Shockingly Literate

I generally prefer novels to short story collections, but I would read a shopping list if Gaiman penned it.

I received Neil Gaiman’s collection of short stories Fragile Things for Christmas, and I’ve been devouring it rapidly. My favorite so far has been a gem called “Other People.”

The story details a man’s punishment in Hell, where he is physically tortured by a demon. He’s then forced to recount his life aloud again and again, admitting to every bad thing he’s ever done, and then he’s forced to learn the repercussions of his selfishness on other people.

In the end, the torture has left him looking like the demon, a soulless husk, and a new wayward human enters the chamber. The cycle begins anew.

In the forward, Gaiman recounts the doubt he felt upon completion of the story. It felt too circular, too neat to be original. It nagged at the back of his mind. He was sure it must have been a story he’d heard years before and then forgotten. After reading “Other People” to a number of friends, however, no one could name a derivative work.

I think this is a problem all writers face. Whenever I get an idea for a story, if I don’t get it written within a day or two, I usually talk myself out of it. I tell myself it’s too much like this other story or it’s taking too much from this movie.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum – everybody draws from their role models and inspirations. What separates us from them, though? How do we differentiate our work, and how do we mark that difference between being inspired by an artist and stealing from them?

I was reading this interview with District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, and he raised a point I found very interesting.

The interviewer made note that District 9 was so surprising because of its originality. It wasn’t based on a comicbook, and it wasn’t a remake. This is increasingly rare in sci-fi and horror films today.

When dealing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remember that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.

Blomkamp agrees. The director points out that the first question many people ask when they hear about a new movie these days is “Where did it [the idea] come from?” He argues that the most meaningful science fiction didn’t come from watching other films

He goes on to point out that many writers and directors say their stories are influenced by other films. Blomkamp argues that the best sci-fi comes from real life stimulation and experience. Many of the classics were based on the effects of the Cold War, experiences in Vietnam, etc, not just the movies you watched growing up.

This line of thinking really bothers me, as I agree with it, but I fall into the camp whose influences are other authors, not real life experiences. I’ve spent my entire life just going to school and university — that doesn’t make for the most unique or exciting stimuli for story telling.

I know my worries about this can’t be unique. How many other writers are out there whose most influential life experiences came not from life itself, but from their favorite books and movies? Can people like us still tell visceral, important, exciting stories armed only with our own mundane lives and our knowledge of literature and film?

District 9 is an excellent film that does what all good sci-fi should: take a real world issue and reframe it so that people will think about it differently. Just like any intro-level creative writing class will say, it’s a storyteller’s job to hold up a mirror to his or her audience.

Sci-fi writers choose to hold up a fun-house mirror instead, hoping that the distorted image their audience sees will cause them to stop for a second and think about what they’re looking at. Blomkamp holds his mirror up to South African society, but what else is out there that needs a good looking at?

William Gibson (@GreatDismal) was kind enough to retweet this article by author David Foster Wallace which was drudged up through the interwebs from all the way back to the year of our Lord, 1998, by @mrphoenix.

Wallace blames James Cameron’s Terminator 2 for “inaugurating what’s become this [the 90's] decade’s special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn.” He’s referring to the blockbusters we’ve all become used to seeing every Summer: 2012, Transformers, etc. He describes them as a “half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes … strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.”

The reason I find this article so ironic is that if you just cut and paste Avatar for Terminator 2, all of Wallace’s points stand strong. Thank the good Lord that Mr. Wallace, rest his soul, passed away last year, when Avatar was just an ominous blip on the dark horizon.

Say what you will about his movie, this T-800 is happy to be here.

My knee-jerk reaction to Wallace’s article was to think he was some elitist fascist who saw T2 and said “This is in no way superior to David Lynch’s 1977 classic Eraserhead, therefore it is mere rubbish for the plebs.” But he cut me off before I could judge — he avows his love for both Cameron’s original Terminator and Aliens right in the article. There must be more to his criticism than meets the eye.

Is Wallace right that all movies’ budgets are inversely proportional to their quality? I love T-1000, but if Cameron hadn’t spent a bajillion dollars on that morphing technology, I still would have enjoyed T2. Despite Wallace’s critcisms, I find the plot solid, the movie entertaining and exciting, and I really like the relationship between the characters. I even like the cheesy cyborg humor.

Take Avatar on the other hand. I excuse the movie’s shallow “corporations are greedy and bad” plot because the world Cameron has made with his new mo-cap technology is so vivid and beautiful. Now, take away the CG and just paint some actors blue instead. Uh-oh, now your movie is straight to DVD.

I don’t think exciting special effects are inherently bad for a film’s depth — they are just a tool. It is the person who holds the tool who should be held accountable. If I put a hammer and some nails in the hand of an architect, when I come home I want to see a house, not one board with ten thousand nails in it.

If you missed "Avatar," try messing with your TV's color settings until people are blue. Now watch "Dances with Wolves." There, saved you $12.

The only defense I can muster is that not all film is made for critics — it’s a free market economy. If Avatar’s special effects alone are causing it to break all kinds of box office records, what does that say about what the public wants? Cameron spent nearly a decade and poured head-ache inducing amounts of money into this new mo-cap technology, so of course he wants to be as audience-friendly as possible to ensure the financial success of his movie.

Now that the technology exists, film makers can do whatever they want with it. I like to think of Avatar as a glorified tech demo, and I’m hungry to see how directors (including JC) use it in future films with more discriminating tastes. Whenever technology moves forward, people are usually loathe to move with it. Somebody had to blow a ton of time and money developing the first camera, and all the Lumiere brothers shot with it was a train coming at the screen. Avatar’s plot holds up a little better.