On Writing

This one's kind of about Kinds of Kindness.

One of my favorite quotes (originally from Polish poet Czesław Miłosz but I heard it from John Mulaney) is “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” I’m not sure how it happened, considering my entire family is made up of those in the science and math fields, but something went wrong and I decided to want to write words in various orders for the rest of my life.

I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s not that much money in it, you’re constantly reading other things that put your own words to shame and creativity seems to constantly be in dire straits.

There’s the big stuff, from media companies merging and slowly choking out any semblance of new, interesting work to stockholders focusing on the bottom line which then forces once-creative places to focus on guaranteed success in sequels or more bland, generic “pieces of content.” But there are also more personal ways that this anti-art agenda grows and grows. For example, New York Public Libraries are wanting for money in order to stay open, once-creative websites have been shuttered limiting resources for young, aspiring writers and a general sense of malaise over fresh movies, books and shows has made it so that everything feels kind of the same.

A lot of new movies and shows feel like they were built in the boardroom and then handed over to creatives. If you look at something like Pixar, for example, the new plans seem to be centered on updates to old material and revisiting worlds we’ve already been to. Inside Out 2 is fine but it feels like a cash-grab in a sense. It’s certainly not as fresh as Finding Nemo or Ratatouille or Coco. Instead, it’s here’s the world you know with some new characters, please like us. In development, we’ve got Toy Story 5 and an Inside Out Disney+ series. Awesome.

On a very intimate note, I’ve been trying to be more creative over the last year or so, resulting in diminishing returns. I write for my job, which I enjoy, but the work I do mainly consists of aggregating stories, writing up quick recaps and reporting that sometimes has me feeling a bit restrained.

I love the idea of art for art’s sake and being creative and weird and out there and fucked up and kinda messy, which is why I like doing this newsletter even though sometimes it feels like a self-prescribed chore. Sometimes you just need to write a bunch of words and get things out of your system.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been trying (and failing) to write a screenplay. Not to get it made, although I’m certainly not against that, but just because I usually feel like I need an outlet to write wonky stuff that I can’t at my 9-5. It’s tough to motivate myself to write something that ultimately/probably won’t go anywhere, which is most definitely the wrong way to think about art, but that’s kind of been ingrained into me. That everything we do needs to be “successful” or lead to something else.

This is a long prelude to saying that I fucking loved Kinds of Kindness, a three-story movie from Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and a band of idiots that I love dearly.

The remarkably dark comedy is the latest in the Lanthimos-Stone catalog and feels like a gang of misfits throwing ideas against the wall that they personally find funny and interesting. If the audience likes it, so be it.

It’s ostensibly about control and what we do for the people we love, but it’s also chockful of tangents and side-stories that range from SNL sketches to NatGeo programming to Three Stooges-era physical comedy. Antara Sinha, after seeing the movie, said that it’s a nice “reminder that when you’re a good enough writer you’re allowed to break all the rules,” which is exactly right. It’s also a nice reminder that none of this matters. If you’re not a big-time writer, you can still break the rules. We all can. You can kind of do whatever you want, and if it’s authentic, it’ll reach the right audience.

I watch movies precisely for something like Kinds of Kindness, which probably shouldn’t work and in fact works more than any other movie this year … at least in my opinion. As some of the most disgusting and ridiculous things were happening on screen, I found myself smiling at the audacity of it all. And the fact that the girl from Superbad and the guy from Friday Night Lights are at the center of it all, giving some of the best performances they ever have, makes the entire thing even more enchanting.

Random Sidenote: There’s something about Emma Stone’s career that feels so exciting. I mean, yes, there are the two Best Actress wins and a host of successful movies from her dalliance with Ryan Gosling to her more straightforward comedies. But there’s something refreshing about someone at the mountaintop deciding to try and produce and star in new things. Instead of falling into age-old Oscarbait, Stone is going the other way giving new(ish) artists bigger and bigger chances from Julio Torres with Problemista to Jane Schoenbrun with I Saw the TV Glow to Nathan Fielder with The Curse. Instead of taking the easy way out, Stone seems to be jumping around willy-nilly, picking projects she’s interested in as opposed to movies that are guaranteed to make money.

As a “writer,” a movie like Kinds of Kindness gives me hope that not everything is as flat as it sometimes feels. Like sure, retreads will get their day in the sun, but they won’t last like a movie that resonates with its fans or an essay that gets shared over and over into oblivion will.

24 hours after watching Kinds of Kindness, I watched an IMAX re-release of Midsommar, certainly a normal thing to do. Like the newest Lanthimos movie, Ari Aster’s break-up movie is horrific, remarkably funny and feels therapeutic. It’s messed up, yes, but it’s also a hyperbolization of feelings that we all have about life or about relationships. It’s also startlingly comical and doesn’t just stick in one mode or genre.

Exciting works don’t have to be gory and terrifying though. Every year there’s a movie or three that makes me excited about art and motivates me to want to do more from blockbusters like Oppenheimer to more arthouse works like The Worst Person in the World or Petite Maman.

I find myself constantly running into these walls that I’ve created when it doesn’t have to be that way. Yorgos Lanthimos understands that and just bulldozes through the nonsense. It’s really annoying that to be a writer you have to write, but this is the path I picked for myself. Well, I didn’t choose it, but I also don’t think I’d choose anything else.