We know that the age of 9 is when most people become lifelong readers, or not, depending on whether they bury themselves in Treasure Island or their tablets. And yet one of the reasons cited for why Middle Grade is suffering compared to other target audiences is that, ironically, the kids are too young to be content creators themselves, and yet still old enough to treat reading like a social activity and therefore mostly read to be on the same page, so to speak, as their friends. This is sort of how it works for every group, but since marketing has moved to social media, there is no organic way to reach such a young audience via their peers anymore. There’s a lot that we could get into with that but suffice it to say that our devices are both helping and hindering our reading habits, depending on a host of factors. The only issue is, as I said, that if you don’t get into that habit by a certain stage in your development, it is unlikely that you ever will. The outcome is that we will see fewer and fewer readers, especially of fiction. Non-fiction tends to appeal to a different sort of person, who is less interested in enjoying a book as they are in ‘extracting value’ from it (despite fiction providing more value, if you know where to look, even in practical matters).

Oddly, despite these trends, it seems that we are consuming more books than ever as a society—and ‘consuming’ is the right word. People who are in the hobby are buying books at a higher and higher rate and are getting through them at an incredible pace. This is another effect of letting algorithms have such a grip on us. When you’re a part of the group, you go all in, and when you’re not, you abstain. It’s binary; you’re either a 1 or a 0. In some ways, it is as though we now have tighter social bonds than ever, yet they are bonds which have formed between strangers. Funnily enough, this part does not actually bother me so much as, throughout my life, I have always been a very take it or leave it kind of person. I would either obsess over something or take no interest in it at all, and while we may medicalise hyperfocus, I think it can be a superpower when channelled in the right ways. The difference comes down to the individual and how one exercises their autonomy. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the non-fiction crowd to look for the value in books first and foremost? Either way, finding intelligent literature and then engaging with it intelligently is certainly my aim; it just needs to be well written.

Being the driver of my own critical engagement and constantly rethinking what it means to be a reader, as well a writer, is how I will get better at both, hence my return to my foundations in revisiting many of the books from my early childhood all the way into my late teens, in an effort to gauge what in me has changed, and what I perhaps need to reassess. It is a way of making visible the blind spots of my own making. Part of why we are normally unable to do this is because we silo ourselves according to what we think we are ‘supposed to’ read. The industry ‘helps’ us along in this (never mind with the increasingly microscopic marketing niches) with the categories of Board Books, Picture Books, Early Readers, Chapter Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult and Adult. Of course, you will find better and more mature writing in a good ‘Middle Grade’ novel than in a bad ‘Adult’ novel. Either way, we need to go back to publishing books with illustrations—no, haha, I don’t mean literally, but literarily. I’m talking about ‘verbal illustrations’, or interior descriptions. Here, it’s better if I show you. This is a lovely passage from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908):

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering—even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.

There are a few reasons that, though we grew up with writing like this, or I should hope, it has mostly not carried over into the prose of today. For one, to achieve this quality requires a great deal of mindly energy and so could never transfer simply via osmosis, unlike what has carried over from children’s books, such as the puerile and heavy-handed treatments of themes, so common now for all ages and across all narrative forms. For two, publishers feel like such passages slow down the reader and that (once again thanks to the algorithms) people don’t have the attention spans for them anymore. Of course, that’s the point! No, not that people don’t have any attention spans, but that we should be slowing down from time to time to savour great prose. I’m not saying publishers were pure back then for putting out work like this. The Wind in the Willows had a hard enough time getting through their gates at the turn of the century, given its unusual structure and how hard it was to categorise. Even so, if you look at most editions today, you will find them to be heavily abridged, and most of those wonderful, illustrative passages have been removed. So, I suppose that we have a dearth of prose worth savouring even when we are supposed to encounter it early in life. That, more than anything, might be why it hasn’t carried over, despite my earlier rationalisations.

I do, however, recall a period of being captivated by prose of this sort, and I thought there was something wrong when I found the likes of Harry Potter turgidly written and dull. Nonetheless, I persevered and decided that maybe such passages as floats through The Wind in the Willows like Rat on his boat was for ‘children’ after all, and that maybe books are supposed to test one’s patience. I later became sucked into ‘learning to appreciate’ whatever turgid dreck passes for literature according to the establishment. That’s a phase a lot of us go through with our online pipelines, where pseudointellectualism is outmatched only by anti-intellectualism, and it’s just a matter of whether we grow out of it or get stuck thinking we need to praise the garments of naked Emperors. Those who don’t grow out of it end up handing more and more territory to two invasive species of writers: those who think artful prose ‘gets in the way of the story’ and those who fancy themselves artistes and saturate their prose with modifiers.

Now, I admit that the passage I quoted is itself overwrought. However, I think it is the result of Kenneth Grahame being a very intuitive writer and feeling that the rhythm and flow of these words would have been harmed had he been too strict about cutting them down. He’s much like Tolstoy in that way. The sort of over-description I’m talking about is often made duller and more mechanical for its excesses, as though they had built up like rust. The pianist Claudio Arrau would say that you must relax to allow the ‘current’ to flow unimpeded into the keyboard. Well, a writer has their keyboard and must relax the mind and the body, not least to get their fingers moving. So, I have found that when I’m not in the right state mentally, it physically prevents me from writing, and my fingers begin to feel heavy and, well, rusty. Anyway, the balance is about being thoughtful without overthinking. I doubt that Kenneth Grahame planned his ‘illustrations’; despite his being a banker, they could only have come from an imaginative and playful way of engaging with the world. It was not a result of workshops but of long walks and ponderings, of being in touch with nature and his own nature and finding words to connect the two. And, as charming as I find real illustrations from the likes of E. H. Shepard and Robert Ingpen, who lent their pens to Grahame’s work in their turn, no picture could convey what those verbal illustrations do.

Now, while there was the promise of a limited sort of adaptation in the form of what were still referred to as ‘decorations’ at the time, these were delightfully impressionistic pictures, and culture had not yet been held up in focus of would-be film cameras keeping time at 24 frames per second. From this little passage of ours, our video of winter in the Wild Wood comes filtered through Mole’s eyes. And now that so many authors bar us from these parts of their characters’ internal woods, it is one reason I have grown to dislike the term ‘world-building’. More personally, even, this was sped along by having a writing mentor rail against my use of the term in discussion of a science fiction novel of his, and though at the time I didn’t think it such a big deal, I have come to appreciate his point of view. You see that novel had an incredibly rich cosmos—long and multi-layered enough to make Dune look like a half-baked short story—and everything was done in service of not merely expanding that cosmos but deepening it. This is what’s missing from the idea of world-building in common parlance. All good description is ultimately about realising the characters, and characters are like trees that need thick, rich soil into which to plunge their roots and reach their full heights. But if you keep those trees in a pot, no matter how well you maintain the soil, you will, at best, only end up with bonsais. As far as what cameras have to do with this? Well, I could overexplain, but I’ve implied the connection, and I’d like you to finish tying that knot on your own. Let’s cultivate good readers, shall we?

Of course, not everything in The Wind in the Willows reads like that excerpt I shared, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s part of letting your art be organic to not rely on one fixed style but allow many styles to take on the various tones of your voice. But with the commodification of literature has come the standardisation of prose in the name of a false notion of consistency (notice how I shifted style to become more authoritative?). Variety is what keeps literature interesting at every level. There is no strict way anything must be written; the only criterion is whether it works. I feel that often, writers somehow try too hard without trying hard enough, and back to the pianist analogies, for I cited Claudio Arrau and, well, he was a great pianist in his own way, in the way that Yasujiro Ozu was a great filmmaker, very subtle and warm and humble, but not wanting to be too spontaneous, and maintaining a certain reverence for his art form. On the other hand, you have a man like Josef Hofmann, who was great in a very different way, in the way John Cassavetes was a great filmmaker: fiery, fluid and raw. Even though Arrau had few good things to say about Hofmann, both were among the most revered artists of their times and remain so today—and I think there is room for their ways and more. The point is that they had their own ways. One’s artistic coming of age is the journey of discovering and deciding upon their own principles. Once you have those, you can be as fluid as you like. Anatoly Karpov, the former World Chess Champion, once said, ‘Style? I’ve got no style,’ and yet, a game of his would nonetheless be unmistakable because his principles guided him where nobody else could follow.

Likewise, there are principles of verbal illustration totally outside of Grahame’s. I’ll show you an example from another of the most well-written children’s books. However, you might not have read it, given its dark and twisted nature and the fact that Disney’s sanitisation has drawn so much attention away from the source material. And this, despite how, as racist and otherwise problematic the book is, the film, which came out decades later, is arguably more so. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about Peter Pan, or, as it’s titles in older volumes, Peter Pan and Wendy, and originally, Peter and Wendy. I think the titles have made more sense over time from a marketing perspective (because, of course, that would be kept in check), and it now follows the Charlotte’s Web approach of naming the book after a character who is not the protagonist—who are Wendy and Wilbur, respectively. Whatever you want to call it, the book was written in 1911 and technically is itself an adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play, after he had let the character stew for several years. Peter himself predates even that story, originally appearing in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird.

It is believed that Barrie had pituitary gland issues preventing him from going through puberty all the way and so was unable to quite ‘grow up’ himself. Peter was one of his demons come to torment him—as I might say if I prone to such clichés, ahem—and it seemed he never left the poor old (and young) man alone, which is how Peter is in the story, returning over and over to those he both remembered and forgot. His short-term memory loss (Peter’s, not Barrie’s) is at once sad and terrifying at times, as, on their way to Neverland, the Darling children wonder if Peter will lose interest in them and go off to do something else. You know, I just remembered that Disney, via Pixar, has their own story about a character with short-term memory loss, in Finding Dory (2016), but that film treats it as a disability and is a story about raising awareness for all kinds of disabilities, albeit in that condescending way only a corporation is capable of. Peter Pan, on the other hand, treats it as an otherworldly curse of the sort that fairy tale lands tend to impart.

Though as much as we ourselves have forgotten of the man behind it, Neverland made Barrie one of the most famous celebrities of his day, to the point that Charlie Chapin declared him the person he most wanted to meet on a 1921 trip to London. Chaplin, too, was a youthful spirit, of course, but in a very different way from Barrie. I could imagine a darkly comedic encounter between the two… I won’t go into that here; perhaps it could be fodder for a play or something. Anyway, the book has many great moments, and Captain Cook is one of the most well-sketched characters in all of children’s literature. Yet it is neither Hook, nor Peter, nor even Wendy, but Mrs Darling who stand out to me, for, though she appears only briefly, at the beginning and towards the end, her small portrait is one of the most deftly composed. Hence why I’ve chosen one of her passages for this excerpt:

Mrs Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, packing into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

You know, I used to be a magician, and one of the core ideas among our ken is that magic is not something that happens before our eyes but within our minds. This is the case when it comes to stories as well. What I mean by this is that whether a story has magical elements or not has surprisingly little to do with how magical it feels. The above paragraph makes magic, figuratively, literally, and literarily, from both the mind and the mundane and holds its own with the story’s most fantastical sequences. Contrast this with today’s ‘magic systems’, which some have dulled even further into so-called ‘hard/scientific magic systems’, and those authors who want to emulate not just films but video games with their work and make the magical feel mundane.

Hmm. I’m going to rant on this, if you’ll excuse me, and then I’ll wind my way back to the main discussion: No, as you may have gathered, I’m not a fan of Brandon Sanderson’s work, and that’s for a few reasons, but, the main one is that he has swung the fantasy genre even further away from a language of enchantment than it had already been, and the discussion now seems entirely about world building and magic systems and all that other BS (which happen to be his initials). Doubly irritating is that Sanderson writes the types of ‘adult’ novels I alluded to earlier, which are less thematically mature than children’s novels like Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows. In fact, I’m not even sure they have more violence or other PG aspects than Peter Pan. Again, I think it mostly has to do with style, not substance—or lack thereof—and the turgidness associated with ‘grown up’ fiction. That he gives lectures on creative writing while Sanderblasting his own prose of any sense of creativity is just more to sigh over. He even said in one of his lectures that literature was about boring people with boring problems. Huhhh…

Of course, he and his asinine statements are symptoms of a deeper issue, that being the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, for the best works in any genre are always classed as ‘literature’ down the line. The false dichotomy goes like this: ‘Literature means unusual or difficult language, and genre means simple and plain language.’ Some may consider literary fantasy or anything else to be a stylistic subcategory of that genre, but this feeds into that same narrow view of what literature is or can be. The true distinction is one of quality. How to make that distinction? Well, that is what this is all about.

All of culture is a war between minds—not only between the minds of individuals but the minds of and within every individual. One of the foundational laws of physics is the principle of least action, which says that all things adhere to the most efficient and low-cost ways of being, moving and doing, given the circumstances. That is not to say that there is no free will or that anyone is bound to always take the lazy way out, for the more complex something is, the more complex are its principles, and we are complex enough even to create our own, as I’ve already said. Nonetheless, we see in those impartial/indifferent partial differential equations into which the only true laws are written the source of our own unmaking. All things tend toward entropy in time. The challenge is to overcome it just long enough.

A writer’s true audience is the masses, at least a part of them. No part that can be divided into demographics on a spreadsheet, but that part of each individual able to resist those old commandments of the cosmos. All great writing is universal. Yes, there are caveats. I would not recommend a truly adult book to be read by children, though a great children’s book can and should be read by adults. I suppose all great writing is universal when it comes to everyone 18 and up. That’s less poetic than what I was going for, but the point stands! Moby Dick is a rather masculine novel and maybe a novel of men, but it is a novel for men—just as much as The Wind in the Willows is a story of animals, though animals don’t read.’

‘Well, I don’t think many humans read either. In fact, I doubt most of them will even get to this point of the essay.’

‘What? Who are you? When did this become a dialogue?’

‘Since I put a quote on the end of that paragraph.’

‘That was you? What was the point of that? I thought it was a typo.’

‘I’ve been hearing a lot about how people only read dialogue these days, so I just thought I’d try to do something that appealed to those types.’

‘So, you read all of that about how literacy is struggling, and that it starts in childhood with the lack of good writing in children’s books, and you want to reinforce the dumbing down by resorting to this?’

‘Listen—sorry, what was your name?’

‘Dan’

‘Listen, Dan, I think it’s good to give people what they actually want sometimes. As long as they’re getting some enjoyment out of it, what’s the harm? And btw, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those “illustrative passages” and what have yu. But there are books that have a way faster pace, and they’re also pretty good. You might even say that writing like that, those “Paper Lanters,” as I’ve heard you call them elsewhere, well, wouldn’t you say those are a bit indulgent?’

‘First, why are you writing like this is a text chat? This is an essay. And second, how did you know I called them that? Have you been snooping around in the manuscripts I’ve been editing? Those are confidential.’

‘We’re having a convo, aren’t we? And I doubt that if Plato wrote his Socratic Dialogues today that he would refrain from using text-speak. It’s just the way people talk online. This is online, isn’t it?’

‘Are you serious? Huhhh. You can’t win a race to the bottom. Enjoyment and escapism is one thing, but it narrows your potential to encounter to engage with reality when the book ends. I think this is only growing more important as the world becomes both so connected on a surface level and yet so fragmented in deeper ways. Of course, there is something to be said of immersion, I’m not denying that—hence why illustrative prose is so important. No, it’s not the only way to supply the reader with that depth that they can take with them in life, but with the right techniques, you can basically write a story about anything, and if you do it well, the reader won’t to mind—as long as they are open-minded. You know, I’ve been reading a new novel, well, manuscript, from that mentor of mine—’

‘Is that that guy who—’

‘Hold on a second. I’ll formally introduce him and his work in another essay, when I have room to so a whole story about it.’

‘Sounds fun. Continue.’

‘So, I’ve been reading this new work of his, and I had certain expectations for what it was going to be. It turned out to be something completely different. Now, I know that most readers have a very hard time with that. It’s why I believe Moby Dick is seen as boring by a lot of people. They’re engaging with it on the wrong level because they have been primed by what they’ve read before to look for certain things, and when they don’t get them—while missing everything they would get instead if they were only paying attention—they get mad at the book. Well, we’re all prone to that to some degree. The difference is that a mature person doesn’t let their preconceptions dictate their whole experience. The same is true of life. It would be like if a wildlife photographer decided to aim his camera at one spot all day and complained that the animals wouldn’t stand for a picture.’

‘I mean, the animals in The Wind in the Willows might. Some of them, at least. Maybe not Badger.’

‘Are you following what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Now, it wasn’t just that what happened went against my expectations. I just was not a fan of it. It felt like it was recycled from his plays, and all I could hear was the grinding of an old axe. I just found it frustrating that he would hijack what I had thought was going to be the story to do this. And yet, the longer he went in this direction, and the sharper the axe got, the more compelled I was to keep reading. It’s like finding the water too cold when it’s only up to your knees, but as you go deeper and start to become immersed, you acclimate and don’t want to leave.’

‘I wanted to ask, why do you use a lot of metaphors?’

‘I think they’re colourful ways to communicate. Why not? Anyway, I wish you respond to the substance of what I’m saying.’

‘I mean, I don’t quite relate to what you’re saying is the thing. I’d just be like, “When are we getting back to the story?” I find tangents annoying.’

‘Then why did you interrupt the essay? This whole thing is a tangent.’

‘You know your paragraphs are really long? And I thought you were just going to go on and on and keep opening things up further and further. It’s like, I get it, everything is connected, and so there’s a lot to discuss, but I thought you were getting carried away.’

‘I was actually about to wrap up this part. We’re going on and on because of this nonsense. Anyway, the way I write is just called maximalism, which is all about doing the most with the least, and I think that’s what we should be doing as writers. I mean, I love I Am Legend, the book, but it feels so short to me these days, and now all I can imagine is just how much more could have been done had it been, pardon the term, fleshed out.’

‘I don’t know. Long books tend to waste a lot of pages with filler.’

‘I’m with you there. It just has to be done well. However, given the choice, I would take a long book over a short one if they were equal quality, even though many of my favourite books are short, ironically. That’s probably because more writers are sculptors, as opposed to builders, on average, so they overwhelm on sheer numbers.’

‘They are? I thought most writers just did a regular job?’

‘What? Oh, I see. Well, it has to do with whether your approach is one of adding or subtracting. In my editing, I always try to determine what a manuscript needs. Do we need to add blocks or chisel away at them? Obviously, it’s something I have to address at a granular level, but authors do have certain temperaments. Builders are quite rare, but Kenneth Grahame was surely one of them. Melville too. Unfortunately, most editors aren’t trained to discern who is a builder and who is a sculptor, so they often cut the builders and indulge the sculptors. I have found that, while I can be a sculptor, cutting things down E. B. White style because of certain neuroses I developed during my time in magic, it always leads to a destructive amount of overediting.

‘Wait, what’s the difference between that and all the other things you mentioned? Overmodifying and overwriting and whatnot?’

‘So, those have to do with using too many adverbs and adjectives. Overediting is like seeing so many small defects everywhere that in your desire to correct them, you end up ruining the whole. If you see a small bump on the nose, and you end up chiselling away the nose to remove it. I would literally do this when I had to do woodworking in school.’

‘Like that Father Ted episode?’

‘Huh? I don’t remember much of Father Ted. It came out ages ago.’

‘There’s an episode where they are trying to sell a car, but it has some dents. I don’t recall the reason. Anyway, Ted tries to hammer out the dents and ends up turning the car into a wreck because he can never quite get it right.’

‘Ha, okay, that’s pretty good. Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like. You’ve got to relax. And when you’ll be able to transition between high and low much more naturally. It’s part of why I’m such a fan of Moby Dick. Melville could go from the comic to the cosmic in one breath.’

‘If he’s able to go so far in one breath, that would make him a whale in a way.’

‘Are you trying to make a metaphor? Well, I guess it ties into the whole immersion thing.’

‘Literally! Or figuratively? Wait, I’m confused.’

‘Literarily.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. We’ll continue this some other time.’

Introduction

Looking back, 2011 was one of the best for film. I don’t know of any other year in the 21st century that saw as many as three capital “M” Masterpieces appear on the big screen, via festivals or otherwise: Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; Béla Tarr’s (or “Tarr Béla’s,” if you’re from his native Hungary) The Turin Horse; and the subject of this piece, Shame, by the British filmmaker Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the Hollywood actor of the same name). Even besides these, you had other excellent, albeit flawed works, such as American director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

If you’ve seen all of these films, you may have noticed that, despite their directors all being from such different backgrounds and cultures, they have all inherited some qualities of Andrei Tarkovsky—the visionary Russian filmmaker prominent a few decades prior. What connects them all is their attitude toward presenting the textures of life in a very raw manner, retaining its nuances, and not being afraid to slow down and brood on them with their characters in order to make the viewer both think and feel deeply.

Most importantly, though, what connects these filmmakers is that their work is made for “grown-ups,” by which I mean people who are emotionally mature, who do not need to be spoon-fed, and who are moved by substance rather than the cheap manipulation that is the standard way of getting audiences to tear up. Alas, such an approach has never been fashionable. Even the likes of Martin Scorsese, who has made kino like Taxi Driver (1976), which, in its content, caters to this kind of viewer, would still adopt a more fashionable style. That is, Scorsese films are “cool.” In contrast, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, 1978)1—the magnum opus of Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes, based on a story the pair developed years before Cassavetes wrote the final script—is not cool nor anywhere near as popular. It is, however, the equal or (I would argue) superior to Taxi Driver. It goes for realism in the most authentic sense possible, and, as amazing a performance as Robert De Niro brought to the character of Travis Bickle, Ben Gazzara’s Cosmo in Bookie managed to transcend even the concept of “performance”—it reminds me of Jeff Buckley’s covers of Lilac Wine and Hallelujah, in that they come through with total authenticity as though Buckley himself had not only written the lyrics but lived them. Anyway, nonetheless, some dislike Bookie for all of the reasons that, to me, make it great art; it is shunned because it does not consider its audience immature or impatient, and it is a distinctly gritty and unglamorous film. We seem to have fetishized grittiness on so-called “prestige TV,” but this aesthetic grittiness is actually just another form of glamor. No, Bookie depicts sleaze, ugliness, shallowness, violence, perversion, addiction, etc., as they are. That is, it does not merely show them onscreen to be reacted against but gives them texture and subtext that allows an intelligent viewer to reflect.

It is a film that shares much in common with Shame, in attitude as well as what is depicted, and Michael Fassbender’s Brandon is perhaps among the handful of rivals to Ben Gazzara’s Cosmo in terms of casting. But, the subject matters of Shame—the struggle with loneliness, lack of meaning, and the unhealthy ways damaged people self-medicate—are actually closer to Taxi Driver, just expressed through a different avenue.2 The difference is simply that, again, much like Bookie, as well as McQueen’s other two Masterpieces, Hunger (2008) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), it has no escapist qualities. Every film mentioned in this paragraph, though, does have a common X factor, and that is that they follow a single character in an unwavering, claustrophobia-inducing closeness. In short, despite the isolation and loneliness of thee characters, there is a form of one-way intimacy that we as viewers are able to share with them. We’ve seen into the depths of their beings and understood them in a way only art can help us to. Sadly, it is not a kind of art that gets made very often, and when it is, it is rarely shown to (or sought out by) the masses. McQueen summed up the typical attitude in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2011:

Steve McQueen: “You know, I’m very disappointed with how people make movies these days. And I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ll be honest—I think they’re rubbish. It’s almost like they’re treating audiences like idiots. Every movie is a cliché. . . . And nothing this year, ever, has surprised me.”

I’m going to assume he didn’t see the other two Masterpieces I listed above for that year, of course, but that is a powerful statement nonetheless. 2011 was a fairly solid year in film, even sans its top triumphs. But… he’s right, most of what came out then did treat audiences like idiots—and this applies to “art” films as well. That tendency has remained consistent, as we can see by the 2023 Yorgos Lanthimos “experiment” Poor Things—a take on Frankenstein of sorts in which the mad scientist’s creation is a woman whose brain was replaced with that of her unborn child upon jumping off a bridge out of disgust for it. It is an artsy film with the pretense of a concept that is ripe for something surprising to be done. However, in execution it turned out to be a collection of predictable tropes and gimmick characters that made it seem as though Lanthimos was trying to mash up the themes like baby food for those incapable of chewing upon them.

It reaches further than being “subversive in polite society,” which is one of the factors that only emphasizes how stiff, glossy and commercial it really is. By contrast it gives me more appreciation for the Cassaveteses and McQueens, who, despite taking their time to develope and refine their ideas and scripts, ensured the process of creation happened organically, with actors that were trusted co-creators of the moment, as though, once more, musicians lending their covers to a song that they were allowed to make their own. With this same trust, the viewer is invited to be a co-creator themselves, and it is in this framework of co-creation that meaningful analysis and critique can take place beyond a mere evaluation of the material.

The Shame in Shame

You know, it was actually this film that made me decide it was a good idea to include the year after the title for any work of art I brought up, as it shares its name with a great 1968 film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Both play off of that title in different ways and yet, there is something about the later film that is illuminated by the earlier one. Shame (1968) also primarily focuses on a man and a woman. However, rather than siblings, they are husband and wife—portrayed by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman—who have to commit horrors to survive during a foreign military occupation (the details of which are never specified). To mirror this, there is a line from Sissy toward the end of Shame (2011): “We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.” And, spoilers (if you believe such a film can be diminished by knowing what happens), this is shortly before Brandon finds her with slit wrists from an attempted suicide. It shows that, even without war and in seeming comfort, the true stakes can be immense, and people are not necessarily at peace. In both cases, they do what they can to survive, as much as it hurts others and, in other ways, destroys them as well.

Now, there is an important distinction to be made between the concepts of shame vs. guilt. Guilt separates who we are from what we have done. It is anti-essentialist. Shame, on the other hand, is the idea that certain things make us intrinsically bad or that we do bad things because we are bad. We can never set down the burden. It is no coincidence that Brandon calls Sissy and consistently treats her as a “burden” when she is such a symbol of his past. More than a symbol, Sissy is both a casualty of and an invader from that continent of time that looms beyond the shallows of Brandon’s comfortable life. Like the nature of the war in Shame (1968), we do not get any details of this, no backstory. When Brandon breaks down on the pier and cries out in anguish, I suspect part of that anguish is at the fact that Sissy survived and that he knows he must change even if he does not believe he is capable of such a feat. Of course, this is only one of the many emotions compounding at that moment.

Like great art often does, this film plays with ambiguity. We are given the suggestion that Brandon and Sissy’s relationship may have been incestuous at one point. It is curious how often Sissy seems to provoke Brandon in her own sexuality, from which Brandon recoils. That opens up questions of shame carried over from this opaque part of their lives. Of course, this is not necessarily what happened. Obviously, there was something that caused a degree of trauma for both of them, but its exact nature is not easy to pin down, nor is the nature of the shame. The most common explanation is that the title refers to Brandon’s sex addiction. What the film is more deeply about, however, as we’ve given a lot of ground to thus far, is loneliness. Specifically, the kind of loneliness that comes from two extremes of psychology—what some may refer to as avoidant (in Brandon) and anxious (in Sissy) attachment styles. For the likes of Brandon, being who he is—outwardly very attractive, wealthy, and successful—he likely feels shame over what he sees as his own weaknesses. One must understand that this film does not present merely a series of one-off events but a slice of cyclical life. For instance, we see Brandon being unable to perform with a woman with whom he has a real connection and who has been priming him on the prospect of a committed relationship. We never see her again, but this is clearly not the first time this has happened with someone like her. Brandon fears anything that might lead him to lose his sense of freedom, as it is what he values most in life.

On top of that, people are never good at expressing complex and contradictory emotional states. They tend to double down on whatever comes through the strongest in that moment. Part of Brandon’s brooding nature has to do with his being locked in indecision. He is not able to find balance, and the demands of those around him exacerbate this. To bring is back around, yes, there is a kind of shame in always hiding or suppressing parts of oneself because, paradoxically for Brandon, who cannot let anyone come close enough to trust with the nuances of what he is going through—the context required would be too great, and this is passed on to the viewer via the film’s lacunae, which, like his silences, Brandon leaves for us to fill, as voyeuristically as we watch, or listen to his voicemail.

How McQueen Paints a Scene

Given the damage caused by the recent hurricanes, I was reminded of how of my encounter with the Story Grid YouTube channel. This is not run by the creator of Story Grid, Shawn Coyne, but by someone he has coached. Coyne is, like me, a developmental editor, except that our approaches are very different. While I would concern myself with the artistry of a novel and where I believe its literary merit lies or not, he doesn’t seem to believe such things are practical enough to be of concern, and insofar as it is possible to grasp, it’s something abstract and not for the editor to judge. Instead, Story Grid is all about what makes something commercial, what gives it appeal to an audience you know how to market towards. I have to admit that there was a time, not that long ago, when I partially bought into this approach, in that, since it was possible to make something both commercial and artful, as I mentioned was the case in Taxi Driver, why not opt for a balance? The issue, for me, is that, in principle, it is too limiting, and, in principle, art should not be compromised in this way. Besides, nobody really knows what makes a commercial success. There are certainly some common factors that are found in popular works, and deviating too much will make it harder to gain traction, but it doesn’t go the other way—as in, there are some necessary factors, but they are never sufficient without a lot of funding, distribution, and luck. Most of the time, books or films engineered from the ground up for mass appeal end up flopping regardless. It is much easier to sell something that solves a concrete problem, and that’s where the Story Grid branding is so effective—it denotes a level of certainty and control, and it is targeted toward those who are feeling insecure about their abilities.

Anyway, I saw this video on SG, and the host was talking about how, for practice, he had tried writing a “lovers meet” scene set in a café. He was attempting something like the painter’s fruit basket—a standard scene into which you can bring your own interpretation, the idea being that if you could make something like this interesting, then it would show real craft. For feedback, he sent it to Mr Coyne, who, credit where due, pointed out much of what didn’t work. The problem was that nothing interesting was brought into the picture. It was just the usual trite stuff that could have been written by an AI pulling together the average of what is expected. Now we get to the point, that being Coyne’s solution to this, which was not to address any of the underlying issues of craft but to—a la the Gulf of Mexico—put a hurricane in it. No, literally, he advised the author to simply have a hurricane blow through the café during this scene, knocking over every fruit basket in its wake.

The common bias, which is becoming more and more prominent, is that stories about ordinary life are inherently uninteresting and that we need the unusual, dangerous, and especially fantastical to make people care. As fantasy author Brandon Sanderson once said in a creative writing lecture: Literary fiction is for people who want to write about boring people with boring problems. Except, of course, it isn’t. It’s just that both the people and their problems are more complex. That, among other reasons, is why it isn’t really boring. So, let’s see how this can translate to film. In Shame, we have such an ordinary scene of two potential lovers in a restaurant on their first date, specifically Brandon and his co-worker, Marianne. There are two avenues for doing something interesting with a scene that don’t involve hurricanes or gimmickry: by using it in an interesting way within the broader context of the work or by bringing distinct texture and detail at the micro level. McQueen does both.

I use a painting of van Gogh’s as an illustration not just because it’s so recognizable but because his approach is actually quite similar to McQueen’s if you were able to transpose their respective mediums in how they capture their subjects. Van Gogh’s forms are simultaneously soft and bold, and there is a distinct separation between elements. The details are not explicit but gestured at with subtle remarks of coloring and different orders of contrast existing within any individual object than exist between objects. McQueen uses these same techniques, although he opts to integrate them within a realistic, rather than an artificial, presentation. In either case, there are so many touches that you won’t notice on initial viewing. The first time around, you are just taking it in as a whole. But each time you revisit it, you may see something new, which was understated not to draw attention to itself but which gives you something new to appreciate when you’ve grown accustomed to the big picture. That’s what I mean by the varying levels of contrast. At first glance, both the painting and the scene appear simple, vibrant, and direct, but this is an illusion.

Then there is the rest of the gallery/film to give you an even higher order of contrast against which all this becomes a moment within a movement. Given Brandon’s reluctance to be in a committed relationship while still very clearly connecting with Marianne (especially if we include them walking down the street together afterward) and given that she obviously wants a long-term relationship—it would be natural to assume in a typical film that this would be the start of a trend towards Marianne saving Brandon from his ways, and the couple would settle down. What we get instead, as I’ve mentioned in passing, is that Brandon can’t perform in bed with her as he becomes too overwhelmed with complicated feelings to enjoy what has until then been the simple and straightforward act of sex. So Marianne leaves, not wanting to upset him with her presence and to give him the space to rescue his dignity, and Brandon immediately hires an escort to help him bang out his frustrations in that same room. This progression, while very organic and realistic, is nonetheless not one that would even be considered by the majority of writers, let alone executed. This is because the Story Grids of the world have conditioned writers to believe that stories have to be written a certain way—never mind that this is precisely why so many stories are so predictable and boring to a sophisticated audience.

Let’s zoom into the details of the scene itself. Brandon is initially hesitant to step inside. He looks up and sees a woman getting pounded against a highrise window, and only then decides to enter. Marianne remarks that he is late and was wondering if he was going to show up. Throughout, Brandon is awkward with both Marianne and the waiters, who buzz around them and act to unsettle the atmosphere. Despite the girl in the window being on full display to the streets, this act is still anonymous, in a way. It is a reflection of the world from which Brandon has descended. He is used to intimacy being purely physical, abstracted away far above the rest of humanity—Harry Lime in the Ferris wheel. Now, he is at ground level, and people are interrupting or looming over him in a moment of not physical but emotional intimacy. You might not consciously notice all of this, but you will likely feel it. Due to how this scene is introduced, as we follow Brandon on the street and then see him sit down, engage in small talk, look at the menu, etc., it creates a very tangible sense of being in that position, entering this environment, and trying to relax, even as the atmosphere is fussy and high strung. It is also clearly not an environment Brandon is accustomed to; the closest thing to a dinner date he would normally engage in would be eating takeaway while watching a live cam model. The conversation leads organically into a deep point of dramatic tension. Marianne is separated but is willing to move forward, but Brandon fears the stagnation that would come with only being with one partner, but couches this in a forward-thinking rationale about the direction of society at large—which is reflective of the only other scene in which he and Marianne are at a table with one another and that is at a meeting, listening to their boss describe their company’s “forward-thinking” approach which, like Brandon’s habits, was once seen as disgusting, though attitudes appear to be changing.

After dinner, as they are walking down the street and talking more casually and openly, Brandon expresses that he would rather be someone else, which tells a lot by itself, but there is also a touch of symbolism in his answer. He says he would’ve liked to be a musician in the 1960s. At various points, Brandon is seen listening to music, especially classical and piano, including on vinyl, to quell his restlessness. On the one hand, the ‘60s was a time for forward thinkers and sexual openness. On the other hand, it seems that there is something about “the classics,” whether that be Bach or The Beatles, that brings some stability to his life. Marianne, by the way, responds that she would not wish to be anyone but herself, here and now (and, of course, being a black woman in New York, she has no interest in joining Brandon in the ‘60s). That shows just how different shows just how different their perspectives are. Brandon’s life is fundamentally all about escapism, and this, as I’ve detailed, is expressed throughout the film both explicitly and symbolically. In some ways, Brandon Sullivan is the more realistic and artful way of exploring the kind of person that was loosely the inspiration for Patrick Bateman of American Psycho (2000). Brandon’s strategy of commodifying connection is very much a coping mechanism he has applied to modern life, as he sees it, in which things like relationships, as he told Marianne over dinner, are, to him, the delusional fantasy still being clung to. Marianne, despite her own relationship falling through, remains healthily optimistic about them. She is very different from Sissy in that respect. Sissy craves connection and walks willingly into abusive situations. By contrast, Marianne has what might be considered a “secure” attachment style. It is commonly held that one of the most reliable ways for someone with either an anxious or avoidant attachment style, as Brandon has, to heal and overcome their own toxicity is to build a long-term relationship with someone who has a secure attachment style. Essentially, Marianne was Brandon’s best shot at actually escaping the world in which he is trapped.

It may even be oversimplifying it to call Brandon’s attachment style “avoidant.” It is possible his style is actually what is known as “disorganized,” meaning that he, deep down, does want a relationship, but since he believes that such a thing is not possible, he protects himself with avoidant behavior, not letting anyone in. Keep in mind I merely use these psychological categories as a way to highlight the different ways in which individuals in this film deal with others—the contrasting colors that make each of them so distinctly stand out. So, rather than join Marianne, he tries to bring her into his world, taking her up high to make love, but it is no use, as Brandon is emotionally anchored down. After she leaves, Brandon gets what he wants: to be the man in the window and for the woman to be a stranger. The cycle is complete and bracketed off within his life. At the end of the film, when Brandon once again makes eye contact with the married woman on the train, he may be feeling regret at this moment at not pursuing something with Marianne and, perhaps, if we were to be uncharitable, senses that he has missed out on a kind of thrill the woman is clearly engaging in at cheating. Whether the cycle has broken or is merely entering a new phase, we don’t know. The scars on Sissy’s arm, the latest bandaged up as she recovers in hospital, are like notches counting Circles ever downward.3