The present is a messy place very concerned with simply getting on with itself. I believe we tend to miss quite a lot of plain and necessary beauty as people living in the present, and particularly this present. Advertisements vie for our attention in almost every space. Horrible realities await in every other headline. “Bleak” is often an applicable word to the general state of things.
The vast majority of us are just trying to stay human amid the chaos. One of the most enduring human practices besides being kind to one another is the act of storymaking. From dance, to art, to music and poetry, telling stories has been a way for people to understand one another since long before Gutenberg’s press brought books to the masses.
We are a species so aware of ourselves and our mortality that over time, we’ve distilled this essential pastime into very identifiable threads we’ve come to call genre and trope. Droves of us in the global West study Save The Cat and the hero’s journey, Carl Jung, Euripedes and his contemporaries, because people preserve patterns that make sense to them—we strive to teach the generations that come after us the things that spoke most deeply to a collective sense of expression.
We like familiarity: rhythms we can tap our feet to, plot devices that delight us with subversion, sets of characters who match so well that people have written sagas and operas and many, many, many appendices about them—etcetera.
The Ancients took the baton from the bronze and iron age. Classical antiquity applied their ideas to what the Ancients left in turn. Enlightenment principles drew deeply from Classical rhetoric. And the wheel turns onward.
One supposes there’s a certain thrill in looking back at the kinds of people humans used to be, or always have been. Like leafing through old photos, human history as a reminder is all at once an ecstasy, an agony, and some strange combination of neither-yet-both at once. Finding evidence of the present in things that have already happened can produce incredibly vivid parallels.
Shonni Enelow recently wrote an article for the Criterion collection about New Queer Cinema staple My Own Private Idaho putting a very specific twist on a lesser-trod corner of William Shakespeare’s popular canon. It’s far from a direct interpretation of source material, focused on references to offstage behavior and the background of its main event: the Henriad, by the specifically-American sweat-stained inside of its collar instead of its crown, set auspiciously in the Pacific Northwest at the genesis of grunge.
And I think Shakespeare would have loved this adaptation.
The era of Britannia’s revival beginning in the 1570s was a bolt from the blue of imperialistic fervor driven just as heavily by culture as it was by blood. Theater reigned in a return to the Greek tradition, and Shakespeare and his colleagues set to the work of expression. Like any playwrights worth the sweat, they were particularly concerned with making a living on commissions, finding clever ways to make their wealthy benefactors look fallible, and sometimes getting in very hot water over it (see: stabbed in an alley by a monarchist, RIP Kit).
As Enelow observes, “[familiar storylines] made certain challenging themes more palatable…ideas that felt rebellious, even dangerous, in the late twentieth century were already intrinsic to Shakespeare’s plays.” She highlights how much of this wave of lofting Shakespeare gladly and vividly into the 1990s concerned itself with the queerness written into the shadows of Elizabethan wordplay and casting decisions.
Adaptation is human nature. To understand and be understood is essential to one’s peace of mind. At best, any adaptation of someone else’s story should function like a good cover song: you know the words, you probably know the tune, but you’re still pleasantly surprised by the way someone else puts it all together.
When one looks for similar patterns of Very American Media putting its own spin on the old greats, there emerges an engine largely—and perhaps stereotypically—driven by television. The early 2000s kickstarted the era of peak or prestige TV, and there is no shortage of gold to be found in its offerings. The Sopranos is a factional drama to rival top shelf Athenian tragedy, and became a perfect time capsule of how the zeitgeist tipped into overwhelming anxiety in the wake of 9/11. The Wire, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad are patently Homeric polemics examining the cyclical madness of unequal systems, the generational anguish of crying AI AI to the gods and hearing no response. The West Wing and Succession and their ilk have been told again and again about every generation of the ruling class, making gods fallible with flaws so human we can find them easily in our own families.
These are rarely ever one-to-one retellings from the top down, but rather intertwining episodic arcs iterating on the concepts we as humans can’t help but dissect: who are we, really? What is our purpose? For what, if anything, are these common and hideous agonies worth suffering against over and over again?
My sophomore novel, THE UNBECOMING OF MARGARET WOLF, is itself a ship of iterations: set in an unsettlingly-prescient McCarthy era (serving hot hot catharsis at the queer midcentury litfic table this season), thick with its own irony, The Tragedie Of Macbeth presents itself with its brakes snipped on a stage already prepared for quite a different farce.
The dramatic trope I love most is the play within a play: a troupe brought on in the middle act to caper for the effigies of the elite, to make them human onstage for a watchful double-audience. What of the lives in that troupe’s own backstage, their waking hours as people instead of bit parts in someone else’s plot? Who are the civilians standing in the alley-margins of power, unwittingly transmuting its crackling potential?
I’m obsessed with the people in the background of major stories. Often I find myself digging into asides and secondary plotlines for characters in whom I see particularly interesting motivations. The narrative can only make the lives of so many characters truly multidimensional, so for the rest, the audience must infer—and that inference is my favorite junction of the creative process: the genesis of character.
There are two people in a room, and they want something from each other. What is it?
Go.
The aterial plot of MARGARET WOLF is a story that could persist in the backstage of a fairly garden-variety mob serial: deceit and hierarchy, duplicity and politicking, with a twist of southwestern charm to keep it sharp. It will be up to the reader to decide how deep that rabbit hole goes, and to what ends it serves the novel’s truth.
Every small and large fiction we peddle has history in its marrow, whether acknowledged or not. The artist should aim to be curious about who has already leveled the ground in which they want to begin building—consider the architecture of the cathedral below its surface ornaments, and suddenly something entirely new appears in the blueprints.
You look at what came before you, and you make a self-portrait with the pieces you like best.
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