Where Chekhov Meets Poochie

The Simpsons comes up on this blog sometimes, and it comes up among friends sometimes, but it comes up in my brain, like, all the time. Most of the minutes I live in any given week contain a thought related to The Simpsons. I'm certainly not the only person whose mind is more or less a Simpsons encyclopedia, but I know people who've never watched it. So I never really know, when I'm trying to use The Simpsons to make a point or a joke, whether it's going to make the right amount of sense to everybody.

Okay, then. Disclaimer made. 

The Simpsons once introduced a character named Poochie, a "soulless product of committee thinking" to its violent, animated show-within-a-show, Itchy & Scratchy. In the episode, the title characters are driving, approaching a fireworks factory, when Poochie appears at the side of the road. He proceeds to mug, shout catchphrases, and generally make like soulless characters did in the 1990s. Cut to Milhouse, one of the watching Simpsons characters, who moans "When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?" Poochie hops in the car and drives off, and the fireworks factory sits there, unused. No violence; no joy.

The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show from Johnny Sasaki on Vimeo. 

You probably don't need to watch this if you were nodding along to the paragraph above, but if you weren't, please watch it, if only up to 1.30. The rest of the post'll make more sense. 

The longer this scene has cooked in my brain, the more writing lessons I find in Milhouse's question. (Really.) Poochie was introduced because Itchy & Scratchy's ratings were falling, and the producers wanted to keep getting raises every year. So they added Poochie to the "dramaturgical dyad" represented by Itchy and Scratchy (or by Tom and Jerry, or by Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote). And Poochie fucked things up not necessarily because he was a dramaturgical third wheel, but because he was a gimmick. What he did was not what the show did. 

Hence Milhouse's question. What he's asking is, when is this show going to do what I expect it to do? When am I going to get the explosion that is the whole point of this experience? 

It is a completely correct question to ask of any art. I'm not saying that every piece of art has to do what the audience wants it to, or what makes the audience feel comfy. That would mean we'd only ever have committee art: blockbuster summer movies instead of art-house films, James Patterson books instead of (not in addition to) Virginia Woolf. But every narrative has to be consistent to its purpose, and satisfactory, whether we're talking about a Roadrunner cartoon or a Faulkner novel.

One of my professors has said that a good book or a good story teaches the audience how to read it. Good art in any stratum accomplishes this. I sit down to watch The Avengers, and I know what kind of movie it is, what kind of enjoyment I'm going to get out of it, before five minutes have passed. I sit down to read a David Markson book, and I know what its pleasures (or lack thereof) will be in a few pages. It tells me what it's up to, and I adjust my expectations.* That's how audiences get satisfaction out of art. Stopping a Roadrunner cartoon in the middle to put Wile E. Coyote on a soapbox about the disappearing desert ecosystem, and never tossing him off a cliff at all, would not satisfy, even if the audience cares about the environment. The audience would just sit there, scratching its abstract audience-head, going "Why didn't he fall off the cliff?" Because that's what a Roadrunner cartoon is for. 

Audiences with any small measure of sophistication adjust their expectations based on the art they're consuming. I may not feel that every one of my questions has been answered when I watch a Lynch film, but that is not my expectation. 

And so back to Milhouse. His question betrays his expectation for Itchy & Scratchy: it's going to be violent. If a fireworks factory appears in the frame, there damn well better be explosions before the end of the show. Failing to make that happen betrays the audience's expectation and, more significantly, the purpose of the art. By showing the fireworks factory, the show is teaching Milhouse how to watch it, and by bringing in Poochie (who is essentially a commercial for the 1990s, not a character), it discards that lesson. 

The fireworks factory is something else, too: it's Chekhov's gun. 

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. 

Chekhov's gun mostly means "don't put shit in your stories that doesn't matter," but I also think of it as a lesson about narrative coherence, and about what draws the audience's attention. A gun on the wall in a story about the descendants of Samuel Colt might not need to go off, but that gun in the Winchester in Shaun of the Dead sure as hell had to. It was contextually unusual, and it was brought to the audience's attention. The fireworks factory might not be unusual in the context of Itchy & Scratchy, but it was brought to the audience's attention, and Milhouse is totally right to ask when that particular gun is going to go off.

There's yet another lesson that comes out of this question, which was (IMHO) most succinctly stated by Tom Servo in the MST3K of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: Never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie. The fireworks factory is the most interesting thing in the cartoon, but it's Poochie's bullshit that's front and center. And Poochie is rendered even more horrid by the possibility of the fireworks factory. 

So, in sum, what can writers take from Milhouse's question? I'll put it in bullet form: 

• Teach your audience how to read your art. 
• Don't fuck with that lesson. 
• Understand that your audience is going to have expectations of your art, based on when and where s/he is consuming it and whatever other paratextual cues you offer about it. 
• Meet those expectations, unless you want your art to annoy. 
• Put only the stuff that matters into your work. 
• Make that stuff matter as it narratively ought to. 
• And don't shortchange the best parts of your work in favor of something that works less well, even if that something matters more to you. 

That's a lot to glean from one nine-word question in a TV episode from 1997. Not bad, Van Houten, not bad. Oh, and there's a thing to learn from Poochie himself: don't put a commercial masquerading as a character into your art. But I don't think we really needed Poochie to learn that. 

--

*This is why postmodernism is so cool to me: it constantly tosses those expectations up in the air and lets them fall as they may. But it's also why not everyone can deal with postmodernism - because they want their experiences to be consistent, because they want to feel secure about the kind of art they're consuming. You should've read the reactions on an opera fan page I frequent about a postmodern production of Prince Igor I attended last season. Whoo, they were not happy. 

Perhaps I'll Wet My Whistle

I have a long post drafted and ready to go, but I think I've written a few too many long posts of late. So here's something shorter.

I got an acceptance from a pretty cool magazine last night, but I can't tell you about it yet because I'm following my own advice. It was for the grandma story, which I apparently haven't talked about on this blog much; the only place I found it was in this post, which was almost a full year ago. I was satisfied enough with the story that I just kept sending it places instead of fussing over it and blabbing about it here. Maybe there's a lesson there.

I'd like to note that this acceptance comes after an extended string of rejections over the last couple of months. I am very, very happy. I even had a second glass of wine to celebrate. (I live dangerously, y'all.)

The end of the semester can't come soon enough for me this time around. I think I must be doing one of my classes wrong, because the workload is just monstrous. I do not actually have a plan for how I'll complete everything I have to do over the next month. Freak out and run around in circles, maybe?

Here, let's let some Simpsons writers amuse you more than I can. A meatier post is headed your way next week.

Good Thoughts / The Necessity of Because

A dear friend of mine is having a serious crisis right now, and I'm worrying my face off about it. Please do me a favor and close your eyes and think good thoughts for my friend, even for a split second, if that's the time you have to spare. This person really, really deserves good thoughts and good things and has had far too much of the opposite.

It feels weird of me to say that and then go and have a normal post below, but I wrote the bulk of this post before any excrement hit any spinning blades, so here you are.

I got another one of those amazingly good pieces of feedback the other day. This time, my miracle reader reminded me that only the wrong kind of stories occur with "ant writing", i.e.: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. No, stories are supposed to have events that result from one another. Things that happen should lead to other things happening, which interact with other things to create new things happening. With the things and the happening. "Because" is the key connector.

I knew this in an instinctual way, but no one had ever pointed out to me before that it's lazy writing to build a story any other way. I thought it over and realized that many times in the past, I had done this all wrong. Mostly because I was following my desire for the piece to come out exactly like I imagined it. I imagine a girl in a box, and that's where she is for the 2,500 words of the story, explaining her situation. There's no because, there just is.

And it dawned on me rather quickly where this came from. Two major sources that informed my storytelling in exactly the wrong way.

One was John Ford. Ford was a director of mostly Western films during much of the 20th century. Name a famous Western made before about 1965, and the odds are that Ford directed it. Ford's first talkie Western and one of his best-known films was Stagecoach, from the magic year of 1939. Stagecoach is good. It sets forth archetypes on which Westerns would depend for decades to come, but still makes them feel rather fresh and complex. Hooker w/ heart o' gold, quiet & reluctant hero, John Wayne, etc.

The climax of the film involves a chase, specifically a chase of the titular stagecoach by a gang of Apaches. Lovely long tracking shots as everyone rides hell-bent for leather. Years ago, I read on the IMDB that someone had asked Ford why the Apaches didn't just shoot the horses that were pulling the stagecoach. That would have stopped the coach for sure. Apparently, Ford answered, "Because that would have been the end of the movie."

But wait! The cavalry always rides in to help!
Hey, Injuns, let's just sit and wait for them, and then we can all go home!

From this I learned that you can cheat on obvious plot holes if you make the story compelling enough. (Well, obvious to some people. I never would have thought about shooting the horses, but now, of course, every Western I see I'm yelling at the Indians to do the same thing. They never do.) I learned that the creators of fiction sometimes see those plot holes and just don't care,* because they're telling the story that they want to tell, and the movie isn't over until they've said exactly what they want to say.

The second source was The Simpsons, the episode "Lisa's Sax":

Homer: And that, my children, is the story of Bart's first day of school.
Bart: Very nice.
Homer: Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. Except you were supposed to be telling the story of how I got my saxophone!
[snip]
Lisa: Mom, can you tell me the story of how I got my saxophone without having it turn into a story about Bart?
Marge: Sure, honey. Bart had just completed his first day of school, and Bart...
Lisa: Moooom!
Bart: Hey, she's just giving the public what it wants. Bart by the barrelful!
Marge: Sorry, Lisa, it's just how the story goes.

It's just how the story goes became a mantra I repeated to myself as I built stories. She decides to put the found pieces of a mannequin together because that's how the story goes. He decides he wants to bring her back to her homeland because that's how the story goes. He breaks his ankle and stays behind because that's how the story goes.

Wow, was this ever shoddy storytelling. "It's just how the story goes" works when you're telling stories about your life, or when you're a Simpsons writer with an A plot and a B plot you have to connect, or when you know you've got to have an exciting chase sequence at the end to make the audience happy. It does not work when you're a rookie constructing a novel or a short story that has to be good enough for people to want to read it.

There's no because in either of these examples. It is what it is because it is what it is, and while I think that can work pretty well with visual narrative art since the consumer is distracted by all else about the medium, it's not how you write books. There has to be a because. The Indians have to have a damn good reason why they're not shooting the horses.

So, lesson learnt, Miracle Reader. No more listening to John Ford (by all accounts, he was a jerk, anyway), no more listening to Marge. Plots have to have purposes. It all has to connect and make sense. It doesn't in real life, as we all know, but in fiction there has to be a because.

*I couldn't find a place to put this above, but I can't miss the opportunity to say it: a rare exception to this attitude is the Coen brothers. I've yet to find a single plot hole in any of their movies. Their screenwriting is shockingly perfect, and they're no less amazing for creating stories both outlandish and insanely neatly tied up.