#21 The Prestige, Life is Strange 2, and Losing Friends
Hello. The obsessive/compulsive side of me would love nothing more than to write and send these newsletters out at the same time every single week. But I’ve found when I do that, the quality of the newsletters seems to suffer. And while I have all sorts of deadlines in my other writing work, I don’t see much reason to add another one when it isn’t necessary.
So this is your notice that you’ll get these newsletters in your email (assuming you’re a subscriber) when they’re ready to be sent out. That may change in the future. But for right now, I’m going to lift the self-imposed guilt I feel for not getting these newsletters out in a timely fashion.
A lot is going on with me right now. I just finished my first virtual residency at Goddard College. This is my third semester in my MFA in Creative Writing program and it promises to be an eventful one. The main focus of this semester is a class I will be teaching. It’s online. This means any of you could join the class if you wanted to. I’ll share more details here when it’s time.
Okay. Let’s get going.
What I’m Watching: The Prestige
After Insomnia, Christopher Nolan brought the Batman franchise back to life with Batman Begins. I’ve already talked about the Dark Knight trilogy. After Batman Begins, Nolan made perhaps his most ‘meta’ movie with The Prestige. Like his Batman movies, The Prestige stars Christian Bale and Michael Caine, but added to the mix is Hugh Jackman, David Bowie, Rebecca Hall, and Scarlett Johansson. All of whom do incredible work in this movie.
The title refers to the third act in a magic trick (and in Christopher Nolan movies). If one pays attention to what’s going on in The Prestige, you’ll notice Nolan literally showing you how he tells a story. Of course paying attention to what’s going on is difficult because both magicians and Nolan like to keep their audiences distracted. The Prestige is told in bits and pieces, assembled out of order. This forces the audience to put the pieces together and distracts from what might be a more obvious trick if it were told in a linear fashion.
Like nearly all Nolan movies, this movie messes with perception. A careful second viewing of The Prestige will reward viewers by revealing all the pieces necessary to understand the hook at the end are right in front of the viewer the whole time if one knows where to look. Nolan’s trick is making you look somewhere else the first time through.
One could say that The Prestige is Nolan’s first great original movie. He’s not constrained by budget or equipment like he was in his early films like Memento. He’s not forced to conform to previously written material like in the Batman movies or Insomnia. This is Nolan firing on all cylinders with a cast that makes this turn of the century period drama about rival magicians absolutely riveting.
Next: INCEPTION
What I’m Playing: Life Is Strange 2
Seventeen-year-old Sean Diaz was busy. So when his nine-year-old brother, Daniel showed him the fake blood he’d made, Michael ignored him. Daniel then went outside where he playfully squirted fake blood on a neighbor kid who was 18-year-old. Sean saw through his bedroom window as the neighbor kid grabbed his little brother. Sean ran out to the yard and confronted the neighbor kid. There was yelling and punches thrown. A police officer pulled up and got out of his car. Around that time Sean and Daniel’s father came outside to see what was going on. The Seattle police officer saw the man approaching the scene and reacted by shooting Sean and Daniel’s father. He was unarmed.
This sounds like something that could have happened last week, but it is in fact the beginning of a 2018 video game called Life Is Strange 2. Like its predecessors, Life Is Strange 2 focuses less on action and more on personal relationships. All four of its games (Life is Strange, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and Life is Strange 2) have an emotional core that is unlike any other video games I’ve ever played. No games and very few movies have made me cry harder than these ones. They manage to make the player care deeply about these characters and what happens to them. If you’re looking for a shoot-em-up, this isn’t it. If you want to take a deep dive into another world, I can’t recommend these games enough.
What I’m Thinking About: Losing Friends
I’ve been losing friends lately. My friend Stephen Cysewski just died. He was a photographer. You can read more about that here. Another friend had a full mental breakdown, cut a bunch of us out of their life, and hopefully is getting the help and support they need. But there are others both online friends and real life friends who have directly and specifically stopped being friends with me. And I’m not sure what, if anything, can or should be done about it. Still, the loss of friends tends to bother me. It’s something I inevitably end up thinking quite a lot about. I don’t take friendships or the loss of friendships lightly.
I say that I don’t know what I should do about it because at no time did my behavior include anything that I would personally consider immoral or that anyone could consider dishonest. If I’m not lying or doing anything wrong, I can’t imagine what I would want to change about myself to accommodate others.
People who know me know that I am someone who hold few, if any, things sacred and my humor is as dark as a good stout. So I am apt to say something that more sensitive folk might find offensive. A woman I once dated said, “You should come with a warning.” Perhaps that’s true. If I were a movie, I’d be rated a hard R. But it isn’t as if hide this fact. If you’re someone who doesn’t like occasional profanity or the darkest of humor, you’re probably not someone who is going to get along with me. And that’s fine. I get that I’m not everybody’s cup of tea or shot of whiskey.
Still, I’d rather not lose friends. So I think about it.
What I often find is that it’s my darkness that turns people off. It’s what I’ve referred to as my criminal mind. I allow the dark thoughts because I’m capable of recognizing them as thoughts and not mistaking them for who I am. Unfortunately, while I am capable of that distinction it would seem that others are not.
And this is what I want to talk about because I see a similarity in those friends who have chosen to leave. It’s not about me and my darkness. Each one of these people is someone who, from what I can tell, refuses to acknowledge the darkness in themselves. They lose me as a friend because I remind them of an aspect of themselves that they cannot face.
I’m reminded of a quote from the television show Homicide: Life on the Street in which Detective Frank Pembleton says the following:
“Let me tell you something. We’re all guilty of something. Cruelty or greed or going sixty-five in a fifty-five mile per hour zone, but you know what, you want to think about yourself as the fair-haired choir boy, you go ahead…I’m saying you got a darkness. You, Tim Bayliss, you got a darkness inside of you. You gotta know the darker, uglier sides of yourself. You gotta recognize them so they’re not constantly sneaking up on you. You gotta LOVE them because they’re part of you. Because along with your virtues they make you who you are. Virtue isn’t virtue unless it slams up against vice. So consequently, your virtue isn’t REAL virtue until it’s been tested…tempted.”
A former friend of mine stopped being my friend because I said something he found disturbing. And no amount of explaining or apologizing was going to fix things between us because to him my ability to have such dark thoughts at all was too much for him. Though he initially claimed otherwise, it became clear that his problem with me was that I didn’t think more like he did.
And before it sounds like I’m trying to exonerate myself of any wrongdoing, I’ll be the first to admit that anyone has the right to find what I say offensive and anyone has the right to not want to be around someone who they fear may say something offensive. The former friends of mine who have walked out of my life are right to do so. I’m not George Costanza. Everyone doesn’t have to like me.
But what they cannot do with any degree of honesty is act like they are somehow better than me because they’re afraid of the dark. They aren’t. And this isn’t where I start pretending I’m all superior either. There’s a principle at work here. I don’t get to tell you how to be you and you don’t get to tell me how to be me. We’re different. And that’s okay. If you don’t like how I’m different than you, feel free to fuck off. (Also fuck off if you can’t stand profanity.)
I expect that I will continue to lose friends and gain other friends. That tends to be how life works.
- Jack Cameron