Everything ‘movie’ in my mind changed for me—all at once—recently.
In truth, it wasn’t a huge change. But when I sat down and thought about, it was a telling change. I realized something both about the movies and stories I most love, find reflections in my own writing.
For over twenty years, I have ranked the enchanting movie Amélie, as my “favorite” movie. This is just a personal thing—I don’t actually keep lists of such things. No people I know, especially members of my family, think of me as a great movie critic.
But for me, Amélie was the gold standard. In all those years, only one other movie seriously contended for first place and that was Arrival. I actually debated (in my own mind) for a while, which I liked more. Eventually, I left Arrival in second place as a movie, but decided I had a new favorite author in Ted Chiang who wrote the novella Story of Your Life on which the movie is based. The movie is great, the book is even better. Chiang writing is impeccable, but it’s his glorious, unique, mind-bending ideas that make him great.
After Everything finally took the crown, I thought about for a while. What did I like in each of these movies? What draws me to these strange, sometimes absurd worlds? And I realized it is the same thing that draws me to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (The radio plays are best), and the 1966 classic The King of Hearts (Le Roi de Coeur).
When I Choose To See The Good Side Of Things, I’m Not Being Naive. It Is Strategic And Necessary. It’s How I Learned To Survive Through Everything.
Waymond Wang, from Everything Everywhere All At Once
What draws me into these stories is the humorous, ironic but never cruel surrealism. I like movies and books and stories that allow us to look at reality in a skewed, weird, sometimes humorous way that makes reality more, not less, clear. Each of these stories takes an “everyman” (or woman) who is a bit skewed in their own right, and forces them to come to terms with reality by looking through a prism of new and unexpected ways of seeing.
Ultimately, I think my own best fiction is like that. Even when I write tragedies like A Sticky End, The Singer of Starfish, or even the very dark Something That Will Not Let Go, my characters—and I—find a kind of a silver lining at the end, even if it is a dark one. June from Something is at peace with her end as she burns down her terrible childhood home. Ee-ah-kik-ah from The Singer of Starfish knows what she accomplished even in her own terrible loss. Russ Hennessy in A Sticky End is resigned to his own fate and worries more about how his shipmates will react when they are awakened to see his remains stuck to the robot.
A friend—who helped me with Tudor use of profanity—wrote this to me about the book when he finally read the whole thing:
“It exudes brightness and originality, is optimistic in tone throughout and so entertaining…”
Even ignoring his hyperbole—you can ignore it, I, personally, will continue to revel in it as is my right—it is interesting that he calls my stories “optimistic” considering how many of my characters die or suffer irreparable losses. But I think he is right, even the worst of my “tragedies” are not truly tragedies but transformations.
By and large, I am not religious; I don’t believe in magic or fate or any supernatural intervention. My own life has had pain, insoluble problems and some tragedy of my own, but I still think of myself as mostly very lucky. For all that the world is random and dangerous, I do believe the world is a more magical and weirder place than our minds can completely fathom, even without mythical magic, and I try to reach for this in my writing.
In some ways, the hot-dog fingered people and the sentient rocks in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the shy woman who is wickedly good at pranks in Amelie, Arthur Dent who looses the earth he knew, not to mention his house, to discover a whole new weirder universe are alike. They all teach us to look at the world as it exists through a filter of fables, magic and absurdity. Maybe that is also the power of religion, I just prefer my surrealism to be explicitly fantastic.
In “Songs of a Befuddled Muse,” you can find stories where the world is somehow different from our everyday reality, where clowns view themselves as living a lifestyle, where a terrible sci-fi author gets to live the remainder of his life inside his own stories, where a man finds his creative muse is a very real, demanding, sensuous woman. Even though I write in many genres, each of my stories pick at similary strange and wonderful ideas and alternate realities.
And that, I think, is what ties my odd collection of stories together and, I hope, ties me to the great weird, wonderful stories like Everything Everywhere All At Once and Amélie.
