Gillian Flynn’s Richard Bachman?

Title: A Flicker in the Dark

Rating: 4 Stars

I read a fair amount of current mystery novels. I don’t write about them often. One reason is that they usually have already received a significant exposure, so me throwing my thoughts in at the same time seems to be kind of a pointless exercise. For instance, this novel, A Flicker in the Dark, published about a year and a half ago, has over two hundred thousand ratings and over twenty thousand reviews on Goodreads.

Another reason is that mysteries are kind of my literary comfort food. When I was growing up, both of my parents were readers. My dad was all about sci-fi while my mom read mysteries like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Earl Stanley Gardner. For whatever reason, the sci-fi genre never really sang to me, although I do read more of it than I used to. On the other hand, mystery novels have always occupied a warm spot in my heart. When I read them, I’m not looking for deeper messages (well, except for maybe 1950’s noir novels, which I really do enjoy). Watching a complex plot slowly unspool is soothing to me. Therefore, when I finish such a novel, I usually don’t have much to say or think about it.

I did enjoy reading A Flicker in the Dark, so while it was fresh, I thought that I’d throw out a few words about it. Chloe Davis is a thirty-two year old psychologist in Baton Rouge. At the age of twelve, she had a nightmarish experience when her father confessed to the murder of six teenage girls. Her father is alive but will spend the rest of his life in prison. Chloe, prone to self-medication via illegally prescribed pills, is still troubled by her childhood trauma.

Now it’s coming up on the twenty year anniversary of the murders. Chloe is engaged to be married to Daniel, who appears to be the perfect man. Her brother Cooper, who also shares Chloe’s pain, is still in her life but, for some reason, seems to hate Daniel. Their mother attempted suicide shortly their father’s confession. She survived but has been in a near vegetative state since.

In the midst of all this, a New York Times reporter named Aaron shows up and warns her that he’s going to do a twenty year anniversary story on Chloe’s father’s murders, whether she cooperates or not. Even more shocking, teenage girls begin to disappear and are later found murdered. Especially distressing to Chloe is the fact that the victims all seem to have a connection to her. She knows, without question, that her father is still in jail. Is this a copycat serial killer? What is her connection to the murders? Will Chloe figure out who the killer is before they kill again?

As I said above, I did enjoy reading it. It did a good job sucking me into the plot. As expected, there’s all kinds of plot misdirection to keep the reader confused. At various times, nearly all characters come under suspicion. The story moves the reader along very efficiently. I felt compelled to finish the novel within a day or two of starting it.

A couple of things did keep me from awarding it five stars. One common feature that often recurs in novels such as these are overtly poor decisions by protagonists. I do understand that, if the protagonist always made the right decision, plot driven novels would necessarily max out at about fifty pages because much of the plot misdirection would disappear. However, there are good ways and bad ways for poor decisions to be authored. If the poor decision happens organically due to previously understood personality characteristics of the protagonist, then that’s all well and good. It often appears to me that the poor decisions seem to be contrived just to move the plot along. I get slightly annoyed when I feel that happening.

The final twist isn’t really all that surprising. I’m not saying that I had it all figured out. It’s just that, as I was reading, I saw the ending coming like the headlights of a coming train. I simply wasn’t that surprised.

One reason why I probably wasn’t surprised was, because, as I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Gillian Flynn. The troubled female protagonist traumatized by childhood trauma, the ever twisting plot, even the family member in prison for a horrible crime, are all motifs of Flynn. The novel seemed to be especially derivative from Dark Places.

I was so struck by this that it inspired my post title. During Stephen King’s most productive period, he was writing so furiously that his publisher told him that he couldn’t release more than one book a year. He had so many extra novels written that he came up with the pseudonym Richard Bachman just to give him an avenue to publish even more novels (as well as to validate to himself that his writing could still sell even if it wasn’t associated with his name).

In fact, if you’d told me that Stacy Willingham was actually a pseudonym for Gillian Flynn, I probably would have just nodded and thought yep, that makes sense.

If you’re a fan of Flynn’s work, I think that I can pretty safely guarantee that you’ll enjoy A Flicker in the Dark as well.

The Digital Game Is Afoot

Title: Missing

Rating: 3 Stars

Missing would be a pretty average missing person film with the exception of its gimmick, which is that the film is entirely filmed via computer screens and mobile devices. This is not a sequel, but the second part of an anthology to the film Searching, which apparently used the same gimmick. I have not watched Searching. It was made back in 2018, so it might be interesting to compare the online presence of 2023 with 2018.

June (Storm Reid) is Grace’s (Nia Long) eighteen year old daughter. June’s father died of cancer when she was a young girl.  Since then, June has come to resent her mother’s overprotective ways. Grace goes off to Colombia with her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung). When June arrives at the airport to pick them up, they never show. Concerned, June calls the hotel in Colombia and learns that they checked out but left their luggage. She finds the Colombian equivalent to TaskRabbit and hires Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to investigate on her behalf. From there, the plot twists and turns in many unexpected directions.

Since the film is so new, I won’t throw in too many spoilers. Let’s just say that Grace has an unexpected past. Kevin has an unexpected past. The FBI get involved. The Colombian police get involved. Even a church that specializes in rehabilitated ex-cons makes an appearance.

If you’ve seen films like this before, the plot, even though it contains surprises, follows along a fairly predictable course. People are not what they seem. Even you learn something new about a person, that person is still not what they seem. If genre missing person films are your thing, then sit back in your lazy chair because it’s going to be a comfortable ride.

Where it strives for innovation is in its presentation. As I’ve said, the film is 100% electronic screens. The action mostly takes place on June’s Mac. She’s got multiple windows open, including one that is an open window with the camera pointing at her. She has FaceTime phone calls. She has WhatsApp phone calls. She hacks into gMail accounts. She hacks into dating sites. She watches live footage of police raids. She watches cameras mounted at tourist sites. She watches news feeds and reads articles. All of the time, she’s also texting with friends.

When the action moves away from June’s Mac, we see the action through her Apple Watch or security cameras.

Considering the fact that the large bulk of the action rests on June sitting at her desk at her computer, a lot rides upon Reid’s performance and the cinematic wizardry of making screen time mesmerizing.

Reid does good work as June. She doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot to work with, character wise. She plays a character that is exasperated by her slightly overbearing mom but becomes terrified when she’s missing and comes to realize how important her mom is to her. This is a well trod path, character wise. but Reid makes it believable.

The film is also pretty effective at making June’s screen time interesting, if not always compelling. Building a narrative through bread crumb accumulation of information is a pretty big challenge. The film does do a good job of showing June slowly, digitally, unravelling the mysteries. Even if there was actually little action outside of a computer screen, tension did build during the course of the film.

There are themes in this film that are larger than just the telling of a story. One is that there is no escaping from a digital presence.  Everywhere you go, everything you do, you are dropping digital breadcrumbs. Unless you want to rent out Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack in Montana, there is no hiding. This film shows how exposed we all really are.

Similarly, if we are not careful protecting our digital identity, it’s very easy to hack into our accounts, learn our secrets, or even assume our identity. By this time, we should all know this. Obviously, for the sake of dramatic tension as well as the practical realities of a two hour film, the hacking time was quite compressed, but it doesn’t change the fact that, for most of us, it would be relatively simple for a motivated, experienced person to tear apart our digital footprint.

One more subtle issue that was raised was the truth of digital information. On the one hand, video is a reflection of reality. However, in the hands of a person with access to the raw video, it can be edited to show a view that distorts reality. I’m not even talking deep fakes or something sophisticated like that. Simple edits of a video can dramatically change context with the video consumer being none the wiser.

My only quibble that rang false with me was the fact that June constantly had her Mac camera on at all times. Sure, you’d have the camera on during video conferencing like FaceTime, but having it open at all hours? I’m not a Mac user, but I can’t imagine staring at a prominent window on my screen that is just me typing away for hours on end.

It was an interesting attempt at creating a film using innovative techniques. As is often the case with such films, the filmmakers concentrated so much on the technical innovation that the story itself, while certainly well executed, was not quite as creatively innovative.

Needing One Another Is Our Strength, Not Our Weakness

Title: Bootstrapped

Rating: 4 Stars

It’s the story that we’ve all been told. The best kind of man is the self made man. If you haven’t made it on your own, you haven’t really made it. You have to be hustling, and when you’re not hustling, you should be side hustling. To achieve your dreams, all you have to do is bear down and grind it out. If you follow your dreams, the money will follow. Your success is yours and therefore all wealth accrued from your success is yours as well. If you need inspiration, just check out self made men like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.

The opposite story is that, if you haven’t made it, it’s because you’re not smart enough or you’re not working hard enough. Just as all of the successes that a self made man has achieved is deserved, all of your failures are all your own fault.

These stories are embedded into our American DNA. It’s perhaps not surprising to me that successful people believe it. After all, it not only validates their wealth but allows them to enjoy their wealth guilt free even as they are surrounded by the misery of poverty (after all, if these people just worked as hard as me, they’d have as much as me, right?).

What is more surprising is that those struggling believe it as well. Those people who see, first hand, the many systemic ways in which barriers to success are placed in front of them still continue to believe that it’s their own personal failures that have prevented them from succeeding. It’s this self judgment that sustains our current system of unparalleled economic inequality.

The theme of this book is that those stories are all bullshit. No one, and I mean, no one, makes it solely on their own. Every successful businessman has thousands of employees that enable the success of their company. They benefit from a society that has laws. They benefit from a society that educates all.

At a personal level, without fail, every successful person has had a veritable army of people that explicitly or implicitly has enabled their success. Let’s look at the three self made men that I started with. Bill Gates was the wealthy child of a prominent lawyer. As a young teenager first getting into computers, his mother attended business meetings with him. One of Amazon’s first loans came from Jeff Bezos’ parents. Elon Musk’s father owned an emerald mine. These not pauper to riches stories. They are born on third base stories.

Why is this myth so engrained in our psyche? That’s one of the topics of this book. Going back close to two hundred years, we are told stories of successful Americans that make it on their own. The three most famous examples are Henry David Thoreau,  Little House on the Prairie, and Horatio Alger. Let’s take a look at each.

Thoreau is most famous for essentially abandoning modern civilization and living in a log cabin at Walden pond. There, away from the trappings of modern life, he was able to commune with nature and experience the peaceful bliss of living a primitive, isolated life of nature without the trappings of domesticity that wear us all down. As lovely as that is to dream about, his reality was different. His cabin was actually a short walk from others. His mentor, Emerson, another transcendentalist that quite conveniently lived comfortably off of an inheritance, had a room in his house for Thoreau and subsidized Thoreau’s life. Not only did Thoreau not live in isolation but he had regular visitors to his cabin.

Little House on the Prairie is the story of settlers in the Midwest. Through a series of novels, a small, religious family takes on some land, builds a log cabin, and builds a successful life. This is the quintessential American pull yourself up by the bootstraps story. Even better, by and large, it’s based upon Laura Ingalls Wilder’s actual diaries.

As you can probably imagine, it’s not that simple. The land that the Wilders settled on was available only as a result of a government handout. That they had any land to settle on was because of the Homestead Act, which handed out land allotments. This ‘free’ land wasn’t exactly lying around previously unused either. The US government exiled native tribes that were living there onto reservations. Unsurprisingly, this ‘free’ land was essentially available only to white families.

Horatio Alger is the strangest saga of them all. He wrote some hundred or so novels. His stories predominately featured poor, orphaned boys living on the street that were graced with natural pluck. After struggles, this pluck would be recognized by some older male benefactor that would give them some lowly job in their office. Through that same pluck and hard work, the boy would quickly rise through the ranks and become, in his own right, a wealthy and successful young man.

First of all, it’s not clear to me how these stories are bootstrapping. Literally, deus ex machina, some wealthy benefactor swoops in and sets the young boy on his way? In the real world, what exactly is the ratio between poor young boy and older rich benefactor? I’m guessing that it’s not 1:1. Our young hero becomes successful only due to the whim of an elite.

There’s also the darker side to this story. As a young man, Alger was a minister. He was caught sexually abusing young boys in his flock. He was able to escape punishment only due to the intercession of his father, himself a prominent minister, who convinced the congregation to not press charges if his son promised to leave town and never serve as clergy again. Given that background, Alger’s stories of the poor, vulnerable boy being courted by a rich, sophisticated, older man take on a darker hue.

Even though if you scratch a little at these stories they begin to fall apart, we are predisposed to believe these myths. We desperately want to believe that the world is fair. We want to believe that good guys earn their just due and that failure is the result of some moral or other shortcoming. It’s cognitively tough for us to understand that much of the world is chance. A person can do all of the right things, diligently work three jobs, and still end up economically impoverished.

We need to replace the myth of the Ayn Rand libertarian self made man with a new myth. Quart offers up some examples that are working today. She offers up examples of mutual aid groups, cooperatives, and community trusts that make social interdependence central to their efforts.

It’s the responsibility of leaders to publicly acknowledge the debt that they owe to all that have helped them. As she mentions, this is not only the job of leaders. We all must acknowledge that our successes did not derive exclusively from our own efforts. Doing so does not lessen our successes but provides valuable context.

I certainly have no claim to be a wholly self made man. My father, an engineer, from a very early age inspired and encouraged my love of mathematics that ultimately led me to computer science. My mother paid my college education, leaving me debt free as I embarked upon adulthood. For my first three years at college, I received Social Security due to the death of my father (this was a program, long since discontinued, where students received a monthly payment upon the death of the head of the household). Many people, both students and professors, provided me with invaluable guidance during my academic career. I got my first job when my best friend literally took my application out of the garbage can and placed it on the manager’s desk. I got my first professional software job due to the efforts of another friend’s father.

Believe me, that’s just a partial accounting. I could (and probably should at a later date) go on for some time about the many ways in which I’ve been helped over the course of my life.

To quote from the close of the book: “Needing one another is our strength, not our weakness”.

Reality’s Reality

Title: Reality

Rating: 4 Stars

This film is about Reality Winner. For those that need a refresher, back in 2017 Winner was arrested for downloading a classified document and leaking it to The Intercept, an investigative web site. She ultimately ended up pleading guilty and was sentenced to around five years. She served a couple of years, was released early due to good behavior, and is paroled somewhere in Texas.

This film concentrates on her arrest. When I mean concentrates, I mean to an exclusive extent. The FBI recorded everything from their initial contact with her all the way to her being led away in handcuffs. The dialog for this film is composed entirely from this recording.

It’s not quite done in real time, but it’s close. At one point, there was a caption in the film that said that the following took place at the 86th minute of the recording while the film, at that point, was somewhere between an hour and an hour ten.

The first thing that you’ll notice about the film is the awkward quality of the dialog. There are sentences that don’t make sense. There are sentences that start in one direction and end in another. Words are misused. There are awkward coughs. There are innumerable awkward pauses.

This brought back dark memories of the novel JR, written by William Gaddis. Way back in 2015, when I was suffering through James’ The Golden Bowl, I compared it to the differently unreadable JR (read about it here). To boil it down, in JR, Gaddis tried to exactly replicate normal human verbal communication. The resulting mishmash was incredibly difficult to understand, making the novel at times virtually incompressible.

The challenge is that our brains are uniquely designed to understand the verbal chop suey that takes place during normal conversation and can seemingly effortlessly process it. However, divorce us from that context and our brain quickly gets bogged down. Watching a film you have the expectation of some kind of structure to the dialog. In a typical film, even characters that are portrayed as being poorly educated actually speak in a more structured form than everyday colloquial conversation.

Listening to the choppy dialog of the actual interrogation and comparing that to normal cinematic interrogations was eye opening. Once again I was reminded of how facile our oral communication capabilities are.

Because the film essentially just consists of an interview, there are really only three roles. The three main characters are Reality (Sydney Sweeney), Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis), and Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton). A couple of other actors have lines but are not named. Probably not surprising, the film is based upon a play (Is This A Room). Because the action is basically the dialog, the film certainly felt like a play brought to screen.

Of the three, Sweeney has the most to do and she does outstanding work. She has to balance being confused by the agents’ sudden appearance, being cooperative once she knows she’s under suspicion, confessing a little bit at a time as she learns how much they know, to breaking down and confessing all once she understands there is no getting away with it. It’s a meaty role and she does an outstanding job.

The interview text was pretty dry and, as I’ve said, choppy. It was interesting how the choices that the actors made in delivering the lines as well as the movement of the cameras during the interrogation and the background music together made for a pretty compelling film.

It also cast light on the severity of Winner’s punishment. After all, she only downloaded one classified file. It wasn’t a list of Russian double agents. It wasn’t our crown jewel of nuclear secrets. It wasn’t our strategy of winning a war against China. It was a document describing how Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 election for Trump’s benefit. If a document is classified, then an individual does not have the right to disseminate it because they think it should. Winner was clearly legally in the wrong. However, this scarcely seems to be a traitorous action. This is especially true when you compare that to the more recent case of Jack Teixeira, who allegedly downloaded hundreds of documents, including Ukraine war plans, to his online buddies, apparently just for clout. To be sentenced to five years for sharing that one document seems pretty unfair.

Weighing in at around eighty minutes or so, this was a quick film to watch and, given its innovative approach, was entertaining to watch.

Truman Show Jury Duty

Title: Jury Duty

Rating: 5 Stars

An ad is placed on Craigslist. A documentary crew wants to follow someone around while they’re performing jury duty. The purpose is to get an inside look at the actual details of performing your civic duty. A number of people apply. Only one, a solar contractor named Ronald Gladden, is selected. The trial that Gladden participates in is a civil trial where an employee is accused of causing extensive damage to his employer’s business while high on drugs or alcohol.

We see Gladden go through the entire process. We see him fill out his juror questionnaire. We see him go through voir dire. We see him get selected for a jury. We see him get picked to be the jury foreperson. We see the opening statements, the evidence presented, and the closing statements. We watch as he leads his fellow jurors in deliberation. Once they come to a consensus, he reads the verdict in the courtroom.

Along the way, Gladden sees some weird shit. First of all, at best B list actor James Marsden (known for roles in the X-Men series of films as well as The Notebook), is a jury alternate and it turns out, kind of an asshole. We meet his fellow jurors, including the techno nerd Todd, the slow talking but very earnest Ken, the virginally innocent Noah who discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him during the trial, and the vixen Jeannie, who leaps at the chance to seduce the now disconsolate Noah. Gladden sees Marsden hire paparazzi to invade the courtroom in a bid to get out of jury duty but instead results in the jury getting sequestered over the course of the trial, which lasts for an astounding seventeen days. Gladden also sees some comically incompetent lawyering on behalf of the defendant.

What Gladden doesn’t know (but we know) is that it’s all a sham. There is no jury. There is no trial. They are all actors. The judge is an actor. His fellow jurors are actors. Both the plaintiff and the defendant and their lawyers are actors. Gladden is the only person not in on the joke.

In the final episode, when Gladden is told, all of the layers are exposed that made this deception possible. There is basically a control room devoted to watching Gladden (in case you haven’t already, you now get the Truman Show reference in the blog title). There are hidden cameras everywhere. On the dinner out, the entire Margaritaville restaurant was closed and taken over for the show. Similarly, at one point the Huntington Beach District Court was shut down, ostensibly for COVID reasons, to prepare for the show.

The main thing that comes out of it is the sweet nature of Gladden. No matter what happens, he treats everyone graciously and respectfully. Even when told that the trial is a sham, he just looks astounded and laughs. Of course, the $100,000 that he’s given for being the ‘hero’ of the show probably helped mitigate whatever feelings of betrayal he might have had.

The execution of this astounds me. For seventeen days, an entire rehearsed show was performed. For seventeen days, no one could break character. If Gladden figured it out on day fifteen, all would have been lost. Behind the scenes, you see that the producers have entire flow charts of possibilities that they might have to execute, depending upon the choices that Gladden makes. There’s a whole scene where Noah claims to be a racist in a very misguided attempt to get out of jury duty. This could only work if Gladden remembered and mentioned an old South Park episode. There was a factory visit (the so-called scene of the incident) where it was important for the later jury deliberation that Gladden go upstairs to an office. They had to contrive a seemingly natural way for him to choose to go up. They were seemingly prepared for nearly every contingency.

In many ways, this reminded me of the very strange yet very funny Nathan Fielder series, The Rehearsal (I wrote about it here). Like The Rehearsal, it exists in this strange nexus of reality television and scripted drama. As you get deeper into the series, you begin to wonder what really is real and what is scripted. Did Gladden really have no inkling what is going on? Is he really in on it and the joke is on us? When everyone is involved in the deception, who can we trust?

James Marsden is outstanding. He perfectly plays the spoiled, self centered, fragile actor. Not only does his antics cause the jury to be sequestered, but when he clogs Gladden’s toilet after taking a massive dump in it, he coerces Gladden to accept the blame for it because otherwise TMZ might hear about it and report this Marsden toilet clogging scandal. Marsden reminds me of Nicholas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Immense Talent (written about here). It must be challenging to play a subtly different version of yourself. In Marsden’s case, he needed to do it for seventeen days without breaking.

Now having watched it, I now wonder if Gladden is going to spend the rest of his life experiencing Main Character Syndrome. For seventeen days, unknowingly, he was the lead in a fictional story of his life.

And The Award Goes To

Title: Oscar Wars

Rating: 4 Stars

I had higher hopes for this book than was probably warranted. On the one hand, I’m not really all that enthralled with Oscars. I probably haven’t watched it in over ten years. On the other hand, I do love films. I watch probably over a hundred a year. If nothing else, the Oscar nominations gives me a heads up if there’s a film that I’ve missed that I should check out.

The award ceremony themselves are kind of silly. For instance, at the 1995 ceremony, nominations for best picture include Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Given how different these films are, what rationale can there be to choose the best?

Even so, people care. When people win an Oscar, they lose their minds. They weep. They shout. They climb over chairs. They thank everyone that pops into their head. Somehow the gold statuette seems to endow value.

Oscar Wars is not really a history of the Academy Awards. Given that they’ve been handed out for close to one hundred years now, an exhaustive history would be, well, exhausting. Shulman has identified ten or so key events in Oscar history to focus on.

I can see why he did that, but the book ends up being composed of disjoint chapters. He does try to establish a connective tissue between the chapters, but it’s tenuous at best.

Of course, you have to start at the beginning. The Academy was created by studio heads as some kind of League of Nations (this was, after all, the 1920s), where the various players in the business, be they producers or directors or actors or screenwriters or the technical crew (eg set builders, the lighting technicians) could get together and iron out their differences. The Academy awards were an afterthought to this noble goal.

It turns out that directors, actors, writers, and the technical crew were way more interested in forming their own unions than in participating in some organization that seemed to the product of studio heads. The cinematic League of Nations idea fell away pretty quickly and instead the focus of the Academy was on the awards.

One personal drawback to reading this book is that I do have some knowledge of Hollywood cinematic history, so at times it was a rehash of things that I already knew. That’s not the fault of the book that I have that knowledge but when the author focuses on only certain key events, those chapters in which I already had knowledge were not that interesting to me. It made the book more of a mixed bag. So it was with the chapter on Citizen Kane being effectively shut out of the Oscars due to its plot bearing such a strong resemblance to media tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s life.

I did find the chapter on the blacklist interesting. The impact of the blacklist on writers like Dalton Trumbo and other writers was significant. Trumbo in particular, forced to write under assumed names, had to work at least twice as hard for half as much pay. It proved embarrassing to the Academy when one of his aliases won an Academy award. Trumbo couldn’t accept it and the Academy couldn’t acknowledge him.

Here you see one of the many times in which the Academy, and the movie industry at large, is bent by external forces. In some ways it’s understandable due to the fact that it is a mass media product. For films to be successful, they generally do have to be attractive to a broad audience.

Any time the movie industry feels that its treading even close to dangerous territory, it flinches. You see it with the Hays Code. You see it during the McCarthy era where politicians were looking everywhere for fellow travelling communists. You see it in the 1960s with the rise of television and the rise of the counterculture. Nowadays you see it with the rise of the streaming platforms and the rise of the #meToo and #oscarSoWhite movements.

The chapter that is probably the most amusing was Allan Carr’s. A flamboyant producer, he always had a dream of producing the Oscars ceremony. The mid 1980s was not exactly a golden age for films and the falling Oscar ratings reflected that reality. In desperation, the Academy turned to Carr to produce the 1989 show. Well, its fair to say that the show went a little over the top. It started off with Rob Lowe dancing and singing with Snow White (you kind of need to see it on youTube to truly appreciate it). The musical numbers were long and bloated. Even worse, somehow Carr forgot to get clearance from Disney to use the very much copyrighted Snow White. The resulting debacle is considered one of the worse Academy award ceremonies in history.

One chapter explains how Harvey Weinstein changed the Oscar campaign process. Before Weinstein, the studios would send screeners to voters’ homes and place for your consideration ads in Varsity.

Weinstein became obsessed with winning Oscars. He didn’t necessarily invent but he certainly weaponized the seduction of Academy voters. A number of them lived in basically old folks homes for movie people. Weinstein would arrange personal visits from his stars to these homes. Other Academy voters would get calls soliciting their vote. Apparently in some cases his Oscar campaign budget would exceed the budget of the nominated film. To adapt, all of the major players in the film industry began to play by the same rules, leading to the current veritable annual campaign orgy.

I could go on but that gives you an idea of the type of stories that you’ll encounter reading Oscar Wars. I found it interesting, if not exactly groundbreaking.

The Thrilling Saga Of Contract Negotiations

Title: Air

Rating: 3 Stars

It seems like it’s been a slow start for 2023 films. Not many have caught my eye. Air seems to have a bit of buzz around it right now.

Air is the story of Nike getting its first sponsorship deal with Michael Jordan. Looking back now, it’s hard to believe to believe that there was a time when neither Nike nor Jordan were considered juggernauts. In particular, Nike was almost a non-factor in the basketball shoe business. Converse had by far the largest market share while Adidas, with its apparel line, was considered the cool brand. Nike was considered to be a low budget non-contender.

Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), working at Nike, felt compelled to change this. Vaccaro understood that Nike’s strategy of spreading its relatively low budget among a number of athletes selected lower in the draft was going to continue its pattern of mediocrity, possibly leading to the death of the basketball division of Nike.

Vaccaro advocated spending Nike’s entire budget on one athlete. Which athlete should he choose? One night, watching college basketball highlights, he became transfixed by Michael Jordan’s last second shot in the NCAA championship. Convinced that Jordan had the potential to be a transformational athlete, Vaccaro became obsessed with landing him.

Although he was stymied by the twin hurdles of Jordan’s strong preference for Adidas and Nike’s suspicion of his one athlete strategy, Vaccaro persevered. This is his story of how he overcame the resistance of the Jordan family and Nike corporate inertia.

First things first. The film is well made. Directed by Ben Affleck, the film does a great job of capturing the mid 1980s. The film is well acted. Particularly worthy of mention is Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Phil Knight as a kind of West coast liberal, Buddhist, egotistical, cautious corporate founder. Also worthy is Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother, Chris Tucker as a Nike executive, and Chris Messina as the bombastic player agent David Falk.

It is also about a significant moment in sports history. The deal with Jordan made Nike a player in the basketball shoe business, a business that it would eventually dominate. Not only that, but the Jordan deal was historic in that it was the first time that a player got a percentage of the sales of his shoe. Before that, the standard was that a shoe company would pay a flat license fee for a player to wear their shoes.

The Nike deal changed that in a couple of ways. Significantly, the athlete became the focal point instead of the shoe. Nike designed a shoe that was specific to Jordan. Today, all prominent basketball players have their own custom designed shoe, complete with model years. Secondly, the change from licensing to a piece of the revenue led athletes to tremendous, generational wealth. Today, it’s estimated that Jordan alone earns some 400 million dollars a year from Nike.

All of that is interesting. I’d probably even read a book about it. However, is this really a subject for a film? At the end of the day, it’s the story about a rich corporation negotiating a contract with a rich athlete, making both exponentially richer. It was kind of like watching a film about the Exxon and Mobil merger. Or maybe a film about the time, when I was a lead developer on a large software team, that we released a block point on schedule. It was exciting for us but I’m not sure if there were a large number of cinematic moments to engage a film audience.

Is the signing of a contract really worth a two hour film? Near the conclusion, when Phil Knight gives Vaccaro the approval to include the profit sharing clause into the contract, the background music swelled like it was the Braveheart battle speech. It struck me as a bit silly.

Don’t get me wrong. Michael Jordan is one of the greatest players in the game. He and I are about the same age, so I watched his basketball career with great interest. I remember watching his 63 point playoff game in 1986 against the Boston Celtics, one of the great basketball teams of all time. Even though the Bulls lost in double overtime, watching Jordan play essentially a game of one on five against a team of future Hall of Fame legends was incredible. Afterwards, Larry Bird claimed that he was God disguised as Michael Jordan.

In a film like this, you want to root for the underdog. We know, with the passage of time, that there is no underdog in this story. Nike became a dominate force in the shoe business that eventually got into trouble using overseas child labor. Jordan became a six time champion whose competitive spirit is so unquenchable and seemingly carries a permanent chip on his shoulder that it made him a difficult person and a challenging teammate.

Knowing this, it was hard for me to root for either Nike or Jordan.

The End Of The Golden Age Of Streaming?

This is kind of a weird week. This week marks the end of not one, not two, not three, but four series that all are considered prestige streaming series. I’m talking about Succession, Barry, Ted Lasso, and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.

This seems like a moment. Just a short couple of years ago, the streaming services were on a rampage creating content. Thinking that the more content it generated would bring that many more eyeballs to their service, a virtual endless set of projects were greenlit. It seemed like any writer would eventually become a show runner for their own show. The various streamers were just throwing money around. In particular, Ted Sarandos, for many years the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, seemed to have a virtually unlimited budget.

Things seem to be changing. Perhaps reality is starting to set in. The streaming services are showing a bit more self control in greenlighting projects. Even more bizarrely, services are choosing to cancel already created content before even releasing it to the public (I’m looking at you Max). Some series that have been released are being pulled out of circulation. Apparently, the services are willing to eat the sunk cost of this content to keep from paying residuals to the artists involved in the production.

So, in case we are at a pivotal moment, I thought that I’d say just a few words about the four important series that just concluded. I’ll discuss each one in ascending order of my own personal ranking of the series.

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel: Wrapping up its fifth season, I really enjoyed the first season. The series felt like a sip of champagne. The colors were bright and the dialog was sparkling. Taking place in an idealized 1950s New York City, I became immediately invested in the comedy career of Mrs Maisel. Her relationship with her manager Susie, her soon to be ex husband Joel, and her parents were lively and fun. Unfortunately, in the early part of season 2, Mrs Maisel’s parents temporarily move to Paris. This seems to start off a series of unrelated adventures across all of the major characters. It seemed to be following the traditional sitcom pattern of forcibly putting its key characters into weird situations as opposed to just letting them organically grow. By the time the fourth season rolled around, I’d started losing interest and was watching just because I was previously invested. The last season was a semi-random series of time jumps over a thirty year period or so. Of the four series, this was the one that I was happiest to see end.

Barry: Lasting four seasons, this was another series where I most enjoyed the earlier seasons. The idea of a hitman, very good at his job but at a point in his life where it felt that his soul was dead and then having it reawaken upon stumbling into an acting class, was a great concept. It did a fantastic job of creating a protagonist that you cared for even though he was, deep down, a monster. The tension of Barry trying to rediscover his humanity through the medium of acting while also constantly being put into situations of having to kill people was interesting and actually quite funny. It was necessarily a very dark comedy but, by the third season, it became way more dark than comedic. By the end of the fourth season, in my opinion, it’d lost the balance between darkness and humor at the expense of humor. Not to spoil, but unquestionably it had to end the way that it did, but again, like Mrs Maisel, watching it felt almost like a chore. In the final episode, it did redeem its black humor when we watch Barry’s son watch a hilariously fictionalized version of Barry’s life as portrayed through some schlocky adaptation.

Ted Lasso: Lasting three seasons, I think it’s best to understand the motivations of its creator, Jason Sudeikis. Ted Lasso was originally a character created for promotional purposes. When Sudeikis was expanding it to a series, it was during the Trump administration. As a counterpoint to the darkness and negativity of that administration, he intentionally made Lasso an inveterate optimistic, positive person. Knowing that is important to understanding the series. Even though the series deals with dark issues (Lasso’s divorce, his father’s suicide), there’s no question that everyone’s going to come out of it on the other side a better person. Everyone (OK, except for the billionaire asshole Rupert, who of course gets his comeuppance) in the huge ensemble cast grows and becomes more positive. Critics are hating on the final season due to the episode length and the schmaltzy closure of most of the main characters. Given the lens that Sudeikis was looking through, I think it’s understandable. There was no way that Nate wasn’t going to end the series as the heel. Lasso was always going to go back to his family. This isn’t Shakespeare here. This is a well made situation comedy bringing all of its characters in for a soft landing. Of all shows that I’ve watched over the last several years, Ted Lasso was the one that most often left me in happy tears. And well done for doing so.

Succession: Lasting four seasons, I’ve already written about it here. This show, even more than Barry, balances perfectly comedy and drama. If anyone has any envy of the very rich, watching this should quell it. These are all not only deeply unhappy people but are emotionally broken. On top of it all, despite their glib quips, they are not very smart. No matter which sibling ended up on top, you just knew that eventually they would end up destroying Logan’s media empire. Logan’s final words to them acknowledged this, accusing them of not being serious people. Logan reached outside of his family to sell off his empire to Lukas Mattson. Mattson initially appeared to thoroughly overmatch the Roy siblings. By the end of the last season, it is clear that Mattson is just another person that confuses glibness with intelligence. The series relentlessly makes the case that our powerful, filthy rich overloads are absolutely cluelessly strutting around with no clothes. This is the late stage capitalism show that our beleaguered timeline needs. I made a similar comment in my Glass Onion article (here), but Succession, along with Glass Onion and Don’t Look Up, needs to be sealed into a time capsule so that future generations, as they struggle to survive the postapocalyptic world that we’ve bestowed upon them, can understand how it happened.

Hopefully I’m wrong about peaking and that the streaming services will continue to build high quality compelling content. Right now, I’m banking on the second season of Severance (on hold pending the writers’ strike, alas).

Will The Real Jason Please Stand Up

Title: Dark Matter

Rating: 4 Stars

You wouldn’t think that a novel based on Schrödinger’s Cat would be exciting, but you would be wrong.

Jason Dessen was a once promising physicist that, years ago, got his girlfriend pregnant. Faced with a choice, he decided to forego his demanding research and marry Daniela. Fifteen years later, he is happily married and a devoted father to his son Charlie while teaching introductory physics at a nondescript university. He has no regrets but does sometime think about the road not taken that could have yielded him reputational fame as a celebrated physicist.

His life takes a turn one night while walking home. A man in a mask abducts him. The man does not want his money. He asks Jason some basic questions about his life. The abductor injects Jason with some kind of liquid and then shoves him into a black box.

When Jason comes to, he is, to put it mildly, quite confused. He is apparently in an advanced, state of the art lab setting. Everyone around him is applauding him as if he’s a returning hero. They believe him to be Jason Dessen, world famous physicist that has developed a technique to traverse multiverses. He is the first person to actually leave his current universe and come back.

Before, I go any further, I think that I need to explain just a little bit of the quantum mechanics that the plot makes use of.

The first thing that I should explain is Schrödinger’s Cat. It’s a thought experiment that I’m going to grossly oversimplify. There is a cat in a box. Also in the box is poison that could be automatically triggered. If triggered, the cat will die. The box is completely enclosed. The cat is unobservable. According to quantum mechanics, during this state the cat is both alive and dead. It is the act of observing that creates the state of the cat being alive or dead.

The second thing is the concept of the multiverse. Everyday, every person makes a nearly impossible to comprehend number of decisions. According to the multiverse theory, each one of these decisions creates a different multiverse. For example, there is a multiverse where I, having a cold and not feeling all that well, decided to say fuck it, and not write this blog post tonight.  The thing is that all of these multiverse branches all simultaneously coexist. Somehow our brain, to keep from going insane, has evolved so that we’re only conscious of one multiverse at a time.

OK, now back to the book. Jason Dessen, the world famous physicist (I’m going to call him Usurper Jason for later obvious reasons) has built a human sized Schrödinger’s box. Along with the box, he has to inject himself with something that somehow allows his consciousness to open up and become aware of the many multiverses. When he’s inside the box, the multiverses manifests as an infinite number of doors that he can open. Anyone of them opens up to a specific multiverse.

Usurper Jason somehow stumbled upon the multiverse in which the first Jason (let’s call him Protagonist Jason) lives. Although Usurper Jason is a world famous physicist, he sees the happy, contented life of Protagonist Jason and covets it. So, Usurper Jason concocts a plan that sends Protagonist Jason back in his place in his universe and becomes the husband to Daniela and father to Charlie in Protagonist Jason’s universe.

Got all of that? Even though Protagonist Jason is now a world renowned physicist, he desperately misses his wife and daughter. Not only that, but the people in Usurper Jason’s universe are becoming increasingly suspicious of Protagonist Jason’s lack of expertise in advanced research physics.

Protagonist Jason steals some injections and manages to get into the black box. He injects himself and sees an infinite number of doors. How does he choose the door that will send him back to his specific multiverse? Among the doors that he chooses include a vast wasteland from something like a super volcano eruption or a nuclear Armageddon. Another option is the frigid result of some climate change event. Yet another is a glittering futuristic looking multiverse.

He finally does make it home to his multiverse. The problem is now, how does he usurp the Usurper Jason? What kind of story can he tell Daniela and Charlie that proves he’s the real Jason?

That’s not even the worse problem. All along this time, he’s been making decisions. Each of those decisions has spawned off new multiverses. Therefore, he’s no longer alone. There are at least hundreds of Jasons now in his multiverse, all desperately trying to get back to Daniela and Charlie. The thing is that all of these Jasons, unlike Usurper Jason, are essentially the same Jason that have just had different experiences in the last month or so. Therefore, among those Jasons, there is no clear ‘real’ Jason. They all started from this same multiverse. How will this get resolved?

Right off the bat, I have to tell you that I have no idea if the physics of this makes any sense. To me, it doesn’t really matter. The concepts held up long enough that I was able to suspend disbelief and allow myself to get sucked into the plot.

The multiple Jasons descending upon one universe actually made me laugh out loud. Because of the nearly infinite branching of a multiverse, this one universe could easily end up with thousands if not millions of Jasons wandering around. That idea amuses me. Can you imagine living in a world where all of a sudden a whole bunch of clones show up and start walking around, all fighting amongst each other to lay claim as the one true husband and father?

Especially after struggling through Rushdie’s Midnight Children, I needed a fun, entertaining, fast paced read. This novel exactly fit that bill.