During my time with this novel, I experienced a few mornings where I woke up with a feeling of purposelessness1, like there was no point in the work that I do day in, day out. While I’m not saying that I’m immune to negative feelings, darkness is not my default mode, and I’m usually able to motivate myself just fine. That is to say, I do believe that the despondent mood of The Bell Jar rubbed off on me.
I mean this as a compliment to Plath’s vivid description of her protagonist’s spiral into depression. It’s a harrowing journey which is accentuated by the fact that it sneaks up on you. When Esther’s story begins, the narrative reads like a fish-out-of-water story, of a suburban girl who’s slightly overwhelmed by the big city, but who has enough wit and intelligence to float above and see through the bullshit. Over time, it becomes more and more clear that her detachment is a sign of her struggle to belong in the world. Mental illness can’t always be explained, and the book doesn’t try to do it: it simply lets us experience it through Esther’s eyes.
Footnotes
This is a moody film, about a pair of friends who bond over a fantasy-action TV show as teenagers. As they enter adulthood, it appears that one of them has disappeared into the world of the show, leaving the other one “stranded” in a miserable suburban life. When I say “moody,” I refer to the creative lighting choices and surreal editing (👍), but also to the acting style, which is monotonous and mumbly throughout (👎).
I understand that the film is an allegory for the trans experience, and I respect it for that. The friend who lives out their life in the “real world” is filled with pain and regret because they didn’t get to exist as their true self in the world of the beloved TV show. However, if I didn’t know ahead of time what the metaphor stood for, I don’t think I would have made the connection on my own, and the film would have really dragged for me.
What I could relate to was being obsessed with certain shows in my youth. I’m reminded of the time that a friend called me for homework tips during Seinfeld’s Thursday night timeslot, and I got mad and yelled at him to get off the phone. Or the time when YTV aired a mid-season cliffhanger of Dragon Ball Z (right before Goku’s first Super Saiyan transformation), and I got so impatient for the next block of episodes that I used the new-fangled technology of the Internet to write a pleading letter to the TV station.
My point is, I know what it’s like to be passionate about a piece of entertainment. But in the film, the performances are so (intentionally) dreary that the emotion doesn’t come through. I was left feeling a bit empty by the film, even if I admired what it was trying to say.
I was reminded of this movie when news broke about Scarlett Johansson’s dispute with OpenAI for using her vocal likeness without permission.
I recall being underwhelmed by my first viewing when it first came out. Back then, I thought it was a simply a riff on the rom-com formula, which swaps one of the couple with an artificial intelligence1. In hindsight, I understand my lukewarm reaction as coming from my lack of relationship experience. At the time, any romance that I saw on screen, even between human characters, felt artificial to me because they were only characters, and I couldn’t see myself in them. The fact that one of the characters was a computer program didn’t make it any more artificial.
But now that I’m happily married, movies like Her work much better for me, because of course there’s a difference between connecting with a human and conversing with your phone. Of course the protagonist would be attracted to a personality that molded itself to his needs, after losing a marriage to someone he loved but didn’t love him back.
Footnotes
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In the film’s dialogue, they use the term “OS”—e.g. “My girlfriend is an OS”—which isn’t exactly technically correct 🤓 ↩
When I started reading this book, I was surprised by its breezy tone. I had expected it to be more serious, given the grandiose subtitle and premise (not to mention the hyperbolic blurbs on the back cover): the author would tell the stories of ordinary people during a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and these tales would add up to show us the universal truths of human experience. But the way Gene Weingarten tells it in the introduction, the whole project was in fact kind of a fun lark that he and his editor came up with over drinks at the bar.
I was enjoying the writing for the first few chapters, especially the one about a heart transplant, a procedure that was still somewhat experimental at the time. I learned a lot about medical history, and the events leading up to the operation are told in a compelling, suspenseful way.
After a while, though, the writing style started to get on my nerves. There’s a kind of clickbait-y rhythm that gets repetitive, in my opinion. A lot of it reads like: “This is Joe. Joe’s just a regular guy. But little did he know that his life was about to change.” Or: “Sue was just going about her regular day, but there was something dark hidden behind her routine.” It feels like there’s a mini-cliffhanger on every other page, and while it does hook the reader, I feel like the technique is overused here.
By the end of the book, I was questioning the ethics of the whole thing. Many of the chapters have some element of true crime. For instance, the heart in the aforementioned transplant actually came from a young man who had committed a murder-suicide, and the book spends a lot of time on how he was a tortured romantic with a dark soul. Isn’t this what’s wrong with the news media, that they romanticize and sensationalize and exploit the traumatic experiences of ordinary people?
There are also a few topics that are emblematic of the Eighties—for example, the AIDS pandemic, racial tensions in the US, and life as a closeted transgendered person—which I feel deserve a more nuanced treatment than a single chapter in this book. In fact, Weingarten’s punchy style makes his superficial coverage of these topics feel insensitive and almost offensive.
As a whole, I didn’t feel like the people in these stories were creating a snapshot of humanity; rather, it felt like they were exhibits to be gawked at.
I was quite impressed with this short story by Tomas Hachard that appears in the Summer Reading issue of The Walrus. As the title indicates, it takes place in the future, and features a young girl named Clarissa who dives into an online historical archive, where she finds a journal of a girl living in our present day.
The future society that Clarissa lives in is rebuilding after a climate catastrophe called “the Deluge,” and the journal gives her a glimpse of life before the disaster: the people of that time didn’t know what would soon befall them, and they existed in a mentality split between fear and denial. Sound familiar?
But all is not well in Clarissa’s future either; as the story progresses, she starts to see the same signs of impending doom that she’s reading in the journal, and the two narratives kind of blend together in a way that I started to be confused about which was which, in a good way.
This story really triggered my climate anxiety, especially as I was reading it at around the same time as some horrendous flooding in Toronto.
The cyclical nature of the story is really effective in creating an ambivalent sense of the future. On the one hand, humanity has persisted, after the Deluge, and life seems to be relatively normal. But on the other hand, they don’t seem to have learned enough lessons from the disaster to prevent it from happening again.
This show caught my attention because I have fond memories of a road trip with my wife, during which we listened to an audiobook of Recursion, by the same author, Blake Crouch. The common thread between these two stories, and what I suppose is the strength of the author, is a mind-bending, twisty sci-fi plot, featuring a character who is motivated by a specific kind of romantic love, that of loyal, long-term partners. It’s this latter emotional element that makes me a fan of his work.1
It’s an unfortunate consequence of marketing that one usually knows a bit about the premise of a show before watching it. As a result, the first few episodes of Dark Matter feel a little slow, because we already know the basic explanation for what’s going on. I think it would be cool to dive in completely fresh.
Having said that, I need to reveal some spoilers ahead to discuss what I enjoyed about the show.
During the middle episodes, as the protagonist Jason explores the many worlds of the multiverse, the question comes up: knowing that there are infinite variations of every person, where each one made different decisions in their lives, what defines the core of a person? By the end, as those infinite variations of Jason appear in the “home” world, the show answers the question in a fascinating, tragic way: he’s defined by his desire to be with his family, and the one copy that we’re rooting for just happens to have been the one that we’ve been following. They all have equal right to their happy ending, but they won’t be able to get it.
Footnotes
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I’m reminded a bit of Robert J. Sawyer, who I read a lot when I was younger. ↩
