storytelling
The psychiatrist approached the mess without proper respect for the mess, Garp thought. The psychiatrist’s object was to clear the head; it was Garp’s opinion that this was usually accomplished (when it was accomplished) by throwing away all the messy things. That is the simplest way to clean up, Garp knew. The trick is to use the mess - to make the messy things work for you.
That passage is from my favourite chapter of my favourite book: Chapter Nine, ‘The Eternal Husband’, of The World According to Garp by John Irving. It is a book about a writer. Most books about writers don’t work; this one does. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you do.
So many of my revelations come when I’m desperate for new TV. I avoided watching Grey’s Anatomy for, what is it now, almost five years. It sounded like Ally McBeal with doctors, and I was never interested. I have now watched two episodes and haven’t been dissuaded of my original assumption, but I’ll keep watching because it’s summer and there’s fuckall else on. I’m an optimist.
I watched the second episode on my Sunday break between school and writing - I needed something to help me switch gears in my head. It made me think about story. When you’re sitting on your hands wondering if your novel will ever sell - or after the general quality of your present and future works - a lot of things inspire you to think about story in a melancholy way. This second episode of Grey’s made me think of Garp, and what he might think of the ‘mess’ of the story arc and how it was ‘cleaned up’.
The premise of Grey’s Anatomy is a bunch of rather gorgeous young doctors working in a hospital whose only complications are allegorical. This episode I watched today begins with the main character, Meredith Grey, talking about the importance of boundaries - personal, professional, and social. It ends with her saying that boundaries ‘don’t keep other people out; they just fence you in’, after which observation she takes her turtlenecked, leather-handbagged gorgeous self off to the parking lot to hang with her other doctor friends.
I have no objection to this, but it strikes me that it is writing, and not psychiatry, that attempts to ‘clean up’. Psychiatry seems at least to recognize that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. In writing, there is simply no room for broken eggs.
This episode had one object in mind: show interns learning the ropes and growing up and getting to know each other. How distracting would it be if one of them were ugly, right, or overweight, because then you’d wonder how an ugly person came to be a doctor, and that would have to be a part of the story. Fat people can be secondary characters, not principals. This is of course true of most television, most film; and the best that novelists can do with such a thorny issue is avoid physical description of their characters at all.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could have an ugly main character without making an issue of it? I know I’m not the first person to say that. (’It’s like,’ Liz Lemon says, ‘those Dove commercials never even happened.’)
When I first queried The Fidelity Trial, I did it with the mess left in. I was lucky enough to find an agent who was willing to work with me to make my story a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted ugliness, illiteracy, and people peeing their pants. (How likely is it, really, that you could keep vigil in a closet for a night without having to go to the bathroom? Come on.) But that didn’t make a story. If the lady pees her pants (or whichever garment you prefer) during her all-night vigil, you forget what the vigil’s about.
People say that the best art reflects life; I don’t know if that’s true. I think we’ve enough life around us to reflect life, and that art should do something else, or at least come at it from a different angle - even holding up a mirror to something makes it look different, makes its nose more crooked or straight.
When asked about his portrayal of Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers says, ‘The reality is that viewers don’t want to see an obese, red-haired guy on a TV series.’ He makes it seem as though he’s made a discomfiting artistic decision, there, and defends it by going on to say that ‘nobody can tell me that how I played Henry isn’t right.’ So here we have Henry at a different angle - and who’s to say it’s the wrong one? I’m a Tudor historian, and I can’t say that. We all know that he was well on his way to fattitude by 1537, but his being fat, in a way, is like my maid of honour peeing herself - it’s become a distraction, and an excuse not to look at what else he was.
It’s another way of rearranging the mess, right: not using it, as per Garp’s instructions, but clearing a space on the floor so that you can move and look around. The Tudors eliminates Fat Henry from the mix, and that’s problematic, because with it they also eliminate Henry’s own character arc: you can’t show someone hardening, which is what Henry did, if he just goes from gorgeous bastard move to gorgeous bastard move. But it’s also interesting and clever: it makes you more willing to look at him, to understand him as a human being, to trust him again and again, because you want to trust Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, no matter how many asshole stunts he pulls.
But The Tudors is airbrushed fare: you’re not meant to see anything unpleasant beyond throats being slit, so it’s dangerous to read too much into it. The show was never meant to be about reality, which makes its occasional genuine insights all the more alarming.
I think what bugs me about Grey’s is that it has no such cartoonish claim: it wants to be gritty, to be real, to be frightening and cute and funny and poignant - in short, to run the gamut. And yes, it might be distracting if Ellen Pompeo had a huge boil on her nose or one tit bigger than the other. But what I do find distracting is the idea that, after a shift of however many dozens of hours, she doesn’t look dirty; her face is free of mascara flakes (not possible); her pants don’t have that accordion of wrinkles from sitting down that all pants have except when they’re fresh out of the wash.
So too with shows like 30 Rock, for all that I love my 30 Rock. Liz Lemon is meant to be a rough caricature of Tina Fey 15 years ago, the old Tina Fey who was a full 35 pounds heavier than she is now. So the show leaves the food in, and leaves us watching in torment while new skinny Tina Fey eats her way through another week in the life and never so much as feels bloated. There are a lot of explanations for this, and I’ve made them all - a bag of cheezies a day isn’t going to make you fat if that’s all you eat, for example. (This is not a diet. This is not a lesson.) But still, it stops you, every now and again - you love it at first, because she likes just what you like! And then a few episodes in, you look at her, and you look at you, and you think that Liz Lemon must have some secret she’s keeping from you. And maybe she does! Maybe season four will be all about Liz Lemon’s Tapeworm. Who knows.
I think my point is that the viewing and reading public can probably be trusted with seeing a bit more of the mess without becoming distracted. The problem with The Fidelity Trial, in its incarnation circa 2008, was that the story wasn’t complete - not that there were too many elements, but that there were vital elements missing. When you know what your story is - when you have your beginning, middle, and end - then you can start pouring on the mascara-flake detail that gives it dimension and makes it real.
And if you fail to do that, well, you’ll have a monstrously successful primetime television show that some unwashed bint in Cambridge will waste an hour complaining about.
(I can’t believe I wanted to post about the art of the mess and ended up with such a telling microcosm of the Achilles heel of all of my first drafts. Try clearing room on your virtual floor to sort this shit out.)
Till next time, &c &c.
