PRIDE MONTH MOVIE WEEK: DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Just a small point today, but one that has stayed with me since I first saw DOG DAY AFTERNOON, written by Frank Pierson and directed by Sidney Lumet. 

For those who don't know it, the film's about a heist that goes wrong, with Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik right in the middle, trying to find a way for him and his partner Sal to get out of there alive and with the money they've taken. 

It's a captivating film. It keeps zigging left where you think it's going to go right. When the cops make a move on him in public, Sonny turns it into a referendum on them and the abuses of prisoners at Attica, and the watching crowd just goes crazy for him. Likewise when food arrives he insists on going out and paying for it, once again making him beloved by the crowd.

By the time we hit the midpoint it really feels like anything can happen in this film. We're so all in. 

And then--and only then--does the story reveal that the wife Sonny has been wanting to talk to is in fact his transgender second wife, that in fact he robbed this bank to try and pay for her transition.

There's another version of this movie whose first act leads with the fact that he's queer and his partner doesn't have the money for surgery, and takes it from there. It might have worked that way, too. But by holding that information back, we get to start right in the middle of everything, which is a much more energetic launch. It also allows the reveal of Sonny's queerness to be simultaneously much more organic and  uncovered at the point of maximum surprise. Which is a great trick.

There's a queer piano bar I love in New York City called Marie's Crisis Café. And sometimes the crowds there will shout, "Sing a gay song!' It's meant as a joke, but it also resonates with mainstream Hollywood storytelling, which often think if you have queer you need to lead with it, because that's where the story is. 

In some ways DOG DAY is more powerful because it doesn't lead with queer. Sonny is so comfortable with who he is, and loves his wife so much, he doesn't even think of presenting himself in that way. This is what you do for love, is the point, not Hey, we're queer.

What's the story I'm trying to tell? And what serves that story best? That's what should be driving our choices, and nothing else.

PRIDE MONTH MOVIE WEEK: SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY

This 1971 John Schlesinger film has a logline that feels entirely modern: Daniel, a middle aged gay doctor and  Alex, a straight woman struggle over sharing Bob, the bisexual man they're both in love with.

In a sense what makes it anything but modern is that it doesn't go in for camp. This isn't a romcom, but a two handed character study of that wonderful 1970s-era variety.  

And from a script point of view what makes it interesting is the ways it resists our expectations of structure. For instance, there's no sense of competition between Daniel and Alex. While each of them get frustrated with Bob and want more, neither of them tries to undermine the other. The two don't even meet until the very end, at which point they talk as friends of a sort, people with a shared experience. 

As my old prof Hal Ackerman was always drilling into us, story is about conflict. But here the conflicts are at first with Bob, who refuses to give either of them what they really want, and ultimately with themselves, as they confront their expectations and choices. 

Each character gets a moment along the way that seems unrelated to their plights or questions and yet ends up being essential. For Alex it's the experience of babysitting her friends' kids and watching one of them almost get hit by a car. For Daniel it's attending his nephew's bar mitzvah and remembering his own.

Both scenes seem almost random. You wonder where are we and why am I being shown this? And yet each offers a moment of reckoning for the main characters, an opportunity to step outside their own lives and see a bigger picture, whether of mortality, beauty or "the meaning" of life. The experiences don't leave them uninterested in Bob, but they do put him in a different position. 

It's similar to that Christmas carol scene I wrote about yesterday from WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE..., a sort of queering of the narrative which disrupts the standard structural expectations in favor of unexpected beats that open onto a broader humanity.  

The end of the film is even more transgressive, as Daniel suddenly breaks the fourth wall to talk to us about the things we're taught to believe as children that aren't true -- that you'll never enjoy being out in the world, that your childhood is the best part, or that you can't happily share a man. 

There's no precedent for this moment in the film. This hasn't been FERRIS BUELLER. And yet it absolutely works, I think because once again it doesn't take its eye off what is essential to this film, its consideration of our complex, slippery, vulnerable humanity.

"All my life, I've been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful," Daniel's monologue ends. "He's not it. But something. We were something. 'I only came about my cough.'" It's just a few sentences, and yet emotionally dense and mysterious. Like catching glimpses of lovers in the fog, there's so much there and also so much for us to fill in. 

 

For me both these films beg the question of the best way of landing key beats like the midpoint, climax or ending. Our first attempts may nail the structural expectations, but these films ask, What would it be like to go back and consider those moments again from a more intuitive angle? Is there another way of proceeding that is less linear perhaps but more resonant?

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One other thing to say about SUNDAY: it presents Daniel's relationship with Bob in a way so ordinary and non-dramatic you can't quite believe it was made in 1971. A great film.

PRIDE MONTH MOVIE WEEK: SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE...

So last week was a lot of moving house and not much else. Sorry about that!

In this final week of Pride I'm going to focus on some queer-themed films, as always looking for a little something something that we can add to our own bags of tricks.

Everything I’d read suggested SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE... is a very sad film about the widespread self-hatred of queer people in the 1970s. And there’s definitely plenty of that in the film, which is set on Christmas Eve in a gay bar and follows maybe 20 different characters through that night together at the bar. 

 

You've got Jimmy, the wild man who drinks too much, embarrasses the partner who so clearly loves him and eventually goes crazy on Karen when he realizes she's transgender in the film's wrenching climax. You've got the waiter Philip who hasn't told the blind date coming to the bar that he's a man, and then is so afraid of being rejected he leaves the date there the whole night without introducing himself. We've got the ad exec whose mother shows up and shames him into coming home, the married man who just can't bring himself to leave his wife, the shy man who leads the carols and falls for Karen, only to have her run off.  It goes on and on. 

 

On paper it really is a pretty sad film.

 

But the sum really is so much greater than the parts. Putting these stories and a bunch of others together, what's made clear is simultaneously the rich diversity of this community of people and the fragility they share, the human vulnerability, no matter how they might initially present. It's brought out in lots of different ways, from the endearing insecurity of Philip to the combination of horror and helplessness with which everyone in the bar reacts to Jimmy attacking Karen. That sequence is profoundly disturbing, and yet in ripping off Karen's clothes Jimmy ends up exposing everyone's humanity, including his own, as fucked up and broken as it is.

The singing of Christmas carols which takes place at the midpoint functions much the same. The normal affairs of the bar stop for carols followed by Helen, an older straight woman who seems to serve as a kind of den mother to the men who frequent this bar, thanking the entire group for being there for here in her convalescence. It's such an unexpected sequence, completely off the track of the individual stories, but both elements--the singing and the thank you--build a sense of this group as a real community. 

 

And as a result, in the end rather than feeling like a dark and depressing tale of what it was like to be gay in the 70s, you feel like you've seen something profoundly touching. To me it's kind of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS for queer people. The  fragility in each character's stories is very much akin to Charlie Brown's tree, making it all so beautiful. 

I was trying to think what exactly the writing takeaway is, beyond go watch this film (which is available for free on YouTube). Maybe it's the power to be found in telling a bunch of different stories together. When you're dealing with a group as diverse as the queer community, it's so helpful to offer a range of stories and characters. 

 

 Or perhaps it's the importance of the midpoint and climax speaking not only to the ongoing plot but to the bigger themes of the piece. The midpoint really has nothing to do with the ongoing stories of the film, and yet thematically it is essential.

 

I think for me the most important takeaway is that if you keep your stories and your characters honest, it doesn't matter if some things might seem depressing on the surface. The deeper beauty and truth will shine through. 

PRIDE MONTH: ADMIRING GAME

 In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL. 

This post is less a "See What They Did There?" and more "Reason #347 Why I Love This Show".

 

In Episode 206, written by Neil Reynolds, we’re introduced to a group of astronauts who have been living in outer space for 55 years. One is Yelena, a Russian woman who has a spirit inside her, similar to Larry. The other two are these manically upbeat 20somethings who speak in 30s patter and seem to be constantly slapping each other on the ass. They are by turns fascinating and annoying. 

 

Over the course of the ep they keep popping up repeating the same banter. It gets weird and tiresome. And then Yelena explains that they are in fact dead. Their bodies have been inhabited by a spore of some kind.

 

And then there's a further twist of the knife – that spore probably can’t survive on Earth. So what we're seeing happening in front of us is the two guys actually dying. At the end of the episode they’re left to pass away, mumbling little bits and pieces of their patter, and it’s actually really sad.

 

So, in the course of a 45 minute TV episode, we’re introduced to two all new characters, they go from delighting to annoying us, and then somehow end up breaking our hearts.

 

I could sit here and try to break down how Reynolds and the writing staff and the performers did that, or talk again about how well this captures the beating queer heart of the show, where no one is  left just a joke or a monster.  But really all I got in me is gratitude and wonder. 

NEXT WEEK: I'M MOVING!

 

I've got some posts about queer movies I'm hoping to get up, but we'll see how we go. (Wow does packing takes forever!)

PRIDE MONTH: PLAYING THE CON

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL.  

 

This is in some ways an addendum on my last post (and apologies for not posting it yesterday; I'll have one more DOOM post tomorrow). 

Season one ends with the group discovering that Niles, the man who has been "trying to help them all this time, the man they've spent the season trying to rescue, has actually been responsible for the tragedies of each of their lives and is using them to try and find a way to achieve immortality for himself. 

There’s a little more to it than that--he’s got a daughter who doesn’t age and is incredibly dangerous, so he feels like he has to be around to protect her/protect the world from her. 

 

But even so, it’s quite a brutal turn. And after a first episode of hijinks as the team tries to find its way from where season one left them (tiny and living in a dollhouse – DOOM PATROL is so great, you guys), the characters start to confront that betrayal.

 

Meanwhile Niles begins to investigate a new means of immortality on his own. And Rita, who comes upon him doing so and getting frustrated, insists the team will take care of it, despite the fact that he tells them not to. 

 

It seems like a pretty big turn given what they've learned. But then when they actually jump into the mission, which involves stealing a purposely ridiculously named substance from a purposely ridiculously absurd time traveling guy, it turns out the only way to get to the substance is to kill him. Which Niles had conveniently not mentioned.

 

So having only just learned how they’d been used all this time, the characters have let themselves be conned again. And even better, so have we, because Niles continues to be written--here by April Fitzsimmons & Neil Reynolds--and performed by Timothy Dalton without a single nod to his inherent treachery. He is as amiable and genuine as ever. 

 

It's a pretty rare thing to see a story go this way;  9 times out of 10 after the end of season one reveal we're going to get nods to the fact that this guy can no longer be trusted.

Instead the DOOM PATROL writers continue to write Niles at the top of his innocence, as it were, even though he's not innocent at all. And that choice really energizes the storytelling. Every single thing Niles says and does now has to be scrutinized. Is there anything that's not part of the con? 

 

Because he never lets down the mask of innocence we're also left with the question, does he even recognize what a monster he is? And that creates so much interesting space for future episodes to play in, and a fun journey for him as a character. 

 

File this under: Always Write Your Villain as Though He is a Hero.

 

TOMORROW: ADMIRING GAME

PRIDE MONTH: HIDING THE REAL VILLAIN

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL.

If you've been reading this blog for long you know that I'm fascinated by the writerly art of distraction, the sleight of hand by which storytellers get us to look one way while the real story lies somewhere else, waiting to surprise us later.

One of the great ways DOOM PATROL plays its shell game is by not letting us know there's a game going on at all. From the start of its first season, it's clear who the villain of the piece is and the danger that he poses. Mr. Nobody's abduction of the team's father figure/savior Niles Calder is in fact the inciting incident for the season, forcing the group to slowly confront their own fears and histories and work together to find and save Niles. It's a classic story setup: the team are Mario and Luigi, Mr. Nobody is Bowser and Niles is Princess Toadstool. Let's do this.

Along the way other antagonists pop up, most especially Victor's father, who from the first time we meet him just does not seem on the up and up when it comes to Victor's accident or desires for him. Eventually some of those hunches are confirmed, with terrible emotional consequences for Vic. Later he seems to turn to the good, breaking Vic out of Super Power Prison Experimentation Camp -- by seeming to betray him, of course. But even after, he just doesn't seem trustworthy.  

So we've got two Big Bads, the mad scientist and the monster, and each of them is 100% convincing as the Not Nice People we need to worry about. 

Except it turns out their presence and the dangers they've represented have all also been a way of hiding the real Big Bad, which is Niles himself. In the finale we get the reveal in flashbacks that Niles was in fact responsible in one way or another for the events that ruined each of the character's lives, and has been using them ever since to try and find a way to live forever. 

 

Icing on that cake, we get the surprising flashback scene between Vic's dad and Niles where Niles is trying to advise/play him, and Vic’s dad calls him out on all the horrible things he's done. And suddenly most of what we've seen him do in relation to Vic in the season, which is where our distrust of him began, is cast in a totally different light. Rather than trying to manipulate Vic he's been trying to protect him, because he knows the harm that Niles poses.

 

It's such a satisfying and surprising turn of events. And stepping back we see that the surprise of it all has come not only from the villains pulling focus, but the presentation of Niles himself. From the start he's this kindly old (and handsome) scientist in a wheelchair who loves chocolate pancakes and has dedicated his life to helping these tormented people that society has rejected. Having the series start with him surrendering to being taken by Nobody only further emphasizes both his fragility and his goodness.

 

If you've got a big turn in your show, DOOM PATROL has some great ideas on how to hide it: don't give the audience the sense there there is one; paint your Big Bad in colors we don't expect; and have others who are legitimate threats to keep the audience from looking around. 

TOMORROW: PLAYING THE CON

PRIDE MONTH: DOOM PATROL ALSO KNOWS HOW TO META

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL. 

DOOM PATROL's season 1 has about the most meta villain you can imagine in Mr. Nobody, a character who not only comments in narration on the action but understands that this is a TV series, even going so far as to wear Doom Patrol gear in 114 and to burn their TV series poster down. The degree to which they take his self-awareness is delightful.

 

But meta characters and commentary are a a huge challenge to a longform story. Even as they might entertain us, they also undermine the stakes of the story and its characters, by reminding us over and over again that in fact this is just a story. 

 

Stories are like Disneyland; they want to carry us away completely. At Disneyland, that's in part about thinking through every single detail that we experience, from the way you enter the park itself to the texture of the hallways that you walk through on the way to the Haunted Mansion ride. But it's also about constructing the park so that once you're inside, you can't see anything going on outside. There's nothing to pull you out of the experience.

Meta characters and commentary are exactly that. They intentionally pull you out. And once that momentum starts it tends to build on itself.  So having a meta main villain is a huge challenge. 

And yet the presence of Mr. Nobody does not in the end overwhelm the story or undermine its emotional stakes. And the writers accomplish this by not allowing his meta-ness to distract them from the fact that he is in fact a character with depth and a journey of his own.

 

In 114 as our heroes are finally facing off against him Jane’s psychologist persona manifests and starts analyzing why Nobody is like this. And very quickly the team recognizes, he’s actually just like them, someone who has been damaged. And just like that his meta-ness goes from undermining the story to becoming an expression of the pain that he's in. It calls forth their (and our) empathy.

The final episode takes this one step further. After having struggled over the course of the season to claim her own body and her own narrative, in 114 Rita was finally able to dismiss Nobody’s narration of her story and started narrating her own. But then in the finale she turns around and  encourages Nobody to reclaim his own narrative.

 

It’s some powerfully wise storytelling, the woman who has faced her own worst self and come out the other side teaching a monster who has tormented her and her friends to do the same. But it’s also all a very clever means of kneading the meta back into the story.

 

The lesson DOOM PATROL teaches: If you’re going to have a meta character, make sure you don’t forget the journey they’re on. Meta is super fun, but it's not the end all be all of who they are, it’s the thing above the surface that points to important thing going on down deep.

TOMORROW: HIDING THE REAL VILLAIN

PRIDE MONTH: DOOM PATROL DOES THERAPY SESSIONS RIGHT

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on HBO MAX's great queer superhero show DOOM PATROL.

Therapy episodes are the writer's version of a thirst trap. We watched the SOPRANOS, we saw just how good those moments between Tony and Dr. Melfi were, and we want that in our story. 

But in practice therapy sessions are really hard to do well. They are the very definition of Telling instead of Showing. And they're usually predictable. In order to create a sense of problem or conflict, the patient has to be unwilling in some way. And the game of the sessions is really just about getting the patient past that resistance just enough to share some one bit of new insight into their lives, which is by the way not something they've gained from the back and forth of therapy, as you might expect, but just some secret they've been withholding. Making the entire sequence really just a concocted way to hide the fact that this is an Exposition Dump.  

 

In DOOM PATROL 107, writer Neil Reynolds opens on the idea of our main characters sitting together to do a group therapy session together. But then--in classic DOOM PATROL style--it both subverts the conceits of the therapy story and creates a truly compelling therapy-like experience from them. 

 

Reynolds' first great insight is to dismiss the whole "sit and share" conceit. Having shown them all sitting together, Reynolds then jumps back to earlier in the day and lets us follow each of the characters from there to the point where they're now sitting together. 

 

Just like that, the scene goes from a passive lull in the story to active and alive. And rather than doing the typical Kabuki fan dance of trying to hide what our hero's real struggle is, Reynolds immediately shows you what each person is dealing with. Jane is literally fighting herself over whether to destroy the work Niles has done with her; Rita is desperately trying to re-form her body as she tries to get to the meeting; Cliff is finally freaking out about being trapped forever in a metal shell. 

 

Coming after we've already witnessed each of their struggles, the"therapy" moment  now actually functions like real therapy, with characters gaining insight.

 

At the same time, this approach also allows less to ride on the therapy moment. Jane can say fuck this, not because the author needs a sense of conflict in order to distract us from the exposition to come, but strictly because she's already learned what she needs to learn. The therapy happened elsewhere. 

 

So if you're going to do a therapy episode, consider: 

 

How do I keep this active and organic to the story, rather than an interruption or lull? Therapy does not have to be just the patient and therapist sitting talking to each other.

 

How do I keep the scene from becoming just an Exposition Dump masquerading as a quest for insight? A good test: Is the therapy sequence bringing them to some genuinely new insight, or is it really just about convincing them to reveal something they already know?

 

Does what they learn set them off in a new direction or give them new momentum? That’s the funny thing about these kinds of episodes; even if they seem like the character is being forced to take a beat, and thus a pause in the main action, done right "taking a breath" should actually create new energy. 

 

It’s like when you’re working on a screenplay and you get super blocked, and you keep pushing and nothing happens. But then instead you give up and I don’t know, watch your kittens fight. (Vicious creatures.) And then when you come back, everything you need is now there. The gear shift was not a distraction after all, but the path forward.

  

TOMORROW: DOOM PATROL ALSO KNOWS HOW TO META

PRIDE MONTH: EUPHORIA'S RETCON BROADENS THE PICTURE

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA.

 

EUPHORIA did two standalone episodes during the pandemic. In the second, “Fuck Anyone Who's Not a Sea Blob” (such a great title) we’re with Jules as she tells a shrink why it is she decided to get on a train and abandon her dad and the girl who loves her.

 

At first it’s kind of what we would expect – all the terrible things she’s been through, all the people and events that make her afraid or make her hate herself adding up.

 

But then the show reveals things that went on during the season that we never knew about. Most shockingly, we find out her mother showed up clean during the season and tried to make amends. Jules initially rejected her, then with her father's help agreed to try, only to find her mother had left again. A week later she relapsed, a fact Jules found out the night of the Halloween party where in season we watched her get really crazy.

 

There's also the reveal that the whole season Jules was actually falling in love with Rue, too. We get the famous moment when Rue kisses her and runs away from her point of view, how much she had been wanting that moment and how bad she felt about freezing up in it. 

Retcons can so easily function as just a narrative cheat to fix a problem.  We painted ourselves into a corner, and so now we insert the story-version of a backdoor through which to escape.

But in the case of EUPHORIA inserting major new information works both because Jules has been such a private and enigmatic character, and because the series is so deeply embedded in Rue's point of view. In a sense the season is giving us that experience of falling in love, how you can never really know what the one you love is feeling. Our partners are always in part a mystery to us.

 

So rather than a fix, adding these new scenes in "Sea Blob" plays like a chance to finally see things on Jules' terms, free from Rue's POV. It works because it's something the show has denied us thus far, and that consequently we've been waiting for. 

I also think it poses an interesting experiment for us as writers. Every character we write has so much of their life happening off screen. 

 

A lot of that is extraneous. But maybe not all of it. 

 

From time to time we might step back and ask the question, What are the other parts of this character's life? What else is going on with them? What am I not seeing?

 

You never know where you might find a new vein of story waiting to be told...

NEXT WEEK: DOOM PATROL'S QUEER SUPER HERO STORIES

PRIDE MONTH: GENTLEMAN JACK GIVES ITS PROTAGONIST AN EQUAL

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA. 

As much as I binge watched the early seasons of HOUSE OF CARDS, in the end I always had the same problem with it: there was never anyone truly on the level of Francis and Claire. Different characters would be set up to be their equals and legitimate threats, but in the end they'd always prove one or another kind of dupe. 

In some ways the show tried to use that issue to its advantage by making the two of them each other's  antagonists. But eventually their desires would usually intersect, leaving them once again allies. 

GENTLEMAN JACK begins with a similar problem. There's no one quite at the level of Anne Lister. As antagonists go Christopher Rawson comes closest, but he has little direct interaction with her during the season; almost everything works through Christopher's much softer and more human brother Jeremiah.   

Her personal life is similar. Her great love Ann is terribly fragile much of the time, as well as seemingly naive. And her family, while they know her well, mostly accept being bowled over by her. 

Unlike HOUSE OF CARDS, which had many seasons and kept returning to that same "Francis is Smarter than Everyone" well, JACK has only had on season and Anne has had to confront plenty of problems. In a sense her great antagonist will always be society itself, which is so much harder to fight or even just pin down in any meaningful way.

But in the finale we see her at the court of Queen Marie of Denamrk. And the Queen proves to be if anything smarter than Anne, and absolutely disarming. Similarly, on the road to Copenhagen she has an encounter with a younger woman who sees right through her. Both encounters open up aspects of Anne's character that we haven't seen. She's both more playful and more humble in their presence. 

The first series ends with Anne and Ann getting married. And with it, Ann also stops being the swooning girl we've known for eight episodes. She asks for what she wants. She prods Anne and tweaks her for the way she is. And once again, the show feels better and more interesting for it. 

It's true for a lot of shows that their greatest strength is also their greatest potential weakness. Think the mythology of LOST or X-FILES; or again, the magnetic characterization of someone like Francis Underwood.  

And a lesser writer than Sally Wainwright might have thought giving Anne equals as allies or antagonists might diminish her. But in fact the opposite is true. The harder she has to fight, the more clearly she's seen and called on her moves, the bigger and more interesting the show (and she, too) become. 

TOMORROW: EUPHORIA RETCON BROADENS THE PICTURE

PRIDE MONTH: EUPHORIA'S MANIA SHELL GAME

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA. 

As I was saying Monday, EUPHORIA is really good at frontloading joy and humor as a way of making the revelations of trauma or addiction surprising. 

 

In episode 107 it takes that strategy a step further. Rue's problems are more obvious than ever, she's clearly in a manic/depression cycle. 

 

But rather than have us confront that head on, creator and writer Sam Levinson couches her mania in a very funny cop fantasy, in which she and Lexi are detectives. Meanwhile during her depression we get more deep, interesting takes from her on what she’s going through, what depression is like, as well as stunning, even beautiful visuals of her work and home life blurring together.

 

We end on nightmare, or nearly so – Rue on the floor just waiting for someone to see her and get her to the bathroom. But the path to that moment has been so filled with things that make her situation seem much more relatable and manageable that when we get to that point it is raw and surprising. 

For me it's a further indication of just how much you can actually present sad or worrisome things going on and still fool the audience about them. 

TOMORROW: GENTLEMAN JACK GIVES ITS PROTAGONIST AN EQUAL

PRIDE MONTH: GENTLEMAN JACK'S DELIGHT IN DISORIENTATION

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA.

GENTLEMAN JACK was another show I finally watched during the pandemic. And in some ways its writing approach is similar to that of EUPHORIA. 

For instance, as I've written about already, JACK's pilot is a 60 minute symphony of bold choices made by our protagonist Anne Lister, all of which not only gives enormous definition to her character but absolutely makes us love with her. Give a character big, risky choices and we are going to invest in them.  

But having done that work in the pilot, GENTLEMAN JACK the uses the next few episodes to reveal parts of Anne that are a lot less attractive. In the pilot she's our hero, moving at the speed of light. But then in 102 and 103 we've got her manipulating the seemingly fragile Ann Walker because she's attracted to her (and also maybe because she needs her money -- a truth she and the show repeatedly dance around). And even as she proposes marriage to Ann, she won't  consent to her sister Marian or her servant marrying who they choose. 

 

Given all that Anne faces as a queer woman in rural 19th century England, we as audience make all kinds of assumptions as to the kind of person she is and values she has. To suddenly reveal that actually she's still very much of her time and unenlightened in ways you wouldn't expect is a great twist. 

As in EUPHORIA, there's a "Let's let the audience feel what the supporting characters experience" element to this, us unsettled and spun around by Anne just as her family and friends are.  

 

But creator Sally Wainwright's choice to lay out the opening episodes in this manner is also a further way of locking us in as audience. Having set us up to make one set of assumptions about Anne and then knocking some of them down, we no longer know what's going to happen next. It's a show we have to watch to find out. 

 

TOMORROW: EUPHORIA'S MANIA SHELL GAME

PRIDE MONTH: EUPHORIA'S SEDUCTIVE NARRATOR

In honor of Pride I'm spending this month looking at writing techniques in queer stories. This week I'm focusing on two great queer shows, GENTLEMAN JACK and EUPHORIA. 

During the pandemic I finally got the chance to catch the first season of EUPHORIA, which to me felt a lot like what if THE LEFTOVERS was just about the teenagers (and also their struggles were built not from some external-Rapture event but just the horrors of living today).

One of the most striking elements of the show is creator Sam Levinson's use of narration. In the pilot, main character Rue tells us the story of her life and reality, teaches us random things like how to fake a urine sample, and all the way through she's endlessly charming, funny and also pretty wise. She’s written in the voice of your best friend from high school, or maybe your big sister, someone who cares and that you instinctively love.

 

But she's also in a way the voice of God; in a unusual move, she's a first person narrator given omniscience. So in the start of 102 she tells us Nate’s story -- and once again with humor and the quiet compassion of understanding. Each subsequent episode she does the same with a different character.

 

What’s fascinating to watch is how making her both the big sister and benevolent god-figure of the show ends up giving Levinson a hiding place for so much drama to come. We know from the start that Rue is an addict, that she’s been to rehab and is back at it. And yet, in the pilot we see very little of the negative consequences of her choices.

 

In 102 we get more – we see her shouting at her mother and shaking a piece of broken glass (although it's in a flashback without audio). We also see a lot more of the pain that she caused her little sister Gia, who found her when she'd OD’d. And we see her treat her friend Lexi like absolute shit. 

 

But having spent the first episode falling in love with this character, I found I took in all of this new information much differently. I judged Rue far less and didn't consider what the broader implications of those moments might be.  Her voice and benevolence in effect hides her awfulness, even as she’s showing and telling us that she is an addict.  

 

In effect Levinson is giving us the same experience everyone else in Rue's life goes through. She is playing us, distracting us, hiding lots of terrible and painful things right in front of us. It's a brilliant technique. 

Also one that highlights a really valuable writing truth: You can present really terrible/worrisome things in plain sight without the audience really noticing them if your character is winning enough. Charm the hell out of us with funny stories and insight and we will be completely stunned when six or seven episodes later the troubled addict who has been in front of us the whole time completely loses her mind.

 

TOMORROW: GENTLEMAN JACK TAKES DELIGHT IN DISORIENTATION

PRIDE MONTH CREATORS WEEK: ZAL BATMANGLIJ TRUSTS THEIR AUDIENCE

 

Have you seen THE OA? If not, you might want to skip this post, because I'm about to ruin its ending. And honestly, it is not a show whose ending you want ruined. It really really isn't. 

Okay, here goes: when Zal Batmanglij and co-creator Brit Marling wrote the first season of their I Don't Really Know How to Describe this Series, But Stay With Me, Because That's Sort of Fitting Netflix drama THE OA, they came up with what is to my mind an entirely unpitchable idea for their finale: that the season would end with a completely unexpected school shooting scenario that The OA's friends avert  by way of the series of physical gestures and movements The OA had learned in captivity. No words, no gunplay (or not much anyway)--just the group standing and beginning their strange and a propos of nothing dance. Seriously, from an exec's point of view Marling and Batmanglij might have said, "And then the kids stand and do the FOOTLOOSE dance, but as though choreographed by space aliens in another dimension, and it saves the universe."

Even more insane is the fact that the idea absolutely works.  

As you can see from watching the sequence below, part of the power of the moment lies in the courage it takes them to stand and risk their lives like this. 

But it's also very much the choreography itself, which is passionate and gorgeous and brave and somehow so fucking tender that even without any context the scene can still make you weep. 

(Have I mentioned finales make me weepy? It seems to be a theme of the week.) 

Even having built up the importance of this strange series of movements in various ways throughout the season, still it took tremendous courage for Batmanglij and Marling to climax the season with us finally seeing the full sequence performed by our cast. If the audience didn't get it, there was nowhere else for them to turn for understanding or a satisfying payoff. 

 Also, despite the fact that TV is a visual medium, the fact is 99% of the time it relies not on images but on words to convey meaning, feeling, significance. So the chance that the audience would not get it also seemed very very high. 

But the creators trusted their cast and team to get it right. And they trusted their audience to be capable of more than what most TV assumes or gives them credit for. Much like David Lynch in the third series of TWIN PEAKS, Batmaglij and Marling trusted their viewers to be able to go beyond being passive consumers to active partners and co-creators of the experience.  

Honestly, if you haven't watched THE OA it's worth it just to get to that finale and experience that finale as audience. Watching the series is like listening to astronauts talk about how much they learned about life and the universe after a year on the International Space Station. You walk away realizing you can dream so much bigger than you might have believed possible. The audience can handle so much more.

NEXT WEEK: GENTLEMAN JACK & EUPHORIA!

IN THE MEANTIME, HAPPY PRIDE!

 

 

PRIDE MONTH CREATORS WEEK: ALAN BALL FOLLOWS THROUGH

Today, June 3 2021, is the 20th anniversary of the debut of SIX FEET UNDER, Alan Ball's magnum opus about a family of undertakers in Los Angeles. It's one of the foundations of HBO's Golden Age, along with THE WIRE, THE SOPRANOS and OZ. 

It also boasts perhaps the greatest finale of any TV show ever. Which is not only to say that it's just a tremendous hour of television but that it's an hour that follows the premise of the show all the way through to its natural conclusion. That's ultimately what a finale is supposed to do--to build on not simply the story that has come before but the underlying idea of the show, the What Was This All About Anywway. And to do so in that magical way that feels in retrospect absolutely inevitable but also completely unexpected. 

SIX FEET UNDER is a show about how death is coming for each of us. And, if you look to the pilot, more specifically it's a show about how death is coming not just for each of us in that general sense by which we really mean those people over there, poor things. No: that train is hurtling 1000 miles an hour toward the people we are close to, embodied in the show in the patriarch of the Fisher family, who dies in the pilot.

Standing as he does in the place of the center of the household, his death is a wake up call not only for his family but for us. It's Alan Ball right from the start saying Dear, have a bag packed and get that bucket list going because death is coming for YOU, and she don't take Not yet for an answer. 

Over the course of the series this idea keeps coming back. While pretty much every episode has some stranger dying and then needing the services of the Fishers' funeral home, the series also involves Nate Jr. finding out at the end of the first season that he has a potentially fatal condition and then almost dying in season 3; his wife Lisa drowning; his brother David being kidnapped and almost murdered by a psychopath; his second wife/OTP (...I guess?) Brenda having a miscarriage the day before their wedding; and then him actually dying in the final episodes. Death is always in the background waiting for our characters.

And so, too, is the question of--in the words of Mary Oliver--"What it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" (The end lines of her poem "The Summer Day" are actually a perfect encapsulation of the series:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

David Fisher starts out deeply in the closet. Nate is a romantic afraid of commitment. Claire is afraid to pursue her dreams. Mother Ruth has allowed her life to become just a vehicle to support and control all of the others. And all of them struggle to actually be honest with each other. (As a young gay man David's story was always empowering to me, but the most powerful moments of the show were actually the kitchen scenes where they swear and speak truth to each other, particularly in front of Ruth. Even now that kind of honesty and messiness challenges me and blows me away.)

So therein is the premise of the show: Everyone dies, rarely when or how they might expect, so what are you going to do?  

In the final sequence of the finale, Ball brings all of these ideas to their natural conclusion. We watch every character that we've loved all these years of the show move through the rest of their lives and die (except for Billy, because he's just plain awful, and Vanessa, because Justina Machado is forever). Some die absurdly, some randomly, some poignantly, while in the present Claire drives cross country to chase her dream of being a photographer. It's funny and sad and the absolute highest form of the show's insight that we only have this one chance on this crazy, beautiful, fucked up planet so grab hold of every minute while you have it goddammit. 

Here's the sequence in full.

And here's Alan Ball talking about it as it plays behind him. 

 

It's been fifteen years since that finale aired and even in this form where the focus is on Ball and we can't even see the full shot or hear Sia singing I still cry watching it. 

In part that's because the sequence has so much pathos and truth to it. But it's also because Ball grounded where he ended in where he began. He found his finale in his premise.

Death, the monster chasing us all, has become the means of liberation not only from our burdens but from terrible, ridiculous, crippling fears. 

TOMORROW: ZAL BATMANGLIJ TRUSTS THEIR AUDIENCE 

PRIDE MONTH CREATORS WEEK: RUSSELL T. DAVIES SHOWS THE POWER OF A POINT OF VIEW

When QUEER AS FOLK creator Russell T. Davies restarted the DOCTOR WHO franchise in 2005, there were lots of big question marks. The multi-multi-part storytelling style that the series was known for had gotten incredibly long in the tooth; special effects that in their heyday had seemed either innovative or adorably hokey now appeared just cheap. And the later generations of the show had gotten darker and less resonant. The last iteration, in 1996, had lasted all of one TV movie. The one before that, ten years earlier, had hemorrhaged viewers. Maybe the whole concept was of an age now gone. 

The biggest question, though, was who they would get for the Doctor himself. He's the main character. He's the madman in the box. Everything turns on him. 

Davies would find fantastic leads in both Christopher Eccleston and a year later David Tennant. He also completely renovated the storytelling style, made it lean, often scary and very clever, with season-long subplots that were paid off in surprising ways. 

But what truly made the restart a hit is his choice about point of view. Instead of accepting the conventional wisdom that the Doctor is the main character, Davies told the story through the eyes of Rose Tyler, a shop worker who meets this strange man when she's nearly kidnapped by bizarre living mannequins, ends up working with him to stop them, then agrees -- as we do each week -- to go with him on his madcap adventures.

Putting Rose in the center gave the audience a way to see itself, the Doctor's most faithful companion, as the hero of the story. And at the same time it allowed the Doctor to become more than he had been, not only the object of our fascination, but someone mysterious, unpredictable, even dangerous.

In some ways the kind of change in point of view Davies brought makes for a small distinction; in its fundamentals the story of DOCTOR WHO remained the same as ever. But the experience watching the show was completely different. It feels much more personal and engaged. 

It's the difference between setting up a shot straight on and letting the action play in front of the camera, or choosing an angle that itself becomes part of the moment being shot. Either is a way of telling the story. But the latter ends up giving the experience specificity and a voice.

In his most recent work, IT'S A SIN, about the AIDS crisis in the UK, Davies makes a similarly unexpected and powerful choice. There have been many films and TV shows about AIDS and the queer community in the 80s and 90s. But usually those stories are told from the point of view of men in their 20s to 30s. Davies' main characters are instead teenagers, whose eyes are filled with life and possibility. The first episode in fact, while touching in a serious way on the quiet rise of this horrible disease, is mostly about these five kids finding family and joy in one another in London. 

Starting from that point of youth and vitality ends up making what happens all the more brutal. But far more than that it makes the storytelling fresh. Even as much of what happens plotwise is familiar--some get sick and die; some get radicalized; some are rejected by family; some are reembraced--in the midst of it all there's a continued sense of discovery that's different than the typical AIDS drama, simply because these are the experiences of a younger generation, for whom everything is new.

And some of the insights they have are not related to the pandemic they're facing. One of the scenes that has most stayed with me concerns the government's insistence that school children not be "subjected" to any reference to homosexuality. 

Ash, the schoolteacher, describes the process of being forced to do that work. 

So they said it could be six months work as this teacher's replacement, and I'm thinking Great. Proper job. And it's got 2000 people and it's rough as hell but that's okay. 

Except, I walk in, I report to the office and I get shown around by Mr. Crane. 'And these are your pigeon holes, check them every day but not too often. We know what you're like, you lot, fiddling with your holes.' How did they know? All I did was walk in, said Hello, best behavior and they just know. Breeders, they can smell it.

And that's just the beginning. Because then he takes me into the library. He says, 'I got a perfect job for you, make a start in here, removing inappropriate material.' Like what? 'Clause 28. We have to remove any books or material that might be promoting a homosexual lifestyle.'"

"So what did you do?," someone asks. 

No choice. I could get sacked for saying one gay thing out loud in school, so I did as I was told.

Crane comes back: 'How's it going?'

Great. Fine. Good. 

'And what did you find?'

Nothing. 

'What do you mean, nothing?' 

I mean, nothing. I found nothing. I checked Shakespeare. Nothing. You might get versions on stage that might get a bit fruity with men in togas, but you need to ban the director, not the book because in the whole of Shakespeare there's not one man with a man, not one woman with a woman. 

Dickens, nothing. He wrote about the rich and the poor and dwarfs and saints and orphans and ghosts. Not one homosexual anywhere. Jane Austen did not write about lesbians. 

I checked the history books. So what if Julius Caesar and Aristotle and Alexander the Great had their odd little fling with a catamite? Not according to the schoolbooks they didn't. 

I looked at Asterix and TinTin. I looked at Disney and sport and the Bible. I looked at the Talmud and the Koran and the Guinness Book of Records. I looked at the vast halls of literature and culture and science and art and there's not the slightest danger of any child ever being infected because there's not one gay man or woman anywhere.

There is nothing. There is nothing. That's what you're protecting them from. Nothing. 

"But what did you really say?," someone asks.

There's a couple of Mary Renauts.

It's a tremendous monologue, one that probably would have landed no matter what. But coming from a young person who is fully confronting this awful reality for the first time in his life, it's that much more searing. 

TOMORROW: ALAN BALL FOLLOWS THROUGH