"Listen carefully. And if you would remain safe, let your face show nothing which might further rouse the suspicions of those army women."
I'm just about 100 pages into Wizard and Glass in my 2019 Dark Tower re-read, and I figured it was about time to get cracking on this here Drawing of the Three post lest I get too far ahead of myself.
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE ART FIRST
I more or less had the same reactions to this book in 2019 that I had when I first read it in 2012. With one exception: 2012-me seemed to really like Phil Hale's art. 2019-me really did not. Let's tackle that first.
The moments chosen were all so odd, although that's a general complaint for the Dark Tower series art altogether. It's like they had zero idea what moments of the book were iconic, or how characters were supposed to look. Let's say you were an illustrator and were hired to produce 5 or 6 illustrations to accompany a new edition of The Hobbit, to choose something fairly universally known. Would you a) draw the most notable monsters of the book in a way that is directly contradicted by the text description? b) have one of the drawings be a close-up grin of a character who's not even in the book? and/or c) have the rest be odd-angle close-ups of only one of the action sequences, say the dwarves fighting the goblins under the mountain? In a way where you can't tell who's who or what's going on, not like an epic battle scene that conveys any of the scene's excitement.
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you and Phil Hale would seem to be on the same page.
 |
| Does this look 4 feet long to you? Or like lobster/ vulture hybrids "with a coat of paint?" |
 |
| Total waste of space. (Actually, is that one in the middle Phil Hale? You'd figure this stuff would be organized neatly and comprehensively out there, but go ahead and google "Phil Hale and Drawing of the Three" and click on everything that comes up: even the Stephen King Dark Tower page mixes things up and leaves things out. That's supposed to be Walter/ the MIB, right?) |
No offense to Mr. Hale, whose reputation is world-class. But this time around I was baffled by the selections and their execution. Thankfully I enjoyed revisiting the text a lot more than the pictures.
LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING
Things get off with a bang when Roland walks along the edge of the Western Sea (and I don't quite understand how it's the "western" sea, but cardinal directions - like the flow of time - are all kablooey in Roland's world) and meets the lobstrosities, some of my favorite things from any King novel. I love these guys and their "lawyerly questions" ("dad-a-chock? dad-a-chick? dad-a-chum? dad-a-cham?") and the little things, like how they all raise their arms up when the surf comes in. One of them takes a sizable chunk out of Roland's hand and poisons him. Exciting beginning and a rule of the monomyth ("You have forgotten the face of your father") : grievously wound your protagonist near the start of his journey.
From there Roland finds the first of The Doors. Not Manczarek and the gang but actual doors hanging into space, leading, it seems, into one of the "other worlds than these" Jake mentioned last time. Let's spend a moment on the doors themselves.
The whole business with this first door and everything that goes with it (going back and forth, testing what can be brought and how, carefully considering the physicality of everything described - including a surreal, shimmering door following Eddie in a taxi cab, etc. - "coming forward" etc.) is like a peak at King's inner writing process. We're seeing the struts and the beams of the novel-in-progress. He's asking questions of his concept and answering them, in "real time" as it were, allowing the prose itself to pose the question and provide the answers. All of this stuff is great fun - and it's something he will revisit, both less successfully and more, in The Regulators, Dreamcatcher, and End of Watch - and the way King breaks up the sections is also fun. Like this:
King has mentioned the importance to the reading eye of occasional (and well-strewn) white space between blocks of text a few times in interviews or introductions. Here, it helps with the whole POV shifting in play. (I also like how Roland is expressing the author's own sleight-of-hand in pt. 10 up there. By emphasizing and isolating his relief that Eddie Dean is buying the whole set-up, he is extending the same acceptance to the reader. Jedi Mind Trick. I approve.)
That said, some of the stuff with the Doors (reading the 'Mortpedia' etc. It'd be like getting a thesaurus in a whole different language. Can he read "pictures" in Mort's mind? If so, are they limited? It's referred to as pictures from a menu. How can he interpret these things? Or with Eddie, how can he know so much but be so confused/ vague on things?) is just too much. It's magic, and King doesn't need to make sense, but the illusion of sense that he weaves is sometimes so strong that he ends up illuminating the ways it doesn't add up.
THE PRISONER
(EDDIE DEAN)
I have very few complaints with this section. Eddie is introduced well, and I like pretty much everything that happens and how it unfolds. The army women quote up there amuses me muchly. Everything with the gangsters and Eddie's inner world and Henry and his interactions with the customs folk = A+. Loved it.
Three things, though:
(1) "O great sage and eminent junkie..." You know when King seizes on a phrase and drives it so far into the ground that it goes through the center of the earth and causes earthquakes in China? He doesn't quite do that here, but you see him almost losing it. At one point, though, he gets tired of this little tic he gave himself to work with and it becomes "great sage and eminent blah-blah", then he drops it altogether. I was grateful.
(2) Eddie gets off heroin kind of fast, doesn't he? I get that there are extenuating circumstances (and how), but yeah: I don't know of anyone who had a junk habit, kicked it cold turkey, and then took care of a fever-sick gunslinger (or anyone) during their weeks of withdrawal. I'm not saying it's impossible, just improbable to such a degree where I feel King should have addressed it more.
(2.5) While we're here, do Eddie and Odetta fall in love a tad too conveniently and quickly? Do they ever. But I can shrug this one off. Truth be told, I can shrug off the accelerated pace of his heroin recovery as well. If only King's quickened pace (for either) had a real world analog.
(3) In the span of one half a page, Eddie references Christa McAuliff, Walter Payton, and the movie The Shining. (And mercifully doesn't bash it.) That plus all of Eddie's endless wisecracking (with about 1 of every 100 being actually funny wisecracking) I think King is (or maybe was) a lot like Ritchie Tozier. I wonder if that's his purest how-he-is-in-real-life analog. I don't think there is one perfect one, but I'd love to pick his wife and loved one's brains on the topic.
ROLAND
At one point Eddie says Roland has "eaten an apple from the fever tree." That sounds like some down-home expression that I should have heard before and hell maybe I have and forgot. It's a good one, though. Sort of like the mirror universe of The Sweetheart Tree.
During the fever "shuffling" sections, Roland's diseased body and scattered POV put me in mind of certain passages in The Tommyknockers or Misery, and I wondered how much this was the real-world author of 1985-1986 peeking through. (Which is kind of funny given the actual author's later appearance - is this foreshadowing of a certain kind?) I wasn't sure exactly when he was writing Drawing of the Three, though, so I turned to The Truth Inside the Lie maestro Bryant Burnette who sent me the following:
"There is an appendix (in Bev Vincent's The Road to the Dark Tower) containing a timeline of the series' creation. It lists the dates of the writing of The Drawing of the Three as June 15, 1986 to September 1986. The corresponding dates for the other books you mention aren't listed, but each of those individual books do have their dates listed at the end (which Drawing itself does not):
It -- September 9, 1981 - December 28, 1985
The Tommyknockers -- August 19, 1982 - May 19, 1987
Misery -- September 23, 1984 - October 7, 1986"
It -- September 9, 1981 - December 28, 1985
The Tommyknockers -- August 19, 1982 - May 19, 1987
Misery -- September 23, 1984 - October 7, 1986"
So yeah that would put the writing of DOT3 smack-dab in the middle of "the end of my adventures" section described in On Writing. There might be some of King's real world anguish in this part. (All the odder, then, that he'd give an inaccurate read on Eddie's heroin withdrawal. Perhaps it was wishful thinking - my kingdom for a door to a world where I can't score and have to kick and have a gunslinger to save.)
THE PUSHER
(JACK MORT)
Skipping ahead to Jack Mort for a second. What an unsung creation from King's catalog this guy is. All the Do-bees do it right stuff and all the rest: an unpleasant but solid creation. You really have to give him massive credit for how individuated each of these new characters is. Jack, especially - and you'd be forgiven for not even noticing given where he falls in the book and all the other stuff that's already happened/ is happening by that point.
I guess I find it a little silly that Jack is responsible both for dropping a brick on Odetta's head when she was a young girl and also the accident that took her legs. But here King has given himself an out: "it's all ka, brother." Okay fine.
The scene where the ammunition in Roland/Mort's explodes, and he drops his pants to reveal he's wearing ladies' underwear made me laugh. I pictured it Quantum Leap style, i.e. the viewer would see Roland, with a confused but very serious look on his face, but he'd be dressed in Mort's clothes.
The scene where he orchestrates Mort's suicide to fuse Odetta and Detta makes zero sense. I read it three separate times, but it's lost in magic and vagaries. Still: cool to see the fucker get what was coming to him.
Okay, so I mentioned the similarities between certain sections of DOT3 and Misery and The Tommyknockers. Here's the one that unfortunately is the equivalent of the sewer gangbang in the other book he was writing during this time. Everything above I more or less loved, even the parts I take mild objection to. I'd have no problem saying I love this book, it's an A. Here's the part that singlehandedly drops that grade to just about a 'C,' though, and baffles me:
THE LADY OF SHADOWS
(ODETTA HOLMES and DETTA WALKER)
Holy goddamn moley. Look: Detta Walker is just a mess. Not just as a character, but as an indication of King's synapses woefully misfiring. Just a real wtf, and possibly the only other wtf of the big man's catalog I can say is equal to the sewer gangbang in It. (And that neither can totally sink either work is truly amazing: how good do the other sections have to be to not sink the ship with these two complete missteps? Pretty effing good.)
I can hang with the idea of Odetta, even if it's weird that King named her after an actual 1960s civil rights activist who she clearly is not. But okay - different levels of the tower, resonating (somehow), whatever. I'm sure there are those that object to a white guy authoring such a character, but I object to those objectors: at their heart of their objection is a bigoted, false premise they are not addressing. And I can sort of admire the idea (and the audacity) of trying to craft a character like Detta Walker / "Butterfly McQueen gone Looney Tunes" * nightmarish mess. And I like the idea of a "fused" Susannah Dean, but as we'll see, this fusion comes and goes at King's discretion (as even eventually her handicap does.) So, it's kind of a false resolution.
* And it's not enough (verdammt) to just have other characters recognize how goddamn absurd and over the top and insane and hateful she sounds. This is King writing this, about himself; it reminds me of reading Raymond Chandler flirt with himself for pages. It's a stupid feint to even have the characters comment on this.
Thing is, Detta Walker is not the only time in King's catalog where he bafflingly indulges this Stepin Fetchit/ Little Black Sambo Tourette's disorder (see The Plant, Mister Mercedes, et al) nor its equally cartoonish white counterpart (see Henry Bowers, Mister Mercedes and End of Watch, et al). It's kind of an insane part of King's head that he needs to never put on the page and you can't help but wonder just what the hell he thinks he's doing with this stuff. The dialogue he gives Detta ("GOAN, GRAYMEAT! GOAN, HONKY SONSA BITCHES!") is unreadable. These sections from her POV can only be skimmed. To look straight at them is to gaze upon the face of the Medusans.
And it sure does make me wonder how they figured on handling ANY of this in the movie. Especially when they cast Idris Elba as Roland and the whole conversation that kicked up. (I say conversation, but, as is all too often the cases in the media-academe environment of the 21st century, it was actually a monologue.) What gets me is that there are issues of substance and authorship and identity here, and instead of addressing them, King, when asked, chose to play the "Oh, the only thing that matters to Roland is how he treats is ka-tet" sentiment in response. Yeah. Lovely sentiment, but it sidesteps completely the this-is-only-there-because-you-WROTE-this-batshit-you-honky-mahfah issue. Not to mention he carelessly creates a false division between people who just read what King tweeted and clutch their pearls and get teary-eyed and anyone who actually cares about the novels or has a pretty reasonable question about this aspect of them. Suddenly, membership in the latter camp - previously open to anyone who, you know, cares about the books - is tied to the virtue-signalling bimbosity of the former. It truly angers me that instead of addressing this, King (and everyone involved in the looks-to-be-thwarted Dark Tower franchise) chose the false division path. We're only here because of you, big man; that wasn't an opportune time to fuck off back to la la land.
In addition to how stupid the character is and how appallingly (if spiritedly - he wrote her with gusto, but it's like diarrhea: it's not an excess anyone should be particularly impressed by. Its excess is a result of the sickness that causes it) she is written, the fact that she commando-style captures Eddie on the beach is also... well, how many different ways can I say stupid/ ridiculous, etc. I'm unsure why King makes her handicapped if any time he writes her into a situation (and the worst of this is yet to come, in bks 6 and 7) he can just shrug her handicap off.
On this, though, I defer to the actual handicapped. Is this a problem for them? Or is it no big deal or even pleasant to see such a shrug-off in fiction that the real world does not afford? I can't answer this. The English major in me, though, objects beyond this and for other reasons: you just shouldn't give characters traits you're prepared to jettison when you feel like it.
There was a better path - and in Detta's case, a non-crazy-as-mothereffing-hell path - and King should have found it. Detta Walker torpedoes this book, and it's a damn shame. The ship ain't sunk, but it's listing into port through an act of pure self-sabotage.
DARK TOWER STUFF
- My main question from last time about why the CK/ MIB steer Roland to these doors is answered satisfactorily in The Waste Lands. We'll cover that next time.
- Flagg and Marten are referred to as different people. That's not right, is it? Of course, when he wrote this, the 2003 revision of The Gunslinger (where the MIB tells Roland this explicitly) was still in the future. Perhaps that's why?
- The ending is suitably cliffhangerish and the book as weird as it is suitably bk2-ish. I don't know how else to describe it, but it seems to fit my hazy mental idea of what an acceptable pt. 2 of an 8 pt. serial should look like, even if - to its credit - it has no analog to any other pt. 2 I can think of. Although: the very last few pages with Eddie and Roland seemed to just run into the end of the book. I guess King had some immediate other concerns at the time.
So much for my re-read. See you in pt. 3.
(1) I've never much cared for the Phil Hale art, either. I first encountered them in 1990, back when I was too undiscriminating to have a sense of what did and didn't work, so back then I kind of just accepted them uncritically. But I never looked forward to looking at them, the way I did Whelan's art for the first book. That's kind of the tipoff, I guess; I might not have known what I disliked, but I definitely knew what I loved, and Phil Hale's art wasn't it.
ReplyDelete(2) IS that supposed to be the Man In Black grinning? I always thought it was Roland, but I have no actual idea of why I thought that.
(3) You make a Doors-the-band joke there, but ... I wouldn't be surprised if King got the idea for these doors in part (maybe even totally) from the same place Jim and pals got their band's name. Quite possibly via hearing about it by reading about the band. So you may not be as far off as you thought!
(4) "We're seeing the struts and the beams of the novel-in-progress. He's asking questions of his concept and answering them, in "real time" as it were, allowing the prose itself to pose the question and provide the answers." -- That's a great insight.
(5) "By emphasizing and isolating his relief that Eddie Dean is buying the whole set-up, he is extending the same acceptance to the reader." -- Ditto.
(2) I'm confused as hell why - in 2019, with the Dark Tower/ King as widely dispersed as it is, and so many "MASSIVE KING FANS HERE!" commenting on this topic, why there cannot be a single site that lists each illustration that appears in each book and who's it by. And all of the sites that purport to do so should be in 100% lockstep agreement. So bizarre to me that this isn't the case. Anyway! If it's Roland, holy moley, I hate it even more. That picture is not Roland. Fuck you, Phil Hale/ Sai King/ anyone who signed off on this. Pardon the aggression! Late night wine. (I told myself I'd hold off on responding until Early Morning Coffee, but hey.)
DeleteIt's even more confusing (not that pic specifically but the Hale art in general for that novel) when you consider that the original art was eventually replaced by different art by the same artist. All of the examples you included (I believe) are the originals and not the revised versions. Which do NOT, I should note, come from a revised version of the novel; such does not exist as of yet, though King has mentioned wanting to revise all of the earlier books.
DeleteWhew...! Hard to keep all that straight. There really should be a comprehensive list of all the Dark Tower art. Surely that exists SOMEwhere. If not, what an oversight by the King community!
By the way, I just went and did a little hands-on research and found that that particular image IS indeed titled "The Gunslinger." But I agree with you: in no way does that actually represent Roland.
DeleteFor the revised artwork, that illustration was replaced entirely. So clearly somebody must have agreed that whatever that was it was NOT Roland.
Regarding the revised Hale art, by the way: I like it even less. Whatever one thinks of the originals, they are at least colorful and striking; not necessarily striking in a good way, but they have an impact. The revised versions are bland and colorless, mostly. Yuck.
When I think about it, my fond DT-art feelings are almost entirely focused on books one, three,(some of) seven, and eight. The others are mostly washouts for me.
Thankee, sai, for the extra research. I cannot believe that was passed off as Roland. WTF? At least they attempted to correct it, but yikes.
Delete(6) "You know when King seizes on a phrase and drives it so far into the ground that it goes through the center of the earth and causes earthquakes in China?" -- I think he's now progressed to the point where entire novels - nay, series of novels - are written in this getting-it-out-of-his-system manner. Not my favorite aspect of his work, not by a long shot. Weirdly, the "great sage and eminent junkie" bit never bothered me.
ReplyDelete(7) "Eddie gets off heroin kind of fast, doesn't he?" -- Knowing nothing of the process beyond what I saw in "Trainspotting," this never occurred to me. Thinking about it, I wonder if maybe the idea isn't that Eddie gets better quicker because he has ZERO options, even mentally. Dude can't even go score some KFC. It's probably more likely that King simply didn't want to dwell on it, knowing that such a period lay somewhere in his own future; dreading it, he glossed over it just a bit. And I guess there's also the time-is-funny-over-here thing.
(8) "While we're here, do Eddie and Odetta fall in love a tad too conveniently and quickly? Do they ever. But I can shrug this one off." -- Me too, but this actually does bug me just a little. ONLY a little; I like the characters (and King's writing) so much that I'd be willing to accept damn near any plot contrivance that enabled me to spend time with them.
(9) "I think King is (or maybe was) a lot like Ritchie Tozier. I wonder if that's his purest how-he-is-in-real-life analog." -- Oh, man ... I think you're onto something there, for sure. And I'm projecting forward to the new movie and the photos I've seen of Bill Hader, who I can totally imagine playing King in a biopic. But yeah, I think his own sense of humor is probably such that he's actively envious of both Eddie and Richie. (A weird thing to say given that he invented them both, but I think it tracks.)
(10) "Roland's diseased body and scattered POV put me in mind of certain passages in The Tommyknockers or Misery, and I wondered how much this was the real-world author of 1985-1986 peeking through." -- I remember when I reread all three of these books a few years back, I was struck by how sharply each of them tackled the themes of addiction and (?) recovery, but moreso than that how differently they all went about it. Almost as though King were trying them each on for size. And they all came out in the same year! AND then he did it again two years later with "The Dark Half." We can all carp about individual aspects being problematic, but King's body of work only seems to grow more impressive the more reflection upon it one puts in. A true cavern of wonders.
(7) Sadly I've had a lot more experience with people struggling with heroin/ withdrawal since reading this in 2012. If that's true of me, it's probably true of most people, King too, since 1987. I think your logic is sound , here, and it's not something that really bugs me. A perhaps more realistic scenario would have been Eddie braining Roland when they got to the 2nd door and running into the world to get heroin and having a section or two of that chaos. But it's no dealbreaker.
Delete(8) Agreed.
(10) Good points all around! Agreed, as well.
(11) "I guess I find it a little silly that Jack is responsible both for dropping a brick on Odetta's head when she was a young girl and also the accident that took her legs. But here King has given himself an out: "it's all ka, brother." Okay fine." -- To some extent, ka as King uses it is merely a thumbs-upping-of-bullshit switch that he can flip on occasion. I guess I can see how that wouldn't work for some people, but it works for me more often than not. I mean coincidences like that DO actually happen sometimes, so why not write a story in which there's a sort of meaning to it? As fantasy fiction, I can roll with that. It's even kind of thrilling to me at times, and this dark presence of Jack Mort in Odetta Holmes' life does that for me. Like getting a peek behind some secret curtain of existence.
ReplyDelete(12) I feel about Detta Walker something similar to the way I feel about Phil Hale's art. My grown-up brain recognizes it as bad, but it's not my grown-up brain that reads this book so much as it is the vestigial remnants of my fifteen-year-old brain. And that side of me thought -- thinks -- Detta was/is equal parts dynamic and terrifying. A complete cartoon, yes; and I think you're 100% right to wonder what it is that made the real-life King think that was a good idea.
I'd need to spend some real time with my own thoughts on it to know exactly how I feel; or, more precisely, to know WHY I feel how I feel. Which is: accepting of Detta. I *like* Detta. It may be simply because I love the novel, and have never bothered to fully examine her.
This entire side of King's work -- including the other examples you mention (Henry Bowers, Jerome's "Tyrone Feelgood," etc.) -- is one that probably deserves to be taken to task more than it has been. And I'd imagine in the coming years, it will be. I don't think he'll ever get branded in the way actual racist H.P. Lovecraft has been, but I wouldn't rule it out, either.
(13) "And it sure does make me wonder how they figured on handling ANY of this in the movie." -- My guess: by sidestepping it altogether. There were rumors floating around during the Ron Howard phase of the movie that noted white woman Jennifer Carpenter was going to be cast as Susannah. Which, hey, good actress. That sort of thing isn't what I wanted from the movies, but if Roland could be Idris, I'd have been okay with Susannah being Carpenter.
(14) "Not to mention he carelessly creates a false division between people who just read what King tweeted and clutch their pearls and get teary-eyed and anyone who actually cares about the novels or has a pretty reasonable question about this aspect of them. Suddenly, membership in the latter camp - previously open to anyone who, you know, cares about the books - is tied to the virtue-signalling bimbosity of the former." -- As a member of that latter camp, I feel this. Although I myself argued years before the fact that you COULD cast Roland with a black actor. So I kind of straddle both camps like a meddling trickster at times, I guess. I even piss myself off sometimes.
(15) On the subject of things like that, have you heard that Holly in HBO's "The Outsider" (mini?)series has been racially reassigned? With, apparently, a terrific actress; so I'm kind of okay with it. I just don't know how -- or if -- they are going to deal with the "Mr. Mercedes" backstory at all. THAT'S my real concern; Holly being white, black, red, brown, or yellow isn't too big a deal to me.
A somewhat different story with Roland and Susannah. But even then, I was okay with provided the story was changed to accommodate it, which it was.
(11) "Like getting a peek behind some secret curtain of existence." That's almost certainly the intention, I think. It annoys me when King just gives a character telepathy or what not, and likely always will, but I agree, here he gives himself the ka (and ka-tet) covering fire at least.
Delete(12) The weird thing is, when the inevitable "let's brand King a racist and burn his books!" mania kicks in, I'll be defending him with all my heart and very much anti-that assertion/ smear. I don't think he does any of this stuff because he has racist ideas of what black people do or feel or like; I think he's got that weird inverted narcissism of the white liberal. I object to THAT, but I doubt there'll be any mobs grouped around that topic. But my objection to Detta Walker is just that this is a dumb idea. If it was the only thing in King's catalog like this I'd say well, dumb idea but let's move on. Instead, tho, I find myself wondering what the hell it is about this kind of dialogue that King finds so spellbinding. I can only speculate, but I think his Ritchie Tozier-side likes funny voices and accents and cartoon impressions, etc., and anyone of King's generation probably had that sort of Detta Walker character as part of their repertoire growing up. Unpleasant, but there it is. And I have some sympathy there. One personal example - the whole Asian-stereotype voice ("can I have eggrow preeze?") anyone would agree this is not something anyone should do or defend. And yet, I'm sure there are people who have used such a voice among friends who aren't doing it because they think Asian people are ridiculous, they're referencing more Hollywood stereotypes, etc. I don't know if it's quite a one to one - I'll have to think about it. I suppose we should be thankful King isn't as addicted to THAT voice as he is to the Little Black Sambo/ cra-AYY-zy black person voice. (Can you imagine a whole book of someone saying "Yes preeze" etc. and then people saying "Gee, why are you doing that?" Gaaa.)
(13) It's so weird how people continually second-guess the source material with King. I remain opposed to all race-swapping as I think it's motivated by something really dumb (i.e. it's racist if we have only white people in this cast, even if they're white in the book). But, what am I going to do, boycott everything? That just emboldens the asshats. Hollywood is run by really dumb people, especially on this subject. It's just race narrative narcissism. Anyway! With source material as specifically black/white as this is, it's tugging on unraveling threads to try and "fix" it. If I were adapting it, I'd find an actress who really wants to dive into the part and have a lot of discussion beforehand.
(13.5) Maybe they'll cast Jennifer Carpenter as Susannah's "white legs" when we get to bk 6.
(14) "I kind of straddle both camps like a meddling trickster at times, I guess. I even piss myself off sometimes." ha - I know the feeling. But this adaptability on your part is probably a good survival mechanism.
(15) I hadn't heard that. I guess who cares, sure. Haven't read THE OUTSIDER so I don't know if it alters anything in the book to do so.
(12) You make some good points here. It had never occurred to me to be deeply thankful that King has never -- that I remember, at least -- written a stereotypically Asian character, but now I feel like I've dodged a real bullet.
Delete(13) It feels to me like Odetta/Detta/Susannah is a role just waiting to turn some lady actor into a superstar. Iconic stuff, played by the right person. Sure, tone the cartoonish racism down; by all means. Or hey, maybe the right actor could make a compelling and believable meal out of that stuff, too.
(13.5) lol
(14) Probably so. It's mostly accidental.
(15) I don't think Holly's race matters much to any of the books, so I'm not stirred up by this at all. However, her experiences in the Hodges trilogy are VERY much a part of the background to her character in "The Outsider." They're the whole reason she appears at all. So I'm not quite sure I see how that's going to work in this series. Maybe they'll just ignore all of that? That's likely doable, but at that point I wonder why you don't just change her name, or cut her out altogether and assign all of her scenes to some other character. But I'll give them a chance to win me over in that regard, I guess.
(13) I agree! My rants aside, if I were adapting teh book for the screen, I'd take this tack: "we're going to tone down some of this ridiculousness, but the general concept is the same. Are you ready to win all the Oscars?"
Delete(15) There sure is a lot of King being adapted lately. Which is cool, but I hope sooner or later we get another DEAD ZONE or SHAWSHANK and stop with all the 11.22.63 and UNDER THE DOMEs and CASTLE ROCKs.
(15) For sure. Although between "It," "Gerald's Game," and "1922," I thought 2017 was pretty solid in the adaptations department. And this year we get the second "It," a new "Pet Sematary," and "Doctor Sleep," all of which could theoretically be great. Equally, they could theoretically be turds. I'll see 'em no matter what.
Delete(16) I never had much of a problem with Detta getting the drop on Eddie. I took it as an indication that she was super-wily and stealthy in the way that Roland was super-accurate with marksmanship. She wouldn't have been able to just run up on Eddie while he was awake; she's not THAT kind of super. But she's crafty enough to know how and when she *can* get the drop on him, and then does so.
ReplyDelete(17) My workplace has for customers probably a dozen or so wheelchair athletes, most of them female. They all strike me as being impossibly badass. That's a very limited perspective, I'll grant you; but I suspect there's at least SOME truth in Detta's physical ability.
(18) "My main question from last time about why the CK/ MIB steer Roland to these doors is answered satisfactorily in The Waste Lands. We'll cover that next time." -- I think I've forgotten about that! Something for me to look forward to.
(19) "Flagg and Marten are referred to as different people. That's not right, is it?" -- Seems appropriate for this to my comment #19... This entire issue is so confusing that I can never keep it straight. I'm pretty sure King flat-out contradicts himself between books one and two, and that that is a large part of why he made some of the revisions he made for the 2003 "Gunslinger." If so, it's sloppy work, but it's also weirdly emblematic of the world-moving-on/time-slippage/reality-slippage aspect of the story. So via not working, it kind of works. Or it's bullshit and I'm making excuses. Maybe even both!
(16) and (17) I agree that being wheelchair bound doesn't mean you CAN'T do these things. But I found this particular instance rather unrealistic.
Delete(19) The Flagg/Marten/Maerlyn/Ageless Stranger stuff is already pissing me off. Knowing where it all ends, too, makes me grumpier. (Well, not counting WIND IN THE KEYHOLE, if we use that as "where it ends.") Mainly, tho, this idea of one character assuming so many different guises is fine, but intentionally refusing to keep any of it straight is annoying, and I sense that's King's attitude.
(16-17) It kind of brings to mind for me flashes of the climactic scene of "Freaks"!
Delete(19) It's a different form of his inability to help himself from doing certain things when they pop into his mind, I bet. It makes sense he'd sometimes write the way an alcoholic drinks, I guess.
I don't know that I've ever dwelled on this Flagg/Marten/etc. thing, which is probably good for me. If I thought about it much at all, I must have just sort of assumed it made sense behind the scenes somehow and that King was putting readers in the shoes of Roland and saying, "Well, it doesn't make sense to HIM, either." Maybe so, but that'd obviously be bullshit as plotting goes.
More likely, it's less a refusal to keep it straight but one of his occasional failures of memory. He's prone to those at time.
"More likely, it's less a refusal to keep it straight but one of his occasional failures of memory. He's prone to those at time."
DeleteThat's probably the case.
King has mentioned that he had a one-page summary of DARK TOWER at one point that he lost. He's also on record as saying a notebook is a great way of keeping a bad idea. I like that, and I like that he wings it /discovers the story as he's writing it. But sheesh. An outline/ notebook might help with some of these details.
(I also think he cheats on this, sometimes; HIS notebook is in the actual prose. I think he leaves himself reminders, especially in the DARK TOWER books. Just a paragraph or a sentence here and there - there's one I'm thinking of about Alain and Cuthbert that comes out of left field and reads like King saying "Don't forget this!" How is that different than a notebook where he has "don't forget this Alain and Cuthbert stuff"? Arguably it's worse as it intrudes (well sort of) on the text. Intrudes is the wrong word - it's there to be explored later and usually is, so that's hardly an intrusion.)
Listening to the whole conversation swirling around the character of Detta has reminded me a few more examples of the kind of stuff you used to see in the work of older artists. The most famous would have to be the awkward moments in the otherwise excellent work of John Ford.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is one example in particular that my mind just zeroed in on. What makes this unique is that I’m not sure I can tell whether the example I’m thinking about belongs to this category you’re talking about or not.
I’m talking about a video game called “Bendy and the Ink Machine”. It’s a survival horror game that takes its setting and story from the Golden Age of cartoon animation.
One critic has gone so far as to assert that the main inspiration for the whole game is the real life work of animator Max Fleischer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvxrQr5nVI&t=230s
Either way, the game’s popularity has reached that level where fans are starting to make things like music videos around it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV9fxNi46zU
As I was reading the comments and commentary on Detta, however, I began to notice things like the characters appearances, and began to wonder whether that was some sort of problem?
I also wondered about whether the elements that get borrowed from the past for these projects are things that should be emulated or not? I’m asking and not telling here. For my part, I can see how some might find such work objectionable.
Then there are places where I don’t know one way or the other. Let’s take Fleischer again. He once based an entire cartoon around Cab Calloway’s performance of “Minnie the Moocher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7VUU_VPI1E
I suppose some of it gets close to Detta territory? On the other hand, my first reaction to seeing Calloway was, “Those are Michael Jackson’s moves. I think Jackson probably got his style from Calloway”. So, there’s that. I don’t know what it means other than I find myself on a strange fine line, and I have no idea where to go from there without looking like something I prefer not to be.
Fleischer just makes it more complicated when he makes a cartoon which really does seem to be based around the idea of pushing for a more tolerant stance with others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHTUHT4kAOY
ChrisC.
Thanks for the links. I know very little about Fleischer except when he comes up in ALTER EGO, Roy Thomas' Golden Age of Comics magazine.
DeleteMyself, I'm not reminded much of Detta in those links. That MatPat guy reminds me of ADAM RUINS EVERYTHING. Not my favorite genre, this voxsplainy annoyingly-voiced smash-up stuff. Here I'd say the Disney stuff he's "exposing" is incredibly obvious from the game itself. Does anyone actually need to be told this Bendy stuff is an analog of Goofy, Mickey, Oswald, Betty Boop, etc.? As I was watching that and listening to his "OMG YOU GUYS!"-ing, I kept waiting for him to actually expose or reveal something. (Plus that narrative on Disney is just kind of tired. My two cents. I've gone through my Disney-was-a-fascist phase and come out the other side. Again just my two cents.)
Actually that game looks mega-cool. Have you played it? I might have to try that.
Cab Calloway was great! I honestly don't see anything untoward with the Minnie the Moocher cartoon. Certainly nothing Detta-like or that would make me think Max Fleisher had some kind of Sambo/Stepin-Fetchit Tourette's.
As for Calloway and MJ, you are absolutely correct. I think MJ actively credited CC (and Vincent Minnelli) for some of his moves. ( Compare that to Elvis, who to his death NEVER acknowledged the influence of young Forrest Gump on his signature dance moves. )
Well that's a relief. I didn't think there's was anything wrong, if my thought was more on how ahead of it's time the whole thing was.
DeleteAs for the game, no, yet I have watched a few walktrhoughs and the ending is interesting in that it does kind of sound like the "Dark Tower" without actually being "Tower" if that makes any sense. The ending is best described as a "St. Elsewhere" type. Still, I think I like that game for that very reason.
As for Gump, I'm afraid it is his sad fate to forever remain the unacknowledged American. Shame really.
ChrisC.
A shame indeed.
DeleteI like a good "St. Elsewhere" reference! Thanks for that.
I'm going to have to check that game out, looks pretty wild.