My Hunger Games movie review

…is right here.

There’s a long tradition of Socialist Worker movie reviews generating major debates, so I am eagerly awaiting responses.

Wednesday Words: From this week’s episode of The Simpsons…

…in which Bart and Homer form a tween fiction writing team.

So many vampires, with the fangs and the capes and the medals – nobody knows how they earned them.

- Professor Frink (weird scientist guy), The Simpsons

I like my romantic ideals a bit less anti-romantic, actually.

It is because I am so committed to romance novels, and teen romance in particular, that I must register some objections. Why are so many of the romantic ideals in these books so… unromantic?

[Spoiler alert for HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES]

As Exhibit A, take HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES, and specifically their codas. Both of these books end by jumping into the future to show us that the protagonists really do stay Together Forever with their teen sweethearts, which I guess is meant to prove that it really was true love after all.

Which: have some confidence in the stories you told us, Rowling and Collins, because some bland factual knowledge that the characters are still together in 20 years doesn’t add anything to the emotional resonance of what I already experienced those characters experiencing together. I gather that the logic is that the significance of the relationship lies not in its meaning in the present, but in what it turns out to amount to in the future. And what exactly is romantic about that?

By the same token, I don’t see how a compelling story of those characters changing later on and maybe not working so well anymore cheapens the story we already saw. The scene when Willow and Tara blow out their candle in New Moon Rising does not take away one bit of power from the way Willow smiles when she gets that Oz really likes her, because how could it? The romance isn’t in the future; it’s in all the moments.

Also. I’ve had enough of this “you’re just what I was always waiting for” business that’s in every third teen romance*, mostly when the author doesn’t seem to have any idea what else a romantic hero might say to express their feelings, because the image it gives me is of a giant checklist that you create early in life of all the traits you seek in a person, and serendipitously there comes the creature that you have reductively decided to want. But is not the whole idea of romance that someone is always surprising to you, and this matters precisely because you never stop being curious enough about them to try to puzzle them out? And also that through their relationship, both parties to it become something a bit different than what they already were?

I feel like romance is an emergent property of a relationship, not something you can shellack on top of a story by offering proof (through declarations or longevity) that it must have been there the whole time. And I also feel like my idea of what romance is is the much more romantic one, in the sense that it’s so inherently idealized, and so it puzzles me that people drawn to writing romance don’t seem to share it.

And in truth I feel a bit plaintive here, because the fact is, I was built for romance stories. I cried and cried for Dawn and Tim, people. Why am I finding so little romance in my romance novels?

* And yes, I do make an exception for The National. Obviously.

Wednesday Words: Grieving (and giggling and griping)

Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical center knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anesthetic — the slow, sawtoothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.

– Richard K. Morgan, THIRTEEN

And since I’ve been so scandalously absent from blogging, here are two small bonus Wednesday Wordses that made me giggle. From the next page of THIRTEEN:

It’s Falwell. Nothing short of death stops that motherfucker.

(referring to an infectious disease spread by weapon, a very appropriate object for the Falwell signifier, I feel.) And:

It’s a metaphor for bad writing!

– My friend Aly during LOST last night. It was when we were enjoying the subtle shades of meaning behind Ben Linus digging his own grave. Don’t you like how they always include inconspicuous symbolism for the really sophisticated viewers to pick up?

We’re all of us growing up… me, Angela, and Jordan.

I was going to post this on my Facebook wall… but two of my friends did it for me. Why does everyone know me so well? (Oh, right, the fact that my current Facebook profile pic is a Brian Krakow headshot may have something to do with it.)

The Guardian tried to fill in the blanks between then and now.

I, meanwhile, am 27 today. And (at last!!!!) defending my Master’s thesis tomorrow. The latter being one reason for my extended absence from the blog, despite the immense joy, and pain, and longing that accompanied my discovery of GRACELING and THE HUNGER GAMES within weeks of each other.

If I survive tomorrow, my many opinions about them may follow… let’s hope!

Kids are so smart.

How old do you think this kid is???

I love the way he nods his head. And when he pauses and looks like he’s going to pick his nose, but he’s just scratching his face.

I feel like the stereotype of adults reading kids’ books is that they are somehow debasing themselves, but let’s face it: I will never, at any age, be as cool as this kid.

Oh, and yes, that is a ukulele he’s playing. I’d like to hook him up with Stephin Merritt, but it’s possible the world would explode.

The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

h/t Complications Ensue

There’s a children’s book article at SocialistWorker.org, and I didn’t write it?

Warms my heart.

I haven’t seen the WTWTA movie yet (can’t wait. And I want to see to CLOUDY & A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS too. And I never go to children’s movies). But I think this is an interesting short review even though I got sort of lost in the argument:

But this isn’t a coming–of-age movie. In the final scene, it’s joyously unclear whether Max has learned anything from his adventure. One thing that is clear is that, whether scary or sad or belligerent, children should see this movie if for no other reason than as an antidote to movies made by men who want them to grow up.

One reason I think I love YA books so much is that I truly love coming-of-age stories. But I’m interested in the idea that stories about younger kids maybe shouldn’t all be about growing up, but about simply being the age that they portray. You know, the Ramona books are always my gold standard for anything, but I’m now wondering if this is one reason why.

Actually, even in a lot of the YA I love, it sometimes bothers me that the teenagers are like little adults (I’m thinking of Sarah Dessen’s protagonists here, but this is something that bugs me all the time). They have adolescent lives — particularly, they’re under their parents’ control in certain respects — but they have a level of emotional maturity that some of us… lacked. Not that they don’t make mistakes, but they aren’t particularly adolescent mistakes. I’ve been reading so much lately about adults who read YA (like me!), and I wonder how much of this is driven by YA that isn’t really about adolescence at all, except as a metaphor.

Shades of MSCL: When instead of apologizing for betraying someone, you minimize their pain, and it’s supposed to be self-deprecating and romantic

From Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE:

“It’s never been alright. Not since the day I walked up these stairs and walked away from you. I ‘urt you that day, I know I did, but all you lost was me. I ‘urt myself a million times worse because I lost you.”

From MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s should’ve-been-penultimate episode (damn you, “Weekend”), “The Betrayal”:

Angela: Look, I don’t care anymore, okay? So just go away.

Rayanne: You’re not the only one who got hurt.
Angela: Well, forgive me if I can’t feel sorry for you, Rayanne.
Rayanne: You lost nothing, Angela. You lost a lousy, selfish friend, a guy you never really had… you lost nothing! …. I lost a really good friend! I lost everything.

And then comes the part where I cry and cry. It’s better on the show than in the book.

The vagaries of memory… in a narrator?

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.