Modelland by Tyra Banks
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
01/12/2016 Update:
“Every new Bella started menstruating at exactly the same time.”
Mic drop.
A couple days ago I was saying that this book has ape-ed Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and all kinds of other stuff, but I forgot Judy Blume. I should have known we’d get to Blume.
The chapter begins with Tookie having stomach pains, and then another Bella said, well, the line quoted above.
I should be fair to Tyra and say that it’s explained THREE times that this is not what normally happens, that cohabitation can cause a synch-up where everyone’s Aunt Flo visits on the same day, but it normally takes months. Or longer than 24 hours. Tyra is so good about explaining that this usually happens on a longer timeline that I’m like, “Okay, I get it. I get that you don’t think this is how it happens in real life! Geez!” I mean, THREE times in one chapter.
Also, I’m not happy with that Aunt Flo thing. How is that a euphemism for period? That’s like me taking a dump and saying “Oh, just gave birth to a baby named Duke. 7 lbs, 8 ounces. Healthy boy. VERY healthy boy.”
We’ve come a long way in this book. Young Tookie has gone from girl to woman in these pages. Or from girl without a period to girl with a period. Or woman without a period to woman with a period. I’m not really sure what the defining thing is between a girl and a woman, and I’m not totally convinced it’s period-based. If so, then what’s the defining thing that separates boys from men? I’d say it’s the first time you perceive that the world is a horrible and crushing place and it’s best just to stay inside, so for me somewhere around 2nd grade, I became a man. Boyz II Man. If women would like to use that same standard, I think that’d be cool, although I guess we’d have to start calling a lot of elementary school students men and women.
The period talk isn’t over, but I just want to put a short bit about the class we attend in Modelland during this chapter. This is kind of how the chapter is “structured” anyway, period, then class (period), then more period, so we’ll do the same thing here.
Let’s look at Tookie’s class schedule, copied here verbatim:
Uno: CaraCaraCara: Time Midnight-Blue, Sharp
Dos: Run-a-Way Intensive. Time: Kelly Green, Sharp
Tres: Mastication. Time: Goldenrod, Sharp
Alright. Am I expert enough a linguist to break this down? Can I channel my inner Tookie, who speaks EVERY language, and translate this from Fuckface to English?
Our first column is obviously Spanish. Got it. Why we need a time AND an order is a little confusing, and why the number is there in Spanish instead of as a numeral, especially if we’re dealing with girls who don’t all speak the same goddamn motherfucking language, I don’t know.
Excuse me. Especially if we’re dealing with WOMEN who don’t all speak the same goddamn motherfucking language. Apologies.
Next we have the class name. Instead of being a class that has a name that kind of says what the class it about, we have this crazy horseshit. Most classes are named by what you study. What do you study in this class? Chemistry? Okay, then let’s call it Chemistry, how ’bout?
Not in Modelland!
The Modelland version of that conversation: What’s this class about? Chemistry? Okay, hmm. Let’s call it…something about chemicals. Beakers. Pipettes. Fashion…
Camisoleistry. Done and done.
Finally, the time portion. Time is told by color in Modelland. Again, replacing the universality of numbers with something that no one understands. Good. Perfect. That makes all the sense in the world.
This is what I fucking hate about Modelland. This is the thing right now, anyway. There are lots of things, and they rotate through my brain like a carousel of hate. A Lazy Susan where all the spices are stupid Tarragon. A Hate-sy Susan of Hate Spice, if you will.
A good sci-fi-ish or fantasy thing to do is to take something in real life, twist it a little, and thereby make the world a stranger, more interesting place.
But the trick is, you have to actually IMPROVE something. Not make it shittier and weirder for the sake of making it weird, also with no explanation of how any of it works.
Let’s look at some weird clocks that do a better job than Modelland:
Crazy wires and tubes and shit. Still numbers.
Obnoxious, makes you do math, I’ll be mad if I ever see this in your home, but still uses numbers.
I guess if you want to really feel time pressing down on you, ruining every fiber of your being, this is one way to go. My god, talk about a way of saying “Get back to work” with all the subtlety of the Hulk lifting a clock factory and smashing it over your face.
This is a RIDE. A fucking ride, and it’s still a better representation of the way time works that TIME in Modelland. It’s not a GOOD clock, nor is it a GOOD ride. I mean, I can remember being on something like this and hoping I only had to go around one time because by the time I hit the apex, I was bored as shit. But still, better clock than Modelland.
This one is racist as fuck, and it’s still a better method to tell time. Awful racist clockmakers were better at time than the whole of Modelland.
This one has what I can only assume is a Goombah swinging from Mario’s wiener. I know, it doesn’t look exactly like that, but graphics weren’t as good back in the day, you guys. You really had to fill in a lot with your imagination. A shitty turtle was a deadly beast, and a straight black line was a juicy wang. And even though this clearly pornographic clock is inappropriate in a lot of ways, one could still use it to tell time.
Okay, we do actually make it to class in this chapter, despite the schedule complications, and it turns out that CaraCaraCara goes like this: an instructor who sounds like Speedy Gonzalez tells the girls to make opposite faces of their emotions. The girls are shown various images, such as a rabbit with no ears and then a “photo of a dead cat giving birth to an octopus on an abandoned road.”
Judy Blume, David Lynch, all in one chapter.
Oh, and this whole class takes place in a giant ship that’s constructed out of a whale carcass.
I’m blowing through this because at the end of class, a statue constructed of an element that “doesn’t exist in the periodic table”* comes to life and tells the girls that from now on they will never have periods for the rest of their lives. They can still procreate, but gone are the cramps and whatever other crap goes along with a period.
*just a note, if a new element is discovered, it’s just added to the table, as happened earlier this year. That’s how science works.
Let me just recap something here.
At the beginning of this chapter, Tookie got her first period. A potentially interesting event in a young girl’s life, I’d imagine, especially if she were to be away from home in a strange place. This is potentially a powerful, grounding element for this story that could mix the humanity of the situation with the kooky Modelland whatever-ness.
And as a quick aside, it did not go unnoticed by this reader that Tookie got her first period, didn’t do anything about it, and then just went about her day. Maybe it was bloodless? I don’t know.
And yes, I’m AWARE that she could cramp BEFORE there was any bleeding. But, god help me, I wanted to know what kind of tampons they have in Modelland. I’m that deep in the rabbit hole. If you present me with something like this, goddamn it, I want to know. I want to know what crazy ass name they’d have. Crampons? Clampax? I want to know what sort of weird packaging they would come in. Our main characters just saw a roadkilled cat corpse give birth to a live octopus, so I ask you, WHO IS THE WEIRDO HERE?
But we didn’t address periods beyond their existence, really, and it didn’t matter one bit because no sooner does Tookie get a period than a magic statue makes it so none of the girls ever have to have periods again for the rest of their lives.
Okay, that’s even another route. You could go the route of saying that Modelland is stripping away these human things about the models.
But then again, you really can’t because Tookie has her period for all of an hour before it’s gone forever. How much is she going to miss it?
So it seems that we’ve got another situation in Modelland where the way something was executed was the LEAST powerful or interesting way. Almost purposefully so. Tyra wants the credit of bringing up periods and womanhood, but can’t be bothered to write about it for more than a chapter, so fuck it, we’ll just wipe the slate clean once again.
Gah!
As a quick P.S., I got a Kindle for Christmas, and so now I can A) read this book in public and not be embarrassed. I’m not a believer in book-shaming, but I DO think I should be book-shamed for reading Modelland, so there you go. B), I can tell exactly how far into the book I am, right at 41%. Almost half way. I don’t really know what bullets could possibly be left in the chamber with this book, but it’s still surprising me, so I guess we’ll see.