Gayleen Froese

Where Stephen Moffat screws himself over is in being brilliant at everything.

I’ll explain. For those who don’t know, Moffat is the guy behind the new BBC Sherlock series. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Now would be good. What’s that? You don’t have time to drop everything for the better part of a day and watch all six episodes? Normally I’d understand, but this is Sherlock. Get your priorities in order.

Oh, okay. Watch it later. Just know that it’s set in the modern day so that the rest of this post makes sense.

Now, I liked Deadwood a lot. Great show. Remarkable, really. But I’d have no trouble pointing out what I considered exceptional about it: the writing. That’s not to take anything away from the performances or any other aspect of the show. It was high quality across the board. The acting was top-notch and the production was great in general. Still, the writing is the astonishing part. So distinctive.

And poetry, of course, by design. It wasn’t in iambic pentameter throughout, but thought was clearly given to how each line would scan. The writing was so noteworthy that you might not even notice how good some of the performances were. You’d notice Ian McShane, maybe, because he’s amazing but also his role was flashy. You might not notice how good Tim Olyphant was because his role was more subdued. To be honest, I didn’t realize how good he was until I saw him in Justified and realized that he disappears into his characters.

In a show where the cast is remarkable and the writing is good but not… well, not Deadwood… you might notice the performances more. Big Love comes to mind here.

The “problem” with Sherlock is that it’s so good across the board that nothing in particular stands out. It’s not perfect and some episodes are better than others, but generally the show surrounds you with so much excellence that you don’t even notice that, for example, Stephen Moffat has sorted the entire problem of how to work texts and email into a script.

Everyone else has done it awkwardly. Characters read texts aloud to themselves. There’s a shot of a phone or computer screen, held forever because some people read slowly. It doesn’t feel organic, and it’s boring. It damages the pacing of a show. For these reasons, people don’t email and text on television at the rate they do in life.

Moffat’s solution has the hallmark of elegance–it’s so simple and sensible that you think someone must have done it before. Thought it’s likely something like his solution has shown up in the past, I’ve never seen it used consistently and with such confidence–as if it were merely natural and not impressive at all.

Moffat puts text on the screen, the way you’d expect to see subtitles or the Fringe location markers, or a network bug. Of course! Why not? We’re used to seeing words there. Texts are generally short and easy to read. Not only does this work beautifully and allow the characters in Sherlock to text whenever a real person might, but it gives you a pathway into the characters’ inner worlds without the need for exposition or voice over. What I mean by that is, a text is something you read silently and register privately, within your own head. When you glance at a text in the middle of a business meeting, the meeting is the shared experience and the text is part of your private thoughts.

In a television program, there are four ways you’ll typically experience a character’s private thoughts rather than a shared experience. One is to show, with great deliberation, that a character is looking at something specific. All it tells you is that the character is interested in that thing, but it is something relatively private. Two is the voice over. Three is to turn the private thoughts into a shared experience through dialogue. “New shoes,” says Leo of Twin Peaks, and then spits. So you know what’s on his mind. The fourth is the fake out that you’ll seen a thousand times–more if you watched Scrubs. Something happens–usually something strange or even impossible–and you think it’s real for a moment before it’s revealed that this was just something imagined by the protagonist. What? The new head of obstetrics has Godzilla’s head and breathes fire? Ah, no… it seems JD just thinks she’s scary.

Moffat, being the clever bastard he is, made a natural leap from putting texts and emails on the screen. He recognized that they are essentially thoughts and, so, there was no reason he couldn’t treat actual thoughts the same way. Why have a long exposition of what Sherlock notices about the person he’s eyeballing when you can use your words? Moffat doesn’t overuse this to the point where the show becomes Pop-Up Video, but he applies it where it’s useful. Sherlock looks John Watson up and down and words appear near clues. Dark circles under John’s eyes tell of a late night, for example. He looks at Irene Adler and sees nothing, because she is unreadable to him. Sure, you could have Sherlock say all that, but it would be longer and less elegant and not in character for that man in that scene. Is he about to tell Adler that he can’t read her? Hardly. That’ll be his little secret, and ours.

In the second series, we’re allowed all the way in to see Sherlock’s thought processes, with images and words playing off each other, being drawn by associations down blind alleys, becoming more focused as the correct path becomes clearer. We see not only Sherlock’s work toward the solution, but the things he casts aside as useless. Again, it’s quick and elegant. It’s fascinating. And why not do it that way, in a visual medium? It goes to show that we’re still learning to unlock everything video can do.

You’d think everyone would be talking about how Stephen Moffat has come along, so late in television’s career, to teach us that there are still new things to be done. But he’s so good at everything that it seems to be just another part of the show.

Current Bedside Reading: Alan Moore, From Hell

Commentary: I’m planning a trip to London and I wanted to read it again before going.

My iPad is Singing: “I bet you got the tarantism–and how!”

There is a young man I know who says exactly what is on his mind. He is not, I think, neurotypical. I don’t mean that he lacks tact or that he is blunt. I mean that, as near as I can tell, he says everything he thinks as he thinks it.

I know some things about his life, because of this. I know some of his interests. He has some friends he speaks of often and I know things about them.

Sometimes, this young man repeats things he has been told. For example, he might say to you, “Don’t visit Mary in the nursing home.” I believe he says this sort of thing because someone has said it to him. Would he, in that situation, be warning you not to do something, in order to keep you from getting in trouble? It’s possible. It’s also possible that he has these warnings going through his head and so he speaks them, and it’s as simple as that.

What’s interesting is that I don’t know which it is. There are a lot of things I don’t know about him and there are some things I can never know. I’ll probably never know why he says the things he says in the way he says them, though I can, and do, make guesses. I can certainly never know what it’s like to be him.

The idea of whether we would know one another better if we all said what was on our minds has been explored in art of varying quality for a long time. It’s also showing up in science media these days because fMRI technology has detected and displaed the difference between lies and truth in the brain. Under specific and limited circumstances, it has even allowed us to see something you could call thought–the activation of parts of the brain in response to a question.

It’s often said that honest communication helps people to know and understand one another better. I think that’s situational but it can be true. The question is, does fully honest, fully open–entirely unfettered, in fact–communication create even better understanding?

Listening to this young man talk isn’t the whole of the answer, I know, but it suggests to me that the answer is no. I believe I hear what he thinks as he thinks it when he’s speaking to me. I don’t believe I understand him. Sure, I understand what he’s saying. The words make sense. But how he feels, or why he says what he says… why he repeats certain things so many times… I couldn’t tell you. I could ask him and sometimes I’m tempted, but I doubt he knows, either.

Maybe, in order to get something from open communication, the people communicating have to have what psychologists call “insight.” They need to not only know what they’re thinking, but who they are and why they see the world the way they do–including the ways in which their perceptions might be distorted. No one has perfect understanding of those things, but some understanding might be needed in order for someone to communicate their inner world effectively.

Coupled with that would be my old favourite, theory of mind, which helps people to guess what information another person might need to understand them, and supply it.

All of this assumes that understandable communication of one’s inner world requires context–that is, the communicator has to add to their thoughts some discription of the waters in which they swim–and, ultimately, intent. You have to intend to connect with someone and act on that intention with a certain level of skill. Just saying whatever comes to mind is not adequate to express what’s going on in your head.

As to how fully we can hope to understand one another through verbal expression, even with the intention to be clear and the skill to do so… that’s still unknown.

What do you think?

Current Bedside Reading: Tobin T. Buhk adn Stophen D. Chole, Skeletons in the Closet: Stories from the County Morgue

Commentary: As Strunk and White told us, apparently on a day when Mr. Buhk was attending an autopsy, there’s no need to dress up a good story in frippery. There are great stories in this book, laden with the sorts of things twelve-year-olds write in their diaries. Which is not to say Mr. Buhk talks about boys, and what a bitch Courtney is, but that he likes to talk about the warm fingers of the sun teasing awake the slumbering horseshit. It is tiresome.

My iPod is Singing: “This stolen feeling amplified through a busted speaker, blaring, blasting, amplified, distorted beyond reason…”

Did anyone else grow up with Childcraft encyclopedia? It was a set of themed educational books for children too young for World Book (who made Childcraft.) My set was from the late 1960s and I’ve never seen a set from later than the 1970s. I’m told they still make it, but I don’t see it around anymore.

It was brilliant. It has missteps, the way anything from over four decades ago might, and there are things I’m sure they do differently now, but it was still brilliant overall. I’ll write about it in detail in another post. For now, I just want to share something I often looked at with longing as a child:

I would look at that page and think how incredible it would be to have such a thing. I believed that, maybe, it could happen someday.

As I got older and personal computers entered the home and I learned the limitations of my (still wonderful) C64, I stopped believing in the answer machine. Sure, someday, but not for me. Not in my lifetime.

The next thing I knew, it was real.

What happened there? Did Childcraft have a contact at DARPA? Was that writer psychic, or brilliant, or lucky? Or, did a few of the many people who helped push the web forward read that article as a kid in the 1960s? Did it, on some level, shape their ideas about what the internet could and should be and, therefore, subconsciously direct what they tried to make it do?

I ask that question not because it’s answerable but because I think people should lay off Orwell and Huxley. I’m not going to say they get no respect, because that’s not true. But they do get both praised and criticised for something I don’t really think they did.

People often talk about 1984 and Brave New World as if they were attempts by their authors to predict the future. You’ll hear people say, “Orwell predicted this,” or “Orwell got that wrong.”

I don’t know that Orwell really meant to predict anything, exactly. I think he, and Huxley, were more interested in discussing the times they were living in, extrapoliting from that, warning people about where certain roads could lead… all of that, certainly, but that’s different from saying that you think the world of the future will have HDTV.

When a writer does seem to anticipate a technology (as people like to say Wells did with the fax machine, though something similar was in the works in the mid-1800s) there are two ways of looking at that. One is that the writer was clever or made a good guess. The other is that writers give us ideas. Would we have had flip phones if they hadn’t had flip communicators on Star Trek? Maybe–it’s a reasonable design. But maybe not. Certainly the communicators influenced mobile phones, overall. Once an idea has been put out there and enough people have seen it, it’s difficult to say whether a writer predicted that invention or inspired it.

That concept goes beyond technology to social development. Even if Orwell did intend to say, “this is how I think the world will look in 1984″, he wrote a book that has been read by countless people. We have a term, Orwellian, to quickly and easily identify certain kinds of lies or intrusion. We are sensitized to certain things. In other words–and this shouldn’t surprise any physicists–by closely observing society, Orwell has probably changed it. Huxley, too. Again, I don’t think their goal was to predict the future, but I also think that predicting the future in a public enough forum is a self-defeating activity. You predict, people hear, change happens.

Not complete change, obviously. There are “Orwellian” things that go on these days, despite our having an understanding of them and a vocabulary to discuss them. There are cameras everywhere, particularly in the U.K. But, without Orwell, who knows? Maybe they really would be in people’s homes (and not just the way that webcams are now.) Maybe you really would be forced, rather than enticed, to have the TV on at all times. Maybe TV would still be king, instead of something people don’t even seem surprised to hear me say I don’t own anymore (well, I do, but it’s a third monitor for my main computer and the shows I watch on it came from iTunes or Netflix.)

As for Childcraft, which really was trying to predict the future and did a remarkable job, I can never know what the influenced aside from my expectations about what things would be like when I grew up. But influencing people’s expectations can still bring a lot of change.

Current Bedside Reading: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Commentary: Because I am all about mysteries, I’ve tried a few times to read The Moonstone and was never able to make myself care enough to finish it. I’ve also tried a few times to watch the film, and fell asleep each time. So, it’s a relief that I actually find The Woman in White interesting. I’m still not wild about Collins’ style, but there are some interesting characters running around this book, and surprisingly different relationships from what you might expect people in a Victorian novel to have. Interesting fact: Collins asked to have “Author of the Woman in White” put on his gravestone, and so apparently shared my preference.

My iPod Is Singing: “They still think they’re the gods of antiquity.”

Feeling a little better, so I thought I’d try getting back to blogging. We’ll see how it goes.

Here’s a funny story about how you can mix two seemingly unconnected things and get them all tangled up into a roiling mass of tentacled evil. No, really, it’s a knee-slapper. You’ll love it.

We all know how public relations started out convincing women to give themselves cancer and generally treating the truth like a two-dollar whore. Public relations practitioners behaved so badly that they eventually had to stop telling people they were public relations practitioners and saying they were in “communications” instead.

You might think communications is just public relations under a new name. In some cases, you would be right to think that. In most cases, though, communications is practiced differently these days. What you’re taught in school and what most organizations actually practice, more or less, is transparency. Tell the truth. Share information. I’ve never seen this admitted in any PR–sorry, Communications–text, but I think the main inspiration for this change in technique wasn’t so much a sudden fit of ethics as the realization that the internet makes it difficult to keep secrets. Not impossible, but difficult. It’s simpler to tell the truth.

The idea behind telling the truth is, or was, that the organization refrain from doing things it would rather not find on the front page of a newspaper. This is what we were told to say to our bosses–if you don’t want the world to know you did something, don’t do it.

While we were saying this, Facebook slouched into town and all the people who’d been posting their lives to blogs found it much easier to tell everyone everything they were doing as they were doing it. It was so easy, they barely had to think about it. At first, there was a lot of hand-wringing about people posting things they’d be sorry about later, or posting that they were in Cancun for month and then coming home to find people had been robbing their home at leisure, but eventually living your life on the internet started to seem normal. Transparency, right?

Oh, but wait–wasn’t the idea of transparency supposed to be that, sure, there will be a ton of photos of you on the internet, but none will show you licking a toad to get high for the simple reason that you did not do that? Or, at least, not with a camera around?

Yes… but also no. When you say, “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want on the front page of the newspaper,” that’s really all you’re saying. Not, “Don’t do that.” Just, “If you’d be embarrassed to have people know you’d done that, don’t do that.” As more and more embarrassing things were posted and more and more people didn’t seem to die of embarrassment, and fewer and fewer people could even say that they didn’t have embarrassing stuff on the internet… having everyone know about your embarrassing life seemed less dire. It seemed normal.

So there are the two unconnected things:

1. Public relations stopped being about lying and started being about transparency.

2. Blogs, and later Facebook, dramatically changed what people felt embarrassed or worried to have others know about themselves.

Put those things into a sippy cup, give it a good shake, and what comes out is what I call the Scott Walker epiphany. Not Scott “Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” Walker, which would be a nice thing. Instead, Scott “You and Your Stupid Girlie Rights Can Suck My Hairy Root” Walker, Governor of Wisconsin.

Along with most people, I was introduced to Scott Walker by the media around the time he was threatening to eliminate collective bargaining for public employees. This was a popular move with some people and very unpopular with others–not all of them public employees. There was protesting. There was media coverage. To a lot of people, not just in Wisconsin but across the US and beyond, Walker looked like something of an asshole. A lot of politicians, in the past, would have backed down or softened their position if they thought they looked bad to so many people, even if they had a strong enough voting base that they could get reelected regardless. That’s what many people believed Scott Walker would do. He did not. That’s because Walker, or someone on his team, seems to have had an epiphany. If everyone knows everything about you, you’re supposed to tiptoe around and be careful not to make too many people angry. Buuuuuuuuut, you can do anything you want on Facebook and, in general, there are no repercussions. What happens if you take the Facebook approach to transparency and assume that, whatever you do, no matter who knows, it does not make any difference? What if what happens is nothing?

Walker did eliminate collective bargaining, which isn’t the same as eliminating unions except in as much as it takes away the only real power any union has to effect change. But that’s not all. He went on to repeal Wisconsin’s equal pay enforcement act and to pass a number of bills that further limit reproductive rights in his state. Did people complain? Why, yes, they did. Did he look like an ass on the national stage? Outside of, say, Utah and Arizona, yes. Did he care? Nope. This is a man who figures that his base can reelect him. He isn’t interested in anything anyone has to say about him. Think of him as a guy who has uploaded his entire set of photos from Cancun to his Facebook page. He does not care how he looks. He does not believe there are negative consequences connected with anyone’s opinion of him and, so far, he has been correct.

Time was, if you looked bad in public, you didn’t just look bad for the embarrassing thing you’d been caught doing. You looked bad because most people went out of their way not to look bad. Therefore, without knowing it consciously, people felt that (a) you must have done this bad thing a lot, or to an extreme, else the odds were you wouldn’t have been caught out, and (b) you must be careless or thoughtless or a full-on moral idiot, else you would have done a better job of hiding your shame.

I am not advocating a return to a time when pregnant teens had to be sent to group homes in the country to hide their shame. We’ve come a long way (baby) in reassessing what is and is not shameful and in being more honest and human with one another in public, and I think that has been mainly good.

I am not a big fan of shame, in general, and so it hurts me to say this, but… I think shame is necessary to a functional democracy. The Americans are very into “check and balances”, so I’ll put it this way–I think shame (or, at least, the fear of looking bad) was intended to act as a check on political and government behaviour. I think the concept that a free press is necessary to a democracy isn’t just about giving people the facts so that they can vote. I think that a free press is also supposed to be able to bring public disapproval to bear on people who have plenty of time left in office. In the past, that has sometimes been good (from my perspective) and sometimes bad. Regardless, it’s been the way things worked.

Politicians such as Scott “Tentacles” Walker have stepped outside of the system. I’m sure they’re proud of themselves for it and that their supporters are proud of them, too. They’ve realized that any politician with enough of a base to be reelected can do anything he or she likes. They have seen that things have changed and that they can safely shrug off the check of public disapproval. As a result, they have remarkable power. We can complain loudly and bitterly about Walker’s repeal of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act. Walker can still repeal it. The people who want to fight Scott Walker are accustomed to protests and bad press being effective tools. They’re still doing it. They must have noticed that Walker doesn’t care, so my guess is that they simply don’t know what else to do.

I don’t, either. The Scott Walkers on the political scene are viruses for which we have no immune response–any more than the women Edward Bernays talked into buying Virginia Slims had a defence against his new style of manipulation.

I sure as hell hope we figure something out, soon.

Current Bedside Reading: Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Commentary: What’s fascinating in this true crime book about an 1860 murder is that detectives, as a specialized part of the police force, were brand new. Mr Whicher was one of the first detectives of Scotland Yard. The book talks about the way they were popularly viewed (thanks, in great part, to Charles Dickens), how they fit in with the zeitgeist, and what it was like solving a crime when there was no forensics team and, if you needed to check for blood inside a pipe, you’d prevail upon the local plumber.

My iPod is Singing: “I love the sound of its condition.”

This is the lovely house that will be publishing The Dominion.

Updates as events warrant. Hope to be back to regular posting soon.

So, here I am depressed as all get-out and having trouble keeping to my weekly blog post schedule (obviously) and I thought, well, maybe I’ll recommend some books about depression that I found helpful. And then I realized I couldn’t really think of many, because most have some patronizing “I got in touch with my inner zirconite and my depression was CURED and everyone who takes medication is a DELUDED FOOL!” axe to grind.

Often, in these cases, the author’s depression=made some bad life choices, felt sad about life sucking, and couldn’t think of anything direct or productive to do about it. These are the people who say, “I’ve BEEN depressed, so I know you’ve just got to take up yoga and literally turn that frown upside down!”

Yeah, honey, you were not depressed. I’d bet my vitamin D drops on it. You were mildly sad about getting a shitty haircut and your overworked doctor said, “You’re sad? You must be depressed!” and put you on some SSRI, and you flushed it into our water system with smug indignation all over your pert little face, and then you took up yoga and your hair grew out and now you think it’s your business to tell people with a serious medical condition that they should shake their silly heads and live in the sunshine the way you do.

Oh, but where depression=losing an important round of biochemical sweepstakes and therefore struggling throughout life in all manner of ways that cannot remotely be described as “just feeling sad”… and having to take a subtle and shifting approach to managing this that involves all sorts of medical and lifestyle and intellectual and emotional remedies… I haven’t found much written about that.

The For Dummies books are okay, as they often are. I liked this one a lot when I was in university, though I’m nearly certain it’s outdated and I think it’s out of print. Otherwise… eh. Chevy Chase (yes, that’s what I said–Chevy Chase) is awesome on the topic, if you can catch him being interviewed about his depression.

Which is a long way of saying I have basically nothing to recommend. Except there was one book that, though unlikely to do anything for you and not specifically about depression, was illuminating for me. Maybe you’ll enjoy it, too.

It’s by a man named John Wylie and it’s called Diagnosing and Treating Mental Illness: A Guide for Physicians, Nurses, Patients and Their Families.

I am grateful to Mr. Wylie because he has been kind and insightful enough to staple the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence for me.

I’ll explain. Back in the Jacquard loom days of computing, the always-entertaining Freeverse Software released a program called Sim Stapler. It was a little stapler image that sat on your desktop. You could click it, if you liked, and imagine stapling things. The program’s instructions recommended using Sim Stapler to virtually staple the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, as it’s not possible for most of us to actually do this.

Of course! Staple them, put them in a file together and you only have to look in one place if you need them. It’s gloriously sensible. I love putting things into categories and storing them together. It gives me an illusory sense of mastery over chaos.

I feel the same way about illness. For example, if I have a headache and a stiff neck and a fever and you tell me I’ve got meningitis, I’ll be… not thrilled, because that’s a bad thing to have. But I’ll feel a certain satisfaction in having all of these issues explained by one disease.

Doctors like this sort of thing, too–they are encouraged to look for a single source of symptoms. Of course, there isn’t always a single source and looking too hard for one can cause you to misinterpret a straightforward sign of a second, coincidental illness. Or, in the words of John Hickam, “Patients can have as many diseases as they damned well please.”

Nonetheless, I like to bundle my symptoms–and my issues–whenever I can. Wylie has given me a new way to do this by explaining a buried link between the anxious kind of depression and Type A personalities.

According to him, it’s about feeling trapped.

This may not ring true for everyone, but it makes a ton of sense to me. I’m anxious about keeping my independence. The things that most horrify me are generally related to losing it, in a variety of ways. For the past four years, at least three nights a week, I’ve had nightmares in which I’ve had to go back to living in my parents’ house. I’m not exaggerating. That is how often I have these nightmares. Some weeks, it’s every night.

I’m also anxious about being trapped in conversations or situations in which I might be forced to share opinions or emotions I wanted to keep to myself or to reveal, oh, a messier house than I’d like to show to guests.

For example, say I’m angry at someone because she randomly showed up at a party wearing the same thing I was wearing. This is a totally fictional example and not anything I would ever be angry about. I find accidental clothing match-ups funny and interesting. But, say this happened and I was angry. Well, we feel what we feel and that’s just how it is. At the same time, I would firmly believe that she had done nothing wrong and that this should not become her problem. So, I’d probably leave the party early so I wouldn’t have to talk to her and reveal my anger by my facial expression or body language, and so that she wouldn’t notice I was avoiding her in particular. It would be very important to me that I not be trapped there.

Much though I understand the environmental value of car-pooling, I avoid it when possible so I can leave places without delay or negotiation.

I moved to Edmonton because it was a large enough city that, if I really hated a job, I knew I could quit and find something else. I went to a lot of trouble to buy a house so that I wouldn’t have to live under a lease or condo agreement that could change to a “no pets” agreement at any time, grandfathering in my current pets but forbidding future ones.

You could say a house is a trap, but I don’t see it that way because it’s under my control. I own that sucker. I can sell it if I want. I can stay there as long as I like (and can pay the mortgage.) My choice.

Right. I get that I do not like being trapped and that this causes me anxiety. So, Wylie picks up Sim Stapler and my anxious depression… and then he picks up my push to do more and more and more–write more, record more, have more experiences, learn more because we only get to live for about 80 years on average and that is no time at all. Go go go!

And Wylie says, here, time is the the trap. It’s the ultimate trap because, every once in awhile, you can almost feel that you’re pushing yourself out of it by getting a bunch of stuff done, but you really can’t get out. You will always fall back in. You will always fall behind. You’re not getting out of time or death. And you hate being trapped, so no wonder you’re always freaking out–you are eternally stuck in the most unbearable state for you and there is no way to escape.

Click. Anxious depression and Type A personality, stapled! Put them in a file and you’ll always know where to find them.

It doesn’t change anything but it does make me feel somewhat better organized.

I’ll take it.

It appears this will be my next published novel, likely followed by The Sisters.

I could do at least three posts on the separate ways in which Jaume Balaguero’s film Darkness is terrible. Yes, that’s the Jaume Balaguero of [Rec]. That’s why I gave Darkness a shot, even though I’d seen some discouraging reviews.

I really could go off in all directions on this film, but I’ll keep to one distracting oddity in this post. Language.

I don’t mean the cursing that, confusingly, got cut back for the US version of the film. Honestly, who is still getting their panties in a bunch over “fuck”? Anyway, not cursing. Language as in English or Spanish.

The film is set in Spain, presumably because it was filmed there and it was easy to make that the setting than to change road signs and licence plates and everything else you’d have to adjust to make Spain stand in for the US or UK. Accordingly, the premise is that an American family has moved into a house in Spain. You eventually determine that the father of this family lived in Spain until his parents divorced when he was a young boy and he moved, with his mother, to the US. You further learn that his father (let’s call him the grandfather) stayed in Spain and owns the house into which the family is now moving.

Okay, so what we’ve got is a father who presumably spoke Spanish as a mother tongue but doesn’t seem to have spoken it much since then and now speaks accentless English… a mother who has no connection to Spain and may or may not speak Spanish… and two kids who may have been taught Spanish by their father–but that’s not ever discussed.

In this film, everyone speaks English all the time. The people from Spain speak English with a Spanish accent, not only to the family but with each other. The Americans speak English without a Spanish accent. Their guests at their housewarming party–in a town where they have been for three weeks and supposedly don’t know anyone, really, so who the hell are these people?–speak accentless English.

At first I thought, maybe this is sort of an Allo Allo thing, only not being played for laughs. Maybe we’re to think that the Americans are speaking Spanish but have an American accent when doing so. Except they all seem effortlessly fluent, even the mother.

I’d like to think that, in this film, I should assume I’m hearing and reading Spanish whenever I hear or read English but I don’t think that’s what was intended because, for example, there’s no difference in how the family members speak to one another and how they speak to a Spanish-speaker in the same scene.

So maybe everyone is speaking English around the family because it’s what they speak–only no one makes the mistake of speaking Spanish to them and then realizing they speak English instead. No one is unable to communicate with them in perfect, colloquial English. And, again, Spanish-speakers in this film speak English to one another.

At first, I thought the teenage girl in the film went to a school for ex-pats, since it was all English all the time. Then I saw a sign in Spanish and realized, no. Apparently written material in this town is in Spanish. Oh, except, later in the film, the teenager discovers a few old newspapers from something that happened in the town forty years earlier and they’re all in English.

None of this has to do with the plot of the film (which is a huge problem in itself). It’s just distracting.

It also suggests that the writers and director shrugged off the creation of a coherent reality. They might have (wrongly) decided that a believable setting was of no importance to a horror film but I doubt they gave it even that much thought. Why does everyone speak English? Because the film was going to be released in the US and UK. Why is that sign in Spanish? Because making a new sign would be a pain in the ass. Why are the newspapers in English? Again, for US and UK viewers.

I wouldn’t have cared if the movie had been in Spanish with subtitles or if the family had spoken English around each other and Spanish with the people who lived in the town, or if everyone had spoken English around the family and Spanish with one another… all I ask is a consistent approach that makes some damned sense.

How does a film get made–even one with so many other problems–without anyone in charge realizing this is a mess and fixing it?

I guess no one cared. And, since this movie seems to have more than made its money back, they might even have been right not to care.

Current Bedside Reading: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Commentary: I’ve barely started this book, which is on the large side, but I’m loving it so far. Also, since I’ve had an (awesome) email exchange with Steven Pinker and he’s been interviewed by Stephen Fry and Steven Colbert, he is my six-degrees link to a remarkable range of people.

My iPod Is Singing: “… the overuse of metaphor.”

Here are some numbers I’ve been thinking about lately:

10/80/10

Communications people in a variety of fields will tell you that’s roughly what you can expect to get when you bring an idea, suggestion, change, and sometimes a product to a group of people. Ten percent are going to hate it no matter what. Ten percent are going to love it no matter what. Eighty percent will either be neutral or have a contextual like or dislike of the idea.

What do you think of this new device that lets you control your phone telepathically?

Ten percent LOVE IT! They’ve been waiting forever to telepathically control something. They don’t care what they have to do to make it happen. You have to put an implant in their hind brains and only half the people in the trials survived the operation? That is OKAY by them!

Ten percent HATE IT! It’s scary and we’re too dependent on technology anyhow. You say it’s free and, not only is it safe, but it cures brain tumours? It’s still TERRIBLE!

The other eighty percent, well, they can see some value in it, but how well does it work and is it safe and what does it cost? They want information. They want a conversation. They might tell you the conditions under which they would like, even love, the telepathic phone controller. Make it pink, eliminate the brain surgery, and bring the price point below $100.

Obviously 10/80/10 isn’t an exact figure for every situation, but it’s close to the mark more often than you might think. In fact, it’s so reliable that I see it not just in work but in life. I’m planning to go to dinner with nine friends? One won’t care where we go. One won’t like anything we pick. The other eight have some preferences but aren’t married to anything, and they talk it over.

I’ve even found the idea can apply to individuals, or to myself. It’s probably fair to say that, when asked for my opinion, I’m immovably negative about ten percent of the time–for example, if someone thinks Terminator Salvation is a good movie, I not only disagree, but make a mental note to never again listen to their opinion about a film. I haven’t read an A.O. Scott review since.

There are also movies that I think are just plain good and I’m not interested in what anyone has to say about them.

Most of the time, I think a movie was generally good or generally bad, but strong in certain areas and weak in others. If someone points out strengths or weaknesses I’ve missed, it might sway my opinion about how good or bad the film was. I’m also prepared to look at most films in terms of audience and say, “I hated the shit out of that movie, but I’m not the audience for it and I can see that it was well-made to reach its audience.”

Whereas I feel the same way about Terminator Salvation that Richard Jeni did about Jaws IV: “A movie so bad that, even if you didn’t have a brain, you wouldn’t believe the plot. That’s how bad it was. Even if you didn’t have a brain–let’s say you were sitting on your bed, a bucket of popcorn and a spinal cord. That’s all you have. Even your spinal cord would go, hey, hey, hey… I’m not a brain or anything, but this is a stupid movie.”

There is nothing anyone could say to me to make me feel differently.

Do you find that 10/80/10 holds in your life, with groups of friends or with your own opinions? What opinons are in your ten percent zones?

Current Bedside Reading: Serita Deborah Stevens and Anne Klarner, Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons

Commentary: Sloppy work. Lord knows, I wasn’t expecting much when I saw this book and took it out from the library. As the DPCS said when he saw me reading it, there’s little point in reading most books with “for writers” on the cover because it’s so rare that such books are both for and by writers.

I did expect that an editor had been somewhere near this book and that’s where I was wrong. It’s one of those funny situations where you’re reading a piece of non-fiction and you can tell it’s sloppy because it reuses the same phrases three times per page (for example) and you wonder whether the information is accurate, but you’re no expert, so what do you know? Then you stumble across a section where you’ve got a particular interest–venom, in my case–and you see errors everywhere. I won’t start listing them because I would be here for hours, but here’s a fun example: they repeatedly call scorpions “insects”. I learned the difference between insects and arachnids in third grade. Maybe the authors of this book were playing doctor with some sixth graders behind the maintenance shack that day, but you’d think they’d have picked it up somewhere since. Or, and I know this is a reach… maybe they’d have done some damned research before writing a book that purports to explain poison in simple terms for poor dumb mystery writers who find science so terribly confusing.

My iPod Is Singing: “The reason we’ve stopped… the reason we’re all hanging around in the snow not doing anything… is that some people don’t seem to know the rules. Isn’t that right, number 71?”