Loop-di-Joop

I’ve always thought that the most beautiful words in the English language are the ones that I’ve contributed. That sounds about as narcissistic as you can get, but it’s true. There’s no logic to what makes a word sound nice, it’s all illogical intuition, and who knows my intuition better than me, after all? My all-time favorite word is Loop-Di-Joop, which was the name of my imaginary friend from Venus back when I was three. I don’t remember Loop-Di-Joop at all (I only know of the name because my parents told me later) but there’s something undeniably pleasing to me about the sound of it. That’s what baby babble is, after all, making noise for pleasure. To anyone else it’s nonsense, but to me, nothing will ever match the elegance and glory of those three syllables.

That’s what’s so wonderful about childhood, isn’t it? You don’t care what your words mean, you just say them because you want to. It doesn’t matter if anyone else can see the strange and wonderful world inside your imagination, it’s enough fun that you don’t need any company. I get discouraged pretty often when I’m sitting at the keyboard, trying to transpose the story in my head into a language that I didn’t create. If only I was content to close my eyes, lean back in my chair, and just live in the illusion.

Only I can’t, because I can’t think like a child anymore. It’s a fun fantasy to believe that there’s a secret world of monsters under the sewer grates, but I can’t jettison the fact that there’s nothing down there but sewage. Somewhere along the line I traded imagination more powerful than anything I’ve felt in the real world for some self-sufficiency and communication skills and about two feet of height. It’s a trade that I never agreed to and, for years, it was one that I wished I could take back. Starting in middle school, I got a feeling I couldn’t shake that I was losing a vibrant imagination that I’d never be able to get back.

It took me a long time to realize, but now I think that maybe losing it isn’t all bad. Looking at the very short, very confusing novel I wrote at age six, it’s pretty clear that I had an active world living inside my head, full of slime monsters and clocks that can stop time and an odd amount of emphasis on keeping your shoes dry, but none of it translated into the real world very well. And, even though I have to admit that it sucks not to be able to conjure worlds from nothing the way I did back when I was a kid, at the same time that I lost that, I learned how to let other people into my head a little with my writing; first with an underground satirical newspaper, then with sharing short stories and novels I’d written, and finally with this blog. Best of all, with writing groups like the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio or the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop or tabletop RPG groups, I can see that I’m not the only one with an imagination, and that living in someone else’s imaginative world for a little while can be pretty great too. Growing up is a compromise, in the end I’ll never know Loop-di-Joop as well as I used to. But now maybe someone else can know him too.

The Smart Money: A Screenplay About a Man Who Falls In Love With a Giant Pile of Money

Searching through the dark corners of my google drive, I found the script for an absurdist deconstruction of the rom-com genre called The Smart Money. I think the basic idea of a movie where a man literally falls in love with an enormous pile of money and it’s all treated like a legitimate romance is actually pretty decent (if a little on-the-nose), but thirteen-year-old John went overboard with the absurd humor and it turned out practically unreadable. Still, here are the first two scenes anyway. I'm not sure if the randomly capitalized verbs are some kind of obscure joke or if I actually thought that was how you wrote scripts.

1. INT. APARTMENT. NIGHT.

A New York Apartment, messily organized, with posters askew and dishes piling up in the washing machine. There is disturbingly little money on the money pile. GREG and LINDA are having a loud conversation, both are obviously distressed.

GREG: Linda! I just need more time!

LINDA: No, Greg! I have been you girlfriend for eight months, so you know that I am an open-minded woman. But there are certain things I will not sacrifice my dignity for, and chief among them is dating a poor!

GREG: Linda, you know that I’m not a poor! Look at how much of my grandfather’s inheritance is still left. (He motions to the money pile)

LINDA: There isn’t enough, not enough to make me happy. You’ve fooled me for too long, Greg, and I know that before long that money will be gone and you’ll be out on the street, practicing law or writing novels or doing something else that no rational person would ever do!

GREG: No, Linda, don’t leave!

LINDA: I’m sorry, it’s too late for me. I’ll only come back if in 23 days your money pile is twice the size it is now.

LINDA EXITS

GREG TURNS, SITS on his sofa

GREG: Oh God, why did you have to bring me into this world if I weren’t good with money? Why can’t you magically make my money pile bigger?

From behind him, glitter FALLS on the money pile and harp music PLAYS. Little streams of smoke RISE from the money pile, FORMING OLIVIA'S GHOST.

GREG LOOKS at his messy table, PICKs UP a piece of paper.

GREG: Wait a minute, it says here that if I take this to the bank before midnight, I’ll get a million dollars! Wowzers! But midnight is in ten minutes! 

GREG RUNS out of his apartment, down the stairs, into the New York street. The song “The Final Countdown” begins PLAYING.

GREG continues to RUN through the streets, through dark alleys with broken windows and graffiti and gang members sniffing foam. 

DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1 STEPS in front of GREG, POINTS a gun at him. “The Final Countdown” begins fading out.

DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1: Give me all your money, GREG!

GREG: Never, DISGRUNTLED LUNATIC #1!

GREG keeps on RUNNING. “The Final Countdown” begins playing again, louder than before.

GREG RUNS up to the bank.

GREG: Hi, can I turn this paper in to get my million dollars?

BANK MAN: Sorry, Greg, it’s past midnight.

GREG: Oh no! 

GREG’S ARROGANT RIVAL #1: Hi, bank man! Can I turn in my paper?

BANK MAN: Sure, Greg’s Arrogant Rival #1, but only because you’re my son!

GREG’S ARROGANT RIVAL #1: Thanks, dad!

BANK MAN: Here’s your million dollars.

BANK MAN hands GREG’s ARROGANT RIVAL #1 a million dollars.

GREG WALKS dejectedly out of the bank. “The Final Countdown” fades out.

CRIMINAL approaches GREG. 

CRIMINAL: Hey, GREG, I could give you a million dollars, if you’d help me out with some stuff.

GREG: No! I’d never stoop to criminal activity!

CRIMINAL: Jesus Christ, why would you think I’d want your help with criminal stuff just because I’m a criminal? Talk about offensive generalizations!

GREG: I’m sorry.

GREG continues to WALK dejectedly.

2. INT. APARTMENT. NIGHT.

“The Final Countdown” continues playing, but softer and in a minor key.

GREG: Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do.

GREG POURS gasoline all over his money pile.

GREG: I’ll have to set fire to my money pile and commit insurance fraud.

GREG LIGHTS the lighter. A single tear DRIPS down his cheek and LANDS in the gasoline.

THE GHOST OF OLIVIA (Invisible): Stop! Wait! Don’t burn me!

GREG: What? Who said that! Was it you, God? 

T.G.O.O: No, Greg. It’s me, the spirit of your money.

T.G.O.O. FLOATS up from the money pile, LOOKS down at GREG.

GREG: Jinkers! Am I going nuts?

T.G.O.O.: No, Greg.

GREG: How do you know my name?

T.G.O.O.: I’ve been watching you for a long time. I’ve seen good in your soul, but also great sadness and breaking up with Linda. I’d like to help you with your money problems.

GREG: Would you really do that, spirit of my money?

T.G.O.O.: Yes, I would.

GREG: Is all money haunted?

T.G.O.O.: Ummm, yes. Yes it is. All money is haunted. That’s all there is to it.

GREG: Sounds bonkers! Well, what do I do to fix this money conundrum of mine?

T.G.O.O.: Go to the stock market and invest me! Don’t worry about what happens next. It’s very confusing and probably not worth learning about.

GREG: Okay. Then I guess I’d better be going to bed.

GREG GLANCES over to his bedroom but SEES it filled with trash and paper. 

GREG: Or maybe I should just sleep in here.

GREG COLLAPSES on the gas-soaked money pile and closes his eyes. T.G.O.O. STARES down at him for a moment, SMILES, then DISSIPATES.

That Time I Got so Fed Up With Edina That I Compared it to the 19th Century Russian Monarchy

In my senior year of High School, after successfully publishing a bizarre, Edina specific horror story in the student newspaper and almost getting away with a satircal article where the whole joke was the word “horny,” I decided that the paper really didn’t care what I wrote, so I went ahead and compared the school’s administration to the late 19th century Russian Monarchy. I succeeded in the sense that no one suggested I get suspended this time, but it did lead to an awkward meeting with the school's media specialist. If you want to support the school paper by reading it on the actual website, here it is.

The Edina tech policy everyone’s currently up in arms about is the new cell phone confiscation rule. And, while I think it’s absurd that Edina is trying to saturate the student body with technology, then trying to exact total control over those devices, that isn’t the issue I’m going to tackle today. No, today I’m going to talk about an issue that’s been around as long as Edina computers have: blocking websites.

It’s a good idea, in theory. Anyone who’s ever gone through the comments section on YouTube knows that the internet is often an ugly, hateful, inappropriate place, and Edina High School is an institution charged with educating young people, most of whom are legally still children. Providing some sort of internet safety is a basic necessity. I mean, we can’t have students pulling up pornography on learning devices.

The problem is, the internet is often hateful, ugly, and inappropriate, but also unbelievably large and complex, so trying to toe the line between too much freedom and total censorship has lead to some strange results, especially when certain classes deal with adult themes. In Film and Literature class, for example, there are assignments that are impossible to do on school owned Chromebooks because of restricted mode on YouTube.

Then there are totally banal sites that the school insists on blocking. If I want to read this morning’s Pearls Before Swine comic strip, check the Ask.fm account for the literary magazine I work for, or see the newest Magic: The Gathering spoilers, I have to go out of my way to get around the firewall. I could get it if the school blocked all social media or game sites, but they allow Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and other time wasters way more dangerous than GoComics.

And, in its ultimate goal of keeping students from adult content, the firewall fails. It is possible, on school wifi, to access an image of Jesus, Moses, Ganesh, and the Buddha all having graphic sex with one another. But it would be simply awful if they blocked the site this appears on, because that is The Onion, an excellent source of political satire with enormous educational potential.

This example really underlines the essential problem with blocking websites: there isn’t some binary designation between safe and unsafe sites. School is a place to learn about the real world, and sites that display how the world works will inevitably have borderline inappropriate content.

And Edina Public Schools doesn’t really have a problem with adult content (The God of Small Things, The Color Purple, and Slaughterhouse Five are all required reading for some classes, after all). What they really fear is a lack of control. In the end, the firewall operates on the same principle as the new, wildly unpopular rules concerning cell phones in classrooms. They’re operating like the Russia in the late 19th century, when the monarchy wanted to urbanize without the social progress that inevitably comes with urbanization. The EHS administration wants the benefits of technology without the costs, namely the lack of control of information.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to strive for that, I’m just saying that it’s futile quest.

Grinnell

We were having a conversation about the precise definition of “hipster” at the cross country table the other day, and I started to make the point that, by definition, no one at Grinnell was really a hipster, since what could be less hipstery than living in the middle of Iowa? But I cut that idea off mid-sentence when I realized that going to Grinnell might just be the most hipstery thing one can do. I’m sure students at other schools ask each other “So why did you decide to come here?” but I really doubt that anyone but Grinnellians say it as “So why did you decide to come here?” As if they’d made it to the pearly gates, been offered a prime spot in heaven by St. Peter, and said, “Nah, I think hell is a better fit for me, you know?”

And Grinnell matches my idea of hell a little better than I’d like to admit. It has nearly the same bitter cold of Minnesota without the picturesque snow, and the wind gets vicious once you get outside of town. Sometimes everything smells like manure for days on end. The train cutting through campus is pretty cool, I guess, until you hear the wheels grinding and the whistle blowing outside your dorm at three in the morning. And, even if everything in Grinnell were absolutely perfect, you can’t deny that there really isn’t all that much to it. From three years as a cross country runner, I know all too well that you can’t go more than ten minutes in any direction before you’re looking at an endless straight road with rows of corn on either side.

So yes, Grinnell totally seems like the kind of place that a hard-core hipster would go to college ironically. But I think the connection between Grinnell and hipsters is wrong, because every supposedly sarcastic enjoyment that defines that outdated cliché is ultimately shallow: no one gets unnecessary surgery for ironic enjoyment or joins a cult because religious deviance isn’t mainstream. No one can live four years in a place that they really hate, and I think, under all that sarcasm, everyone here really finds something meaningful about living in this tiny, smelly, rusting town.

I thought I had a non-ironic reason for going to Grinnell when I came here. At that time I had about as many theories about how the world works as you’d expect from a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer, and none of which were particularly accurate. I’d read The Great Gatsby the year before, claimed to love it because it’s the sort of book that an aspiring writer is supposed to love, and found a common thread through the text (or, actually, through my mom’s old notes in the margins) that portrayed New York as an ethically blighted place, while the Midwest still held some sort of moral purity. Being a guy from Minnesota and Texas, I’d take any snobbery over the coastal states that I could get, but I took an extra strong hold on that theory when every East Coast school I applied to turned me down. Since the Midwest was the only place left to go, I doubled down and went to the most Midwestern school I could think of in hopes that I was making it seem like some kind of big plan.

The town and school were charming at first, but it was charming in the way that a joke is funny: spend long having it repeated over and over and over again, and any enjoyment you used to get from it drains away. Living my life on the one square mile patch of campus got old quick, and before long I’d seen all I thought there was to see in the rest of the town from wandering aimless running and wandering. Within my first few months, I’m pretty sure I had gone down every street the town had to offer, and couldn’t find very much worth looking at in any of it.

There was never a single moment when some light switched on in my head and Grinnell started looking brighter. But, even if I don’t know why or how, it looked brighter all the same. The way the rooms inside a house seem to expand once you’ve lived in them for a while, little scraps of the town that I hadn’t noticed before emerged from the blurred landscape. In the second semester of my first year I discovered a tiny game store in the basement of a law firm. A little while later I found out that a building I’d taken as just another old house was actually the Grinnell History Museum. Not everything I discovered was quite so positive: despite all the clean, new, college subsidized buildings, it doesn’t take much searching to find real poverty in Grinnell. In a town this small, you can’t shuffle it off into another neighborhood.

Yesterday, my art history class took a minor field trip to the town bank. I’d noticed the unusually elaborate front facade before, but until then I’d never really paid much attention to it or even acknowledge its beauty. Smooth, vegetal patterns weave together into the town’s logo of interlocking squares, centering on a green-yellow stained glass window that makes the shades of corn into a celestial glow. It was designed by Louis Sullivan, the first architect who tried to make skyscrapers into something of unique aesthetic virtue. After his style went out of fashion in the big cities he bummed around small towns for the rest of his life, making little jewel box banks like these. I wonder if he pretended like he was retreating from the corrupt costal elites into the land of unspoiled virtue. I wonder if he thought of himself as something of a hipster.

Whatever his story was, I’m glad he came here, and I’m glad I did too. Maybe if I’d gone to school in New York or Chicago I could’ve found pieces of art and history around every corner. But I’d probably never have had the time to pay them any attention. After all, it took me three years to give Grinnell its due.

I, The Person (An Abandoned Novel)

Looking for an archival post for this week, I found an old document in my Google Drive that looks like the start of a novel, though I have no idea where I was going with it (aside from everything that the very on-the-nose foreshadowing in the prologue implies). For me, it’s a fascinating look back at my writing style a few years ago, back when I started a lot of novels and abandoned them after less that 1,000 words (as opposed to now, when I write at least 100,000 words before abandoning them) and was more open to crazy ideas like starting a novel at the inception of the universe.

Prolouge

For most of its life, nothing very important ever happened to fifteen uninhabited square miles out in the middle of Texas. If it has a consciousness, it probably spent its billion-year lifespan complaining about its mind-numbingly boring.

It, like most land on earth, had been created during the formation of the sun. It was molten magma for awhile, then cooled down. Awhile after than, it was part of the ocean. Then, for reasons that were never entirely clear for that little scrap of land, water covered it and there were a lot of fish. A little while later the water drained away, the fish left, and trees and grass started growing.

Native Americans crossed it a couple of times, then some Mexicans, then some white settlers, then a couple of guys got shot there. Those murders were probably the most interesting thing that happened to those fifteen square miles, and even they weren’t all that interesting. Most of the rest of the land, especially the land in Texas, has much more interesting slaughter stories.

Someone built a house, a wacked out writer who tried to retreat from society to become one with nature and become their true, uncorrupted self. It didn’t work out, though, and she left almost immediately.

A highway cut through it, filling the big, hollow Texas nights with the yellowish glow headlights and the sound of tires tearing across pavement, trying to get somewhere more interesting than this bland bit of land.

There was one interesting thing that happened to it, though.

It lasted just one year. Really just a moment, a flash, a microsecond for a piece of land that had already been around for billions of years and had another couple billion to go until the sun exploded. It seemed like it was over as soon as it had begun.

For that year, the only thing people seemed to talk about was that piece of land. Not just people in central Texas, people all over the country, all over the world. Every few days another a news crew came to do a story on the piece of land that no one had ever given a rat’s patoot about. The trees were cut down and houses were built and cars drove about and people flocked from miles around to take pictures on their phones and post them to social media and get into spirited debates in the comments about the nature of freedom and law and nationality and all sorts of other things that the land represented.

And then it was over. The land was scarred and gorged and littered with trash and dea and, ultimately, forgotten. Every once in awhile someone would bring it up casually in conversation, but never more than a passing mention. It got a brief notice in some history books, a footnote of a footnote.

But that didn’t matter. The land got more than it ever could have hoped for, a sudden flurry of attention that all began with a 911 call.

“Hello, this is 911, what’s your emergency?”

“Am I on the phone with the government?”

“Sir, are you or anyone around you in immediate danger?”

“Answer the question, dammit! Am I on the line with someone from the government?”

A deep sigh. “Yes, I am on the government payroll, if you insist. Now, if you please, are you or anyone-”

“Well listen up, government! I’ve got fifteen square miles of undeveloped land out by Interstate 35 and me and it are seceding from this socialist hellhole of a nation. Pass it on.”

“Sir, please, are-”

There was a click as the man on the other end hung up the phone.

Thus, a nation was born.

And fifteen square miles of land got its story to tell.

Chapter 1

Sarah Hartley got home after a long, depressing day answering 911 calls. There had been a woman who had called right after being robbed and attacked. A child who had misdirected two fire engines and an ambulance to a nonexistent fire as a prank, and a man who had just cried into the receiver for awhile, then hung up.

In the midst of it all, she almost forgot about the man who claimed to have seceded.

She was young, just out of college, and already back to living with her parents. At first she’d tried to maintain some level of independence by renting her own apartment. The building burnt to the ground a few weeks before after her roommate had been smoking in bed, however.

It was sort of ironic that, when she called 911, she personally knew the receiver.

Sam was gone for hours and

The Nation Novel Writing Month

You don’t dedicate your life to something without becoming a bit of a snob about it. Regardless of my actual skill as a writer, I’ve generated enough written pages to equal my own body weight, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve committed enough time and effort to the practice to get the privilege of a little snobbery. So I’m not too afraid to come write out and say that I don’t get the Nation Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’m not exactly opposed to it, at least not as much as my brother (who actually finished the challenge and wrote an entire novel just to make fun of it, which seems like stretching meta-irony so far that it’s not really irony anymore), but I can’t help but feel a little alienated when my Facebook feed fills up with NaNoWriMo-related content.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a monthly challenge that has gotten pretty popular over the past couple of years, netting 400,000 participants last year. The idea is that aspiring writers all come together for the month of November and each try to write a full novel (defined as 50,000 words). 

Given how much I claim to love writing and the writing community, it seems like NaNoWriMo would be the kind of thing I’d love. That’s what I thought when I first found out about it in high school. It felt great when I started writing a novel of my own, at least at first. The heavy demands of the daily word count forced me to take an idea I’d been considering for a while and put it to paper. Something about the structure of the project made my writing feel more substantial, like instead of just generating words by myself I was channeling the energy of the thousands of people working beside me. The setting felt more real than anything I’d ever written before, the characters seemed to have authentic voices for the first time, the plot felt less like something I was making up as I went along and more like something that had happened a long time ago, something I’d forgotten for almost all my life and was only just now remembering.

And then it all blew up. Suddenly I was spending three pages describing someone’s left shoe because I didn’t know how to move the story forward but still had to meet the day’s writing quota. A couple days like this in a row and I found myself with 40,000 words of a story that was only moving further from a real conclusion as it got closer to the end. And yeah, of course it would turn out like that, it was only the second novel I’d ever written. Even so, the failure felt like something more important than just a writing project that didn’t take off. It was a novel that was part of an institution, so my failure wasn’t my own to bear, but something to judge against people who had succeeded. 

So, like so many other disaffected youngsters, I got bitter and turned against the system. I found out that, of the thousands of novels written over NaNoWriMo, only six have been published and gone on to any kind of acclaim. I read one of the few popular products of NaNoWriMo for school, The Night Circus, and felt vindicated that this stupid challenge was full of wannabe writers who churned out 50,000 words of fluff without ever saying something of value. Real writers, meanwhile, were the folks who suffered for their work, the sort who didn’t need pretty little online wordcount calculators to know that they were making literature, the kind who weren’t afraid to go outside and live! Not that that’s anything close to what I was then, or am now, but I was a storyteller, it was only natural that I would make up a story about myself.

The story I made about myself was ultimately just a way to cover up my overwhelming fear. My first NaNoWriMo was when I realized how big the writing world was, and how little I mattered in all of it. There’s a quote in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar that sums it all up perfectly: “Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing. Say someone or other finished a manuscript in every minute; in five minutes that would be five manuscripts stacked on the Fiction Editor’s desk. With the hour there would be sixty, crowding each other out on the floor. And in a year…”

If I had to read all the manuscripts that showed up at her desk in a year, or that people made for NaNoWriMo in a month, then I’d probably be so braindead from all the words that I wouldn’t even recognize my own when I finally found it. So what are the odds that it will stand out to anyone else?

There are legitimate reasons why I don’t do NaNoWriMo. I strive to write 2,000 words a day whenever I’m not editing (and even then that’s the goal, it’s just harder to quantify), so marking November as special really doesn’t work for me. And I know from experience that having a word limit for first drafts is a terrible idea, they inevitably feel stretched too thin or cut off too soon. But, at the heart of it, it’s all about how the sheer size of the NaNoWriMo community makes the world of writers seem so large, and makes me feel so small in comparison.

But there is some hope, I think. A few months after my NaNoWriMo failure, I found out that they had something called Camp NaNoWriMo, where some algorithm sorts writers into twelve person private message boards called cabins for them to chat as they work on their stories. In this more laid-back section, you can set your wordcount however you wanted, and I selected a more reasonable 30,000. I didn’t end up hitting that either, but through the chatroom I found someone who asked if anyone wanted to exchange writing after the month was over. I took her up on her offer. She sent me some of her writing and I sent her some of mine and we gave each other encouragement and gentle feedback. The writing world seemed smaller all of a sudden, and much friendlier, and some of my disaffected youthful bitterness started to fade.

Terrible Ways to Give Back

Right next to my dorm there’s this community bulletin board where people are encouraged to write ways to give back to the community. Sounds like a sincere attempt to encourage students to do good, right? So, naturally, my first impulse was to spam it with violent, sarcastic, and bizarre suggestions. Luckily, my fear of being publicly humiliated on Grinnell Thumbs Down* has held me back so far, but I figured readers of my blog are probably desensitized enough by this point to endure my really bad ideas for ways to give back:

• Support the U.S. Postal service by sending all your hate mail the old fashioned way!
• Help out a criminal in need by pleading guilty to a crime you didn’t commit!
• Get back at your annoying neighbor by designating their house as a historical site so they can’t alter it and have to put up with idiots walking all over their lawn to read the plaque!
• Turn away from wrongdoers and follow the path of the righteous, for there shall come a time of burning flesh and gnashing teeth when every offense to the heavens must be answered in human suffering!
• Support the good old U. S. of A by illegally selling weapons to Iran in order to fund right wing Nicaraguan insurgents!
• Post inflammatory statements on Grinnell Thumbs Down so stressed-out students can have an easy target to vent their rage at!
• Vote on November 6th, which probably will only be news to you if this bulletin board is literally your only communication with the outside world!
• Donate too much blood!
• Send in terrible applications to Grinnell under multiple false names so our school can rise in the rankings by being more exclusive!
• Destigmatize spitting at people!

_____________________

* For non-Grinnellians, Grinnell Thumbs Down is a Facebook group where students post complaints about the school. Students who have left the group seem to have much healthier outlooks on life than those who remain in, though a much less developed understanding of the recent drama-infernos to hit the Grinnell student body.

I Review a Low-Budget Canadian Horror Movie From the 90s That, Odds Are, No One Really Cares About

Since I’ve set a pretty standard precedent of using Thursday posts for general ponderings, it might seem strange that I’m filling this slot with a movie review. It might seem even stranger that I decided to review Cube, a low-budget 1997 Canadian horror film that was met with poor ticket sales and mixed reception. And yeah, I don’t think anyone would make the argument that Cube is a visual masterpiece. I sure won’t. But it is something distinct from any other movie I’ve ever seen and, when even great stories seem to blend together, something that really stands out is worth talking about. Also, I’m running low on ideas*.

If things get a little messy in this movie as it goes on, you have to admit that the filmmakers have laser-focused accuracy for at least the first scene. It reveals none of the important questions, but tells you everything you need to know for just about the entire movie. People wake up in a harshly-lit, perfectly cubic room. Each wall, the floor, and the ceiling all have little hatches that lead to nearly identical cube-like rooms. Some rooms are safe, and some have traps that kill the people that enter in gruesome and bizarre ways. Aside from a little math and a lot of characterization, that’s all you’ll really learn about the world of the movie, and you have to respect a story that takes a premise you can explain in under a hundred words and spins ninety minutes of drama out of it. The sheer surreality of the premise might at first make it hard to empathize with the characters. If you’ve never been trapped in a life-or-death escape from a gigantic box maze (and I’d guess most people haven’t), it would be hard to link up your own experience with the characters’ struggles. But, strange as it is, there isn’t much to the premise either, so even if you can’t relate at first, you can understand quickly, and that makes it easier to reflect your own feelings of paranoia, claustrophobia, and fear onto the characters.

Maybe it’s not right to praise the constraints, because a lot of them seem like cost saving measures. It’s pretty obvious that each room is just the exact same set, reused over and over. The tiny cast seems like an artistic choice to give intimate focus on a small number of characters, but odds are that narrowing the number of paid actors down to seven was more a way to cut expenses than anything else. But having such limited resources is probably the best thing this movie could have done. So often when, storytellers are given an infinite canvas with an empty page or a blank check from a studio, the endless possibilities get scary and the writer ends up sticking to what they’ve seen before. That’s not an option when you’ve got to shoot the whole movie in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room and, for these filmmakers at least, being starved for space to grow the story led to some real creativity.

I realize I’ve gotten pretty deep into this review and have hardly said a word about the writing, characters, plot, and themes, which is odd because usually those are the only things I usually care about. That’s because they were ultimately disappointing, especially the characters. Two in particular seemed like they would be really fascinating at about the halfway mark, but then fell back into simpler characterizations when the writers got antsy to wrap things up. Quentin, the leader of the people trapped in the cube, at first seems like an interesting commentary on how strong personalities can be both necessary and abusive in life-or-death situations, but right when the ambiguity seemed to reach its fever pitch, things get a whole lot more exciting but a whole lot less interesting. It’s rare enough to see people with disabilities in movies, and at first it seems like do it right when they introduced Kazan, a man with severe developmental disabilities, as one of the Cube-dwellers. He repeatedly frustrates the group’s escape attempts, which put them in the awkward position of not wanting to leave him but not having a use for him. I thought the story was getting at a really important and rarely told theme, that all human beings have innate value and are worth saving, no matter what they can or can’t do. But, to avoid going to heavy on the spoilers, all I'll say is that the filmmakers bail out on this potentially interesting idea too.

So, judging from the fact that most of my praise for this movie is in all the things it was unable to do with its limited resources, I think it’s fair to say that this is not a movie that will live on as one of the high water-marks for cinema. And that’s okay, not every movie has to be, or even can be. But it’s also something you see very rarely in movies: a singular vision, never muddled up by studio demands or test screenings. It might not be great, but it’s about all I can hope for in my own writing: something constrained and flawed and honestly kind of stupid, but something that no one has ever seen before and something everyone will remember.

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* Also, I’m scared that Thursday posts are getting a little too formulaic and I don’t want my writing to ever get predictable. So expect more stuff like this.