She/her. Cis, queer, American, curmudgeonly. I was born the year of the moon landing. I have many fandoms: Sherlock Holmes (Granada Holmes, ACD Canon Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock until it jumped the shark), Good Omens, X-Files, Doctor Who, Star Trek (Original Series) Broadchurch,The Great British Baking Show, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, Hamilton, and many more. Since 2016 I have kept up an intermittent commentary on American politics, tagged as #the current catastrophe.
Why It Is Not Surprising That There Are Old People On Tumblr, and Why We Are Surprised By It Anyway
I don’t know how the whole debate about the X-Files’ original demographic got started, so it would be foolish for me to enter into it. But I have been interested to see the information going around about tumblr’s actual demographic breakdown, and to discover that the percentage of people on tumblr under the age of 18 is comparatively small.
I’m 46. I can tell you why I’m on tumblr, and why it makes sense to me that a lot of people in my age range or slightly younger are on it. And yet I too had the impression, when I first signed on, that tumblr was basically a teenagers’ site, and quite frankly felt very weird about that at first. I’m going to talk about what ‘social media’ (we were not calling it that then) was like back in the 1990s when we first started using it, and why I think tumblr replicates some aspects of that experience, and how and why I think tumblr creates the impression that its main demographic is 13-18 year olds. This is all subjective opinion and you don’t have to believe any of it. But you know, old people, we are always trying to share our wisdom. We can’t help it. I know it’s annoying.
But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”
She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.
She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.
I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.
The difference was this:
In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.
In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.
In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.
When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"
I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.
That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.
The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.
The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.
Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.
It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.
And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.
Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.
That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.
I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.
Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."
Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.
(dry look) Nobody gets to tell me when to cringe. I reserve such assessments to those who have sufficient experience to correctly judge what’s cringeworthy.
I would rather read the worst human-written fanfic than the most highly polished string of words extruded by an LLM. I am sure i am not in the minority on this.
If you write something on your own then you are one human being conveying something to another. Which automatically makes your writing more worth my time than anything generated by a machine.
Gen AI will not make your writing "good." It will make your writing, at best, a pleasant meaningless noise. Do not give up the privilege of using language to help you become who you are and share that with other humans.
What A Swell Party This Is: Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley
So, after reading my screed about Marie Benedict's novel The Queens of Crime, @planetarywanderer chimed in to say they had been looking forward to it because their beloved Margery Allingham was in it (she is one of the five classic mystery writers designated the "Queens of Crime," along with Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Baroness Orczy). Well, Benedict's treatment of Allingham is even more disappointing than her treatment of Sayers and Christie. Allingham, Marsh, and Orczy are basically sidekicks, and none of them register as characters in their own right. Well, I said, recommend me am Allingham mystery and I'll read one.
This is actually not one of the ones @planetarywanderer recommended; I chose it because it's the first in the series, and I always like to start with the one that introduces the detective. As it turns out, this isn't as important with Allingham's detective as it is with many another; but more on that later. I'm here to tell you that I found The Crime at Black Dudley delightful, despite its incorporation of elements that normally put me right off, and that I'm ready for more Allingham.
Behind the cut tag I will try to avoid major spoilers, but there will be minor ones. So for those thinking about taking the plunge, let me just say this: This isn't a cozy mystery, but it is silly; and it turns out that while I can't do cozy mystery, I apparently can do silly. I mean "silly" in the sense of the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks. A big part of the appeal of this novel is watching this random assortment of young things from the 1920s try to cope with the series of increasingly dire and dangerous predicaments in which they find themselves. There is a bit of a Jeeves and Wooster vibe, except that the guy playing the Jeeves role actually comes across a lot more like Bertie. There is a classic murder mystery here, and it will eventually be solved through ratiocination and whatnot; but the murder mystery is interrupted by a whole different kind of crime which introduces a whole raft of chaotic shenanigans. I appreciate the injection of anarchy into a form that can start to become oppressively rule-bound. As for my opinion on the series "detective" Albert Campion, you will need to go beyond the cut tag for that.
So although this mystery partakes of the general prejudicial atmosphere that you find wafting through a lot of classic mystery novels (including casual antisemism and xenophobia), it will be a relief to my fellow Americans to know up front that Black Dudley is not a person; it's a house. It is in fact the house depicted in the cover art above: an ancient, massive, square tower standing in the middle of nowhere. It has not been updated any farther than the 18th century, really; there's no electric lighting, etc. This house is currently owned by Colonel Coombe, who married into the aristocratic Petrie family that has lived in it for centuries. The main point of view character is a doctor/forensics expert named George Abbershaw, who's been invited to a weekend house-party there by his friend Wyatt Petrie. The main hall of this house is decorated with weapons, the centerpiece being an Italian dagger. Wyatt mentions to his guests that the dagger has long been incorporated into a family game, where once a year someone takes down the dagger, they blow out all the lights, and play Hot Potato with the dagger until the 20 minutes or whatever are up. The player holding the dagger when the lights go up has to pay a forfeit. Naturally--naturally!--everyone decides this would be a super fun game to play right now. At this point, I said to myself, I think I can see where this plot is going.
So the thing is, I was right...and also wrong. There definitely is a murder committed; but that's only the first and not actually the worst of this party's problems. Because it's only after Colonel Coombe is hustled upstairs by two fairly sinister guests who keep saying he's had a "heart attack" that we start to realize that this party is Not What It Seems. In fact, two of the people Colonel Coombe invited to this party are obviously sinister--I mean like cartoon levels of visually marked villainy--and they are in cahoots with the entire staff, all of whom are part of the international criminal organization that one of these thugs is the head of. They are looking for something that was in Colonel Coombe's possession, and they're going to keep the entire party prisoner until they find it.
So instead of a murder investigation, what we get next is the attempt on the part of the non-international-criminal guests to escape from this deathtrap of a house and the armed and brutal thugs who now control it. Now, I really dislike stories about organized crime. Arthur Conan Doyle's "secret society" stories are some of my least favorites, and his invention of Moriarty has led to a lot of bad writing. A couple weeks ago I picked up a couple Agatha Christie novels I haven't read yet, one of which was The Big Four. It is about an international crime syndicate which has decided to try to wipe out Hercule Poirot; and although I can't say this is the worst novel Agatha Christie ever wrote, it's definitely the worst one I've read. These genius-led highly organized international syndicates give mystery writers license to leave the rational universe and its challenges behind and create one which is essentially magical. There is nothing subtle about the criminals Allingham creates for this caper. One of them literally looks like an animated bust of Ludwig van Beethoven and is routinely referred to as "the Hun;" the other is named Gideon, and it takes a while, but someone does eventually trot out the telltale period-typical slur that identifies him as Jewish.
However. If you can get past that, then there's a lot to enjoy in the story of Random Group of English Eccentrics vs. Highly Trained and Disciplined Criminals. The house itself really comes into its own as a character here; one of the major ways the English characters thwart and elude the bruisers is by discovering secret passages and doorways that connect apparently unrelated parts of the house. Despite considerable ingenuity, pluck, and stubbornness, their stratagems keep failing. But they do manage to maintain a kind of stalemate: the thugs can't keep them under control, but they also can't escape. One of my favorite moments is when the extremely frustrated head thug, having corralled them all together after the failure of their last sally, does not shoot them, but instead gives them a lecture about how they are all behaving like children and they need to grow and accept the seriousness of this situation.
But this, they refuse to do; and this is where we see the importance of Albert Campion, the closest thing this series is apparently going to have to a detective. Campion is (based on what little we learn from this novel) most likely the black sheep of some aristocratic family, who has decided to make his living as a con artist with a sideline in conjuring tricks. Like Wimsey, Campion camouflages his acumen, experience, and effectiveness behind a flippant exterior, the difference being that Campion makes it even harder to get behind that to find out who he really is. We can't trust anything he tells anyone about himself. Campion is not his real name, but neither are any of the other names he uses. He's at the party not because he was invited but because someone else paid him to grab this thing that all the heavies are looking for--information he offers up pretty cheerfully once the criminal gang reveals itself. It's also pretty clear that most of the men in the party assume Campion is gay, though what they actually tend to say about him is that he's a lunatic. Campion's determination not to take life, death, or life-and-death situations seriously is even more extreme than Wimsey's defensive flippancy, and it's what makes this section of the novel entertaining to me instead of just frustrating.
We eventually do get back to solving the murder mystery; but Campion's really not involved in that part of it. This is why I keep putting "detective" in scare quotes. At least in his first novel, Campion isn't really about logic or order or the leetle gray cells; he's a chaos goblin whose chequered career has taught him how to game systems, frustrate plans, and in this case disrupt what is intended to be an invicible murder machine. He injects a freshness into the classic murder mystery that I think I could learn to like. I didn't even mind that I correctly guessed the identity of the murderer long before I was supposed to. So we'll see. I might go on over to Ngaio Marsh next; but I could be back for Mystery Mile.
The Train There's No Getting Off: Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express
So, constant readers may recall that a few days ago I vented my spleen about Marie Benedict's novel The Queens of Crime. Having finished, I thought to myself: this hasn't actually made it any easier for me to tell Mrs. P's sister that I enjoyed her gift. But wait! She also gave me this novel by Emma Donoghue! I have been reading Emma Donoghue since the 1990s and most of the time I've enjoyed it. (She has had some misfires, including--in my opinion--The Wonder, which was made into a film starring Florence Pugh.) She is best known now for her novel Room, which was made into a feature film. My favorite Emma Donoghue novel is Hood, whose protagonist is a lesbian who is mourning her long-term partner while in the closet in Ireland. But I digress. Maybe, I thought to myself, I could read The Paris Express and talk to her about it and I can just not bring up The Queens of Crime at all.
Success! I liked The Paris Express.
What I especially appreciated about it is that it shows you that you can do historical fiction right even under the pressure of contemporary conditions. So behind the cut tag, I'm going to talk about that.
The Paris Express takes place on a single day in 1895, mostly aboard the eponymous Paris Express. Most of the characters in this novel--most of whom are based on historical figures--are either passengers or crew on this train. The constant reader has likely deduced from these facts alone that something bad eventually happens to this train. For readers who haven't, Donoghue tells you at the end of Chapter 1 that this train is "heading straight for disaster." Now, I don't want to tell you exactly what this disaster is, because for me not knowing was part of the enjoyment of reading it. So I recommend you ignore reviews and marketing materials about this book if you plan to read it, because they all seem to give that away immediately.
But of course we know it's headed for disaster. Disaster is what trains are for. Think of any metaphor or figure of speech you use in ordinary conversation that involves trains. My money says that metaphor is based on the idea of the train as an unstoppable force that is hustling you inexorably toward a catastrophic denouement. One thing The Paris Express does well is convey what trains meant and how trains felt to the first couple of generations of people who had the opportunity to ride them. The third-person narrative voice spends enough time on the technical aspects of train travel, via the points of view of the train's driver, stoker, and guards, to give us a sense of both what a revolution these steam trains were and how and why they were dangerous. Everyone riding that train feels some kind of way about all of this, and we will eventually find out how--along with a lot of other things.
Donoghue has invested a lot in historical fiction. Back in the aughts, she produced two mammoth historical novels based in the eighteenth century: Slammerkin (2002), which I've read, and Life Mask (2005), which I haven't. I was compelled by Slammerkin but ultimately couldn't tolerate the cynicism. As in Slammerkin, Donoghue has helped herself out by choosing fairly obscure historical figures. Little is widely known about most of the passengers on this train apart from their jobs, their position in society, and the fact that they were on it. But Donoghue has done her research, and she's good at extrapolating from the facts she was able to find. This is the opposite of what happened in The Queens of Crime, where the historical figures were all well-known and Benedict never really allowed herself to past the biographical outline.
Somehow, The Paris Express makes its social commentary both more overt and more balanced than it was in Slammerkin. The train, with its first, second, and third class carriages, is a metaphor for France's stratified society--and for the way rapid technological advances exacerbate inequality. One of the plot's driving forces is the anarchist Mado (short for Madeleine), who believes that nothing but violence can cure the inequality and injustice that has ruined life for the working class and for her specifically. But she's surrounded by quite a large and diverse cast of characters, each of whom has a slightly different relationship to that society and a slightly different take on what's wrong and how to fix it. Most of these characters don't understand just how high stakes these differences of opinion about the nature of society and the possibility of reform really are, because most of them don't know that Mado has boarded the train with a homemade nailbomb that she intends to detonate.
Unlike her earlier historical novels, Donoghue moves the novel along with the same speed and pacing as the historical train; the chapters, in fact, are organized around the Paris Express's timetable. It's true that at this pace we don't get to spend very much time at any one point with any one character; but thanks to Donoghue's skill at selecting evocative details and doing characterization through exposition, these characters real enough for us to care what happens to them. As we come to care about these characters and their fates, we watch Mado struggle not to--or rather, struggle to maintain her conviction that the violence she is about to unleash is lesser than the silent violence perpetrated on the innocent every day by the capitalism that is grinding workers into the dust. Mado has a point, as the conductor's POV constantly reminds us; the company that operates this train has carefully crafted a system of incentives and punishments designed to push train operators to care more about punctuality than about their own lives. In the details Donoghue has selected, in fact, we can see the reflection of what the twenty-first century's neverending speedup is doing to workers: the elimination of bathroom breaks, the surveillance, the Taylorization of everyday life.
The train is also, if you think about it long enough, a metaphor for fiction itself. A bunch of imagined people are thrown together into a plot, and we are forced to care about them for as long as they are trapped in the machine that is chugging along its tracks. Will we continue to care about them after the train reaches its final destination?Most of the time, no. This is a hard saying but it's true. They matter to us for as long as they're on the train, and then after they get off we just lose them in the crowd. Characters who stick with you after they disembark are the exception. So I'm not mad about the fact that most of these people aren't going to stay with me.
I do wish that Donoghue had done more with the one real experiment she tries in this novel, which is making the train herself a character. Engine 721 doesn't talk and she isn't anthropomorphized, but she does occasionally become a point of view character. I for one wish we could have heard more from her. Dump John Millington Synge, who seems to have been included just for the sake of his being Irish and who IMHO is adding no value, and let's have more train, is what I would have said, had I been the editor for this one. But nobody listens to me.
For my birthday, Mrs. P's sister gave me, among other things, Marie Benedict's 2025 novel The Queens of Crime. The Queens of Crime refers to a group of classic mystery writers--Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Orczy--who were all members of the Detective Club spearheaded by Sayers and Christie. Benedict didn't invent the nickname; what she's done in this novel is create fictionalized versions of all these writers of classic detective fiction and have them work together to solve a real murder ("real" meaning "real within their story world").
I was happy to receive this and looked forward to reading it. Mrs. P's sister, a former high school English teacher, a discerning reader, and an all around excellent person, knows of my fondness for Dorothy Sayers, and she herself is also a fan of Agatha Christie. As 60% of the founders of the Detective Club and 40% of the Queens of Crime, both writers are major characters in this novel, and Dorothy Sayers is the narrator. So it was with high hopes and great expectation that I finally found time to crack this one open.
The adjustment of my expectations was swift and drastic.
Behind the cut tag, I'm going to talk about why I found this book not only not good, but downright distressing. I'm doing this partly because I cannot say any of this to Mrs. P's sister. I am instead going to tell her that I read and enjoyed her gift, and writing up this review is one of the ways in which I aim to make that statement true. The review is going to contain spoilers. For those who don't want to be spoiled, here is the bottom line up front:
For readers who like cozy mysteries or true crime, but don't read classic detective fiction and are therefore not familiar with Sayers or the rest of the writers who are fictionalized in this novel, The Queens of Crime is probably very enjoyable. The mystery plot is decent, the investigation phase is pretty well worked out, and the ending is no doubt satisfying in many ways.
If you are familiar with classic detective fiction--especially if you know and like the fiction of Dorothy Sayers--every page of this novel will make you want to tear your hair out.
Why the disparity? Well, follow me behind the cut tag to find out. I woudld normally offer a tl:dr at this point, but I actually don't think that what I'm about to say can be easily summarized. I can only tell you that I think this is an interesting, and possibly an important, question.
So keep in mind, as you read this, that Marie Benedict has been immeasurably more successful, as a writer, than I ever have been or will be. She's published seven novels on her own and co-written a further two. She is a popular and widely read American author who has been on bestseller lists. No doubt she has a large and faithful readership. What I'm saying here is that Marie Benedict has mastered the art of writing fiction that the market likes. This is not easy to do. If it were, I would have done it long ago. I have not, and never will.
Dorothy Sayers, who famously worked in advertising before selling her first crime novel, was adept at writing what the market wanted. But she was also adept at creating a market for the kind of crime fiction she wanted to write. That was what the Detective Club was for: to cultivate, amongst readers of crime fiction, a taste for quality--and to force cultural gatekeepers to recognize crime fiction as a form of literature rather than disreputable and disposable entertainment.
In pursuit of this legitimacy, Detective Club authors were encouraged to pride themselves on the ingenuity and creativity of their plots as well as the rigor of their construction. Both the Detective Club Oath and the Rules of Fair Play stress the importance of constructing mystery plots that were logically coherent, would stand up to rational scrutiny, and would disdain the use of "cop-outs" and cliches. Or, as the Oath put it: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on, nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?"
Now, I will be the first to tell you that this Oath was more aspirational than enforceable. Agatha Christie in particular did not always honor this part of the Oath, or the Rules of Fair Play, and I would argue her fiction is often the better for it. But what strikes me as important about all this, especially in light of having just read The Queens of Crime, is the shared understanding that crime fiction should celebrate detection--the use of intelligence/logic/reason to clear away darkness and confusion and arrive at the truth. Detective Club members pledged themselves to challenge the reader intellectually, instead of merely stimulating the reader's sensations (as the sensation fiction of the 1860s did) or inflaming the reader's passions (the main goal of the "thrillers" and "adventure stories" that the Detective Club's bye-laws excluded).
In other words, a big part of the Detective Club's raison d'etre was to elevate crime fiction that challenged the reader intellectually. And for their readers, matching wits with not only the murderer and the detective but the author herself was a big part of the pleasure of reading one of these novels. Agatha Christie emerged as the reigning Queen of Crime in part because she was so good at winning these matches, while also giving the reader the illusion, with every new novel, that this time the she might actually outsmart the author.
Sayers was certainly as hard-core about the intellectual challenge of detective fiction as any of her colleagues. Though her detectives are not above relying on coincidence and intuition, her plotting is rigorous and her puzzles are challenging. But for Sayers, that wasn't where the mission of crime fiction ended. Sayers used crime fiction to explore all of her interests--literary, intellectual, theological, spiritual, ethical. For that reason, a Dorothy Sayers novel feeds the reader's whole person while also offering you an immersive experience in Sayers's own mindset and milieu. You come away from a Sayers novel with a lot more than you took into it.
Constant readers are probably wondering why I'm spending so much time establishing all of this. If your hypothesis is, "Does The Queens of Crime perhaps not capture any of that?" then give yourself a prize. And make it something good, because this novel's failure to capture any aspect of Dorothy Sayers as either a historical figure or a writer is SPECTACULAR.
The Queens of Crime, in fact, approaches detective fiction in a way that is diametrically opposed to everything Sayers cared about. As I said, the mystery plot is decently constructed, though it relies not only on the details of the historically unsolved May Daniels case but on the various solutions that various true crime aficionados have proposed. It's the writing itself that betrays everything Sayers stood for. In its approach to the reader, The Queens of Crime is the opposite of challenging. Instead of stimulating the reader's intelligence, this novel insults the reader's intelligence by making everything insistently and baldly obvious. It is written as if Benedict and/or her editors assumed not only that her readers have never read a Dorothy Sayers novel, but that her readers would be incapable of doing so.
This novel is supposed to be narrated by Dorothy Sayers. It does not sound anything like her. In fact, Benedict seems to have no ear for voice at all. All of these characters, major and minor, speak with the same voice, which is indistinguishable from the narrative voice. That would be a problem (for me, anyway) in any novel, but it's a special problem in a novel where the five main characters are mystery writers with very distinctive voices. This is the kind of thing that drove me nuts about P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley, a murder mystery set in the world of Pride and Prejudice. James's absolute failure to capture Lizzie Bennett's voice--or really any of her charm and wit--was baffling to me in the same way. Are both of these novels the result of authors/editors/publishers trying to cash in on the fanfic phenomenon without actually understanding how fanfic works? Possibly. I can certainly tell you that I know there are fanfic writers out there doing a better job with Dorothy Sayers's voice than this woman (shoutout to @oldshrewsburyian but I'm sure there are others). Maybe it is only because I have spent this much time in the world of adaptation that I am cranky when someone who gets paid to write--which I, let me stress again, do not--seems not to have engaged with or been captivated by the source material.
But that's not the whole problem. The problem is that what we get instead of Dorothy Sayers's voice is this:
"I force myself to stay silent as we make our way through the savory and sweet delights. I want to say nothing that will overwhelm. Aside from the odd remark about the wonder of this mouthwatering sponge or that delectable sandwich, we do not speak. The unnatural quite makes me physically uncomfortale, and I squim until finally Agatha says, 'Your Detection Club is a noble and worthy endeavor, make no mistake. We writers of mystery and detective novels have great need of the unity it would provide if we are to elevate our craft.'
As she reaches for a slice of the pastel-colored Battenberg cake from the tray, I echo her sentiments. 'No matter how beautifully written a mystery book is or how important and profound its themes, mainstream reviewers lump us in the 'genre' category and refuse to consider our work as literature. They think of our books as pulp fiction, and as one who reviews detective novles for the Sunday Times, I am keenly aware of the difference in treatment. But if we support one another and insist on a certain level of quality, then we stand a chance.'
'I am committed to your new club,' she says. 'But what is this "greater need" you have of me? On that, the jury remains out.'
'Well,' I venture, delighted that she's chosen this moment to take a bite of her favorite orange poppy-seed cake--a delectable confection always softens my mood--'you know I've installed Gilbert as the first president.'
Nibbling away, she nods at my mention of G. K. Chesteron, known as Gilbert to his friends and colleagues. He's well loved by the publicfor his Father Brown mysteries and a little less loved by his fellow writers for his verbosity. Still, I chose him to give the club a certain level of gravitas that I wouldn't be able to confer if I'd named myself president."
OK, that was a long excerpt; but it showcases many of the problems I have with Benedict's writing. The way she handles the introduction of Chesterton's name is typical: her narrator refers to Chesterton in dialogue, and then in the following narration immediately gives you the top three facts that would turn up in the AI overview if you searched his name on Google. When Christie and Sayers discuss the Detective Club, they trade facts about it in language that no human being would use in conversation. To make it seem like this is fiction as opposed to a slightly goosed Wikipedia stub, Benedict includes some details about what her characters are eating which create a rudimentary sense of place and also establish for these Queens of Crime some safely generic character traits, such as a fondness for expensive little treats. It's all very safe and very bland. There's no personality. There's no flavor (OK, the cake is orange-poppyseed). There's no zest. There are no risks taken.
And the whole novel is like that. Benedict assumes throughout that her readers will just never get anything from context and cannot wait a single sentence to have references explained to them. She is unwilling to leave anything mysterious, even for a moment. Sayers's job as narrator is to make things obvious: to tell the reader what matters about what is happening and how she should feel about it. Interactions amongst the Queens are flattened by what I have started calling "round robin dialogue," where you can see Benedict going down the list of participants to ensure that each of the five Queens weighs in, in order, on whatever topic is being discussed. We never learn anything about any of these women that we couldn't learn from a biographical blurb. Characterization, dialogue, descriptions--all of it is maddeningly superficial. Again, comparing this to what you find in fan-written fiction--even fanfiction that might have a lower level of technical competence--there seems to be no love here for Sayers's work itself. At moments I wondered whether Benedict had actually read any of Sayers's writing--such as this one, where "Sayers" reflects on how different it is investigating a 'real' crime than writing about it:
"Suddenly I wonder: Have I ever had my detectives experience these emotions as they study the belongings of the victim? I fear I've created cold and calculating investigators who don't recognize the humanity of the deceased and feel a sense of loss at their death."
This made me really angry. Because if there is one writer amongst these Queens of Crime who has absolutely NOT created cold and calculating investigators, it's Dorothy Sayers. It is in fact one of Lord Peter Wimsey's core traits that the glee he initially takes in the discovery of an intriguing new murder puzzle is always at some point overtaken by a crushing sense of the responsiblity he's taken upon himself by meddling with it. The flippancy Wimsey demonstrates when he first gets the facts is defensive--something which is dramatically revealed at the midpoint of Wimsey's first mystery, Whose Body? In fact, in Whose Body?, Wimsey attends an exhumation of the murder victim which is so upsetting for him that he dissociates. It's true that often Wimsey's concern is more strongly evoked by the effects his investigation might have on the living; but Whose Body? isn't the only novel in which confrontation with a corpse nearly undoes him (it happens again, for instance, in Unnatural Death).
So why have her fictional Sayers "wonder" whether she has done something that the historical Sayers certainly did not do? I can only understand this as part of this novel's attempt to overwrite the actual life stories and literary work of her Queens of Crime with a superficially 'feminist' narrative that's more comfortable for her and for her contemporary audience. She wants her "Dorothy Sayers" to have an arc in which involving herself in the investigation of the murder of a real woman leads to a feminist awakening which is eventually shared by the Queens of Crime, who become a little society that will take up the cause of defending single women from the criminals who target them and the media and law enforcement organizations who at best ignore female pain and trauma and at worst smear and blame women victims for the violence they have suffered. In order to do this, Benedict has to invent a Dorothy Sayers who has never thought seriously about the relationship between crime and crime fiction, or cared about the predicaments of single women in postwar Britain (despite having lived through many of them).
Now. If you have read Missing Pages, I know what you're gonna say. "But Plaidder...isn't this arc establishing the Queens of Crime as a feminist detective agency exactly what you did with the ACD canon verse when you invented the Society for the Protection of Single Ladies?"
Why indeed, I have asked myself, do I hate this arc so much in Benedict's novel when I have myself perpetrated something similar? And I have come up a word to explain why I have had such a negative reaction to the 'feminism' this arc generates: "self-satisfied." There is something about the contrast between how basic the 'feminism' of this novel is and how much Benedict congratulates her characters for achieving it that sets my teeth on edge. It's Benedict's refusal to actually encounter the times and places in which these women lived deeply enough to understand why the "feminism" of figures like Dorothy Sayers of Baroness Orczy is complicated that bothers me. The point of historical fiction--from my point of view anyway--is to introduce the readers to ways of thinking and living that our current time and place has tried to erase. This novel does the opposite. It takes the safest, least controversial aspects of 21st century feminism and shoves them into a story about the past, displacing anything that we might have learned from our encounter with it. We see this from the beginning, when Benedict has Sayers recruit the other Queens of Crime to solve the 'real-life' May Daniels murder in order to prove their worth to the male members of the Detective Club. Benedict's author's note admits that she just invented this no-girls-allowed animus on the part of Chesterton et al.; and this is exactly the kind of presentism I'm talking about. I have no doubt that Sayers, Christie, Marsh, Allingham, and Orczy did encounter sexism everywhere they turned; but not in this particular form. Sayers and Christie built this damn treehouse; nobody was going to hang a "No Girls Allowed" sign on it. Nor would Sayers and Christie have accepted "proving ourselves worthy to the boys" as a reason to do anything, let alone involve themselves in a real murder investigation. They knew they were worthy. More to the point, they would have known that "shutting the boys up by showing them how boss you are" is a losing game. The boys never accept your proof; and they never shut up.
I've spent a lot of time taking this thing apart and if you are wondering why right now, well, so am I. I think it's because this book seems like an attempt to persuade readers to think they've had the experience of meeting Dorothy Sayers when they absolutely haven't. Reading this novel is like listening to someone fake their way through a presentation on a book they haven't read. I recognize that Sayers's narration is actually very difficult for contemporary readers--for instance, Wimsey's dialogue is often highly allusive and many of the allusions no longer read. But this doesn't build a bridge between Sayers and modern readers; it actually separates them by substituting a fake Sayers that they will find more palatable and accessible. Which, if you believe that difficulty is important and that it is one of the reasons that reading teaches you things...is distressing.
Can't Touch This: Project Hail Mary and the Third Dimension
So...Project Hail Mary is a lot, and I don't have time to deal with it all. I'm going to talk about one thing at a time. This post is going to be about how this film creates a sense of materiality in a medium where that doesn't come naturally. If you've ever seen me go on and on about Jeremy Brett handling paper, some of this will be familiar to you. But I think one of the things that explains why Project Hail Mary means as much as it means to so many people is the way it restores and validates our experience of the universe as real--by which I mean non-virtual. We have all the trillionaires out there trying to dematerialize our lives because that's how they monetize us. But like The Martian, Project Hail Mary is based on the fact that virtuality is a lie. What is sold to us as virtual is in fact material. Nothing in the universe is actually as weightless, as 'frictionless,' as consequence-free as we're told that the virtual world is. Not even light. Especially not light. The whole problem facing everyone in Project Hail Mary is that light does in fact have physical properties. The specific problem facing the scientists in Stratt's group is how to move a single material object to a single point very very very far away. The whole movie is dedicated to making us believe in materiality again--partly because that's the first step in getting us to believe in science again.
And this, IMHO, is why the turn to practical effects after decades of CGI is so important.
So here's what IMHO is really important about the fact that Rocky is a puppet and not a computer animation: from looking at him (in the GIF up top, for instance) you feel like you know exactly what he would feel like if you touched him.
In addition to all the textures that went into building his body and limbs, he has a bunch of etched grooves and designs that allow you to imagine what it would feel like to run your hand along his surfaces. Now this, of course, you cannot do, because film is a two-dimensional medium. I think it's important to the way this film works that Grace can't do this either--because his atmosphere is poisonous to Rocky and vice versa, they're never able to share the same space without one of them being either enclosed in or on the other side of an impermeable barrier. (The one time this does happen it's because both of them are in peril of their lives.)
This device--physically separating two characters who desperately wish they could touch each other--is usually deployed in a romantic or sexual context, because it increases the tension. This is a different context; but the effect is the same: we feel their desire for contact so intensely that we can't help sharing it. The 'hug' is the most obvious expression of this desire on Grace's side, but we also see it on Rocky's side in the way he keeps building stuff that helps diminish the amount of space between himself and Grace.
More important, though, the fact that neither we not Grace can touch Rocky means that everything that makes Rocky real to Grace also makes him real to us. The more we learn about him the more real he becomes and the easier it is for us to imagine him as something that has mass and takes up space. The fact that this is an illusion is not special; film is always an illusion. What is special (nowadays) is the fact that this illusion is created with real objects. Texture--the thing that most makes us feel like we know how Rocky would feel--is one of the hardest things for animation to do, whether we're talking about 2D or 3D. Creating the sensation of weight is also difficult. Whatever about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, we can tell the difference between an image of something and a simulation of it. Partly because of everything we've absorbed from our own life experience about how light works.
Anyway. After we saw the film I reminded PJ about the old Star Trek: TOS episode "The Devil in the Dark" and the horta. I think the odds that Andy Weir has no knowledge of ST:TOS are vanishingly small. And this film also captures one of my favorite things about ST:TOS relative to the newer incarnations, which is that the main way they made the aliens real was through acting as if they were. This is Ryan Gosling's job; and I have to assume that Rocky being a puppet made that a lot easier. But perhaps that is another story for another time.
I have some bonus thoughts about how Ryland Grace's teaching style fits into all this.
As this is a science fiction movie it is not anti-tech. But it is absolutely, and I think deliberately, anti-edtech.
If you look back at the scenes in Grace's classroom, it does not look like the typical 21st century classroom. We see a lot of models, a lot of handmade charts and things, and that hacky sack he uses to play "lava," which is a game that a lot of high school teachers play some version of (one of my acquaintances called it "trashball" and it was played with a big ball of used masking tape). The kids are not on tablets or Chromebooks or anything that has to be plugged in. Presumably they do have access to computers in some way, but all the teaching we see Grace doing is sensory and kinetic and often involves the use of physical objects to help them grasp scientific concepts. Many of these things are then redeployed during his collaboration with Rocky. The model of the solar system is the most obvious; but there's also the use of sand on a plate to visualize sound waves, and of course the hacky sack is still with him.
Once he's recruited by Stratt, we see him start off working in a kind of sterile box full of expensive equipment. It is significant that the first real breakthrough comes when Grace persuades Carl to take him out to Home Depot and buy a shitload of duct tape, cardboard, and tinfoil so he can create a model. In a movie that I am sure was longer than the executives wanted it to be, time is taken to show how much joy both Grace and Carl find in playing around with all these objects. And I figure that's because this emphasis on learning through tactile experience is kind of a through line.
And I'll tell you something else:
When people want to represent teaching in a positive way, this is what it always looks like. The tablets and screens don't come out until we're representing education as dystopian misery. All of our stories acknowledge what the tech industry somehow convinced the administrators to forget: that we learn in three dimensions and through interaction with both the things and the people around us.
A question for whenever you have a long and boring task day (or when you don’t): Which work of classic literature is most deserving of a Muppet adaptation?
Thank you for this timely question! I am at an airport with time on my hands. This will be a slightly unorthodox proposal, and it is true that I happen to have it on the brain right now, but:
The Count of Monte Cristo.
I was thinking about this and being dubious about it because it seems like it would really work much better for the first half of the novel than the second. But I've come up with a fix, I think.
OK, so basic summary: the young sailor Edmond Dantes, on the day he is supposed to marry his true love Mercedes, is framed and thrown into prison through the collusion of four men who all have different reasons for wanting him out of the way. While in prison he meets a wise old Italian priest who tells him the location of a fabulous buried treasure. After the Italian priest dies, Edmond escapes, finds the treasure, and reinvents himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. After ten years' preparation, he returns to Paris--where all his enemies are, along with Mercedes--and executes his diabolical revenge.
So. For the pre-escape part of the story: I mean obviously, Kermit as the young and idealistic Edmond Dantes, Miss Piggy as the devoted but fiery Mercedes, and Fozzie as Faria. I think the villains should be played by humans, except for Caderousse, who is played by Gonzo. (Were we able to suspend the laws of space and time, I'd want Joe Keery as Fernand, Steve Martin as Danglars, and Vincent Price as Villefort.)
BUT. After Edmond escapes and becomes the Count...he is played by a human actor. Some young and hot comedian who can also do Scary and Brooding. Or maybe a young Denzel Washington. Either way. When interacting with all the villains, the Count is played by this devastatingly suave human actor. BUT. Mercedes is the only person from his past who knows who he is right away. SO. Whenever the Count is seen from Mercedes's point of view...he's played by Kermit.
I think the original Muppets team would have had a field day with this. There are so many opportunities for stupid puns! Imagine Miss Piggy and the Count doing the whole scene in the greenhouse! The fact that Monte Cristo is also the name of a sandwich opens the door for all kinds of shenanigans involving the Swedish Chef, Animal, etc. Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew could be brought in for the poisoning plot. Mercedes's son Albert could be played by Robin, or maybe Scooter. I mean I don't know how many people know the story well enough to groove on this, but it's entertaining me!
#you’d need to change the ending though right?#muppet movie has to have Piggy and Kermit (or his human stand in) end up together#I think you could cut Haydee from the muppets version#adaptation license and all#and the count could actually forgive Mercedes#you would also have to do something clever with the whole murdering a child thing#but i would trust the muppet team to handle it#or cut it#it’s been several years since my last read#but this is a very fun exercise
I have...so many Serious Thoughts about the ending, about Haydee as a character, and about the way Dumas creates these fascinating female characters and then criminally misuses them...but this is not the place for them. We are talking about a Muppet movie. So here's what we're gonna do with the ending:
So we get to the big confrontation, the night before the duel with Albert is supposed to happen, when Mercedes confronts the Count and tells him she's always known exactly who he was. Now, in this adaptation, at some point, Mercedes/Miss Piggy is going to lose it and just come at him. She HI-YAAAAAAAAs into him so hard that she literally chops in him half. Now there are two of him: the Count, played by the human actor, and Edmond Dantes, played by Kermit. At the same time.
Nobody fights Albert. The Count sails off into the sunset with Haydee. Now obviously they're not sailing off as A Couple because he raised her from the age of 11 and we're just, we're not doing that. Haydee is going to be his first mate and they're gonna have High Seas Adventures, probably involving Tim Curry.
Edmond Dantes goes home to Marseilles with Mercedes. Movie ends with Kermit reading The Count of Monte Cristo to Robin as a bedtime story.
Can't Touch This: Project Hail Mary and the Third Dimension
So...Project Hail Mary is a lot, and I don't have time to deal with it all. I'm going to talk about one thing at a time. This post is going to be about how this film creates a sense of materiality in a medium where that doesn't come naturally. If you've ever seen me go on and on about Jeremy Brett handling paper, some of this will be familiar to you. But I think one of the things that explains why Project Hail Mary means as much as it means to so many people is the way it restores and validates our experience of the universe as real--by which I mean non-virtual. We have all the trillionaires out there trying to dematerialize our lives because that's how they monetize us. But like The Martian, Project Hail Mary is based on the fact that virtuality is a lie. What is sold to us as virtual is in fact material. Nothing in the universe is actually as weightless, as 'frictionless,' as consequence-free as we're told that the virtual world is. Not even light. Especially not light. The whole problem facing everyone in Project Hail Mary is that light does in fact have physical properties. The specific problem facing the scientists in Stratt's group is how to move a single material object to a single point very very very far away. The whole movie is dedicated to making us believe in materiality again--partly because that's the first step in getting us to believe in science again.
And this, IMHO, is why the turn to practical effects after decades of CGI is so important.
So here's what IMHO is really important about the fact that Rocky is a puppet and not a computer animation: from looking at him (in the GIF up top, for instance) you feel like you know exactly what he would feel like if you touched him.
In addition to all the textures that went into building his body and limbs, he has a bunch of etched grooves and designs that allow you to imagine what it would feel like to run your hand along his surfaces. Now this, of course, you cannot do, because film is a two-dimensional medium. I think it's important to the way this film works that Grace can't do this either--because his atmosphere is poisonous to Rocky and vice versa, they're never able to share the same space without one of them being either enclosed in or on the other side of an impermeable barrier. (The one time this does happen it's because both of them are in peril of their lives.)
This device--physically separating two characters who desperately wish they could touch each other--is usually deployed in a romantic or sexual context, because it increases the tension. This is a different context; but the effect is the same: we feel their desire for contact so intensely that we can't help sharing it. The 'hug' is the most obvious expression of this desire on Grace's side, but we also see it on Rocky's side in the way he keeps building stuff that helps diminish the amount of space between himself and Grace.
More important, though, the fact that neither we not Grace can touch Rocky means that everything that makes Rocky real to Grace also makes him real to us. The more we learn about him the more real he becomes and the easier it is for us to imagine him as something that has mass and takes up space. The fact that this is an illusion is not special; film is always an illusion. What is special (nowadays) is the fact that this illusion is created with real objects. Texture--the thing that most makes us feel like we know how Rocky would feel--is one of the hardest things for animation to do, whether we're talking about 2D or 3D. Creating the sensation of weight is also difficult. Whatever about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, we can tell the difference between an image of something and a simulation of it. Partly because of everything we've absorbed from our own life experience about how light works.
Anyway. After we saw the film I reminded PJ about the old Star Trek: TOS episode "The Devil in the Dark" and the horta. I think the odds that Andy Weir has no knowledge of ST:TOS are vanishingly small. And this film also captures one of my favorite things about ST:TOS relative to the newer incarnations, which is that the main way they made the aliens real was through acting as if they were. This is Ryan Gosling's job; and I have to assume that Rocky being a puppet made that a lot easier. But perhaps that is another story for another time.
Say No To THIS: Plaidder has a Moment watching a "Say Yes To The Dress" YouTube Thing
At some point recently YouTube's algorithms started showing me compilations of "Say Yes To The Dress," a TLC reality show now in its...my God...23rd season. I don't know what I did to deserve this. I have recently been through a very high-stress period in my life and in desperation started using YouTube to wind down. I started watching Girl With the Dogs's grooming videos because I found them satisfying and because Vanessa is funny and so are a lot of the dogs, and then I found Right Choice Shearing, a channel started by two lesbians in Texas who travel around shearing sheep, llamas, and whatnot. Which, honestly, I don't know whether Tumblr has been sleeping on this or whether I am as usual the last to know, but if you like butches and you like seeing animals feel better after 3 intense minutes, you really need Right Choice Shearing in your life.
Then YouTube started in with the Hoarders videos and I'm not even going to link any of that because Hoarders is not something that should have been allowed. Let's take someone who for 15-20 years has suffered from mental illness and is now facing eviction or worse, and let's be surprised that under conditions of extreme pressure they cannot in fact do something that they couldn't do even on a GOOD day!
I'm sorry. I seem to have wandered a bit.
So the algorithm, apparently upset by the failure of Hoarders, started showing me these Say Yes compliations. And mostly I have been enjoying them. It's nice, in this day and age, to spend a few minutes in a world where the biggest problem anyone has is which of these nearly-identical white dresses to purchase. I of course am endlessly entertained by Randy Fenoli, the dapper little gay genius loci of Kleinfeld Bridal, and have even become attached to a few of the army of straight women "consultants" who do most of the work.
And then I saw this one.
Behind the cut tag, I'm going to talk about the mother in the first clip. (The mother in the second clip is really quite lovely and that vignette is a great demonstration of how to resolve an actual conflict without ruining the relationship. After that comes a lot of fat-shaming and I noped out at that point.)
This mother's name is Diana (her daughter's name is Samantha) and I don't know anything about her life outside these 15 minutes of infamy. No doubt she has her own horrible backstory which might make some kind of sense of her behavior. But I want to talk about this clip anyway because...
I am not a therapist or any kind of health care professional. What follows is not an attempt at diagnosis. It is an explanation of why this particular episode is a valuable tutorial for people who might one day need to know what emotional abuse looks like between women. In this case, between mother and daughter. Diana makes so many classic, classic moves here. And on the one hand, you can see how good she is at all of these tricks and how devastatingly effective they are. Everything that she does works...on Samantha. None of it is working on anyone else, least of all the camera crew and the producers. It especially doesn't work on Randy, behind whose dapper facade we eventually see some flashes of genuine queer heartbreak. It's rare, and I think valuable (though enraging) to see such a successful manipulator so exposed in the act of manipulation. Ultimately my point is: if there is anyone in your life who is doing things with you that you see Diana doing with Samantha in this video? SAY NO. RUN. GET OUT.
The ominous underscoring begins in the first interview with Samantha where she says she's already been to 80 bridal salons and tried on hundreds of dresses. The producer's incredulous response is heard--unusual in itself since normally the producer's questions are cut from these interviews and we only see the subject's responses--"Eight zero?" Samantha confirms this. How you even FIND 80 bridal salons to go to...but let's say this is an exaggeration. Let's say it's only 40, or only 20. That still tells you that someone is deliberately prolonging this process. There is someone in this operation whose goal is not to find a dress, but to stretch out the process of finding a dress as long as possible.
And pretty soon we learn that it's not Samantha.
So here are the things you can see in this clip, if you look for them:
Diana constantly makes herself the center of attention even though she is not the bride. This, however, is fairly common and can usually be explained as an effect of the toxic fumes the mother has absorbed during her own journey through heterosexual femininity. Mrs. P and I planned our own wedding and did not involve our parents in it and paid for it ourselves, so we were spared all this. Our younger sisters did the Big Traditional Straight Wedding and they both spent a lot of time coping with our mothers' issues. Mrs. P's sister bought a gown that her mother liked more than she did, and now feels sad about it.
In their first side by side interview, in which Samantha says that she and her mother have different tastes, Diana says that she buys all of Samantha's clothes. At that point you notice (I noticed, at least) that Samantha's hair is done the same way as Diana's and that Samantha's makeup is done the same way as Diana's. In addition to suggesting that Diana can only see Samantha as an extension of herself, this also suggests that individuation is not something Diana is OK with.
It's when Samantha tries on her first dress that things really get scary. It's a dress Diana picked out for her to try because she liked it on the mannequin (thank you producers of this episode for including the video evidence). But when Samantha comes out in it and says she loves it, Diana immediately turns on it. And this is the thing: she does a 180 on the dress as soon as she realizes that Samantha likes it. All the shit she says about why she doesn't like it--too many poufy layers, whatever--is the merest bullshit. She shoots it down because if Samantha buys it, that ends the dress shopping, and that ends what is one of Diana's last opportunities to torment her daughter.
Why is the word "torment" not too strong for this situation? Watch the change in Diana's affect as soon as she realizes that she has ruined Samantha's feelings about the dress. Once it's clear that the dress that once made Samantha feel happy and confident now makes her feel sad and full of dread, Diana is suddenly much more cheerful. Diana, in those moments, will show you the face of someone who is enjoying exercising power over another human being. More than that, someone who is happy to have made another woman miserable. Someone who is relieved to discover that she's still got it, and that even in the middle of all this Apparatus, which is set up to produce happy endings, Diana can still make Samantha miserable.
And then, we get to see the gaslighting. I think the most revealing piece of that is the way that Diana offers to pay for the dress only after she has ensured that Samantha's associations with it are so painful that Samantha will never want to wear it. This is where you see the virtuosity resulting from years of practice. By offering to pay for the dress, Diana makes herself look like she's being the bigger person; but before she makes the offer she makes it impossible for Samantha to accept it. It LOOKS like Samantha is free to buy the dress. But she isn't. It LOOKS like this is Samantha's choice. But it's not. Diana even gets Samantha to THANK her for using this gambit. By manipulating Samantha's emotions, Diana has controlled the outcome just as effectively as if she had refused to pay for the dress, or set fire to it, or locked Samantha up in a cell. But Diana knows that now that she's made this offer, her coercion will become invisible, and that when Samantha declines the offer, she'll think that's her own decision. (Footnote: It is not invisible to anyone but Samantha. Samantha's friends know exactly what is going on. So do Randy and the consultant. So, obviously, do the producers.)
From a life education point of view I think that's the most important part of this video. Diana's control over Samantha's emotions is made visible enough that we can see how false this offer is and how it's calculated, not to help Samantha, but to protect Diana's claim that she loves her daughter (which she will reiterate in a later side-by-side interview) and is not abusing her.
She is, though. Diana is deliberately producing negative emotions in Samantha because that feeds some kind of need she has, AND she is covering her tracks (or at least thinks she is) by presenting herself as a generous and caring mother. I have no doubt that Samantha has never known material want and that her parents have provided her with Stuff and Opportunities that other kids can only dream of. But all of that has come at the price of Diana treating Samantha like a toy, or really more like livestock--like a source of some nutrient that Diana needs. And unfortunately for Samantha this necessary nutrient appears to be the pain of other people.
And this is why Samantha and Diana have been to 80 bridal salons. Samantha is getting married. This will reduce Diana's opportunities to prey on her. This dress shopping process is one of the last best opportunities Diana has to torment Samantha, and that's why she is making it last as long as possible.
Randy says, at one point, that he's afraid for Samantha. And he puts it in terms of the stress of the wedding, etc.; but I do not think that is all he really means. Any gay man his age has seen this before--if not in his own parents, in someone else's. Because when you come out, and you let your parents know that you're not going to actually be a copy of one or both of them, you find out what your parents are made of. And a distressing number of them are made of whatever Diana's made of.
This episode is obviously very old. I hope Samantha is happy somewhere far away from Diana, with or without a wedding gown, with or without her fiance. But...these tactics are timeless. Learn them, and know them, and recognize them. And if you see anyone trying to use them on you...run. That person has nothing to give you but misery.
