Here comes the sun, and I say it's all right

I don't read dystopian fiction.

I realize this is a pretty broad statement, especially considering that the market- especially the young adult market- is absolutely saturated with dystopias right now. For instance:

"IN A WORLD WHERE [x] IS OUTLAWED, OUR [straight/white/non-disabled/cisgendered] HEROINE DARES TO BREAK THE RULES!" - half the YA section of my local bookstore

There are two reasons I'm not a dystopia reader. First, it's BORING. Not that I begrudge you if you do enjoy dystopias- and I know people who do, and who have very valid reasons for doing so- but there's only so any retreads of Anthem I can take before my eyes roll out of my head and go bumping across the floor. (Also, has anyone else noticed the distinctly Ayn Randian slant a lot of dystopias have taken these days? Where our hero is the only one smart and special enough to realize that the world is messed up? This isn't just me, is it?)

But disliking/not being interested in various aspects of the genre isn't unique to dystopia; it's the same reason I don't read hard sci-fi, or literary fiction, or romance novels. There's one very particular thing about dystopia

that keeps me from reading/enjoying it, and while it might say shallow when I say it out loud, it's very true.

Dystopias are sad.

Moreover, dystopias are cynical.

Look, I get that a lot of people see sad, depressing, nihlistic works of art as inherently holding more meaning and value, and they can . . . well, they can think that. I don't agree. But that's not why I avoid dystopian fiction. The reason I avoid dystopian fiction is very simple: I'm sad enough already. I don't need my fiction making it worse.

I have OCD. Depending on the season (all through fall and winter) I also have depression. Depression convinces me that life isn't worth living and that I shouldn't bother to get out of bed in the morning. OCD tells me that I'm an awful person who should just kill herself right now to spare everyone else the trouble. I take medication for both these conditions; they help. But there is an ever-present danger of something tripping me up and sending me down a self-loathing spiral that can last for MONTHS. I have been down those spirals before. They are not fun. They are, frankly, something I'd like to avoid when all possible. And you know what has the potential to set them off? Reading or watching something that happens to push just the right buttons at just the wrong times, especially buttons that say things like "the world sucks!" or "nothing is ever going to get better!" It's like the opposite of taking anti-depressants. I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. And the other side of that coin is- well, my life as someone who deals with mental illness is not always an easy one. I'm not trying to perpetuate the idea that people with mental illnesses live in a state of constant despair, because it's not true, but what IS true is that we face challenges that neurotypical people simply don't, including a sometimes-skewed image of what the world is. This makes up enough of my day-to-day existence that I don't need to see it reflected in fiction.

The Toast has been doing a series of posts called "femmeslash friday" (highly recommended, by the way) and today's post is on Sansa and Brienne in Game of Thrones. GoT is (arguably) not a dystopia, but the writer of the article, E.M. Freeburg, neatly summed up a lot of what I'm trying to articulate here:

“If I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept magic and dragons, then you are overestimating my restraint if you expect me not to smuggle happy ladies along with them. Fantasy breeds fantasy, and if we’re building worlds than I’m going to build myself into them . . . Cynicism and skepticism and an assumption of the worst-case scenario for people like myself is for every other waking moment of my life, thanks.” (x)

Freeburg is writing about popular depictions of queer women, which is a dicussion for another post, but it's also extremely applicable to all groups who live in a society that treats them like crap. I've had enough of endless reminders that I shouldn't expect anything better. Society tells me that. My own brain tells me that. I don't need it on my fiction, too.

(P.S. if you attempt to insinuate that I- or people like me- are just don't understand art for not enjoying sad books, you're kind of an ass. Actually, strike the "kind of." You are an ass.)

Female suffering and the myth of "realism"

There’s a scene in Martin McDonagh’s film Seven Psychopaths where Christopher Walken’s character confronts Colin Farrell’s screenwriter on his terrible handling of female characters: “None of them have anything to say for themselves, and most of them get shot or stabbed to death within five minutes.” Farrell’s character (named “Marty-“ yes, we see what you did there, Mr. McDonagh) defends his creative choices by claiming that he’s trying to show how terribly the world treats women, but Walken scoffs “yeah, it’s a hard world for women, but most of the ones I know can string a sentence together.” I found the placement of the scene to be a little eyebrow-raising- suffice to say that as a writer, Martin McDonagh shares more than a name with his character- but it’s funny, and it’s true. And it ties in to something I’ve been thinking about lately: the idea of “realism” and how often it seems to tie into “we’re going to beat the ever-loving SHIT out of our female characters.”

I’ve been watching AMC’s The Killing lately, because someone described the main characters’ dynamic as “Mulder/Scully-esque” and it piqued my interest. I really should have remembered that “Mulder/Scully-esque” generally implies “season upon season of unresolved sexual/romantic tension until it finally descends into weirdness with alien babies” and fled screaming into the night before watching the pilot, but hindsight is twenty/twenty, and I’m the kind of person who finishes every show she starts. (No, really; the only show that’s managed to break my streak is Hemlock Grove, because even I had to bail after the angel pregnancy started.) The Killing is- well, really not a good show, in terms of writing. A third of the screentime is taken up by a storyline that could be best described as “The West Wing: Municipal Politics Edition,” and another third is given over to watching the family of our main murdered girl slowly going to pieces. Sad, yes; compelling, not really. The remaining third is given to Scully and Mulder- er, Linden and Holder (look, it’s a tiny redheaded no-nonsense officer paired with a snarky, pop-culture-spouting partner; SOMEONE had to say it) trying to navigate the central question of “who killed Rosie Larsen?” And something this show really loves- something I didn’t notice until the latest season, but which was impossible to ignore when I DID notice it- is beating their female characters down. Over. And over. And over.

Now this is what you call a “hyper-realistic” show, which usually translates to “incredibly depressing,” because many writers (not me) think that the real world is dark man, dark, and the only way to show this is to make the most miserable shows possible. I may not agree, but hey, it’s their prerogative, just as it’s mine to take Craig Ferguson as a writing compass. Point is, this show glories in realism; despite my X-Files references, there are no aliens, nor any hint of them. Despite the obvious Twin Peaks comparison (teenaged girl is murdered; show revolves around reactions to and investigations into her death) there is no BOB or Black Lodge or Bookhouse Boys. The colour palette is drained nearly to the point of black and white (it’s set in Seattle, and filmed in Vancouver.) But the most salient issue is, everyone on this show is miserable. These people don’t have skeletons in the closet so much as they have entire mortuaries. Holder, the main character’s partner, is a recovering meth addict who is estranged from his only remaining family after stealing from his six-year-old nephew while on a bender. Our main, Linden, fares slightly better at first (although really, “no meth” is kind of a sad standard of “better”) but over the course of the show to date, she loses custody of her son- after being investigated by child services- gets dumped by her fiancé, gets tossed in a mental ward (under false pretenses, of course, because it’s that kind of show) loses her job, loses ANOTHER boyfriend, gets kidnapped by a gun-wielding street preacher, has an affair with a married man, discovers that- spoilers!- said married man, another police officer, is actually the serial killer she’s been chasing and is driven to murder him in cold blood, after his coverup leads to an innocent man (who she arrested) being executed.

God DAMN.

Now I’m not going to argue that nothing bad should happen to Linden, ever; this show is called The Killing, not My Little Pony: Murder Is Magic. I’ll allow the kidnapping, and even the psychiatric commitment (though in general I am sick to death of the “BUT THEY’RE NOT REALLY CRAZY” trope, seeing as how rarely actual people with actual mental illnesses are seen on TV.) Hell, I’ll even allow for the lost custody; the character had to be gotten off the show SOMEHOW. What bothers me in all this is that she’s so rarely given something good to counterbalance the bad. I didn’t mention, by the way, that all of this is preceded by her frequently alluded-to miserable childhood in foster care, which is implied to have damaged her ability to hold functional relationships; thanks for that, show. But let’s tally it up- three (3) lost love interests, two of who were lost in fairly traumatic ways (the fiancé dumped her after the false commitment incident, literally taking off so that she could come out of her room and find that she'd been abandoned), a lost child, a lost childhood, murder, more murder, and frequent abuse at the hands of her suspects. Shit, if I were her, I would have crawled into a blanket fort and refused to come out by this point. I suppose it’s arguable that bad shit happens to Holder, too- see the aforementioned methhead backstory. (By the way, has anyone ever seen a meth addict who looked like this guy? Yeah. Yeah, no. Check out what meth does to a person's face sometime; I garuntee you will be scared straight for life.) But the thing about Holder’s story that’s so lacking in Linden’s is that he gets actual happy endings to balance out all the crap. As of the end of season three, he has a girlfriend who knows about and accepts his status as a recovering addict; he’s on the road to reconciling with his sister and nephew; he’s edging towards a promotion to police sergeant. God knows there’s still plenty for him to angst about, but there’s also an incentive to get out of bed in the morning. Linden’s long since lost that; the fact that she’s still functioning at all is not much short of a miracle.

"I have a good luck charm. It's called 'being a cismale.' You
can't have it, sorry."

Realistic? Well, maybe. Plenty of crap DOES happen to people who don’t deserve it, and they DO keep on dragging themselves through the day, because what the hell else can they do? Watching the narrative constantly heap abuse on Linden isn’t fun, but I can’t argue that it couldn’t possibly happen in real life. But then there’s the way the rest of the female characters on the show get treated: we have poor dead Rosie Larsen, her aunt the unwitting murderer (as the result of a chain of events that severely stretches this show’s claim of realism), her mother the bereaved parent, the political campaign aide who, it’s revealed, was molested as a teenager . . . it goes on and on. And that’s just the first two seasons. The third and latest season, which revolves around the disappearance of a series of (female) street children, features Kallie, our primary victim who doesn’t even get the dignity of a confirmed death or a proper burial; Bullet, Kallie’s friend who is tragically in love with a straight girl and is eventually fridged to give Holder manpain; Kallie’s mother, whose name I don’t remember, who is condemned repeatedly (and not entirely unfairly) as a Bad Mother and is last seen still desperately searching for her lost child; multiple nameless victims who suffer the added indignity of being mutilated pre-mortem (“he took my left finger,” one surviving victim says pitifully, “what if someone wants to marry me? Will it matter?”); the past victim who had her throat slit “so deep he nearly cut her head off;” and, of course, Linden, who loses two boyfriends, one of whom ends up being The Killer. I have neither the inclination nor the patience to count down the female versus male body count of this show, but I can tell you right damn now, the former outweighs the latter. Because . . . realism?

Look. Women face a lot of violence. Women face constant questioning regarding their parenting skills. Women are vulnerable to sexual assault, especially when homeless and queer. (Oh, I forgot to mention; Bullet, Kallie’s friend, is also raped early on in the season for reasons that remain a total narrative mystery to me.) And yeah, sometimes cops and other authority figures turn out to be bad guys; remember Russell Williams? But if you try to tell me that a serial killer cop AND a secret web of political corruption that lead to a teenager being unwittingly murdered by her own aunt AND an evil Native American chief colluding with the corrupt City Hall politicians (did I mention this show is racist? Yeah, it’s really super racist) AND a guy getting mistaken for a murderer because he was trying to smuggle a potential female circumcision victim out of the country AND the primary investigating officer turns out to have been unknowingly schtupping the secret serial killer cop is totally realistic . . . but a woman having something nice happen to her for once is just out of the sphere of reality, I kind of have to wonder what version of reality you’ve been living in. Mostly so I can make sure to never, ever go there.

(Another repeat offender in this category is A Game of Thrones, which is so terrible to its women and in so many ways that I couldn’t even begin to list them here. “But it’s based on the Middle Ages! Things really were awful for women back then!” Yeah, you know what they didn’t have in the Middle Ages? FUCKING DRAGONS.)

Get thee behind me, she-devil!

As you can probably tell from looking at this blog, I put a lot of thought into the media I consume. I'm not saying this to brag about what a smart person I am; I just do it automatically. If you don't think about what you're taking in, how can you enjoy the nuances of the plot and characters? You have to put at least some thing into what you're watching or reading, or you're just staring at a screen/page for hours on end. You don't have to go in-depth with your analysis or anything, but it's pretty basic media consumption to think "X did Y because they were motivated by Z." Again, it's not about whether or not the viewer is smart; it's just how we're wired to interact with media. I think I tend to look a bit closer because I want to create media myself, and so I look at the ways other people have gotten it right or wrong. As a woman, I'm also invested in/tend to notice the way the media I consume treats female characters, because the way we are portrayed in fiction reflects the way we feel about ourselves in real life. If I want to do anything as a writer, it's boost self-confidence rather than deflate it. I want readers to know they're not alone.

So, I've been watching a lot of movies lately! I watch a lot of movies in general, and since I'm taking two film courses this semester, I'm watching more than usual. I've also been looking at horror movies, since Hallowen is approaching. And what I'm finding is . . . disturbing. I'm familiar with the way the media in general views women; you can't be a consumer of fiction and NOT be aware of it. What I wasn't aware of, at least not personally, is the way the horror genre treats women- specifically, how much it loves tearing them to pieces.

Let's look at a proto-example, The Exorcist. You probably know the story: a little girl gets posessed by a demon, and a priest struggling with his faith has to overcome his doubts in order to save her. What are two things you notice about that summary?

One: the person in peril is a little girl, specifically a twelve-year-old. Two: the focal point of the story, the character who has an arc and emotional journey, isn't the little girl at all. She spends most of the movie under control of a (gender-neutral) demonic force. It's the priest. The movie isn't about the person being put through hell and having control of their body taken away; it's the one who Feels Really Bad About It. And the man. The male role here is the important one. It's even the title of the movie: "The Exorcist," not "The Posessed." Regan, in the grand scheme of the film, doesn't matter. Moreover, the way the film uses her to make a point- I would argue- says a lot about what we value as viewers and what frightens us. Remember this scene?

Of course you do; it's one of the movie's big shocking moments, and certainly one of the most controversial. Regan, now fully under the demon's control, "masturbates" (I'd argue it looks more like stabbing, but the intent is there) with a crucifix while her head rotates 180 degrees, and when her mother enters, the demon drags Chris's head down in an attempt to make her fellate her own daughter. Disgusting, right? Of course it is- it's incest. But it's also playing on a lot of our fears about girls, especially preteen ones who are just beginning to be aware of their own sexuality. What's the scariest thing in the world? A young girl masturbating, apparently. And masturbating with a crufix- intentionally profaning one of the holiest symbols in Christianity. So young girls > female masturbation > blasphemy. Starting to see my argument?

You can argue the point; Regan's mother Chris is, after all, a character in her own right who influences the plot. She has feelings towards her daughter, and she isn't removed from control of her body like Regan is. But she still isn't the focal point of the movie itself- Karras is. We may sympathize with Regan and Chris, but Karras is the one we're meant to root for. He is the one who's here to slay the dragon and bring the princess home to her castle. I ask you, then: why isn't her mother given that chance? I know that within the logic of the film, Karras is needed because he's a priest and priests are the ones who perform exorcisms, but what he does in the end is simply invite the demon to enter his body and then kills the demon by killing himself. Did that really need a priest?

Okay, you argue, but The Exorcist is only one movie. There are plenty of horror movies- exorcism movies, even!- that don't involve the demeaning of a girl or woman for the benefit of a male character. Okay, then. Where are they?

How about The Exorcism of Emily Rose? Who's the protagonist of that one?

Oh

Well . . . okay, how about The Last Exorcism? Does that have a female lead?

Not so much, no.

Okaaaaaaaaaay . . . Stigmata! That's the movie I watched that spurred this whole ponderance on my part. That one's got to have a woman who gets to reflect and act on her situation- she's billed on the poster! Surely they won't take yet another story about a woman being tortured and robbed of her bodily autonomy and make it all about a male crisis of fai-

Oh, for the love of God!

I'm not writing an essay (I have to write about five for class anyway); I can't claim to have drawn a definite conclusion from this. All I can say is what I've seen for myself. And what I've seen is . . . an endless parade of women being battered, bruised, and beaten while a man stands nearby weeping quietly over their suffering. But the final shot isn't the women's face. She doesn't get a say in what happens next. Whether she lives or dies (we have a 2/2 ratio on that one, though I'm told that if the director of Stigmata had had his way, it would have been a 3) it's not her story. It's his. This is veering genres wildly, but do you remember the posters for the first season of The Good Wife?

Like I said, completely different genre. But if you take the tagline and flip it, you've got a pretty good description of the horror genre- at least, the subgenre I review in this post. Her suffering. His story.

Sometimes, you just need a self-affirmation

I've heard it said that high school English is specifically designed to make students hate literature. Having gone through four years of it and earned relatively good marks all the way through, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. If you're not interested in English in the first place than it's soul-crushingly boring, but that's true of just about any subject: high school math class didn't make me hate math. Math made me hate math. As a dorky, lit-inclined sixteen-year-old, high school English gave me a creative outlet for my various feelings on the literature we were reading. It also gave me a bitchin' excuse to read Lady Macbeth's part out loud when we covered Mackers. Admittedly my creative writing course did briefly make me hate writing when my teacher advised me to think of myself as a conduit rather than a writer and let the words "flow through you to the page," but I got over that quickly enough. I still wanted to write, I just didn't want to write that. And at the end of four years, I left with a diploma and my faith in literature relatively unshaken.

No, high school English did not make me hate literature.

College English, on the other hand . . .

The way we've structured higher education in general is pretty much designed for maximum pain, regardless of what you're studying. You spend four years, minimum, cramming information into your brain at a rate that you can't possibly process, and promptly forget about it during the next block of classes because you have new information to cram in there. You squeeze yourself through a meat grinder of papers, tests, and evaluations with the goal of "get good marks" rather than "learn." At the end of those four years, you have the option of either launching yourself into the workforce with the knowledge you've forgotten, or go on to incur even more debt and forgotten facts by going on to graduate school. Congratulations! You have successfully navigated through our culture's rite of adulthood. As a prize, you get student loans!

Our culture's attitude towards grades is- pardon the language- really fucked up in general. There's a narrative that says your grades (usually equated with your intelligence, though the two actually have relatively little to do with each other) mean you're a better person, a smarter person, a more patient and hardworking and generally worthwhile person. Why? Because you can explain algebra? Because you understand the literary significance of the scarlet letter? These things are your abilities, and you have the right to be proud of them. But they don't make you a good person, or a kind person, or a person who does good in the world. Hell, even all of those things don't make you a worthwhile human being. You're a worthwhile human being because you're you. You bring something new to the table simply by virtue of being an individual. If what you want to bring is pumping gas or working in a bookstore or staying home with your kids, congratulations. You're making it. You're making it because you are doing something that changes the world, however small. You think pumping gas doesn't change the world? That person who needed to get to work might disagree. Working in a bookstore? You may have just sold a book that will inspire the reader to get up and keep going for another day. Staying at home with the kids? You're raising the next generation, and God knows we need more kind, caring people in the world.

A friend of mine, Hannah Johnson, has a book out called Know Not Why. I'd recommend it because it's an excellent book in general, but there's one passage in particular that I go back to when I'm feeling down about my purpose in life:

It's like she's thanking me for something way bigger: getting her kitten out of a tree, helping her granny across the street, I dunno. It's funny, how stuff that seems so small can be so important. I guess there's no real way of telling how much something can mean to somebody else. Maybe even this job is sort of important.

A few years ago, I worked at a museum where part of my job was to help pick up artifacts from donors. The first trip I went on was to a woman's house, where she told us all about the problems she was having with her son and her landlord. As we were driving away, my boss explained to me that the real purpose of the job wasn't picking up the artifacts: it was letting the donors talk it out for as long as they needed to. Sometimes they just needed a listening ear. Of all the things I learned in that job- cataloguing, restoration, museum curation- that's the lesson I've kept with me the longest. Sometimes it really isn't about the letters you have after your name, or whether or not you can explain Godard's King Lear. It's about whether you're happy with what you're putting out into the world. If you are, I think you're doing okay.

"And now I'm going home"

14915 / 50000 words. 30% done!

I'm back! And apparently a weekend off was what I needed in the first place, because my wordcount is once again happily rising. I have my outlines back, and I'm tinkering with them a bit, thinking about story structure and character development and all those good things. I've had some ideas for extending the plot (which was, as it stood, bound to fall short of the necessary wordcount) and the characters are developing un ways that are new and exciting and making me happy. Progress all around!

As part of my weekend off, I a) lounged around the house and watched movies with my mother (The Holiday; it wasn't a masterpiece, but it also wasn't a half-bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon) and b) I went to a local concert in Gage Park. The performer, Heather Dale, has been a favourite of mine for quite some time- I believe I originally heard of her via Tamora Pierce's blog, where she linked to Dale's song "One Of Us" Since Dale is, happily, local to me, I got to see her perform (yay!) and get her autograph (double yay!) Her music is in a genre- Celtic folk- that I've always been fond of, which I guess is no surprise, given that I'm the granddaughter of Scottish immigrants. Possibly it's foolish, but I like feeling connected to my heritage- even if it is just by listening to "Mordred's Lullaby" on repeat. (Yes I know Mordred wasn't Scottish. Shhh.) I've only been to Scotland twice- once when I was two, and as such don't remember a minute of it, and once a few years ago as a post-graduation celebration. It's a bit of a weird experience- neither sides of my family (Scottish on my dad's, French-German on my mom's) have stayed especially connected to their ancestor's culture, but for whatever reason, that's only made me more determined to hold on to it. Culture's a bit of a weird beastie like that- I think the further away you are from the source of it, the more invested you are in keeping it. Maybe it gives you an illusion of belonging to something, although I don't really see it as illusory. Whatever community you're in, it forms part of you're identity. I'm not advocating for subsuming yourself into the group for the greater good (THE GREATER GOOOOOD) but I think for a lot of people- myself included- nationality and culture represent a sort of semi-family, something you're born into and choose to take or leave as you get older.

Whew. Heavy stuff for a Sunday night. But the section I just wrote had the two main characters discussing community and family, so in an odd way, it all comes back around. Here's a little bit of back-and-forth for you:

“But-” I shook my head. “Of course you need to worry about other people. Don’t you want friends? Family?”
“Of course,” she said impatiently, waving a fry in the air for emphasis. “But I don’t need to rely on them, is the thing. I never need to rely on anyone. Even if people take off, it doesn’t matter, because I can still take care of myself. No matter what.”
I stared at her. “That’s really what you want?”
She shrugged. “Nothing to do with want. It’s just how things are.”