Shutter Island

Tweet

I went to see Shutter Island at last today. I've never been the biggest fan of Martin Scorsese, but I am a fairly big Leo fan, so off I trotted to my local cinema to see if the so-called 'Gothic thriller' would live up to expectations.

For the most part, it did. Set a thriller in a creepy mental institution on a remote island, lashed by a hurricane and staffed by Max von Sydow and Sir Ben Kingsley, and your suspicions will instantly be aroused. Sure, we've seen this before, so Scorsese throws in a staccato strings soundtrack (perhaps Hitchcock misplaced it after making Psycho), weird dreams of a dead wife and some Holocaust flashbacks, and ends up with a bizarre concoction that doesn't seem to be able to decide what it wants to be. Psychological noir-thriller? Surreal horror? Knowing pastiche of an entire genre?

Mental institutions are rarely depicted as calm sanctuaries of healing. Arkham Asylum, possibly the most famous cinematic institution, is usually a Gothic pile full of dark cells and screaming inmates, while even superhero pisstake Mystery Men featured a fortress-like asylum on an island off the mainland, home to Geoffrey Rush's delightfully insane Casanova Frankenstein. Scorsese has taken this on board, and added flourishes borrowed from the decaying Danvers of Session 9, to give us Ashecliffe.

Rachel, played by Emily Mortimer, is a patient at Ashecliffe (home to the criminally insane). She has murdered her three children, but is so unable to acknowledge her crime that she lives in a fiction, in which Ashecliffe is her former home and the other patients are neighbours. She manages to disappear from inside a locked room, leaving behind her shoes. Apparently Jonathan Creek wasn't available, so they call in Teddy Daniels, a US marshall (played by Leonardo DiCaprio, still looking as youthful as ever), to investigate. Partnered by the affable Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), Teddy starts digging, although if you dig up the past, all you ever get is dirty.

Conspiracy theories are never far from the surface, particularly in a film set in 1954 (a time when 'the Reds' were hiding everywhere - if you weren't careful, you might even find one in your morning bowl of cereal), and soon Teddy doesn't know who to trust. Believing there is more to Ashecliffe than meets the eye, he finds himself stranded on the island, and convinced he is being kept there to prevent him 'blowing the lid' off what really happens at the institution (shades of The Wicker Man, anyone?). His dreams grow weirder, seeming to encroach on waking life, and the backdrop of the hurricane ramps up the tension. Frequent references are made to his time as a GI in WWII, particularly his involvement in the liberation of Dachau, although whether we are supposed to take this past as an explanation for his defensive, paranoid state of mind is unclear.

It's beautifully shot, perfectly evoking the 1950s through its excellent wardrobe stylings, and references to 'the H-bomb'. At the same time, it also brings to mind the stark film noir of the time, with typical chiaroscuro lighting and inmates - sorry, patients - who wouldn't look out of place in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Watchmen's Jackie Earle Haley plays a disfigured patient in a dank cell, proving that he can play more characters than psychotic Rorschach by playing...another psychotic. Leo is as watchable as ever, although he's perhaps a teensy bit too earnest in his portrayal of a haunted, paranoid detective. Kingsley's Dr Cawley is just the right side of sinister, although von Sydow's German doctor is too one-dimensional and stereotypical to really work.

I would recommend it, particularly since it's different from the other films currently on release. I enjoyed it far more than Alice in Wonderland, which I didn't like enough to even write a post about. This is madness that you can not only believe in, you can fear...after all, how would you ever know if you were so crazy that the world around you was simply your invention?

Fiction Friday #5

Tweet This story has been taken down as it's out for submission!

Cool Things To See And Do!

Tweet

Ever since I got into the blogging 'thing', I've found I really enjoy it. I enjoy writing my own posts, both here and for my fiction serial, Tales from Vertigo City, but I also really enjoy reading other blogs. My Google Reader is full of blogs, from those on writing and blogging, to graphic design, to photography, comics and knitting.

So, to make a change from my usual posts, here are nine of the best posts I've read today!

Blogging
The Massive List of Ideas for Blog Posts - Marelisa's Abundance Blog

How To Build Your Blog - Elana Johnson

5 Techniques And 10 Tools For Making Blogging Easier - Boagworld

Writing
The Secret Strength of Killer Queries: Specificity - Nathan Bransford

What is Structural Editing? - Jodi Cleghorn on Write Anything

What is your pen personality? - Fuel Your Writing

Cool Stuff
The Greatest Spiral Staircase Ever - Craziest Gadgets

Steampunk tattoos - WebUrbanist

Zombie Samurai Transformer - Io9

I also urge you to go and visit the blogs of my fellow Below The Foldians - links to the right!!

Oh, ho, ho, it's magic!

Tweet

In a flurry of creative output, I wrote my response to the Fiction Friday prompt yesterday, and in so doing, I decided to re-enter the world of Emascula the Great (albeit just his household - for now). He's a Victorian stage magician with a healthy disdain for his public that I first dreamt up back in 2007, for a 60-word flash fiction challenge on the EditRed website. This is the story I came up with for the prompt, The Oldest Trick.

"Emascula the Great waved the wand above his assistant. The audience gasped and cooed with delight as she pulled the swords from her body, tossing them to the floor with a clatter. She posed, apparently unscathed. Emascula smiled cheerfully, but sighed inwardly. These cretins were so easily fooled. Parting them from their money was the oldest trick in the book."

Weirdly enough, Emascula decided to make an appearance in a short story I wrote a couple of years later, The Mirror Phase. This was originally published on the Fictionville website, but once that closed down, I added it to my own site, including a wonderful illustration by the very talented Jimmy Misanthrope.

Now it would appear that Emascula wants a little more attention, so watch this space for more tales of the enigmatic magician!

Fiction Friday #4

Tweet

Here's my attempt for this week's Fiction Friday challenge on the Write Anything blog. Today's challenge is;

The keys opened every door in the house, except the small wooden door at the end of the hall…

[NOTE] I've actually edited this, following comments from the lovely Kathryn Jankowski! 

Beth flipped through the heavy iron keys one last time, but as before, not one of them fitted the narrow lock. She slapped the rough wood in irritation. The small door rattled in a frame speckled with woodworm.

"Problem?"

Dawes leaned against the wall behind her. Paint streaked his arms and peppered his thinning hair. He gnawed on a raw turnip.

"Yes, there's a problem. The master gave me these keys, and they're meant to open any door in the building," replied Beth. A shiver of disgust skated down her spine as he scraped at the vegetable with his few remaining teeth.

"But they don't open this one," said Dawes. He spoke as he ate, treating Beth to the sight of a mouthful of half-chewed turnip.

"No. Why not?"

"Maybe the master don't want you going in there."

"But I heard something in there. Like...scratching. And crying."

"Probably just the wind. It's an old house, it makes peculiar noises." Dawes picked at his gums with a ragged fingernail.

"All the same, I want to have a look and make sure." Beth shuddered. The noises beyond the door did not sound anything like the wind.

"Look, lovely. You're working for a magician. There are going to be things he's going to want to keep hidden. Secrets, stuff for his act. He'll probably give you the key when you've been working here long enough that he won't think you'll go straight to his competition," said Dawes.

Beth stared at Dawes for several moments, before concluding he had a point. After all, she only got the keys from Mrs Hooper yesterday, and she hadn't even met the elusive magician yet. She hauled herself to her feet, and brushed dust off her knees. She nodded at Dawes, walking as fast as she could away from the handyman without running.

Dawes watched her go. When he heard her hob-nailed boots on the stairs, he knelt beside the door.

"Are you there, my pretty? Don't worry, I'll be coming for you soon." He whispered through the narrow key hole, stroking the door.

The prisoner on the other side of the door whimpered.

Location, location, location.

Tweet

Writers often spend a great deal of their time concentrating on developing authentic dialogue (spoken by fleshed out, 3D characters), and on creating a coherent plot, contained within a sensible structure. All well and good, but how often do we give setting, or location, only the most cursory of nods?

Setting is by far one of the most important parts of storytelling. Think how many stories begin with "In a faraway kingdom..." or "In a galaxy far, far away..." Location, or setting, not only helps define genre ('the Wild West' informs the Western, while noir is often set in grimy or shadowy urban landscapes), it also gives us a sense as to why things happen the way that they do - The Thing just wouldn't work outside of the Arctic, and nor would Twister be even remotely plausible if it was set in the Home Counties of England. Beyond that, the setting can almost become a character in itself - Mordor is a physical manifestation of the otherwise absent Sauron, while the island and its moods in Lord of the Flies reflects the transformation of the boys.

So how do you go about writing a good setting, or choosing a location?

If you're writing fantasy, you essentially have carte blanche to write whatever you want. Alice in Wonderland would be a perfect example! Science fiction in space is open to almost boundless possibilities, and even science fiction on Earth can be bent whichever way you want. Futuristic settings, or alternate realities, let you go crazy with the invention. I'd recommend Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books for a good example of alternate realities. Swords'n'sorcery-style fantasy requires the kind of geography associated with the likes of Lord of the Rings - think castles, forests, plains, etc. Fairly generic, but as you don't need to have visited, you get to decide what goes where.

Of course, if you're writing the kind of fantasy wherein weird stuff happens to ordinary people, then you'll want to ground your story in a more realistic setting. After all, the weird happening becomes all the more weird when set against a mundane background. In this case, you'll need more of a grasp of where your story is taking place. You can set it in your hometown and just change the names, or you can keep the setting intact. It helps to keep things believeable - one of my many problems with 28 Weeks Later was how wantonly they screwed with London geography. Two of the characters are supposed to get to Wembley from Westminster via the tube tunnels, despite the fact that they'd need to change lines on the way! Once you annoy someone in that way, it's difficult to persuade them to further invest in your story. You've broken the 'suspension of disbelief'. These issues equally apply to other genres outside of fantasy.

But what if you want to set your story somewhere that you've never visited? Joanna Penn deals with the idea of how to write about a real location if you haven't been there in more detail, and I highly recommend that you read her post (the suggestion about using Google Maps or Street View is a brilliant idea). I actually recommend that you subscribe to her blog anyway as her posts are fantastically useful (you can also follow her on Twitter). Of course, you could always go down the Neil Gaiman route, and give your location the Neverwhere treatment - translate place names into their literal meanings (if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it as a masterclass on location). It doesn't matter if you've never been as the places are given a whole new meaning by you.

Of course, you could always treat yourself to a holiday and visit that pretty Alpine town you want to use as a backdrop to a 1920s murder mystery...

I always did have a soft spot for Miss Havisham.

Tweet

It's a common problem for creative types that finding the motivation to get the idea down on paper can often be a bit of a struggle. With this in mind, my friend Scott and I decided to set each other writing assignments. The idea was that with a deadline, and an intended audience, we would be more likely to produce. It didn't last, but during that time, I did write a few things of which I'm actually rather proud. The first piece is the exercise below, in response to the prompt; "Describe an object of great importance to a character: a car, trophy, dress or ring, for example. First, write a paragraph using details that portray the object as sensuous, beautiful, and tempting. Then write a second paragraph in which the same object is described through details that make it seem repellent." Guess which is which.

1) The wedding cake drew gasps of admiration from the guests clustered around the table. Three feet high, mock Greek pillars separated the five thick slabs of alternating chocolate and fruit cake. Angels of white icing cavorted among sugar roses along the top tier, and a small plastic couple clasped hands beneath a delicate lattice arch. Iced scallops ran around the lower tiers. Dried fruits embedded in the icing looked like jewels waiting to be mined. Spun sugar draped across the layers to echo Magda's veil. It seemed a shame to cut this cake, but she had been waiting for this day for her whole life.

2) Magda sat by the table, gazing at the remains of the cake. Insects had long since burrowed into the soft innards, chewing out the chocolate and the dried fruit. Only the icing remained, hardened into an impenetrable shell. Dust clogged the scallops and the roses, and the angels lurched across the top tier. Some of their limbs had snapped off, and lay discarded among corpses of flies. One angel was even missing its wings. The spun sugar disintegrated years ago, replaced by soft cobwebs. Magda occasionally watched spiders scuttle across the icing, chasing those flies tempted by the last remaining crumbs of cake. The plastic couple lay shattered on the floor under the table, pieces of the pair scattered across the grimy parquet floor. Tears welled in her eyes, but at least she never had to cut the cake. She could never spoil anything so beautiful.