March 27th, 2023 - Minority Report
Dear TNY,
What a strange story in “Minority Report” on this fine, Hawaiian morning.
The conflict in Debby is phenomenal. This kind of inner, honest dichotomy is what I have been talking about for years. That conflict is the essence of being human. The person turning against itself. And here, with this story, we have one looooooooong exploration of a woman who is battling this conflict over the majority of her life. Consciously and subconsciously.
Writing about sex or any kind of sexual activity, to do it well, is a very hard thing to do. It’s such a small landing zone between overt gonzo porn, earnestness, clinical descriptions, purple prose, sexually shaming the reader, etc. It’s got to hit just right. And this does, to me. It’s got great timing with its bluntness. And it avoids the obvious. And it also includes the right, non-sexual details. So many of the scenes in this story involving sexual material looked like the end of the movie One Hour Photo. You know, the one where Robin Williams’ character (brilliant fucking performance by the way, one of his best, RIP big fella, I would have loved to talk with you for maybe just 30 minutes, I think your wet computer was one of the finest mankind has ever and will ever produce, the amount of information you were able to obtain, store, and access, and the goddamn speed with which you accessed it…you could have done anything with your life, a true genius, but the fact that you dedicated your life to making people laugh??? you truly were the best of us, somebody we should have put on ol’ Sagan’s gold records, currently on the Voyager missions, as an example of what greatness can live within humanity, that it’s not all war and pain, it’s also a clown that can make you feel like your dad is paying attention to you, like he’s making you laugh just to see your smile, because you fell down and skinned your knee and you don’t understand that it’s going to get better, but he does, and he loves you enough to help you get to the place where you do too) takes photographs of random objects in the room while he makes the couple fuck. Because it’s the odd details. The details of his trauma that he was trying to recreate.
God did I love that aspect of the story. There was a paragraph where the author smashes all these crisp descriptions of her dreams together, one right after the other, and it’s wave after wave of erotic, shameful, sexy, sterile, infuriating imagery that doesn’t give you a chance to come up for air.
I think that the reason this piece is strong is the pinky. That even after all of that, she knew she put her pinky over his finger. That she did not and does not want to be treated like that, but also that she did want to be treated in some way, a way that, even to her, was uncomfortable. That the lawyer was definitely the villain (also, such good choices by the author to not just go straight for the jerk-off scene, but instead start in such a bizarre way, my favorite being when she bent over the desk and said “I am stupid” over and over again (also, if you haven’t watched the prostitutes whip each other in the show 1923, you are missing out on something you cannot look away from while also desperately wanting to be anywhere else)), but he was not the star. He was the catalyst that created the complexity of this MC. A chain reaction that was absolutely not resolved. That at the end, even in the office, she knows she was both. Schrödinger’s cat. This is the reason why Walter White is compelling. Hell, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles titular character (a leper) rapes a woman in the first couple chapters of book one. And he’s the protagonist. It’s the conflict in these characters that makes them complex. And as the voyeur, you are compelled by them and their messiness. And that messiness and complexity in them makes them more real, more relatable.
Yeah yeah, all you phonies out there that think you are devoid of the evil within…you aren’t. You know what you really think. You know what you’ve done. I imagine if I went to a hundred different strangers’ parked cars and left a note under their windshield, handwritten, that said, “You know what you did,” at least one third of those people would apologize to someone. The others would think about it, but not do it. Except ten. Those ten are narcissists and would be unable to think of anything they had done wrong. Because we are all messy little creatures. And this story captures that. God, the fact that she masturbates to it, that’s messy, but then that her fucking therapist asks her to masturbate to it in front of her! Fuck yes! Everyone is a fucking shitshow!
I digress. I know the work of this author. I like her work. It’s dangerous. She wrote one years ago about a guy who is worried about his son becoming a killer, and then as we dial back into the guy’s life we see that he almost became a killer himself, but when he tried to kill a woman who picked him up (hitchhiking), she leaned into it, her wig shifting slightly, likely a cancer victim with nothing to look forward to, and goddamn can I recall that scene plain as day, in the front seat of that car, him holding that gun and her scaring the shit out of him, and scaring the want to hurt anyone out of him too. What I’m trying to say is that I appreciate that we aren’t shopping for couches here. We aren’t pissing about with some writer in NYC with no real life problems, just making ones up for something to do. Nope. In this, we have a real character who is and is decidedly not a victim by the end of the story. We don’t know what to think.
Also, I have a very badly peeling sunburn. I swam with turtles. I can freedive. I am a machine. And I’m proud of myself. I installed a new radio in my Japanese spec Honda Street Raccoon (which has a sticker on the front that, no joke, says “JAP Express”; I am not responsible for this sticker and its racism, it was put on by the company that owned the van before me, in Japan, named, here we go: JAP Express).
That’s all for today. Thanks for publishing Gaitskill. It’s almost always a pleasure to read her, and this one was nice to dig into. Even at, gulp, over 11k words.
Nick
