Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Angsty Fun Times

alecaustin and I had a long conversation today about how fiction sometimes needs to have depiction of horrible things, and the fine line between “necessary horrible” and “voyeuristic horrible,” and the way that readers have sometimes been conditioned toward voyeurism regarding horrible things (see: the problem of depicting rape), and so on. And he got me wondering what I would consider to be the worst violence I’ve inflicted on a character of mine.

Off the top of my head, I decided it was the stuff that happens to Seniade in drafts of what eventually became Dancing the Warrior. It isn’t actually the most damaging violence — she doesn’t die of it — but it’s horrible because it’s being done to her by a sadist, and she knows it, and she accepts it because she think it’s what she needs to do. Plus I dwell on the details of it, the step-by-step process and the pain that follows, which I don’t generally do otherwise. I called it “borderline torture” in that conversation, and only leave it at “borderline” because Sen could walk away at any time.

For all that, though — as I told alecaustin — it bothers me less than, say, the plague stuff I wrote for In Ashes Lie. Partly because Sen volunteers for it, but partly because most of us are desensitized to violence. And then that made me realize that what I find “worst” about the DtW stuff isn’t the physical suffering after all, but the psychological: what’s going on inside Sen’s head. (Which is why it’s the drafts, not the final version, that are the worst. One of them — not so much a draft as an exercise — is a pure, unadulterated inner monologue.)

And then I started thinking, you know, that might be why I tend to prefer torturing my characters psychologically, rather than physically. Because it bothers me a lot more. <g>

I’ve known for a long time that I’m a sucker for suffering and angst. It only works if you get me to really care about the character first; angst in an unlikeable or boring character will just make me roll my eyes. And it has to be the right kind of suffering; my taste tends toward the operatic end of the spectrum, rather than the grinding, day-to-day banality of things like “how will I find the money for rent this month.” But if you hit the right notes, on a character I’m invested in? I will eat it up with a spoon.

I can’t say it’s fun, exactly. “Magnetic” would be more apt. The next-to-last scene of the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is excruciating to watch; something truly horrible happens, and there’s no resolution afterward to let me feel it’s All Okay Now. But it’s an amazing scene. (One which I didn’t see until after A Star Shall Fall was over and done with — but if you want to know what psychological note I was aiming for near the end of that book, watch the movie. Or, y’know, watch it just because it’s a bloody brilliant piece of work from Cillian Murphy. It’s streaming on Netflix, and worth it for the ending alone.) I can’t look away from such things, and they stay with me long after they’re over.

Really, it’s cathartic. And yet — why do I enjoy the experience? Why am I so often a sucker for drama over comedy? And what determines what kind of suffering I’ll enjoy, versus what will just depress me? I’m still working on the answers to that. So I’m curious to know how others feel about this kind of thing. Do you like angst, and if so, what kinds, under what circumstances? Which kinds of suffering bother you more, and which are you desensitized to? What can you bear to write, versus read, versus watch?

I’m hoping your answers will help me understand what’s going on in my own head. πŸ™‚

Holmes and Watson need new punctuation

Saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows tonight, and had much great fun. Is it just me, or have we seen a tendency in the last 5-10 years for sequels to actually be better than the first movie of a series? If so, I attribute it to these being planned as series from the start, rather than the sequel being tacked on after the first one does well, and also on the way a second movie doesn’t have to spend all that tedious time setting up the characters and situation, but can just jump right into the story.

Anyway. That actually isn’t what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about slash, and how utterly inadequate I find that word for describing the situation with Holmes and Watson in this movie.

(I’ll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but I can’t promise about the comments.)

See, here’s the thing. To me — and I know people use the term in different ways, so this is just my own usage — slash is the process of taking the homoerotic subtext of a story and treating it as text. And one of the reasons I can’t call AGoS slashy is because it isn’t subtext. You simply cannot look at the interactions between Holmes and Watson in that film and think the story is not deliberately presenting you with two men who love each other very deeply, even if they can’t quite unbend enough to express that affection in direct terms.

The other reason I don’t want to call the film slashy is because, although you can find abundant bait there for imagining Holmes and Watson in a sexual relationship, I don’t read them that way. Partly this is because I get frustrated sometimes at how the slash lens tends to filter out all other possibilities for male emotional intimacy; we can’t let guys be friends or enemies even brothers without also sexualizing the relationship. That actually frustrates me sometimes, on par with my frustration over TV shows that like to use slashy subtext to engage the fans, but will never actually deliver on those wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises. (We can have slash, but almost never The Actual Gay.) Anyway, getting back to Holmes and Watson — sure, there’s certainly space there for reading it in that light. But I’m more interested in the story of two friends, because it’s a kind of friendship I feel I don’t see very often these days, where it isn’t all macho fellow-soldier camaraderie, but something with real vulnerability on both sides.

I don’t have a good term for what I see between them, in the first movie and especially the second. The closest I can come is a term my friends and I have used sometimes, “hetero lifemates,” for two straight people of the same sex whose friendship is of the lifelong kind. But it doesn’t quite hit the target I’m aiming at, maybe just because it’s unwieldy. Neither Holmes nor Watson would ever say it openly — let’s face it; they’re both late nineteenth-century men, and one of them is a rampaging narcissist — but they care as deeply about each other as either of them (okay, Watson) is capable of caring about anyone of the opposite sex. I feel like I need to resort to Greek here, except I don’t actually know which word I want. Agape? Philia? Eros? (Wikipedia claims that one doesn’t have to be sexual. Actual Hellenists, please weigh in.)

Whatever you call it, I’m fascinated by the way the movie embraces it, and does so without totally sidelining Mary Morstan. She doesn’t play a terribly prominent role, but they do make it clear that Watson isn’t marrying her just because it’s the sort of thing he’s expected to do. She and Watson have their thing, and he and Holmes have their thing, and it’s my sincere hope for all three characters that they manage to settle down into a dynamic that doesn’t force Watson to choose between them. Mary’s willingness to roll with various events suggests it may be possible.

I can’t refer to the guys as Holmes/Watson, though. They need new punctuation, something other than a slash. Any suggestions? πŸ™‚ And, more to the point — what should we call this kind of thing, if it isn’t slash?

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Eight: Netflix Streaming

Yeah. I know. I’m lazy. But it’s true; I’m thankful for Netflix Streaming, and other services that allow me to enjoy movies and TV from the comfort and sloth of my home. πŸ™‚

Not only because they enable me to act like a total slug, but because they make it me more willing to give a shot to various things I wouldn’t have tried if I had to make an effort to seek them out. And, as a corollary, they make it easier to give up on stuff that isn’t any good. If I’ve rented something, or waited for the disc to be sent to me, I’m more likely to feel as if I should stick it out for the whole thing, even if it isn’t really holding my interest. If it’s streaming, though, I feel very few compunctions about quitting after fifteen minutes. And that frees up more time for me to try the stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph!

(Mind you, it also means I’m apt to let such things suck away more of my time in general. But there’s a price for everything, I suppose . . . .)

a glimpse inside my mind

So I’m watching the last Harry Potter movie — don’t worry; no spoilers — and at one point there’s a shot which completely distracts me from the movie. This has happened before with the films.

But as I leaned over and said to my husband a moment later: this time I was distracted by contemplating dragon anatomy, and not by trying to ID the slice of London flying by in the background.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new series has clearly moved in and set up house.

Green Lantern: actually doesn’t suck

The money I paid to see Green Lantern would have been well-spent just for the character of Carol Ferris, who is probably the best female character I’ve seen in a superhero movie in quite a while.

The rest of the movie is, contrary to what I’d been led to expect, not terrible. Yes, the central idea is goofy (glowing space cops who use the green energy of willpower!), and yes, the “good guys” make one monumentally stupid decision partway through the movie, and there are smaller details in the story and script I would have tweaked. But Hal Jordan, the main character, is not nearly the “dur, I’m a man-child who can’t take anything seriously” disaster the first trailer seemed determined to advertise him as, and the central theme is better than some I’ve seen lately.

And Carol Ferris. She is smart, and competent, and not terribly interested in Hal’s bullshit (though she’s interested in him sans bullshit), and she does actual useful things. Not the best actress in the world, and there’s one thirty-second scene where I would have rewritten all of her dialogue, but it was the only sour note; the rest of what they did with her, I liked a great deal. Spoiler cut:

So’s I can list specifics.

buh . . . but . . . WHY?

Just put in a DVD of a Japanese film (Ichi).

The music playing on the menu screen is a Japanese-language rendition* of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley.”

Just . . . what? The hell?

Aaaaand now it’s playing over the credits. I am very curious to see if the plot of the film somehow mirrors or makes use of the events in that song. (Minus, one presumes, the specific Irish context.)

Jesus! It doesn’t just sound like Lisa Gerrard, it is her voice!

Okay, I’ll stop live-blogging the movie’s musical choices now.

*I’m presuming that’s what they’re singing. Can’t understand the lyrics enough to be sure. The melody, however, is unmistakable.

update on parallelsfic

I went ahead and put in some nominations for , with a specific eye toward variety: one Hong Kong source (The Bride with White Hair, an awesome old-school kung fu fantasy flick), one Korean (The Good, the Bad, the Weird, a crazy 1930s Western), one Indian (the Ramayana, because it’s a more manageable epic than the Mahabharata), and one Japanese (K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces, aka the alternate-history Art-Deco-punk superhero movie I keep meaning to make a post about). In general I tried to go with the theme of “crazy fun;” the only reason I nominated the Ramayana instead of Om Shanti Om was that somebody had already beaten me to the latter. πŸ™‚

Anyway, I still don’t know for sure if I’ll be participating; you’re required to offer four sources, and so far — apart from my own nominations — there’s only barely enough things listed that I feel I know well enough to write. But nominating isn’t a commitment to participate, so I figured why not.

Nominations are open until the 25th.

I think I’d prefer a Marlovian film.

It had to happen eventually, I suppose.

SCENE: The inside of swan_tower‘s head

SWAN: Let’s go look at movie trailers. Anonymous — what, like the group?

PAGE: <loads>

SWAN: No, it’s something set in Elizabethan England! With Derek Jacobi and other cool people! <reads further in synopsis> . . . oh, shit. It’s a “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays” story.

TRAILER: <plays>

SWAN: Old London Bridge! <swoons in a fit of historical geekery>

DIRECTOR: <is Roland Emmerich>

SWAN: grk.

IMDb: This movie’s theory is apparently Oxfordian, since Rhys Ifans has top billing, and he’s playing Edward de Vere.

SWAN: <sigh> But . . . London Bridge . . . Elizabethan geekery . . . but Roland Emmerich. And Oxfordianism. <more sigh> Well, at least it seems I’m over my knee-jerk “please god no more” reaction to the sixteenth century. And that’s something. Whether or not I can bring myself to watch this movie . . . we’ll have to see.

today’s dose of gaming geekery

Courtesy of lunch with my husband, I give you The Lion in Winter (preferentially the Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn version), with the characters re-cast as Changeling sidhe of various Houses:

  • Henry — Gwydion. The rage says it all.
  • Eleanor — Fiona, most likely; one of them has to be, to explain their screwed-up marriage.
  • Richard — also Fiona. Philip, plus “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”
  • Geoffrey — Ailil. Naturally. He’s a cold-blooded scheming bastard.
  • John — this one is hard. Tongue-in-cheek, he’s a Dougal; he made that little headsman toy, and clearly his physical defect is his brain. As kniedzw said, though, “I respect the Dougal too much for that.” Problem is, we respect all the Houses and kiths too much for that.
  • Alais — Liam, maybe. On account of being stepped on by everybody around her.
  • Philip — Eiluned. Mostly because I can’t tell when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth in the bedroom scene, and neither, I think, can Henry.

Inception in Real Time

From gollumgollum, an awesome video:

Not worth watching if you haven’t seen the movie; most of it won’t make sense, and the bits that do make sense will be spoilers. But if you’ve seen Inception? Watch this video. It beautifully illustrates the time-dilation aspect of the film. (And the vidder did an excellent job editing the “Mombasa” track onto the footage, too.)

thoughts on Inception

Saw it a second time tonight (with my brother and sister-in-law, who hadn’t been yet), and have a much clearer sense of the film this time around. Most of the things that were bugging me as inconsistencies turn out not to be; I just hadn’t caught the explanations that cleared them up. (Things like the distinction between the dreamer and the subject of the process — I had assumed they were the same person.)

(Which isn’t a spoiler, if you just flinched, thinking I’d given something away. I’m talking mechanics there, not plot.)

Definitely spoilery thoughts below the fold.

Do not pass unless you’ve seen the film!

Never underestimate the importance of body language.

Last night I was watching Brick while ironing my gi (fabulous movie, btw; noir set in a high school, and it works), and thinking about how Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of those actors I don’t often see, but generally enjoy when I do. Then I thought about N.K. Jemisin’s guest post on Whatever about Inception, and a comment in the thread there about JGL, and I realized what it is that gets me about his performances:

He understands how to use body language.

Most guys look good in three-piece suits, but as Arthur in Inception, he doesn’t just wear the suit, he wears the posture that makes the suit look good. In Brick, when he’s been beaten up something like four or five times in as many days and is coughing his lungs out, there’s a shot of his feet stumbling down to the path that will lead him to a very dangerous confrontation — and then he stops, and his feet settle, and then he walks off as if nothing’s wrong. (Gamer-brain says, “that’s what spending a point of willpower looks like.”) He doesn’t just act with his face and his voice; it goes through every part of his body, so that the telling details might be in his hands or his shoulders or something else you maybe don’t even notice, not consciously, not unless you’re looking for it.

I’ve realized this is a common theme among actors I like, the ones where hearing they’re in a movie will instantly get me more interested. Johnny Depp does it, and brilliantly. Cate Blanchett does it, though at the moment she’s about the only actress I can think of who does. (I blame the industry, not the actresses; they don’t often get as wide a range of roles to play.) Paul Bettany does it, and he was the one who made me realize body language was a key point for me, after noticing the subtle physical cues he works into his performance. When Vin Diesel remembers to do it, he can hold the entire screen by presence alone; one of the most bad-ass shots in all of Pitch Black is him simply standing up.

And when people forget to do it, that failure can undermine an entire performance. (Now I’ve got kitsunealyc in my head, ranting about Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible posture in Emma, that made all her dresses look like sacks.)

This drives me a little crazy because of course I want to make use of this idea in fiction, and I can’t — not exactly. The kinds of physical quirks I’m thinking of work best when they’re done subtly, in the background; in prose, though, I have to describe whatever I want you to see, and that automatically draws your attention to it. Especially because getting the nuance of a gesture or twitch might require an entire sentence of description, when the act itself takes half a second. You have to approach it differently: well, duh, it’s a different medium. I think the equivalent in prose is finding that precisely-calibrated angle from which to describe something, that will carry a whole weight of implied meaning without taking up a lot of space. Dunnett does this brilliantly (as she does so many things), particularly with Lymond’s hands; she’ll say something about his face being caged behind his fingers or whatever and somehow her descriptor manages to make me see everything else surrounding it: posture, white knuckles, the whole ensemble of body language, from that one perfect detail. It won’t always work, because one reader’s metaphoric connections aren’t the same as the next, but it’s the only way I can really see to accomplish what I want.

So, I just have to become as awesome as Dorothy Dunnett. <g>

I’d love other examples of this, either in the form of authors who really pull off physical nuance on the page, or actors/actresses who make good use of it in performance. Do you find it as effective as I do, or are your particular buttons of a different sort?

Interview with the Resurrectionist

Tell me if you think these words belong together: “Victorian,” “supernatural,” “grave-robber,” and “comedy.”

If the answer is “yes,” go rent I Sell the Dead. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is a resurrectionist about to be executed for his crimes; Francis Duffy (Ron Perlman) is a priest who comes to interview him before his head gets chopped off. Blake tells the story of how, as a wee lad, he got into the body-snatching trade — and then how he and his mentor discovered the real money was in stealing the undead. Wacky hijinks ensue.

It’s a low-budget film that embraces its limitations and turns them into an aesthetic: lots of fog-filled shots with painted backdrops, occasional fades to cartoon sketches, that kind of thing. And, y’know, a fairly sick sense of humour. But you’ve already admitted you think a resurrectionist comedy sounds like a good idea, so there’s no point in pretending you aren’t going to laugh at the jokes.

I rented it in the name of research. There will be no grave-robbing in this novel, but if an Onyx Court body-snatcher story shows up at some point, you’ll know what source to blame.

People get paid for this crap?

I don’t know what it is, but within the last year or two, the synopses on the Apple movie trailers site have just become abysmal. Not so much in content — though a few of them are irritatingly content-free, leaving me with no sense of what the film is about — but style. A sentence from the synopsis for Lovely, Still: “What begins as an odd and awkward encounter quickly blossoms into what appears to be a romantic late life love affair that takes us on a heartfelt and wonderful journey which takes an unexpected turn.”

Okay, seriously? The first thing that caught me was the repetition of “takes,” which made me notice they had this whole daisy-chain of subordinate clauses, plus you’ve got that “appears to be” (what, is it actually a CIA plot? a behavioral experiment by a psych student? a dream in the head of an old man in a nursing home, that he’ll wake up from at the end?) cluttering up your sentence, and gahhhhhhhhh. Not to mention the tendency in these things to tell me how heartfelt and moving or thrilling or hilarious or whatever the film will be, which really makes me want to hit the writer with a raw fish, because if you tell me that, I automatically disbelieve you. And don’t get me started on the hideous cliches that get deployed in some of these things.

I don’t know where they get them from, but I hope to god it isn’t the marketing department for the films themselves. It would be appalling to think the people who pour months or years of their lives into making a movie would pay somebody to promote it so badly.

’nuff said.

io9 on The Last Airbender: “M Night Shamalan Finally Made a Comedy.”

The Last Airbender is a lavish parody of big-budget fantasy epics. It’s got everything: the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum. No expense is spared β€” Shyamalan even makes sure to make fun of distractingly shitty 3-D, by featuring it in his movie.

and

Shyamalan’s true achievement in this film is that he takes a thrilling cult TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and he systematically leaches all the personality and soul out of it β€” in order to create something generic enough to serve as a universal spoof of every epic, ever. All the story beats from the show’s first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean? We never know, because it’s time for more stuff to happen. You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place. And it’s laughing louder than you are, because it’s got Dolby surround-sound and you’re choking on your suspension of disbelief.

and

Later in the film, Katara says my favorite line ever, “We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs.” It’s as if Shyamalan had a cue card that he was planning to turn into an actual bit of dialog, but he forgot. There’s a lot of cue-card writing in this film, and it feels like Shyamalan is leaving things as sign-posty as possible, in order to make fun of the by-the-numbers storytelling in so many Hollywood epics. The master has come to school us all.

Also, Roger Ebert on same:

“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

The good news is, we still have the animated series. And that’s what I’ll be watching tonight.

Hollywood Plays It Safe

A lot of people rant about the fact that all Hollywood seems to be putting out these days are sequels, adaptations, and remakes. While there’s a grain of truth to that, I decided recently that I’m going to stop being angry at them for it — for the simple reason that if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same.

Because making a movie is expensive. Sure, if your story is about hipster twentysomethings having relationship dysfunction, or a suburban family gathering for the holidays, then you can make your film for twenty thousand dollars on a handheld digital camera. On the high end, it might cost a few million, depending on the paycheck your actors demand. But my favorite genres are SF, fantasy, action, etc, and the price tag on those is a lot higher. So when it comes to those genres — surprise! — Hollywood plays it safe.

Remember, the definition of “a risk” is that it might blow up in your face. That’s one thing if your ten-million-dollar romantic comedy only makes back seven million or so . . . but apply that same ratio to a two-hundred-million-dollar sci-fi extravaganza, and the losses become a lot more appalling. A big-name director might still have a career on the far side of such a failure; anybody below their rank might never work in that town again.

And one way to hedge your risk is to film stories that have already been test-driven. Sequel? If people enjoyed the first one, you’ve already got a built-in audience, and so long as you don’t massively screw it up they’re likely to turn out for a new installment of the same. (Human nature; I also don’t blame audiences for acting that way. Especially since I do it myself.) Adaptation? There are differences between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen, but allowing for those differences, you know in advance that the story resonates with people. (Plus you can cross-promote, which is always a plus.) Remake? Take something people have a nostalgic fondness for, and update it for modern aesthetic sensibilities, that want something better than forgotten ’80s B-list actors and rubber monster suits. It may not save you; sequels and adaptations and remakes have all tanked. But at least you have some basis for guessing how they’ll do, even if that guess turns out to be wildly wrong; with a new story, you might as well throw darts at a dartboard. And when you have to justify to a studio how you lost so much of their money, I’m betting it helps to be able to point to good book sales or something else in that vein, see, we had reason to think it would work, as opposed to admitting you flung yourself off a cliff with a parachute that had never been tested before.

There are kinds of playing-it-safe-ness that I don’t excuse. “Our hero has to be a Standard Beefy White Guy, because we don’t trust that audiences want to see women or minorities do cool things” — no. And god knows I would like to see original films be original, with plots I haven’t seen a million times before, even though I realize that’s a lot more likely at the Moon price tag than the Avatar one. But a Hollywood that made a lot more big-budget original films than sequels, adaptations, and remakes is also a Hollywood that would rapidly run itself halfway out of business: pretty soon Moon would be the biggest thing they could afford to make. Hollywood isn’t and never will be the home for daring experiments. That’s what the smaller studios are for, the people outside the main system.

So for my own part, I’ve stopped complaining about the conservative game Hollywood is playing. I like the big-budget FX extravaganzas; I admit it, they’re a weakness of mine. So what I do is this: I see the ones that really do appeal to me, the ones that play off a source I really love, or sound like they’re actually decent. I avoid the ones that seem like exploitative crap (Transformers 2, I’m looking at you). And I also go see things like Moon, thereby doing my small part to say that hey, there’s an audience for this, too. Because the small studios are part of the greater film ecosystem, and they’re the place to go if you want to see people taking risks.

Maybe in the long term, it will have an effect. Coming to a theatre near you, in 2021: Moon: The Remake, starring Jaden Smith And A Lot Of Explosions That Weren’t In The Original! With Bonus Sexy Alien Chick!

I’ll believe it when I see it, but . . . .

Courtesy of moonandserpent: Elfquest movie inches closer to actual existence.

I’ve always assumed the thing would never happen, but if it did . . . folks, this is one of the deep foundational stories in my head, one of the things that’s been with me for years and years and years. A movie would either be awesome or a travesty. I’m willing to risk the latter for the chance of the former.

And now I need to persuade myself that the things I have to get done today take priority over curling up with Elfquest.

Alice in Wonderland

Spoilery thoughts will go behind the cut, but the exterior thought is this: that Tim Burton, working from a base of freaking ALICE IN WONDERLAND, has done a better job with the notion of “strong-minded female protagonist does protagonisty things, up to and including saving people and kicking ass” than most directors who set out to tell a story about a Strong Woman Kicking Ass.

The movie has flaws, but this aspect pleased me quite a bit.

Now, on to the spoilers.

today’s mental writing exercise

This is totally cat-vacuuming — it’s unproductive speculation on something that probably won’t ever happen, and even if it did, I certainly wouldn’t be involved — but I started it on my walk to and from the post office, to keep myself occupied, and it’s an interesting exercise in thinking about story structure. Spoilers for the video game Dragon Age: Origins follow below the cut.

How would you go about making DA:O into a movie?

what the hell did we spend our time learning?

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War last night.

Got furious, again, over the state of history education in this country.

Maybe somewhere in the U.S., there are schools that do a decent job teaching history. God knows I didn’t go to one of them, and neither did anybody I’ve ever talked to about this. We never seemed to make it past the Civil War; even in junior high, when U.S. history was split over two years, the first one ending with the Civil War and Reconstruction, we still didn’t get through the twentieth century. Why? Because we started the second year by recapping . . . the Civil War and Reconstruction. And then got bogged down reading All Quiet on the Western Front. I know nothing about the Korean War. (Except that I think technically I’m supposed to call it the Korean Conflict.) What I know about Vietnam, I got from movies. Ditto WWII, mostly. And when it comes to things like Afghanistan (the subject of Charlie Wilson’s War) or our involvement in Iran, there are whole oceans of historical incident I’m ignorant of.

Historical incident that is very goddamned relevant right now. How many people in the U.S. — especially those under the age of 30 — understand the ways in which our problems in Afghanistan are of our own creation? We wanted to stop the Soviets, so we poured weapons and support into the hands of the Afghans, and then wandered off as soon as the commies went away. What’s worse than rampant interventionism? Half-assed interventionism. But thank God we’ve learned our les — oh, wait.

You can’t learn from history if you never learned it in the first place, people.

I want the history textbook I never got. I want a single-volume overview of United States history, 1900-1999, that will tell me the basics about the Korean War Conflict and Vietnam, about Afghanistan and Iran and Iran-Contra and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, about all those things that were kind of important to U.S. policy and foreign relations that might be tripping us up today, and most especially about the ones I’ve never even heard of and so can’t list here. Bonus points if it has colorful pictures and informative sidebars and maybe a brief quiz at the end of each chapter, because when it comes to this stuff, I’m about at a junior-high level of comprehension.

I don’t even know if that book exists. If it does, I don’t have time to read it anyway, because the downside of writing the Onyx Court series is that most of my nonfiction reading is about Britain. But I can always buy it and hold onto it until the next time I hear about some war I never even knew we fought, and then maybe I’ll drop everything for a few days and learn about my own country.