Movies that work without making any damn sense

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PACIFIC RIM: the story of a talented but troubled pianist searching for love.

At least, that’s what I told my son it was about when I told him we were all going to see it. He’s old enough to to tell when I’m joking most of the time, but I kept telling him it was part of music appreciation and homeschooling, so he eventually just flat out admitted “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or serious.”

Note to self: teach son meaning of “sarcastic.”

Anyway, once he saw the poster outside the theater, he knew there would be zero piano players. He bought his usual treat of a small popcorn with extra butter, but when the movie ended it was completely untouched. He’d been so engrossed in the film that he’d forgotten all about it.

A big question for me is: WHY? He wasn’t half a block away before he started picking nits. Why did the pilots have to be inside the robots? being the big one. My wife and are were also laughing about how ludicrous the whole thing was: Our Hero has a jaeger that is analog, not digital, because it’s nuclear powered? I guess that mind-meld technology runs on diskettes.

Anyway, the whole thing is deliberately absurd, but also powerfully affecting. When we got home, there was a Netflix disc in the mailbox. It was THE MATRIX, another movie that worked like gangbusters despite the fact that it made no damn sense at all.

So why do they work? It’s not the spectacle. There are plenty of dull movies full of spectacle. (We just watched 2012, so that’s fresh in my mind.)

The real secret is that the relationships between the characters, and the way the characters change, is what draws us in. Yeah, there’s a visceral thrill from the sight of claws, teeth, and roaring. Yeah, the music gooses your emotions.

But all of it falls flat if the emotions don’t work.

The funny thing is that I spent years trying to understand narrative structure, and so much of that time was spent on plot mechanics and exposition. It wasn’t until I began using the structure to focus the characters’ emotions and relationships that I began to have any success at all.

Stories are better if the plot makes sense, but if the characters don’t appeal no clockwork plot in the world will make it worth the audience’s time.

Five Things.

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1) OMG, another terrorist attack in England! But maybe you haven’t heard of it because it was an attack against a mosque.

2) We only just started watching GLEE on Netflix (and I didn’t much like it) but we were all saddened to hear that one of the stars died of a drug overdose.

Media reports keep saying “He had just spent a month in rehab to break his addiction” as though it’s a shame that rehab failed him, but what few people say is that the risk of death by overdose is incredibly high after an addict has been clean for a while. Their tolerance drops, and when they fall off the wagon they go back to pre-rehab levels of drug use. That can be lethal with lowered tolerance.

I realize it could be undermining to say: “We don’t want you to fall off the wagon, but if you do…” but someone ought to warn people.

3) And of course there’s the Zimmerman verdict, which… Christ.

Not only are you well aware that many people are afraid of you—you can see them clutching their purses or stiffening in their subway seats when you sit across from them—you must also remain conscious of the fact that people expect you to be apologetic for their fear. It’s your job to be remorseful about the fact that your very nature makes them uncomfortable, like a pilot having to apologize to a fearful flyer for being in the sky.


It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.

To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?

4) There’s a growing movement for people to boycott the movie ENDER’S GAME because the author of the novel is a wackadoodle homophobe who done work for the NOM and has, in the past, advocated revolution if the same-sex marriage became legal. Lionsgate acknowledged the issue in their own official response, but I like this response better.

Personally, I doubt I’ll be seeing the movie myself but I was already meh on it before I heard about the boycott. Color me skeptical of stories about child soldiers. Besides, if I’ve already skipped the sequel to the rebooted Star Trek, Epic, Oblivion, and a bunch of other half-baked summer fare, I really can’t see myself stealing writing time for this film.

5) In much lighter news, JK Rowling published a book under a pen name, which was just outed last week.

I’ve talked about this a lot on Twitter and it’s hard to summarize everything for this space. Personally I think it was a smart thing for her to do; a pen name gives her the freedom to write without expectations. No one is comparing her books to the last Potter book, no one expects a huge event out of it. It’s just her doing what she wants.

Now that it’s out, of course, it’s like the blind wise sages describing an elephant: Some people think she tried to abandoned her fans, some think she proved that publishing is all (or mostly) about luck, some think it’s all about how a few bestselling authors dominate the market and make things incredibly difficult for new and midlist authors.

And then there’s this:

Which I think is hilarious.

This week sucks

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It was just Monday that I blogged about how grateful I am that folks are supporting me in the Clarion West writeathon and that I was taking those pledges seriously and hoping to get a lot done.

Then, later that day, I broke a tooth in a big way.

Tuesday, I discovered that I could not get in with my dentist that day.

Wednesday, I learned that I will probably need a root canal that I can’t afford.

Today, my wife found out that a very old friend of hers passed away. She’s processing it as best she can and I’m trying to stay close in case she needs support.

Guys, this week sucks. As soon as we can put this one in our rear-view mirror, lets.

On top of that, I realized too late that progress on the book had grown sluggish because my subconscious was telling me that I’d made a structural mistake. The book felt flat and I couldn’t keep pushing through it any more. This realization felt almost Strossian.

So, it’s late in the day but I’m going to go back and redo those pages in the proper way, and hopefully they will help to build the climax the way it’s meant to be done.

Week’s not over! It’s possible that tomorrow will be non-shitty. Let’s hope so.

I won’t be at Comic-Con

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Based on the search strings I’m seeing from people searching for my site, I should make it easy on folks to find out this piece of information:

I’m not going to SDCC this year.

What’s more, I’m not planning to attend ever again. I’ve tried a convention or two and I mostly didn’t enjoy them, so I decided some time ago that I wasn’t going to go. Maybe if I’d started at 15 or something, it would be different. Now I’m an old guy and I just don’t have the interest.

Sorry. I know this is the sort of thing some readers expect, but it’s not the right thing for me.

The Banality of SFWA

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So I was reading Darin Strauss’s The Banality of Butter: What Hannah Arendt Can Tell Us About Paula Deen in The Atlantic Wire and I reached this section:

… sometimes what we call evil — and what can bring about the most horrible outcomes — can often more accurately and simply be thoughtlessness of a sort. That is to say, people, and communities, are often no good at the kind of abstract thought that helps us understand the experience of others. [italics original]

This lesson comes from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and as Strauss says in his Atlantic article, it’s absurd to compare what Paula Deen did with what Eichmann did.

I’d like to pause here to emphasize that: for Strauss, the point here is not to compare what Deen did with what Eichmann did, and I have no interest in trying to compare what serial harassers inside SFWA or other convention spaces with what Eichmann did. That would be absurd.

But the way that communities react to these issues is very much to the point. Deen’s supporters have refused to acknowledge that her behavior was worth condemnation, or that their assertion that what she did was no big deal stems from a cultural abscess that should have been lanced a long time ago.

Another quote:

Again, Arendt was perhaps the first to write coherently about the trouble communities have in seeing the world as being something other than what they have been conditioned to see — without any kind of cultural empathy.

Isn’t that what we see from the harasser-apologists? People with no empathy for the way women are treated in their shared spaces, and who think women should just suck it up, or laugh it off, or consider that maybe possibly kinda could this all be a misunderstanding?

It seems to me that there are few more effective ways to rile up a bunch of people than to puncture their self-image as people of virtue.

Randomness for 7/9

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1) Dungeons & Dragons and the Influence of Tabletop RPGs | Off Book | PBS Digital Arts Video

2) Camera allows you to see parkour from the POV of the traceur. Video.

3) Cartoon rejection rates at the New Yorker. Includes a TEDTalk of course because New Yorker.

4) A Visual Guide To The Mastery Of Kirk-Fu.

5) Extremely unfortunate spelling mistakes on Twitter.

6) How to live with introverts, a comic.

7) I need NEED to become an incredibly wealthy person solely so I can purchase one of these. My wife and kid can have one, too.

Clarion West Writeathon total… so far

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I want to thank everyone who has pledged in my name to benefit the famous Clarion West workshop. The six-week workshop is only in its second week, and already folks have donated $340.

I’m taking my part of this seriously, too, working to finish the promised pages by the end of the six-week period.

Each week I get a short email from the Clarion West folks letting me know where things stand, and each week the pledge total has been higher than before. If no one pledged another penny after this point, I would be grateful and flattered.

Thanks very much. The Great Way will be finished soon. That’s my pledge.

Here’s an odd birthday present

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A tweet I wrote on impulse on Saturday night has been retweeted over 275 times.

Somebody get me a little “verified” check for my name! I’m famous!

Okay, not really, but it is kinda weird. Also surprising: how little hate-tweeting I’m getting in response.

Randomness for 7/1

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1) Mars Rover takes a billion-pixel photo so you can click and zoom around in it to explore the red planet.

2) How To Use Math To Crush Your Friends At Monopoly Like You’ve Never Done Before.

3) A series of photographs showing various types of rounds cut in the cross-section. Way more interesting than it sounds.

4) Beautiful kinetic sculptures. Video.

5) An offer of free lodging always has some kind of catch to it, right? (People are weird)

6) The Ten Best Superhero RPGs ever. I’m not obsessed with them like the author of this article and I certainly haven’t played all the games on this list, but I agree with his top two.

7) If movies were reviewed like video games.

Happy Birthday to me

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People who have been reading me for a while (and who have good memories) know that I celebrate my not-birthday today. Since my wife and I have the same birthday, and since sharing the day with your spouse sucks, I moved mine.

And hey, at the bottom of this post I’m going to ask you for a present.

My wife will be at work most of the day, but the plan is:

    Write in the morning.
    See Man of Steel (which no one else in the fam wants to see).
    Come home and play a video game, if you can fucking believe it (alternately: write some more).
    Delivery Indian food for dinner.
    Giant fruit salad instead of cake. (We are not people of the cake.)

Best part: no nasty melon in the fruit salad. Everyone puts melon or cantelope or something in fruit salad, and it always ruins it. We’ll have cherries, apple, pear, nectarines, and some other fruits that are not on the reactive list. So incredibly good. I can’t wait.

From you, good reader, I will ask for a birthday present. As you know (professor) I’m going to be Kickstartering and self-publishing my latest book. I would ask you knowledgeable folk to post three or fewer links to the most instructive blog posts and articles that you know about the process.

If you don’t know of any good Kickstarter articles, no worries.

I’ll turn on comments on my main blog for this. Hopefully, the spam won’t be too overwhelming. Not working. Reader, I sigh. You can also comment on my LiveJournal, on Twitter, on Facebook, or any of my social media.

Have a great day, you guys. I plan to.