“I’m talking about the unironic insertions of ropey excretion you’ve mouth-ejaculated onto the page because you’re not really trying.”
I hate puke scenes.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
I was just putting a bite of food into my mouth when it happened. The food I was aiming carefully into my cake hole was a jiggling nugget of buffalo chicken mac & cheese, made from scratch like I’m a goddamn church mom. It is a culinary triumph of fresh rotini pasta slathered in a rich, creamy bechamel loaded with gruyere and parm, in which slightly melted chunks of expensive stilton hid like rare treasure. Just as this glistening knob touched my lips, on the television before me —a monstrously 60-inch high-definition digital godsend, a work of technological magic that presents movies in such astonishing crispness you can nearly smell them, that slab of wizardry whereupon my eyes were fixed, taking in the sheer brilliant joy that is [show] — [actress] threw up. Right in my face.
I know why you do it, and by “you,” I’m addressing the showrunners and directors plying their trade on the small screen. I know it’s because it grounds the viewer in the real. I know that this is a technique that provokes a physical response in 90 percent of viewers — a response which, against all wisdom and logic, draws them deeper into the fictive reality of your show. I get it. But for the love of Christ, urely someone with your creative faculties and HBO-charged budget can devise one single slightly less disgusting narrative device .. There has to be another way.
And I’m not talking about ironic puking like in The Santa Clarita Diet or Team America or Family Guy. I can parse satire, thank you. I’m talking about the unironic insertions of ropey excretion you’ve mouth-ejaculated onto the page because you’re not really trying. The everyday puke. The work-a-day horf. The ‘Heavens-Jeremiah-shall-the-vilage-now-discover-I-am-with-child’ juicy sluice. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s passé, it rarely means anything, and you’re ruining my goddam buffalo wings mac and cheese, you overpaid vainglorious hack.
Onus for this fluid malfeasance lies entirely with Monty Python’s infamous scene in The Meaning of Life wherein Mr. Creosote vomits 950 pounds of condensed Italian wedding soup, creamed corn, a bit of…hrrrph…a bit of tomato, diced carrots, and…horrghh…Russian salad dressing. It is egregious as a point, and thus set the standard for any cinematic glurp following. Exempli gratia: the full fifteen minutes of unmitigated hurling in The Triangle of Sadness, delivered to us, we long suffering viewers as some kind of spectacle that borders on hazing (or torture, if you happen to be consuming your Östlundian delights on a plane)
Let us be done with gratuitous puking scenes. There are other metaphors out there, dear storytellers. In fact, here for your edification are a handful of sure-fire ways to move your B-plots and “character going THROUGH it” beats alongwithout hurling all over my appetite.
INSTEAD OF PUKING, ORCHESTRATE PLOT DEVELOPMENT BY HAVING YOUR CHARACTERS…
Farting. As real as vomit. Twice as funny.
Sharting. We’ve all trusted the veracity of a lurking toot only to find ourselves besmirched in our britches. If it’s good enough for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, it’s good enough for you.
Taking a dump. At the end of the day, we humans don’t really see each other do this that much, so this is far more visually interesting. Gross, true.
^^In fact, have them taking an egregiously symphonic dump in the busy public bathroom at work. When someone tentatively asks, between the irregular staccato from the angry trombone section of your lead’s orchestral posterior, are you ok, have them try to hide their identity and respond in the only Czech phrase they recall from their Euro trash period in college. See? Storytelling.
(If you’re writing an edgy workplace drama:) Taking a disaster shit in in their khakis on the “quite luxury” low-pile taupe carpet in the hallway that runs along the floor-to-ceiling interior windows of the office of their biggest client as everyone watches whereupon our lead wishes, more than anything, that they could just fucking die there. You know the feeling They’re running for the gender neutral loos just around the corner on the sixth floor, and we the audience observe them already making peace with the surety of ruining some part of their #powerdressing #goals Loro Piana ensemble. This is the moment we realize that our lead, who is late in their thirties perhaps, that they do, after all, believe in a supreme being and at this moment, as they shudder around that corner with one hand out to pop that stainless steel handle and at last foul oneself in private, knees welded together (as if that will do anything), they discover all three of the toilets occupied. As it happens, while it happens, you the astute audience recognize the genius of having Muzak’s version of “Creep” by Radio Head as the scene’s musical cue. It’s about shame, get it????
Sneezing? It’ll separate the good actors from the great ones.
Inspirational <3
Delightful diversion from everything else in today’s news..thank you!