I’ve been avoiding writing about this movie. Not because it’s bad. Hell no. Exact opposite. But because there’s just so much meat there that I’m not even sure where to start.
Well, I’ll start by saying that I absolutely loved this movie, and that I almost didn’t see it. After my feeling of profound meh from Frozenand my increasing grumpiness at how damn oversaturated everything to do with that movie was, I was a bit done with Disney. Honestly, the only thing that convinced me to give Zootopia a chance was seeing an article where it got mentioned what a big deal it is that there isn’t a romance plot.
From a Disney movie. (Setting Pixar films aside, here, as their own thing.) No romance plot. Okay. You have my attention. That’s all I knew going in.
It’s a fun story. Small-town bunny Judy Hopps goes to the big city, Zootopia, to follow her dream of becoming a police officer. Zootopia is an amazing mix of technologically created biomes, where predator and prey animals live together in relative harmony via handwavium that’s never explained and really doesn’t need to be. Judy’s the first bunny to ever become a cop in a police force that’s really controlled by size more than anything else; she’s tiny compared to the big cats, water buffalo, bears, hippopotami, and other big mammals that dominate the force. She gets assigned to write parking tickets, where she runs across conman fox Nick Wilde and gets hustled by him. Not long after, in the right place at the right time and on the verge of being fired, she picks up an abduction case. With no resources and no help to be found within her department, she pulls her own hustle on Nick to force him to help her, and it all proceeds from there.
I’m a sucker for a good buddy cop comedy. I really didn’t expect this one to kick everything but Hot Fuzz out of its way, but Nick and Judy (how many cross-gender buddy cop duos have we had? Not bloody many) have firmly found a place in my heart right next to Nick and Danny. Just on the level of a buddy cop movie, Zootopia succeeds beautifully. It’s got a fun case with some twists in it that I didn’t expect. It’s got a lot of comedy, much of it based on the setting and mammal jokes. I’m going to end up buying a Disney animated film for the first time in years because I enjoyed it so much and I love these characters.
But what makes Zootopia special and incisive is that it acknowledges not just the existence of prejudice (racism, sexism, classism) but privilege as well, and the interplay between them. I’d caution against taking the allegory too literally. If nothing else, there’s an odd interaction along the predator/prey divide, where prey animals still haven’t forgotten the “savage” days when predators ate them and thus remember the fear and distrust, while in the modern city of Zootopia, the predators only make up about 10% of the population. It’s not something that has a direct analog to any part of the modern world that I’m aware of, and that’s okay.
I suppose technically what follows could be considered a spoiler, but I’m going to talk in generalities here.
Judy’s the underdog character for much of the movie. She’s a small town girl, viewed as a hick in a big city, fighting to find her place in a department that’s generally hostile toward her because of who she is. Yet we see her exercise her own privilege over the fox, Nick, in little ways and then big, awful ways. She calls him articulate. And in a scene midway through the film that I found incredibly difficult to watch, she vilifies predators as a whole and does incalculable harm to them by telling the truth as she sees it. She’s even initially puzzled why Nick is so hurt. Because she just told the truth, right, why is he so upset, he’s her friend and he’s different. Ow, ow, ow. As a reminder that just because you face oppression of your own (for being LGBT, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also have privilege you can wield to devastating effect, it’s razor sharp.
And of course, yes, let’s talk about vilifying a minority group as a means to gain and maintain political power. It’s definitely not the first time a movie’s made that point, but it’s worth making again and again until people fucking listen. It was a cringe-worthy irony that the theater I watched Zootopia in was right across from one playing London Has Fallen.
Zootopia is good. It punched my soul in the kidneys. But it’s funny. There are sloths in the DMV. And I’m going to dream of an ever so slightly different ending, in which Judy turns to Nick and says, “Little hand says it’s time to rock and roll.”
And by the way? The manager at my local Alamo Drafthouse, who now recognizes me on sight, initially assumed I was there to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Oh no, I told him. Gods of Egypt. His eyebrows went up and he said, “Wow, your job must suck.” (He knows I write reviews for pay sometimes.) No, I assured him, it’s because people donated money to charity to make me watch this. How much? $305. “They didn’t pay enough,” he said.
Alex Proyas must be some kind of culinary magician. No doubt with help from the studio and a terrible script, he managed to take $140 million worth of metaphorical cinematic vegetables and garnishes and POOF! turn it into a film salad that’s equal parts insulting, lazy, and boring, the kind of salad that strips the skin off your tongue and takes a sour dump in the back of your throat and there is not enough wine in the world to wash that taste away, you just have to wait for the cells to die and slough off naturally.
Here, let me illustrate where this film falls, via Venn diagram.
Hit the sweet spot, aww yissss
The inexplicably white pantheon of Egypt walks the Earth and rules the Nile valley. Super white Osiris (Bryan Brown) wants to retire and crown his party boy jerk son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), so all the other gods are throwing a party. Then Set (Gerard Butler), sporting an excellent spray tan, shows up and murders the shit out of Osiris while the other gods sort of stand around awkwardly and try not to make eye contact. He then calls upon the powers of computer generated graphics to become a shiny animalbird transformer and beat the shit out of Horus in the first of the movie’s many unarresting fight scenes, rips out Horus’s eyes, and only refrains from killing him because Hathor has a nice rack. Set immediately declares that the afterlife will now be a capitalist enterprise and the only way to get anything nice is to buy your way in with money. And by the way everyone who doesn’t have money right now will be a slave.
As this happens, we get white Aladdin knock-off Bek (Brenton Thwaites), who is a strong, independent man who don’t need no gods. His girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) is Horus’s number one fangirl, and is enslaved by an architect guy whose main job in the film is to construct a towering black obelisk (with a gold vein on one side) for Set, which is basically the only appearance of wang in a film about Egyptian gods. Zaya gives Bek the plans for Set’s vault, which is basically Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, and he goes there to steal Horus’s eyes back. He gets one eye, singular, and then tries to escape with Zaya. The architect guy shoots her through the boob with an arrow and she is tragically fridged, except there’s not even really any manpain about it.
Bek decides he’ll help Horus get his other eye back (so Horus can turn into a CGI birdman) if Horus will bring Zaya back to life. They go off on a buddy adventure through fantasy Egypt, during which Bek decides that gods are okay, he guesses, and Horus presumably undergoes some sort of character development. While they’re doing that, Set methodically goes about whacking all the other gods, except for Isis, she already killed herself in grief over Osiris, and yes you just read that sentence. Once he’s collected the whole set of god body parts, Set goes full Satanic Ritual and basically makes himself an Egyptian God Voltron. Bonus points for the part where he literally inserts the glowing brain of Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), the only one of the gods who is black, into his own skull.
Take a moment to let that one wash over you. I’ll wait.
Thus empowered, he goes up to Ra’s awesome skyboat, throws dad out into the void, and then invites the serpent Apophis to eat everything??? because???? it???? will give???? Set more power????
Deep breaths, Egyptian mythology nerds. Deep breaths.
CGI things happen, there’s fighting I guess, Set loses, whatever, I kind of mentally checked out at that point. I just mostly remember that prior to her resurrection by a newly humbled, nice-guy Horus, Zaya had absolutely perfect lip gloss for a corpse.
Entire books could be written about how wrong the mythology is in this film, beginning with the fact that Christian good vs evil framing ruins everything, please stop making chaos gods into the devil, thank you and goodbye. But that would be a waste of someone’s perfectly good time that they could use to pick their nose or scratch their butt crack or a million things more productive than giving this film a second or even first viewing. And by the way? When Set plays God Part Voltron, the piece of Osiris he has, the piece that poor Isis couldn’t find before she offed herself as a side note, is Osiris’s heart. His heart.
The really upsetting thing here though is that there is a lettuce cameo in this movie. (Aha, so that’s why ze started with an incredibly strained salad metaphor.) When Horus, Bek, and Hathor go to Thoth’s library to get his help, Thoth is examining the scientific merits of a head of lettuce. It’s like the screenwriters signaled to us, hey, we totally did this research and know about the jizz lettuce wraps and the wangs and all, but we decided to write this bland as shit movie instead.
I have never been simultaneously so pleased and so angry to see a goddamn head of lettuce. Here’s your lettuce, assholes, but there are no wangs. NO WANGS.
Apparently I talk a lot with my eyebrows when I’m drunk.
Well, no wangs other than Set’s giant black stone Wang of Evil (yes but can you make it taller), which considering the absolutely delightful racism exhibited in the casting, well. Those are some stygian depths perhaps best appreciated from a distance.
So with all that going against it already, the sheer badness of the directing and acting in Gods of Egypt is really just the oh-god-that’s-not-actually-dressing on the lettuce. This movie should make it into a screenwriting course as exhibit A for this is how we don’t do voice over. The dialog is forgettable at best, awful at worst. And I don’t know if it’s an artifact of the extensive CGI shit they had to do to make the actors playing the gods twice as big as the humans so maybe they were all just acting in isolation in green closets, but none of the dialog actually sounded like dialog. There was no flow. It was actors, many of whom we know can turn in a decent performance, barking out lines by rote without any kind of interplay or response. It was weird, disturbing, and really fucking annoying. We’re talking Plan Nine From Outer Space levels of woodenness, here, but without any of the bizarrely kitschy charm lent by tiny plywood tombstones and pie-plate UFOs. Instead we get overblown visuals that are occasionally breathtaking (Ra’s spaceship hauling the Sun up over the edge of a flat Earth springs to mind here) but probably squarely to blame for the fact that every actor appears to be shouting their lines from a green screen vacuum.
And it’s boring. This movie is so. Fucking. Boring. It’s 127 minutes (still shorter than Transformers 4‘s 109 hour running time, mercifully) that should have been maybe 90 minutes, padded out with boring as shit action sequences with random moments of bullet-time slomo so I guess we can appreciate how cool this is. This film is fucking genre salad all thrown together (buddy comedy, action, romance, family drama, etc) and dressed with cheap exploitation because they spent their god semen budget on birdman transformer effects. The only character whose motivations make any sense is Bek, who presumably loves Zaya because we’re informed of this fact, even if they have the emotional resonance of two slices of plastic-wrapped American cheeze being rubbed together. Set wanting to let Apophis consume the entire world only makes sense if you consider it’s his only way to escape this fucking movie and then okay, maybe he’s doing us all a favor.
In that thoroughly awful way, maybe there’s one tiny, very well-disguised blessing to the unforgivable whitewashing of Gods of Egypt: at least no cowardly studio exec will be able to point to this shit salad and bleat that it somehow “proves” no one wants to watch fantasy movies starring black (and other non-white) actors. If any real lessons stick, like oh maybe it’s past time to stop trying to make movies about ancient (fantasy or otherwise) Egypt that headline white people, that remains to be seen. I don’t do sucker bets.
And remember, kids, if someone wants to sell you a salad, take a good, long look at it first and see if that dressing is really what they’re advertising.
As promised, here are my handwritten notes I took in the movie! You can track my inebriation by how bad my handwriting gets. Not as bad as 50 SoG, I’d say: Gods of Egypt notes
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Hey you! Yeah you! I’m raising money for Act for Change, and in exchange I’ll drunk watch Gods of Egypt and chronicle my suffering for your enjoyment. Details here.
I don’t even do the horror thing, why do I keep watching these movies? It’s all David Annandale‘s fault, basically.
I saw this trailer for The Witch some months ago, and my immediate reaction was
Because gosh that looks scary and tense and I bet there aren’t any fart jokes. (I was right. There aren’t.) But then David started retweeting all sorts of interesting pieces about the film, about it being different and comparing it to It Follows and FINE. I got curious.
I didn’t think it was as scary as It Follows. I saw the movie with Sunil because he is a god among men, and did not actually attempt to burrow into him until about twenty minutes from the end. Which as horror movies go for me is pretty tame. No jump scares, which I appreciate. But the tension in the film was just unending once it got rolling.
Plot is simple: family gets kicked out of their Puritan village because dad doesn’t agree with the elders 100% on religion. They strike out into the wilderness to make a new home for themselves. Times are hard, and bad things keep happening, and happening, and happening, and then shit really goes sideways.
Several things were striking about this film. First off, despite the reason for the family being out by the creepy woods being religious differences, the patriarch of the family isn’t the villain; he’s religiously not any wackier than the rest of the Puritans at the time, as far as I could tell. The family is one of generally good people who make little mistakes such as lying to each other in an effort to avoid conflict, that balloon into terrible familial conflict later.
Much has been made about the historical accuracy depicted. As a non-expert, I can’t confirm or deny this, but it certainly feels like the work’s been put in to make this feel like we’re just following a 17th century Puritan family around. The language and accents took me about 10 minutes to get used to, because it was very different from modern American English. That was actually pretty cool.
The horror is played very close to the chest here, in a way I could appreciate. While it’s very clear what happened to the missing baby, much of the rest is left ambiguous. Is the rabbit we keep seeing actually a manifestation of evil, and we’re afraid because we’re seeing it through the eyes of a family that’s isolated and afraid? Nothing blatantly supernatural starts happening until very close to the end.
The film rests almost entirely on the backs of six actors, who comprise the family that’s heading for a terrible end. Everyone did excellent work, but Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the oldest daughter Thomasin, was particularly excellent.
I don’t tend to be a fan of witch-as-monster stories; they just never sits right with me, considering the history of innocent people getting executed for witchcraft in the early modern period. In the light of day, I can’t say I feel any better about it, though in the moment I was too busy squirming in my seat to think about it over much.
Hey you! Yeah you! I’m raising money for Act for Change, and in exchange I’ll drunk watch Gods of Egypt and chronicle my suffering for your enjoyment. Details here.
I’m guessing that if you’re a big enough fan of the Coen brothers, you will convince yourself that Hail, Caesar! is a work of genius. I’m not a big enough fan to be able to do that. Setting aside the douchey stuff the Coen brothers said when questioned about the blindingly white cast of this movie, which left me annoyed enough that I felt more compelled to see Deadpool a second time on Hail, Caesar!‘s opening weekend, it’s honestly not that good of a movie.
It’s got some of the quirky fun that made O Brother, Where Art Thou? fun and worth rewatching. It just doesn’t have anything like the narrative coherence that made that movie an excellent piece of art.
Hail, Caesar! is nominally the story of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), in charge of Capital Pictures, and follows him through about two days while he’s trying to get principle filming finished on the titular movie. (So yeah, it’s one of those film with in a film things that can sometimes get a little too masturbatory for anyone else to enjoy.) The star of the film, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), gets kidnapped by communists and throws the whole thing into disarray. Then there are a lot of other side issues that Mannix is dealing with, showing how busy and stressed he is, and at the end he decides that as hard as his job is, he’s going to keep it. There is also a narrator that sounds straight out of a Biblical film, which is fun I guess, since in the fictional movie Hail, Caesar! is actually about a Roman coming to believe in Jesus Christ.
There are a lot of fun little set pieces in this, little homages to the films of the 50s and 60s, including an extended synchronized swimming sequence involving Scarlett Johanson, and a gay sailor tap-dancing revue with Channing Tatum where they sing about how there are no dames. I would have rather watched the whole “no dames” musical, since I do love me some singing and tap dancing. But these things ultimately end up feeling self-indulgent and almost all (except the tapdancing, but I love tap so much) go on long past the point of boredom. There isn’t a narrative thread that binds all of this together; the plot in this movie is damn weak. And yes, I get that perhaps this is supposed to be more of a comedic character study of Mannix, but the Coen Brothers spend so much time in the minutiae that Mannix is completely lost. I don’t care about him as a character. He’s supposed to be struggling with if he’s going to keep his job or move on to something less stressful, and there’s no room for that between the minor plot lines that he’s trying to juggle.
This doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like a collection of index cards with “wouldn’t this be fun?” ideas that got pulled of a cork board and filmed. I enjoyed individual funny scenes because they were clever and had some fun stylistic and visual gags. I could not have given less of a crap about the whole.
And it’s not surprising that the Coen’s were jerkily defensive about their casting choices. I saw only three non-white characters in the entire film, two of whom were the staff at a Chinese Restaurant. (Yeah, they used that trope.) The third was Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who was absolutely cute for the few minutes she was on stage. I wish we’d seen more of her and less of her studio set-up boyfriend, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich). Sunil claims he saw an African-American extra in one of the scenes too, though he was not in focus and behind another actor.
The best thing about this movie was that I got to see it with Sunil. And that has nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with, you know, Sunil. If you cannot convince Sunil to go with you (not bloody likely), ask yourself if ten minutes of Channing Tatum tapdancing are worth the price of admission.
I saw two movies this weekend: Zoolander 2, and Deadpool. Actually, I saw Deadpool twice because I liked it that much. I don’t know jack shit about Deadpool as a comic book character, but the movie is hella funny and I think Ryan Reynolds finally got the movie he’s been craving for years. It’s crass and profane and earns the R-rating without ever going the full Tarantino, which I appreciate immensely.
Zoolander 2 isn’t terrible; it’s got its funny moments, but it kind of feels like a collection of cameos held together with a thin veneer of plot. (The Neil Degrasse Tyson and Kiefer Sutherland cameos make it, by the way.) It’s not really as coherent or weird or funny as the original Zoolander, which I’m not ashamed to admit I loved in all its stupid glory and regularly rewatch. I’m not sad in a general sense that I watched the sequel, but I’m not feeling a burning need to own a copy, like I do for Deadpool.
Two things strike me after viewing the movies so close together. There’s a scene near the end of Zoolander 2 where Fashion Police agent Valentina and henchman Katinka have a fist fight, and it’s called out by Mugatu as “Look, they’re sexy fighting!” And they sure are rolling around and making porn faces in a way that’s not really that much exaggerated from the way such fights are in “serious” action films. I appreciated it as a moment of calling out how bullshit and ridiculous woman versus woman fights can be in action movies and making fun of it.
But in that vein, I liked what Deadpool did even more. There’s a scene about midway through when Deadpool is hunting down a bunch of bad people and he’s taking on two women. He hits one of them (just like he has with the male bad guys he’s taken on) and then when she screams he says in what sounds like sincere distress, “I’m so confused! Is it sexist if I hit you? Is it more sexist if I don’t?”
I think the reason that scene just stuck with me is it’s been a staple of so many superhero movies that when there’s a female hero on the team, there’s got to be a female villain, and those two fight. I think there’s a deep discomfort with seeing cross-gender violence in these kind of action movies just because female heroes and villains are universally sexualized. (Extra points here for the number of spandex-clad and au naturale ass shots we get of Deadpool, the most sexualized character in his own movie.)
And as weird as it sounds, I appreciate very much that Deadpool is an equal opportunity puncher/stabber/shooter in that sense. The female villain in Deadpool, Angel Dust, does eventually fight Negasonic Teenage Warhead, but her longest and most protracted action sequences is with Colossus, and there is nothing sexy about it.
Of course, the bothersome thing about Angel Dust is that when she first shows up and we learn her mutant power is super strength, pre-Deadpool Wade of course has to make one of those fucking “jokes.” You know, the you are strong therefore you must not actually be a womanhey I bet you have a dick jokes.
And before you crawl into my comments and tell me all about how Wade is crass and nothing is sacred and he’s supposed to be an obnoxious dickbag, please stop. Every line in this film was a choice, by the writer, by the actor (if adlibbed particularly), by the director, by the editor. Wade was a lot of things (obnoxious being number one) in the movie, but he was far less sexist compared to what he could have been and what I expected. He wasn’t disgustingly racist, just think about his interactions with the cringe-y stereotype of a cab driver (Dopinder) and with Al. The transmisogyny there, so reminiscent of the whinging bullshit you hear every time a female athlete excels, was unnecessary. (eg: going with the athlete vibe, how about sensing some steroids instead of wang?) Wade manages to be a dickbag to Angel Dust plenty of other times without playing to a harmful stereotype that resides entirely within the audience and makes even less sense in a world where the X-Men exist.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the “All” scene in Zoolander 2. If I have to pick my transmisogyny poison, I’ll take the throw away line versus whatever the fuck this scene was supposed to be. After seeing the entire thing in context (because it does go on way longer than in the trailer, unfortunately), I’m still not sure what the actual point was, though I am sure I didn’t like it.
The scene starts out with Derek and Hansel being nosy about what All’s got stashed in their trousers, which is bullshit way too many trans people have to deal with already in real life. Then on one hand, you have someone defending All and calling out the notion of the strict binary. On the other hand, it sure feels like mockery considering it’s coming from the hipster fashion designer who continues on about All being in a “monomarriage” with “hermself.” All in the movie is the hottest model in fashion because I guess nonbinary gender is supposedly “trendy” and thus deserves mockery. Somehow, I don’t think any fashion gender ambiguity trend outweighs the “trend” of trans people being murdered or committing suicide or being targeted by shitbag lawmakers who are more obsessed with genitalia than Derek and Hansel.
The only other time we see All, they’re dressed in a weird fashion angel outfit and diving down to lash Hansel and Derek with a whip on the runway. I got nothin’, other than the fact that I really wish this scene hadn’t even existed. And yeah, Derek and Hansel are dumb, that’s part of the joke. But I’d ask: is the real joke in this shit show of a scene supposed to be that Derek and Hansel are dumb for thinking they have any damn business asking about All’s genitals, or that All is a caricature played by a cis male actor and All brought it on themselves by being ambiguous and weird and is making Derek and Hansel uncomfortable?
To end on a positive note, yay Deadpool. It was a good Valentine’s day choice, believe it or not. The movie has an emotional core to go with all the quips and fourth wall breaking and Ryan Reynolds snarking about the Green Lantern movie. Vanessa and Wade are disturbingly cute and have a strong, emotionally healthy relationship. One of the big questions of the movie is if that relationship can survive how Wade has changed, and the answer is pretty satisfying. Not what I expected out of an R-rated superhero movie. The opening credits alone are worth the price of admission.
Hashtag fuck cancer.
BTW I’m raising money for Act For Change, an organization that helps and promotes diverse artists. You should check it out.
(PS: I am not perfect at writing about gender issues. If I have been an asshole unintentionally, I appreciate very much being told so I can stop being an asshole.)
I’m now current on the TV show version of The Magicians, which puts me done with episode 4, waiting on 5. Full disclosure: I have not read the books, so I’m going into this blind. And occasionally cheesy special effects aside, I have really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far. (Take a moment please for us to contemplate how awesome Penny is. There we go.) After I mentioned growing concern about Julia on Twitter, the inimitable E Catherine Tobler spoiled me for the books with my permission and Jesus fucking Christ on rye toast I hope that’s not where the TV series is going. There are not enough tables in the world for me to flip.
But this is about the TV show, so I’m going to focus on that and leave that particular alarm about the future aside even if it makes my feelings of doom exponentially worse..
To me it seems that, Quentin and Julia are set up as opposing main characters, a study in contrasts. They begin as extremely close friends who survived high school together via nerdy fandom; Julia is ready to move on and Quentin isn’t. They bicker, they argue, Julia tries to push Quentin to do something with his life when he’s barely hanging on, but they are still obviously friends. She also tells him that she loves him in an obviously platonic way, while he mumbles jealously about her boyfriend. It’s a messy, close, complicated friendship.
Then Quentin gets to go to the super elite Brakebills for his magic education. Julia doesn’t pass the initial test and has to figure things out on her own, grubbing in the street. They both have the same desperation for learning magic; they both at multiple points express that they cannot go back to normal life, that they need this in order to survive.
Quentin gets leeway for his fuckups; he screws up profoundly but hasn’t yet been cast from the Brakebills. He’s making friends. He’s learning things. Julia’s fuckups are no less profound but given no mercy. The group she falls in with out of desperation to learn magic is one in which she gets manipulated and used. And what she does learn gets belittled and scoffed at by Quentin and his friends. In episode 4, Julia is forced to confront the terrible thing she was partially (and I say only partially because she was out to hurt him, she just didn’t intend for it to be that bad) tricked into doing to Quentin and makes right on it, but is then thrown out of her group while Quentin reaffirms his place in his.
So far, so good. Study in contrasts.
Julia obviously does have some talent with magic. She begs Quentin to help her, asking him to bring her to the attention of the school administrators because she wants another chance at the test. He refuses, dismissing what she’s learned on her own as a single trick (even though he’s not exactly hot shit himself) and telling her that she doesn’t always get to win. He also mentions, I think importantly, that he’s upset Julia never wanted to be in a relationship with him, something she reacts to with shock since it seems she didn’t quite realize he had designs on her.
Jealousy and complicated character interactions make for interesting stories. It makes the characters extremely human. But the question that now plagues me is where this is going. Because the story that is told to us with these building blocks says a hell of a lot.
Is the narrative going to affirm that Quentin was right to take a petty revenge on Julia by refusing to help her because he was hurt by her not returning his feelings, say by making her into a villain and thus proving she was a Bad Girl all along ? Is she going to go into a downward spiral that he can later feel all kinds of manpain about when he realizes maybe he should have been the better man, but too bad, so sad for Julia? Is Julia going to destroy herself in her quest for magic while Quentin, who wants the magic just as desperately, gets to have his cake and eat it too? Will Julia sacrifice herself for Quentin and in so doing help him fulfill his own narrative? Will Julia get beaten down into realizing that her quest for magical power, so similar to Quentin’s, is somehow Bad and she deserves to have her memories removed and be sentenced to an ordinary life? Will she be subjected to sexual violence that male characters almost never fear, because everyone knows that’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman?
Or are they going to reconcile and cooperate and teach each other? Are they going to stop hurting each other and remember that they are friends? Is Julia going to have a happy ending as reward for her stubborn refusal to give up, for the obstacles she overcomes, the lessons she learns? Is she going to come into her powers and find the knowledge she craves, becoming a better person through this difficult journey? Is Quentin eventually going to suffer for turning his back on a friend? Will Quentin sacrifice himself for Julia so she can be redeemed? Will Julia redeem herself and gain the respect of those around her after she’s fought for it hard enough?
Each possibility (and countless more I haven’t written out) make statements via how the characters are punished or rewarded, whether we like it or not. I wouldn’t be nearly so worried if both characters were male, because there’s push and pull and stories that go in all directions with this kind of setup (minus the frustrated romance angle). But this becomes more fraught because Julia is a woman, and Quentin is her friend with whom she was completely uninterested in having a romantic relationship. Considering the genre history of women being sacrificed on the altar of manpain, of women being narratively punished–often with sexual violence–for showing the same ambition as a men, of women time and again only finding their stories in being selfless so the men can be selfish, do you understand why I’m having a bad feeling about this?
I think I’m taking this a little more personally as well, because I like Julia as a character. She’s flawed and human and has her own story. She makes mistakes and grapples with problems. And she’s ambitious, stubborn, unwilling to give up when she’s told time and again she should, when she’s dismissed repeatedly (almost always by male characters, note) because the urge to learn burns so fiercely in her. For that alone, I identify with Julia and her struggles, and even with her more cringe-inducing mistakes. She’s fighting in her own flawed way to be the person she knows she is despite the withering scorn of someone who is supposed to be her friend. She’s fighting tooth and claw for the destiny she knows must be hers–and this struggle isn’t a zero-sum game. Her learning magic doesn’t take anything from Quentin, just as him learning doesn’t take anything from her. The world is wide enough for Julia and Quentin, and yet. And yet.
Knowing now what happens to her in the books, this is scaring the hell out of me. Stories are rarely kind to ambitious women, and it is a chilling, constant reminder that neither is society at large.
I made a little list yesterday, about some basic problems I noticed repeatedly in my slush pile. Things worth fixing that’ll help a story survive the savaging of the slush jackalopes, at least.
But what about the stories we liked and loved? And I’m not talking here about just the ones I sent acceptances for. I had 15 or so additional stories beyond those I could accept that I desperately wanted to keep and didn’t have room for. These were decisions that made me cry tears of blood because I didn’t want to make them.
The thing is, it’s way easier to tell you what doesn’t work about a story than quantify what does.
After the initial Rejectopocalypse, I had 58 stories left. How did I get that down to the stories I ended up picking?
There was a sort of two-tiered process to how I filled out the ToC . There was an initial set of stories that I read that just clicked with me so well, I put them in a file labeled “You can have these stories when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.” Each one of these stories was a hill I would have been willing to die on, so to speak. And there weren’t that many of them. They didn’t even take up half of my available space, when all was said in done.
A few of the stories that ended up on that list didn’t even make it there on first reading; I thought they were good and liked them a great deal, but wasn’t immediately ready to fight a great white shark armed with an assault rifle for them. But those stories lingered, and niggled, and refused to let me go, and a week later I was still thinking about how utterly fucked up they had made me feel. I realized I couldn’t let them go either.
But the bulk of those 58 stories in the second round were simply “stuff wot the jackalopes and I liked,” and there were way too many of them. So I went over those with a much less forgiving eye. A lot of stories, I enjoyed, but had to tack on a mental caveat of “but X needs to be tweaked.” Unless X amounted to copyediting issues, I made myself let those go. Other quite good stories were too similar to stories that I considered non-negotiable, either in plot or tone or topic, so those I let go as well. That took us down to around 35, when things got really brutal.
I ended up dragging my excellent slush jackalopes onto a Skype call so we could sit down in real time and look at what we had. Fights were had. Alcohol was imbibed to deal with the pain. Stories were sorted into keep or go piles. But the reason I wanted the slush jackalopes on the call was that each of them had a few stories that were hills they were willing to die on, and I thought that was important. A story that I thought was very good and merely (“merely“) liked might be a gut punch to one of them. I needed perspectives from outside myself, from people who knew the shape of the slush, because otherwise I was at a stalemate of, gosh I like all this stuff equally and 35,000 words of it has togo, what do I do?
So what made for the stories we universally liked and someone was willing to fight for? There’s not a single answer, partially because I tried to choose a wide array of stories that cross the genres from hard scifi to high fantasy, the tones from utter bleakness to screwy hilarity. (You’ll see what I mean when I finally show you the ToC.) The best I can come up with is:
Stories with a strong narrative voice and tone. This isn’t just about first person narration; there’s a tone that goes with third person as well, that’s evident in word choice and sentence structure. Every story we loved had a consistent tone and a strong voice that made us want to keep reading.
Good pacing. Pacing is what knocked a lot of the stories out at the second round; pacing hiccups are one of the most frustrating things in the world to try to fix as a writer, and I didn’t even want to deal with it as an editor. I won’t say that all of the stories we kept were fast-paced; there are a couple I’d consider to have a very deliberate feel to them. But they don’t stop. They don’t bog down. They’re exactly as long as they need to be.
Fascinating characters. Most of them, we liked. Some of them, we just wanted to follow and see what kind of train wreck they’d be getting into.
The stories that were funny made us laugh out loud. Heartily. Inappropriately.
We have a profound weakness for ridiculous, long titles, but only if the story that follows supports it.
But those things? Aren’t that helpful if you’re looking for a blueprint, except perhaps for the point about pacing. You can get into some useful wonkery with pacing and arranging your beats and making sure none of them are lasting too long, and that might help. But I don’t think anyone sets out to write characters who aren’t fascinating, or stories that don’t have a strong tone. I’m sure everyone who sent us a funny story thought we’d find it funny.
And that’s perhaps the point. While there are objective measures (many of them grammar-based) that can tell us if a story isn’t going to work, there’s not a rubric I could give to say what does. This is your reminder, then, that getting published is ultimately a crapshoot. You could be at the top of your prose game, you could have a tight story with great characters and an interesting plot, and unless it hit one of us in just the right way to make her say I would wrestle a bear for this story, it wasn’t going to make it. And I think it’s worth remembering that the stories I was willing to go to bat for were not all the same stories the jackalopes defended with their antlers filed to razor sharpness.
I know we’ve all had the experience of reading a story and thinking who the hell paid actual money for this, my story is way better. Sometimes you might be right, but sometimes it’s that your story didn’t deliver the plot payload the way you’d hoped, because no two editors are the same. Maybe you got the wrong editor, the wrong time of day, the wrong phase of the moon. There’s no knowing. If being able to write a story that punches someone in the gut and steals their emotional lunch money is the best part of being a writer, it’s also the most frustrating. Because you’ll never know if that punch landed until you open your email and see yes instead of no.
I’ve now sent the last of the responses for the anthology; if you haven’t gotten an email of some sort from me and submitted a story, please query immediately. This is the first time I’ve ever truly dived into a slush pile, and it was a really cool experience. I ended up enjoying way more stories than I could fit in the anthology, which made writing the last round of rejections particularly agonizing.
But after shoveling all the slush, here’s some things I noticed. These are not meant to specifically call someone out, and I will not be naming names because that would be damn rude and unkind. Any details are made up as examples.
Technical Things
A lot of people apparently don’t know what is meant by standard manuscript format. But honestly, I’m not even this picky. I just want double spacing, indents on the first line of each paragraph, a readable font, your contact info, and a header with page numbers.
If you can’t be bothered to send me your story in one of the acceptable document formats I list, I can’t be bothered to open it.
Please don’t summarize your story for me in your query letter. I want to read your story and find out for myself. In fact, summarizing in the query letter actually makes it more difficult for me to evaluate whether your story accomplishes what you set out to do.
Please make sure you have deleted all editing comments and accepted all tracked changes in a document before sending it. I really don’t want to know how the sausage was made before it arrived in my inbox. (Note that this did not cause me to reject anyone, but it was super distracting.)
You’d better darn well know what you’re doing with ellipses or one of my slush jackalopes will probably take out a hit on you.
Commas are extremely important. They make the difference between sarcastic insult (“Awesome, jerkoff”) and porn (“Awesome jerkoff”).
If you’re not querying a piece as a reprint, it better not have been published anywhere. Ever. Things that count as publishing even if you made not a blessed cent and only your grandmother saw it: putting it in your uni literary magazine, posting it publicly on your blog, publishing it in your church bulletin, writing it up on a series of pictures that you’ve shared on instagram. And so on.
Don’t tell me what the speculative element is. If I can’t locate it without you telling me beforehand, I’m not going to accept your story.
A lot of stories really stumbled when it came to the integration of the first line. If I can tell it’s literally pasted onto the start of a story and nothing’s been adjusted around it, that’s not going to fill me with confidence. Also, I admit this is a weakness of such a prompt, if a narrator starts with “No Shit, there I was” and the rest of the story contains absolutely no cussing and no colloquial language, that’s going to be very dissonant.
I don’t generally find puns amusing. Sorry, punsters. This is a flaw in my character I’ve never been shy of pointing out.
General Plot Things
Speaking of speculative elements, it has to have a clear “what if” that is fantastic or science fictional in some way. If your main character just thinks the orange on their desk is talking to them, that’s not speculative. If the orange on their desk is actually talking to them, then it is speculative.
Stories need to have a fully realized plot with a beginning, middle, and end, in which something changes. It could be the character. It could be the development of the plot itself, or a change in the world caused by the action of plot and character.
What does not count as a plot: several thousand worlds in which a narrator describes the history of the world in a giant, expository dump. If there is more time spent by your character describing the world than actively interacting with it, you do not have enough plot.
Personally, I prefer character driven stories, where the internal and external needs to the character either drive the plot or become developed through interaction with the plot. However, if you write a really good plot driven story (there are several in the anthology) I will still enjoy it!
First act bloat is a problem I battle, myself. But the setup of the world and the introduction of the plot should be at most 1/3 of your page count. Multiple stories had a first act break was 1/2 to 2/3 of the way of the page count in, which makes for an unevenly paced read.
Your story needs to have a beginning, middle, and some kind of conclusion. If it reads like the first chapter of a novel, it’s not going to work as a self-contained short story.
Three act structure is most definitely not required or necessary, but it’s not a bad place to start if you’re not sure about your pacing. An alternative tool is Jule Selbo’s 11 steps (broken out here in three act structure, but actually they don’t have to be); while this is a film structure tool, it’s useful for examining the development of plot and character.
Twist endings can be good, but they still need to make some kind of sense. Approach with caution. I need to be able to look back on the rest of your story and think ah, now X, Y, and Z make sense or oh man that totally screws with my perception of all those events! If your “twist” amounts to kids picking daisies in a field and suddenly a lorry comes screaming out of nowhere and runs them over, that’s not actually a twist. It’s a non sequitor.
Thoughts about the how and why of the successful stories to follow later.
And hey! I’m raising money for Act For Change by hate watching Gods of Egypt. You should check it out.
This movie was pretty good. You should support Act For Change and make me watch a bad movie instead so you can feast upon my sarcastic rage.
I’ve been trying to catch up on as many best picture nominees as possible for special podcast-related reasons, so I jumped at the chance of seeing this one at the Alamo Drafthouse last weekend. (I am also trying to find a showing of Creed I can watch, for potential talking shit about the nominees purposes.) Like most of the other nominees, this Isn’t My Kind Of Movie, which means it’s the sort of movie I should still watch anyway in the interest of expanding my horizons out of the genre dungeon.
Brooklyn is about an Irish immigrant with a name that’s completely unspellable without referring to IMDB (Eilis, played by Saoirse Ronan) who comes to the titular city in the 1950s, looking to make a future for herself after she can’t find decent work in Ireland. She meets and falls in love with an Italian plumber who is regrettably not named Mario or Luigi (Emory Cohen) and eventually has to decide if her home will be in America or Ireland. There’s not that much plot to it; this is more a character study built on scenes of fairly ordinary days that add up to a life.
It’s a very pretty movie, with a softness to the way everything is shot that reminds me of old photographs. I think there’s a lot of that sort of nostalgia filtering going on throughout the film; everything looks exceedingly clean, society is startlingly polite. Maybe 1950s Brooklyn had a Leave-It-to-Beaver air to it, I don’t know my history granularly enough to say. On one hand, that gives room for Eilis’s conflict to be entirely a choice between old and new lives, without any outer social distraction. (And Time magazine seems to feel it was pretty accurate in some ways.) But I felt entirely unmoored, since I didn’t find any distinct sense of history beyond the costuming to really remind me where we were.
One thing I did love about the movie, which was highlighted in my mind perhaps because I’d seen Lazer Team less then twelve hours earlier, was just how many women there were in it. It was about mothers and daughters and women helping each other make it in a new place or occasionally trying to destroy each other. Men mostly exist in the film as arm candy for the supporting characters, and while one of Eilis’s conflicts is choosing between two equally nice men, it’s secondary to her choosing if she will go back to her life in America generally, or stay in Ireland with her mother. I also loved that some female characters I expected to be quite nasty thanks to common film tropes ended up being immensely supportive of each other.
Ultimately, it’s like eating cotton candy; it fades away almost immediately but for that lingering memory of sweetness. I didn’t find it to be terribly substantial, and while I can’t say I regret watching it, not by a long shot, I’m really not sure what it’s doing up against movies like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, or even The Martian.
(Still to go: Spotlight and Room. And Creed because I’ve heard it sure as hell deserved a nod.)
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So no shit, there I was, poised to send a flood (118) emails to writers who submitted to my anthology.
I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings right now, let me tell you. Part of me is excited because this is one step in a long process of putting an anthology together, and it also means that my slush readers and I have managed to go through the entire beautiful, terrifying pile. But I also feel no small bit of guilt, because I’ve been there, man. I’ve gotten plenty of rejections. And now it’s my turn to give other writers one more piece of paper to pin to their wall.
As I joked with the Skiffy and Fanty crew earlier, I have become the enemy. Paul quoted, “I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” To which I answered, “I have become editor, destroyer of dreams!”
It’s a weird feeling.
The No Shit Anthology has a pretty modest slush pile, as slush piles go; when the dust settled, we were at 176 stories. Not bad for a particularly themed anthology, nothing at all like what people who run magazines get. But that alone has given me an appreciation for how much time and work slush readers and editors put in. It ain’t easy. And it’s honest to say that my readers and I have enjoyed the vast majority of what was sent to us, which I think means we hit the jackpot.
I’ve got 118 emails queued up now, to say thanks for letting me read this, but it’s not going to work out. And really, thank you for letting us look at all these stories. We mean it. The remaining 58 stories, we’re holding on to for use in building the ToC, which is the part where I hear blood is going to be both sweated and cried, so here goes. If you don’t receive a rejection today (and you did get an acknowledgment of receipt when you submitted) you are in that second round. My hope and intention is to have the ToC mostly decided before ConDFW in a couple weeks (this may or may not be to avoid any awkward conversations about the state of the slush at barcon) so expect the rest of the rejections and the smaller number of acceptances to trickle through soonish.
I’ll make another post here once everything is decided so you’ll know.
