Martin Seay’s sprawling debut novel, The Mirror Thief(Melville House, 2016), has been described, and rightfully so, as a big novel with big ideas, clocking in at close to six hundred pages, and taking us as far back as 16th century Venice. Many are comparing the book to the works of David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, and Umberto Eco — but, really, The Mirror Thief is hard to pin down for comparison, and equally hard to summarize in just a few words. Via the miracle of email, I had the great honor of discussing the book with Martin, as well as the long road to publication, his process, the three Venices, and, of course, the mirror.
— Timothy Moore
Timothy Moore: There’s a lot to unpack here and a lot of different ways we could go with these questions, Martin, but I want to start with something small here, or, rather, something those of us not named Martin Seay often take for granted. To paraphrase a character in your book, I must first ask, why should we consider the mirror? And why did you?
Martin Seay: Thanks for asking! I have to admit that I myself started considering the mirror somewhat arbitrarily: I really just wanted to write about Venice, but I was lacking certain elements — e.g. characters, a story, yadda yadda — that would make it possible to do so.
Then I stumbled across a book by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet (The Mirror: A History) from which I learned about the two-hundred-ish-year monopoly that Venice had on the manufacture of flat glass mirrors, about the intrigues that resulted from the efforts of various foreign powers to steal the technology for themselves, and about the draconian measures that the city-state of Venice took to thwart them. That, I figured, was enough plot to hang a book on; it also led pretty naturally to themes of reflection and iteration, which allowed me to play with the idea of Venice as a city that keeps getting duplicated: versions of it have reappeared, for instance, in Southern California and in Las Vegas, to name only the two instances that are pertinent to my book.
But the idea of the mirror — its physical attributes, its role in culture, and so forth — quickly asserted itself as more than just a McGuffin and a motif. I started to think about what a big deal it must have been to see a flat glass mirror for the first time. People had had mirrors in their everyday lives for centuries, including large ones and flat ones, but the new methods of the Venetian mirror-makers yielded products that were both large and flat, and as such enabled people to see themselves for the first time as they appeared to others in social spaces: the way they moved, the way they took up space in a room. A flat glass mirror is not only a cosmetic tool, but also a tool for fashioning and rehearsing a public self; it becomes widespread in the culture at about the same time that we see the early-modern obsession with the public self and the private self — a distinction that hadn’t been firmly established before — really take off. (Think of all the Shakespeare soliloquies in which a character walks the audience through some elaborate strategy for deceit.)
It also occurred to me that in many ways the mirror is the first screen: a featureless surface that we look at to receive illusions that (in theory, and/or up to a point) help us better understand ourselves. There are, obviously, a bunch of other screen-based technologies that have succeeded it.
Plus, mirrors are just really weird. Right? They’re tremendously strange, disorienting objects. They have a defining property that’s very close to invisibility, in that we don’t really ever see them: we know them from their effects more than their appearance. You can easily understand why they came to carry so much mystical and superstitious baggage, to be the occasion for so many metaphors and anxieties. Encountering one must have been a deeply unsettling experience for somebody in the sixteenth century. It must have seemed like a gap in the fabric of reality: something their brains could barely navigate.
Moore: I love that you said “gap in the fabric of reality” here — for one, it’s a great point! But also, it allows me the opportunity to make a clumsy segue, as gaps in the fabric of reality really run throughout your book. Take, for instance, one of your main characters, con man Stanley Glass. A big thrust of his personal journey is, of all things, his obsession with a book of poetry. Not so much for its literary merits. Instead, he believes the book to be some type of map that will open him to another world — one that he suspects he belongs to. Would it be fair to say that your own obsessions may lie in these strange corners — at the edge of the real — call it mysticism, call it the occult — something just at the peripheral of the everyday?
Seay: It would probably be fair to say that, yes! But I’m not sure it would be a hundred percent accurate. I am very sympathetic to this kind of radical, gnostic sensibility — a punkish attitude memorably summarized by Greil Marcus as the belief that “the whole of received hegemonic propositions about the way the world was supposed to work comprised a fraud so complete and venal that it demanded to be destroyed beyond the powers of memory to recall its existence” — but ultimately I’m not sold on it. This attitude sometimes picks good targets and often reveals hidden injustices, but I think it generally proceeds from a place of unexamined privilege, and it’s pretty much always deeply irresponsible. (Stanley’s behavior as he pursues this aim is ultimately not super-admirable.) Lately I feel myself more touched and compelled by the beautiful, barely-effectual mess of small-scale democratic exchanges, where dissimilar individuals trip over each other, work through their shit, and build something genuine and earned.
I know it’s obnoxious to quote my own characters, but at one point Veronica, the art-historian-turned-professional-gambler, says something along the lines of: I don’t believe any of that mystical mumbo-jumbo, but I am very interested in what happens when other people believe it. That’s pretty close to where I’m coming from.
Moore: It’s interesting too — what happens to people who believe, but also what pushes them to believe, isn’t it? I’d like to talk about these rich characters you’ve developed here, but first I feel it’s necessary to bring up these three periods in your book — 16th century Venice, late 1950’s Venice Beach, and the Venetian Casino circa Las Vegas on the eve of America’s second war with Iraq. I feel like the characters in The Mirror Thief are shaped by their personal histories, but also by the traumas of history itself. I know that you started with wanting to write about Venice, but how did you decide on these periods in history? Did your characters develop after you figured out the setting?
Seay: I’m glad you asked, because this is something that I had honestly almost forgotten about: how I picked the specific settings, particularly in terms of their historical circumstances. From Melchior-Bonnet’s book I knew I wanted my Venice sections to fall somewhere between about 1500 and about 1700, during the period when the Venetian flat-mirror monopoly was in place. From my early reading on the topic, I learned that many written accounts of the mirror-making process are by alchemists; that in turn led me to cursorily investigate alchemy as it would have been practiced at the time, which quickly led me to learn a little something about the intellectual tradition that alchemy came out of: a counter-tradition to Thomist scholasticism that emphasized the value of pre-Christian “secret knowledge.” Dabbling in such stuff could get somebody in big trouble, even in a comparatively liberal city like Venice; I ended up deciding to set this portion of the story in 1592 because that’s when the poet-philosopher Giordano Bruno was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition. (He was ultimately burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.) Bruno ended up being more of an event than a character in the book, but I’m happy with the result.
…if you have a legitimate excuse to write something set in Vegas, you pretty much have to do it.
Once I’d decided to set the other two thirds of the story in copies of Venice, it was pretty easy to decide to make one of those a Venice-themed casino on the Las Vegas Strip — because, I mean, come on: if you have a legitimate excuse to write something set in Vegas, you pretty much have to do it. It’s a narrative-rich environment. (My decision was very swiftly reinforced when I learned that the world’s first mercantile casino, of the sort that now lines the Strip, opened in Venice in 1638.) The decision to set the Vegas sections in 2003 is one that I kind of backed into; I actually started sketching out the book in 2002 — with the notion that the Vegas sections would just be “the present day” — but I was writing slower than history was happening, so these sections too ended up being a period piece.
I very clearly remember working on outlines of the plot of the Las Vegas narrative and the various backstories of its characters while watching U.S. Marines pull down the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square, and a lot about that moment — the anger and despair that I (and, of course, a lot of other people) felt about the invasion, and the untrustworthiness of the images that were being used to explain and justify the war — ended up being very important to the book.
It was slightly trickier to settle on Venice, California as my third Venice, but here again I let myself be guided by what seemed like richness of narrative possibility: I knew it had been a colorful place for a long time — a somewhat shady entertainment destination in the 1930s and 40s, a major flashpoint in the development of Beat culture in the 1950s, and a site for the flying of many a freak-flag ever since — so I figured it was a safe bet. Significantly, like the Venetian casino, it was also a place that was built to emulate the original Venice, and not just named because of a perceived similarity to it (which is, for instance, how Venezuela got its name): when developer Abbot Kinney built it in about 1905 he very deliberately sought to copy Venice, putting in copious ersatz Byzantine and Gothic architecture, as well as a bunch of canals, most of which were filled in after Los Angeles annexed the community in 1926. So far as the timeframe goes, I picked 1958 because it’s the year before the publication of The Holy Barbarians, Lawrence Lipton’s sensationalistic bestseller that made Venice nationally infamous as a hotbed of crazy Beat culture; it’s also the year that Ezra Pound — who wrote memorably about Venice in the Cantos, who’s buried there on the cemetery island of San Michele, who cast a huge shadow over midcentury poetry, and who provides a troubling case study of the role of a poet in wartime — was released from confinement in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. I figured I might be able to use that.
And yes, I picked those times and places first, looked for things that linked them or were common to them, and then developed scenes and other plot elements from that. The characters showed up last of all.
Moore: Did your characters take shape organically from there? Or was there a struggle? It’s interesting because, while your central characters are shaped by their times and the events surrounding them, your book peers very closely into their interior lives — in a close third person perspective. We see what your main characters see, what they hear, feel, and fear. To sharpen my question a bit: was it difficult to balance these big ideas and settings with a sharp focus on your characters as well?
Seay: That’s an interesting question! As you mention, the narration is mostly presented in close — very close — third, and also (mostly) in the present tense; as it happens, my reasons for doing that were totally conceptual, at least in the beginning. I knew the book was at some level going to be about the not-so-great things that happen when a culture disproportionately privileges visual information and image-based ways of knowing stuff, and I wanted the narration to reinforce that and to function analogously: giving the impression that we’re always peeking over the three protagonists’ shoulders, and then gradually making it clear that that very closeness is hiding things even as it reveals them.
But for that point of view to work — for it to be honest and play fair — it had to be more than just conceptual, which meant that I had to really immerse myself in my made-up people’s embodied experience of my made-up world. For a couple of years after I started the project, I had to pretty much stop writing and just try to imaginatively inhabit the situations and circumstances that I planned to put my characters in, to think hard about their sensory experience . . . and not just somebody’s sensory experience, but theirs. Trying to understand them as physical presences helped me figure out their personal histories, which in turn helped me figure out what memories and anxieties and desires might be triggered by things they see and people they encounter.
…no real magic happens while I’m writing, but only when somebody reads what I’ve written…
This was a time-consuming process, and one that does not come naturally to me: I’m an idea-driven writer, not a character-driven writer. I’ve known a bunch of people over the years, many of them very accomplished novelists, who describe their creative process in terms of “hearing voices”: a character pops into their heads and starts talking, and a story takes shape from there. I’ve never been able to do that, or to convince myself that I’m doing it. Consequently my process never really feels organic — it feels more like growing crystals than growing beanstalks — and I never have the experience that many writers describe of “fighting” characters that seemingly develop their own agency and want do their own thing. I’m always very aware that I’m just building something out of language — in Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster refers to characters as “word-masses” — and that no real magic happens while I’m writing, but only when somebody reads what I’ve written and brings their own imaginative and interpretive stuff into play. That, for me, is when things get cool.
Moore: I’m sure that it must be such a rewarding experience then to have this book finally out there! From what I understand, you’ve been working on The Mirror Thief for nearly ten years, isn’t that right? And now it’s been released to enthusiastic acclaim from some really MAJOR publications (like the New York Times!). I’m sure all these readings and interviews have been a whirlwind — but can you talk a little bit about what it’s been like to jump into this new limelight, and having your work reviewed, scrutinized, and discussed after having such a long journey to publication?
Seay: It’s been pretty great! It’s very gratifying that people seem to be enjoying it; it’s even more gratifying that they also seem to be reading the book that I think I wrote: catching what I wanted them to catch, getting what I hoped they would get.
If I’m remembering (and doing math) correctly, it took me about five and a half years to write the book, and then an additional seven and a half to find a publisher — Melville House — that was willing to send it out into the world. Tack on another year for the publication process, and it makes a total of fourteen years between the release date and the day I first started working on it.
I definitely didn’t plan on that long gap between finishing the book and its publication, and I can’t honestly tell you that I’m glad it took as long as it did, but there are a few silver linings. One of them is that it gave me an opportunity to increase my critical distance from the book: I can go back to it now as a reader to a much greater extent than I was able to before, which is nice. I can also handle negative comments better than I imagine I could have back in 2007: it’s easier for me to think, “Well, I can understand why someone might make that complaint,” rather than feeling personally wounded or judged or whatever. I’m certainly no less enthusiastic about the book than I was when I finished it, but it’s easier for me now to separate myself from it, and to understand it as something that is finally able go about on its own legs.
About the Interviewer
Timothy Moore has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Chicago Reader, and Entropy. He lives, writes, and sells books in Chicago.
Remember the music that made you an adult? And the city that served as your backdrop? And all the songs that spoke uniquely to you, and the experiences that felt singular and unrepeatable? I remember being twenty-two and moving to New York City. I wrote a novel about it.
I knew nothing about music back then, and I know nothing now. I latch onto Top 40 songs like your average pop junkie. Any decent musical taste I have was bestowed on me by one of the musicians I’ve been in love with, or by one of my esoteric, vinyl-collecting friends. I have always been happy to be educated.
Sweetbitter is a sonic novel — the traffic and murmurs of New York City, the clanging of the kitchen, the cacophony of voices during dinner service, and the ambient jukebox of every dive bar in the city — these are the true soundtrack of the novel. But there is also a lot of music. Tess, the fictional narrator of the novel, inherited my age when I moved to New York City, my old apartment on Roebling Street in Williamsburg, and some of the songs that shaped me in 2006. Beyond that she is a sincere, naive, confused twenty-two-year old, and will always be so much cooler than me.
1. “All My Friends” — LCD Soundsystem
— “It was our song when we were heading out into the night — the manic, dizzy piano introduction stretching us. The song was all promise — that this night would be different, or different enough.” Pg. 281
When I got to the city it felt like I was the last one on the LCD train, but I was there with my usual enthusiasm (fwiw the actual last ones were the ones that joined in 2010 with “This is Happening”). Their music haunts the whole novel, that blend of dance and pop and disco, with James Murphy’s speaking/singing, and sarcastic yet sentimental lyrics. In 2006 and 2007 they were still somewhat an NYC band, a discovery that you made when you came to the city. My fandom never wavered. Many years later I worked a wine store in Williamsburg, Uva, and James Murphy used to come in to shop and I would be blasting Sounds of Silver. Awkward.
2. “Maps” — The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
— “I woke in the mornings inwardly hysterical at the possibility of seeing him. I took great pleasure in subduing it. I practiced composure. He was teaching me a previously unknown patience. It was about him, but it was also not him. I longed for satiation but was terrified of it. I wanted to live in this queasy moment of fantasy for as long as possible.” Pg. 149
Is there a live performer as compelling as Karen O? I don’t know if you can convince me. I often say that Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is the single greatest meditation on desire, and I think that Maps is the single greatest song about desire. About living in the bubble of longing that barely even requires the beloved’s presence. There are barely any lyrics, just Karen engaged in the act of watching the Beloved from an impossible distance, and being in pain, but not trying to close the distance. Instead we linger in it.
3. “Ceremony” — New Order
— “Who’s Joy Divison?” Pg. 256
If Tess and her love interest Jake ever got married, they would walk down the aisle to “Ceremony.” But Tess is a girl who doesn’t know that New Order was Joy Division’s successor, or who Ian Curtis is, or about his tragic suicide, or anything about British New Wave — that is one of many reasons that she and Jake are not meant to be. I think every hot guy I idolized in my twenties was obsessed with Joy Division. I haven’t figured out what that means yet.
4. “Heartbeats” — The Knife
— See Park Bar, on pg. 178
“One night to be confused One night to speed up truth We had a promise made Four hands and then away Both under influence We had divine sense To know what to say Mind is a razorblade”
Is this not the song about being young and buoyant? Benchmark electro-pop music by a pair of masked, reclusive siblings — Deep Cuts in 2006 was their breakout, but still such an overtly strange and sexual album. “Heartbeats” was everywhere thanks to the José González cover, but in NYC the synthed-up original version was blasting in the all the bars like an anthem.
Author Stephanie Danler, credit Nick Vorderman
5. “Abbey Road” — The Beatles
— See Park Bar on pg. 67
This is a true story: I didn’t listen to anything but the Beatles until I was twelve. As a child I could identify each of their individual voices, knew which lyrics — down to the line — John Lennon had written. I listened to my mom’s records on repeat, gathered trivia about them obsessively. I do not know much about music, but I know everything about The Beatles. I know that Polythene Pam into Bathroom Window into Golden Slumbers into Carry that Weight is miraculous. So when Tess is in Park Bar, and someone puts on Abbey Road — the entire album, which I love when bars or restaurants do — and she’s blown out on cocaine, it’s the perfect vehicle for the only hint of a flashback about her past, in which a very young Tess leaves a birthday party invitation for God to take to John Lennon.
6. “Sweet Thing” — Van Morrison
— “I put on Astral Weeks and when “Sweet Thing” came on he said, This one deserves a dance. We danced, him bare chested in stretched-out underwear, me in his shirt with no pants on, moving in circles on the carpets under the gauze of cigarette smoke. That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good soundtrack with knowledge.” Pg. 332
Van Morrison is too easy right? Until you are in the process of losing yourself, falling in love in some dingy apartment, and you realize that every song, particularly “Sweet Thing,” was written for you.
7. “Blue in Green” — Miles Davis
— “She dropped a record-player needle into place, and jazz startled the room into the present tense.” Pg. 138
Kind of Blue, a glass of fino sherry, a fire escape, a sunset over the Hudson. I never understood jazz until I lived in a city.
8. “With Every Heartbeat” — Robyn
— “Sasha was a tough nut to crack. He loved watermelon-flavored Smirnoff, Jake, cocaine, and pop music. Those subjects provided just enough overlap between us for me to occasionally warrant his attention.” Pg. 112
Robyn doesn’t get enough credit for making intelligent, danceable pop music, paving the way for Lady Gaga and Sia. She has been consistently making great music since the ’90s and is still relevant. Her dance moves, her hair, her weird shoes. This woman gives zero fucks about the pop music media circus. This is a song you forgot about but love, it’s a keeper.
9. “Fake Plastic Trees” — Radiohead
— “I realized that Fake Plastic Trees was playing over the speakers. I hadn’t listened to it in years and when I had, on repeat, in the bathtub, I hadn’t really understood what it meant to be worn out. I couldn’t shrug the song off. So I sighed and said to Georgie, with my face in my hands, “Misery. Will you just turn it up?” — pg. 329
There was my life before a boy gave me The Bends, and my life after. I often wonder, How do you protect the fierceness of angst, without falling into cliché? How do you make something universal out of your private pains? Radiohead does it. This album coincided with learning to drive, learning to write, learning to read poems, and learning to stare out the window and not run away from sadness. When I re-read some novels I feel like I couldn’t have possibly understood them the first time, they were so meant for this moment in my life. When Tess hears “Fake Plastic Trees” at the end of the novel it feels like a coda for everything she’s gained and lost. She had to have those experiences to understand the song better.
About the Author
Stephanie Danler is the author of Sweetbitter (Knopf 2016). She’s based in Brooklyn, New York and holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School.
Oleh Shynkarenko’s novel Kaharlyk features a man with no memory, a town frozen by experimental weaponry, and a journey plunging into the past. As strange as that sounds, the creation of the novel might be even stranger. In 2014, Shynkarenko began posting 100-word bulletins on Facebook from an alternate reality set in a post-apocalyptic future. Previously he’d written versions of these fictive snippets (vaguely criticizing then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych) as entries on his blog, but after being interrogated by Ukrainian security services, the author took to the safer webspace of Facebook. According to the novel’s translator, Steve Komarnyckyj, Shynkarenko created in addition to the text, “fragments of concrete music, mixing sounds, such as Serbian liturgical melodies, washing machines, and cows mooing, to develop a soundscape for his world.”
The novel transparently echoes the violence, corruption, and censorship at the heart of the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests in Kiev. In this way, the endless series of 100-word fragments feels especially fitting; how else can one recover the shards of a splintered world but by the knitting together of its constituent parts? Fellow Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov called its structure “hologrammatic,” with the inner architecture of the novel consisting of, “beautifully crafted puzzles.”
Shynkarenko’s novel will be published in English by Kalyna Language Press. According to The Guardian, a first look at the English text is available via the Index on Censorship. The extract begins: “The wind blows listlessly through every cranny. Travelling to Kiev on the main highway, two identical 26-storey buildings are visible by the road in the distance. They stick out, the last two teeth in a jawbone. Thus the city’s corpse lays, its head southwards. Their sole inhabitant is a mummified 45-year-old wearing elegant spectacles.”
This infographic shows the real-life locations of Game of Thrones sets
Game of Thrones finished its sixth season with a bang last night. Fans will have to wait a year to see what happens next in the wild world of Westeros, although George R. R. Martin’s next A Song of Ice and Fire novel (from which the TV show is adapted) may come out before then.
If you wish you could see the world of Game of Thrones yourself, well, you kinda can. This infographic from Walks Worldwide shows you the real world locations used as the castles, fields, and cities of Game of Thones.
Allison Amend’s Enchanted Islands is as bewitching as the title suggests; this lush and captivating tale of friendship, marriage, and espionage follows Frances Frankowski, born to Polish immigrant parents in the 1880s in the Midwest, from Milwaukee to San Francisco, and eventually to Galapágos, where she acts as a government spy in the years preceding World War II. Amend’s writing is spellbinding, and her characters are complicated and richly conceived. Whether in Frances’ relationship with her best friend, Rosalie, or with her husband, Ainslie, Amend captures the nature of intimate relationships, their beautiful complexity and tragedy together. Amend’s work is based on the real life memoirs of Frances Conway, and her relationship with her husband, Ainslie. Amend’s characters’ deepest connections include profound hurt, and yet the island becomes a catalyst for Frances’ growth — she must learn to accept that pain and risk come with companionship. In this tale that touches many genres, Frances comes of age, befriends a complicated girl with her own problems, escapes both poverty and hard circumstances, earns an education and a living, finds purpose and adventure on a deserted island — in her fifties — and learns that love doesn’t always feel happy. Amend tells a good story, and she tells it beautifully.
Amend’s characters’ deepest connections include profound hurt.
“Friendship between women is complicated,” Frances tells us early, as Amend establishes the frame of a best-friend story that will enclose Enchanted Islands’ lengthyflashback. When we meet Frances, she is living with Rosalie in an assisted living facility. Frances has held her secret for decades about her life on the island with Ainsley. Even at their advanced age, we see the tension and competition between friends:
A belch of jealousy burbles up inside of me. Rosalie is to be honored. It was always thus, that Rosalie was in the spotlight while I sat in the wings, but this in particular galls me. I am the one who truly served my country during the war. I am the one who stayed in a marriage for the sake of my country, who came close to losing my life for it. And I can tell no one.
Early in the story, Amend allows Frances the complexity of both negative and positive feelings toward the same thing. Rosalie is as close as a sister, and yet Frances resents her. This sets the tone for what become the two intertwining threads of the story: Frances’ relationship with Rosalie, forged in youth and built upon an early betrayal, and Frances’ marriage to Ainsley, who turned out not to be who Frances thought he was. Each of these relationships mirrors the other. Frances’ life is told in reaction to a series of shocks; early on she is not an observant character, and this allows those close to her to use her trusting nature to act on their own demons. But Frances’ growth comes not from learning to notice all that is around her; instead, Amend helps her to realize that it is her choice of reaction that will dictate what comfort she is allowed. And in Enchanted Islands, Frances learns to value friendship that matters more than betrayal.
Frances’ complication makes her one of the best introverts in recent fiction.
The first third of Enchanted Islands is about Frances’ desire to flee. Frances helps Rosalie escape a situation where she’s being sexually exploited, but as the two try to build their life together, Rosalie hurts Frances deeply, and Frances leaves. Thus begins her pattern of running as far as she can get, and it is therefore not a surprise when she accepts the opportunity to create a false life on the other side of the world. “[W]e’ve rescued ourselves,” the girls contend when they first run, and yet Frances has to learn not just to run, but to be alone, to accept what is and let go of what could be. It is not until she takes on a marriage proposed by the government that she learns to rely on herself. Frances sees herself from the beginning as an observer. “I have always been a rather quiet person,” she says, “content to observe rather than participate, and my reticence grew with age so that by the time I reached my early fifties, an age at which women stopped being noticed, I blended into the scenery as neatly as a camouflaged iguana.” And yet, her inability or unwillingness to realize the truth about those around her is both a major theme and a stumbling block to her happiness. Frances’ complication makes her one of the best introverts in recent fiction. Amend’s characterization of the protagonist feels as rich and vibrant as her descriptions of the island. It is worth mentioning here, too, that female protagonists over 35 are rare in contemporary fiction, especially women over 35 whose lives have purpose beyond stereotypes or saccharine conclusions; that Frances is over 50 for the bulk of the story and is rich with complication makes this vital tale even more of an enjoyable read.
The uncertainty of spying allows Amend to push her characters’ comfort with truth. When Frances learns a secret about her husband — on the island, after they have been married for some time — she questions how she has allowed herself to accept a false version of the man who is, ostensibly, her best friend. The Conways are spies, yet Amend uses them to show how we all construct a version of the truth. Frances asks herself:
Should I have known or guessed? Probably. But do not forget I was lying to myself about so many things. Lies were my entire life at that point. I had lied about my real name, my religion. I lied about being ready to travel halfway around the world to an island on the edge of nowhere. Ainsley and I lied to everyone we met, and when there was no one to meet, we lied to ourselves.
If this were a tale told by a lesser author, it would end with reflections about betrayal, and Frances would get what she deserves in the way of a happy resolution. Yet Amend allows her not to see betrayal as the end; this feels more representative of what true love is in relationships — a choice, even in the face of disappointment. Ainslie tells Frances: “We don’t get what we deserve,” and yet that’s not an admonition or a command to give up. Ainslie, too, suffers in a world where he cannot be who he really is, and he understands that disappointment isn’t limited to any one group of people. Characters in Enchanted Islands choose companionship over the idea of perfection, and Amend renders this over and over with aplomb.
Amend’s work in Enchanted Islands is never syrupy-sweet or didactic, and yet it becomes a tale of self-reliance and hard work. Amend’s work sings on a syntactic level, and she imagines lush detail into the lacunae of Conway’s memoir. Frances educates herself, lives alone in a time when it was rare to do so, and takes on a completely foreign lifestyle. “It seems that with enough practice, we can get to know just about anything,” she says. These are fully conceived characters who will stick with you long after you finish the book. Amend shows how friendships change over decades, and how much we need other people. Frances and Ainsley forge a life on the island from nothing — both in their habitat and in their relationship. Amend’s characterization of their marriage, though conceived and arranged by the government as a means to an end, becomes an honest and mature take on companionship. “I loved him,” she says, “I knew him better than any other being, and he me. This was intimacy, the like of which I’d never known except with Rosalie, and even that relationship was fraught with secrets. We can know each other deeper than mere facts. We can love each other deeper than our actions.”
On June twenty-first, I woke up in my familiar twin-sized bed with poppies sprouting from my knees. It was the day after the bomb fell and destroyed most of the city I had lived in my whole life. I was not, at first, sure which of these things was real, and which was the dream: would I have to continue on, knowing that nearly everyone I had ever met was now dead, or was it the pain of new shoots pushing up through my pores that was real, and that other, larger pain that was the dream. Like a child, I lay on my back, staring at the grey ceiling of my room, listening to the low rustle of the poppies, pretending that none of it — not even I — existed. Then I called 911.
After automated directions about fallout shelters, a woman with a cool, dispassionate voice came on the line and asked about my emergency.
“There are poppies growing out of my legs,” I said, watching the clean stalk of another seedling press against the inside of my skin. It was green and coiled in on itself like a fetus.
“Is this an emergency?”
“I don’t think I can walk,” I said.
“Unless you’re in critical condition, I advise you to seek home care. There are people dying in all the hospitals.”
“I’m sorry, I know, of course,” I said, and hung up the phone. As an experiment, I pinched off the red budding head of a stalk, which began to drip blood onto my sheets, and then onto the floor. Wherever the stain touched, more poppies pressed up, blooming out of the carpet, the exposed edge of the mattress, my shins and the torn-up beds of my fingernails. I wondered if I was anaesthetized, or dead. I called you, but the landline was disconnected.
After that, I slept for a while, and dreamt that a boy with sticks for hands came into the bedroom to say that we were all going back to where we came from, and as he said so, turned into a tree, tearing up the floor by the window with his roots. When I woke again, I could not be sure it was a dream. The face of my building had collapsed, and the remaining rubble and brick was threaded with branches. I had thrashed in my sleep, and the poppies covered the mattress, my legs, the bottom halves of my arms. I lifted my hand to look at the thick clusters of flowers there, so dense, it was like I didn’t have hands at all. As I stood, I could hear the stalks breaking and the faint, spry sounds of growth everywhere I walked.
In the kitchen, I ate fumblingly, surprised that my body still required the same things that it had before. Shouldn’t things be different now (outside, a woman passed with hundreds of mice in her hair; one of her legs had been broken, and she cried to drag it under the weight of all them) shouldn’t it be that my living skin might subsist on sunlight? I lay on the kitchen floor, made heavy, and watched the changing clouds or smoke drift over through a hole in the roof. If I slept, it was only momentary, churned briefly through the terrible machinery of dreams. The pain was dull and thin now, like humidity, like a blunt object.
In the evening — if it could be called evening, with a sulfuric lump of light rising up out of the east — the radio came on. It did this by itself. The stalks growing from my arms had become so entangled with those growing out of the floorboards that I could hardly move at all. It only hissed, and began playing one pop song over and over. I knew it from somewhere, and was made instinctively sad, but could not remember why. When the wind came in through the missing wall of the apartment, the sound of the flowers brushing up against one another was so loud it drowned out the music.
Around three a.m., the song stopped playing. “Hello?” said my mother’s voice from the radio. “Hello?”
“Mamma,” I said. “I’m here.”
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
“I’m here, I’m here. Please don’t hang up.”
“You’re so quiet.”
“I can’t move.”
And she said, “Where are you?” and I thought that something very terrible must have happened to her, and that she was standing somewhere as a field of wheat, or a rosebush, and could not remember the things that had come before.
“I’m at home. My apartment — ”
“Your apartment,” she said, and her voice began to crumble into static; great chunks of it simply broke off and fell into the sea of white noise. The sound hissed for a while, ebbing in, and then cut out. Everything was very quiet in its wake. I could hear the shoots spreading, budding out of places I had touched all across the room. They were a part of me, so I could feel the tiny winged creatures hatching and nosing blindly into stalks beside the fridge, and the colony of ants that had come up out of the exposed floor. I no longer felt the pain of them at all. Instead, the sturdy blooms at my back lifted me slightly, and I was pillowed. One seed began to unfurl ever so precisely in the cool bed of my right eye, then the same in my left, and I was blind. There was very little of me left. I could not remember things, like the bomb that had destroyed the city, or that nearly everyone was dead, perhaps even my mother, perhaps even me. The roots of the poppies reached back through the channels behind my eyes and dug their pale fingers into my brain. It was not bad to be a field of poppies, even if we were inside an apartment building. Eventually, a little rain began to fall through the hole in the roof, and all we could know was the absolute pleasure of growth under this fine mist.
I thought that would be the end, but we woke later, all unsettled. Without eyes, we looked up. I could not be sure where we were, only that it was dark, and something was moving through the poppies toward me, at its center, though really there was very little of me left. I thought of the roots of a sapling, breaking a clay pot but holding the soil’s shape; perhaps this had happened to my body. Someone continued forward through the shoots, stepping carefully around us, and without seeing, I knew it was you. For a moment, I thought that you had come back, and sat beside the bed where I was dying, but instead, I was not dying, and the bed was not my own, but a bed we had shared once, and there had been no bomb, but only some slight sound in the night, and I had rolled over, and you were asleep.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing a tunnel.
If a tunnel only has one end, is it really just a long hole? What if the tunnel loops around to itself like the number six? What is it then? A tube? A very simple maze?
I found what I think is a tunnel last week while exploring the woods. It was a small, dark hole that I could only fit into by getting down on my hands and knees. As I made my way, I was overcome with excitement thinking of all the things the tunnel might lead me to. A treasure seemed like the most obvious outcome, but an isolated world where dinosaurs and megafauna still roamed freely didn’t seem impossible. This tunnel could be my key to a new life.
Being only 500 miles from Toronto, the drug capital of Canada, I crossed my fingers I wasn’t crawling through a drug tunnel. Crossing my fingers made it harder to crawl, and after a while they had cramped up in that position, but I was too excited to stop.
After about six hours (I counted out loud to keep track of the time) of crawling in complete darkness, I took a nap. Unfortunately I couldn’t count out loud while sleeping, so I have no idea how long I was in there. Judging by the number of bugs on me when I woke up, assuming one bug crawled on me per hour, I was probably asleep for a few hundred hours.
Being deprived of light, time, sound, friendship, and water left my mind in a strange state. I began to question everything. Where was I going? Why did this tunnel exist? If I ever got out of the tunnel, would life be too overwhelming and would I find myself needing to return to the tunnel for true comfort? Had I become a tunnel person?
I made myself a promise: If after six more hours of crawling, I didn’t find anything, I would slowly crawl backwards until I got out. But after crawling forward for only another minute I hit a wall. It was the end of the tunnel and there was nothing there. There never had been. The tunnel was an illusion. It promised me things it couldn’t deliver and at the end was just nothingness. I had never asked for this tunnel but it was thrust upon me due to poor decision making.
When I finally emerged into the real world again, I heard someone yell, “There he is!” At first I assumed someone had spotted a celebrity, because that’s what I always yell when I spot one. (The only one I’ve ever spotted was Alan Alda.) I looked around and pulled out my autograph book. It turned out to be a search party looking for me. I had never felt so important! Not important enough for anyone to ask for my autograph, apparently, but import to be mentioned on the news as “a confused senior citizen.”
That tunnel stripped me down to nothing, only to build me up again. I was refreshed, renewed, and determined to never hope for anything again.
BEST FEATURE: The guttural screams I released on more than one occasion echoed in a really neat way. WORST FEATURE: When making my way backwards out of the tunnel, I had to crawl through the spot where I had defecated earlier. That was really my fault more than the tunnel’s, I guess.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a rug.
Debbie Graber’s short story collection Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday mines a rich tradition of office-set literature. One might point to such antecedents as Ed Park’s Personal Days or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, but the roots probably lie all the way back in “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In Herman Melville’s existential tale of the absurdity of bureaucracy, the titular scribe repeatedly refuses to work, offering only the gentle reasoning that he “would prefer not to.” There are more than a few Bartleby-types in Graber’s book, office drones and social losers who, in small but significant ways, push against the idea that their job titles define their identities even as they dutifully show up to work. These include Gregg Fisher, a martyr to mean-spirited company gossip whose disappearance foments his coworkers’ angst; the second-person protagonist of “What do you think is wrong with you?”, a call center representative whose vulgar outburst will probably get him fired; Kyle, a fundamentalist Christian who alternately lusts after and despises his nonbelieving co-worker; and Kevin Kramer himself, a sadistic senior vice president who ruins his own company for no reason other than that he can. Their rebellions, like Bartleby’s, are ultimately self-destructive, demonstrating that alienation is often the price of independence.
There are more than a few Bartleby-types in Graber’s book, office drones and social losers who […] push against the idea that their job titles define their identities even as they dutifully show up to work.
Graber is especially interested the tension between the collective and the individual in the workplace. To that end, a few of the stories are structured around disembodied narrators/protagonists — not quite the first-person plural We but nonetheless suggestive of groupthink. The title character in “Gregg Fisher’s Pontiac Vibe” never actually appears in-scene. Instead, the story relates the escalating gossip that surrounds him, the refrain “Someone said” filling in for co-workers who prefer to remain nameless, e.g. “Someone at the company was seriously afraid that Gregg Fisher was a carrier of the Black Death, and wrote an anonymous note to HR.” It’s the kind of device seen in the work of Stephen Millhauser, but Graber’s application of it to the office setting is innovative and insightful. Our sympathy is with the pariah; Fisher is a tragic character, a scapegoat probably conscious of his status but unwilling or unable to confront his accusers. Similarly, “New Directions” takes the form of a series of unsigned memos from the executives of Production Solutions, a company whose programming staff has apparently vanished rapture-style. The office’s gradual descent into chaos is juxtaposed with the matter-of-fact tone of professional discourse:
Employees:
Some of you may have heard that the clothes the software department members were wearing at the time of their mass disappearance were found in the dumpster near the facilities shed across the street. This is unsubstantiated. No clothes were found in or around the dumpster.
Graber has performed at Second City and the collection’s first-person stories betray that influence, reading like comedic monologues ideal for live performance. She is masterful at crafting a certain loquacious brand of narrator whose desperation for an attentive audience leads to inadvertent confessions.
In “Northanger Abbey,” a Coover-esque piece of metafiction, the narrator describes the novel he intends to write, and it soon becomes apparent that his book is little more than a feeble revenge fantasy. “Back to Me,” a one-sided conversation between the narrator and her psychiatrist, is rife with moments in which the reader is much more aware of what the narrator has let on than the narrator herself; when she says that her self-appointed boyfriend Bret took her on dates to places like “his parking garage or the alley behind Duffy’s” the dramatic irony makes the narrator’s delusion pathetically and hilariously clear. Perhaps Graber’s monologists talk so much to distract themselves from past traumas and transgressions. As they vacillate between neurotic self-absorption and wounded compassion, they call to mind the narrator of another office lit classic, Bob Slocum of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened.
The two best stories are about the least likable characters. “Winners and Losers” features an aspiring screenwriter referred to only as “the winner,” a despicable guy who separates people into the two titular categories. He is pickup artist philosophy incarnate. Throughout most of the story the only thing that demarcates him as a winner is his artificially inflated self-esteem. He’s broke, his family has cut him off, and he spends all the money he has left on a screenwriting class. But the problem, the narrative insists, is us; we don’t see the big picture. “Losers might find it concerning to blow their entire savings on Robert McKee’s Story Seminar at the LAX Embassy Suites, but winners keep their eyes directly on the prize.” But Graber resists an easy ending in which the winner earns his comeuppance or continues to toil in failure the rest of his life. Instead, the winner wins: He gets an agent. He embarks on a lucrative screenwriting career and gets everything he’s ever wanted. And success doesn’t change him; he remains as nasty and self-absorbed as ever. What begins as yet another fictional ethnography of a sad sack loser becomes a refreshingly cynical meditation on the arbitrary nature of success. Likewise, Kevin Kramer is a loser who transforms himself through sheer force of will into a winner. A sociopath in pursuit of power for its own sake, his impressive (though made-up) resume and facility for con jobs has snagged him a senior VP position at Entertainment Solutions. His demanding, can-do demeanor earns him the admiration of the executives even as his erratic approach to management sabotages the company. He fires valuable employees on a whim, is profligate with company funds, alienates peers and clients alike. The only sign of any human tenderness he exhibits is when he browses the internet for “online photos of narwhals, the rare unicorn whales he remembers reading about as a child.”
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday is at its best in moments like this, when Graber probes the surface impersonality of office culture and reveals it to be the grounds of a unique vulnerability. After all, our co-workers, though we may not know them well and they may be sociopathic bastards, are the people we spend as much time with as our closest loved ones. Insightfully utilizing the tools of the institution itself — business jargon, circular speech, memorandums, emails, gossip, confession — in Graber’s hands the office is a microcosm of life itself.
At our house you get points for speaking in movie lines.[1] Since my daughters are still technically “children,”[2] we have a limited pool to draw from, basically kids’ flicks, plus a handful of extras.
Let’s say I ask one of the girls to move her puzzle pieces off the middle of the living room floor, since people and sundry pets often walk there and whose fault is it going to be when pieces end up missing from her game. Say my daughter refuses, loudly, dramatically, bloviating at length on how life is so totally unfair. I will struggle, and fail, to empathize in such a situation. How bad can your life be when it’s entirely made up of variations on the dual themes of having everything anyone could ever possibly want and being a royal pain in my ass? But instead of explaining, even more loudly and amid a profusion of hand gestures, why she owes me an occasional favor given that I am her father who gave her life and clothes her and feeds her and wiped her butt, for God’s sakes, for years on end, several times a day, not that long ago, I will simply say “Thank you for nothing, you useless reptile.”[3] My daughter will smile and, while cognizant of the reproach implicit in the statement, will feel the warmth of unthreatening intimacy that I am gifting her, and then she’ll turn around and still do whatever she damn pleases.[4]
[1] Not points as in you-win-the-House-Cup points, but the metaphorical kind, as in the shared but unspoken tally that modulates the interactions of people who spend a lot of time together.
[2] At eleven and eight (or so), according to the child development experts, they are in “latency,” which is basically the stage between little kid and teenager, but which is latent only outwardly, in that puberty is not yet visible in their bodies but very much happening. This is supposed to be the best time to be a parent, the lull between the bewildering endlessness of taking care of a baby who might roll off a couch, then a toddler who might trip down the stairs, then a preschooler who might jump out a window, and the emotional fracturing that dealing with an adolescent is guaranteed to cause.
And they’re great, my kids, they really are. Smart, healthy, loving, alive little things for whom Mommy-Daddy-me-and-oh-yeah-her is still the core of everything. They’re not so great with each other, understandably. That’s what happens when the PTB pick your roommate for you. They also often display, ahem, “deficiencies in the regulation of affective states,” as the wise ones say. Still, when I remember myself as a teenager, I shudder at what the future has in store. And I usually restrict myself to picturing best-case scenarios.
[3] That’s Jay Baruchel as Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. A favorite.
[4] And then there will be yelling and hand gesturing. I’m no saint.
Or say I’m reading on the couch and a child-shaped meteorite suddenly blocks my line of sight and makes my heart do a cartwheel. She’ll yell “It just be raining black people in New York!”[5] and then slip away as I try to catch my breath. Or say I’m in the kitchen and I ask my wife, depending on how the day went, whether she wants a peeled-and-sliced kiwi or some banana topped with ice cream topped with peanut butter topped with whipped cream topped with hot fudge and sprinkles. She’ll respond by bellowing “Anybody want a peanut?,”[6] which will inevitably lead to twenty minutes of Inigo and Vizzini and Miracle Max impersonations.
The dream, we all agree, is to communicate entirely through quotes, our borrowed-but-private, secret-but-not-weird-secret language.
I’m not blind to the potential pitfalls of continuous, perhaps even compulsive, film watching. Movies, to begin with, are commodities, the result of profit seeking as much as artistic vision. American movies in particular are designed to motivate consumption beyond the viewing experience, what with tie-in toys and merchandizing and novelizations and TV serializations and sequels and prequels and re-releases and reboots and adaptations for the stage and the ice and Halloween costumes and all the rest. I’m embarrassed to tell you how many objects in my house bare the visage of Elsa from Frozen.[7]
The dream, we all agree, is to communicate entirely through quotes, our borrowed-but-private, secret-but-not-weird-secret language.
[5] That’s Will Smith as Officer James Edwards in Men in Black, which, despite containing some PG-level forays into race relations and adult sexuality, and the occasional cuss word, I have deemed perfectly safe for children as young as six and my kids totally love it.
[6] That, obviously, is the incomparable Andre the Giant as Fezzik in The Princess Bride, only the most quotable movie ever. If I was in charge of the world I would make it a criminal offense not to introduce children to The Princess Bride as soon as they’re old enough to sing the Alphabet Song. You think they can’t handle the torture scene? Watch what Gru goes through trying to sneak into Vector’s lair and then we can talk.
[7] I’m also embarrassed to tell you about my awesome collection of Lego minifigs, including some choice hard-to-find items such as a custom-made Admiral Ackbar figurine that I’m not going to tell you how much I paid for. I keep them in sealed Ziplock bags and specially designed display shelves, just like Will Ferrell’s dad character in The Lego Movie. Here’s your pants. Show’s over.
Then there are the effects on my kids’ precious psyches, which, since watching Inside Out multiple times, I can’t help but think of as the Grand Canyon with high-tech command stations run by talking jellybeans. Movies have the power to shape them (my kids, not the jellybeans) in profound, irretrievable ways, psychologically,[8] politically,[9] sexually.[10] My daughters being daughters, I also have to be concerned about gender-role socialization and heteronormativity and the patriarchy and all that shit.[11] And don’t even get me started on all the murders and dead parents.[12]
[8] All parents should spend several hours a day reading academic papers about the effects of media on their children’s psyches, as soon as they’re done watching The Princess Bride. I’m a sucker for cutesy titles such as “Look Out New World, Here I Come!: Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children’s Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks,” and “Am I Too Fat to Be a Princess?: Examining the Effects of Popular Children’s Media on Young Girls’ Body Image,” and, my favorite, “Pass the Popcorn: Obesogenic Behavior and Stigma in Children’s Movies.” Or, as Peter O’Toole’s Anton Ego would put it: “I don’t like food, I llllllove it. If I don’t lllllllove it, I don’t sw-WA-looooow.”
[9] Did you know The Incredibles is an Ayn-Randian parable about the dangers of welfare-state mediocrity? Did you know Despicable Me encourages Satanism? Did you know The Lion King is soaked in proto-fascist imagery? Did you know The Iron Giant is anti-gun propaganda, Happy Feet is environmentalist propaganda, Astro Boy is Marxist propaganda? Did you even see Astro Boy? It’s a film adaptation of the Japanese TV show adaptation of the manga books from the 1950s about a child-shaped android created as a Pinocchio/Galatea for a government scientist who then becomes a crime fighter (the android, not the scientist). It’s awful. And Marxist.
Did you know The Incredibles is an Ayn-Randian parable about the dangers of welfare-state mediocrity? Did you know Despicable Me encourages Satanism?
[10] I’m not talking about the “subliminal” pornographic messages rumored across the Internet to be embedded in Disney movies. You know, a mysterious voice says “take your clothes off” in the middle of Aladdin and the undersea palace in The Little Mermaid looks like a giant penis. First of all, if you can see it it’s not fucking subliminal. Second of all, those are all ridiculous myths concocted by dirty-minded morons. The only true one is the one about the topless painting in The Rescuers. Having said that, there is something a little sinister about, say, Disney’s obsession with bondage. I mean it. Watch Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Tangled in succession and tell me I’m making it up. If you have the time, google “kenneti disney dungeons.” You’ll thank me, I hope.
[11] There are the old-timey handsome-prince-true-love’s-kiss-beautiful-but-helpless-damsel inanities of Snow White and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty to combat, but also the third-wave pseudo feminism of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Mulan and the post-culture-wars-post-Sex-and-the-City compromises of The Incredibles and Tangled and Maleficent to unpack. And what is up with Elsa’s transformation from Frigid Elsa to Sexy Elsa in the middle of “Let It Go”? And what is up with male heroes looking different and female ones all looking the same? Do yourself a favor and google “gianna tumblr sameface syndrome.”
[12] Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me why so many children’s stories involve death, especially parental death. You would think children would hate such stories, not drag their parents to the theater half-a-dozen times and then pester them to pay $39.99 for the DVD when they could just as easily stream the thing. But no. They witness in utter and all-too-real horror as Nemo’s mother and seventy-eight million of his siblings are eaten by a barracuda, and seconds later are completely entranced by the question of whether Nemo’s going to get to go to school. It’s like magic.
Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me why so many children’s stories involve death, especially parental death.
Are we happy that kids can do this? It must be developmentally okay, since I have the death of Bambi’s mother securely stored in my long-term memory shelf, immediately followed by Thumper saying “He doesn’t walk very good, does he?,” and I turned out relatively well adjusted. Anyway, parental death was already a staple of the Grimm’s tales and of myths and legends the world over, though why this was necessary I can’t fathom. It can’t have been easy in the olden days to reach the age of five without having been exposed to, like, actual death.
And yet, despite the psychological risks and the brainwashing and the merchandizing, I still think it’s worth it. Just for the laughter it’s worth it. My family and I hunt especially for the throwaway line, the one that does not advance the plot but is only there because the movie gods have decreed this is a propitious moment for you to laugh. Like when a ten-year-old girl hand-fashioned in clay blurts out “Go ahead, eat me! I’m sure I’m delicious!”[13] Laughter is that rare thing that both feels good and is unambiguously good for you. I never ever take for granted what, say, Kung Fu Panda or Chicken Run can do for a person, young or old, in the good-humor department.[14]
Movies are such concentrated experiences. In a couple of hours (usually less for G and PG fare) a movie throws at you both a world and a three-act full-on story set in that world. If it is at all effective, you absorb it, then become immersed, then become invested. This is true even of mediocre outings like Thumbelina or Cars. Human beings are story-loving creatures and there’s been enough said about that. A novel offers a more complex and sophisticated narrative experience, but who has time for that?,[15] and anyway it will take days or weeks to read. A film is consumed in a few bites, but somehow crams into those bites an astonishingly vivid visual experience[16] plus beautiful music plus humor and action and drama all rolled in together plus, in many cases, satire and social commentary. And I can discuss all of these things with my wife or my friends or my kids immediately after the viewing experience and then watch the whole thing over again and still not have exhausted an entire afternoon.[17]
[13] That’s Elle Fanning as Winnie Portley-Rind in The Boxtrolls, the only movie I’ve ever seen in which the villain gets his comeuppance by cheese-allergy-induced explosion.
[14] That laughing is a good thing is one of the few things everybody in the world ever has and will forever agree on. The Bible is pro laughter, “A merry heart is like medicine,” and so is the Koran, “He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.” Lao Tse recommended that we laugh at everything and Plato said even the gods love jokes. As Catelyn Stark says in A Game of Thrones, “Laugher is poison to fear.” Doctors love laughter too, because it’s a painkiller and helps prevent heart attacks and cancer. Seriously, google it. When you have something that appeals to Jesus and George R.R. Martin and the Surgeon General, you know you have something.
Of course not all comedies are funny. I once sat through the entirety of Madagascar III in a theater packed with children and their parents and at no point did anyone laugh at anything that was going on onscreen. The only funny moment, Chris Rock’s Marty the Zebra dancing and singing “TA TA TARARARARA TA TA CIRCUS! TA TA TARARARARA TA TA AFRO!,” had been given away by the trailers.
[15] I once met an adult woman who, being of sound mind and in full use of her faculties, told me her favorite movie was Taken 2.
[16] The best animators are master world-makers. A recent favorite at my house was Big Hero 6’s San Fransokio, half San Francisco, half Tokyo, half superhero anime, half Boy Meets World (although now it’s Girl Meets World).
If you don’t love the Cat Bus, I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with you.
But you have to look elsewhere in the world, expand your movie horizons, to find true originality. Hayao Miyazaki seems to be able to invent new colors, and has no interest in borders, between red and blue, between the city and the country, between fantasy and reality, between wakefulness and sleep. Also, if you don’t love the Cat Bus, I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with you.
In a totally different vibe, Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea look like some discarded South Park cutouts fell into Van Gogh’s brain.
[17] My youngest daughter still wants to watch Mulan and Pocahontas over and over. This drives my eleven-year-old crazy even though she emerged out of this stage only recently. But it’s not just a kids’ thing. I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption approximately nine hundred and sixteen times. I once saw it twice back-to-back. Why? Maybe because I’m Irish, but also because I love it and I like to be around things that I love.
And that’s just movies in general. The really good ones are as fulfilling as great works of art in any other medium, illuminating, perplexing, immediately gratifying, elusively sophisticated, both mind-expanding and soul-expanding. Don’t believe for a second the stereotype that kids’ movies are all the same.[18]
These are corporate products, intended to appeal, literally, to all the children in theworld.
Yes, there are lots of conventions that must be adhered to. The overwhelming majority emphasizes “family values” like honesty, generosity, and loyalty. They always[19] take place in morally just worlds, in which “good” characters triumph and are rewarded and “evil” characters are both defeated and humiliated. Parental deaths suck, but they are invariably the catalyst for the main character’s coming-of-age-metamorphosis, as are the onscreen deaths of mentors such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore, and Oogway the Turtle.[20] Yes, children’s movies peddle the infallibility of “believing in yourself,” even when such a sentiment makes no sense in the context of the story.[21] But how can they not? These are corporate products, intended to appeal, literally, to all the children in theworld. They are so successful at it because they understand children, and children, especially young children, are the same everywhere.[22]
[18] Take AntZ and A Bug’s Life. Granted, neither is a masterpiece, but it’s amazing how two films released at around the same time and having essentially the same plot (misfit ant starts out mocked and shunned by all but eventually saves the entire colony and wins the love of the beautiful ant princess) and the same message (be brave, follow your heart, be yourself, and everything will work out for you and everyone else, except for the bad guys, of course) will go about it in such dramatically dissimilar ways.
AntZ constructs a brown-and-orange world of claustrophobia and cynicism, voiced by some of its era’s biggest box-office draws: Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Jennifer Lopez, Gene Hackman. It’s half driven by the personality of its star (Woody Allen) and half by an inexplicable desire to channel Full Metal Jacket into an animated comedy. One sight gag involves a soldier so badly wounded only his head is left. A Bug’s Life is all blues and greens and joyful eccentrics doing their thing: Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Phyllis Diller, and on and on. Happy-happy and totally forgettable.
[19] Okay, almost always. Have you seen Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle? That thing is to children’s movies what Cranberry Redbull is to cranberry juice.
It’s derivative, but derivative is the point.
[20] And Gandalf. They’re all Gandalf. And Tolkien ripped Gandalf off from medieval stories and Viking sagas. Everybody loves a good father figure dying. It’s derivative, but derivative is the point.
[21] If you want to see a particularly egregious example, watch the straight-to-video Mulan II sometime. Better yet, don’t. It’s awful.
[22] Yes, I know, animated movies are Western products built by Western minds for Western interests. Yes, I know they are racist and heteronormative and pro-capitalist and in all probability edited in the presence of government operatives wearing dark glasses and earpieces. But you can’t deny their popularity. They are universally appealing. They just are.
Ironically, this enforced conventionality, born of financial decree, this almost infrangible predictability, allows for clever filmmakers to work in complexity along the edges, to challenge viewers’ expectations and force them, at least the more attentive ones, to think. I’m not talking about trying to sneak some hidden message into unwary minds. It’s the other way around. The good ones want you to notice. As long as they aren’t too obvious about it, they can get away with a lot, precisely because parents and kids see their creations as pre-approved, and therefore harmless, entertainment. Because of this I think of the best children’s movies not only as art, but also as immensely powerful philosophical and pedagogical tools, as great art, in other words.
Ironically, this enforced conventionality allows for clever filmmakers to work in complexity along the edges, to challenge viewers’ expectations and force them, at least the more attentive ones, to think.
Say my daughters notice me giving a dollar to a homeless man. They want to know why I gave him money, and why then I don’t give money to all the other homeless people, and maybe I’ll talk about fairness and serendipity and the fickle alliance between your moral compass and your emotions, and then we’ll really get into it, for how is it fair that little Nancy has a pony and her father drives a Maserati and we just have a Prius and a cat who scratches the furniture, and how is it fair that we drive a Prius but little Natalie’s mom lost her job and they had to sell their car and the teachers are requesting donations so they won’t get evicted from their apartment, and how is it fair that there are millions of people around the world who don’t have anything at all to eat but everybody’s worried that poor people in America are too fat?
So I’ll steer the conversation towards Wall-E. The one with the robot.[23]Wall-E hits all the conventional buttons: self-discovery,[24] love,[25] friendship, family, loyalty, the works. (I’m assuming you’ve seen Wall-E. If you haven’t, please refer to the analog hyperlinks, aka footnotes). But the storyboasts some glaring plot holes and contradictions. Based on no evidence other than my own reading of this bodaciously excellent film, I choose to assume these are deliberate challenges, placed there by artists with something real to say struggling against the straightjacket of cliché.[26]
[23] The world is barren and brown and covered in trash. Humanity has escaped to the stars and lives in tranquil comfort in a giant cruise liner called the Axiom. All human needs are met by an inexhaustible supply of robots, each of which follows a specific “directive” — its raison d’être — and is designated by an acronymic combination of letters that can also be pronounced as a cute and merchandizable name. All of them were created by Buy N’ Large, the very same private conglomerate that was responsible for the overconsumption that led to global catastrophe. Wall-E is the last functioning cleanup robot from the army of identical garbage-bots that were left behind on Earth to deal with the mess. Wall-E is alone and lonely until he meets Eve, a kick-ass babe who can fly and shoot lasers from her arms and looks like an iPhone. Eve’s directive is to find growing vegetation on the surface, but she is quickly taken in by the Chaplinesque garbage-bot and they fall in love. They eventually end up on the Axiom, where human beings have languished and expanded into helpless blobs under the well-meaning attentions of their mechanical caretakers. Nominally in charge is the ship’s human Captain, whose name is never spoken but is, according to the Internet, B. McCrea.
Shockingly, following a series of exciting and hilarious adventures, Wall-E and Eve team up with the Captain and together they save the human race, return to Earth to rebuild the world, and live happily ever after. The key to mankind’s salvation, it turns out, was a little wisp of a plant, which Wall-E found on Earth and gifted to Eve. The plant, a symbol of the Earth’s capacity for rebirth and of man’s yearning for nature, adds an always-timely environmentalist slant to the proceedings.
[24] Although I love Wall-E, I remain pissed off at the misleading marketing campaign that preceded its theatrical release. The trailers implied that Wall-E developed “a personality” and human-like emotions after his (he’s definitely a he) long sojourn of solitude. In fact, all the robots in the film have personalities and are human-like in most ways. Isaac Asimov wrote somewhere that there are only two kinds of robot stories: “robots as threat” and “robots as pathos.” Wall-E is neither, because it’s not a robot story at all.
Why is it that American fiction abounds with unattractive loser men who somehow lure gorgeous, extraordinary women into marrying them?
[25] Why is it that American fiction abounds with unattractive loser men who somehow lure gorgeous, extraordinary women into marrying them? Eve, the perfect girl who literally falls from the sky, is magically won over, as they always are, because Wall-E is sensitive and makes her laugh and that’s all women really want after all. When they get older and bring this up, I’ll ask my daughters to guess the ratio among screenwriters between unattractive loser men and gorgeous, extraordinary women.
[26] Consider a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. The protagonists are watching an old video in which the President of Buy N’ Large (played by Fred Willard) is welcoming Earth’s refugees to the Axiom, when he throws out this little tidbit: “due to the effects of microgravity you will experience some… uh… slight bone loss.” The screen shows a graphic of ballooning bodies supported by disintegrating skeletons. The moment passes and is forgotten. Except that, now that this has been established, it makes it impossible for humanity to return to Earth after several generations and five hundred years on the ship. Keeping this in mind, you might be forgiven for screaming, after the credits begin to roll, “It’s not a happy ending at all! They’re all going to die!” I can neither confirm nor deny that I did this when I saw it for the first time.
Under a patina of platitudes,[27]Wall-E deals in moral grayness: Is it okay for the audience, an audience of mostly children no less, to root for the movie’s robotic heroes, Wall-E and Eve, both of whom are unapologetically selfish?[28] This is a pro-selfishness movie, is what I’m saying. There’s no need for altruism, goes the message. You don’t need to waste time thinking about other people, you see, because your needs will magically align with those of everyone else. You can be selfish and you can be good, so you’re all right.
By encouraging ambivalence and strong responses, Wall-E demands to be taken seriously.
Wall-E the robot is cute and funny, and he screeps and blizzles in ways that would make R2D2 turn purple with envy. But he is also thoroughly self-absorbed, not unlike the heroes of more “adult” movies like Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Is Wall-E adopting the moral metaphysic of these films or satirizing them? Unclear, at least to me. Either way, its message is now problematic, at best controversial and at worst pernicious.[29] This is a strength, not a weakness. By encouraging ambivalence and strong responses, Wall-E demands to be taken seriously.
[27] Best reflected in Captain McCrea’s heartfelt “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!” I only recently put two-and-two together and figured out Captain McCrea was voiced by Jeff Garlin, the dad from The Goldbergs. Also, the survive/live line is uttered by Chiwetel Ejiofor playing Solomon Northrup in Twelve Years a Slave. Movies are like onions. So many layers!
[28] You don’t believe it, do you? Think about the key scene in the movie. Wall-E has been wounded and lies dying in the Axiom’s garbage dumpster. Eve tries desperately to help him but to no avail. She must decide whether to stay with her beloved or follow her directive, to abandon him and use the plant to save the world. Eve chooses the former, she will stay with Wall-E, damn the consequences for the rest of the humans and robots on the ship. But wait, Wall-E, slowly, painfully, brings himself to the plant and hands it to Eve. Take it, he gestures. Eve shakes her head. And then Wall-E twists his face in a way that Eve recognizes, “if you take the ship back to Earth,” he reminds her by the movement of his binocular-shaped eyebrows, “we can use the spare parts I’ve stored to repair me. You must save the world, in order to save me!” And that’s exactly what happens.
[29] Traditional morality almost always teaches that selfishness is bad. So do Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, and they would know. Kant’s notion of “categorical imperative” demands that the right thing to do be always what you would want anybody else in the same situation to do. Mill’s “utilitarianism” determines the right thing by calculating the amount of happiness that can come out of the alternatives course of action, except that you’re not allowed to think about your own happiness, but about that of everyone involved. Both Kant and Mill, then, subscribe to the core of Biblical morality, the Golden Rule: treat other people as if they’re as important as you. Wall-E and Eve’s intended actions were immoral because they only thought about themselves. And remember that you can’t argue that all’s well that ends well, since all the humans die in the end because of microgravity.
But wait. Isn’t Golden-Rule morality totally unrealistic? Nobody can be reasonably expected to be completely selfless. That’s why religion has to offer divine reward to good people. Kant and Mill, as it happens, both agree with that. They believe that good people are good because they have been trained to feel good when they do good things. In other words, good people are good because it makes them happy, and so are, deep down, acting selfishly. It’s true. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll show you. So Wall-E and Eve, who were just trying to be happy, might have been good after all. See how much there is to think about just because a pair of binoculars on threads wanted to get it on with a flying iPhone?
Say my kids actually pay attention to what the movies they’re watching are actually telling them, and they realize that the two main lessons they are given over and over — “always follow your heart” and “always be loyal to your family” — can’t always coexist harmoniously.
Or say my kids actually pay attention to what the movies they’re watching are actually telling them, and they realize that the two main lessons they are given over and over — “always follow your heart” and “always be loyal to your family” — can’t always coexist harmoniously.[30] That, say, duty should sometimes overrule personal preference, but determining when this is the case is problematic to say the least, particularly so in our era of instant access to unlimited information, of video games that surpass reality in every way but the ones that matter, of socially-condoned self absorption.[31] I could easily conjure for them the dilemmas in The Little Mermaid or Mulan, both of which deal explicitly with this tension between self and other. The problem is that both of those movies are full of shit, albeit with fantastic tunes. Follow your heart, they say, and everything will be all right. Follow your heart, and all conflicts within as well as without will be resolved. No, sorry. We’re not doing that. We’re bringing out the BFGs, the Holy Trinity of children’s films: the Toy Story series.[32]
[30] The belief that the different goods in the world are often in irreconcilable conflict with each other — as in, the more freedom you have the less equality, and vice-versa — is called “agonism.” Just in case you’ve run out of ways to impress your friends at parties.
[31] Social conservatives have one thing going for them: Too much freedom is bad for us. And when social institutions disintegrate under the weight of freedom, and the technologies that enable that freedom, then people become aimless and apathetic and dangerous. There are scientific studies that show that too many cereal options produce harmful psychological effects. The problem is that so-cons wouldn’t be caught dead citing a scientific study, having embraced anti-intellectualism as the basis of their political ideology.
[32] In the world of the Toy Story films, toys are alive. They can move and act and have lives of their own, and relationships with each other. Horribly, in the presence of human beings they must pretend to be inert, and let themselves be manhandled and mutilated in the worst sorts of ways. The source of this rule is unexplained, but there’s no doubt that a toy’s greatest pleasure and primary aim in life, analogous to the directives for Wall-E’s robots, is to belong to a child and be loved and played with (and I’m sorry but I can’t make that not sound dirty in my head).
The source of this rule is unexplained, but there’s no doubt that a toy’s greatest pleasure and primary aim in life, analogous to the directives for Wall-E’s robots, is to belong to a child and be loved and played with (and I’m sorry but I can’t make that not sound dirty in my head).
In the first Toy Story the action is focused on the favorite playthings of a ten-year-old named Andy. Their leader is Woody, a cloth-and-cotton old-timey cowboy who, somehow, despite being a fifties-era toy in the room of a boy living in the nineties, is Andy’s favorite. The core group includes Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles), Slinky Dog (Jim Varney), Rex the cowardly dinosaur (Vizz… ehm… Wallace Shawn), and Hamm the piggy bank (John Ratzenberger). (I’m telling you who does the voices because that’s a holy-crap!-level ensemble.) Needless to say, they all have hilarious lines that echo in my house whenever they populate my television screen. The only girl toy of note is a china Little Bo Beep (poor, wasted Annie Potts), who exists solely to wind Woody’s analog insides into improbable knots of Platonic desire. She has no funny lines.
The plot involves the arrival of a new toy, Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger, who does not know he’s a toy and behaves as if he is actually a Space Ranger, but nevertheless crumples to the ground whenever Andy enters the room. Woody and Buzz, due to the latter’s stubborn and unacceptable desire to be awesome, become separated from Andy and must escape from the clutches of Sid, the evil boy who doesn’t take care of his toys.
In the second one, Woody is stolen by a toy collector with a poultry fetish, who intends to sell a set of old-timey cowboy toys from the fifties to a museum, where they’ll be put on permanent exhibit. The third one deals with Andy’s impending departure for college and the uncertain future that awaits the toys that have not been broken, thrown away, given away, or lost. It’s about death.
An indisputable asset of all three movies is the presence of the three-eyed “alien” toys, first rescued from a claw machine. They’re mindless, ignorant religious fundamentalist and thus hilarious.
Much like the robots in Wall-E, the toys in Toy Story are persons in every way except for physical appearance. They think and feel and love and have hopes and fears and dreams. Their existential condition is meant to be as morally significant as that of the human characters. Except that it’s much, much more horrible. They are obligated by their very essence of toyness to be owned, to be under the total control of another person (their “kid”), except that the other person doesn’t know they’re alive.[33]
Their existential condition is meant to be as morally significant as that of the human characters. Except that it’s much, much more horrible.
So in the first one Woody crushes Buzz’s dreams and indoctrinates him into the ultimate desirability of belonging to somebody else. In the second one Woody fights to ruin the plans of a group of toys who want to be taken care of forever, rather than destroyed and lost by some moronic child, and indoctrinates Jesse the cowgirl into the ultimate desirability of belonging to somebody else (not surprisingly, Buzz and Jesse become an item). And in the third one Woody faces a tyrant who, through admittedly authoritarian and nepotistic policies, is trying to create a safe space of self-determination for toys. Our hero is forced to remind all of his friends over and over, even in the face of obliteration by dumpster furnace, of the ultimate desirability of belonging to somebody else.[34]
That’s right. The Toy Story series is pro-slavery (Andy’s toys are branded with their master’s name on the bottom of their shoes) and Woody the cowboy is nothing but a toy Uncle Tom.[35]
[33] If a kid knows her toys are sentient beings, then naturally she can’t “own” them. That would be wrong. In the same way that it’s wrong for Hugh Jackman to kill all the Hugh Jackman clones he creates for his magic act in The Prestige, and it’s wrong for us to kill cows, grind their flesh, shape it into patties and eat it as burgers if Peter Singer convinces us that cows are people. The Western world abandoned slavery when it internalized the idea that non-white people were just like white people except not white. This, unfortunately, only happened following many centuries of people engaging in the slow and painstaking process of looking at what was right in front of their fucking faces. I can’t wait for my kids to be old enough to watch Blade Runner and Ex Machina, by the way.
[34] Aristotle believed that some people were just born to be slaves. Here’s his argument: slavery is such a horrible, unbearable condition, that a normal human being who found himself a slave would not hesitate to kill himself. Any slave who does not kill himself is therefore inherently predisposed to not mind being a slave. Albert Camus countered that, for all people, the only question that bears asking is “why shouldn’t I just kill myself right now?” They were both, by most accounts, lovely guys.
[35] In case you don’t know, because it used to be read in all middle-schools and high-schools in America but these days is no longer, possibly because its characters are morally complicated beings rather than straightforward heroes and villains in a slavery-is-bad oversimplified fantasy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the story of the relationship between a white, slave-owning family, the Shelbys, and several of their slaves, most notably Uncle Tom himself, who, despite being treated as infrahuman and having his family torn to pieces, remains loyal to his master to the very end.
This isn’t, like, technically the case, obviously, insofar as the filmmakers and the parents and the children understand that this is a fantasy in which inanimate objects come to life and they are not meant to represent real human beings that anybody should expect to encounter any time soon. Having said that, the series is encouraging complex, out-of-the-box moral thinking, identification with creatures who might seem familiar but whose internal life is completely alien to us, and a serious examination of what freedom and family entail for finite beings of plastic and flesh with very dismal long-term prospects.
But why should the toys give a shit about Andy’s proper cognitive development?
Is Woody a hero? Why is he a hero? He’s certainly a devoted family man, but he understands the family as centered squarely on the father, I mean, the kid. Is Woody’s unbreakable loyalty perhaps related to the fact that he’s the kid’s favorite? Woody wastes no thought on those who have been “lost along the way,” even if some of them may still be languishing forgotten on the back of some easily-reached-for-mobile-living-intelligent-creatures closet. All he cares about is Andy, his kid, and he willingly risks the safety of his peers to insure Andy gets some additional minutes of imaginative play. Because that’s what makes you good, possessing that very specific, anarchic yet unthreatening, form of imagination. But why should the toys give a shit about Andy’s proper cognitive development?
And then there’s this: the toys can escape if they want to! The end of the first Toy Story establishes indisputably that toys, if they so chose, could move and talk in front of their human owners. Woody, of all toys, makes the decision to do this so he and Buzz can escape from Sid’s room.[36] The results speak for themselves. Sid is flummoxed and terrified and the plan a complete success. Why don’t toys rise up against their human overlords like the apes in Planet of the Apes or the toys in Small Soldiers[37]? Where is the toy Ghandi? The toy Martin Luther King? Stinky Pete the Prospector and Lotso Huggin’ Bear show that the toys can reject their directive as easily as Eve in Wall-E. Why don’t they pretend to be possessed by the Devil and persuade a few million idiot humans to worship them[38]?
See? So many layers! I can’t in good conscience deprive my children of such wellsprings of intricate moral questioning, nor can I deprive them of the opportunity to learn the perfect line to dismiss away their overbearing nerd of a father. They just need look me up and down and say: “You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.”[39]
[36] While we’re at it, why is Sid a villain? He doesn’t know the toys are alive. Yes, he likes to break them apart and reconnect them in unusual ways to create mutant toy hybrids. Yes, he likes to attach them to explosive devises and shoot them up into the sky. But why are these bad things? Why is Sid not the curious, inquisitive boy who’ll grow up to be a rocket engineer, while Andy, being pathologically attached to his mass-produced possessions, will grow up to be a hoarder? Equally worrisome is the fact that Andy, at eighteen, is still inordinately attached to his little-boy toys, and this is depicted as an attractive facet of his personality instead of as a symptom of gerascophobia.
[37] In Small Soldiers the toys all behave as if they are persons, the good ones and the bad ones. Nobody ever yells at them “You are a toy! You are a child’s plaything!” They’re all Buzz Lightyear before he turned slavery apologist.
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