Let’s play Ten for Ten! To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities. This post is presented in three installments.
“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.
In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.
And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.
It takes an unholy degree of time and stamina to write a book. Consequently, it’s advisable to have a really good reason to take a given project on—then see it through to the finish line. Before typing word one of a new manuscript, it behooves us to ask (and answer): Why is this project worth the herculean effort required to bring it into existence?
I wrote my debut novel The Dogcatcher (2023) for the most elemental of motives: I ached for the kind of bygone horror/comedies on which I’d come of age in the ’80s, an era that produced such motley and memorable movies as An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Evil Dead (1981), Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), The Monster Squad (1987), The ’Burbs (1989), and Tremors (1990). Where have those kinds of movies gone? I wondered.
Hollywood, to be fair, hadn’t stopped making horror/comedies, it only long since stopped making them with any panache. I have spent many a Saturday night over the past decade in a binge-scrolling malaise, surfing numbly through hundreds of viewing options on Netflix or Prime or Hulu or whatever, when suddenly my inner adolescent’s interest is piqued—as though I were back at the old video store and had found a movie right up my alley.
I certainly sensed the stir of possibility in Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), about a group of teenagers from my hometown battling undead gentrifiers. Night Teeth (2021), featuring bloodsuckers in Boyle Heights, seemed equally promising. And Werewolves Within (2021) is set in a snowbound Northeastern United States township already on edge over a proposed pipeline project when its residents find themselves under attack by a werewolf.
All of a sudden, I felt like that sixteen-year-old kid who saw the one-sheet for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) while riding the subway to work—“She knows a sucker when she sees one,” teased the tagline, depicting a cheerleader from the neck down with a wooden stake in her fist—and knew he was in for a good time at the cinema.
No such luck. Vampires vs. the Bronx, in an act of creative criminality, pisses away a narratively and thematically fertile premise through flat, forgettable execution.
Night Teeth, meanwhile, answers the question: How about a movie set in the same stomping ground as Blade (1998)—inner-city L.A., clandestine vampiric council calling the shots—only without any of its selling-point stylistics or visual inventiveness?
And Werewolves Within establishes an intriguing environmental justice subplot the screenwriter had absolutely no interest in or, it turns out, intention of developing—the oil pipeline isn’t so much a red herring as a dead herring—opting instead for a half-assed, who-cares-less whodunit beholden to all the standard-issue genre tropes.
Faced with one cinematic disappointment after another, it seemed the only way to sate my appetite for the kind of horror/comedy that spoke to me as a kid was to write my own.
On the subject of kids—specifically, stories about twelve-year-old boys—I haven’t seen one of those produced with any appreciable measure of emotional honesty or psychological nuance since Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body. That was forty years ago!
Storytellers know how to write credible children (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone, Room), and they know how to write teenagers (The Outsiders, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Clueless), but preadolescent boys are almost invariably reduced to archetypal brushstrokes (The Goonies, The Sandlot, Stranger Things). The preteen protagonists of such stories are seldom made to grapple with the singular emotional turbulence of having one foot in childhood—still watching cartoons and playing with action figures—and the other in adolescence—beginning to regard girls with special interest, coming to realize your parents are victims of generational trauma that’s already in the process of being passed unknowingly and inexorably down to you.
For all of popular culture’s millennia-long fixation on and aggrandizement of the heroic journey of (usually young) men, our commercial filmmakers and storytellers either can’t face or don’t know how to effectively dramatize the developmental fulcrum of male maturation. George Lucas’ experimental adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–1996) sheds light on Indy’s youth from ages eight through ten (where he’s portrayed by Corey Carrier) and then sixteen through twenty-one (Sean Patrick Flanery); the complicated messiness of pubescence, however, is entirely bypassed. Quite notably, those are the years in which Indy’s mother died and his emotionally distant father retreated into his work—formative traumas that shaped, for better and worse, the adult hero played by Harrison Ford in the feature films.
Lucas’ elision seems odd to me—certainly a missed creative opportunity1—given that twelve-going-on-thirteen is the period of many boys’ most memorable and meaningful adventures. King and Reiner never forgot that, and neither did I, hence the collection of magical-realism novellas I’m currently writing that explore different facets of that transitory experience: going from wide-eyed wonder to adolescent disillusionment as a result of life’s first major disappointment (Spex); being left to navigate puberty on your own in the wake of divorce (The Brigadier); struggling to understand when, how, and why you got socially sorted at school with the kids relegated to second-class citizenry (H.O.L.O.).
This single-volume trilogy, I should note, isn’t YA—these aren’t stories about preteens for preteens. Rather, they are intended, like The Body/Stand by Me before them, as a retrocognitive exercise for adults who’ve either forgotten or never knew the experience of being a twelve-year-old boy to touch base with that metamorphic liminality in all of its psychoemotional complexity. They’re very consciously stories about being twelve as reviewed from middle-aged eyes.
As I’ll demonstrate in “Part 2” and “Part 3,” both that WIP and The Dogcatcher take inspiration—narratively, thematically, aesthetically, referentially—from the stories of my youth, the books and movies that first kindled my imagination and catalyzed my artistic passions.
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
My own creative impulses were certainly activated by my formative influences, which led me after college to pursue a career in Hollywood. I was twenty-two when I signed with my first literary manager, unusually young for a would-be screenwriter to secure representation—and a testament to how much raw talent and commercial potential I possessed. I spent the next decade-plus touring the bungalows and backlots of L.A., honing my craft by pitching spec projects (that were mostly just impersonal X-meets-Y twists on movies I admired) and vying for open assignments—meaning, competing for some tedious work-for-hire gig a thousand other screenwriters could do just as competently.
Yet it is only now, in my forties, far from the homogenized “creativity” of Hollywood, I feel I’ve come into my own artistically—that I’m finally telling stories worth a damn. Stories only I could tell, however materially they may draw inspiration from the narrative antecedents that forged my sensibilities, what Lethem identifies as “creating out of chaos.”
But it begs the question, doesn’t it: When can you say you’ve achieved a sound or a style all your own? It’s basically when your influences have become so diverse that they’re no longer easy to trace; they’ve blended together so thoroughly as to create a stew of your own making. But that’s not enough. In my view, it requires a diversity of influences and the strength of your individual character. . . . The more influences one has that are then filtered through one’s own personality, the more one ends up with a style and a sound that one can legitimately call one’s own.
Geddy Lee (with Daniel Richler), My Effin’ Life (New York: Harper, 2023), 211–12
I learned everything I know about storytelling from my days in the Tinseltown trenches: how to pitch, how to structure, how to write actable dialogue, how to identify my genre and compose a commercial logline. All of it. But what I never understood was the secret ingredient that separates an aspirant from an artist is having a voice. The stories I’m developing these days are increasingly the product of painful soul-searching—i.e., confronting formative traumas—as opposed to commercial calculation—putting a slick “spin” on some formative influence. (“The show’s called Stranger Things, and it’s The Goonies meets The X-Files!”)
With the latter—which is, for better or worse, the screenwriter-for-hire’s stock-in-trade—all you’re really doing is sampling, remixing, and repackaging someone else’s work. It merely requires a flashy “take” on a proven concept, not a soulful perspective on the human condition. For the screenwriter, a personal POV isn’t merely unnecessary, it’s a handicap.
But, Christ almighty, if you’re not willing to rip your guts out and use them as raw creative materials—unpleasant, embarrassing, and triggering though that can be—what the fuck’s the point of being a writer? Storytelling is too much work if it isn’t at least providing some measure of therapeutic ROI. Reflecting on his own experience creating The Sopranos (1999–2007), David Chase said this:
“Network dramas have not been personal,” Chase observes. “I don’t know of very many writers who have been cops, doctors, judges, presidents—and, yet, that’s what everybody writes about, institutions: the courthouse, the schoolhouse, the precinct house, the White House.” Even though it would be a mob show, The Sopranos would be based on members of his own family. “It’s about as personal as you can get,” he continues. “How many times has that ever happened in the world of TV, where you actually wind up making your show in the little town you came from? About the people you grew up with? It wouldn’t have happened if HBO hadn’t invested in the idea of the writer’s voice.”
Peter Biskind, Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV (New York: William Morrow, 2023), 29
I recently met with a screenwriter/author friend for lunch here in New York, a former critique-group colleague from our days in L.A., during which the subject of writing with a personal touch was discussed:
“It feels different when the stories [one is writing] operate on that cellular level,” my friend observed. “All that time we spent as young screenwriters, that was always about chasing the next easy-to-pitch, this-meets-that premise, you know? But those scripts never produced the humming sensation in my gut I get now—that unnerving but definitely also thrilling molecular vibration that lets me know, ‘Shit, I’m onto something good.’ Something truthful, I mean, not just”—pantomiming air quotes—“‘marketable.’”
“You do get a bit of a ‘writer’s high’ when you write from that very personal place,” I agreed, “and that moment when you start to see—start to feel—the emotion fueling the story, and the story serving the emotion, the whole mechanism just running like a Swiss watch.”
“I just never got that when I was out there pitching ‘Collateral meets Fast and the Furious! How’s that for dope?’ That’s not telling stories. At best you’re just flipping specs.”
“You’re more of a used-car salesman than a storyteller,” I said. “You’re selling a ‘cool’ conceptual mashup, not a story from some dusty corner of the mental attic that, like, attempts to contextualize and even maybe redeem some shitty experience [that’s] left a dent in you forever.”
“And you can still do genre,” he was quick to point out.
“Absolutely!”
“The genre element—the werewolf, in [your] case—that’s the thing that hooks the reader, but it’s the, kind of, human experience that invests them.” He explained how that’s exactly what he’s doing right now with a novel spin on the demonic-possession genre he’d pitched me—how it’s really about the complicated relationship he had with his late father, and the way he’s haunted by all the unresolved conflicts they had. (“The Living Years” meets The Exorcist? Now those would be some incongruous influences!)
In “The Dogcatcher Unleashed,” I elaborated on some of my debut novel’s creative muses. Through subsequent conversations I’ve had with my readers—some who know me well, some not at all—I’ve become more sensitive to just how much my own personality and preoccupations infiltrated the text and subtext. Admittedly, much of that I was already expressly cognizant of, but when I compare The Dogcatcher to other projects, including that forthcoming Out of the Bottle bildungsroman, I can’t deny certain recurring stylistic and thematic patterns in my work.
Accordingly, when I take Geddy Lee up on his challenge to backtrace some of my sources of inspiration (of which the music of Rush ranks right up there), even I am somewhat astonished by the overt feedback loop—the symbiotic relationship—that exists between the art that once inspired me and the art I now produce. Whereas the former were passive (if undeniably potent) cathartic experiences, the latter is the active (and doggedly hopeful) enterprise of cathartic self-expression.
The ten movies discussed in “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood” and “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’90s Adolescence” reflected my experiences at the time I first saw them and consequently shaped my worldview; the stories I tell now, the “stew of my own making,” both express that worldview and pay tribute—owe a creative debt—to those formative influences. We’re going see how over the next two installments of “Under the Influence.” First—a detour into the mad, mad mind of Quentin Tarantino.
The Man with the Golden Briefcase
In Cinema Speculation (2022), arguably the most accomplished filmmaker of his generation (thirteen years my senior) takes us on a fascinating tour through the exploitation-cinema scene of the 1970s in a series of in-depth essays covering Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Getaway (1972), The Outfit (1973), Sisters (1973), Daisy Miller (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Hardcore (1979), and The Funhouse (1981).
Tarantino doesn’t merely share his enduring affinity for those formative faves and offer some truly insightful critical appraisals; in many instances, he speculates (hence the book’s title) on what those movies might have been had discarded story ideas/script drafts been used (for instance: Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Rolling Thunder before it was rewritten by Heywood Gould); had different actors been cast (Angie Dickinson or Lauren Hutton or Faye Dunaway over Ali MacGraw in The Getaway); had a filmmaker not capitulated to studio interference (the false grace note of Hardcore); how a different director might have interpreted a script, resulting in an entirely different movie (Brian De Palma, who passed on Taxi Driver—as in, literally passed it on to Martin Scorsese because it wasn’t sufficiently commercial). Tarantino has given these scenarios a lot of consideration, which he shares with enthusiasm in his first collection of film criticism.
To his credit, QT balances his fanboy enthusiasm for his chosen cinematic specimens with sober critiques of their creative shortcomings and missed opportunities, but it must also be noted his analytical readings come exclusively from a position of white male privilege. He openly delights in the bloodlust of grindhouse cinema, but never examines the social cost of that commercial exploitation—of glorifying, for the sake of entertainment, the violent one-man vendettas of white male antiheroes (many of whom are motivated by the sexual assault and/or murder of a woman, another troublesome trope). Tarantino mostly just dismisses, justifies, or explains away the motifs of vengeance or fascism or racism that underpin many of the “revengeamatics” he reveres.
For instance: He declares Dirty Harry a cathartic crime thriller made for the vicarious pleasure of aging Greatest Generation audiences who were, at the time, watching in horror as “their country” was “overtaken” by draft-dodging hippies and the Black Panther Party. Indeed, the times they were a-changin’:
The Vietnam War did much to radicalize the young after 1965. However, the young had been turning against their parents’ establishment, and inventing the ‘generation gap’, years before President Johnson escalated the war in Indochina. . . .
. . . The May 1968 uprisings, Woodstock, even the fervour with which the young threw themselves into the civil rights campaigns smacked of the rebelliousness that usually foreshadows a fin de siècle; the end of a regime and its replacement with something new.
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing), 50–51
In that context, therefore, Harry Callahan wasn’t the wish-fulfillment antidote to crime on our city streets so much as upheaval to our social order—the threat to the literally greatest generation’s hegemony (the demographic cohort to which Dirty Harry director Don Siegel belonged). Tarantino’s assessment of Dirty Harry is spot-on… but doesn’t that alone—the movie’s shamelessly fear-based exploitation of “the other”—make it socially problematic, however aesthetically brilliant it may (arguably) be?
He furthermore calls out Scorsese for being disingenuous when the director claimed to be shocked! that audiences found Taxi Driver’s climactic violence exhilarating rather than horrifying—that instead of interpreting the picture as a subversive critique of vigilante thrillers like Death Wish (1974), viewers identified with Travis Bickle’s paint-the-walls-red nihilism. I tend to think Scorsese’s social-commentary intentions were honorable, but given the ambiguity of violence in cinema, empathetic antiheroes are by nature a risky artistic undertaking: More often than not, even socially conscious storytellers wind up inadvertently ennobling that which they’d intended to censure.
Take, for example, Vince Gilligan’s Emmy darling Breaking Bad (2008–2013), which chronicles the transmogrification of sad-sack chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) into ruthless meth kingpin “Heisenberg”:
Walt chokes a man with a bicycle lock. He crosses the line that protects children, in this case by poisoning a little boy. In one particularly damning scene, he watches Jesse’s girlfriend choke on her own vomit, without lifting a finger to help her. By one count, Walt is responsible for nearly two hundred deaths. Said Gilligan, “I’ve lost sympathy for Walter White, personally.” He explained, “We want to make people question who they’re pulling for, and why.” Good luck!
Gilligan tried and failed to make Walt impossible to root for. Like the fans of Vic Mackey, Raylan Givens, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, and the Jenningses, Walt’s fans didn’t care how bad he broke; they refused to break with him. According to Robin Weigert, “Anna Gunn got a lot of hate mail from viewers who wanted her character to be a more supportive wife.”
Biskind, Pandora’s Box, 136
Holy shit! Well, I guess it’s a man’s world, huh? As Scorsese found out the hard way, storytellers like Gilligan can tell themselves all they want their intentions are noble—that depictions of violence are meant to repulse, not titillate—but they don’t get to decide how an audience reacts to their work and interprets it. Because it seems to me that viewers who are appalled by screen violence and antiheroic behavior, who haven’t cultivated an insatiable appetite for it, tend not to watch those movies and programs with any regularity or enthusiasm. They’ve already gotten the message that this shit is poisonous and should be consumed, like alcohol, in judicious moderation.
(For the record: I happily broke with Tony Soprano, bailing on the series—not for reasons of quality—halfway through its original run. My wife and I had let an entire season’s worth of episodes aggregate unwatched on our DVR queue, with interminable plans to “get to them.” Finally at one point we turned to each other and said, “Do we not want to watch this show anymore?” We summarily deleted it from our watchlist and never looked back. Unlike our old favorite Goodfellas [1990], which eventually has the mercy to let you out of its ugly, violent, paranoid, wearisome world, The Sopranos had no intention—even through its controversial final episode—of ever letting viewers off the hook. So, we made the decision for ourselves that enough was enough—and never regretted it. I don’t care how many Emmys it won, being rid of that show was a fucking relief. Same for Deadwood.)
At least Tarantino, for better and simultaneously worse, doesn’t make excuses for his addiction to cinematic slaughter. Like the bloodthirsty fans of so-called Prestige TV’s endless succession of tough-guy antiheroes, rather than interrogating the morality of B-movie violence, Tarantino reflexively stands by the unchallenged assertion that it’s fun—it’s what audiences want—and why should any filmmaker apologize for that, let alone consider (and God forbid take some measure of responsibility for) the noxious worldview they’re promulgating? It’s just entertainment, folks!
Yeah, okay—but it’s entertainment from the perspective of white male filmmakers about white male protagonists more often than not taking violent revenge (in the form of mass shootings, no less) on behalf of a brutalized (and helpless) female. That’s entertainment? Only if you’re privileged enough to be a straight white male viewer, methinks. (And I say that as a member of said demographic.) It’s more like right-libertarian propaganda—fascist fantasies packaged as “urban thrillers,” like Frank Miller’s hateful bastardization of Batman, The Dark Knight Returns (1986), itself inspired by Dirty Harry.
At no point in Cinema Speculation does Tarantino acknowledge, let alone examine, the sociocultural, -political, and/or -economic phenomena of the era—like, first and foremost, neoliberal capitalism and the systematic dismantling of the welfare state—and the role those outside forces played in seeding the very conditions (like urban blight) that created the disillusioned, hypermasculine antiheroes he so admires. He’s ultimately too smitten with ’70s exploitation cinema, its stylized carnage, to be put off by the underlying social ills those movies were either consciously critiquing or unconsciously reflecting.
Which makes one wonder: What is it about the era Tarantino finds so preeminently appealing? The book offers a window into his psyche from which an explanation can be reasonably conjectured: because these were the first movies—however age-inappropriate, by his own admission, they may have been—to which young Quentin was exposed, when he was taken to the L.A. drive-ins by his mother and his stepfather and then a succession of would-be (Black) stepfathers. (A doctoral thesis could probably be written about Tarantino on that last point.)
The movies (and books and television and music) we consume in our youth impress upon our receptive imagination in a way media experienced later in life never can. We can enjoy, admire, appreciate, and celebrate movies seen in adulthood, but they cannot imprint on us as profoundly and indelibly as those to which we were first exposed. Tarantino’s enduring passion for exploitation schlock is no different from Gen X’s obsessive enthusiasm for the juvenile ephemera of the 1980s: Star Wars and Ghostbusters and The Transformers, et al. For QT, the wantonly violent “revengeamatics” of the 1970s emblemize, however perversely, his own innocence.
And therein lies the true value of Cinema Speculation. The book finally allowed me to put my finger on something about Tarantino that has nagged at me elusively for thirty years: Whenever he talks about his own movies, he seldom if ever cites a personal experience or relationship as a creative influence; he only ever references other movies. He is demonstrably dismissive of—seems almost pathologically uncomfortable with—movies that aspire toward emotional earnestness, what he deems “middle-of-the-road successful films,” or “cup[s] of weak tea,” such as “The Big Chill, Out of Africa, Ordinary People, Diner, Gandhi, Stand by Me,”2 those saccharine studio products of what he repeatedly calls “the miserable eighties.”
[T]he curse of eighties cinema. . . . was that the complex and complicated lead characters of the seventies were the characters that eighties cinema avoided completely. Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties likeability was everything. A novel could have a low-down son of a bitch at its center, as long as that low-down son of a bitch was an interesting character.
But not a movie. Not in the eighties.
After the seventies, it seemed film went back to the restraints of the fifties. Back to when controversial novels and plays had to be drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays. As happened with 9½ Weeks, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, First Blood, The Color Purple, White Palace, Stick, Miami Blues, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. . . .
And if you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes.
Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.
How does Murray in Stripes go from being an iconoclastic pain in the ass, who deserves to get beat up by Drill Sergeant Warren Oates, to rallying the troops (That’s the fact, Jack!), and masterminding a covert mission on foreign soil?
And Stripes was one of the hip movies.
Film critics always preferred Bill Murray to Chevy Chase. Yet, more often than not, Chase remained the same sarcastic aloof asshole at the film’s end he was at the beginning. Or at least his conversion wasn’t the whole point of the movie as it was in Scrooged and Groundhog Day.
Admittedly, when you don’t give a fuck about other people’s feelings, it probably does wonders for your caustic wit. But I’ve always rejected the idea that Bill Murray’s characters needed redemption.
Yeah, maybe he charmed Andie MacDowell, but does anybody think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray?
Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (New York: Harper, 2022), 120–22
Christ, how would he have preferred Groundhog Day to conclude—with Murray gutting the groundhog and wearing its pelt as a tunic as he went postal on Punxsutawney? In Tarantino’s version of Stand by Me, does Gordie (Wil Wheaton) actually shoot Ace (Kiefer Sutherland) at the creekside climax? And presumably only after Ace’s gang has assaulted, à la Deliverance, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman), and Vern (Jerry O’Connell)? When it comes to characterization, why does Tarantino equate violence and nihilism—the antisocial values of a “low-down son of a bitch”—with complexity?
That creative sensibility is the reason, I imagine, Tarantino’s own films are undoubtedly slick and often quite suspenseful (the opening reel of Inglourious Basterds leaves me breathless), but generally devoid of anything resembling an earnest emotion. He doesn’t respond to that in other filmmakers’ movies, and goes out of his way to exclude it from his own. He seems only to make prestige genre movies inspired by grindhouse genre movies—specifically, the revengeamatics, Spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation thrillers, and martial-arts movies he devoured in his youth—not tell stories that draw from painful personal experience and/or hard-earned epiphany, like his sentimentalist hero Sylvester Stallone. (With perhaps the one-two exception of Rocky and Rocky II, which he lovingly admires in Cinema Speculation, Tarantino appears congenitally allergic to—even appalled by, certainly suspicious of—aspirational and/or prosocial storytelling.)
And then… a twist ending.
In the book’s final chapter, unassumingly labeled “*Floyd Footnote”—as though it were superfluous or optional, like an appendix—Tarantino gets deeply personal for (as far as I’m aware) the first time in a public forum: He tells the story of a vagabond Black man, Floyd Ray Wilson, who rented a room in his mother’s apartment for several years in the ’70s, and who served as an off-and-on mentor to young Tarantino—talking obscure movies with him, offering (dubious) advice about manhood, even inadvertently motivating him to become a screenwriter. (Wilson, who fruitlessly aspired to screenwriting himself, directly inspired Django Unchained.)
It’s the most moving piece of writing Tarantino has ever produced, certainly the most heartbreaking—made only more so by its inconspicuous placement as a supplemental postface, an addendum he was “obliged” to include, like endnotes you can peruse if you’re so inclined, but the book is finished now and, really, who reads the back matter anyways?
And that’s when I realized: This book—QT’s entire filmography, for that matter—is a love letter, a sincere (if surreptitious) tribute to this capricious-yet-consequential surrogate father who unceremoniously disappeared from Tarantino’s life one day, his fate and whereabouts still unknown. (A bastard but not a fucking bastard?) In Cinema Speculation, Tarantino is like that cagey patient at a therapy session—the kind that talks around what’s really bothering him for forty-eight minutes, only to “offhandedly” spill the unvarnished, uncomfortable, even painful truth juuuust as the clock runs out. Damn it—looks like our time is up!
At long last I understand Tarantino’s entire cinematic repertoire: It isn’t so much an artistic expression of some heart’s-core pain as it is a monomaniacal project of palliative nostalgia. He’s spent the entirety of his adult life and career recreating the era of Hollywood that offered him the only reprieve from his unstable, fatherless childhood. This is what makes him such a singular and polarizing talent: Unlike most other auteurs, Tarantino’s movies are in no way whatsoever intended as a means to process or share his formative traumas; rather, they are meticulous, handmade odes to those formative influences—cinematic and, in the instance of Wilson, personal—that soothed his psychic stabwounds.
Anti-sentimentalist that he is, Tarantino might very well recoil in abject horror at my takeaway from Cinema Speculation, but he finally, after three decades—and when I least expected it—made me feel a genuine tender emotion: pity.
“Under the Influence” continues with “The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood.”
Footnotes
- The reason for the six-year time jump, I realize, was to allow space for the opening prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), featuring a thirteen-year-old Indy portrayed by River Phoenix. By establishing a temporal gap between each “era” of Indy’s life—childhood (Carrier), adolescence (Phoenix), young adulthood (Flanery), midlife (Ford), and old age (George Hall)—the discrepancies in his countenance could be attributed to “aging.” Creatively, it’s both an understandable decision and a missed opportunity—both things can be true. ↩︎
- Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation (New York: Harper, 2022), 141 ↩︎
Great backstory to this book. I love that you wrote the book because no one wrote those stories anymore. And your friend’s comment–“the humming sensation in my gut”–I get that. Nice to read you again, Sean.
Thanks for being so supportive during my hiatus, Jacqui — and for being the first to comment on my latest post! I very much appreciate your kind encouragement.
Yes, I wrote The Dogcatcher for the 16-year-old me who longs perennially for those kinds of horror/comedies. Look: I’ll be the first to concede that maybe Vampires vs. the Bronx, certified fresh with a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Werewolves Within, which holds a fresh 86% RT score, didn’t appeal to me because they couldn’t appeal to me — that what I ultimately wanted from them was what others my age want from Ghostbusters: Frozen Earth and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Disney and Beverly Hills Cop IV: to feel like the 12-year-old boy who first saw those movies in the 1980s.
As I noted in my appraisal of Cinema Speculation above, the media we experience later in life cannot imprint on us as profoundly and indelibly as that to which we were first exposed. In that sense, I suppose, Vampires vs. the Bronx and Werewolves Within never stood a chance with me. Maybe it was unfair to impose such heavy expectations on them in the first place. (For instance: I admired, enjoyed, and appreciated Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves — which I discussed with dellstories here — but it’s not a movie that will ever influence me in any way; it’s just too late for that. I appreciated D&D for what it set out to be — and absolutely succeeded in being! — but it’ll never make my deserted-island list.)
More and more, Jacqui, I’m coming around to the likelihood that no movie or book or song will ever quite capture my imagination the way they did when I was a kid. The only stories that seem to do that for me anymore are the ones I write: The Dogcatcher. Spex. The Brigadier. H.O.L.O. The Lost Boys of the Bronx. So be it. If the thrill of storytelling these days is experienced by telling stories rather than consuming them — that is, producing the kind of entertainment I want rather than searching fruitlessly for it — well, then, perhaps Tarantino and I have that in common. Maybe that’s what drives storytellers to keep creating — and to raise their artistic ambitions with each new creation?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to sharing my formative influences over the next two posts; expect the second installment in August or September. In the meantime, Jacqui, have yourself a great summer!
Of course you can’t find a movie or book that makes you feel the way you felt when you were 12 years old. You are not 12 years old
We’ve discussed adults who persist in child stories, superheroes, and the like
BTW, I just saw the Goonies for the first time a few weeks ago. It was a decent movie, but it didn’t “grab” me the way it seemed to grab everybody else. That probably would have been different if I’d seen it when I was 9-12
I actually did see Star Wars when I was 12. In the theatre. When it first came out. Before the sequels, prequels, expanded universes, TV shows… THERE was a magic that can’t be recaptured!
Indeed, Dell — I have long been critical, as you know, of my generation’s nostalgic yearning for the Day-Glo decade through endless recapitulations of its pop culture — what’s known as “commercial adolescence.” (Christ, I recently read Ready Player Two — reviewed here — and it is seriously the most cynical, misanthropic, antihumanist, pro–corporate capitalism piece of shit ever produced. If over, say, the past 50 years, geek culture has evolved from a niche subculture to a socioreligious belief system, then Ready Player Two is nothing less than its Book of Revelation. It’s an absolutely staggering piece of work… though not for the reasons it thinks.)
I suppose, upon consideration of Vampires vs. the Bronx, et al., I wasn’t looking to feel like a 12-year-old boy so much as I wanted to be wowed like one again — the way movies used to wow me. This time of year always fills me with a sentimental longing for that sense of anticipation that once heralded the start of the summer-movie season — the excitement of having a new event movie, be it a sequel or otherwise, to go see!
But summer-movie season isn’t a thing anymore, and well within a decade, movies themselves — the two-hour, closed-ended, standalone feature film, that is — won’t be, either. Cinema, like comics, is no longer cultivating a younger audience; both art forms will before too long — whenever Gen X ages out — be relegated to the same pop-culture dustbin as the radio drama.
And even if viewer preferences and presentational modes weren’t seismically shifting — which, to be clear, they absolutely are — Hollywood is moribund, anyway. What will rise from its ashes remains to be seen, but it ain’t gonna be the renaissance-like resurgence of the feature film. That’s over, same as the internal-combustion engine.
That isn’t a good or bad thing, mind you — it’s just is what it is. (The end of movies, I mean, not the end of fossil fuels, which I very much support!) But as an Xer for whom the movies meant everything — as we’ll see in the next two installments of “Under the Influence” — I mourn them sometimes. I mourn the seasonal tradition and shared experience of the movies. Who knew when I went to see Knives Out in the fall of 2019 that it would be the last theatrical experience of my life? (Christ, at least it wasn’t Last Blood, which was my penultimate theatrical experience. As poetically apt as that would have been, it also would’ve been depressing as fuck.)
I’ve seen a good number of films over the past two decades that have impressed me, but I think the last blockbuster that wowed me was Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003. How ironic, then, that that was a story about a way of life, however fictionalized, that was approaching its cessation. Who knew, huh?
(I haven’t yet watched Andrew McCarthy’s documentary Brats, but this Salon article about it seems relevant to our conversation: “By making peace with The Brat Pack, Brats shows Generation X how to let go”)
On the subject of piracy: The Goonies came out when I was nine, and I saw it on VHS when I was ten or eleven, as I recall. I enjoyed it just fine — and I’ve enjoyed it the three or four times I’ve seen it, in full or in part, since — but for whatever reason it’s just never been a movie that resonated with me emotionally. I’ve only ever liked that movie, not loved it. I’m not sure why. On paper, a late-wave Xer like myself should hold The Goonies in the same vaulted esteem as Back to the Future and The Lost Boys and The Karate Kid and E.T., but it’s not a movie that inspired me, or that I ever owned a copy of on home video, or that I ever thought about if it wasn’t playing on the TV before my eyes. For me, The Goonies is filed in that same category of ’80s “classics” as Top Gun: I saw it when it came out; I remember the hype around it; I engaged in two or three schoolyard conversations about it; I didn’t carry it with me into adolescence or adulthood.
I’ll have more to say about this in the next post, but I suspect part of the reason I never meaningfully engaged with The Goonies is because I tended to relate to adolescent adventure stories in which the boys came from broken homes (E.T. and The Karate Kid and The Lost Boys) and/or dysfunctional families (Back to the Future and Stand by Me and, in the instance of Cameron Frye, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Every one of my friends — every one, without exception — hailed from a home blighted by either divorce or alcoholism or depression or infidelity or mental illness or some combination thereof. Everybody was fucked up.
Accordingly, I think I responded unconsciously when I saw familial dysfunction reflected in the movies of the ’80s, even — perhaps especially? — if it was just background detail. Whereas I saw myself and all my friends in Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern from Stand by Me, The Goonies‘ Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, and Data were just reductive archetypes — cartoon characters on a cartoon adventure, with no emotional stakes whatsoever. And there’s nothing wrong with that… but I suspect it’s the reason The Goonies neither spoke to me nor stayed with me like the films we’ll examine in “Under the Influence, Part 2.”
I was too young for Star Wars and Empire, but I absolutely recall seeing Return of the Jedi in theaters… and it took my seven-year-old breath away. I know it became fashionable in the ’90s, thanks to shit like Clerks, to crap on Jedi for its perceived kiddie-pandering, but Lucas never claimed to be making those movies for anyone but 12-year-old boys. It’s easy for geek-culture blogs and podcasts administered by middle-aged fanboys to reappraise this stuff from the perspective of 2024; it’s much harder to step back, thoughtfully and dispassionately, and appreciate those movies in the context of the time they were produced and through the eyes of their intended audience, an argument I made in “Superman IV at 35″ and “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” But, then, fandom bled all the fun — certainly any sense of magic — from pop culture a long time ago…
I… have a few “personal issues” that I could use for stories…
But, honestly, I do have trouble confronting them
And in actuallity, my issues, though painful to me, would most likely be banal to the reader
Well, that goes to the matter of “writing what you know,” something you and I were discussing last month, Dell.
I’ll provide very specific case studies for this in “Under the Influence, Part 2,” but “writing what you know” has, I think, three elemental components: influence, inspiration, and experience.
My influences are personal and varied, in accordance with Geddy Lee’s prescription for artistic originality, but they include the horror/comedies of the ’80s, the buddy comedies of the ’80s, the character melodramas of the ’90s (a subject into which we’ll delve in “Under the Influence, Part 3”), as well as my lifelong passion for environmentalism (first inspired by a fifth-grade class trip aboard the sloop Clearwater and then later quickened by An Inconvenient Truth around the time I turned 30) and social activism. All of those interests — and many more — had long since shaped the way I engage with the world around me.
Then I had a moment of inspiration watching The X-Files, wondering if a cryptid attack in Small Town, USA, would really be investigated by the FBI… or more likely fall under the purview of local Animal Control. An intellectual curiosity suggested a fictional scenario: dogcatcher vs. werewolf.
Then I drew on my own personal experiences to create that storyworld and break the plot: a trip I’d taken to Ithaca, New York (the setting of the story); having lived away in California for many years only to find myself home for good again (Jessie’s backstory); having volunteered for L.A. Animal Services (which informed the procedural protocols of Cornault Animal Control); my progressive politics (reflected in the mayor and Nick’s democratic socialism); the lifelong friendship I’ve maintained with the guy who grew up next door to me (the basis for Frank and Waff’s shared history); having lost a parent as a preteen (to divorce, not death, but still); having been in a healthy romantic relationship since I was very young (Nick and Laura’s marriage); and many, many other things I couldn’t even consciously account for. Every story detail was biographically and/or emotionally relatable to me… even if the story itself was pure fiction.
That’s writing what you know: when you fuse your influences with a spark of inspiration, then develop a premise into a narrative by drawing from personal experience to make the story emotionally honest/resonant. And I’m going to show how that was done in the next post by using several examples of commercial films from the 1980s…
I will add in closing that the trio of Out of the Bottle stories I’m currently writing are all deeply, even painfully, autobiographical… but they’re the best work I’ve ever produced. Ditto my novelization of The Lost Boys of the Bronx (or LB-BX, for short). Believe me when I tell you I’ve had days when I’ve been sorry I ever started down those roads — particularly with respect to LB-BX, which dredged up a lot of repressed pain — but there’s been tremendous catharsis in exchange for having undertaken those creative journeys.
And no, nothing about my own upbringing or personal issues is particularly special or interesting enough to warrant a true autobiography! So, I added a dash of magical realism (in the cases of Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O.) and heavily fictionalized the plots (particularly with regard to LB-BX), because factual truth isn’t the goal of good fiction — emotional truth is. (That and an entertaining yarn, of course. I guess the fourth and final component in the writing-what-you-know equation is imagination.) The best fiction is always emotionally truthful, which is the artful amalgamation of influence, inspiration, experience, and imagination — a.k.a. “writing what you know.”
Thinking about it…
I think one of the biggest influences on me might be Dungeons & Dragons and other table-top roleplaying games
A small group of people, with a variety of skills, working together. Even if there is a leader, no one character is the “main character”. It is an ensemble cast
I would imagine many members of our generation were influenced by D&D — particularly early Xers. It was really revolutionary: a board game with a sprawling mythology, structured as an interactive, open-ended, infinite-possibility narrative, where the objective isn’t to win, merely to keep the game going. It’s influence on videogame designers and postnarrative authors/screenwriters is quantum. When it was first published half a century ago, D&D was the perfect underground vehicle to beta-test “storyless fiction,” because there’s relatively little expense in creating a board game, in contrast with an MMORPG or a serialized television series.
D&D was also confined to a niche audience, which gave folks like Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson a certain degree of freedom to experiment — to fail and refine — and to build a ground-up fan base, much the way comic-book superheroes were niche entertainment before they went mainstream. D&D became the proof-of-concept model that allowed creatives to break away from the linear hero’s journey narrative model — which is ironic, given how heavily D&D drew inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, a textbook hero’s journey — and innovate new modes of storytelling.
Also: I’m no expert on the history of multimedia IPs, but I think it’s fair to say TSR was one of the first entertainment companies to capitalize on that concept, franchising D&D with official monthly magazines (Dragon and Dungeon), gamebooks (Endless Quest), a Saturday-morning cartoon, endless original novels, feature films (though a bit later), to say nothing of establishing a “shared universe” with Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and so on…
If you haven’t already read it, Dell, you might enjoy Gabrielle Zevin‘s 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Set primarily in the ’90s and ’00s, it’s about friendship and creativity and the ways in which videogames represent the challenges and unlimited possibilities of life itself. D&D is cited by the characters as an influence. It is, in every possible way, the anti–Ready Player One.
So much to unpack here–you really could teach a course!
That’s what my wife’s been saying for years — LOL! Trouble is, no person in their right mind would pay to hear me wax esoteric about this mind-numbingly meaningless bullshit! (Hell, my wife’s the one who suggested this blog a decade ago — because I think she was tired of being the audience of one for this nonsense!)
When I decided some months to do a post to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of my blog, the original plan was to select ten films and write a paragraph or two on each, like the way I did with my rundown of the ten Star Trek feature films. This post was explicitly intended to be a list (like “On Tap” or “Going Fishing”), not an essay, because I didn’t want to commit to an essay, which takes an enormous amount of work owed to all the thought and research required…
But as always happens, the thing took on a life of its own, and at some point it got so goddamn long, I realized I had to divide it into three different (still themselves lengthy) installments. The more I thought about — and thought through — some of my formative influences, the more I had to say about each of them. So, what started out as an “easy” post became the blog’s most epic thesis to date. I just can’t fucking help myself!
But I have to say, Suzanne, forcing myself to backtrace some of my creative influences and really consider how they shaped my style and sensibilities proved surprisingly illuminating. I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts over the next two installments…
For those unaware, Suzanne’s latest novel Charybdis is now available from JC Studio Press for Kindle, in paperback, and even hardcover! Congratulations, Suzanne!
Your insights into what’s influenced your own create work has amazing depth. It makes me feel that I’ve only been scratching the surface of what has inspired me.
I’ll show over the next two installments, Dave, exactly how a handful of specific movies I saw at an impressionable age resonated with me at the time and stayed with me — that is, became a permanent part of my artistic DNA.
I will say that backtracing my formative influences was surprisingly challenging, and when, after much deliberation, I settled on the ten specimens I’ll present over the next two posts, I then had to justify — to myself — their inclusion. Why are these the Most Important? That required thinking very deeply about precisely how they impressed upon my narrative, stylistic, and aesthetic tastes in a lasting and measurable way.
As I said to Suzanne above, I’d intended for this post to be a listicle, not an article — and certainly not a fucking series! — but in the process of engaging more deeply with my formative muses, their influence came into much clearer focus. As such, I wanted to explore the ways they shaped me — if only for myself. If others read the next two posts and take something of value from them, I’m delighted. But in many respects, “Under the Influence” is mostly just a conversation with myself.
That said, I do think it serves as an elucidation of the old (and ambiguous) axiom Write what you know, as dellstories and I were discussing above. I recommended the 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to dellstories, Dave, and — knowing what an avid reader you are — I think you’d enjoy it, as well. It’s a story about the personal traumas and artistic influences that awaken our own creative impulses — it’s about how and why artists produce art.
My friend, I wish you a safe and happy Independence Day!
Thanks again for cracking open your noggin’ and letting us in! You gave me a bit of screenwriting PTSD with this one. I loathed all the “x meets y” nonsense we had to spout off in pitch meetings, as if a story couldn’t be understood without comparing it to something else. When I wrote with my own “voice” in my specs, I’d get great responses about the writing but then rejections with the typical “love the writing, don’t know how to make this” etc. Would cost too much. Too much risk without an established IP etc. IPs don’t just fall out of the sky——they have to be created! Whew, anywho…
Great takes on Tarantino. I’ve been entertained by his movies for years, but more often than not when I revisit one, it feels like for the last time. I’m done with Kill Bill and couldn’t even get through Part 2 in my last attempt. I haven’t examined why very much, but oddly enough Death Proof remains one I can watch over and over, and that’s one of his least popular films.
This also got me thinking about writing that a twelve year old character as an adult. It’s impossible to truly capture that young thought process (unless maybe you kept extensive diaries as a kid?). No matter how much we try to rewind time in our minds, everything is still being written through the lens of an adult. Truth fights against nostalgia. Pain can be softened or even more visceral. Simply put, memory is fallible, a nebulous mishmash of moments, senses, and feelings that can morph due to our current mindset.
Looking forward to the next piece!
Jeff! So good to hear from you, pal! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment on “Under the Influence.”
I think we all carry around a bit of screenwriting PTSD! LOL! The many, many books (Burn It Down, End Credits, Pandora’s Box) and articles (notably this one) I’ve read over the past few months on the moribund state of Hollywood have thoroughly reassured me I was fortunate to get out of the industry when I did (even if I didn’t feel fortunate at the time). Not only would I not want to be a screenwriter-for-hire in today’s inhospitable climate, but I’m in the most creatively rewarding — to say nothing of joyful — period of my life since the whole Lost Boys II adventure of 1994. If I were offered a choice tomorrow between being a staffed TV writer on a hit show or a penniless novelist/blogger, I wouldn’t even be a little tempted to trade the latter for the former.
Like loglines, beat sheets, character diamonds, STC! genre categories, and the prescribed stages of the hero’s journey, the X-meets-Y formulation is merely tool of the screenwriting trade. In the hands of a skilled writer who finds it useful, it’s an invaluable appliance. For the skilled writer who doesn’t find it useful or, worse still, creatively restraining, they are under no obligation to use it! For the unskilled writer or the dogmatic “creative” exec, however, tools like Save the Cat! and X-meets-Y and the hero’s journey are treated like imperatives — easy-bake formulas for commercial success. Those are the folks who’ve given these storytelling principles a bad name.
I just watched a movie last weekend called A Family Affair, in which Zac Efron plays a spoiled Hollywood A-lister who’s the star of a braindead action franchise titled Icarus Rush (shades of Michael J. Fox’s character in The Hard Way, who headlined an Indiana Jones knockoff called Smoking Gunn), the latest installment of which has been pitched as Die Hard meets Miracle on 34th Street… meets Speed.
Now, that X-meets-Y(-meets-Z) is patently (and, in this case, quite intentionally) stupid and conjures absolutely no meaningful vibe or mental imagery, and God knows I’ve seen a lot of actual X-meets-Y comps as bad as that one. Not every story can be effectively encapsulated in an easy-to-grasp this-meets-that equation. When they can, it can be a very useful way to convey the basic premise and overall feel of a story.
For instance: I once had a development exec pitch me a concept his company had been trying (without success) to break the back of: He said it was about a Secret Service agent who was assigned to protect a young boy who may or may not be the antichrist. “That’s awesome,” I said. “It’s basically In the Line of Fire meets The Omen.” He jumped out of his chair when I said that, and we spent the next two hours brainstorming scenarios that spun out of that X-meets-Y abstract; it established a creative baseline that allowed the pair of us to work collaboratively from an agreed-upon narrative and tonal foundation. (He was basically ready to hire me to write the script, only the prodco had decided at that point they’d poured enough money into the project and it was time to move on.)
Ah, Tarantino. One of the mandates I have for this blog is that if I’m going to write about a subject that’s been covered ad nauseum elsewhere, I have to have a take on it that I feel is A) sufficiently different from others I’ve read, and B) a strong enough thesis to get me excited to take on the weekslong project of developing, writing, revising, formatting, and posting it.
For instance: When I said my piece on Scream, Superman IV, Heat 2, the Buffy movie, and Die Hard, I felt all of those essays passed that litmus test. (I recently hit upon a great take on Batman — even better than “The Man Behind the Mask” — but given my workload, I wouldn’t get around it before 2025. I want to write it… but then, I have a notebook full of aborted or abandoned essay ideas. We’ll see. Right now, 90% of my creative energy has been allocated for my fiction.)
Cinema Speculation was a revelation, because it really did allow me to “crack the code” that is Quentin Tarantino, something I’ve been trying to do with no success for three decades. (I’d been trying to make sense of the closing line of From Dusk till Dawn for 28 years.) And when I went online and read reviews of the book, I was shocked to discover virtually no mention of the “Floyd Footnote” in any of them. It’s the key to understanding the man’s entire repertoire — and no one seemed to pay it much notice.
The only Tarantino film I’ve never seen is Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. I skipped it at the time because I generally avoid movies and TV shows about showbiz (like Entourage), but at this point I can’t really see myself ever watching it. I’m filing it under WGAF. I’m tired of Tarantino, and his worldview makes me sick. Just like The Sopranos, I can admire the artistry of a particular work without actually enjoying or endorsing it. But these days, I don’t suffer movies and TV shows that don’t speak to me emotionally… and precious few do anymore.
Digression: I revisited Reservoir Dogs a few years ago for the first time in ages, and while the movie is a spectacular feat of suspense filmmaking and low-budget innovation, I was really horrified by the liberal use of a particular racial epithet. I get those characters aren’t meant to be likable or sympathetic — we know how Tarantino feels about likable and sympathetic characters! — but holy shit on a sidewalk, was it absolutely necessary to use that word with such (repeated) gleeful abandon? There was an ugliness to that movie — which makes perfect sense, given the indie-exploitation sleaze Tarantino reveres — that made me absolutely grateful when it was finally over.
Plus, I kind of blame Tarantino — along with Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, and Kevin Williamson — for popularizing the whole pop culture–referential craze of the ’90s that taught a generation of screenwriters and authors how to write awful, self-indulgent dialogue. You’ll note how in The Dogcatcher the characters don’t speak like 14-year-olds who compare every experience to something they’ve seen in a movie. I allowed myself a small handful of pop-culture shorthands — Jessie describes her ex-husband as being like Bodhi in Point Break; Waff makes a Team Jacob joke — but I refused to write characters who only engaged in the real world through pop-culture touchstones. I wanted characters who spoke like actual adults, a predilection directly instilled in me by the movies we’ll be examining in “Under the Influence, Part 3.” Digression concluded.
As for writing preadolescent characters: Yes, at best we can produce only an emotionally honest approximation of the 12-year-old thought process and perspective. I think Stephen King and Rob Reiner got it exactly right (with The Body and Stand by Me, respectively) because they established from the outset theirs was a story about being 12 as seen from middle-aged eyes. But they challenged themselves to be emotionally honest, and to confront the unpleasantness of pubescence — the singular growing pains that mark the passage from childhood into adolescence — in a way few commercial storytellers do. I have absolutely held myself to that rigid standard with Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O., and I’m working double time to get them finished! I’m excited to share them.
I’ll have more to say about Stand by Me — about all of this — in the next installment. Look for it later this summer! In the meantime, Jeff, Happy Independence Day!
The pop-culture reference thing WAS brilliant when Tarantino, Whedon, et al, first did it
Like so many other things, it became less brilliant over time, until now it’s cliche
Indeed, sir — the subversion became the cliché. Blaming Tarantino and Whedon for that is like blaming Lucas and Spielberg for all the subpar summer blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s; it’s not their fault rapacious movie studios and less-talented filmmakers emulated what they innovated with far less artistry and personal investment.
That said, I think pop culture–savvy dialogue — and the spirit of detached irony that animates the screenplays of Tarantino, Whedon, Williamson, and Smith (and consequently saddled us with a generation of movies and TV shows produced in that same spirit) — was a lot like bubblegum: The blast of flavor it produced was refreshingly potent… but decidedly ephemeral. What worked so effectively in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction was already starting to feel a little shticky by Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Everything brilliant about Scream was somehow annoying in Scream 2. Everything charming about Clerks felt hacky in Mallrats. Whedon’s sharp ear for teenage dialogue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) devolved into “Buffyspeak” by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003): overstylized, self-consciously clever, and badly dated.
Aside from practicing earnest storytelling, one of the things I’ve tried to do in my own fiction is fuse my ’80s influences (which are mostly fantasy stories with supernatural elements) with my ’90s influences (which are mostly character-driven melodramas that predate the postmodern metafiction of Scream, et al.). Once those films have been spotlighted in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, I think you’ll see how the ’80s antecedents influenced the genre and plot of The Dogcatcher, but it’s really the ’90s stuff that governs my approach to characterization and dialogue. I’m a fiend for naturalistic dialogue that’s meant to feel like it’s coming out of the mouths of my characters, not being placed in their mouths the way Whedon and Tarantino do.
And I am in no way saying Whedon and Tarantino’s dialogue doesn’t have its pleasures — it absolutely does — and God knows they’re better at that sort of self-aware irony than any of their scores of imitators, but it’s not my style. My voice is my voice, and we’re going to learn a bit more about how I developed it in the next two posts.
Happy Fourth, Dell! I really appreciate your sticking with the blog after its half-year hiatus; I don’t take that for granted.
One of the interesting things about reading this as an “older” person is that when I was 9-12, we only had 3 channels (2 of which functioned) on our black and white TV. And us kids had to share with it with dad’s football games all Sunday. TV didn’t have much of an impact on our lives. Movies were limited to John Wayne westerns at the drive-in. So I really don’t experience much nostalgia for the movies that informed my childhood. Reading was much more accessible (which explains my choice in genre).
But I agree with you, that films and television have a very hard time capturing my attention these days. The plots are regurgitated, the characters canned, and they lack depth. I don’t even remember what we watched the night before (partly because it was so vapid that I was playing candy crush throughout).
I don’t mind violence, Sean, but violence for the sake of violence doesn’t cut it for me. Neither does a car chase for the sake of a car chase. I’m with you that we need more meaning films (and shows) that offer alternatives (moral lessons, different ways to think about behavior and choices, real consequences). We’ve somehow, as a species, deluded ourselves into thinking everything can be solved with violence and that goodness is wimpy, and it plays out in our daily lives.
I’m looking forward to parts 2 and 3 and seeing what your influences were. Nice to see your post come up. Have a great weekend.
Diana! I’m aware that, like me, you’ve been on a semi–blogging hiatus, so I appreciate your popping by and leaving such a thoughtful comment — and over a holiday weekend, at that. Thank you.
I came of age in the era of network TV as well, when all we had were CBS, NBC, and ABC (along with a few local stations like WPIX and WWOR). I distinctly recall the excitement around the fifth-grade lunch table when news broke there would be a fourth network (FOX), which gave us then-innovative programming like Married… with Children (a sitcom that dared to portray a family for whom Morning in America never came), 21 Jump Street (a police procedural for teens), and Alien Nation (a sci-fi police procedural with a social conscience). My family not only didn’t have cable, we didn’t even have a color TV! And this was the ’80s! We were really behind the times…
Gen X, however, was the first generation to have home video — meaning, for the first time in mass-media history, you didn’t have to wait for a movie to get a theatrical rerelease (which is how Tarantino revisited his cinematic favorites as a teen) or to be broadcast on network TV in order to reexperience it. It was the prototypal on-demand entertainment. Thanks to the VCR, Xers obsessed over our favorite movies in way previous generations didn’t — watching them over and over and over again — which, rather unfortunately, seeded the conditions of commercial adolescence I studied in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 1” and “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2.”
By contrast, my parents, both Silents, nursed virtually no nostalgic sentimentality for the pop culture of their youth. (My mother did name me for her favorite John Wayne movie, The Quiet Man, but better to be christened in honor of Sean Thornton than Khaleesi!) Likewise, the Baby boomers didn’t seem to pledge quite the same eternal devotion to the films of their formative years like the Xers and Millennials. That started, for better and definitely for worse, with us. (Gen-Xers’ position as the home-video generation is a topic I examined in “Scream at 25″; later, in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” I demonstrated how the Internet created online fan communities that turned pop culture into a socioreligious belief system.)
Whereas pop culture had always been previously understood as ephemera, the immediate and infinite access to it we had starting in the ’80s meant we never learned to move on from it — to let go. That’s what fuels our addiction to superheroes and Star Wars — for the same concepts and characters forty years past their prime:
But I digress. There are plenty of other essays on this blog that cover that subject ad nauseum. This point of this essay — and the two to follow — is to celebrate our influences and to examine the unique cocktail that’s produced when mixed with our individual personalities. I submit, as evidence, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022): Both novels are written by Xers, and both are inspired by the videogames and pop culture of their youth. But Ready Player One was produced by a fanboy with a Peter Pan complex and an immedicable addiction to commercial adolescence; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was written by an artist with a lot to say about the complexities of maturing from adolescence to adulthood, and how creativity helps us face the traumas that rob us of our innocence — how it can offer contextualization and catharsis.
I don’t mind cinematic violence, either, Diana, under the right circumstances, but I think Tarantino was absolutely right when he said that audiences watch violent movies not to be repulsed by it but rather to be enthralled. However… I think he was wrong to suggest that’s a fundamentally good thing — that filmmakers should give audiences what they want unapologetically, because it’s just benign, cathartic fun! He’s wrong to think there isn’t a social and personal cost to that shit over the long haul.
My hunch is that Tarantino is a deeply emotionally stunted human being who hates his mother — and his hatred for his father is matter of public record — and whose only models for manhood were the hypermasculine antiheroes of grindhouse cinema. When faced in real life with an actual low-down son of a bitch, Harvey Weinstein, Tarantino cravenly looked the other way. And when confronted about his inaction by Chris Wallace in 2022, Tarantino embarrassed the fuck out of himself by stammering, feigning ignorance, claiming if he’d known he would have had a “man-to-man talk” with Weinstein (like that would’ve changed anything), and that ultimately he “feels bad.” Who gives a fuck how you feel, Quentin?!
I think anyone who agrees with Tarantino — that movie violence is harmless fun, that “fucking bastards” make for cool protagonists — should read this transcript from Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, dated November 20, 2022:
Couldn’t have a “real hard conversation,” huh? Ladies and gents, there’s the real man behind all those cinematic tough guys he’s created over the past thirty years.
The reason Tarantino said nothing and did nothing — aside from professional self-interest and personal cowardice — is because, as he says in the passage from Cinema Speculation cited in the essay above, he fundamentally rejects the premise that fucking bastards need redemption. That isn’t merely a reflection of the kind of entertainment he enjoys; it’s foundational to his worldview.
And I’m not saying the movies are strictly to blame for that — clearly, something was fundamentally broken in him to start — but they sure as shit haven’t helped. And I suspect somewhere in his heart he knows that to be true… hence the reason he gets so irritable and defensive in interviews whenever the violence quotient of his movies is raised and, worse yet, interrogated.
Thanks again, Diana, for visiting the blog this Independence Day weekend, and for letting me use my response to your comment to make a few additional points I didn’t have room for in the essay. Enjoy your summer!
Sean
You flayed yourself wide open with the revelation about being “willing to rip your guts out and use them as raw creative materials.” I think it’s what made The Dogcatcher such an enjoyable read! Through your blog, I have come to know about the professional roads you’ve traveled as a script writer, but given your affection and heart connection to the genre and what it meant to you as you grew up? It was audible in your book! We’ve never spoken in real life, but I could definitely hear you in your first of, of what I hope become many, novels!
Aw, Wendy! Thank you! Thanks for reading and sharing feedback on both “Under the Influence” and The Dogcatcher! I don’t take any of it for granted.
I’ve always been someone very comfortable with emotional expression, and with sharing unflattering anecdotes about myself (especially if I think they’re funny)! I’ve never been timid about being candid or personal, both in my private life and in my published work (my essays and my fiction). I’m honestly not sure if that’s entirely dispositional (it was probably inevitable I’d be a writer), or if I learned emotional candor early in life through my preadolescent friendships (about which I’ll have more to say in “Under the Influence, Part 2”), or some combination thereof. Who knows.
Regardless, it made me a bit of an outlier in my family back in the day, emotionally repressed Irish Catholics that we were! LOL! Uncomfortable emotions were dealt with in one of two ways: obstinate denial or substance abuse. (I will say that the family members still around today — meaning, the ones that didn’t drink themselves to death — have made admirable strides in the intervening decades with respect to emotional vulnerability.) It’s fair to say a lot of that informed, consciously and unconsciously, the creation of the Antony family dynamic in The Dogcatcher.
There’s a line in Chapter 21 (I think) where Jessie asks Frank if he and his father ever at any point talked about the death of the mother twenty years earlier, and he says something to the sarcastic effect of, “Our family philosophy was, ‘How are you ever supposed to move on from trauma if you sit around talking about it?'” Frank is sensitive, and doesn’t share his father and brother’s aversive discomfort with painful emotion, and I think that really put him on the outside of the family in adolescence and later in young adulthood. He wanted — needed — to look his grief in the eye, but his father and brother couldn’t “go there,” so it wound up creating a hotbed of misunderstanding and resentment.
And while the particular circumstances and emotional dynamics of the Antony family should in no way be interpreted as analogous to my own — they’re not — I will say that I directly related to Frank’s emotional isolation within his own family. Like me, teenage Frank found emotional intimacy in his friendships — particularly with Waff — and then pursued a career (animal welfare in his case, fiction writing in mine) in which his uncommon sensitivity was an asset.
I drew from the same well of emotional familiarity in creating the 12-year-old protagonists of Spex, The Brigadier, and H.O.L.O., which are all works of magical realism, and I explore many of the same feelings and dynamics in The Lost Boys of the Bronx (a novelization of my 2020 blog post). In The Dogcatcher, I looked at those issues from the perspective of relatively young adults (characters in their early 30s who are navigating the complexities of careers and marriages, etc.); in my novellas, I explore them from preadolescent eyes (the time in life when wide-eyed wonder gives way to adolescent disillusionment); in LB-BX, I dramatize the same themes of family dysfunction in a story about three boyhood friends in the final days of adolescence, gazing into the abyss of adulthood.
Each new project offers an opportunity to examine the same themes in a different context, at a different phase of life. But they all come from somewhere inside me — they spring from my relationships and experiences and my feelings about those relationships and experiences — and they all owe a creative debt to the many movies I’ll be spotlighting over the next two installments of “Under the Influence.”
To your last point, Wendy: There will be many more works of fiction to come! Such is the reason I’ve had to step back a bit from blogging this year. Over the years, I have had a chance to meet a few folks in person I originally connected with here, on the blog, and they’ve all told me I speak exactly the way I write! (I assume that’s either a compliment or simply a neutral observation — not a criticism! LOL!) Hopefully one day you and I will get to see how closely our conversational voices match our writing styles…
Is that meet-up at S & P Oyster Co. in Mystic, CT. still on the table?
In this oppressive heat, amidst all the concussive political turmoil of the past few weeks, nothing sounds better to me, Dell, than a day spent gorging on fried shrimp and Sam Adams along the Mystic River!
One of these days, the group of us will hold an S&P Oyster summit! You know, I didn’t have a book launch for The Dogcatcher — it all came together so quickly, and there were other pressing matters in my life happening concurrently, that the release of the novel was never officially celebrated. Perhaps I’ll rectify that when my novella collection is published? It would be nice to do a proper launch party — and perhaps even a book tour, if only in the Northeast? I’ll keep it in mind as something worth considering on the other side of this project…
In the meantime, pal, hope you’re staying healthy and keeping productive!
Hi Sean!
I have to agree on the fact that movies definitely have an influence on the story you write – specially the older horror stories. For me, most of today’s horror movies cannot keep up with what we grew up with. I love Stephen king and I used to watch stranger things, but it’s just not the same as any of the previous movies snd series.
Lena!
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and comment on “Under the Influence”!
A wide diversity of influences is essential for the development of an artist’s voice. And by diversity, we don’t just mean different genres, but also different media: movies, music, literature, poetry, television, theater, comics, dance, illustration. Consider the varied media and genres something like Hamilton draws from, for example.
Given that I’m a member of the home-video generation, and I came of age on the cinema of Lucas/Spielberg and Simpson/Bruckheimer, it stands to reasons I am heavily influenced by those particular movies. I’ve talked extensively about how The Dogcatcher takes inspiration from The X-Files, and how it was written as an explicit throwback to the ’80s horror/comedies I’d loved as a kid (Ghostbusters, The Lost Boys, et al.). This is true.
But what I’ve talked less about is how when I set out to write The Dogcatcher as a novel, my intention wasn’t to produce a “backdoor screenplay.” I very much wanted to write a novel, and to creatively exploit the particular advantages of the literary medium. Yes, The Dogcatcher is conventionally structured like a three-act screenplay, and heavily inspired by the movies I’d seen as a kid, but I in no way wanted it to read like a novelization. A lot of care was put into crafting an enjoyable read, from the descriptions to the dialogue to the characters’ inner monologues.
Without the benefit of mood music and jump scares — the techniques that make horror movies so effective and enjoyable — I had to best take advantage of what can be done on the page but not on the screen. And for that, I drew influence from many authors I’ve admired, from Richard Price (for naturalistic dialogue) to Elmore Leonard (for prose stylistics) to Raymond Chandler (for environmental atmospherics) to Tana French (for poetic descriptives), to say nothing of titans of horror Stephen King and William Peter Blatty, among many, many other literary influences. They are all part of the “stew of my own making.”
And I suspect one of the reasons the book has gotten such positive feedback (on Goodreads and elsewhere) is because it’s accessible like an old-school Hollywood movie — it’s a simple story, simply told — but aspires to be more novelistic with respect to characterization, description, and philosophical digression. I think, IMHO, I struck a good balance between a cinematic premise/plot and a more literary approach to the emotional arcs and interpersonal dynamics, which the page offers a broader canvas to explore. So, even though this three-part blog post only covers a sampling of my cinematic influences, the movies aren’t my only muse!
To your last point: No, even the throwback stuff isn’t quite the same as the source material it’s attempting to evoke/homage — nor should it be. All art is a snapshot of a moment in time, never to be perfectly recaptured. That’s why I think, on balance, it’s better for storytellers to take inspiration from their formative influences without aspiring to bald-faced imitation, a subject I covered in “Artistic Originality: Is It Dead — or Was It Merely a Fallacy to Begin With?” Such is the reason I’ve entirely sworn off so-called “legacy sequels,” regardless of how well-received they are. I don’t find them to be intellectually — or even emotionally — nourishing. Quite the opposite.
Thanks for stopping by, Lena! Hope you’re having a fun, productive summer…
Sean
Always a pleasure, Sean!
I must admit that especially music seems to be a big influence; the right music at the right time for me sets the mood perfectly, but like you said, there are so many things that can influence our artistic selfs!
Even nature, I’ve found can be a good source-all the sounds and movement of people can set something off in one’s mind.
I hope you have a fruitful artistic journey too!
Music can absolutely be a writerly muse! I myself always write my fiction to music I’ve curated in a special playlist for each individual project. I can’t write to music with lyrics (too distracting) — only instrumentals, and usually movie soundtracks.
For The Dogcatcher, all the scenes set in the town of Cornault — those in which everyone is going about their daily business — were written to John Williams’ score from George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987), because I felt that had the right whimsical quality to it: playful with just a hint of something wicked or supernatural.
The romantic subplot, with Frank and Jessie, was written to Ennio Morricone’s score from Mike Nichols’ Wolf (1994). That had beautifully tender texture, an emotional fragility, I really liked — a deep yearning straight from the soul that I thought exemplified Frank and Jessie’s ever-inching-closer dynamic, like two dogs circling each other as trust is incrementally established.
And then all the sequences of werewolf action/horror were written to Danny Elfman’s music from Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010), which had an intensity and sense of foreboding that was perfect to get me in the right headspace to write those scenes.
I give a lot of thought to the “temp score” I play in the background as I write my scenes, because I appreciate the power of music to set a mood. If I were to pick up a copy of The Dogcatcher right now and start reading a random passage, I would hear in my mind’s ear the music it was written to. You wouldn’t… but hopefully the spirit of that score is somehow imbued in the writing; it becomes another layer of texture the reader unconsciously senses, I hope.