Random acts of Ranting

Reasons to Watch Speed Racer

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart.

I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances.

Sadly, this is coupled with the kind of bone-headed narrative decisions that make it a fairly mundane failure rather than failed attempt at genius. Which is why I’d probably recommend people who are interested in writing should watch it, if only to see why certain things don’t work, narratively speaking. Things to pay attention to, when watching Speed Racer as a learning experience:

1) They Haven’t Decided what the film is about.
Not entirely true, since on one level they’ve got this down – Speed Racer is about futuristic cars and remaking a cartoon. But underneath that, on the thematic level, this film is overburdened with themes and it handles none of them particularly well. On one hand it’s a personal story about Speed living up to his brother’s legacy, on another it’s a story about the individual against big business, and on another hand its the thematic equivalent of Star Wars where man conquers the machine through the all-knowing power of the force (or, in this case, listening to the car and driving on instinct). There’s no problem with a story being these things, but it’s never all of these things at the same time – each theme gets set up seperately and independently, taking far to long to integrate.

2) Flashback Mania
In the opening ten minutes of the film, we have about six flashbacks. All these flashbacks undercut the speed and action of the opening race, but most of them add very little to tension. In SF we call this info-dumping and it’s something to be used with caution, but in the film it’s the very literal equivalent of stopping a story to insert “as you know, Bob, Speed’s older brother was once a great racer himself, but he came to a bad end…” over and over again. This would probably be bearable – not good, but bearable – if it was setting something up, but at the end of the race and the flashback sequence we’re given a new problem…

3) The Film has Two First Acts
There’s a structure to the first act of a story – the world is established, something threatens the status-quo, the hero walks away from it, things get worse and people keep saying “fix it”, and finally the protagonist is forced to address the issue. The act basically ends at the moment the decision is made to go and deal with the problem.

Speed Racer does this twice, and really  this is where a lot of the problems mentioned above become unforgivable  – the combination of opening race and story sets up one set of narrative expectations (two, actually, since they cram the background on Trixi and Speed’s relationship in there, rather unnecessarily). The conflict is all established – Speed wants to live up to his older brother’s memory, but also needs to understand why Rex Racer walked out. He relived Rex’s departure, sees the effect it has on his family, gets told not to listen to the gossip that follows. He makes a decision – not to break his brother’s record in the race, to limit himself from surpassing his brother’s memory. We get to a nice point where things are ready to move forward, and….

Then the movie starts all over again. We literally get up the following day and a whole new set of conflicts are introduced –  Speed is being courted by big business sponsors, the big business vs individual is set up, and although there’s some real tangential links to the first story it feels like the start of something else entirely (although this, too, is cut short when the seemingly-nice-big-businessmen reveals himself to be corporate-scum-who-hates-individuals at the end of this sequence).

There’s a notable shift in the way the whole film works after you get past the first half-hour or so – basically, as soon as they hit the rally race everything gets wound together, and things don’t start falling apart again until the very end when they have to end the film three or four times to get everything wrapped up. This is basically one of those signs that you’re layering in too many metaphors and themes at once, and they really could have done something extraordinary if only they’d focused things on one story and hooked everything else in as a sub-theme instead.

4) They didn’t adapt the style to the medium
The Speed Racer cartoon is layered in goofiness and weird stylistic choices – some parts are serious, some parts are cartoony to the extreme. Largely, the difference comes down the presence of Chim Chim and Spritle in the scene. In making the film they’ve tried to keep this stylistic approach, but what works okay in a half-hour television cartoon is death in a film, particularly when those choices are predicated on the comedic talents of a young actor and a chimpanzee in live-action sequences.

I can see the argument for keeping the goofy Spritle/Chim Chim scenes as a means of connecting this film to kids, but on the whole that was probably the wrong choice given how heavily stylized everything is. This is far from a realist film, but it’s also a long way from the kind of stylization that would appeal to anyone who isn’t plugging into the camp nostalgia of their approach. There are times when this leads to some really entertaining irony – the ninja, for example, or the major fight scene – but when that’s pushed to far it becomes inane rather than clever.

5) It Telegraphs Its Punches
Bless it’s heart, it tries not to – but the fact that Matthew Fox is Rex Racer despite the fact that another character plays him early on isn’t exactly a surprise. It’s not just a hold-over from the cartoon series either – Matthew Fox appears at exactly the right point, narratively speaking, to be the missing Rex Racer/Mentor figure and they don’t work hard enough to throw off that suspicion. Much like everything else, thematically speaking, it’s heavy-handed and overstated. It’s even foreshadowed in terms of motif, where people are not what they appear throughout the film (the big-bad-businessman in the first act, the man Speed and Racer X work with in the second act). What should be clever narrative decisions are let down by the flaws in the structure and become far to noticeable.

The reason I say watch this film isn’t necessarily because it’s irredeemably bad, although it looks like it is on the surface. Rather, it’s interesting because there’s enough good points to it that the really obvious failures are killers – or, at the very least, they put Speed Racer on the wrong side of the line between mundane and glorious failure. It’s such a great example of getting things wrong, structurally, that I kind of sat there wondering how they’d missed it (although this is probably a cautionary tale to writers in that respect – it’s easy to think you’ve linked things well enough in a narrative to justify having them there). There’s a part of me that pines for the film this could have been and keeps going back to it in the hopes it can be redrafted and fixed.

This is a community service announcement

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , , ,

Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC.

I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me.

It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things.

This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. At most, if it’d taken the zip disk with it, I would’ve lost about a weeks worth of stuff. While this is stressful – I was trying to hit a deadline for Gen Con Oz this afternoon – it isn’t the catastrophic loss the last PC death.

I figure a goodly portion of my friends list are writers. For the love of god, people, back up your files. Your computer isn’t as permanent as you think, and it truly sucks to be sitting there going “but, but, but” when the techie man tells you there’s nothing left.

As a side note – I’m broke and can’t afford to pay said techie-type people to tell me why the latest PC died and it’s well out of waranty. If there’s anyone local who’se got the know-how to poke at the parts and tell me why it’s gone, let me know and I’ll offer a) gratitude, b) um, whatever form of payment we can work given my limited means.

Some Ideas About Ideas

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , , ,

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer.

So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this:

Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle,  because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way.

I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the time. Hell, I’ve had three in the last five minutes [i]. You can take pretty much anything and use it as the hook for a story once you know the structure and techniques of telling one, so finding a good story idea is largely a matter of knowing the right processes to develop a small concept (say, I’m going to write a story about a guy with a clockwork arm) into a full-blown narrative.

The trick here is realising that the initial idea is almost never a full story – it’s just a hook to hang other things on while the story develops around it. Once you’ve stepped over that hurdle the ideas themselves are largely secondary. Or perhaps its in realising that stories are really lots of ideas, come up with over time. Either way, I think the whole story thing is important – an average idea can be turned into a competent story, but the absence of storytelling chops will kill even the coolest concept.

“Confluence” is borrowed from a short story by Neil Gaiman in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. Partially I use it because it’s a good explanation, partially because I like the word (and it’ll give me an excuse to use the word conflate later in this post, and conflates just one of those words, you know?). In Gaiman’s story the logic goes something like this: “Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra.” And sure, it may have been put forward by a fictional writer talking about the creation of the fictional story he’s written inside the story we’re reading, but if you can remember that one aspect of the pyramid then the other two tend to take care of themselves.

Basically we’re talking about two ore more seemingly random elements coming together, fusing in your minds eye and becoming the basis of a story. It doesn’t matter what those things are – experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve been told by friends, short descriptions of a place, stuff you’ve heard on the telly – once you find the right connection between them you’ve got the beginnings of a story. Sometimes this happens by coincidence, sometimes its’ an active process. Either way, it’s not terribly difficult – a lot of beginner writing exercises are based on this principle. Two examples, off the top of my head: pick a character, put them in a setting they obviously don’t belong in and write about how they got there; or pick three different places (say, a cemetery, a shopping mall, and a water-slide park) and figure out a story that uses one each as the setting for the opening scene, middle scene, and final scene.

There’s a great essay on imagination by Sean Williams where he posits that the imagination is like any other muscle, and it works better the more you get used to using it. Thus the easiest way to have ideas is to pay attention when you have them. It’s not like they’re things that happen uniquely to writers an artists – most people spend much of their everyday life making connections between things that are going on around them and other stuff floating through their head, so it’s just a matter of paying attention. It’s all about asking the right questions to get you started. For me, questions are less interesting than that moment of confluence. The way I write is all about finding the right combination of concepts, finding the tension when two things come together in an expected way. I like putting things at right angles and what develops, then asking the questions that’ll flesh it out into a story. The stories that start with big flashes of energy are almost always the result of two things that create a lot of awkward tension (say, unicorns and autopsies) that immediately link to one of my big narrative kinks (aka, the stuff I really exploring as a writer). This isn’t necessarily inspiration energy that comes from the muse – the combination above led to Horn, and they came out of some fairly dogged and conscious pursuit of a concept to pair up with “virgins and unicorns” that’d lead the story away from familiar territory.

As for the importance of other people’s ideas, well, you know how science is basically a process of one person coming up with a new theory based on a variation in someone else’s ideas? Writing works much the same way – people building new work on top of other people’s ideas, finding new twists and permeations that suit their own narrative kinks. Over time the continued repetition of certain ideas gave us the basics of narrative structure, which gradually led to the accretion of genre traits, which lead to movements within genres, and so forth. Things clump together sometimes, and those clumps become the basis of new ideas (after unicorns and autopsies, the real energy in Horn came when I conflated the big clump of tropes known as Noir into the mix. Ask people who were there when I wrote it what I was like, and I’m fairly sure the phrase giggling like a schoolgirl may come up).

Other people’s work is probably the only place that I really see inspiration at work in the writing process, because while I don’t buy into the mythology of the muse I do believe in responding to other people’s awesomeness. If someone does something utterly cool – and I mean utterly, enviously cool – then my natural inclination is to try and achieve something similar. Not necessarily replicate it, because imitation isn’t that much fun, but finding the new angle on the same technique, or idea, or setting. A new twist, a new tension. Interestingly, I also find a lot of inspiration in ideas that haven’t worked out – not just the merely bad stuff, but the stuff that starts with a good concept and fritters it away. These moments tend to come in more of a “oh god, that should’ve been so much cooler” kind of vibe. Because cool is relative (again, see my note on Narrative Kinks above) and the way I’d like to see an idea play out isn’t necessarily universal.

And that’s me and the idea process. I’m not sure how universal this is, but I’d be interested in hearing how it fits into other people’s processes. It certainly works as an explanation for my approach though – pick any story I’ve written and I’m pretty sure I can unpack the origin of it’s various components using these three vectors as a guide (and they probably would have been easier to explain with a specific story in mind, but it would have taken three or four blog-posts instead of one).

[i] if you’re really interested, they’re I should write a series of speculative fiction love stories set in a Laundromat, I should start a website called readings from a couch that features authors giving youtube readings of their work from a big red couch, and a story that starts with wet footsteps across the floor, leading towards the toilet and the family pet drowned within. Pretty ordinary ideas, and unlikely to get used for anything, but I could probably do something with them if I really wanted too. And before you ask, I know exactly where all of them come from.