round-up: 4/7
a quickie
Happy Friday!
I owe you all a newsletter but haven’t engaged with any media—literary or otherwise—all week. I’ve just been writing. So, with that in mind, I have a quickie for you today.
What’s in this email:
A question for you
What I’m watching
Opportunities
Quotations
Tweets1
Question:
Please see this tweet, which I can’t embed2, because Elon is a nightmare.
Anyway, I’m looking for recommendations, always!
What I’m watching:
Yellowjackets3
Opportunities:
Quotations:
In the academy, I see people categorizing themselves by their marginalized identities, and I do this, too. And: sometimes a point of marginalization can become a shield to hide behind.
I feel young for my age. I feel old in body, but youthful in mind. Poor eyesight but vision clearer. Physically slower, but mentally more alert and playful.
I don’t know that we’ve ever discussed something as being too far because it felt too far. I think it’s more about whether or not it’s right for our characters. What we were saying in that interview is that it’s never about likability. We’re not particularly concerned about likability, because TV has proven over and over again that we will fall deeply in love with monsters. Don Draper and Walter White and Tony Soprano — name a whole slew of others — are dubious at best and monstrous at worst. And if you’re doing your job right as a storyteller, and you’re justifying at least from their perspective and their point of view why they’re doing the things they are doing, I don’t know that there are lines that are too far. For us, it’s a gut thing and an instinctual thing, and we’re making the show that we would want to watch and sometimes that’s just the question. Is this something I would want to watch? Or, is this something that just feels gratuitous or salacious? And that’s something that could lose me, if it’s not motivated correctly.
-Lyle
Tweets:
Have a great weekend—
-Despy Boutris
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For the last time, maybe.
Spoiler alert here, but I really liked this bit of this interview about 2x02:
It can’t just be incident. It can’t just be plot. It can’t just be like, “Oh, gruesome, they just ate Jackie.” It has to emanate from character. And so, for us, it really began as kind of a Shauna story and to try to locate where Shauna was, emotionally and psychologically, at the beginning of the story. She’s such an important lynchpin for a lot of what happens in the wilderness, and so once we realized that she was sort of harboring all of this guilt and self-recrimination and anguish and shame from her stubbornness that led to, arguably, Jackie dying in the wilderness, how could we continue that story in a really vivid way? And, given that the friendship was so fraught and complex in that she loved Jackie, but she also wanted to destroy her; she lived in her shadow, yet this was her best friend. The next step in that is consumption, in a way. And she’s also pregnant, let’s not forget. And starving. And so it started to speak to us as a very truthful story. And once it started to speak to us in that way, it felt like, why should we wait? Why should we tease it out? I think the time is now.