Bildungsroman Blitz: May 2021
The May media log is where we ponder questions like: How do you make a film feel like a book? Can you combine a classic coming of age story with an artsy cult horror story? And is Bo Burnham okay?
Mea culpa at the top: you might be noticing that you are reading the May newsletter in June. As someone who prides herself on her fanatical work ethic, trust me: no one is more disappointed in me than I am.
But I do have someone to blame: Bo Burnham, and his new Netflix special Inside, which dropped on May 30. Sure, I could have saved my thoughts on it for the June newsletter, but rarely do I have a chance to be so zeitgeisty. So, I had to scrap some of what I had before, trim down a rambling intro, and now here we are.
A short list of things I loved this month that I didn’t have time to take a deeper dive into:
Sour by Olivia Rodrigo (album, 2021, available wherever you get your music. I’m thinking of dedicating a future issue solely to songwriting as storytelling, so we may get back to this)
Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress (play, 1969, watched via online reading in 2021. Read this wonderful essay by playwright Gethsemane Herron-Coward!)
You Are Good, formerly known as Why Are Dads (podcast, 2020-present, available wherever you get your podcasts)
Bo Burnham: Inside (comedy/performance special, 2021)
I call myself a “classic millennial multi-hyphenate” in my Twitter bio. Bo Burnham, who is 16 months older than me, is an even more multi-hyphenate millennial. Prior to his latest Netflix special, he could accurately be called a comedian-musician-actor-director-writer. In Bo Burnham: Inside, we can add cinematographer, film editor, and frankly, pandemic documentarian, to the list.
Burnham is a performer who began his career in the early days of YouTube, and he continues to be more attuned to how social media and the internet works and affects people than most. In his debut film Eighth Grade, he zoomed in on how Instagram and Snapchat can magnify adolescent fears and compound loneliness. In Inside, he tackles Instagram again, plus a whole lot more: Twitch streaming as a metaphor for depersonalization, YouTube React videos as hypocritical cringe, and a magnum opus about the internet that is the best Disney villain song written in the past ten years.
You see, it was always the plan to put the world in your hand. Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
I think something many of us have realized about the pandemic is that, while it did create new challenges and new trauma (yay!), it was perhaps more revealing of our pre-existing struggles. White supremacy, healthcare tied to our employment, the general lack of safety nets and empathy in a capitalist society…these have all existed, but with nowhere to go and nothing to do, many of us were forced to really sit with it for the first time (an inherently privileged position, I and Bo Burnham recognize).
Burnham, whose whole career began with the internet and whose fanbase is irreversibly shaped by it, clearly spent the pandemic reflecting on how the medium in which he derives his success is harmful. And yet it is through the internet that he was able to share this special. What are we to make of that? Do we want to have a little bit of Bo Burnham on Netflix all of the time at the expense of other people having a little bit of alt-right recruitment on Reddit all of the time? It’s a Faustian bargain I’m going to be thinking a lot about, and I’m sure Bo is too.
Mudbound (film, 2017)
Directed by Dee Rees and co-written by Rees and Virgil Williams, Mudbound is an adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel of the same name. Jordan’s novel focused primarily on the McAllan family, the new White owners of a cotton farm in Mississippi in the 1940s. Jamie McAllan returns home from World War II and strikes up a dangerous friendship with Ronsel Jackson, a fellow soldier and the Black son of sharecroppers who work the McAllan’s land. In the adaptation process, both Williams and Rees brought the Jackson family forward so that the story was equally focused on both the McAllans and the Jacksons. One narrative device used to achieve this was a rotating voiceover, switching between six characters.
Adapting novels into films is common but difficult to pull off. The strengths of the written word and the moving image are different. One of the biggest things that a film adaptation will lose from a novel is a character’s inner monologue and thoughts. A voiceover is the easiest way to slot this back in, but voiceovers are often criticized for messing with a film’s pacing or atmosphere. But Mudbound proves that a well-crafted voiceover can be integral to a film’s atmosphere, and its success as a narrative.
One thing that the characters in Mudbound share is an inability to express what they are really thinking, or the societal danger that comes from expressing what they are really thinking. Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan) is a whip smart woman who is stuck catering to the whims of her less wise husband Henry (Jason Clarke); the Jacksons, father Hap (Rob Morgan) and especially mother Florence (Mary J. Blige), carry the burden of knowing their livelihood depends on the complete sublimation of their own desires and opinions as they serve the McAllans; Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) is traumatized by the war he served in and can only connect with Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), which puts Ronsel in danger; Ronsel, for his part, cannot adjust back to life in the Jim Crow South, since he experienced more freedom and respect overseas during the war. The use of voiceover, rather than a crutch to tell the audience what its characters are thinking, is important for the audience to understand what the characters want to say versus what they are allowed by society to say.
Bonus points to Dee Rees here, since many of the voiceovers were her own creation and felt like genuine prose from a novel rather than someone’s imitation of prose from a novel. Watch an interview with her that I included in the Link Roundup for more about her adaptation process and just smart things about her filmmaking in general. In conclusion: if you are like me and enjoy the rare but satisfying feeling of a movie that makes you feel like you are reading a book (see also: Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk), please give this a watch. I, like many others, slept on this film when it came out, but if you have access to a Netflix account, it’s right there waiting for you!
Link Roundup (spoilers for the movie)
“'Mudbound' Director Dee Rees on Her Adaptation Process & Changing the Ending”, video interview
“Why Virgil Williams Changed the Ending to ‘Mudbound’”, Andrew Karpan interviewing Virgil Williams for FilmSchoolRejects
“‘Mudbound’ Is a Complicated, Worthy Film About Life in the Post-WWII South”, K. Austin Collins writing for The Ringer
“TIFF17: MUDBOUND”, Aren Bergstrom writing for 3 brothers film
The Other Lamb (film, 2019)
Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska and written by Catherine S. McMullen, The Other Lamb is a folk horror film that pings a lot of my previously mentioned true crime interests: cults, religious terror, the inherent danger of husbands. And it’s also a coming-of-age story (my brand!), albeit a pretty fucked up and non-cathartic one.
While browsing reviews of The Other Lamb, something I noticed coming up again and again was the sense that the film was withholding information from the audience, leaving its characters as surface-level types while concentrating more on its showcase of striking and disturbing imagery. The film certainly is sparse in its backstory and employs montages and collages of images that are not necessarily linear, but I also think that the details we do receive are a) the most important to our main character Selah (Raffey Cassidy)’s story and b) are perfectly coherent.
This may be because I have been reading Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat Strikes Back and am seeing story structure everywhere, but The Other Lamb hits a lot of the story beats that Snyder identifies as key to a successful screenplay. I’m going to focus on a few concepts in particular: the protagonist’s want vs. need, a false victory, and Three Acts as Three Worlds. Spoilers to follow.
Let’s start with the Acts/Worlds. The theory here is that in a screenplay, you are introduced to one world in Act One, a second world in Act Two, and a combination of the two worlds in Act Three. In The Other Lamb, the first world is the world of the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman)’s cult, where Selah is one of several Daughters, who belong to several Wives, all of whom serve the Shepherd. The second world is the harsh terrain that the cult suddenly must traverse in Act Two, when local law enforcement force them off their lodging in the middle of the woods. During this trek, Selah gets her first period and is forced to bunk with an unnamed and shunned Wife (Denise Gough) since Selah is now “unclean”. This access to the shunned Wife’s alternative narrative about the Shepherd, combined with the Shepherd’s increased cruelty on the journey, begins to change how Selah sees her world. The third world is perhaps not as clearly defined, but it is a world without the Shepherd but with the community that he created.
The protagonist’s want and the false victory where this want is seemingly fulfilled is key to The Other Lamb’s horror and tension. Selah is a true believer at the start and wants the Shepherd to fill her with his grace, which is exactly as sexual as it sounds. She exhibits jealousy of other Wives who are around her age since Wives have more status in the cult. Remember: the Shepherd is Selah’s father. As Selah begins to question the Shepherd and his teachings, the prospect of becoming his Wife inches closer and closer. When the Shepherd does finally rape Selah and tells her she is going to become a Wife, Selah has technically fulfilled her original want—but at this point in the story, she absolutely does not want it, and now she knows why.
Link Roundup (spoilers for the movie)
“‘The Other Lamb’: An Interview with Screenwriter Catherine S. McMullen”, Catie Moyer writing for HorrorGeekLife
“The Other Lamb”, Monica Castillo writing for RogerEbert.com
“‘The Other Lamb’ Review: Flock Therapy”, Jeannette Catsoulis writing for The New York Times