Raindrops on Roses (Part Seven) -- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

(trailer)

So I lied a little. I said this was “perhaps the best Batman movie.” And, by every definition, this is not a Batman movie. It does have Michael Keaton, perhaps the best Batman; Edward Norton, a former Bruce Banner; and Emma Stone, Sony’s new Gwen Stacy, along with at least one explosion-filled set piece, so perhaps I wasn’t too far off the mark.

But I suppose calling Birdman a superhero movie comes with its own connotations. This isn’t a “stop the baddie” sort of movie (unless you count Edward Norton or Lindsay Duncan’s characters). It’s more of a long meditation on depression and obscurity. Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thomson had once starred in a series of superhero films for the character Birdman, though after declining an offer for Birdman 4, his life falls apart. He attempts to put it all back together by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carter’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and the movie is about those final days before opening night, as characters need to be recast, familial relationships need to be mended, and psychoses need to be dealt with.

To be even more specific, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is about Riggan Thomson, and every character around him is some facet of his personality. His daughter is his fear of his own mundanity (multiple scenes with her involve a prop that represents just how short humanity’s time on Earth has truly been), his producer/lawyer/best friend (played by Zach Galfianakis) is his more realistic side, Edward Norton plays the rock-star-like persona he wishes he had, and so on. Amidst all of this, there’s also the Birdman persona itself, still haunting Thomson, jabbing at him throughout the movie with doses of self-doubt.

Talking about the structure of Birdman is difficult. The most-talked about feature of the movie is how much of it appears to be shot in one take, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope style, making it appear like its own theatre production, and as the most talked about feature, it tends to drown out the other elements, like how each scene is generally only two people, never really involving more of the ensemble outside of very special moments. This means that, despite the movie’s large ensemble cast, the movie still feels introspective, again, focusing on the character of Riggan Thomson.

What I find interesting is the people that call this movie pretentious. Maybe Birdman is too pretentious for its own good, maybe it isn’t. I certainly don’t think it is (I wouldn’t have written about it if I had), but even if it is, when stripped from perceived symbolism, it’s still the story of a man desperately clawing at whatever influence he has left, the story of low points and only the vaguest promise of things getting better in the end.

-F
Next: Oranges and tigers and emeralds, oh my!

A Good Enough Place to Pause

This probably doesn’t mean what you think it means, or rather, it doesn’t mean what you think it means if you’re the one other person I know of who has been following The Familiar series and has been disappointed with the more recent updates. Instead, I offer a reflection on how the Raindrops on Roses series has been going on so far.

I think I’ve settled into the whole “Movie, Game, Book” cycle, offering three at a time in the hopes that someone who doesn’t like any one of them on principle will only have to wait a week or two to find something that more suits their interests. That being said, these are still my interests and no one else’s, so it’s entirely possible that none of these things appeal to you. If that’s the case, well, I hope you take solace in learning a bit more about me, then.

One of the things I noticed when writing the second set of three was how they shared at least a little of the same themes, or at least I tried to touch on the same themes. House of Leaves was kind of an outlier there; I wanted to write about how some people see the story as less of a horror and more of a romance (similar to Shaun of the Dead’s mix of zombies and romantic comedies), and that might have been forced in in the end. But I still wrote them as linked in the way they deal with broken relationships, and how the stories try to mend those relationships each in their own way (pigs, eldritch horror, or mythological monsters respectively). And that’s something I’d like to keep moving forwards.

So here’s the theme for the next set: Theatre. We’ll start with what many call the best Batman movie and work our way from there.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Six) -- House of Leaves

This is not for you.

Or at least, that’s what House of Leaves’ dedication page says. It’s a weird book, to say the least. Here’s some of the things it has that might dissuade potential readers: Colored text, obnoxiously long footnotes, a character archetype that was cliche the second it was written and was certainly outdated by the time the book was published, being forced to tilt the book at awkward angles (or even using a mirror) to read, an entire chapter on the etymology of the word “echo” that has what some would say, perhaps rightly, a weak payoff, and an overall air of pretentiousness. That isn’t to say any of these things are bad (like I said last week, clichés are tools), just that they can be off-putting.

But here’s the thing: The people that like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski really like it. There’s something just weird about the book that draws people to it, whether that be how the front cover of most copies is a quarter inch thinner than the rest of the pages (Clever or impractical? You decide!) or how even the premise (a blind hermit writes a semi-critical analysis of a movie that was never made (but seems may or may not still exist in-universe?) but dies before its publication, someone finds the manuscript, decides to edit it, and maybe(?) goes insane) is just… like what?

House of Leaves is generally put in the Horror category, but it’s not the type of horror that keeps you away from the basement or, as the book implies, taping measuring tapes and yardsticks to the walls of your single-room apartment. It wants you to be afraid of the dark, or more specifically, the unknown. It wants to point behind you and say, “Look out!” while at the same time clamping your neck, making you unable to turn around. And you can hear that something is indeed behind you, and if you could just see and understand it, that would be great but you can’t because you’re too busy reading House of Leaves.

But on the other hand, it’s also a romance. It’s about failed relationships and coming back from them (boy isn’t that a nice coincidence for these past few Raindrops on Roses posts). In the critiqued film, Will Navidson wants to bring his family together, to repair a strained relationship. In the editor’s notes, Johnny Truant finds himself desperately trying to find someone to hold onto as the manuscript scrapes away at his sanity.

These two genre threads nearly pull the book apart at the seams sometimes. But it all works, and I think that’s because of, despite House of Leaves’ reputation, it’s weirdness is still fairly contained. You know when the book is going to get off-putting due to the incredibly tell-y nature of the piece, and everything else is simply the story of two people trying to make sense of something they could never hope to understand.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Five) -- Night in the Woods

(trailer)
(purchase link)

I’m delving deeper into “Must be at least a little literate with a keyboard” games with this one, as well as increasing the necessary time requirement to play tenfold. Or, to put it another way, Infinite Fall’s Night in the Woods is a twenty-hour game requiring arrow keys for one hand, Z X and C in the other, the coordination to time button presses to jump higher, not to mention the rhythm sections which have their own special keys if you’re playing on a computer. Like with my post on The Beginner’s Guide, I go into this one with no small amount of trepidation, but let’s see what happens.

It’s possible to frame Night in the Woods’ narrative as a sort of parallel to Catcher in the Rye. They’re both coming of age stories about young adults running away from school, they both take place around a holiday (Christmas for Catcher, Halloween for Night), and they both carry this odd sense of nostalgia for simpler times.

Of course, to directly compare Night and Catcher is a detriment to both of them. The people who really like Catcher probably aren’t fans of being compared to a video game about a cat girl anyway, but I still like the comparison here as it still is a good introduction to the story Night in the Woods is trying to tell. Mae Borowski, when not playing video games into the wee hours of the night or sleeping in until after noon, is just as lost as Holden Caulfield.

But while Holden had a whole Big Apple to wander around, Mae only has her small coal-mining hometown of Possum Springs. In a sense, Possum Springs is its own character in Night in the Woods, with every member of its small population having its own little story to explore over the course of the game. That’s the biggest draw I find the game has, that you can speak to anyone, or at least listen in on their conversation. From Selmers the poet who sits on their porch for want of anything else to do espousing rhyming couplets as Mae walks past, to Pastor Kate who sometimes doesn’t believe the gospel she is preaching, to Rosa, the old woman by the pierogi stand who was friends with Mae’s grandfather, there’s no shortage of things to do.

The game itself encourages this sort of playstyle as well. All the story-progression events are located on the other side of town from Mae’s house, which means that along the way Mae will almost certainly find something to do. This is where a large majority of the game’s runtime comes from; it would probably be a five-hour game without it.

The comparison I made three weeks ago to Richard Scarry’s Busytown is obvious. It’s a bunch of anthropomorphic animals that all know everybody else in town (for better or for worse, it should be noted). Comparisons to Upstream Color are slightly less obvious, but both are still about finding an identity after having the previous one destroyed -- about holding onto whatever and whoever you can in the face of adversity.

The last comparison I made was to H.P. Lovecraft, which does require a bit of explaining. Some of it has to do with spoilers to specific plot points (though perhaps even mentioning that such a plot point exists is a spoiler in and of itself), but the one connection I can draw without those is on the topic of dreams:

I love dreams as a writing device. I love how slightly disparate from reality they are, which means the author gets to do just about whatever they want with them. Of course Mae doesn’t have dreams where she’s naked during a test she didn’t study for; the first dream sequence, for example, is her wailing on anything and everything she can find with a pipe. But as the dreams go on, they slowly become even more disconnected from reality.

H.P. Lovecraft often wrote about a dream world. The first of this “Dream Cycle,” a short story called Polaris, is about a man who constantly visits the same imaginary city, overshadowed by the titular star, until he believes his own life to be the dream. These two aren’t directly comparable -- while Mae doesn’t always have a firm grasp on reality, she’s pretty sure her dreams are still dreams -- but Night in the Woods still makes use of Lovecraft's uncaring universe and dreamlike worlds.

There’s a conversation near the end of the game between Mae and one of her friends named Angus. They’re both sitting at the top of a hill looking at the stars and talking about Angus’ upbringing (clichés are tools, kids), and near the end, Angus says, “I believe in a universe that doesn’t care and people that do.” Or again consider Pastor K, whose entire subplot revolves around continuing to try to do good, to try to do her job, even, despite constant doubts.

The tagline for Night in the Woods is “At the end of everything, hold onto anything,” and I think that is very apt. Whether literally or figuratively, the characters in Night in the Woods are having their worlds pulled apart at the seams, and it’s all they can do to try to stay together.

Like I said, it’s a huge time investment, but you really should play this game.

-F

Next time: A book about a film about a labyrinth in a house.