First things first. My titles for these got all fucked up. Moving forward, we’ll have the chapter number being reviewed in the name.
Done and done. And now that we’re done with business, we can move forward with all the parts that don’t make any sense whatsoever.
Chapter 3 of Modelland.
This is where the book takes a total trip to teen book town, big time, for real. Every element in this chapter is straight out of a book with a title like “Teen Scene: Write It So They’ll Read It” or “GRL, U NEED 2 WRITE CAN HAZ BOOKS” or something. Basically, it’s every element used to beef up a teen novel, and they’re all jammed into the same chapter.
This isn’t me bashing on teen lit right now. There’s great teen lit, and even great teen lit that uses the tropes I’m about to scream about. But let’s play fair. If teen lit is a legitimate and deserving genre, which it is, then we have to acknowledge that there’s some garbage in there too and that it’s not above criticism.
What makes it so awful in Modelland, what makes these teen-itizing attempts so horrible, is that they seem like such naked grabs at story that isn’t there. We’ve got three big ones in this chapter alone, so let’s take a look.
First, we have Tookie, our main stah, lamenting how there’s no way in hell she’ll be picked to go to Modelland. The place, not the title. She’s already in the BOOK called Modelland, now she wants to go to the place WITHIN the book that also has the same name. You know, like how most books are named after the place where the people go, like how the book Battle Royale was originally called Asian Kid Death Island, and how The Shining was called The Hauntedest Room In The Whole Stanley Hotel.
Modelland’s premise is a Willy Wonka kind of thing. Some people are selected somehow, and those selected people are whisked away to Modelland. And Tookie is moping around, always saying things like, “Sigh. I know I’ll never get picked for Modelland. Might as well not even try.”
Now, I’m reading a book called Modelland in which a young woman is talking an awful lot about Modelland. If Tookie didn’t actually end up being selected to go to Modelland, I’d be pretty shocked and disappointed. It’s obvious she’s going, right? Is there any way the plot in this could twist to the point that Tookie doesn’t go to Modelland?
And this is trope the first. We have some sort of role to fill, and we have a character that doubts his or her place, his or her ability to step into a big pair of shoes. Take Hunger Games (original title: Vaguely Medieval Kid Death Park). Will Katniss go or won’t she? The first book has a very brief misdirect that makes it seem like Katniss won’t be headed to stab teens in the eye with arrows, but then, of course, she goes. It’s a used idea, and it’s there, but Hunger Games keeps it pretty brief. We don’t spend a lot of time wondering will she / won’t she, and that’s probably because the author figured the story really happens when we get to the HUNGER GAMES, so let’s get the characters to the HUNGER GAMES already.
We get some of the same medicine in Harry Potter (original title: Platform 9 ¾, Followed By A Train Ride, Ending at Castle School). Oh man, will Harry be able to get back to Hogwart’s, even though those bastard Dursley’s are always fucking with him?
By the way, one of the worst things about that series. Jesus Christ, why in the holy hell would they send Harry back there? That’s madness. Second question, why would he go? Couldn’t he just work at Target, or Wizard Target or whatever? Don’t wizards need hand towels? Harry could sell hand towels over the break, live in…I don’t know, one of the a billion rooms in Hogwart’s. There are secret ghost rooms and shit all over that school. There was a troll in a bathroom and nobody noticed. The least they could do is clear out a closet under a staircase. I don’t think that’s asking a lot for the kid who basically saves the Magicaverse or whatever.
Maze Runner. Again, same thing. “Gee, I hope I become a maze runner instead of, whatever, a farmer or some shit. I hope in this book called MAZE RUNNER I get the chance to be a MAZE RUNNER.”
So that’s trope the first. That aspirational bit. The problem in Modelland is the constant “Golly, there’s no way a loser like me is going to Modelland” when we, as readers, know there’s no goddamn way we’re NOT going to Modelland. We all know we’re going there, so let’s just go there already.
Oh, and the timeline is a real bastard too.
In Modelland, the characters arrive in Modelland on page 149. One hundred and fifty pages to get through before we open the doors to Modelland. What the fuck? I have to wait that goddamn long to get to the place I’m told about IN THE TITLE? Holy shit.
150 pages, even these pages that aren’t dense, that’s going to take a while. Let’s call it a minute for every 2 pages, let’s be generous, it’s still going to take me 75 minutes to get to Modelland. Do you know how long the ENTIRE Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie lasts? 100 minutes. In the time it’s going to take me to get TO Modelland, I could have seen a fatso drown in chocolate, watched the scariest goddamn boat ride ever, pondered the plight of little people actors, remembered that Mike TV seemed like an okay kid whose mom just never pushed back when he pushed the boundaries, and be pretty much ready to wrap it all up.
This is taking forever.
But to be fair, there’s some world-building to be done here. Let’s move on to trope 2.
Trope 2 is a society that is divided very sharply into different sectors, sometimes geographically, sometimes by job or position. But there’s always a division, and it’s always super-important where you land within that division. You know, which wizard house you’re in, whether you’re a pretty or an ugly, ninja turtle or battletoad.
The world of Modelland is divided into quadrants. We don’t know a lot about the quadrants, but what we do know is Tookie is in the shitty one. It’s hot as hell, windy as hell, if hell is windy, and mostly made up of factories that make jewelry and crap.
What bugs me about this shit, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything in particular preventing Tookie from leaving Shitsville and moving right over to Awesomeburg. Some teen books handle this stuff through technology that prevents movement, or they toss in other magic or genetic ways that lock people in. In Modelland, Tookie was just unfortunate enough to be born on the wrong side of the tracks, and apparently doesn’t have the…will? The will to jump over to the other side?
It’s another trope that kind of sucks. If you have these different castes or whatever, you gotta explain to me why people can’t move between them. Gattaca was a movie based entirely on explaining the ways in which someone could move between stupid lines drawn by a stupid society. Ethan Hawke had a fridge full of piss! That’s a barrier, right there. Tookie’s main barrier? I don’t know. She’s too busy…I have no idea.
I know, I know. It’s not that easy in real life. I’d like to move myself and haven’t managed it. But I know a big part of my problem. I’m comfy. I think there’s potential to be happier, but I’m happy enough. I’m sure as hell not living in a land of intense, crazy heat, working in a toe ring factory and living with my shithead parents. Meanwhile, Awesomeburg is about 5 miles away. It’s a long walk, but holy shit, get a backpack.
Not to get all lit professor here, but I think this whole thing speaks to a desire most teens have to get out of their one-horse town and see the world. It’s weird when you’re a teen because you probably have access to a car. You could just drive off and leave wherever and go wherever. But there’s this other stuff that keeps you where you are, at least for a little while. It’s not so much physical or tangible, but there’s life stuff that lets teens ride it out, part of which is the knowledge that high school will end and then they can pick a path.
With Tookie, we’ve got a loser who is headed for a life of loserdom, and there’s no getting out of it. Except simply getting out of it. AND we all know that she’s destined to get out of it, as seen in trope one. Which means that seeing how crappy her town is doesn’t mean a whole lot, and we’re just dicking around like a bunch of fools, waiting to be swept away to stupid Modelland. We’re really just killing time here pondering whether a quest will happen when we know it’s ABSOLUTELY going to happen, hoping to get out of a town when we know that is ABSOLUTELY going to happen as well.
Which brings us to trope number three, real world problems.
A lot of teen lit deals with real world shit, and like any medium it has varying levels of success. Some are successful in realistically portraying something, others are more heightened and use real world shit to bring some drama to a relationship or situation. And then some just seem to throw it in there because why the hell not?
Right in that last category, why the hell not, let’s introduce Tookie’s friend, the Cutter.
The Cutter is a crazy girl who is Tookie’s only friend. She’s homeless, sort of. She lives in a treehouse that’s described as being filled with jugs of water and pastries and also has a twin mattress in it. The narrator points out that she doesn’t know how a mattress got up there, and points out that there’s no explaining how a young girl carried a twin mattress into a treehouse. I wasn’t exactly dying for an explanation on that one. It would have been fine to go ahead and not highlight a mattress brought high up into a tree, especially in a world where we’ve already seen an insane, Rube-Goldberg-ian action sequence to alter the spelling on a button and we’ve got characters with names like Theopholous Lovelaces. A mattress in a tree house, something accomplishable with a little know-how, isn’t the first thing in this book that made me say, “Now hold on. I’m up for believing a lot, but this is a bridge too far.” Yet, someone decided we needed to highlight the inexplicable nature of a mattress in a tree. Go figure.
Anyway, Tookie’s friend is in and out of some kind of insane asylum, and she’s also a cutter. Tookie sees the girl pick up a sharp rock(?) to cut herself with, and the chapter ends with Cutter skittering away, bending down to pick up another sharp rock.
This cutting business is taken seriously. Inasmuch as it’s not a joke in the book. But, hoo boy, does it feel tossed in for no particular reason.
I’m kinda on board with a madcap romp through insanity with Tyra at the wheel. I’m kinda on board with the overdramatic nature of some teen lit. What I’m not so on board with is the combination of the two. The introduction of a cutter into this story feels pretty unearned. It’s the perfect example of what’s wrong with this book. This book doesn’t know itself. It’s filled with these moments, these moments when Tyra writes herself right out of the few things that make the book enjoyable.
It’s like this. I just watched Demolition Man. It’s awesome. It’s fun. It’s stupid, and it knows that it’s pretty goddamn stupid. There’s a little message in there about society being weak and namby-pamby, but it’s pretty light on message, heavy on people diving while firing a gun with each hand.
If Tyra wrote Demolition Man, we’d have a scene in here where the Sandra Bullock character smokes cigarettes as part of her love of the 20th century lifestyle. And Stallone would have to talk her out of it. Now, I ask you, in a fun movie, is that fun? And if it’s not fun, does it at least accomplish the goal of making cigarettes less cool? No, and no. It’s off-tone, and it’s a waste of film.
Modelland’s introduction of a character with an actual problem just doesn’t work. It doesn’t add to the fun, and it doesn’t have anything serious to say about cutting other than this made-up girl does it. And I don’t want to infer too much, but the two least-explained aspects of this character are her cutting and the fact that she managed to get a mattress into a treehouse. Connection? Almost definitely. I guess next time I move, I’ll poke myself with a toothpick and see there’s a marked difference in upper-body strength.
There’s a really weird moment in this, Modelland’s third chapter, that encapsulates the whole issue. Tookie is walking down the street in her crap town, and she’s thinking about the plight of all these poor factory workers. And while she’s thinking about that, while her heart is beating for all these factory people, she catches a glimpse of herself in a reflective surface, and she reminds all of us that her forehead is a bit on the tall side.
If’n the reader is going to learn, along with Tookie, a ham-fisted lesson about what real problems are, I can dig it. But my memory of this book doesn’t make me think we’re headed that way. My memory of this book has me thinking that Tookie’s beauty doubts continue to be forefront, and we as readers are supposed to identify with the curse of being a 9.7 out of 10 as opposed to that of an oppressed working class.
If it’s a ridiculous world where beauty is all that matters, cool. But then we get class struggle, cutters, and a brief glimpse of the rich girl in school dumpster diving?
I’m all for mixing genres and ideas. Don’t make a mistake and think I’m not interested in that shit. But it’s just done so badly here. It’s like, imagine reading a book that’s light and fun, and at the end of each chapter you get a little text box with a message in it like “Don’t forget, world hunger is a thing and someone will die while you read this book.” Or “Hey, 9/11. Nothing to do with the contents of this book, but imagine the choice to jump out the window of a burning building. Like, whoa.”
There was something, a glimmer of something almost smart about Modelland. Tyra is uniquely equipped to tell the story of being a young model, of how strange that world is, and of what it might be like to be a model who doesn’t necessarily believe in her own beauty.
What I don’t think Tyra is equipped to do, based on what I’ve read so far in Modelland, is tell the story of teens who cut themselves. Or of what it’s like to grow up in a crap town with a crap life being the only future. I don’t know if Tyra ever engaged in self-harm. I do know that she went to an all girls’ school with a $12,925 plus fees tuition as of 2013, which kind of rules out the toe ring factory future. But that doesn’t really matter either. It’s possible for people who haven’t experienced something directly to write about it with authenticity. For PEOPLE it’s possible. For Tyra, I’m saying no. She doesn’t have the particular skills to pay those particular bills, and her book was smart to stick to the craziness and quirkiness, and when it just threw in a cutter for no reason besides throwing in a cutter, it lost the thread.
Because here’s the reality.
As a reader, I’m having an experience with this book. And that experience is a crazy-ass pile of crazy, and the best thing I can do is hang on. That’s kind of what’s to be expected, and if I was pissed off that the book was crazy, I’d be in the wrong. As a reader, with my outside knowledge of Tyra and who she is and what she does, I’m expecting a Demolition-Man-esque ride of a book, perhaps with more eyeliner.
What I’m getting in this chapter is a pile of different stories, NONE OF WHICH are any fun. Is the story of Tookie’s doubt interesting or fun? No. Let’s get to fucking Modelland already. Is the story of the divisions in society interesting or purposeful or fun? No. Let’s leave them behind and get to Modelland already. Is the insertion of real-life problems fun or purposeful or handled so deftly that they cannot be denied? Again, no, and couldn’t we deal with this stuff IN Modelland? Wouldn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t that speak to Tyra’s real experiences, her story to tell, the one that only she could really tell if she could just get over Tookie being such an individual that she has a dumbwaiter instead of a locker and a whipped cream canister she keeps in a cooler at school? We get it. Tookie is weird in her world, and uber-normal in ours. WHO ARE THE REAL WEIRDOS HERE, TOOKIE? AREN’T THE NORMAL ONES THE TRUE WEIRDOS?
Fuck, enough. Just…can we just go to goddamn Modelland already? Is that so much to ask?