May 16th, 2022 - The Face in the Mirror

Dear TNY,

I don’t even know where to start with “The Face in the Mirror”. 

Like….Is this a racial spin on Kafka?  Is this a Jordan Peele rip off?  Is this Soul Man meets 28 Days? Is this an M. Night flick, but it’s missing the Shyamalan twist? Is this Saramago’s Blindness, but without any of the deeper, bleaker, human condition gravitas? Or, more importantly, does it even matter?

Yeah. That’s it. That’s my question to you:  Does the black/white shit in this story even matter?  I’d offer that this story appears to be about a man reconnecting (to a certain degree) with his dying father.  He could have ended up living with his father and reconnecting with him for a million reasons.  Hell, even topical ones, as you idiots like to do to sell magazines.  Like COVID.  Or that he lost his job on a film set of a recently cancelled Will Smith movie.  Afghanistan Purple Heart winner who’s gone home with PTSD. Fuck, they could have been Ukrainian! There are so many viable events that could put Ander’s in the father’s house.  But instead we have a hamfisted disease and some, what, weak social commentary? 

This story suffers from not knowing what the fuck it’s about.  I’d like to suggest an edit in which all the racial shit is cut and the main narrative brought forth is the father/son connection.  Because you know what’s colorblind?  Familiar relationships.  Now we could digress into things like socioeconomic position or the cultural differences between families of different races, but that’s nonsensical.  Families are relatable. And connection/disconnection is the heart of storytelling. We don’t need convoluted reasons to be in that house.

And if the reason to be in the house is more important than the relationship, I’d like to suggest you do another edit of the story that’s more racially focused, because right now if we are supposed to focus on the social commentary, the father/son story is distracting us and it’s making the racial shit look like scaffolding.  Not that I think that the more racially focused story is the better of the two.  Just, you know, pick one.  As it sits, this story is not making much commentary with its heavy-handed use of race, and that seems sloppy and, weirdly, like it’s underutilizing its platform in your shitass magazine, which has possessed mastery of tokenization recently.

Well boys and girls, I don’t actually care enough about this story to say much more.  It is what it is. 

Things in my world are winding down to another batshit summer adventure in which my anxiety will shoot through the roof and I will pray to the VW gods for sunny days and that the breakdowns will be easy to fix.  Only two weeks now, and then will things get weird.

So in the words of The Dude, or His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, “Fuckin’ A, man.  I’ve got a rash.”

Nick