2024 So Predictable

For too many of us contemporary culture vultures, everything feels predictable.

Okay, for this culture vulture but let me speak for the group.

We long for something or someone to surprise us since at this point we usually can predict the outcome of an election, the top winners at any major awards show or whether a new person will bomb or crush in their film or TV debut with at least an 85% accuracy rate.

It’s not that we feel brilliant or above it all… most of the time.

It’s more that there is so much coverage and traditional wisdom around these events everywhere you turn that it’s hard not to be correct.

This is especially true when you’ve made wasting your time following these things your principal side gig because it makes you feel in control of… something.

That is why I’m particularly unhappy to report that after frittering away my Saturday on watching the results of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, the SAG awards and the Saturday Night Live hosting debut of comedian Shane Gillis (Note: He of the well-documented racist and homophobic jokes, imitations and remarks) not a f-ng thing out of the ordinary happened.

-Trump beat Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina by a whopping 20%.

-The Screen Actors Guild awarded Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) top film actor and actress [Note: Turned out it didn’t matter how much WE all wanted an upset by Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Emma Stone (Poor Things)]; and the top honor for best motion picture cast to Oppenheimer to literally NO prognosticator’s surprise.

-Shane Gillis turned out to be as good of a fit for Saturday Night Live as The Chair would be as a guest on one of his infamous podcasts where he does imitations of Asian people, makes Jew jokes and manages to stay timely with snide remarks about the trans community.

At the end of the day, it’s all a bit tiresome.

Meaning, if the world is going to continue to devolve on such sour notes and drag pop culture down along with it, the least it can be is a little unpredictable.

Perhaps the problem is that the last time the majority of us were truly surprised by a political contest, an awards show or the virgin performance of an entertainer in any field was with the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

We all remember that feeling, right? Even those who hoped for that outcome were surprised.

(Note: Yes, Michael Moore, I know YOU knew and I’m still a fan but please, stop SAYING it).

Look, it’s easy to underestimate or overestimate the political the power of Aspiring Orange Hitler, but it didn’t take a genius to imagine he might emerge with a decisive victory this weekend in a state where six of ten voters identify as White Evangelical Christians.

What’s harder to figure is how some of them might not fall away given the 91 criminal charges against him, including the rape of one woman and the bribing of another who just happens to be an adult film star… that he had his lawyer pay to stay silent… about the adultery he committed with her… several times.

You’d think my meter would be broken by now

It also begs the question of thinking that surprise might be coming for him considering his opponent was a popular, two-term former governor of the very state they were running in.

Until you consider that opponent is a WOMAN. And a non-white one at that.

Shame on any one of you, or us, for believing the inside skinny that at the very least this would narrow his margin of victory.

Or that anything could except the literal reappearance of the son of God himself. (Note: But, well, you do know that a subset of said evangelicals do believe He was anointed by God to become POTUS again, right?)

Speaking of God, or goddesses, this brings us back to the SAG Awards and one of the few divine moments in all of those competitive events on Saturday – the acceptance speech by Barbra Streisand for SAG’s Life Achievement Award.

Right, the Chair is gay, AND Jewish, AND from the New York boroughs so OF COURSE he loves Barbra.

But that aside – see for yourself if you don’t find her musings on why she became an actor, and her love of the movies and the people who make them, especially honest, disarming and, well, a bit unpredictable given all the buildup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TPfQvu2KB8

This is to take nothing away from Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us), who provided the other small surprise of the ceremony when he went onstage to pick up his award for best actor in a TV drama series and admitted he was a little drunk and could get drunk because he thought he’d never win.

Yeah, many predicted one of the Succession guys would but I actually had an inkling PP might get the nod because… well… he never wins, he is THAT good and he is the kind of actor who can admit he drank too much but still manage to be charming and semi-coherent..

Not to mention – the just-a-tad too open, but not unwelcomely open, white shirt.

Alas, on Saturday Night Live a somewhat uncomfortable Shane Gillis made his entrance onstage wearing a loose-fitting plain black T-shirt and seemed to do everything he could to make amends by not making amends.

Admitting as he began his monologue, I shouldn’t be here, he then performed a somewhat flat, rather undistinguished ten minutes affirming SNL’s decision more than four years ago to fire him from the cast before he even filmed his first episode. This was due to the treasure trove of free-wheeling online remarks and bits targeting all sorts of minority and majority groups found after his hire that any bro fest across the country might discuss, but only in the privacy of their own, um, bar. (Note: Sadly, times and tastes in the podcasting world have changed since then, and not necessarily in a good way).

What we discovered in Gillis’ SNL appearance this weekend, is what most of us from any of the above targeted groups could have predicted. In the unforgiving spotlight of network TV, his humor level was revealed to be practically nil because it’s not particularly funny, or clever, or timely to begin with, especially when you take it out of the kind of bars where members of groups like us are not welcomed in the first place.

Jokes about the handicapped, the Black community and the gay community are couched by Gillis confessing he has family members in the first two groups, presumably meaning that anything he says about them is now okay. Then, by admitting that he himself was once gay for my Mom as a boy until the first time I whacked off, at which point I then began to wonder, when is that bitch gonna leave the house, he seems to grant himself permission to speak about the third.

So okay, here’s the thing. Portraying yourself as a little gay boy onstage by making shy little gay bows and sways is the kind of very predictable, unamusing stuff that one expects from the guy. Ditto the jokes about Down’s Syndrome just because his sister has a child born with the condition, or the ethnic ones preceding it since she had adopted Black daughters…

There really was only surprise.

Why he, in particular, was brought back to host in a time when we all desperately need to get past our differences and laugh at ourselves. Also, just how utterly predictable and inadequate so much of what is being offered up to us in the public square has become in election year 2024.

Barbra Streisand – “The Way We Were”

02.18.24

by notesfromachair

The Dreaded Third Act

I decided this week that we have not reached the third act of Donald Trump but, rather, America’s third act with or without…HIM. After all, it’s ultimately all of US who are the main character in this tawdry story and whose fates hang in the balance. We’ve got the most at stake and we’re the downtrodden potential hero any reasonable audience will be rooting for.

So….I decided to consult an expert.

Screen and television writer-producer Tony McNamara (Poor Things, The Great) recently wrote a piece for the L.A. Times where he likened the writer’s experience of writing a screenplay, especially its third act, to the three-act structure journey we usually send our main character (Note: They used to call them heroes in the old days, but Donald has forever ruined that) on in our movies.

And since McNamara used his experience writing the crazy, bold and currently Oscar-nominated adapted screenplay for Poor Things, a film that under most circumstances would never get made, much less released, by a major Hollywood studio (Note: Nor certainly in a country ruled by an aspiring dictator) as a metaphor, I figured what he had to say was noteworthy.

Here’s how he sees it:

The first act is the writers’ setup and then acceptance and commitment to take on the daunting task of telling – and actually agreeing to write – the story.

In McNamara’s case this was particularly daunting since Poor Things was based on a Scottish novel and he had never adapted a screenplay from a book, much less one set in Victorian London, that was both “a gothic comedy fantasy and a philosophical satire about shame” centered on a woman (Bella Baxter) who is “reanimated to life when her own baby’s brain is put into her head.”

This may explain why she is always looking surprised

Nevertheless, we screenwriters tend to be nothing else if not game, much in the way many of we Americans used to be in our not-so-distant pasts. (Note: See the 1960s and/or 1970s for examples).

The second act, according to McNamara, is the actual writing process – meaning facing all the obstacles, challenges and conflicts set up along the way for our characters during the process of writing them, and solving them cleverly, dramatically and even with some outrageous humor.

No need to go into details of what he had to do with his screenplay here, except to say that, like most history, Bella’s narrative in the novel was told, and thus controlled, by the men in her life. It was their version of her story with them, taking place in their world.

So the decision was made that the movie “story” would instead focus on Bella’s journey of growth and discovery, as well as the failure of traditional society (e.g. men) to control her. It took the whole project in a new and exciting direction, moving McNamara quickly through much of the scenes he had planned up to that familiar moment in almost every movie, and in many a writers’ nightmare, when a hero/heroine/society’s dream turns to crap and they, and their writer, are faced with –

The dreaded third act.

That point where the writer, and the movie, must pick up their main character (Note: Or even country, if it aspires to be heroic) out of the gutter, figure out a believable solution to the problem at hand, and then come up with a plan of action which will lead to a solution that will resolve the story in a true, believable and somewhat satisfying (though not necessarily happy for everyone) way worthy of said character, its people, and the audience (Note: Or citizenry) living and/or viewing it.

What this meant for the third act of Poor Things can be viewed onscreen (Note: No Spoilers here!) and through the accolades and mostly positive attention it has received from filmgoers and critics since its debut at the Venice Film Festival in the fall of 2023.

But know that it wasn’t easy getting there.

McNamara recalls that at that structural point in his and his film’s journey he was panicked, convinced everything he had planned would happen could now never work, and found himself unable to come up with any solutions.

At All.

Nothing. Nada.

Except sheer panic.

Eventually, and after much thought about, well, A LOT of things, this prompted him to send an email to the director with the words:

It’s too hard. We tried. Let’s never speak of this again.

And a promise to return all the money he was paid to face, what seemed at the time, an impossible task – yet one that with more time, thought and renewed focus would turn out to be anything but.

Most of the writers I know, myself included, have either lived or lives in fear of the moment McNamara experienced as his third act loomed. Of course, It doesn’t always happen in that spot.

For me it’s usually later on, midway through the second draft, where I suddenly begin to hyperventilate, what have I done?, out loud to myself as I slowly begin to realize the whole thing is falling apart.

For others it happens at the beginning, when they have to start, or have started, to their dissatisfaction. Still others have their moment near or at the conclusion, sure every bit of it will not work and that it will mark a real ending for them personally, one they had never anticipated and certainly never intended.

Often it takes the form of a voice that says:

There is NO recovery from this for me. The end is near and there is nothing to be done about it but pack it in, submit to the looming defeat that is about to come and hide in shame until it passes. Maybe you try to live on, but likely you won’t, certainly not in the way that you have been.

Well, I can’t help but feel that many voters in America are in a similar panic mode as they face the current end of act two low point of the Trump Era and contemplate his very well-publicized, gasping grab at a victorious third act…For Himself.

So we need to ask ourselves this:

Whose game are we playing? His? Or ours? Whose narrative is this? Who is the star of this movie – US, or Him? (Note: Ironically, when asked about films he likes he rejects anything contemporary and often cites Sunset Boulevard (A former star who lives in the past and is going stark raving mad) or Citizen Kane (A bitter mogul whose life ends with him moaning for a toy that gave him one single fleeting moment of childhood happiness he was doomed to never experience again in his adult life).

Hey, I like them too. But think about it.

Also, think about this.

There are many other tough, smart Black women willing to follow in NY Attorney General Letitia James’ and Atlanta DA Fani Willis’ footsteps into the white hot national spotlight of scrutiny in order to slay the MAGA dragon and save the country, and in turn, democracy.

But they can’t do it alone. Nor should they have to.

The least the rest of us can do is stop whining about Trump and wringing our hands over Joe Biden’s age and start publicly opposing the MAGA agenda at every single chance we get – verbally, financially and at the ballot box.

We need to write our own Third Act before the Orange Menace does it for us and determines our Final Solution.

Poor Things dancing scene

notes from a chair

Monthly Archives: February 2024

2024 So Predictable

The Dreaded Third Act