“Then the crowd rushed forward…”

Note: This post is the twenty-second installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 23. You can read the previous installments here.

Last week, Buzzfeed ran a fun feature in which a few dozen television writers talked about the favorite thing they’d ever written. There’s a lot of good stuff here—I particularly liked Rob Thomas’s account of the original opening of Veronica Mars, which ended up on the cutting room floor—but the story that really stuck with me came courtesy of Damon Lindelof. At this point, Lindelof isn’t anyone’s favorite writer, but few would argue that the finale of the third season of Lost marked a high point in his career, with its closing revelation that what looked like a flashback was actually a scene from the future. It’s a fantastic mislead that viewers still talk about to this day, and the best part is what Lindelof acknowledges as his inspiration:

The final scene of “Through the Looking Glass”—the third season finale of Lost—was stolen from the movie Saw 2.

If you have not seen Saw 2, all you need to know is that Donnie Wahlberg is in it and that the twist at the end involves tricking the audience into thinking they’re watching something unfold in present time, when in fact, it is unfolding in the past. Also, Donnie Wahlberg is in it. Did I say that already?

I love this for two reasons. First, although I’ve never gotten around to seeing Saw 2, I’ve been impressed by its closing twist ever since it was first described to me: I think it would be discussed in the same breath as other great surprise endings if it didn’t reside in such a disreputable genre. (It’s also worth noting that it was originally written by Darren Lynn Bousman as an unrelated spec script, later retooled to serve as a Saw sequel. Bousman went on to direct the next three films in the franchise, which is a lesson in itself: if you come up with a great twist, it can give you a career.) Second, it’s a reminder that you can derive inspiration from almost anything, and that the germ of an idea is less meaningful than its execution. If Lindelof hadn’t spelled it out, it’s unlikely that many viewers would have made the connection. As I’ve noted here before, even a short description of someone else’s idea—as happened with the Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”—can ignite a line of thought. And when it comes to drawing material from things you’ve seen, you often get better ideas from flawed efforts than from masterpieces. A great movie feels like the definitive version of its story; a misfire makes you think about the other ways in which it might have been done.

For instance, I don’t know how many readers here remember a movie called Dark Blue. It was already a flop when it came out over a decade ago—I’m one of the few who paid to see it in theaters—and it doesn’t seem to have had much of an afterlife on video. Even I don’t remember much about it, although I think I liked it fine: it was a messy, textured cop movie with a nice lead performance from Kurt Russell, who is worth watching in anything. What attracted me to it, though, were two elements. It was based on an original story by James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential, and the idea of a sprawling, contemporary crime saga from Ellroy’s brain was an enticing one. And the premise itself grabbed my attention: a violent police melodrama set against the backdrop of the Los Angeles riots. (Apparently, Ellroy developed the idea for so long that it was originally set during the Watts riots, which says something in itself about the byways a screenplay can take in Hollywood.) In the end, the execution wasn’t quite memorable enough for it to stick in my head. But its core idea, of a plot that intersected unexpectedly with a historical riot in a big city, is one I never forgot. And years later, when the London riots in Hackney coincided with my planning for Eternal Empire, the pieces just fell into place.

And the result, in Chapter 23, is less an homage to Dark Blue than a kind of remake, filtered through the fuzziness of time, or my private dream of what such a scene could be. Since much of the appeal of a sequence like this comes from how closely it hews to actual events, I invested a lot of effort—maybe too much—in putting together a timeline of the riots and assembling visual references. Several moments in the scene essentially put Wolfe and Ilya in the middle of iconic photos and videos from that day. I had to fudge a few details to make it all fit: the prison break in the previous chapter takes place in early morning, so there’s a space of six hours or so in the chronology that is hard to account for. Still, it all hangs together pretty well, and the result is one of my favorite things in this novel. And what would Ellroy say? I’d like to think that he’d approve, or at least tolerate it, since he isn’t above much the same kind of creative liberation: he admits that he lifted the premise of his novel The Big Nowhere directly from the William Friedkin movie Cruising. (Which doesn’t even mention how much Dark Blue, and so many other movies in its genre, owes To Live and Die in L.A.) The cycle of appropriation goes ever on, and it’s a good thing. Until a book or movie executes an idea so expertly that it yanks it out of circulation, everything should be up for grabs. And in the meantime, all a writer can do is take it and run…

The irrational rightness of The Simpsons

There’s a famous but widely debunked statistic claiming that men think about sex an average of once every seven seconds. In fact, according to one recent study, it’s more like nineteen times a day, which may seem like a lot or a little, depending on your point of view. What tickles me the most about this figure is that it’s in the same ballpark as the number of times I think on a daily basis about The Simpsons. The greatest sitcom in history—which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary as a regular television series today—has achieved something that no other series can claim: for a considerable swath of the population, it’s a kind of ongoing cognitive substratum, with quotes and moments clarifying how we feel about almost everything. Whenever I remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok,” which invents a race that speaks solely in mythological metaphors, it seems a little farfetched at first, but if I reconceive of it as a language consisting entirely of Simpsons references, it suddenly feels a lot more plausible. (These days, for instance, I’m trying to teach my daughter how to use the words “you” and “me,” which means that I’m constantly thinking about this.)

What’s even more extraordinary is that I haven’t watched The Simpsons on a regular basis for more than ten years. Which is only to say that I haven’t kept up with the new episodes. The show’s best years—which I’d roughly define as season three through season eight, with a few possible extensions in either direction—have remained constantly in the background for most of the ensuing decade, often with a commentary track, many of which I’ve heard a dozen times or more. (For a long time, Simpsons commentaries played the same role in my life that podcasts serve for many listeners now. Even for the weaker seasons, I still think that they’re the best radio show in the world.) At some point, though, I began to lose interest in what the show was continuing to produce. As best as I can recall, the last episode I casually watched on its original run was “Sleeping With the Enemy,” which aired back on November 21, 2004. It wasn’t a bad episode, and in fact, it was the last script credited to Jon Vitti, who was behind many of the show’s greatest achievements. Yet it was thoroughly mediocre, and I realized that the series no longer gave me much pleasure. Since then, I’ve tuned in for special installments, like the crossword episode and, most recently, the Lego show. But I’ve long since stopped watching it just because it happened to be on.

This isn’t the place for an extensive discussion of the reasons behind the show’s decline, which sometimes seems like the single most thoroughly dissected topic on all of the Internet. What I’d like to highlight here is a quality that doesn’t get mentioned often enough: the show’s underlying strangeness. Looking back at the golden years of the series, it’s striking how many lines, scenes, and images are both inexplicable and totally right. They’re often tangential beats that go on longer than seem comedically possible—not just the rake gag from “Cape Feare,” but Mr. Burns laughing over the crippled Irishman in “Last Exit to Springfield,” or Homer twiddling his thumbs in “Bart’s Comet.” They’re the comedic version of what Donald Richie, in his discussion of Kurosawa, calls “the irrational rightness of an apparently gratuitous image in its proper place,” and as Richie points out, they’re often the things we remember. Which isn’t to say that The Simpsons doesn’t still contain plenty of seemingly irrelevant material; sometimes there’s so much of it that the ostensible plot is almost forgotten. Yet nearly every joke these days can be explained, if you’re so inclined, in ways the left brain can understand: it’s a reference, a sign gag, a parody, a dollop of cringe humor. Every line feels like one that the producers could defend on Twitter, when so much of the show’s best moments work in ways that even the writers would find hard to explain.

Trying to recapture that kind of quality, which is inherently indefinable, is a loser’s game. And there are sometimes still flashes of it. But The Simpsons hit that mark so consistently for so many years that it’s worth wondering what changed. Informed opinion has often linked the show’s permanent decline to the departure of George Meyer, the indispensable man in the writer’s room, who left the show in 2006. Meyer is undeniably responsible for much of what made those classic seasons so special—the subplot in “Lisa’s Rival” about Homer and the sugar truck, for instance, was one that he pitched almost line for line—and the respect in which he was held allowed moments to survive that might not have made it through a more rational rewrite. It’s simplistic, of course, to tether such a rich, complicated show to one man’s sensibility, and the series was always bursting with talent. Yet I can’t help think that Meyer instilled the rest of the staff with the courage to be random, strange, and cheerfully unexplainable. In his absence, The Simpsons became less a writer’s than a producer’s show, and while it continued to produce the occasional high point, like “Trilogy of Error,” even its triumphs, like its animation, felt a little more calculated. It can still be a clever show when it feels like it. But as Meyer liked to say, and as the series has allowed itself all too often to forget: “Clever is the eunuch version of funny.”

Star Trek into dorkiness

You know we’re past the midpoint of summer when Comic-Con is back in the news, with the usual coverage of big announcements, horrendous lines, and occasional bad behavior at the San Diego Convention Center. Comic-Con, of course, is a major business event these days, with the few remaining aficionados of comics themselves shuttled aside into remote floors and tiny conference rooms. Instead of a refuge for a subculture, it’s the headquarters of the monoculture, an overpowering declaration that we’re all nerds now, at least from the point of view of the major movie studios. As it happens, I ended up watching the 1997 documentary Trekkies for the first time over the weekend. And although the film is full of moments—as when we meet dentist Denis Bourguinon, whose office, Star Base Dental, looks like one of William Shatner’s fever dreams—when we seem to have strayed into Christopher Guest territory, it feels now like a bittersweet paean to something lost forever. (I ended up watching it, incidentally, because it was one of the only movies available at the beach house my wife’s family was renting in Michigan City. In summer cottages, we’re thrown back on an earlier world of entertainment, rooting through the same faded paperbacks and board games that generations did before us.)

And I’m glad it took me seventeen years to watch Trekkies. When it was first released, there were heated arguments about its true attitude toward its subjects: whether it was affectionate or condescending, a love letter or a freak show. Seen from the distance of close to two decades, though, it comes across as a surprisingly gentle portrait, especially now that the airwaves are filled with documentaries looking for other subcultures to mock, and it gains an added resonance that wasn’t there at the time. On its initial run, it would have felt like a report from the front lines of nerd culture; now, it’s a time capsule, capturing a moment in fandom that would never come again. It takes place during the most epochal event in the history of fan culture, the advent of the Internet, which allowed obsessive, often introverted personalities from all parts of the world to seek one another out in safe spaces online. We never hear the roar of a dialup modem in Trekkies, but as the camera pans across a fan’s lovingly curated Brent Spiner site on Geocities, it’s hard not to imagine it in the background. And this is still a transitional moment, with Kirk/Spock fanfic and bondage fantasies featuring Captain Janeway distributed in photocopied newsletters.

Today, we don’t need to go in active search of fandoms; the fandoms all but come to us. Internet culture and the Trekkie world overlapped so beautifully in those early years because they attracted people of the same stripe: to get online at all in the mid- to late nineties, you had to be pulled in by the prospect of what you’d find there, and willing to tolerate long nights in a dark room waiting for downloads at 14.4 kbps. Trekkies formed a natural community of early adopters, both because of their interest in technology—you can see rough versions of iPads in The Next Generation and the equivalent of a verbal Google search in the episode “Darmok”—and their capacity for solitary, meticulous work. It’s no surprise that when they logged on, they found people a lot like them. Now, with our options for going online all but beating through our screens, online comment sections have come to look more or less like the rest of the world. You don’t need to meet any particular threshold of patience or motivation to share an opinion: in some ways, it’s harder not to share. And while, on balance, it’s a positive development, it also leads to a form of engagement with pop culture that has little in common with the world that Trekkies depicts.

Call it whatever you like, but it boils down to the difference between hanging out with a few committed friends at the Magic: The Gathering table at lunch period and being thrown headlong into the full cafeteria. Drop into a discussion of Star Trek these days, and you’re less likely to encounter an analysis of the Klingon language than dismissive comments about the J.J. Abrams franchise and invectives against Kurtzman and Orci.  (It’s an especially stark contrast with the treatment of creative figureheads in Trekkies, in which showrunners like Brannon Braga are treated like gods.) If online fandom seems generally less impassioned and more ambivalent these days, it’s only because it reflects the world as a whole, rather than the views of a handful of devotees who wouldn’t be online at all if they didn’t have strong feelings to share. In the world of Trekkies, there was room for everything but “meh.” Negativity has always been part of the fan experience; what it’s striking about it now is how so much of it seems to come from indifference. There’s a sequel to Trekkies, more than a decade old, that I haven’t seen, but I already feel that it’s time for a third installment, even if it’s less about uncovering an unseen stratum of pop culture than analyzing what is taking place all around us.

The logline game

In an interview he gave a few years ago to The Paris Review, James Ellroy told a memorable story about the origins of his novel The Big Nowhere:

I was influenced by a bad William Friedkin movie from 1980, Cruising. It has a great premise. There are a string of homosexual murders in the West Village and Al Pacino is a young, presumably heterosexual cop, who goes undercover and is tempted by the homosexual world. What an idea! Hence, The Big Nowhere. A cop in LA in the fifties gets assigned to a homosexual murder case and becomes aroused by the men he’s investigating.

I love this story because it illustrates a point best expressed by a modified version of Ebert’s Law: “A story isn’t about what it’s about, but about how it’s about it.” A movie that bungles an intriguing premise can serve as a source of inspiration for a better storyteller, and if you’re able to exploit the underlying idea more compellingly, it isn’t plagiarism, but a kind of literary transmutation. Ideas, as I’ve said before, are cheap; execution is king.

As it happens, Ellroy’s example is just one of two I’ve recently encountered of authors quietly lifting an idea from another source. The other night, I watched the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” for the first time. While reading about it afterward, I came across a story about Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies. When the episode first aired, he liked its logline—the brief summary included in the day’s television listings—so much that he deliberately didn’t watch the episode:

I love the idea so much, I’d rather think about it. Forever. The episode is called “Darmok,” and the synopsis simply says that Captain Picard is trapped on a planet with an alien who can only talk in metaphors. Wow. That sounds brilliant. How does that work? What happens? How does it end? I’ve got no idea—not seen it! But it keeps resonating with me…I’ve been thinking about that story and its potential for almost twenty years!

And while I haven’t seen the Doctor Who episode, “Midnight,” that “Darmok” inspired, I don’t have any doubt that the story is profoundly different from its inspiration. Even if we start in more or less the same place, we end up in an altogether different neighborhood.

I’ve started to take a particularly keen interest in examples like this because the novel I’m writing now originated in similar ways. Fifteen years ago, before Eyes Wide Shut came out, there were countless wild rumors about its plot and content, many of which—Tom Cruise wears a dress! Nicole Kidman shoots heroin!—were absurdly off the mark. (In fact, Eyes Wide Shut is an almost scene-for-scene adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s story Traumnovelle, which Kubrick had been hoping to film for decades, so anyone interested in the plot could have read it in the original novel long before the movie’s release.) Early on, however, there was a widely circulated plot summary that ended up in a lot of places, including Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, saying that Cruise and Kidman played married psychiatrists who have affairs with their patients. Needless to say, this isn’t what the movie is about at all. But that inaccurate logline has stuck in my head for a long time, almost for as long as Davies thought about “Darmok,” and I’m currently writing my own version of it.

And if I’m not particularly concerned about revealing this detail here, it’s because I know that whatever story you—or anyone else—would write from this prompt would have little in common with the one I’m working on now. I’ve sometimes thought that if I were a writer looking for new ideas, I’d browse through the television listings to look for a logline that seemed interesting, and then deliberately not watch the movie. Here are a few culled at random from the thrillers section on Netflix: “Moving to a new town proves even more stressful for a teenager when she learns that the house next door was the site of a double murder.” “Convinced by a mysterious woman that a death row inmate is innocent, two brothers investigate and discover a case marred by betrayal and deceit.” “A detective plunges into a murky sea of corruption when he probes the connection between a rash of murders and a notorious New Orleans mobster.” These are intriguing ideas that could go in any number of directions, and the films themselves represent only one of a huge range of possibilities. If you’re curious, the movies in question are The House at the End of the Street, The Paperboy, and The Electric Mist—but if you haven’t seen them, why not make them your own?