Tag Archives: conversation

Conversation: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not necessarily an allusion, though without that literary device, the form itself would not exist. Technically, it’s satire. Sort of. It’s really fan fiction.

The best part about a zombie story is the zombies and the survival or lack thereof. The best part about an eighteenth century novel about manners is the exquisite agony of the nuance of every breath, every bat of a eyelid.

If you choose to launch yourself down the rabbit hole of novel genre mash-up, I would caution you to be an absolute expert on each genre expectation first. For example, in Pride and Prejudice times, there is a mannerly way to press the big red nuclear button: the cut direct. If the cut direct is activated, the person to whom the maneuver has been deployed against no longer exists. This person will not be acknowledged in any way, shape, or form. It’s like a one-person ostracization in a public room and believe me, if anyone has mean-girl shunned you in public, everybody and their second cousin knows it.

So if you were to attempt a genre mash-up involving a comedy of manners and oh, zombies, for example, the understanding of those manners should probably be on par with the fan who buys grocery sacks of romance novels weekly or people Just Might Talk. For more about Pride and Prejudice and its intertwining themes with zombies, check out this amazing haiku review at Dear Author.

Conversation: Girl With All The Gifts

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Below are three levels of conversation around Girl With All the Gifts. The first layer is the one I usually interact with – the subject matter/details of the work itself. That’s not a bad thing, just something I’ve noticed about myself and my consumption of media.

I’ve loved Mike Carey since my brief satanic stint in college. Not to say I went on one, I just got really fascinated by the media that came out of the devil worshiping scare in the eighties. From John Constantine to the Felix Castor novels to Lucifer, I consumed whatever that guy put out. And then he sort of fell off the radar. Or maybe I did.

Girl With All the Gifts was completely different from that whole comic book and gore aesthetic and I nearly passed it right by. Then I looked at the author name and thought, oh, what if… So I gave it a shot. It was good. It was the kind of book you read and then you go on to the next book you’ll read. So a movie came out with the same name and like any good nerd, I reread the book and went to watch the film.

Sometimes we understand a work immediately. The high notes are easy to grasp. Here we have a special child with a special destiny but – oooh, twist! – her special destiny is not what you think. Seriously, go read it.

Most of the PR I can remember about the film talked about how they made the main protagonist black, which was a great example of when changing the race of the protagonist adds to a work and makes it richer. Go read this review on Black Girl Nerd for a nuanced look at how changing the race of the protagonist added depth and a discussion of agency as the work translated between book and film.

When the movie came out, I was doubly excited to see that pivotal end scene, the one that took me two readings to understand. The one that, on the second reading, changed the way I saw the world and the shape of it.

When I saw the movie, I saw they also changed the race of a side character.

MASSIVE SPOILER

But you already read the book, so you know what I’m going to say next. Right?

In the book, we have a special child with a special destiny and a special teacher who, from the child’s perspective, is the best teacher in the whole world. She’s the most amazing adult the child has ever met, which is a very understandable perspective given the cruelty the kid faces every day of her life from absolutely everybody else. She protects her favorite teacher above all else, so that when the whole world ends, her favorite teacher is still right by her side. Because you read the book, you know the students are all zombies, the special child finds a way to turn all the remaining human survivors into zombies, and now the special students will be the leaders of the new world. And the basis of their new world is what they are taught by the best teacher from the old world.

In the book, the most pivotal scene to me, was of the students sitting at the feet of a black woman, ready for their first lesson in the world from the their favorite teacher. Through the film she watches the last vestiges of the world she knows be destroyed by her beloved special student and finally she stands before the children, the only grown-up found worthy. The last of humanity in her known world – and while it is a delightful horror movie ending, there was another layer. She prepares to shape the new world from her perspective, breaking a long history of white perspective for the first time in English speaking countries at least. Remember, the author was British, this writer is American, and most of my formally taught history was written by, or at the very least, filtered through the white, male perspective. That was never more apparent than when Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The last scene of the book, the promise of reverberation, was the kind of scene that nestled down into my brain and crept over me weeks and months later, a quiet what if –

In the movie the teacher was a white woman.

That’s the first layer of the conversation.

Here’s another layer. There is only one black character with a major speaking role (or major narrative role) in either the movie or the book*. Why do we need to accept only one? Why couldn’t we have had both in the movie? Or the book? Why, when the “major POC character” role was filled, were we trapped in a world where we still have to count non-white ethnicities? Why are there so few I can count them?

And there is yet another layer. The book was authored by a white English man. In the chain of creation, there will also be his agent, editor, and publisher. The director of the movie was a white Scottish man. In the chain of creation, there will also be the casting team, producers, etc.

Representation matters, at all levels.

*There are a couple of minor roles played by black actors who exist to get eaten, basically. To be really fair, everyone who isn’t the special teacher or the students are there to die. It is a zombie flick after all.

Conversation: Cabin In the Woods

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As previously surmised on this very site, there are probably tens of thousands of alphabet-type books in existence. There are probably a double dozen published each year in the USA. Some past favorites of mine include a Where’s Waldo type hunt in the illustrations, a jazz rhythm primer, and teaching about the natural history of Hawaii.

When a market is saturated with what has been said, eventually you can say something about what has been said before and add to the conversation of what exactly the market has tolerated, what it means, what it says about us as a culture, a society, and the human experience as it is understood in this moment.

Cabin In the Woods put both of these concepts together and gave audiences a commentary on killing teenagers in a movie, stereotype roles, rituals both arcane and corporate, and the most hilarious exchange (”Am I on speakerphone?”) that illuminated the humanity behind the people who typically hold NPC signifier positions. It was not the final word.

Time marches on, seasons change, tastes change, social mores change, more derivative works are added to the total library of human creation; there is always more to be said.

Cabin In the Woods is a horror movie, first and last. Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom (referenced elsewhere on this blog) is an alphabet book. Both take the structure of expectation of their genre, tick the required boxes, and then hang something new on the skeleton of what is needed to succeed.

Horror movies need horror, and they need to say something horrible or reveal a horribleness about us or at least say something in a horrifying way. Alphabet books need to be about the alphabet or at least include the letters in the currently accepted order or acknowledge that there is an order they will proceed to ignore for the good reasons they go on to state in the work itself.

Alphabet book? Needs alphabet.

Horror movie? Needs horror.

Conversation: The Dollhouse (Ibsen)

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When I was in tenth grade, my English teacher kept us in line by saying she previously worked for the FBI*. She came from another time, which I did not appreciate until decades later when I read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.

Tenth grade was a strange year. It was the year I found my voice** and started a writing club. It was the year I was less angry at things and people. It was the year I began to realize that other people were not set out of time, but that I had not lived enough to understand the conversations going on around me.

Mrs. O had a thing about Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse”. She would talk about how important it was – a piece of fiction where a woman chose – chose! – a life outside of her husband and children. That the protagonist had gone from her father to her husband’s household, and molded her personality to fit. We sophomores stared and waited, not wondering, just waiting for the punchline. In the modern age, we were children of divorce and working parents, mothers with multiple degrees who kept household and career alike.

But Mrs. O waxed on about a woman choosing herself, even if she didn’t know that self yet. As a child, I empathized more with the children who would be left with the stern personality of the father, and as an adult, my heart still aches for them. They would not see a pathway before them to strive for their own freedom, only that a fellow prisoner escaped and did not choose to take them, too.

Decades later, reading about a playwright and critic who fell in love with the then contemporary play, “The Dollhouse”, I finally understood what it was trying to say. In a time before the necessity of two parent working households, in the time before choice, this play mattered. To say there was a choice before that choice was even a thing to be imagined!

The worst part about listening to marketing your work is when people talk about trends vs. Evergreens. When they say trend, they mean you are saying something about the conversation or state of the world today. Evergreens say something about the human experience as it has been and will be. Everyone wants to write an evergreen. For one thing, they sell beyond the pop of the moment. Ibsen wrote an evergreen that was also a trend. While what he had to say was new in his time, in our lifetimes there are still people to which the thought of choosing your own path is a new concept. Maybe not when they are tenth graders in desks in high school, perhaps later in life when they have found themselves at ends. Just as I hope to write something that can be reread as new in different stages of life, I wonder what treasured stories, that I have always accepted, will tell me something new now that I am somebody else.

*One of my classmates nagged Mrs. O until she confessed that she had been a secretary for the FBI. My classmate uttered the immortal words, “Oh, that’s boring.” And we all listened to the sound of one grade falling.

**I’m pretty sure I had a voice before tenth grade, but as my brother put it, “We didn’t think you could talk.” Thanks.

Conversation: Black Panther

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There’s a scene in Black Panther that made me laugh at the layers upon layers of conversation. Winston Duke, who should be in more things, plays M’Baku (this is not a spoiler. Everyone and their grandmother has seen this flick), a leader of the Jabari tribe and antagonist of the main character. He rules his people with care and sees a risk in the prince becoming king – you saw the movie. You know what happens next.


Duke creates a multi-layered character that says as much about his character’s role in the film as it does about his society – which we don’t see a lot of, actually. We get T’Challa and some little bits of the richly complex world of Wakanda, but we’re there for two hours of action and tragedy and triumph. In one scene, Martin Freeman as generic white guy, Everett Ross, keeps talking. Tale as old as time. But he stands before the leader of an entire tribe and interrupts much higher ranking women who already have leave to speak based on the societal hierarchy. That, and, he’s a guest. My man. Rude.


In an interview*, Duke said he invented the barking sound (also called a grunting sound) to make the point that Freeman’s character had no power in the throne room. He had no power in Wakanda. Had anyone else played Ross, like your basic Tom Cruise, or maybe a dozen interchangeable American white guys, it would still be a funny scene. But pick a white guy from a country with royalty and a famously complex cultural level of understanding of acceptable behavior, and it’s hilarious.


Just a shout out to world building: Pretend your character comes from a country with strict class delineations. Now pretend your character is running away with a character from a higher class. Do they speak like a peer? What rules will you have to break to make that okay?

*Empire Film Podcast #356, referenced by Webbed Media posted on March 26, 2019, “Winston Duke Improvised M’Baku Barking In Black Panther”.

Conversation: Bridge of Birds

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My all-time favorite trilogy took some time to obtain. The first was published in the year of my birth and went on the win the World Fantasy Award. It was the author’s first novel. Years later, it would take me three countries and four months to locate all three volumes for a complete set.


Some years after that, I found another complete set at a bookstore two blocks from my then-apartment. Go figure.


Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart has a long and storied history which I highly recommend perusing, but it is not the subject of my post today. The idea of having a conversation within a novel is not new. Normally, we call this dialog. Alternately, think of this conversation as demonstrating two versions of a topic you which to display in order to convey either the superiority of your point or to analyze many facets of the topic you are thinking about as you create.


There are a number of ways to discuss your topic in-depth. Plot and subplot are the most usual manner where the plot is the main point you wish to make and the subplot is the counterpoint played out in a smaller fashion or unsuccessfully so that your main point is the stronger contender in the reader’s mind. Think of a story where something is done twice in some scale. Odysseus is attacked by a cyclops and his men are ruthlessly murdered, after he and his men invaded the cyclops’s home. Some time later, Odysseus returns home and slaughters the strange men within. In the case of this story, the subject highlighted is perhaps when is a crime a crime, or when is an acceptable when performed by some person but not another?


In Bridge of Birds, the conversation revolves around love. Every storyline, every recurring minor character has something to say about love, though not always with words. Some are saying something about familial love, some about romantic love, some about faith which is another kind of love. What love can co-exist? What love is superior? Is any love more than another?


I would caution the writer not to assume that the conversation they put on the page is the only one the reader hears or sees. Additionally, art is accidental. Craft is purposeful. If someone sees something and you didn’t mean to put it there, a few tweaks that make it look purposeful might make you look real artistic. That someone could be a beta reader, or just your future self. Future me is one of the smartest people I know.

Conversation: Allusion

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Allusion is a vocabulary word that we learn somewhere around high school or secondary school, and that is where it stays – for most of us. The allusion is a callback to a previous work of literature such as the nursery rhymes in WH Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” or any reference to Greek mythologies in modern works, or a shoutout to Beyonce in that bingeable TV series you’ve been mainlining on Netflix. It’s a brief mention that operates a little like an in-joke, to the educated folk who know what’s going on, and a little like shorthand to illuminate a point to the reader without going into detail or grave expense of the story.


All works exist within the greater conversation of concepts that we are constantly having with one another even if we are speaking different languages or living in different millenia. Think of the conversation of zombies. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies exists in part because we are already familiar with two pieces: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and zombies.


Your allusion choice may anchor a piece in time or attitude, or may say something about the understanding of the characters and thus say something about their class, education, means of understanding the world and events happening around them.


Consider your allusions carefully. They will always say more about you, and the time in which you exist, the media you consume, and your understanding of the world and the events going on around you, than you think you are saying about your characters.


Consider also that a work without allusions risks feeling anchorless, unmoored from the conversation taking place in that space today.