The Clever Club

It's all over modern narrative: The practice of writing a long-form piece and making every single loose end tie in by the end, causing seemingly throwaway characters/plot lines to balloon into what-a-tweest surprises and/or forcing casual readers to flip back hundreds of pages to remind themselves of insignificant details which are now inflated with meaning. It's so endemic in a certain author's work, I call it Gaiman-ing. This is bad writing, for a number of reasons, but it's alluring as hell. In the process of creating my world for Soil, Ocean, Air, I found myself skirting this approach. Time to "Stop, breeeathe, think," as my mother (and Blue's Clues, I believe) would encourage.

I started grouping together the reasons why I crave such neat wrap-ups, but it turned out that they were all facets of one thing: Pay-off.

I get a little endorphin rush when I solve a puzzle. Doing so in a story with the fewest pieces possible feels economical and smart. Then I feel smart and I want to show it off.  "Wow," the throngs will cheer, "I totally see what you did there. That is so smart. I am in the Clever Club with you, Wirtz! What a great book!" Then they will do the thing I want most--more than reading my work once, they will read it again, now a little smugger because they are in the know. And then they will tell the people they know to read my book because they, like their dear author, will want their friends to join in the satisfaction with them. Gold!

Or is it?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

This film's title gets two (pesky) songs stuck in my head, Dandelion by The Rolling Stones and the old barbershop standard My Coney Island Baby. My mother used to sing the whole rhyme to me and my sibs while counting the buttons on our dress shirts, stopping (based on some rule I now forget) and determining which of the roles we "were". To top it all off, my sister actually watched the original miniseries one summer while we were growing up, flagging this version as a possible point of commonality between us (a bit of a rarity, these days). So TTSS has been nagging at me since I saw it a few weeks ago.

Beyond the stellar ensemble casting, intimate performances and exquisitely claustrophobic mise-en-scene that brought the Circus to life, TTSS offers a valuable opportunity: A reminder that British cinema is foreign cinema. It's harder to see here than in other foreign films. We've been fed most of the cast for decades, many in non-accented roles. And this being a period piece further muddies the water (though Gilliam's epic Brazil put a hyper-Brit, hyper-bureaucracy into the cult consciousness forever ago, and the source material, as it were, is well displayed in TTSS). Toss in the fact that there are swaths of Canada that require subtitles, and you've got about as subtle a genre piece as you can find (subtlety being an indicator of the film's foreign status, of course. Sorry Hollywood).

There are Others all over this film, and it is they who give the nod to the outsider in every Yank moviegoer. Gay men, spies, Scotsmen, women in the government--there's a social maze ancient and twisted for the characters to navigate, one so intricate that the audience might not even notice as we stride right over the top of it, from our modern, American perspectives.

But those of us who can sit in the theater and say, "Wow, England's really different," are actually invited in. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an outsider's film, for them, by them. And the moral of the story is that being an outsider hurts, really costs, but, hey, you aren't as alone as you think. Not a bad feeling to walk away with for the price of popcorn and a pint.

How Does That Even Work?

My acting experience is negligible, but it does exist (Cough, cough, high school, cough). I also know a few actual actors who have, y'know, talent and skill and careers. It is from conversations with them about their processes, as much as from my own limited knowledge, that I now ask this question of myself:

If I had a career and all the stuff that you need to get one, namely lots of training and practice (this is a hypothetical me, so let's ignore the luck/endurance/connections that getting a career in anything actually takes) and I needed to cry for a role, and I being a totally rad actor could cry for said role, how the hell would I force just one tear out of just one eye?

Is it skill? Luck? Faked by make up? I don't know. When I get weepy, my nose runs in a very undignified way. Can you... control that with acting? I heard a lot of hand-waving about Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and it was well-deserved. But Mark Strong cries a single, perfect tear of ultimate heartbreak and nuance, and the intensity of his performance has me almost embarrassed. (More on this next time)

It bears mentioning that describing the scene I'm referring to in prose sounds maudlin and trite. I mean, c'mon, "a single tear"? Snort. But on film it works. It's breathtaking. And if I see my man Mark getting type-cast with any more BS occult villain roles (Sherlock Holmes is a silly-ish movie with a serious-ish role, but, jeez, Stardust? He spends half the movie making the wtf-I-can't-believe-I'm-from-the-same-magical-realm-as-these-dopes face, and what else could he do?) I'ma make some casting directors cry.

Winner, Loser

I came back to a comic I wandered away from today (was reading it at work, no other reason), and I'll never stray again, things keep on like they are. Look Straight Ahead is actually doing something. There's a real understanding of how things feel and how to translate that into how things look. You can sense the theory, if you know it, but the experience--an experiential webcomic, now there's a rare bird--is rich enough that the thought process is never obtrusive. A seamless blend of execution and idea. Boom, yummy. Kudos, Elaine. I really like the simple truth with which you're writing Jeremy. Teens are hard; nicely done.

And I'm wandering away from a comic I've been reading for almost a year now. The Concrete World has great story, world and dialogue (minus a few nit-picky errors that crop up now and then). The art is riddled with a problem my illustrator and I call "squishy head"(go see what I mean). I read it diligently despite its miserly update schedule and occasional iffy drawing: Good story is a lot harder to find than pleasing art. And now they're going on hiatus, and I am disappointed and unsurprised. Momentum can be key in an undertaking as demanding as regularly updating your comic. Six pages a month is a dribble, and when you're dribbling it's so easy to just drop it.

The comic I work on updates around fifteen pages a month. It's grueling to produce like that, and it takes a big investment of creative energy and time. But in a medium where dropping off the face of the earth (hiatus is often code for this) is practically expected, it's invest or go home.