Modelland by Tyra Banks
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
01/26/2016 Update the Second:
Yes, friends, I worked the weekend, and that means there’s time for double updates. Celebrate this glorious day. Really wring the juices here.
When last we met, earlier today, Tookie was being wheeled into surgery for a scratch on her lip. And in this chapter, she wakes up in an all glass building that is -gasp- the Giant M building of Modelland! The one that candidates are forbidden from entering.
Of course, Tookie’s first thought is I’m not supposed to be here. I’d better escape.
Let’s ignore the fact that I was wheeled in here while I was unconscious and a bunch of people almost certainly saw me. Let’s ignore the fact that I had nothing to do with my entry to this building. Let’s ignore that and instead, engage in an escape scene straight out of fucking Metal Gear Solid.
See, the M building is all glass, and the different glass panes fog and defog from time to time. So you can make your way around by sneaking juuuuuuust right. And if you get far enough, you might make it to the same sign Tookie found, the one that says “Emergency Exit to the M,” even though the sign means to say “FROM” the M. Not to mention that I’ve never seen an exit sign that specifies the building it’s for. “You are currently in McDonald’s. To exit McDonald’s, use this McDonald’s exit door. And hey, fuck BK. Seriously, have a great night.”
Also, if you make your escape just right, you can overhear Ci~L talking to the Belladonna, revealing what the fuck is going on!
I’m going to make this brief.
We don’t actually know what Ci~L did to get punished so much, and we still don’t after this scene because the Belladonna and Ci~L manage to talk with some serious verbal gymnastics that completely avoid specificity. But we do learn that Ci~L knows a secret about the Belladonna. What secret? It turns out, T-DOD, The Day of Discovery, is a sham! All those girls dancing around in the streets, it turns out models aren’t selected on that day, but a pre-determined list is created, and pre-selected models are simply picked up out of the dancing crowds.
Now, this is supposed to be world shattering. My god. It’s like finding out the Super Bowl is rigged or something. Or a NASCAR thing. Whatever their big thing is for NASCAR, imagine if that thing had a predestined outcome!
Honestly, I didn’t know that this wasn’t the case. Tyra made a big point about T-DoD, but I didn’t know that WE, as narrators or readers, were supposed to assume that selection was all T-Dod based. That a girl’s performance that day is the single thing that decides whether she’s worthy for Modelland.
In fact, Tookie found the SMIZE, which was supposed to guarantee her passage to Modelland. Wasn’t that the whole point? So the SMIZE people are predetermined, but the rest are doing a 3-minute dance off or something? And people would be really upset if they found out that entrance to Modelland was actually slightly more rigorous?
I’m becoming less and less sure that Tyra is remembering what she wrote previously in her own book. Each new section makes that less and less clear to me.
But wait, now we get the real bombshell. Ci~L knows that the Belladonna violated one of the three Belladonna tenets: Do not mess with the predetermined Modelland selection list.
Who did the Belladonna put on that list?
Tookie de la Creme.
Boom.
Soooooo the big revelation here is the one that we’ve suspected as readers from the very beginning, and the one Tookie has suspected herself. It’s less a reveal than it is a fulfillment of the boringest prophecy ever, but what the hell. Let’s roll with it. And I guess the fact that it was the Belladonna, not Ci~L who did it is different.
Ci~L also says she’s “experimenting” on the Unicas, the other uggos with Tookie, and she’s doing things to their bodies.
That’s all we get before Tookie makes her escape out the door marked “In order to exit the M, the building in which you currently stand, the door below this sign would be an acceptable route. Thank you for visiting the M. If you’re escaping and not really visiting, shame on you, but, well, you read all the stuff before THIS already, so there’s no going back now.”
Quick smash cut to the Diabolical Divide, where Myrracle and Creamy are making their way to Modelland by land. Their traveling mates have been attacked by some kind of weird creatures, and as they sleep, some kind of plant tries to kill them slowly. But Myrracle and Creamy are doing quite alright due to Creamy’s uncharacteristic preparation and knowledge. It seems she’s the Bear Grylls of the DD, knowing what to do with each kind of danger. I’m guessing we’ll find out some bullshit about how Creamy’s made the trip before, but it’s hard to say. It might not even matter.
Also worth mentioning, one of the travelers is a hunchback they’ve affectionately named “Hunchy.” Hunchy is from a race of people who eat the organs of the albinos, and he’s apparently headed to Modelland to eat the organs of Tookie’s albino friend. I don’t know why he has such a hard-on for her organs specifically, but there you go.
Back to Modelland where Tookie runs back to tell her friends what happens.
On her way, she wrestles with the fact that she took another girl’s spot in Modelland, maybe stealing the slot from, “…a girl who is worse off than even I was.”
Fuck me, we get it. Tookie is the most selfless person of all time. We get it, 10-4, okay.
Oh, except she runs into Bravo, and for some reason she has NO problem brushing him off and being, frankly, kind of a dick. Bravo, the ripped architect who is almost infatuated with Tookie, who’s also really nice to her, who finally told Zarpessa to fuck off, who Tookie is also very attracted to, but she keeps blowing him off because…well, if she didn’t, then they would just be romantically involved and that would wrap up that whole portion of the tale. So instead, she has to literally shove Bravo out of the way when he’s about to kiss her, and Tookie runs away to tell her gal pals about what she just learned.
Am I the only one who hopes that Bravo gives up on Tookie? That he’s like, “Whatever. I liked Tookie, but how many times can she physically shove me out of the way to go do something else before I move on?”
Tookie arrives at the D (after slapping away the best D in all of Modelland) and tells the other Unicas what’s going on, that Ci~L has been acting, to borrow a phrase from Dylan, cuh-ray-zee, and that they’re poised to be the subjects of experimentation.
Okay, okay. Let me recap this for a second.
Ci~L fucked up somehow, she’s been tortured horribly, she’s been forced to return to first-year classes. The Belladonna replaced a legit candidate with Tookie, and Ci~L knows this. Therefore, Ci~L is blackmailing the Belladonna, who is allowing Ci~L to experiment on the Unicas. “Experiment” being a very ill-defined term so far.
This leaves a lot of questions. I’ll give it up, I’m fucking confused. If Ci~L is holding the cards, why the torture? Why the return to classes? If Ci~L learned this information by working in the admissions department, wouldn’t EVERYONE in that department know this information? What’s going on here? How does any of this make any kind of sense? What sort of backwards-ass plot is developing here?
Smart money is on a Snape situation here. I’m thinking Ci~L is secretly a good guy somehow. But I guess the story could be that the Belladonna is secretly good, although she’s the Belladonna, so why the secrecy?
None of this is important. What’s important is that the Unicas decide the only thing to do is escape Modelland.
And thus we get the stupidest ever formation of an escape plan ever created in fiction.
The decision is made to escape, and by the way, includes the best joke in the book so far:
Tookie: We have to escape.
Dylan: I’ll do anything not to get tortured. Even if it means goin’ back to work in customer service.
Okay, when planning an escape, there’s certainly no one way to do it. You could say, “Alright, I want to be over there. Let’s work our way backwards.” Or you could say, “I know my immediate surroundings best. Let’s plan it from where I stand now to where I want to be.” Or you could even think about it in a different order, like hardest part first.”
Or, you could be a Unica, and decide that the first thing to do is assign roles.
Yes, assign roles before you know what you’re going to do, where you’re going, and what might be required.
This is like the best part of an action movie. Getting the team together. We’re all familiar with this trope from the Ocean’s movies, but it’s probably done best, or at least MOST, in Armageddon, a film where we had a dozen different people to pull together, all of whom run away from the authorities immediately, even once on horseback.
I’m not afraid to call this a FILM.
How does the Modelland version look:
Piper: The researcher and tech expert. She’s good with that stuff, so it’s important to have a researcher and tech expert to…I don’t know, sit in the library with a giant book called “How to Escape Stuff.”
Can we take a second? I think that it’s stupid horror movies that have created this expectation, where a student comes to the library and is like, “I need a book about the religion in Germany before World War II,” and then when you pull down a couple books and explain that they might have to synthesize the info from multiple sources, they seem disappointed that you didn’t have a book that shares the exact title of their paper. It’s always the horror movies, they go to the library and they’re like, “I need information on the hauntings at this address.” And then some dusty old broad pulls down two HUGE volumes of newspaper clippings and is all, “This is all we have.” Or we get a dictionary of the occult, open to a page and it’s like “Peak, Crimson. Definition: A scary house with haunts. You can defeat these haunts with the following methods.”
Stupid youths.
Right, back to the team.
Dylan: Bigmouth distraction. I guess she’ll just yell, or maybe gossip loudly in order to make this happen?
Shiraz: Speedy lookout. We don’t know what she’ll be looking out for where, but she’s the fastest, so it only makes sense. I guess she must also be the wuss. Everyone knows the wuss offers to be a lookout because they think they won’t get in trouble. Newsflash, wusses, you can’t be a lookout for a bank robber and get out of trouble. You’re still fucked. This is a childhood lesson we should really be incorporating into classrooms. Core Knowledge my ass.
And finally, Tookie: Well, nobody can think of what Tookie is good at. She doesn’t seem to have any real skills. So they make her leader.
Sounds like A LOT of work teams I know.
And with that, the girls think for weeks and come up with two plans:
Brilliant Plan 1. There is a Zip Zap, those teleport things, that is near the new stadium being built by the boys of Bestosterone. ZhenZhen, one of the upper levels, said not to use it because it’s a 50-50 chance you’ll get where you want to go, and you might end up in the Diabolical Divide, which is just on the other side of the wall.
Brilliant Plan 2. Just go over the fucking wall.
2 isn’t a horrible plan, but it took a few weeks to come up with that. Come on, ladies.
Okay, now an astute observer will note that the Diabolical Divide is to be avoided, and Plan 1 gives us a 50-50 chance of doing just that. Plan 2 provides absolutely no chance that we’ll avoid the DD.
And therefore, the Unicas pick Plan 2. Yep. They’re stupid.
Imagine if you will, you are presented with two plates of food. You MUST eat one of these plates of food. Plate A has a 50-50 chance of containing spoiled meat, which would make you sick. Plate B 100%, for sure has spoiled meat on it, and it will absolutely make you sick.
You can pick between these plates, and you pick Plate B because, hey, at least you KNOW you’re going to get sick.
Idiots.
The girls are formulating a plan, which seems to consist of going to the wall and climbing it, when a girl, totally separate from the Unicas, scales the wall herself one night in an attempt to make a daring escape.
The girl scales the wall and makes it to the other side. Lightning strikes the wall, making it see-thru, and the girls watch in horror as the escapee is instantly aged 50 years. Lightning strikes the wall a second time, rendering the wall into a two-way mirror so that the escapee can marvel at the horror of her face while the girls inside Modelland can see her, and then a rollercoaster car appears to take her back home so that her boyfriend can see she’s become a hideous old shrew. Oh, and then a third lightning bolt hits the wall and turns it back to a regular-ass wall.
The consequence of scaling the wall is being aged 50 years, so that’s out. Even though these are supposedly unattractive girls who fear they’ll be killed anyway.
More exciting to me was the way that Tyra managed to show what was happening on the other side of a wall. She really puzzled that one out.
“Okay, I’ve got this girl on the other side of the wall. I need the girls to SEE what happens. Hmm. Mirror. Window. Some kind of magic looking device. No, no. That’s all too far0fetched. Okay, I got it. Crazy lightning will strike the wall, rendering it transparent, a thing that does not happen ever anywhere. THEN, I need the girl to see she’s aged. Hm. I got it. SECOND lightning strike, and that turns the wall into a two-way mirror. An EVEN MORE unlikely thing, which makes the first strike seem almost sane. And then, fuck it, just to tie up loose ends, I’ll make sure there’s a third strike that turns the wall back to normal. I don’t want to have to keep remembering that there’s a see-thru part of the wall.”
The whole thing ends with the Unicas deciding that, No, they can’t escape by climbing the wall, and Tyra writes Ci~L a letter in her T-Mail Jail, basically saying she’s confused because it seems like Ci~L cares about the girls, but she knows they’re just experiments to her.
T-Mail Jail, if it had been used consistently, could have been a way to do like the end of a Scrubs episode, where the narration kinda says a little too much, but you know, most of us weren’t paying close attention that whole time. That’s kind of what TMJ does here, but goddamn is it clumsy.
Is Ci~L really a baddie? Is the Belladonna on the Unicas’ side? What will lightning turn transparent next? Stay tuned.