Brain Bombs or How to Read My Stories

This afternoon I asked one of my mystery colleagues what he thought of "The Ice Cream Truck's Song" (now "The Ninth, Not Final, Plague"). He said frankly that he frankly didn't get it at all, even after reading it twice. Interesting. Here he was a native speaker and he'd fared worse than my students. They at least knew it was a ghost story. Hmm. We talked about the title, which I admitted was misleading. He said it made you think something nice was going to happen. Well, something nice did happen, from a certain perspective. He said it reminded him of Poe's madmen stories. Lots of detail. I can't remember what triggered it, but he suddenly shouted, "Oh! I know who the ghosts are!" I must have said something about its being a ghost story. I think that's right. The minute he knew it was a spooker, everything clicked. Hmm.

The conversation reminded me that I'd planned to write a brief treatise on how to read certain of my stories which begin "in medias res" and don't supply obvious hints about what's going to come in handy down the road. I'm referring here to things like the James Bond movies, where Bond invariably pays a visit to Q, who invariably hands him a set of disguised weapons and other gear, which Bond invariably calls upon in a tight spot, or the Harry Potter stories, in which one or two magical gadgets introduced casually early in the tale end up being crucial to the plot (think of the time-turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the portkey in The Goblet of Fire, the pensieve in The Order of the Phoenix and the vanishing cabinet in The Half-Blood Prince).

While I don't mind, and even enjoy, this obvious style of presentation in other people's work, but I like to do it more subtly myself. I like to show you the world and let you notice what you will, the way it works in the real world. Of course, there are myriad differences between any story and the real world. Any report or representation of reality is going to be restricted in content, our attention is going to be funneled to a few pertinent items, but I so like those moments in M. Knight Shyamalan's movies when a whole mess of seemingly insignificant details or oddities suddenly string together into one tight and intense realization (as when Malcolm Crowe can't open the basement door in The Sixth Sense, David Dunn sees Elijah Price's diagrams in Unbreakable, and Graham Hess confronts the alien in Signs).

And so to "The Ninth, Not Final, Plague". I'm not entirely pleased with that title, which may be the subject of a future entry called "Evolution of a Title". It's a good title, but it's a bit heavy for the story, just as "The Ice Cream Truck's Song" was too light. Anyway, let's talk briefly about how the story works.

It starts with what for some readers would be, and is, an obvious clue: "I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell." This is a pretty plain tip off that something weird is about to be described. If that isn't enough, we have the next sentence: "Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing." What else could we be talking about but ghosts, especially after the next paragraph, which tells us that "there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof"?

Next thing you know the narrator is hearing voices. Not much later he is making them out. It could only be ghosts, ba.

The question for most of my students is "Who are the ghosts?" They really puzzle over that one. Yet the clues are so numerous it's almost embarrassing. You could be forgiven for thinking the narrator was freaked out until you read paragraph five: "It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before." If that doesn't help, he tells you "I would have let it ring a decade if I could", not what you'd expect from someone experiencing fear, unless you take it to mean he'd rather hear the bell ring than face the ghosts in the corridor. Ooh! That gave me the cold pricklies! But then he goes on "grasping at shadows", actually trying to touch the ghost that rings the bell, so he's obviously not afraid of the ghosts, and then he claims to know where the ghost's hand, arm, shoulders and head should be–even what the look on its face must be! If that doesn't do it for you, he digresses about shoes and dust and about an apartment that hasn't been looked after for a while. Then there's the perfume, a sly little twist to show he has a grip on reality. He's sure he must be imagining the perfume. It wouldn't be so apparent if its wearer were returning.

Then we have paragraph eleven, which spells out in huge flaming letters the relationship between the ghosts. Taken with paragraph ten's "family grave" simile for the vacant parking spot that neighbours wish to buy or rent but which the narrator refuses to sell or rent in case "they" return and paragraph eight's dust and shoes description, paragraph eleven amounts to a statement of the relationship between the narrator and the ghosts. The second to last paragraph talks about fear, but not of the ghosts: of their eventually not coming anymore, a fate the narrator would rather avoid. Why? Well, you figure it out.

This type of story I call a brain bomb. You go along, wondering or not, and somewhere very close to the end, it all clicks and your brain explodes with it. In the explosion, all the subtle hints come rushing together to be relived, everything takes on new meaning (or just meaning, if you didn't start to get it earlier), and there's this intense, exquisite paroxysm of understanding and awe, awe not for my finesse with the pen or keyboard, but for the splendour and terror of the human soul, the beauty and horror of our state.

Does that help anybody?

Where Ideas Come from

I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

Rubber Masks and Twists and Turns

I was watching Alias last night and thinking to myself how silly many of the most recent TV series are. I guess TV series have always been silly, but I've been particularly aware of this phenomenon lately. The same applies to movies.

Last night's silliness resided in two elements: impersonation and misdirection.

I haven't been following the series closely, so I can't be sure what all has happened between the episodes I've watched, but it appears that Lauren, an apparently exposed Covenant mole, has managed to get back onto the "Rotunda" wearing a rubber mask in the likeness of Sydney, the show's heroine. Now, forgive my lack of credulity, but it seems to me that properly trained field agents and desk officers of a crack intelligence agency would see through or around a mask in less time than it takes to bat an eye. Besides the cosmetic anomalies, there would be the little matter of what carries the head around, to wit, the rest of the impersonator's body. Surely physique/figure, posture, gait, tread and a dozen other characteristics would give the impersonation away. As it happens in this episode of Alias, only a change in perfume is apparent.

Masks as paraphernalia of impersonation have been around for a while on the stage and screen. John Woo was into them for a bit (Face Off, Mission Impossible 2). They featured prominently in Darkman. Granted, the Face Off and Darkman masks were somewhat more sophisticated than the MI2 and Alias ones, but there are so many problems with the whole conceit of fooling everybody, including spouses and lovers in bed, with a simple change of face and voice that it's a wonder the idea gets used at all.  I guess it's effective, though. People watch the shows–and sometimes pay money to do so.

Incidentally, the Japanese historical drama Kagemusha explores quite effectively the complexities of impersonation. A thief is very secretly recruited to impersonate an assassinated warlord. He succeeds brilliantly, even managing, though with initial difficulty, to fool, or at least win over, the warlord's grandson, but is ultimately exposed by the warlord's horse, who is not fooled at all and throws him off like a sack of rice. The warlord's favourite concubine, who has been kept away, like all the warlord's wives and concubines, from the impersonator, rushes to her supposed lover's side only to discover that his shoulder lacks an identifying scar.

More annoying than the business with masks is this tendency to stuff a show with misdirection. It's become so common that I've grown to expect it. You'd think the characters in the stories would expect it, too, especially the ones in TV series, who encounter it weekly or daily or whatever. The problem with it as a plot device, from my perspective, is that you stop trusting the characters. For me, at any rate, this creates a hesitation to care, a tiresome uncertainty that what I'm seeing is actually happening (in the context of the story) or that it means what I think it means. It's gotten to the point that I sometimes don't bother forming conclusions about the reality or significance of events in these shows. Well, all right, that's impossible, but I've adopted a sort of limp inquisitiveness, a ginger, half-hearted, detached curiosity focused more on how silly it's going to get than on what's actually apparently happening.

Another example of the device occurred in a recently aired and re-aired episode of 24. I haven't followed that series closely, either, but I get the gist of the events and relationships. In the episode in question, Jack Bauer, exposed as a CTU mole in the Salazar organization, moves to re-infiltrate the Salazar organization. Whatever happened to once bitten, twice shy? Don't the people in these shows have any sense? Why on earth would the supposedly sagacious head of a heavy-handed family criminal organization with terrorist connections allow an exposed anti-terrorist triple agent back into the bosom of his gang, especially when by discrediting himself with the government that agent has undermined his own usefulness to the underworld? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

The only explanation I can think of is that all this is somehow symptomatic of the currently empowered generation, the late-twenties through mid- to late thirties generation, I guess, that writes, directs and markets these productions. They must feel uncertain of the people and events in their lives, that anyone could be an imposter, that it's impossible to tell who is really behind or with you, what's really going on, or what anything really means. Perhaps it's the lack of a code, of a set of beliefs and morals they would rather die than betray. Perhaps everything has become so relative that people expect and forgive betrayal, trusting when trust has been abused, and overlook patent uselessness, anticipating benefits when no benefit can logically be expected.