The beauty and power of words part 6: Who the hell am I to be writing any of this?
I try to stay focused on the writing and not think too much about what happens after. The two concepts seem inseparable, in as much as you naturally ask yourself if what you’ve written makes sense to anyone else. “Write like no one else will ever read your work” does not absolve you of writing content that lands with your reader.
You can’t ignore that someone other than you will read what you write, but you also can’t get fixated on how much authority any reader will see in a writer they know nothing about. If you ever get to a point where you’re asking, “Who the hell am I to be writing any of this?” you may as well stop.
And right off the bat, there’s a problem that I’ve been staring down for some time. I just referred to “the authority of the writer,” when we should actually be looking at the authority of the writer’s work. It’s in the text, except when it isn’t. But it starts with the text.
One of my biggest bugbears is when people follow up anything you’ve said with the words, “In your opinion.” Of course it’s my opinion. I can only give my view of anything, make it authentic and have some sort of conviction in what I’m saying and hope that it resonates with others. Authority is in the meaning you are carving out. You’re earning it the way it’s supposed to be earned. And that’s how even the best known writers and authors have to live.
There’s a tendency for people to see a novel with “Extra comments from the author,” and think, “Well, this will be the definitive word on the subject.” This is the modern-day form of a mutated afterword that seems to have a lot in common with DVD Extras. We can now get together and ask, “Did you read the standard edition or the special edition?”
The introduction of the “special edition” creates a sense of cultural authority. The reader might think, “This must be important because it comes from the author and brings something new.” Lost is the idea that it is important because the words are good and there’s a reason for them. And there’s typically only a reason for them when the cultural importance of the work is worth the continuing conversation.
Classic examples would be Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Margerat Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. They deserve the DVD extras treatment. Not because they’re famous works by famous authors. Not because of the films, TV Series, video games, and Graphic novels, connected to them, but because the work itself provokes a need for it to exist outside of the framework of what it originally started life out as. At that point, they might still be rooted in the novel—or they might have left it behind entirely.
I find that I have to keep reminding myself of the good job done by these writers that made the legends grow and made the work live on long after you’ve finished reading.
Whoever you are, the goal is for the writing to stay with the reader, to mean something, long after you’ve finished reading. It’s in the re-reading, re-watching and the thinking about it, where stories live on. If you get to the end of Handmaid’s tale and say, “Phew, I’m glad OfFred escaped that horrible Gilead place. Worst country ever,” and never think again about it all, then I don’t think you’re getting your money’s worth.
The Handmaid’s Tale legend outgrew the written word a long time ago. If you knew nothing else about it, you’d know that it’s got something to do with a totalitarian state where woman live to produce children for the elite classes. It’s that one about state sanctioned rape and it’s a bit feminist-y. If you knew nothing else, you’d at least think you know that. And if you did know that, then you’re wrong anyway, because it doesn’t take a feminist way of thinking to spot how wrong things have gone in Gilead. Handmaid’s is one of those works that has a life outside of the pages, but everything links back to the original work.
The amazing thing about the recent TV Series is that it takes the story far beyond where the novel leaves it and yet you’d think it had all been plotted and planned by Attwood from way back. You feel that this is exactly what OfFred would have done if the novel continued. You have no proof of that. What you have is a sense that the writers took the novel and extrapolated from it where to go next, adding along the way a reflection of societal issues that have persisted and existed from the launch of the novel in 1985 to present day.
Conversely, a story like Fight Club expanded beyond its pages to become something of a parody of its DNA. The very existence of comic books, graphic novels and video game, makes you feel this is the exact opposite of what Tyler Durden would have done. Which is probably what Tyler would do, just to spite himself. In any regards, Fight Club depends more on a feeling, an attitude, raising questions that are more important than the answers that never come. Forgetting all the surrounding media related to the novel, Tyler Durden lives on in quotes, a philosophy and an ideal. I don’t know if Chuck Palahniuk ever intended to start a rebellion against Swedish Furniture. But he at least wanted you to start thinking about how you are not defined by these things. You are not your Swedish furniture, your Gande Latte, or your fucking khakis and buying the right sofa does not complete you. Palahniuk may have written of “The all-singing all-dancing crap of the World,” but it was up to the readers to run with it.
No matter how many books you sell, you could start to think that, as a creative, you are not and maybe never were the God of all you create. Well, at least not a God that’s in the driver’s seat. So, please adjust your seats to the upright position, and know that your well written opinion is as worthwhile as anyone’s.
Then again, sometimes you’re just plain wrong about your creation, particularly if the creative project is a collaborative effort. Just keep in mind that Ridley Scott, to this day, will insist that Deckard, the protagonist in his film Blade Runner, was a replicant.
Perhaps Scott has a reason for wanting to believe that a story about a human tracking down and killing dangerous illegal synthetic humans deserves a twist at the end where we ask, “Was the human really a human? Or was he a replicant just like the ones he was chasing?” But the issue is: The whole film had done the work of questioning what it meant to be human. The story hinges at many turns on working out who is human and who isn’t. To add questions about whether or not the protagonist was human adds nothing to the story that hasn’t already been done up to that point. More importantly, there’s nothing in the “text” that makes us want to question Deckard’s humanity. Throughout the film there is no suggestion that he is not human. I certainly didn’t watch it and say, “Hang on. Are we sure he wasn’t a replicant?”
Ridley is the only one who thinks this. Harrison Ford played the character as human. Co- screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples wrote the character as human. The audience in the original cinematic version all thought he was human. But Ridley? No. He later, in his director’s cut, puts in one scene and because of that one scene he then thinks he has proof that his lead man was indeed playing a replicant, without even knowing it.
From a story telling point of view, there isn’t enough in the additional seconds of footage to turn the whole story on its head. The Unicorn dream scene that is supposed to be a big clue that Harrison’s character Deckard has implanted memories, seems more like a misplaced piece of footage that’s shoehorned in and frankly could mean anything. Granted, there is room for personal interpretation but ultimately, it’s the work that’s there that tells its truth. Forget that the screenwriters didn’t write the story that way. Forget that Philip K Dick who write the book that it was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? didn’t write it that way. Forget that the man acting the role didn’t for one second think his character Deckard wasn’t human. Forget all of that. If you take away the one additional dream sequence in Ridley Scott’s cut, there is nothing that makes the viewer think what Ridley’s thinking.
Interestingly, much of the meaning you find in the film is turned on its head if we do buy into the protagonist being Ridley Scott’s Replicant Blade Runner. For instance, one of my favourite pieces of dialogue is at the end of the film, when Edward James Olmos’s character, Detective Gaff, shouts through the rain to Deckard, “You've done a man's job, sir.” And that always gets to me. Deckard is well and truly beaten and only survives because Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, brilliant throughout as the film’s antagonist, let him live. Batty himself, with a limited life span, due for his time to be up, is resigned to his own death. The implications of his actions, of saving his hunter at the end, are the cause of much debate. To show mercy, to value human life, to have Deckard bear witness to Batty’s own end, so that there is someone alive to remember him, are all put forward as plausible reasons for the villain saving the hero. The resounding idea is that the artificial human is more human in the end than the human who is hunting him. Aspects of that ending live with you for years after you’ve left the cinema. The implications of, “You've done a man's job, sir,” feels different if you want to believe that Deckard isn’t human. Luckily, it’s more than easy to watch the film and not have to go there, because the story, doesn’t take you there. If ever asked who you are to be writing what you’re writing, saying what you’re saying, just ask – “Who is Ridley Scott to do so?”
There’s a great Hollywood myth about Raymond Chandler getting a call from movie execs at Warner Bros while they were making a film out of his novel The Big Sleep. They asked him, “Who actually killed the chauffer?” To which, legend has it, Chandler replied, “How the hell should I know?”
There’s no documentation of what exactly was said. “How the hell should I know?” makes for a great story though. The Big Sleep is regarded as having a messy plot. So, we can all be excused from answering the chauffer question. Even the author gets a free pass here. But what would make anyone think that the author of the work would know anything about what happened in the world he wrote into existence and why do we need to have a greater authority when there is none. Chandler should have said, “Look, it’s your film. You don’t even need the Chauffer character if you don’t want him. It’s your world now.” One reason he can say he doesn’t know is because it’s not in the text. It is regarded as a loose end that is never tied up and it doesn’t matter who anyone thinks did it. There is no answer. Which, in itself, is the answer. Whether intentionally or not, Chandler left us with a story where you can never know because he never wrote it.
So, let’s rephrase: Who am I to be writing what I write when we know all this, when we know stories begin to exist beyond the page, when authors can’t even remember or care who killed a character in their novel, or when a film director wants to tell us how to understand his work, even when there is very little evidence to back up his point of view?
Perhaps the most happily, yet quietly, smug I ever got in class, was when I felt that I’d connected with the text, when reading A Clockwork Orange. Tibor Fischer, who I always found very engaging, asked our MA class if we picked up on the notion that an underlying subtext of the novel was that Anthony Burgess wanted us to see is that there’s something fun in being bad. Obviously, the “being bad” is taken to ugly and vile extremes. And the fix for Alex, the protagonist, the brain washing and torture, is also extreme and ugly. Burgess takes his metaphors to the Nth degree, but essentially, there are questions in there about the nature of being bad.
In response, I said that I’d go one further and say that it’s essentially about childhood and growing up and becoming responsible. Society drives the youthful badness out of you. Some years on I’d see how the same path had been carved out for Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Albeit Hal’s badness was more playful but just like Alex in Clockwork Orange, the time comes to grow up.
In class, at that time, I was not so versed in Henry IV, and couldn’t add that to my point. But I was so sure that at the heart of it all lay the idea of childhood being stripped away and adulthood forced on us. Tibor said he couldn’t see that. And at that point someone else in the class pointed out that there is a version of Clockwork Orange with an additional chapter, and in that chapter, Alex has grown up and turned his back on his old violent ways and accepted that he is drifting into adulthood.
It turns out that the original UK version has twenty-one chapter, but the original US edition cut the final chapter. I’d seen the film, read the book with only twenty chapters and still got a sense that it was in many ways it’s all about childhood. I had not read the missing chapter when I drew my conclusions. I didn’t need Burgess to confirm my thoughts, but discovering the twenty first chapter vindicated how I felt. More importantly, it vindicated how the meaning is in the text. Burgess later made it clear that the missing chapter was essential to his original intended meaning. Although it does solidify his meaning, you can argue that he doesn’t need that last chapter and that it is possible to get to the intended meaning just by reading chapters one to twenty. The meaning was in the text all the time. That’s how you gain authority. And you do so without fame, without DVD extras, without having to explain yourself.
I think of Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA Analyst who, in the film, about the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, was responsible for finding bin Laden. She’s sitting in an old-boys club of a CIA meeting, as all the men in the room discuss the intel that has got them to a point where they think they’ve found their man. It’s her intel. Her work. But she’s stuck with a role of sitting at the back of the room only observing. The CIA Director, asks, “And how close is that to the house?” One of the men in the room, her boss George, responds, “About a mile.” At which point, perhaps to push the issue and reiterate that someone, namely Maya, has done the research, done the hard work, Jessica Chastain’s Maya confidently chips in saying, “Four thousand two hundred and twenty-one feet. It's close to eight-tenths of a mile.” The CIA Director turns to her and asks, “Who are you?” Maya doesn’t miss a beat and calmly and quickly says, “I'm the motherfucker who found this place, sir.” It’s a great scene.
Maybe, once you’ve done all the hard work of writing anything, rewriting, researching, finding all the right words, finding the flow and the pacing, and lived and breathed everything you write until you know it’s good enough, and you think, “Who am I to be writing any of this?” Just tell yourself, “I’m the motherfucker who made this.”