Chapters 8 and 9
We finally made it to The Day of Discovery, or T-DoD if you prefer the obnoxious shortening.
It’s not totally clear how the Day of Discovery works. But that’s to be expected in this book, so buckle up.
From what I can tell, the way this works is that any aspiring models who want to participate and possibly be discovered go to a capital city of sorts, dress up, and for 15 minutes or so, walk around. The hope is that a scout will see them, pick them from the crowd, and then whisk them off to Modelland.
The mayor, Mayor Rump as he’s properly named, initiates things by saying the classic pump-up phrase “Begin”, and the girls start walking around.
What happens is about 15 minutes of girls all walking around in heels and dresses, and it would seem a lot of these girls attended the Moe Howard School of Perambulation.
We have a girl trip and fall, and not only does she fall to the ground, on the way down she hits her head on an old man’s mobility scooter. We have no less than three girls fall down the same open manhole. Which, by the way, is a big public works fuckup. You can’t just have an open manhole, let alone if there’s a goddamn parade coming through.
The girls walk back and forth, in model format I guess, and then they collide and they fight and roll around on the ground and tussle. They break shoes, they tear dresses, and they have people shouting “Go! You can do it!” and shit like that, even though all they’re doing is walking around, far as I can tell and far as it was described by Tyra.
Tookie, our hero, runs into Theophilus Lovelaces, the love interest, who asks Tookie her name. This is a big moment for Tookie, although it seems pretty goddamn tacked on if you don’t mind me saying. We have this huge hubbub going on, and meanwhile he’s asking her name? Who gives a shit?
Tookie tries to get above the crowd by standing on a solid gold car with spinners, and once atop the car she sees the Modelland scouts begin to appear. A light post magically transforms into a scout who picks a girl. A hole opens in the ground, and another girl is chosen. And then, get this, you are not going to fucking believe this, a scout comes out of the roof of the car and selects…MYRRACLE! Tookie’s sister! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. Probably because it’s not what happens, and instead the scout reaches out to Tookie.
Guys, beleive it or not, it looks like Tookie is going to Modelland. She didn’t believe in herself, but fuck it, she’s on her way!
That’s two entire chapters of this book, what I just summarized right there.
Here’s the big problem with this whole fucking thing right here.
We hear about T-DoD over and over and over. Oh, this is when the models are chosen. This is when girls have to parade around. Myrracle’s in walking lessons for years and they get the perfect dress and this is the big day. And then the scout just picks Tookie. Who isn’t dressed, who isn’t walking around. I get that we’re probably building to a point about inside beauty, but if she gets picked for doing nothing, what the hell, why would anyone do any of this model shit anymore? If you can just stand around and watch, what the hell is everyone parading around for?
This last weekend I went and Saw Mad Max: Fury Road. Which I’m really happy about because it was fucking awesome, but also because it is really helpful in explaining what I like about bonkers things and why Modelland is bonkers and still terrible.
I’m not going to say a whole lot about Fury Road because you need to see that shit, and the less you know ahead of time the better. If you like movies, films, if you have ever enjoyed a movie, then you’re the ideal audience for Fury Road.
Here’s what I do want to say about it. It’s a good movie in all the ways movies need to be good, and it’s also fucking bonkers. Like really crazy. And it’s great. Crazy shit happens, the characters are insane and gross, and it’s as close to a non-stop car chase that a movie can be and still be watchable. And I’m not a huge car chase guy. I fell asleep during Ronin. But this movie, it adds things to the car chase lexicon that we’re going to be seeing forever. It’s way more than squealing tires and shit. This is the movie that I think Fast and Furious aspired to be and never reached because it’s just too damn stupid and there’s too much silly plot that gets in the way of the Fastness and Furiousness. Fury Road is crazy, it’s fast, it’s fun.
Modelland is also crazy. But for whatever reason, Tyra kind of screwed herself out of the ability to write about crazy stuff and have it be entertaining.
The big sin, she over-explains EVERYTHING. Every little piece of the world, the narrator shares the backstory. Why this is this way, why that is that way. Not only do I not need to know as much as she tells me, but the backstory of this world is uniformly a lot less interesting than the world itself. Than being dropped into this bizarre world. And when you explain everything, it makes it feel like the world is less novel and weird. When I know the history of everything, and when that history is kind of trying to justify the existence of something more than it’s trying to tell a good story, it really removes the magic from the world.
Tyra’s world in Modelland doesn’t believe in itself enough to tell you that some things are a certain way, and they’re that way because this is a world that’s different from our own. Everything is in the context of being explained to us, the readers, and that method just normalizes everything or makes it dumb.
Fury Road hits it right. It explains very little because you don’t need to know a lot. You know the people are people, some apocalyptic shit happened, and now we’re in a crappy situation. The rest plays out in the movie. We don’t have to stop and get a backstory about every vehicle and every type of person. Nobody asks the bad guy like, “Hey, what’s up with the scary breathing mask thing?” We don’t have to hear what the different territories are and their history and who lives there. We keep fucking moving forward.
And what’s really weird about it, the page Tyra could have taken for her book, the ONE page that could have replaced a couple hundred, is that everything in Fury Road DOES have a backstory. All these characters have backstories created for the sake of making a real, filled-in world. What they don’t do is subject us to every backstory of every thing within the actual movie narrative. The backstories are out there, on the internet, and you’re welcome to check them out. But you sure as hell don’t need to. And they sure as hell didn’t stop the movie every five minutes to explain something that doesn’t matter. Why do they call it guzzoline instead of gasoline? WHO GIVES A SHIT!? I know what it is, it makes sense in the context of the movie, let’s move on.
This movie has a guy on bungee cords who shreds on a flamethrower guitar as he rides a giant war vehicle that’s blasting through the desert. How is that improved by an explanation? I don’t want to know who that guy is. I don’t want to know how he learned to play guitar. I want to see him shredding on a giant war vehicle that’s blasting through the desert.
It’s a narrative problem that kills the mood in Modelland. And when everything is explained to me in this, “Wow, isn’t this a strange world?” tone, then it brings me into that world in a way that feels disingenuous. Just show it to me. Believe me, if it’s anything like a bungee guitar road thrasher, I’ll understand that it’s weird. I’ll get it. But instead of handling the uncanny that way, Modelland goes out of its way to explain why something weird and cool isn’t that weird and, by proxy, isn’t that cool either.
It’s weird how these two things are similar in my mind, Modelland and Fury Road. I think both are very crazy and strange. Both have characters that have ridiculous names like Rictus Erectus. In fact, a Modelland versus Fury Road name game would be pretty sweet. And difficult. Slit? Which one does that come from? Who even knows anymore?
Yet, one is great, the other is dogshit. And the reasoning is pretty simple. Modelland feels the need to explain absolutely everything, and absolutely every explanation is absolutely stupid. Fury Road is crazy too, and it recognizes that not only is there no need to explain a guitar bungee flamethrower guy, but that any explanation of that would just make it stupider and less fun.
Which is maybe the key to the whole thing. Fun. Fury Road is crazy and fun. It doesn’t lose sight of the fact that, although a lot of the movie deals with death and apocalypse, you have fun watching the movie. Modelland is not fun. It’s very serious-minded, or very oriented towards making a point. Or about a hundred points, really. Most of which seem to be quelling Tyra’s private, inner voice of self-doubt that must be a holdover from her younger days.
That all adds up to making it really difficult to actually enjoy Modelland.
And also adds up to me telling you to go see fucking Fury Road. It’s a good movie. I don’t see a lot of movies because I kind of tend to hate so many of them, and this is one of the few that never left me wanting anything else.
Let me sum it all up here.
Fury Road is crazy. The events are crazy, the people in it are crazy. But it’s not stupid. It’s purposeful, and everyone knows what they’re doing.
Modelland is crazy. But the main character is very normal, and the side characters are crazy in very predictable, fairy tale ways that don’t offer me a whole lot to be interested in. And Modelland is stupid. The book, the story, it’s very stupid.