Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Fifty Shades of Grey

Sorting through the Clutter:  How “The Girl Before” Misrepresents Minimalism

August 29, 2022 / / 59 Comments

The Girl Before depicts minimalism as an obsessive-compulsive symptom of emotional instability, in contrast with what I can attest it to be from years of committed practice:  a versatile set of tools/techniques to promote emotional balance—that is, to attain not merely a clutter-free home, but a clutter-free head.

In the BBC One/HBO Max thriller The Girl Before, created by JP Delaney (based on his novel), brilliant-but-troubled architect Edward Monkford (David Oyelowo)—ah, “brilliant but troubled,” Hollywood’s favorite compound adjective; it’s right up there with “grounded and elevated”—is designer and owner of a postmodern, polished-concrete, minimalist home in suburban London, One Folgate Street, which he rents out, with extreme selectivity, at an affordable rate to “people who live [t]here the way he intended.”  Prospective tenants are required to submit to an uncomfortably aloof interview with Edward, whose otherwise inscrutable mien lapses into occasional expressions of condescending disapproval, and then fill out an interminable questionnaire, which includes itemizing every personal possession the candidate considers “essential.”

The rarified few who meet with Edward’s approval must consent to the 200-odd rules that come with living in the house (no pictures; no ornaments; no carpets/rugs; no books; no children; no planting in the garden), enforced through contractual onsite inspections of the premises.  Meanwhile, One Folgate Street is openly monitored 24/7 by an AI automation system that tracks movements, polices violations of maximum-occupancy restrictions, regulates usage of water and electricity, sets time limits on tooth-brushing, and preselects “mood playlists”—just for that personal touch.  All of this is a reflection of Edward’s catholic minimalist philosophy:  “When you relentlessly eradicate everything unnecessary or imperfect, it’s surprising how little is left.”

“The Girl Before,” starring David Oyelowo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Jessica Plummer

The Girl Before—and I’ve only seen the miniseries, not read the book—intercuts between two time periods, set three years apart, dramatizing the experiences of the current tenant, Jane Cavendish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), grief-stricken over a recent stillbirth at 39 weeks, and the home’s previous occupant, Emma Matthews (Jessica Plummer), victim of a sexual assault during a home invasion at her flat.  (Emma, we soon learn, has since died at One Folgate Street under ambiguous circumstances that may or may not have something to do with Edward…?)  Edward’s minimalist dogma appeals to both women for the “blank slate” it offers—the opportunity to quite literally shed unwanted baggage.

This being a psychological thriller, it isn’t incidental that both Jane and Emma bear not merely uncanny physical resemblance to one another, but also to Edward’s late wife, who herself died at One Folgate Street along with their child, casualties of an accident that occurred during the construction of the home originally intended for the site before Edward scrapped those plans and went psychoneurotically minimalistic.  Everyone in The Girl Before is traumatized, and it is the imposition of or submission to minimalist living that provides an unhealthy coping mechanism for Edward, Jane, and Emma, each in their own way:

In this novel, [Delaney] wanted to explore the “weird and deeply obsessive” psychology of minimalism, evident in the fad for [Marie] Kondo and her KonMari system of organizing.  “On the face of it,” he wrote, “the KonMari trend is baffling—all that focus on folding and possessions.  But I think it speaks to something that runs deep in all of us:  the desire to live a more perfect, beautiful life, and the belief that a method, or a place, or even a diet, is going to help us achieve that.  I understand that impulse.  But my book is about what happens when people follow it too far.  As one of my characters says, you can tidy all you like, but you can’t run away from the mess in your own head.”

Gregory Cowles, “Behind the Best Sellers:  ‘Girl Before’ Author JP Delaney on Pseudonyms and the Limits of Marie Kondo,” New York Times, February 3, 2017

Indeed.  And if only The Girl Before had been a good-faith exploration of what minimalism, the psychology and practice of it, actually is.

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Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them.  Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations.  Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives.  Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time.  That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works:  A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral.  Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists.  Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations:  an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers.  The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given.  Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash.  Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots:  she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule:  Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable.  And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda:  I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant.  Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us.  Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

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Writers Groups—the Pros and Cons

November 28, 2017 / / 19 Comments

From 2010 through 2014, I participated as one of the founding members of a writers group that met every other Tuesday at restaurants around Hollywood to trade script notes and war stories.  There were eight of us in total, all with representation, though none had yet experienced what they would’ve defined as their “big break.”  We had genre screenwriters (including yours truly), drama and sitcom scribes, and even a comedic playwright, of different genders, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds.  Everyone brought a distinct skill set and perspective to the table.

That was nothing if not an interesting time to be a screenwriter in Hollywood.  The disastrous 2007–08 Writers Guild strike left the once-robust spec marketplace decimated, bringing about permanent systemic changes to the industry:  Studios were no longer—with very rare exception—buying and developing original materials any longer, opting instead to aggressively franchise their vast libraries of branded IPs (hence the endless Star Wars and superhero movies retarding our culture at present), and since those jobs only go to screenwriting’s top one percent, the lion’s share of screenwriters out there could neither find work nor make sales.

While screenwriters picketed, the studios cleaned house

But in 2010, the full impact of that paradigm shift hadn’t yet made itself undeniably evident, so everyone—screenwriters, agents, managers—were still operating, however futilely, under the old model, in which spec scripts were churned out by writers under the developmental “guidance” (read:  marching orders) of their management, then shopped by agents lured out of hiding only by the dangling carrot of their 10% cut.  “Spec’ing” is a demoralizing practice in the best of times, and those were hardly the best of times.

But our writers group was a tremendous source of comfort and counsel to me during that period.  It was a regular opportunity to get out of the house for a night out, to socialize with folks who understood the particular anxieties, frustrations, and exhilarations of attempting to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood.  It made the town a far less lonely place.  All of us, not just me, looked forward to those Tuesday evenings.  But more on why they eventually reached their end shortly.

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