Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

A mosaicist's pebble

2021-07-26T19:54:19Z

Today with my workout I watched Eight Men Out, which I have seen before but not for years, probably decades. If you've only seen one movie by John Sayles, it's probably that one. I have seen most of the movies by John Sayles and also read two novels. I love John Sayles. He is one of my favorite directors and filmwriters, and incidentally or perhaps not I also love his two more recent novels. I always feel weird knowing that Eight Men Out is the one people have seen, though, and watching it again showed me why. I feel like a brilliant mosaicist has just handed me one really beautiful pebble.

Mosaicists are quite good at picking pebbles! It's their job. This one is green. And under another circumstance, he is very well aware that he could make it someone's eye, or a tree, or a flower. But this one is just one pebble, very smooth, self-contained.

It's the self-contained part that gets me, because...nothing else Sayles does is like that. Nothing. And I can see the places where he doesn't go off the map. Arnold Rothstein, Ring Lardner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis--I can almost hear him whispering to himself: not now, John. Reel it in, John. He doesn't tell you about Joe Jackson's hometown. About Fred McMullin's connection to Bill Burns. Not a whisper, even, of the influenza pandemic that directly affected the game, and that's the thing that made me sit upright and say--aloud to myself, because I am a terrible television companion, I talk to the screen--this is a John Sayles movie? This?

Because he knows all this stuff, and more to the point, he cares about all this stuff. He cares about all the connections, the way that it all fits together. He cares about whether any of the Black Sox were ever on record favoring votes for women. What their various attitudes were to the actually Black people around the stadium. 1988 John Sayles is still John Sayles--he still makes sure there's a Black person having a line about how it's the best white team he's ever seen. But he manages, in this one movie, in 1988, just this, not to go into that man's story. Not to go into the wives' stories. To keep the neighborhood kids' stories only in their emotions about baseball, not their home lives, not their ambitions. Just this.

He makes a baseball movie that is substantially--almost uniquely, among baseball movies--about baseball. He could have passed the Bechdel test in it, if the Bechdel test had existed and if he'd wanted to, by having Helen Weaver and Rose Cicotte talk earnestly about the new tighter-wound baseballs they were talking of using next year--because all of these characters, all of them, eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. I would absolutely have believed it.

I can't recommend it if you don't like baseball. Because it's about class, and it's about how power structures like these corrupt. It's about the end of a gilded age, and labor, and who gets left holding the bag, sure. It's still a John Sayles movie. If you watched it at a John Sayles film fest--oh, what a beautiful thought that is--the kind of people who would show up for that, the kind of people like me, would be stifling full on horror queen shrieks when Kennesaw Mountain Landis came on screen. "He cleared out the Reds during the War"--oh run, children, run, this is not going to be good. Do people who are watching this as their only John Sayles movie know that? I think the message comes through, but...not in the same way without the rest of the body of work. The implication, the denouement, are so feather-light. It feels so strange to take it in isolation like this. To know that for so many people this speck of green is not going on to Matewan, it's not going on to A Moment in the Sun, it's not touching Lone Star or Brother or any of that, the mosaic that is class and corruption and America is not part of a leaf, it's just its own flash and then gone.

And then there's this: this man's pebble is a full two-hour feature film. This is what he does for flash fiction.

I wish there was such a thing as a John Sayles film fest. I do. Because it makes me understand a little, though I try to fight it, why people invest personal identity in their fandoms. Because the sort of person who would show up for a whole weekend of John Saylesiana...well, I won't say I'd like all of those people, but I think they'd inevitably have to have some substantial interests and personality traits overlapping with some of mine. And it would be interesting to talk to other people who have gone all in on all the other much messier works about this one much tidier one.

I believe reining himself in made this more accessible. More popular. I don't think it's an accident that the one where he told this story and just this story is the one people know. And it's a good film, I'm not saying it's not. But I am left wanting all the rest of the mosaics. I'm left so relieved, so incredibly relieved, that he made all the other films, that he wrote those big messy books, that are full of connection and depth and...a little bit of chaos. Even if it means that I am left flailing trying to get anyone who doesn't already live here to talk about A Moment in the Sun with me. ("Wanna read a thousand pages of fiction about America in 1905? Hey, where are you going?") I'm willing to indulge this one cleanly told story. But you can get a cleanly told story almost anywhere. With Sayles I want the whole thing. I know it's a lot. I'm a lot too, John. I can take more than just the pebble.

It's a really nice green, though, I'll give you that.

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Indirection and the Horrors of the Moment

2018-09-07T20:26:15Z

Last week I finished watching Season 2 of The Good Fight on CBS Some Access (that's not what they call it, but...welp). I really loved the show from which it's a spin-off, The Good Wife, and they kept some of my favorite characters and added a few new characters I like a lot. All the things that frustrated me most about the original show were gone, plus they had kept the rich and extensive universe of characters going. Yet I found watching this season a slog--I was going downstairs to watch it with my workout with a little distaste rather than a lot of excitement--so I had to think about why.

The Good Wife had fictional court cases inspired by real ones in recent headlines, starting from the first season. That wasn't new. But The Good Fight doubled down on the contemporary references. It is a show that is entirely about American politics in 2018. There's a lot that's directly about Donald Trump and his effects on local and state level politics. There are also plotlines that are less inspired by and more copies of current events in other areas. Even plotlines that are supposedly about the characters' love lives are often also about the fate of protesters or how candidates are presented in modern elections.

I sympathize. I do. There's a lot out there, and sometimes just screaming into your pillow is not enough. Sometimes you really want to scream something in words, that someone else can hear. Words like, "What is even going on," and, "I am not okay with any of this." I get it. But I think that there's a paradoxical effect where the closer you get to an actual nonfiction commentary without being one, the harder it is to take.

I think the people who wrote M*A*S*H are a great counterexample here. M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War, but even a cursory glance tells you it wasn't about the Korean War. It was about the Vietnam War. Not only does the quagmire timeline not make sense for the US's presence in Korea, none of the characters' backstories do either. Anyone over the age of 22--so all of the main characters except Radar and maybe Klinger--but probably just Radar--should have WWII experience if they're regular Army. If they're not, they should still have the perspective that came of having their country in an all-out world war within the last decade. But they don't seem to. What they do have, eventually, is Colonel Potter, the old-timer with world war experience that he's always hearkening back to--but not recent experience, of course. This makes no literal sense, but it makes complete emotional sense when you consider that the show is really about the US troops in Vietnam instead.

Why bother? Why use one war to comment on another? Why remove your characters that far? If they wanted to talk about current events, why didn't they? For me, one of the answers is: it can get overwhelming. Dealing with news stories and then having your fictional entertainment copy those same news stories exactly: it's too much of one thing. Which is bad enough when that one thing is chocolate peanut butter ice cream, far worse when it's a specific corruption charge.

Another answer is broader thinking. One particular policy discussion can start to fall into "denounce this one thing, this one thing is bad." In real life, that can be necessary! But art gives us the chance to look for patterns. To ask, what kind of thing is this, where have I seen it before, where might I see it again, would it still be bad in those contexts too or is there something specific to this one. What are my actual principles here, when removed from the immediacy of people I already know I trust or distrust? How would I react to a situation like this one if there were a few things different? and what does that tell me about this situation?

Of course my bias is toward indirect comment because I'm a science fiction writer. M*A*S*H may have been the first Vietnam War commentary I encountered, in reruns my parents watched while they were making supper, but The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is also pretty influential in my line of work. Haldeman is a Vietnam vet who had things to say--and he used the depth of hundreds of years to say them. Haldeman also wrote War Year and 1968, both of which are non-genre novels inspired by his experiences--both of which are very different from The Forever War. Indirection and shift of perspective give you different art, even when it's coming from the same person.

I'm not giving up on The Good Fight. I hope that it manages to find its footing and a place to stand where it can create commentary that stretches beyond the current moment, that gives us a lens that allows us to look into that moment without damaging our eyes with the intensity. But my preference as a reader and as a writer is going to continue to be work that tries to find a different angle for perspective and illumination.

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Why, Miss A! You're Beautiful Without Your Shift In Meaning!

2018-03-20T01:47:43Z

A few months ago, we had to explain to my goddaughter the old trope where the hero takes off the heroine's glasses and says, "Why, Miss A! You're beautiful without your glasses!" Because...she has never known a world where she can't get cute glasses in flattering styles and a wide variety of colors. That's just how glasses are--and not because her parents are wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, either. Some of my friends who are struggling a lot for money still browse dozens and hundreds of glasses styles on the internet, able to choose from more on their tight budget than the richest could have dreamed of on theirs 50 years ago--especially the richest children.

My parents tell stories of having one choice of glasses, sometimes one gendered choice--here you go, here are your glasses. Doesn't flatter your face? Too bad, this is what you get. Glasses. Now you can see. The fashion for girls right now is cat's eyes. Boys get square blocky ones. For me, it was a little better than that, but not much--and they were not well-fitted to my child's head, on the assumption that kids were growing, and as a result they were always slipping down my nose, and--in a fairly low-parental-conflict childhood--my mother was always nagging me to push my glasses back up.

Meg Murry's glasses did that too. In A Wrinkle in Time. It was one of the reasons I bonded with her instantly when I first read the book in grade school: ugh, the glasses thing.

My goddaughter doesn't have that. Meg's glasses slipping down her nose are an individual character trait for her, not a bonding moment for every kid with glasses. There is no presumption that obviously everyone would look better without theirs, because, hey, there are so many flattering pairs of glasses, she knows so many people who look great in them. She looks great in hers. And if some jerk ever tries to take her glasses off to tell her she's beautiful without them, she hasn't been prepared that that's the only way this can ever work. The idea of finding someone who thinks she's pretty great with them is not a massive shock. It's...life, it's reasonable, it's how things are.

The entire meaning of that description has shifted.

So you can't just put Meg Murry in a pair of glasses and film it that way, assume the modern viewer will get it--in fact, you can assume they won't. Translation is like that. The past, we say over and over again, is a foreign country. Sometimes the recent past even more so, because we don't think of what we're not seeing. We don't have to explain chamber pots and carriages in the Murry home. Glasses are known technology, aren't they? We understand glasses, don't we? Oh.

And then there's the hair.

This article on Meg's natural hair in the movie is really good, really interesting. It quotes from the book, and I'm going to repeat the quote: "Meg’s hair had been passable as long as she wore it tidily in plaits. When she went into high school it was cut, and now she and her mother struggled with putting it up, but one side would come out curly and the other straight."

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well.

A Wrinkle in Time has a 1962 publication date. Before the hippie era. So...I think younger readers mostly don't understand the implications of women's hair here. The passive voice is not accidental: when she went into high school it was cut. This is basically a force of nature, in social terms of the time. Wearing her hair in the braids that actually worked for (book) Meg is no longer an option because that is little kid hair. If you find a high school yearbook from the early 1960s, especially in a small town, you are not seeing the option of long hair worn straight or in braids yet. That came later. So what has happened here is that there are requirements of existing in the teen social world, between the kid world and the adult world, and Meg's hair is failing her at them. Imagine one of the bouffants from a 1962 yearbook, but done poorly. That is what they mean by "up." It is "done," it is done with a fair amount of AquaNet or equivalent, it is one of the miserable child faces underneath a failed elaborate coiffure, because an extremely simple hairstyle of whatever length was not one of the options at the time.

Some of this is universal. Hair texture changes at puberty--sometimes daily--and it can feel impossible to work with whatever you got. And figuring out what on earth other people think is stylish and why on earth they think that is even more difficult when "people" means "whoever I am randomly assigned by geography" rather than "someone I have any interests in common with." But...I think that people who post-date the hippie era--myself included, on some emotional levels--have difficulty conceiving just how many more options there are for What People Can Look Like, what we can do our hair like, what we can do our clothes like, what we can reject or choose for makeup or nails or any other grooming options.

And so...if you showed a modern audience. Especially a modern child audience. The vision of Meg that was in Madeleine L'Engle's head for Meg. The hair that had "been cut" and "put up," the failed bouffant. It would be fundamentally not understood. Even if she was surrounded by other '62 teenagers in a '62 high school. The reaction, I think, would be, "What happened to her hair? Why did she do that?" Because as modern viewers, we just don't have the context of the range of bad hair in the past. We know what present teen struggles with hair look like. We have no reason to keep the data set for 1962.

Similarly, if you filmed the fancy dress occasions of the 1920s, exactly as imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald--the brilliantine on the gentlemen's hair would overwhelm us as modern viewers. And so on through history. It just...gets adjusted for the modern viewer. Inherently. Because the world is large, history is large, we cannot keep it all in our head. Every movie made from a book is a translation. No matter how faithful to the text it tries to be. It's still a translation. The more so for a movie that's more than a year or two from its source text.

So--read the article in the link about how Ava DuVernay decided to translate Meg's struggles with her hair. It is a translation, a visual translation, or a transformation, but it's a necessary one even if the movie had decided to do other things than what it did with race (of which I thoroughly approve), because the world has gone on. I haven't seen this movie yet. I don't know if I'll ever be able to--I hear that it's one of the most vertigo-inducing movies made in a very vertigo-inducing recent crop of movies. But I think that this particular choice of visual translation of Meg's struggles with her hair is a brilliant one. It's one that has some chance of making sense to a modern audience in a way that a literal rendering of the original just couldn't. And the minute I hear people talk about filming what's on the page, I know that they're missing how books and film work differently as media--much less books and film across time.

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