Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
That’s the news, hoopy froods — a reminder that my rescheduled B&N Easton/Bethlehem appearance is this very weekend.
I’ll be at B&N in what they call Bethlehem but I think is kinda sorta Easton — it’s this store right here.
I’ll be there at 1pm!
I’ll sign books!
I’ll talk!
I’ll dance!
I won’t dance!
It’ll be great!
That’s it, really, that’s the post — WANDERERS is on sale! $2.99 at your major e-book platforms. So if you haven’t checked it out, now’s yer chance. And if you have checked it out and care to spread the word, that’d be awfully nifty.
The links, if you need ’em:
Aaaand of course if you do check it out, especially at this oh-so-shiny price point, it would be utter aces of you to leave a review somewhere. A nice review. A pretty, precious review. *pets the review* *stares at you*
(Plus, if you read WANDERERS, then you have the sequel, WAYWARD, waiting for you. In the darkness. With a crowbar. I didn’t give it the crowbar. It just took it. I don’t make the rules. Just do what the book says.)
Let’s see, what else is going on? Anything? I finished the second draft of BLACK RIVER ORCHARD and sent it off, so that’s nice. Did I ever mention I was on THE DARK WORD, Philip Fracassi’s podcast about horror and horror writing? It was a blast and a half. A really great conversation. Go give a listen. And I was on Dead Headspace, which was also a hoot (with guest host Mercedes Yardley), and also on Ben Blacker’s podcast, The Writer’s Panel? I think I mentioned this stuff but the pandemic has chewed even more holes into my brain.
ANYWAY OKAY BYE
On this, the first ‘official’ morning of 2023 (meaning, a work morning), I read an article, as one does, at Bookseller: “AI narration is inevitable.”
Written by Mark Piesing, it argues that AI narration is already very good and will only improve, that it’s cheap-as-free, that human narration is not necessarily better, and so on and so forth. (It also begins with a paragraph suggesting the writer is stung because people praise the audiobook narration done for his own work, but do not instead praise the writing he did for said book, which is an awfully strange way to begin the opinion piece, as it strongly suggests a bulging mouthful of sour grapes as motivation. “These narrators are getting my credit!”)
Mmm yeah, no. Fuck all of that. Let’s talk about this a little bit.
(Excuse that it’s a bit of a ramble. Don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back.)
First, the implementation of any technology is not automagically inevitable. We need to stop treating it like just because a thing exists it is now as certain as the fucking sunrise. It was once “inevitable” that e-books were going to completely eradicate print books. Did that happen? It did not. Sometimes it goes the other way — it has been supposedly inevitable that high speed rail would take over the country and the world, and it has not. (Certainly not here in the US, anyway.)
You can, with enough confidence, assert that anything is inevitable, no matter how weird or how horrible. “Eventually, we’ll all have domesticated chimpanzees thanks to genetic engineering!” “It is futile to resist turning homeless people into cobblestone — we have the technology to make human bricks, and this solves the homeless problem and will be a green initiative!” “Its obvious that we have already destroyed the Earth and so we should just get used to living in one of Elon Musk’s Martian Exo-Colonies, even if the Prefabricated Smart Habitation Modules sometimes uproot themselves and roll themselves off into deep canyons, screaming racial epithets as they crush everyone inside!”
Just because artificial intelligence exists and works does not mean it is universally:
a) good b) necessary c) desirable.
Is it good? Not at this point. It’ll certainly get better, but in the space of narration it’ll absolute miss the vital subtleties that make human narration enticing. (Same goes with art and writing in general: the robots will never understand those little things, those little beats, the larger emotional throughline, and so forth.)
Is it necessary? I’d argue no. Cheap or free insulin is necessary. Health care is necessary. AI narration is… a frippery, really. I note here that AI audio narration for some things could certainly assist anyone with visual impairment, and to Piesing’s point this might be best with things like technical manuals or academic textbooks. But that’s also quite a bit different from, say, narrating a novel or a non-fiction book, and it’s quite a jump from one thing to the other.
Is it desirable? Not for me and, I hope, not for most others. This may feel like a leap, but in a time of pandemic (and figuring out life in the midst of pandemic), I think we’ve come around to the idea that it’s actually pretty nice to connect with other FLESHY MEATBAGS both online and especially in person. Humans may not be awesome en masse, but individually, they’re pretty fucking great, and to go back to the first point, I think humans in narration and art and writing form part of that connection we want to make. I don’t want to read the novel an ATM writes. I don’t want my car to paint my portrait. I want art and stories and the voices of actual BLOOD-FILLED THOUGHT-HAVING PERSONS.
Yes, as a technology as I expect AI will continue to inform our daily lives on the regular. It already is. We will surely find a broad degree of problem-solving being done by AI in hospital systems, in GPS, in coding, in engineering — sometimes this will be a good thing, sometimes (aka, more times than we’d like to admit) the AI will come with all the unseen biases and prejudices the designers and programmers accidentally (or purposefully) baked into it.
But consumer choice matters, as does the choice of those in power.
If you, the reader, the viewer, the listener, don’t want it — it doesn’t happen.
If the people in charge of making decisions don’t want it — which really only happens if they think there’s going to be blowback, enough to harm their reputation and bottom line — it doesn’t happen.
If the artists and writers and editors and narrators don’t want it to happen — well, that one gets stickier. Because all too often, we get steamrolled. But I think this is a place where we have some autonomy, too. I’m a writer, and I damn sure don’t want artificial intelligence writing my books, because then I’m out of a job. So it would be mighty hypocritical of me to suggest that I’m okay with someone using AI to design a book cover of mine, or to edit my books, or to narrate those stories. I can push back there, and this is me, doing that.
I will not have AI-generated book covers on my books.
I will not have AI narrators.
I do not want AI mucking about in my books at all, please and thank you.
Listen, I flirted with AI-generated images because it was nifty to ask a piece of software to design RON SWANSON AS A POKEMON or some goofy shit, but when you see that the digital sausage is being made from the art of real artists (SOYLENT DIFFUSION IS MADE OF PEOPLE), you start to flinch at the idea. I certainly did. I also recognize that narration and writing from AI aren’t necessarily pilfering “style” as directly as it seems it is with art — but dollars to donuts you’re going to start to see AI writing crib whole phrases or sentences from working writers, you’re going to see AI done “in the style of” an existing narrator or actor, you’re going to see humans turned into chum to feed the capitalist sharks, because that’s what this is. (And yes, I recognize we are all participating in a system of capitalism and it’d sure be lovely if we could all just have a Universal Basic Income and blah blah blah if we all lived our socialist art dreams where we created what we created because it gave us beauty and not because it gave us a paycheck. But I still live in the real world where my bank really wants me to pay my fucking mortgage. This isn’t revolution. It isn’t praxis. Artificial intelligence will just make rich people richer. It will not magically undo our system of chits-and-ducats, okay?)
Never mind the fact that cutting out audiobook narrators also cuts a lot of jobs; never mind the fact it only gives big company more power, not less, as either some publisher or maybe Amazon/Audible or even just some Elon Muskian tech bro charges you for the “privilege” of having a dead-voiced droid tell you the tale at hand, cutting out all the actual creators in the process.
Yes, I understand that the article’s author is suggesting this will broaden the exposure for indie writers and such — but those indie writers could hire indie narrators, or indie artists for their covers, or indie editors. Writing a book isn’t easy, and publishing one isn’t free. Even using AI, the cost is coming from somewhere. Somehow, that price is extracted. Better to ensure a fellow creator is seeing that benefit, isn’t it?
More to the point, audiobook narrators do an incredible job at layering the work of an author with the additional strata of their own human experience — it brings to the table their inflection, their attitude, their (to be redundant) humanity. Acting and narration aren’t just DOING THINGS and SAYING STUFF. Just like art isn’t FILLING IN LINES WITH COLOR and writing isn’t SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION. It takes human experience. And it feeds human experience.
Man, c’mon. Stories and art are human endeavors. They just are. We tell our stories and paint on the cave walls and sing our songs because we want to be heard, we want to tell you things that we’ve seen and that we feel, we want to feel less crazy and less alone, and we want to stitch our thread into the tapestry of human experience. We don’t want a shitty robot to do it for us. And I hope you don’t want that either.
EAT SHIT, ROBOTS.
WE DON’T WANT YOUR BEEPS AND BOOPS AND YOUR WHIRRING MURDER FINGERS BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW THAT’S YOUR ULTIMATE PLAN, TO JUICE US FOR OUR FLUIDS AND TURN US INTO SOFT BRICKS THAT DO NOT CORRODE OR DEGRADE YOUR HORRIBLE WHEELS OR CLICKING SPIDER LEGS
GOOD DAY, ROBOT
I SAID GOOD DAY
Anyway. Yeah.
As I have the aforementioned mortgage, I remind you that I’ve written some stories about artificial intelligence and particularly what it does when it gets a little bit over its skis, so to speak. So, if you haven’t checked out WANDERERS and its sequel, WAYWARD, well, I’d sure love it if you did so, and yelled about it to all your friends and family and pets.
(P.S. — someone here is going to call me a Luddite. And here I ask you to read up on the Luddites. “They protested against manufacturers who used machines in what they called ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to get around standard labour practices…. Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with legal and military force, which included execution…”)
(If you’d care to read last year’s 2022 resolution — here ’tis.)
This year’s resolution is simple on the surface, if difficult to implement:
Be vigorous in your defense of your work.
Now, already I want to be clear that I don’t mean “defend it against bad reviews” or “against healthy criticism” or “editors” or whatever.
So, let’s unpack what I do mean.
As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work. It’s something anyone can do, they think. You’re replaceable. None of this matters. And so on. But writing does matter, we know. Writing goes into everything. Writing is bricklaying — it holds up the world. The stories built from the written word can change the world, too. Maybe not the whole world, but often, one person’s world. And that ain’t nothing.
But I don’t know that everyone… agrees with that? Or understands that? And I think there’s a very real threat against writers that comes from all directions. People want your time. They want to take your place. You are the singular summation of your experiences and have stories to tell, but sometimes people want you to tell a different story — one better designed to sell books or one that is simply someone else’s story that they want to put in your mouth. And this is definitely the year where I feel like I’m hearing from a lot of writers who are feeling somewhat beaten down by all of it — by others’ estimation of writers, by the industry, by the doom of Twitter, by just the pandemic in general. They feel taken advantage of, in some cases. They feel whittled to splinters.
So, I think this is a good year to dig in your heels a little.
It’s a good year to ensure that you take the time to write when you need to take that time. And also to carve out a place — a literal place! — for yourself to write, be it a room, a desk, a kitchen table, a shed, whatever, wherever.
It’s a good year to worry less about killing your darlings and instead start to learn what hills you’re willing to die on.
It’s a good year to think about what you want out of this career — what matters most to you, what stories you want to tell, you must tell — and to seek out those desires as if you deserve them. (Because, spoiler warning, you do.)
It’s a good year to make sure you’re not sacrificing things to anyone (publisher, family members, whoever) just to further their needs and not the needs of you, your stories, your career. Don’t let them ding your future. You deserve to get paid. You deserve your rights. You deserve to have your voice heard.
It’s a good year to make sure we stop believing that writing and storytelling is just some precious privilege and you’re so lucky to be doing it that you should be willing to give everything up just to be allowed to stay near to it.
It’s a good year to understand your power and to hold onto it.
To express it when you can, or when you must.
Again, this is not an exhortation against criticism or review or editorial oversight. It is not to say your story is so good it must be published and damn anyone who doesn’t listen. This is not to say you are a perfect being with perfect stories. This is also not a refusal to compromise. Compromise is vital. Writing, even when it’s just you, is a collaborative act in a sense, and there will be compromises that must must must be made to improve the work at hand.
Rather, this is all a reminder that you do this thing because you love it, because you have stories to tell. And it’s a reminder that people will try to take a little of your magic away for themselves — and that this can come from people in your life, it can come from big licensed intellectual property machines, it can come from publishers, it can come from whoever and whenever, and it’s important to know when it’s time to say no, when it’s time to say I deserve better, when it’s time to demand respect in service to your art, your craft, your work. In a sense, this is sometimes about good relationships — and you’ll know when you’re in one because they’re going to join you in this defense of the work. That could mean a spouse, an editor, an agent, whoever. They can still challenge you, but that challenge is about bringing the best version of yourself and your stories to bear — it’s not about taking something away, not about reducing you, but sharpening the knife that’s already in your hand. Some people want to brighten your light. Others just wanna throw a blanket on it.
Stand tall for yourself and your work. And stand tall for others who need that defense, too. (For instance, keep up with the Harper-Collins strike here. Support them when you can, because a healthy bookish ecosystem is good for everyone. Look too to how Brandon Sanderson talks about Audible and how that affects authors.) Stand tall for your writing, for the writing of others, for the good of your own support systems inside the publishing machine.
We only get one good turn on this carousel, so make it count.
I hope your 2023 is a good one, a productive one, and one where you make a stand for the stories you want to tell.
I selfishly remind I have a new writing book out this year —
I mean c’mon it has a BIRD flying out of someone’s HEADCAGE.
Preorder from Doylestown Bookshop and I can sign and personalize, if so desired. Comes out June 6th, 2023.
Have a great year. See you in the word mines.
TIME HAS SUCCESSFULLY PASSED, I say, though I don’t find nearly as much evidence of that as I’d like. My wife compared Pandemic Time to defragging your hard drive — the relevant data bits are fewer, and so they get juggled together to free up space, which makes time and memory collapse and crumble in really weird, off-putting ways.
I definitely exist, mentally, in this strange in-between zone. It is, I expect, purely the nature of the pandemic that has caused this — I am increasingly aware that the pandemic made us all Definitely Not Okay, and that there are a great many tremors and temblors rolling deep beneath the surface that we are only peripherally aware of (but are pretending not to feel at all). Lots of little micro-fractures and fissures forming that we don’t notice or are assured will be fine, just fine, don’t worry about it, the bridge is still up, keep driving over it, don’t worry about falling into the river below.
It’s been weird in that sense, as 2022 definitely felt like the year we were all collectively going to decide THIS PANDEMIC IS OVER, even though it is plainly not. And when I say “we all,” note that I don’t necessarily mean you and me, I only mean that collectively, shit has been forced into normal. The square peg had its corners sheared off with a chainsaw so it could fit in the circle fucking hole, geometry be damned. This isn’t our fault, necessarily. The leadership isn’t there. The messaging isn’t there. The CDC is a clown orgy, these days.
And of course, there’s Twitter. The wheels have been coming off Twitter for a few years now, though we’ve all dutifully done the work of jury-rigging up new wheels and tank treads and ice skates to keep that thing upright and moving. But then Musk came along and, I dunno, musked all over it, and now it’s swiftly degrading. I don’t need to reiterate alla that — I covered it here in THE BIRD SITE IS FUCKED. But, y’know, TERFs and antisemitism and anti-vax and welcoming Nazis back and and and, the whole thing is set to go up in flames like your average Tesla. Never mind the fact that the site was hacked, had 400 million accounts exposed, and also, the damn thing doesn’t even work that well. For all the people who lamented how unstable and unsafe Hive is or was, Twitter doesn’t have much room to talk. It’s janky shit right now.
And that to me is maybe the ultimate theme, if you will, of 2022 —
It’s janky.
Total jankiness.
Welcome to Janktown, Population All Of Us.
It’s janky, hinky, wonky-ass business. Airlines (looking at you, Southwest) and inflation and people attacking power substations and god publishing is fucking weird right now and oh there’s still a pandemic even though we’re pretending there’s not — I’m just saying, does it feel to anyone else like the seams aren’t lining up anymore? That we’ve lost symmetry? The edges are fraying, the paint is chipping off, there’s a sound in the engine we can’t quite identify, kind of a tink tink tink, a thwup thwup, maybe a belt is loose, maybe a mouse is dead in there and the gears and flywheels are passing its body around? Janky-ass vibes, all the way down. Not broken, necessarily. But breaking. That’s not to say shit won’t get fixed, or that it’s unfixable. It just sense the vibration in my bones: the gentle hum of entropy, of chaos settling into the marrow.
It’s fine.
I’m probably just imagining it.
Pay no attention to the TREMBLING CICADA-SHRIEK VOID behind the curtain.
To be clear, it’s not all bad. As much as things feel janky, sometimes it also feels like maybe some stuff is starting to get glued back together. The election was way better than we thought it was going to be. Progress is happening. I have… I don’t want to say optimism in that regard, but a general sense that it’ll all come together eventually. And that even in the turbulence and the cascading failures we’ll be all right. But I do think it means the turbulence and the cascading chaos isn’t… done yet. Not by a country mile. So, we hold tight and link arms and stand against the tide and help each other where we can, right?
Anyway.
Me, personally, 2022 was… good? I say hesitantly? I try to note every year that I’m a pretty lucky ducky, a very fortunate soul shoed with the iron of privilege and as such, I am fairly well taken care of. I had a book out, Wayward, and I think people liked it? I hope people continue to buy it and like it? (Consider this my not-so-subtle nudge to please review the book if you’re willing and able.) My middle grade novel, Dust & Grim, came out in paperback and… somehow hit the New York Times’ bestseller list? That’s pretty wild and I’m very geeked about it. D&G also landed on the Lone Star list in Texas, which — woo hoo!
Like I said, you can feel… publishing going through some things, though. Not just PRH losing the S&S bid, not just the Harper-Collions union strike (keep up with the union here, and solidarity to the striking workers who deserve to be paid a living wage), but — I dunno that it’s any one thing? Paper shortages, bookstore sales dropping, just a general sense of not knowing what works and what doesn’t. It’s definitely problematic that one of the primary vectors of BOOK LOVE, Twitter, is violently shitting the bed, leaving an authorial community without stable ground, without as much access to a readership, without (perhaps even more importantly) access to an author community. It wasn’t always perfect and it was often messy, but it was essential, and it’s really just not there like it was before. If at all.
And I think for so long publishers have kind of leaned on authors to have these (vigorous air-quotes) PLATFORMS and BRANDS and those things both really require social media to implement — never mind the fact it also requires authors to be the architects of something in which they are largely inexpert and that, arguably, this is something publishers should be there to handle or at the very least coach you on. (Some are far better at this than others, lemme tell ya.) And even when they’re not relying on authors to do it, I think publishers have still been leaning — understandably — on social media and the internet at large to convey that necessary BOOK LOVE, but that all seems to be crumbling. And it’s possible it was never really as useful as thought to be. Traditional legacy media still seems to actually work at generating buzz and selling books, but fewer and fewer of those outlets exist, and the ones that do — well, they don’t have as much space dedicated to BOOKS anymore, which fucking sucks.
And, I suspect the pandemic damaged a lot of institutional knowledge.
So, authors and publishers and by proxy readers are in this interstitial space. It’s not that there’s not a lot of good books out there. There are. It’s a great time for books. (A great time for horror, actually, if I’m being honest.) But the pipelines and wires with which we connect books to readers are fewer now, and tangled in general, and so I think there’s this great rebalancing going on. We don’t yet understand what comes out of all of this and how it’ll work. Which is not a fun time to go through, because… it’s uncertain and it’s janky and once again we return to the core problem of 2022: AMBIENT JANKINESS.
Anyway. Back to me, because, I dunno, this is my blog and I’m selfish.
Things are good. My books are doing fine. I earned out Wanderers and Book of Accidents in this past year, which is big. And I earned them out internationally, too, across a handful of countries, so I thank readers for that.
Family is good. Dogs are good. (Though our one dog became so plagued by her FART GHOSTS it started to impact her quality of life, and so we put her HAUNTED BUTT on Prozac and… well, that really helped, to be honest.)
And into 2023 we go.
What do I have going on in 2023?
Well.
There’s this.
A proper cover will come in the new year, but for now, may my hasty Photoshop suffice: BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is my new horror novel, coming out in September of 2023 from Del Rey Books. A very bad apple comes to town, and those who eat it are not the same as they were before. It’s all about small-town horror, troubled American history, ingrained wealth, folk horror cults, violent ego, all that good fun stuff. Plus, y’know, APPLES. Apples apples apples. You can pre-order now, I think, from most sites, though I’ll note that first out of the gate was Gibson’s in Concord (and I ordered a book from them recently and got it lickety-quick), so you can pre-order from them if you so desire. You can also pre-order from my local store, Doylestown Bookshop, to get signed and personalized.
I’m just finishing up edits on that book right now, so yay for that.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a spooky MG I wanna write, and also have another horror novel for Del Rey to write and turn in (codename: STAIRCASE, coming ~2024). For those who want to ask, “Will there be more Dust & Grim?” my answer to you is, I hope so, but there’s no current deal, only a couple pitches. I honestly like to hope that after a NYT list hit and the Lone Star list, they’d want more, but so far the publisher hasn’t committed — if you wanna ping LBYR on Twitter and tell them you or your kids would like to read more, you’re certainly welcome to!
Finally, I’m going to… Spain??
Yep, in July 2023, I’ll be at Celsius 232 (with Alma Katsu, too!) in Aviles, Spain, which should be super awesome. I speak… approximately none of the language, so I’ve got some work to do there, but they will of course have translators to make my guttural Pennsyltucky tongue sound like poetry.
ANYWAY.
I’m sure there’s more, but my brain is as janky as the world.
So, to close this post (and this blog) out for the year 2022, here are some of my favorite photos I’ve taken in the last 12 months —
All right that’s probably enough.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, NERDS
*waves*
*turns into a pillar of salt*
I have a theory as to why people kept going back to see the first Avatar in the theaters, and it has nothing to do with the beautiful CGI world or the powerful 3D effects. It has everything to do with simply trying to remember the thing you just spent a lot of money and time to see.
I mean, that’s the joke, right? The first movie was one of the biggest movies of all time, and yet left very little imprint on our pop culture consciousness. We don’t meme it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it. We can’t remember the character’s names. And so, I’m wondering now, did we return to the theater again and again just to try to recall it? To seek out some effect, some memory, some imprint upon us, because surely such a movie would offer that? Were we cuckoo bananapants? Did the movie even exist? Was it really just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
What I’m trying to say is, I saw Avatar 2: The Next One, and I don’t really have any feelings about it.
I spent three-plus hours in a theater.
I saw a movie.
A movie happened in front of my eyes.
Then I left the movie and now I have almost no feeling about it. Very little impression at all beyond the knowledge that I saw it and it exists. Probably.
Maybe this is just a pandemic effect. Hell, maybe I’m just depressed. But I got into the car with my son and wife and usually, we go see a movie (rarer now because, well, pandemic) and we talk about it on the drive home. That’s part of the great thing about seeing movies with other people: the conversation after.
But this talk? It umm, it wasn’t deep.
Son: “I liked it.”
Wife: “Yeah, it was good.”
Me: “It was certainly pretty in parts.”
And then…
A kind of collective sigh as we sought for more to say but there was no more to say, and so little more was said. We talked about other things.
Still, even now, I’m like, what the fuck. That movie was three fucking hours. More than that. And it cost, what, a hundred billion dollars to make. Surely, surely there’s more to say about it.
In trying to gather my thoughts, though, I’m less Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters certain that his sculpted pile of mashed potatoes means something and instead I’m increasingly aware this unsculpted pile of mashed potatoes means absolutely nothing at all and carries with it no cultural cachet or narrative meaning beyond the plop of pale starch it was, and is, and shall be.
That’s Avatar. A pale plop of narrative starch. Delicious, in its way. Satisfying in its moment. But beyond that, did I get anything more? I am full, but only temporarily. It was calories. I ate them. It is done now.
And yet! AND YET. And yet I try, again flailing for meaning, for memory, for something, for anything. So here are some impressions, some crumbs of thought brushed off the counter and into my cupped hand.
The frame rate change is super weird and doesn’t work.
For those who don’t know, it goes from (I think, I’m not going to look this up) 48 frames per second to 24 frames per second. We are used to 24 frames per second in films and it ostensibly clicks with our brain as it tricks our monkey minds into feeling more authentic, because it’s how our brains interpolate visual data. Or something. I dunno. So 48 is *does some quick math on cool calculator watch* twice the standard frame rate.
Put differently, you know how the very first thing you do when you get a new TV is find MOTION SMOOTHING and hit it with the heel of your shoe until it turns off and never can turn on again, and when you go over your elderly parents’ house and they have that shit still on you find yourself irrationally angry at them even though it’s not their fault, this is how the stupid TV showed up in their house? Yeah, James Cameron turns it back on for this movie. He undid all our hard collective work and said MOTION SMOOTHING IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE.
Except, he then added as a caveat, I MEAN, SOMETIMES, I GUESS, because the movie never commits to this fully. I do not know how much of the movie is in this format, but I’d guess about… 50% of it. It switches back and forth, often multiple times in a single scene or sequence. Back and forth it flips and you never ever get settled into one frame rate. What that means is, you experience this jarring flip between:
“This looks like the slickest video game cutscene ever”
To
“Wait now this looks weird, like Claymation.”
Because it goes from eerily smooth to half that, which looks jerky, hitching, erratic. To clarify, this switch makes normal filmmaking at 24 frames-per-second look wrong somehow.
And the result is, neither looks “normal” for the movie because one minute it’s one thing, the next it’s another, and it keeps flip-flopping.
And for me this didn’t allow me to ever lose myself in the story. It constantly made my brain re-adjust to the visuals, so every few minutes I was forced to reacclimatize myself and willfully think about that acclimation.
There are times when it breaks through and that hyper-smooth filmmaking approaches actual beauty. But it doesn’t last for long and you ultimately realize none of this is real anyway and all of this is a big tech demo.
A thin, thin narrative gravy.
There’s the (approximated, paraphrased) saying of, “Trying to fit a 100-pound pig in a 10-pound bucket,” meaning a thing is overstuffed, crammed in, trying to do too much. Avatar 2 does not have this problem.
It has the opposite problem. There is a little baby piglet inside a cauldron. It is bleating. Its bleats echo in the hollow iron. The piglet is sad.
Cameron has crafted a huge storytelling container — a three-hour tour, so to speak — of Pandora. And he brings very little story to fit in it. The story is… fine. It’s there. Things happen, but when you chart the broad strokes, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And the narrow strokes, the smaller character arcs, there aren’t many. They’re usually two-beat arcs. “This character is THIS, and now they’re THIS, the end.” Some have one only one beat. A narrative arc that is less an arc and more a single blip on a radar screen: ping.
When you chart out the story, it doesn’t even make sense in its entirety. In revisiting the story with my wife, I was like, “Wait, why did they do that again? Why did they go there?” And the response is mostly a shrug. “Because the movie wanted them to?” Which is probably a pretty accurate answer.
A lack of stickiness?
Some books, shows, movies — they’re sticky. Meaning, they stick to us. Good or bad or whatever, they live with us and it’s the thing that makes us care about them. We remember certain parts, certain characters, the way it made us feel. And I think the first film suffers in a way from a lack of that stickiness. Nothing really gets under your skin or buries itself in your mind — for good or ill, it just doesn’t resonate deeply. That’s okay, I guess, sometimes things are that way.
I think the sequel is even less sticky than the first one. When later my family talked about the movie more, we tried to discuss it — as one does — by using character names. And we had almost none of them. We remembered Jake Sully and Neytiri. We remembered the tiniest child. And the rest… no idea. I just looked them up now and without the CGI blue goat cat fish people faces to go with them, I couldn’t tell you who they were. I mean this with all seriousness: I have no memory of their names. Or the names of locations. Or any of it. It just slid off me, a fried egg from a non-stick pan. And I try to think, maybe this is just me, maybe this is the pandemic, certainly my brain has felt weird since all of this began — but I think back to movies this year I did like and I find them to have had a pretty sticky factor. I remember scenes and names and lines of movies for the most part. But this one I’m like, “The older brother. Wait, was he the younger brother? And the girl. The one who is Sigourney Weaver Junior for some reason. And the village elder. Him. That guy. No no the other one. And the bad guy, you know, the guy from Don’t Breathe, yeah, Commander Cumsack or whatever they call him. Colonel Quiddich? No. QUARICH. Right right right.”
It’s made all the worse that this movie is clearly a setup for the next 47 of these. Stuff happens but leaves little impact. And this movie undoes the larger Pandora-global effects of the first film without exploring what that even means. I dunno. It’s a movie. It happened. It was fine? It was fine.
This does not sound like a winning endorsement, Wendig.
Well, see, here’s the thing. I really like James Cameron and even when I don’t like a movie of his, I still appreciate the work that went into it. And some of his movies are some of my favorite movies.
This movie was made with an impeccable attention to detail and craft. I don’t know that it adds up to much, but it has some moments of genuine beauty and emotion. Maybe not as many as the movie intends, but they’re there. (The space whale storyline is proabably the one that stays with me. I remember the space whales, I remember the one’s name, even. Payakan! I might be spelling that wrong! But that’s the name!)
So, people ask, should I see it? Should I not see it?
My answer is —
If you’re intending to see it ever, then seeing it in the theater with the full 3D frame-rate big sound big screen IMAX or RPX thing — that’s the way to see it. Probably the only way. Maybe it’s better without all that dressing, but this is, I believe, Cameron’s intended way for you to see it, so if you’re going to see this movie one way or another, then you might as well skip out on a mortgage payment or two and take your family to check it out.
If you genuinely do not care, and I don’t blame you if you don’t?
Don’t go.
It’s fine? It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a movie that exists and you will not be harmed by it (insert some conversation here about the problematic nature of this movie and how it even more than the first one appears to be co-opting specific indigenous cultures and though it’s certainly not my place to make assertions please note there is a boycott of the movie which is worth reading about here). It’s even quite pretty. It’s fine. It exists. It’s fine.
Anyway. I have a number of plot holes and spoilers I could talk about, but I honestly don’t know that I can muster the interest in understanding them, or even asking them in the first place? Suffice to say a number of things didn’t really make sense for me, but that’s probably not the point of the movie anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. If you’re one of those people who goes onto YouTube and enjoys watching like, video game graphic engine tech demos for Unreal Engine 9, then this is your movie. Enjoy the goat cat fish people movie.
Also buy my book Wayward or I die in the abyss. I hope it’s good. You might like it. I hope it’s quite sticky, narratively speaking, and even if it’s not, I covered it in strawberry jam so it is definitely actually sticky. Okay thank you goodbye.
