The challenge of rewriting

To this day, one of my greatest triumphs as a writer came back when I was in college, even if no one other than myself and my professor knew about it. Come to think of it, he would have no idea what I went through, only that he gave the final product an A.

I was writing a paper for a class that combined film theory and literary theory, and I got off on completely the wrong track with it. It was one of two major papers for the term and I could not afford to screw it up.

After I'd written more than half of it -- probably at least 2,000 words -- I decided I needed to scrap my approach and start off with a new one. It was a radical move and it worked like gangbusters. Yep, I got that A. 

This stands out in my memory not because I got the A. I did get my fair share of those. Rather, it's because of how rarely I've done something like that. We writers -- many of us, anyway -- usually adhere to the sunk cost fallacy, which is that if we've already dedicated significant time and effort to something, we are very unlikely to change horses midstream. There comes a certain point where you are pot committed, to use another economic metaphor, and however it's going to be received, you have to continue along the course you've started. 

As a critic, I almost never rewrite anything. In fact, I am far more likely not to write the review at all if I think it's not going well -- something that's an easier choice since I am my own editor, and (usually) there is little consequence to aborting halfway through. I think of the review I tried to write for my favorite comedy (so far) of 2024, Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted, and how after about two paragraphs, I was not saying what I wanted to say. I think I did intend to ultimately shape it up into something publishable -- after all, two paragraphs is more like 400 words than 2,000 -- but time got away from me, as time does, and before long I'd missed my window.

When I am reviewing something I watched via a screener I got from a publicist, though, there is not the option to abandon it unpublished -- not if you intend to keep getting screeners from that publicist. This was the case with The Dead Don't Hurt, as you may remember from Monday's post, which also discussed how there was a major aspect of the film's structure that I did not understand while watching it. (I blame the distracted viewing of the Christmas season, especially as we are also preparing for a three-week trip to the States.)

As also discussed, I did watch the movie again, across Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, hoping to see just how much of a dunce I was to have missed this core aspect of the script, and hoping that I would just amend an author's note to the review I'd already written. 

After that viewing, in which the film climbed a half-star in my assessment -- and it might have been a full star if I still didn't sort of blame the film for not making this device clear enough to me -- I decided I liked it enough more that I owed it more than an author's note attached to a flawed review.

So I did indeed rewrite it, and that left me with the following question:

How do I actually do this?

I knew there were some observations in that review that I was still proud of, and the plot synopsis was mostly sturdy. But the connective tissue had a backhanded compliment, or even sometimes outright critical, aspect to it, and so I'd likely have to reword even within the passages that I thought were still relevant. 

So what I did was copy the whole thing into a new Word document, and just see where I went. 

I decided to incorporate the content of the proposed author's note into a new opening paragraph. I don't usually like to use the first person in my reviews -- I probably only include the word "I" in one of every ten reviews, and sometimes I might go six months without doing so -- but I thought this was a situation that called for it. Because not getting this essential thing about The Dead Don't Hurt was, in fact, relevant to the movie I had watched and reviewed the first time, and I thought my audience deserved to know about it, if only to prevent them from having to watch it twice to get all they could out of it. (Because if they didn't get all they could out of it, they'd never bother to watch it again.)

The confessional first part went simply, as writing in that mode comes pretty easily to me, given how much practice I get on this blog. It also allowed me to take the piss out of myself a little bit, which was warranted.

Then I transitioned into a modified version of my opening thoughts from my first review on the overall feel of the film. The plot synopsis survived mostly intact, though I chose to change certain things that might now be considered spoilers, given what I'd already said about the film's non-linear narrative. (That was the thing I didn't get. I know, I'm a dummy.)

The rest of the review needed to lose my references to certain things feeling abrupt, because that was no longer relevant -- or I no longer saw it as a weakness, anyway, now that I had an explanation. And that allowed me to replace that material with some thoughts on Viggo Mortensen's performance, which stood out to me a lot more on the second viewing, while still staying within 200 words of my original word count. 

The piece closed with comments that were exclusively positive, rather than the negative note of the previous one, even though both of the ratings had still been overall positive. (Incidentally, the movie also moved up more than 30 spots on my in-progress rankings of 2024 films.)

In the end, the task I had been dreading was accomplished entirely within the length of a 25-minute train ride home from work. Which is good, because I'm busy as hell right now, particularly yesterday, when I still had to create and finalize our Christmas cards after getting home (and attain my wife's approval of the photo choices and design) before going to play tennis. If the former wasn't completed before the latter, we might miss another precious day to still receive the cards in time to have our recipients get them before Christmas.

You never read the first review, but if you want to read this version, it's here. 

It was useful to have to do this, as it lowers my fear of the prospect of having to rewrite something in the future. 

What's more, it shows me something I didn't know before this as it relates to my 20-year-old self:

I've still got it. 

The movie I didn't understand

Spoilers for The Dead Don't Hurt.

I had a very odd experience this week, one I'm not sure I've ever had before. 

It's not that I've never misunderstood a movie. But usually a movie I don't understand is existing on some sort of abstract intellectual plane, or I lost my bearings early on and never got them back, or it's just plain muddled in its execution. I've never misunderstood a movie quite like this. 

I received a screener of The Dead Don't Hurt, the new western from Viggo Mortensen, in time to review it for its December 5th Australian release. In fact, I received it plenty early, watching it this past Wednesday and finishing the review by Friday morning.

It was a bit of a middling review. I certainly liked aspects of the film, while overall feeling underwhelmed by it. That's often a 6/10 for me, and that was the case here. 

I considered including my whole review here, but that's a lot of reading, and I'm not actually sure yet whether I will post this review. I have a few days to decide whether I will rewrite it or just include an author's note, because having gotten the screener obliges me to post something about the movie. 

I don't need to include the whole thing, though, to give you a gist of the feeling I had while watching the movie. One line in the review summarizes the disconnect pretty well: 

"The focus of the script from moment to moment feels a bit arbitrary, the eventual resolutions to various plot threads as flat as they are sudden."

These are the words of a person who detected something about this narrative that was off, but could not put his finger on what it was.

There was one thing I wanted to fact check about my review -- namely, the correct way to describe the character played by Garret Dillahunt -- and so I went to read its plot synopsis on Wikipedia, as I am wont to do. Here are where the spoilers come in, but they're only about the structure of the film, not its content. I really only need to give you the portion on Wikipedia that is relevant to what I didn't get about the movie:

"The film's plot is presented as two sequences of events interweaving each other in a nonlinear narrative. The following is a linear summary of the plot." 

Um, what?

When I was watching this movie, I had no idea the events were being played out of sequence. 

In fact, what I thought were two different sets of characters -- a woman and a young boy -- were actually the same characters, only seen at different times in the story. 

I'm not just an idiot, believe me. And here I have to give you some more spoilers to explain myself.

At the very start of the movie -- as in, the film's very first shot -- a woman dies in bed. She's seen very much in close-up, so it's not possible to get a full sense of who she is, or even which actress is playing this woman. Because I surely would have recognized Vicky Krieps under ordinary circumstances, wouldn't I?

But I did not, and so when Krieps shows up again, maybe 15 minutes later, I figured that this was a new woman, not the wife of our main character (played by Mortensen himself) who died earlier. Again, remember, I have no idea these events are being told out of sequence. 

Then there's a child, who I believed to be Mortensen's child from his marriage to this woman who died. Various events occur in the plot (I don't need to get into them) and another child materializes later as the son of Krieps' character, first a young child and then growing older. It's the same child, but I did not know that. (And also explains why there are scenes where this child isn't present.)

What I don't understand is, was it Mortensen's intention to make it unclear that these events were being shown out of sequence, or was it just poor craft?

And that's really my greatest argument for printing my review as it is, maybe only with an author's note to contextualize it for people who might think I'm an idiot. If I, a person who has seen more than 6,500 movies of all sorts of experimental narrative chronologies, did not realize that was going on here, is that my problem, or the film's?

I didn't think I had any reason to go back and review earlier footage in the movie, and I didn't think that some superficial similarities of these characters -- one of whom I only saw on screen in close-up for one minute -- was sufficient reason to believe they were the same character. I think if you are going to do something like this, you sort of have to hit us over the head with it -- at least eventually. There has to be an "a-ha" moment.

The thing that does make me think I might just have been dumb, though, is that there are locations listed on the screen at times, and years. So if I went back and watched the movie again, I might find that the years actually state very matter-of-factly that events are being shown out of sequence. But that required me to remember that one year said 1861 and the other said 1863, or whatever, and specifically care about that in the moment. When the events occur "a long time ago," whether it was 1861 or 1863 often doesn't matter to us. 

So now the thing I am asking myself is: Do I need to watch this movie again before Thursday? The screener link won't have expired yet. Do I need to come at it with fresh eyes, knowing what I now know?

At this time of year, time is precious and there are a lot of movies I need to see. I usually only watch a select few current year movies a second time, and usually only if I love them. There's only one 2024 movie I've seen more than once, for example, and I can't say I have any plans to rewatch any others before the end of January.

So it'll likely come down to how my Monday and Tuesday night go, and whether I think I have the time for this -- or if the author's note will suffice.

It may actually come down to my impression of how stupid not having detected the non-linear narrative structure will make me seem. If I watch it again and it was clear as day, well, maybe I need to re-write the review. But if it strikes me as equally obscure, maybe I'm okay with what I already wrote. And then I have to consider that if I had never gone to Wikipedia, I would have just published my review, none the wiser. If that were the case, there would not even be the author's note. 

Either way, it's a second reckoning with The Dead Don't Hurt -- even if only just in my head as I weigh out these options, and a I write this post.