral, upstanding life – is one worth exploring, but it’s not what Eggers was after, for better or worse.

And, yes, the actual film doesn’t match the tagline on the poster.

The berserker and the office drone

Through sheer serendipity I saw The Northman while one episode away from end (of the first season?) of Sweatpea, a British TV offering showing on Starz in the United States.

Sweatpea is about an outwardly mild and meek office drone, Rhiannon, who been bullied by various people all her life and starts working towards bloody vengeance. Her primary target is Julia, a school bully (leader of a clique, in fact) whose abuse was so bad Rhiannon was literally tearing her hair out. Julie is first and foremost on Rhiannon’s list of “people I’d like to kill,” so she kidnaps her with every intent of doing her in.

Except there’s a complication – Julia, it seems, is a victim of her own, as her fiancé is abusive to her. Rhiannon is thus confronted with a person she wants dead who is suffering through the same stuff she’s gone through – but does that make right all the abuse Julie perpetrated in the first place? I don’t know how it’s going to play out as I write this, but the contrast with Amleth is striking. If Rhiannon goes through with killing Julia it will no doubt be her choice and I doubt it will be portrayed as glorious. Certainly, she’s not going to be flown off into Valhalla. But, then again, she lives in a modern world where things like fate and destiny are only found in, well, in movies and the like.

This Vox review has an interesting take on The Northman:

I wouldn’t go so far as “great,” but Eggers’ refusal to try and tell a story that’s such a throwback at least makes for an interesting watch. Consume in a darkened room and you may wind up thinking you’re back in Iceland, with the spirits of the dead all about you.

Now THAT’S a Twist!

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

NOTE: I don’t normally warn about spoilers, but if you’re at all interested in the Apple TV+ series Sugar, I would bail out at this point. I do recommend the show, so go check it out and come back when you’ve had a chance to see it for yourself.

Twists are hard to get right. Leave too many breadcrumbs in the early parts of the story and people will see it coming. Don’t leave enough and the twist comes along and makes no sense, as if it was just thrown in for shock. There’s a happy medium, where the twist isn’t obvious but, upon reflection, makes perfect sense in light of what came before it.

In many ways, I wish I hadn’t read anything about Sugar, the Apple TV+ series, before we watched.

We were always going to watch it because Colin Farrell is in it and he’s one of my wife’s “guys,” which is fine with me since he usually does interesting stuff. Still, I read a review when the show first came out, just to get a feel for the series, and it said straight up there was a big twist coming near the end of the season that, essentially, turned it into an entirely different show. That review wasn’t wrong.

Farrell plays John Sugar, a high-end private eye who specializes in finding people who have gone missing. Naturally, he has a mysterious past and an affinity for old movies (primarily film noir). After a prologue that sees him rescue the missing child of a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, he returned to Los Angeles where he takes a case of another missing girl, the granddaughter of a famous film producer. Sugar’s handler or partner (it’s unclear which, at first) tries to keep him from taking the gig, apparently because it’s too close to home – Sugar’s sister went missing when he was younger and the missing girl reminds him of her.

So far, so neo-noir. For six of the show’s eight episodes the series hums along in that mode as Sugar pulls back the veil on a sleazy underworld into which the missing girl has disappeared. It’s not anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s well done and an enjoyable watch. Then at the end of the that episode, after a furious explosion of violence, Sugar, alone in a hotel bathroom, decides to just “go home” for a while. He injects something into his neck and we watch as Farrel turns into a bald, blue alien.

No, not one of those.

It’s a hell of a swing, creatively, to turn the show’s premise on its head three-quarters of the way through. Except it really doesn’t. Sugar is part of a group of aliens on Earth to “observe and report” and their existence is now in jeopardy, but that’s about it. He still needs to find the girl and solve the mystery, except “aliens” is kind of sprinkled over the top.

Does the twist work? I’m still not sure. As I said, the big reveal doesn’t actually shift things all that much. Part of me thinks the sci-fi/noir blend might have worked better if we’d known about the alien stuff from the jump. The conflict between the “observe/report” mission and Sugar’s inherent need to help people would have been a good source of tension, particularly given the end resolution to the mystery of the missing girl.

But even if the twist does work, it seems to me that such a shift in the narrative so deep in the show (or book or whatever) makes it a difficult sell for audiences. After all, there are people who love noir movies that will never go near sci-fi and vice versa (one of the interesting things about having a table at book festivals is people often have no hesitation in telling me they don’t read “that kind of thing”!). How do you reach both audiences without spoiling the entire setup?

It makes me think of story ideas I’ve had that have made me wonder just how to present them. For example, I have a long-standing idea (it was my first failed NaNoWriMo project) about a regular guy who finds a book that purports to be filled with magic spells, which he uses to try and make a better life for himself (it backfires, obviously). I’ve toyed with rewriting that idea as a kind of epistolary novel (letters to his lawyer), but I wonder if that would lead to questioning whether the “magic” stuff is just conman bullshit or if it’s real? Does it make a difference if I’m generally a fantasy writer? Do readers have expectations?

I can only imagine someone who had settled into a nice, twisty neo-noir watching Farrell go blue at the end of that episode. Would they feel betrayed? Or would they be so invested in what was going on that they would just roll with it? Maybe that’s the point – being up front about the sci-fi element would scare some people away in a way that dropping it near the end wouldn’t.

While I still can’t say whether the twist really worked, it appears we’re going to have another chance to find out. Sugar has been renewed for a second season and it’ll be impossible to move forward without addressing the elephant in the room now.

Or the alien.

Happy Halloween! Have Some Free Stories! Again!

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I shared my collection of Halloween stories that have collected over the years. All those linked below you can read here on my blog for free.

In addition, there’s a very early spooky story of mine, “The Mask,” that’s available at the Flash Fiction Podcast (it’s also in The Last Ereph and Other Stories, if you’re interested). And in addition to that, if you’re into the idea of demons policing their own, I contributed a story, “The Consequences of Sin,” to The Dancing Plague: A Collection of Utter Speculation, which you can get here (paperback) or here (Kindle eBook).

Enjoy!

“Shift Change” (2020)

The year of the plague, was hard on everybody, demons included. Picture something like the opening of an episode of Hill Street Blues, but not quite, and you’ll have the right idea. Everybody’s got a job to do.

“The Invited Guest” (2017)

Devil summoning is a an old trope, but I thought I’d have some fun with it. This arose, if I’m remembering it right, from a factoid I learned about raising the devil by tossing a heel of bread over your shoulder into a fire. Probably won’t work (playing a tri-tone while you do won’t help). The title is a riff on a Marillion song, naturally.

“All the Wishes” (2016)

This is the second of two stories that Eric mandated be precisely 100 words long – not up to 100, exactly 100. It’s a fun, if frustrating, exercise. This story is about wishing well (or not).

“Quotas” (2015)

The first of the 100-word stories, it shares some thematic connection with “Shift Change.” Apparently I’m interested in how demons make a living.