All Eyes on Me

There was this funny thing my mother used to do-- I suppose this joke or reference she'd make sometimes --when she thought somebody was being overdramatic about a situation. It's a little tricky to describe, but basically she'd hold up her hand, palm facing front with fingers spread, and shake it, while saying in a kind of wobbly voice, "Woe!" It was meant to indicate that the situation wasn't that big a deal, and she felt somebody was being a little silly being so miffed about it. While the meaning of the gesture is clear without a ton of explanation, I somehow also got an impression of where the gesture came from, so to speak, and I can't recall where I got it from.

I have always been under the impression that the bit was meant to represent a court jester holding a little head-on-a-stick version of himself-- Google tells me this is called a marotte --acting as a Greek chorus to whatever the king said. So, like, if the king is lamenting some terrible thing, the jester backs him up by shaking the head-on-a-stick and crying "Woe!" In my mom's impression, the wiggling raised hand is meant to represent the jingling marotte, and the "Woe!" becomes sarcastic.

Thing is, I don't know where this understanding of the gesture came from. I can't remember if Mom ever explained to me that that was what she was doing, or if I actually saw it somewhere and put two and two together. Wish I could ask her. Has anybody ever seen something like this? Or did I complete hallucinate this explanation and graft it onto that weird little thing my mom did?

I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but it came into my head.

I saw The Substance this past weekend, and I am sorry to report I didn’t really like it. Not that it was bad, exactly, but I don’t think it was effective. At least, if it was trying to tell the story I was expecting. SPOILERS AHEAD.

From the marketing, I was going in for a story about a woman whose fear of losing her value as she aged leading her to destroy everything of ANY value about herself. I was preparing myself for this film to, for lack of a better term, trigger the hell out of me, or at least give me big feelings. This is, in theory, a horror movie for me, exploring ideas that I VERY SPECIFICALLY find scary. My fear of aging and becoming ugly is well-documented, after all. But it really didn’t work for me, because I don’t feel like it captured any of what that fear feels like.

To begin with, it is not a subtle film. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but I will say I did not care for it. Anytime a character was remembering something that just happened to them, the moment would be superimposed right on top of things, like it didn’t expect you to make the connection. The misogynist male executive was depicted as loud, gross, and over the top as possible— from having him rant in so many words about how old women sucked, to yucky closeups of him chomping on shrimp. And that’s to say nothing of how over the top the voyeurism of the camera was on Margaret Qualley’s body. I was kind of hoping to see a depiction of pervasive, insidious anti-aging bias is woven into the world, particularly for women, particularly for women in the limelight. It just seemed a bit too easy to have a very yucky man straight-up tell Demi Moore that fifty is too old— especially when she’s so beautiful that she’s able to pass for younger than fifty when she’s actually sixty-two.

Again, I get that this extremity and exaggeration was a deliberate stylistic choice. But to my sensibility, when you create a fantasy of a real experience, you are trying to use the fantastical elements to express true ideas in a manner that makes them stand out even more strongly than they do in life. So it wasn’t that I was expecting this lurid sci fi horror extravaganza to realistically depict the mundane indignities of getting older. But I felt like the representations should be clearly alluding to emotions and experiences that were recognizable enough to evoke horror. But I only saw one moment, maybe one and a half moments, that felt like genuine expression of the struggle of aging.

The first and realest was when her growing insecurity over her appearance in comparison to Sue while getting ready for her date led her to second-guess herself so badly, she not only ruined her appearance, she collapsed entirely. As someone who has wiped off fifty percent of all lipstick she’s ever applied in her entire life, because of staring in the mirror and genuinely being unable to tell if it looks good or clownish— as someone who has wondered if I ought to just get that tiny little poke of flesh at the corners of my jaw “taken care of” before anybody but me starts to notice— I felt that.

The only other one that came close, and to me used the extreme fantastical exaggeration effectively for once, was when her trollishly twisted self stood beside the portrait of herself in her glory days. The comparison— of having been perfect once, having known what it was like to have been beautiful, but intensely aware of how fleeting it is —shivered me, because it evoked a terror that runs genuinely deep. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept my figure up to this point, but my face has visibly aged, losing some roundness around the jawline and loosening up just a tiny bit at the jowls. Even as I exult over the fact that I can still wear a bikini I bought when I was nineteen, the changing shape of my face reminds me that it’s all just a matter of time before it all goes away. No amount of beauty you once had protects you from what’s to come.

It also didn’t manage to capitalize on its compelling premise. The idea was that you use a medical procedure to make a younger hotter self, and trade off weeks of getting to go out and live life. When the selves cannot split time and resources equally and become jealous of each other, they destroy one another. But I think they just didn’t build it out right. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll would maintain consciousness when he became Hyde; he had the same memories and awareness, just like everything about himself and his personality were different. He felt Hyde’s experiences, he knew what Hyde did, because— as was ultimately the point of the book —Hyde WAS him. In The Substance, main self Elisabeth and alternate self Sue shared no consciousness at all, and under most circumstances weren’t even able to meet each other. It wasn’t really like having an alternate self; it was more like having a child you had no relationship with, and no ability to develop one.

It really made it hard for me to see what the advantage of the process was— you miss out on half of your life, you don’t get to personally enjoy any of the benefits of being the young hot self, and you don’t even have any ability to develop love or affection for the other self to make you enjoy their success vicariously. The company that makes the Substance has to continually remind Elisabeth and Sue that they are one, but… they don’t feel that way, to us or to them, because they’re really not. The process really doesn’t facilitate anything that would make them feel that they are.

It made me wonder if maybe it was more a story about jealousy, or living vicariously through your child. But that lack of relationship between them left a lot of even that premise on the table.

I also didn’t quite understand the purpose of the extremely sexualizing camera angles constantly used on Sue. At first, I thought they were trying to establish the excitement of suddenly having an amazing body, and delighting in checking it out. That made sense to me. (Although for the record, if Margaret Qualley is hotter than Demi Moore, it’s only by the tiniest bit, which is saying something since Qualley is 29 and Moore is 62.) But they persisted with the objectifying closeups on her until almost the end of the movie. We get several sequences of her dancing shot like porn movies, with a particular focus on her ass. As I said, this is not a subtle movie, but after a while I didn’t get what it was trying to say by carrying it out so persistently. We knew by that point that she was hot, so… what? I thought eventually they might use the extreme objectification to make her body seem grosser and grosser, the way human physicality can become when you chop it up visually and get too close on the details, but by the time they were ready to do that, they actually started making her body itself fall apart. So it honestly started to feel like fan service to me, which seemed very out of place in a movie like this. If anybody has an idea of what they think it was trying to accomplish, I’d love to hear it.

There was also one element that cracked me up— the intense masculine voice that narrated the commercial for the Substance also was the one who answered the phone anytime Elisabeth and Sue called the company to complain. Poor guy, he probably auditioned for an acting gig and got stuck with a customer service job!

Fighting to catch up because I’m so behind. But this is from Mrs. Hawking 8 again, some time after #25 - “Tweenies” when Beatrice is undercover. The logic as to how the scene fits into the larger structure is still a bit off, but again, good raw material. A little something to raise the stakes of the case.



( Day #27 - Lord Love a Duck )

Argh, I've fallen behind again. Bernie and I went home this past weekend to help my dad around the house, packing up stuff, moving furniture, since he's planning on eventually downsizing. We ended up moving the beautiful library shelves and books up to our place yesterday, which while welcome, was not initially part of the plan! I'm happy since I wanted them for ages, but it meant I didn't have time to write my daily scenes.

So here's my effort to catch back up. This scene immediately follows #22 - "Just Powder" and is an effort to include the idea that since Mrs. Hawking accepted the physical end of her detective career in In the Bones, she's fallen into a bit of a depression. She's not been doing much work, and spends a lot of time hiding feeling sorry for herself. The events of this play will make her confront that and decide how she wants to move forward. I may need to change the specifics of the previous part of the scene to make that totally compatible with this, but I really like exploring this direction.

Also, I get to use the fabulous Victorian phrase "got the morbs".


Photo by Mark Edwards

( Day #24 - “Got the Morbs” )

It's late in the day, but it's still the 20th, so I'm technically still caught up!

This is another little bit of a Captain America fan fiction scene that I wrote as a drama, but could definitely use as the first draft of a prose fic. That technique often helps me get started. It's just a silly little moment, coming out of my personal preference for clean shaven Cap as opposed to bearded, which influences why I write him that way in my by-now pretty extensive post-Endgame series Forever Captain. I guess it's an attempt to find an in-character justification for it. There isn't a lot to this, but it could make for a cute little one shot that I could stick in the continuity of their early married years.

I guess there's also a tiny nod to that awful look Chris sported when he was performing Lobby Hero too.



( Day #20 - Bearded )

So this could turn into something fun, but right now it doesn’t have enough direction. It would be fun to do another Justin Hawking story in the vein of Gentlemen Never Tell, but right now I only have bits and pieces of ideas. I like the idea that each time we tell a Justin story, it comes in the form of a semi-tall tale Justin is recounting to a loved one, so today’s scene is noodling around with a frame for such a story. In this case, I chose Reggie, Nathaniel and Clara’s son and Justin’s nephew, who like his sister Beatrice is finally old enough to be depicted onstage. This scene doesn’t really know what it’s doing yet— what the story is about, what it’s trying to say, what the set up is— but I like the idea of Justin as Fun But Maybe a Bad Influence Uncle in Reggie’s life.



( Day #17 - Let Me Tell You )

I am looking forward to interactions between Mary and Beatrice in Mrs. Hawking part 8. There’s a lot of material in the idea that Mary used to be Mrs. Hawking’s apprentice, and Beatrice’s interest in moving into that role. Mary can be a mentor as well, and her ambivalence about what it means to learn from and work with Mrs. Hawking adds some interesting tension. What would she say to another bright young girl who seems to be on the verge on her life moving in the same direction as Mary’s, with all the good and the bad that implies? With the added complication of the class differences, which can never be ignored in this story.

This scene piece uses the word “scrub” too much, but I like it and all its connotations. I feel like you hear the hard work baked right into it in a way that “clean” or “wash” doesn’t necessarily. That vibe is very necessary to this moment.


Photos by Jacob LaRocca

( Day #12 - Scrubbing )

I saw the Deadpool and Wolverine movie last weekend and enjoyed it very much, as I tend to with Marvel movies— they just make me happy in an uncomplicated way. It also reminded me that it’s been a really long time since I wrote a new Text from Avengers Tower, so I better get on that.

The fun of this one was working to capture Deadpool’s, shall we say, particular speaking idiom. Besides his obvious colorful vulgarity, his sentences use vivid vocabulary, can be surprisingly complex in structure, and are jam-packed with imagery. One of the things I love to do in fan fiction is capture the spirit of the source material, particularly coming up with original dialogue that still sounds believably in the characters’ voices. Texts from Avengers Tower has the additional dimension of figuring out how those same characters would text, such that their voices come through filtered by the way they would use the technology.

I think I did an okay job of that here. 😆 Minor spoilers for the Deadpool and Wolverine movie.



( Day #2 - Hundred-Way )

I’ve always been fascinated with the story around My Immortal. But I've never actually read it.

My Immortal is, if you don’t know, an infamously terrible Harry Potter fanfic written on Fanfiction.Net in the late aughts, full of gratuitous goth-ification of the characters and setting, a nonsensical plot, and rife with spelling errors. It became extremely well-known because of a certain so-bad-it’s-good charm, particularly because the ostensible writer, who identified herself as a goth girl called Tara Gillesbie, demonstrated so much personality in the poorly spelled, melodramatic author’s notes.

There’s been a lot of debate whether or not it was serious, as on one hand its badness was so beyond the pale and seemed to be an exaggerated parody of the tropes of bad fanfic, but on the other, fanfic can get pretty ridiculous in its badness. There’s also the shockingly strange fact that nobody has ever managed to identify who the author actually was— whether Tara Gillespie is a real person, or whether she was an invention of the actual writer, we still don’t know. Because of the fic’s fame, several people have tried to falsely claim authorship for Internet clout, but the actual person to this day has never come forward, nor been plausibly identified.

I would not call myself a My Immortal fan. I have actually never read the whole thing; I actually tend to not enjoy things on the “so bad it’s good” level, so I’ve never really wanted to. But I am fascinated by the circumstances around it, all the questions and controversies. The fact that we don’t know who wrote it, in this day of everyone on the Internet, blows my mind. Hell, people are still divided as to whether it was sincerely written, or deliberately desired to stir up outrage because of its level of fan ficcy badness. I love reading analyses of it, documenting the drama around it and examining the prose for clues as to the intent. If I find a Tumblr post or a Youtube video about it, I’m all over it, trying to form an opinion.

Still, I’ve avoided it all this time because I expect it to be a real drag; things that are so terrible don’t amuse me the way they do some people. I also tend to feel secondhand embarrassment strongly, so I expect to cringe to the point of pain. But I think it’s time to finally read it. I spend all day telling my students that they can’t create a useful opinion in the absence of facts. And I do believe there is value in absorbing things as cultural touch points.

But ugh. I might cringe my face right off.

I did it. I finished 31 Plays in 31 Days 2023, the scene I’ve been struggling with all month, and the first draft of Mrs. Hawking part 7. And here it is.

It doesn’t completely work in sequence with all the other pieces drafted for version 1. But that’s okay; complete is the first step on the path to finalized. And I think I managed to work out some stuff that was delaying me, which will inform the edit when I go in for version 2. I’m really happy and relieved, as it was delayed as hell and I was really struggling. But there’s some interesting stuff in here that can be polished into something real.

This piece goes after 2022’s #14 - “Another Young Girl” and before 2023’s #11 - “Hurt.” Also, I changed the name of a minor character mentioned in here from Faith Tanner to Maggie Tanner. I needed to use the name Faith elsewhere.

And that’s 31P31D 2023, scene 2.4, and Hawking part 7.


Photo by Dan Fox

( Day #31 - Marginalia )