HI ⭐️! (loved Droughtland, would love to hear commentary) :)
HELLO and THANK YOU FOR THE ASK and I'm SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT I loved WRITING IT ARGHH!!!! Also tagging in @catgrub who asked the same just a few minutes later -- HELLO and THANK YOU ZANE!!! Since there were two recs for Droughtland I feel like the extreme length of the following Commentary can be excused.
(For context: I realized I've got 0 idea of how to do a Director's Commentary except for ones I've seen where directors just rewatch their own movie and speak overtop of it, so, I did the same except with reading and typing. This is my read-along author commentary on Droughtland, arranged in chronological order--feel free to look at it with the OG, or not, it should stand alone just fine. Or ignore it entirely. My god it's fucking long, so sorry. Anyway, onwards.)
Okay close reading. Okay commentary. Engaging on this journey together yaaaay.
[Iowa, 1962]
Okay, from the first line, we’re invoking concerns of location, identity, belonging, otherness—Radar struggling to adjust to home because he senses he’s been changed by his experiences in a way that makes him incompatible with the life he used to lead. He’s good at his job, we sense that he’s well-respected, but he’s undeniably not entirely present. Everything he does, sees, thinks, remembers, ends up in service of the Project, which I think I’ve (maybe not obviously or even all that consciously) tried to imply has an element of spiritual or religious calling to it, given that we’re introduced to it in a church.
And retrospectively enjoying the complexity of Radar running the line between escapism and catharsis in his writing at the end of this first section. He misses the people he was close to, that much is clear, and writing is a way to feel close to them. And yet he’s also mentally returning over and over again to a war. A theme I’ve played with in the background of my BeejHawk fics, and more centrally in Droughtland, is one I sort of cribbed from Michael Herr’s Dispatches: Who are you after the most defining event of your life has ended?
[Iowa, 1952]
...And who are you when you KNOW the most defining event of your life has ended? That’s not to say the War Was A Good Experience and One To Reminisce Over. In fact the war being experientially horrific only complicates this idea more. I’m fascinated by how somebody goes about the rest of their life knowing with near-certainty that anything / everything they experience will likely never be as impactful on their sense of self and arc of life than a single past event. Anyway, this ends up concerning Radar greatly, who moves from that Defining Event—Drafted Into the Korean War—back to the rhythms of family and farm life, where he expects himself to be content with the life he’d always assumed he’d have. Actually I’ve read more and realized I had him state that concern textually, rendering this redundant. Ah well. Moving on.
Okay, something else—Radar and writing and fiction and voice. I wanted to get across very clearly that the driving force of his writing is a direct desire to communicate—his first attempt at beginning the book takes the form of an introduction (“My name is Radar O’Reilly”), and he states that writing lets a fellow talk to people who aren’t around. The silent implication being, then, that he’s got no-one real to talk to. Another important set of questions getting kicked around in this piece: Why do we write? Is writing still communication if it’s never shared?
I wanted to play with the idea specifically of writing in relation to loneliness. If you’ve got nobody to talk to, or no way to express yourself meaningfully, or nobody who is interested in understanding you, it makes a lot of sense to sink into the realm of the creative, which we see Radar do here very explicitly. He doesn’t have any close connections, really, or at least not ones he thinks he can explain his new sense of self to, so he turns to writing. Summoning the last people who really understood how he felt, in some ways, writing to communicate with people who are dead or gone from him. Making some record of himself, his experiences, the way he sees the world—an attestation of self, or something, in direct defiance of a landscape and life that feels flat, uncaring, inaccessible—he starts writing alone in a field.
[Iowa, 1959]
Next—mm, field fire section, which was my favorite to write. I’m clearly and obviously soft for rural concerns. I know it’s been pointed out that my voice is significantly different in this fic than in my others, and I’ll admit that I did dip into the author-voice I usually reserve for my personal fictionalizations of family histories, which largely concern, go figure, rural American questions of identity, place, belonging, family, fulfillment, etc. And yet the usual Vonnegut-y sensibilities aren’t wholly gone—the idea of Radar being a volunteer fireman was lifted both from Vonnegut’s life AND volunteer firefighters' positioning in his work as bastions of selfless humanity and civic duty. I like the idea of a latently lonely Radar doing all these very quiet upright civically-minded things. Frequently good people are dealt bad hands, and aren’t cared for by their communities, and still go on doing good anyway.
[Iowa, 1963]
Reading on—and the arrival of BeejHawk. It’s been long enough by this point that Radar’s sort of been subsumed by the Project. We see that tendency in him as he anticipates seeing ‘Dr. Pierce’ and meets Hawkeye instead.
And then—AH! At last! The title is Droughtland, obviously, and that’s a multivalent image, but here’s at least one moment and facet of relief: Sometimes, he thought, a fellow just needed words. Words and words and words like rain on a drought. And the good doctors Pierce and Hunnicutt had always known how to talk up a storm.
As much as it’s a relief, it’s also destabilizing to suddenly have people notice him after so long living almost entirely within himself—Hawkeye calling him Radar shocks him into silence—wow, I’m realizing belatedly just HOW MUCH this fic is about loneliness, actually. Funny the things you can catch on a reread. His name is important, that’s all, and Hawkeye would understand that.
Meanwhile BeejHawk as a unit are very clearly sensing something wrong—not wrong, maybe, but not all right, either. Radar’s Restaurant Allegory is key here as he admits that ‘enjoyment’ is absolutely meaningless in the context of his life—it doesn’t matter if you like the restaurant if it’s the only option. It’s not that he likes or dislikes it—it’s that forming and expressing an opinion would be pointless. This is a stand-in for his opinion on life, which Hawkeye finds distressing, though I think he’d agree with Radar to a degree on his related idea that happiness, delight, joy are intentional practices more than consistent feelings (another idea cribbed from elsewhere: Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, which I am coming to realize sunk way more deeply into my psyche at age 19 than I thought. I may elaborate someday if there’s ever an interest in Parker Creative Nonfiction because the story’s sort of ???, but also, maybe not).
Anyway, Hawk at last manages to drag a bit of real sentiment out of Radar: writing, and the Project, where so much of his internal life is focused (Hawk makes a Lot’s wife joke, because of course he does, but also I like him invoking a story where somebody looks backward on something terrible and suffers for their inability to turn away).
And from here Radar takes the plunge and finally gives all that lonely writing an audience. Terrifying, but it pays off—Hawk affirms that he’s very good (important to me that Radar’s very good as a writer coming from outside a formal academic context. Everybody has the potential to create resonant art, and I wanted to be clear that Radar’s interest in something like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop isn’t the need to be Validated by the Institution or to Escape some sort of poorly-informed or condescending vision of Rural Nonintellectualism (bad themes!!! I hate them!!! NOT at play here, or at least consciously attempted to subvert) but as an extension of the desire for artistic community. To be seen and heard, instead of all the silent listening he’s been doing for years.)
The tradeoff of communicating, by the way—Hawk is a good listener, and picks up on a number of things maybe Radar wasn’t even aware he was revealing in his work—loneliness, vague dissatisfaction, a focus on finding interior fulfillment when the external world fails to provide. Scary, destabilizing, embarrassing… but eventually very, very good. For Radar, at least, who’s suddenly feeling like he’s allowed to want something.
Moving on. Hawkeye’s reaction to learning he’s a part of Radar’s Project. Obviously he’s worried about how he’s going to come across. I think it’s a very scary thing to be the object of cameras, of writerly gaze, all of it, because it creates an image that exists entirely outside the object's control. How horrifying/enticing/awful/fascinating it’s got to be to be able to find out how you exist in another person’s mind… and when that image was formed in the lowest years of your life… of course Hawk’s apprehensive. And clearly it rattles him—but maybe in the way any really, really resonant art rattles us, based on his next-morning response.
Hawk comes downstairs and we get this baffling little kiss scene, which I’ll be honest I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant when I was writing, only that it felt right. But now I’m thinking it’s clearly an exchange of seeing—Hawk feels he’s been thoroughly Seen in Radar’s work, for better or worse, and comes downstairs to communicate in this abstract way that he sees Radar, too—and affirms what he sees.
So we end with these moments, finally, of communication and understanding and connection. Very obviously there’s the Hawk-Radar connection, which is so intense and emotive it’s basically psychic (what's good writing if not successfully communicating an idea or image with all original emotive force and vividness from one mind to another?). There’s also Beej, who isn’t Hawk’s brand of incidentally clairvoyant, but is all around a very bright, kind, warm person who’s able to give Radar the sort of horrendously necessary everyday sort of conversation and care that makes life bearable, the kind it’s so easy to take for granted when you’re experiencing it regularly. And then there’s BJ stepping in to hold Hawk even if he doesn’t fully understand what’s transpired between Hawk and Radar, because he knows Hawk and knows that he needs a second of support, which is sort of psychic in its own way.
And that's the end. So, overall, I’d say the thing is very directly related to the title—drought of the soul which is only starting to lift by the end of the piece. One storm doesn’t solve a drought, after all—you need consistent rain, and time for ecological repair. And still the first few drops of rain after a dry spell feel awfully good.
