Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
My friend Mark usually writes horror/suspense stories. I could never write shit like that, but he does it really well. When he sends me short stories, they remind me of Night Shift-era Stephen King (and if you know King’s work, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for him in terms of quality short stories); when he sends me screenplays, they remind me of a slightly-less-schlocky Brian De Palma. The only exception to this is when he sends me comedies. He’s a really funny guy, but somehow it just doesn’t end up on the page. It’s like what happens when I try to write suspense.
Maybe it’s just a different method to the madness or something. It’s a comedy, so he’s trying to be funny, as opposed to his suspense/horror stuff, almost all of which is thoroughly entertaining and funny without feeling so…derivative. Because, to me, it looks like he just has his set of favorite comedies and is content to imitate them.
The first one sent me was a Clerks knockoff that, at least, tries to define itself by taking place in a totally different workplace environment. Unfortunately, it’s the exact same conflict (20-somethings struggling to cope with their directionless lives and learning something about themselves over the course of one crazy day; he even includes an equally unnecessary “main character gets shot” ending) and the same basic “more obscenities and pop-culture references = more funny” formula that has made Kevin Smith rich.
The second one is Office Space with a lot of tired political satire instead of sharp corporate satire. He grew up as a liberal in a rural, conservative area, and in many cases his writing seems to work out the issues he has with the ignorance and foolishness that causes the agro-poor to support the men who made them poor. It’s a fair point, but there’s always a Michael Moore-esque “preaching to the choir” mentality about it; no ignorant farmboys would go to see this movie. Only yuppie liberals who spend their weekends at the “arts cinema” would seek it out, and they’d laugh knowingly and wonder why these rednecks don’t adjust their attitudes.
When he works in a medium (gory horror) that his chosen demographic might actually watch, and the satire is a little more subtle, it’s much more effective.
So it surprised me when he sent me the first few chapters in a novel he’s started work on. I figured it’d be a long-form horror novel that I could really sink my teeth into.
It was not.
In fact, in many ways it reminded me of Juno, which is a fate worse than death. I can understand it, though; he cited Juno as one of his favorite movies of last year, and I can see Diablo Cody’s awful, blunt satire appealing to him. That’s the main problem: in the five chapters he sent, every single person is a cardboard cartoon character. The big TEEN PREGNANT-style “tackling taboo issues” portion involves a suicide-bombing at a high school, but there’s nothing close to fully realized characters and 3D shading on anybody.
On the one hand, I can see it not mattering; one of the things I like to do is portray these grossly over-the-top caricatures, then slowly ladle on the shading until they go from hilarious to tragic. So I only have 25 pages, most of which consists solely of character introductions. We learn of their ridiculousness and, one hopes, will soon learn harder truths about them.
The thing that bugs me is that he told me specifically that he was inspired by the style of my novel, Cedar Point, which he read throughout the process and gave me dynamite feedback to help with the rewrite. And I can see it, but I don’t like what I see.
In character and plot (what little there is so far), I see the repugnant stylings of Ms. Cody, but in terms of sentence-by-sentence joke-building, I see…a poor-man’s me. It’s like looking in a horrible funhouse mirror, but it makes me wonder: is this a distorted picture of what my writing looks like, or am I really bad? Is he a poor-man’s me, or has he done a spot-on job of aping my poor-man’s Raymond Chandler-cum-Woody Allen style?
It’s making me question everything: was I hard on his comedies in the past because they remind me of myself? I don’t dare ask questions that compare myself to Diablo Cody, because much as I want to say something like, “Maybe my unnatural hate of Juno comes from a secret belief that Cody’s manipulation of the system to produce an offbeat, Midwestern brand of comedy to the mainstream has ruined my chances to do the same thing,” really, at the end of the day, the movie just fucking sucks. The offbeat, Midwestern brand of comedy doesn’t involve quite so much rhyming.
I don’t know what else to say. On one hand, I’m flattered that he thinks enough of me to try to imitate my style; on the other, I can’t be objective enough about my style to know whether his imitation is so accurate I should be flattered, or so grotesque I should distance myself from him. I’ve never had to deal with something like this before. I want to be proud, but I’m mostly just embarrassed.
Posted by Stan on July 18, 2008 9:08 AM | Permalink | Creative Works!, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It
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