Murder, Mayhem, and Writerly Anxiety
Or, the stories we tell in order to live! ft. The Player, The Patient, and more.
A couple weeks ago I started watching Hulu’s The Patient, starring Steve Carell and Domnhall Gleeson. And by watching, I mean half-viewing the screen while doing everything I possibly could to diffuse my full-body terror and remind myself that the show is a work of fiction.
The show’s premise is brilliantly simple, and kicks off in the first minutes of its first episode: Sam, played by Gleeson, is a patient of renowned therapist Alan, played by Carell. In episode one, Alan mentions to Sam that he feels frustrated that the two of them aren’t progressing—Sam, who wears a baseball cap and sunglasses to his sessions, is prone to deflecting when the conversation becomes too personal—and wonders if Sam is frustrated, too. It turns out that Sam is quite frustrated, and answers this emotion by kidnapping Alan and chaining him up in his basement, where he believes he can finally speak freely and honestly. He’s a serial killer, he says, and he would like to learn how to control his urges.
There is so much going on in the show, which has thus far been meted out in taut half hour-ish segments. It reminds me of a really fantastic short novel, where you can’t quite figure out how the author is accomplishing everything in so little space. (Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson is my favorite recent example; the great Maris Kreizman has compiled various lists of excellent brief reads.) Sam is a serial killer, yes, but he’s also a relatable version of human nature writ large. He has some childhood trauma and parental hangups. He wishes therapy were easier than it is. He is a person with a problem that he wants someone else to fix. “There is a kind of pathetic hole at the heart of Sam that he doesn't know why it's there, and he doesn't know how to fill it,” Gleeson told my VF colleague, David Canfield.
There is a lot to say about The Patient but, as someone who quite literally watches it through her fingers, I’ll leave that to more careful viewers. What I will say is that the show made me think about the vaunted history of books and films that depict people committing acts of violence in the name of telling a story, or forcing someone else to tell theirs. In Steven King’s 1987 novel Misery, romance novelist Paul Sheldon crashes his car while drunk and wakes up in the guest bedroom of his most, uh, devoted fan, Annie Wilkes. (The book’s film adaptation stars Kathy Bates and James Caan.) Paul has recently killed off Misery Chastain, the heroine in his long-running Victorian romance series; he wants to write crime fiction instead. Annie does not love this. She feeds him painkillers and gives him a malfunctioning typewriter, demanding he bring Misery back from the dead. Terror, blood, and writing under extreme duress ensue. In 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, once-famous silent film star Norma Desmond (a perfect Gloria Swanson) keeps screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) as a financial and emotional hostage, demanding that he rework the bad script she’s written, which she hopes will be a vehicle for her come-back. Gloria ends up ready for her closeup, and Joe ends up dead.
One of the most delicious in this genre is Robert Altman’s 1992 The Player, adapted by Michael Tolkin from his novel of the same name. The movie opens on an eight-minute establishing shot, kicking off with a clapperboard and action!, panning over a studio lot, where two men discuss the joys of a long film shot, and floating into the window of an office. Here, writers are pitching ideas (“The Graduate, part two,” says the actual screenwriter of the actual The Graduate) to the great producer Griffin Mills, played by Tim Robbins. In the spirit of the movie, one could describe The Player as American Psycho meets Wonder Boys set in the heart of Hollywood, or something. The gist is that Griffin starts getting threatening anonymous postcards from, he believes, one of the many screenwriters he’s blown off. He reacts…poorly.
Along with the bother of the menacing notes, Griffin’s also up against a new hot shot producer vying for the spotlight. In what is surely a creative manifestation of Tolkin’s own anxiety, the morning after Griffin literally murders one screenwriter, his rival has the brilliant idea of metaphorically offing them all and simply ripping stories from “anywhere, anywhere…the newspaper.” Which. Ahem.
Amid murder and mayhem, the movie is two hours of pure entertainment. There are so many cameos: Jeff Goldblum, Bruce Willis, an improvising Burt Reynolds, a baby-faced Julia Roberts, Anjelica Huston with a haircut that makes me want to take out the scissors. Dozens more. Whoopi Goldberg plays a cop who makes meta-commentary on cops. Griffin’s studio’s slogan is, “Movies, now more than ever.” The clothes! They’re very fun. Without spoiling anything, the film comes to a crescendo around the idea of co-opting and rewriting someone else’s story, and it has the best bad ending on record.
All these books and movies and TV shows are about the desire to be heard. They are also about the fierce wish to control the narrative—even a narrative that belongs to someone else. What do we owe the people who entrust us with their stories? Are we owed the stories of others? Are we owed an active, interested listener to the stories we tell? It all makes me think of Scheherazade, the new wife of a ruler known for killing his brides the morning after their nuptials, lest they have time to be unfaithful to him. Scheherazade, night one, quite brilliantly begins telling a tale so interesting that her cliff-hanger makes the monarch keep her around for another twenty four hours. She leapfrogs this way for one thousand and one nights (yes that One Thousand and One Nights; don’t you adore a frame narrative?) and in the end her husband decides to let her live. Of course, her reward is that she’s stuck married to an objectively horrible man but she has, at least, been immortalized through art, and when was happily ever after as simple as it’s made out to be?
Read…
…the recommended books in free syllabi by incredible writers. The good people at Lit Hub had the brilliant idea of asking a handful of authors to share class reading lists: “The Literature of Obsession” with Julia May Jonas, author of your favorite stalking-in-academe novel Vladimir? “Writers and the World” with Pulitzer prizewinner Viet Thanh Nguyen, who will see your genre bender and raise you the house? “Place, Space and Landscape” with Alexandra Kleeman, queen of those three things and more? Yes, please.
Eat…
…the summer comfort food to end all comfort foods (and a Harriet the Spy favorite).
Buy…
…an analogue watch! Earlier this year I got a sudden and inexplicable craving to own a vintage Seiko (this happened in high school, for one of those digital gold-toned Casios that I guess people are wearing again, and in college for a jumbo gold-toned Michael Kors situation). While trawling Ebay on a visit to my parents’, they pulled out the now-vintage Seikos they’ve been wearing for decades, so I guess the mystery of that stylistic pull is solved. I ended up buying a gold-tone face and case tank-style with a black leather band, which cost a cool $35 and has cut down the instances of my pulling out my phone to check the time only to get sucked into a scrolling vortex. If your tastes run more towards Grand Seiko, Rolex, and Audemars Piguet, check out Brynn Wallner’s very fun women-and-watches site, Dimepiece, and her podcast Killing Time, which she co-hosts with Malaika Crawford. And also this short-and-sweet interview I did with my favorite Golden State Warrior about his collection a few years back.
Take a few deep breaths today. Look up at the sky. Let me know what you’re reading or writing or watching; it’s very lovely to hear from you.
Til next time,
KW