The Monkey

The importance of unities in storytelling is one of those weird non-issues that the professional worrying class has invented so they’ll always have something to hand-wring about, like whether or not eggs are good for you, or the male loneliness epidemic. Their concerns are not my concerns. Bring on the omelets.

In fact, the people whose job it is to be right about these things are so wrong that they’re anti-right, a special kind of wrong in which the sheer doofiness of an opinion is actually instructive in understanding the correct side of the argument, which in our case is as follows:

It’s good when a story’s structural elements don’t fit together perfectly.

This assertion, which is so obvious I once saw a baby teach it to a potato, who then taught it to Art Laffer, who then fell down a flight of stairs, which was weird because we were on the first floor, can be confirmed through many avenues, but there is one in particular that is close to my heart:

Weird structural inconsistencies lean into, rather than try to control, the fact that we are all smelly dumbasses who have no idea what we’re doing. It’s good when things don’t fit good. A movie has to be real on some level, and ain’t nothin’ more real than being a mess – it’s the imperfect way in which you try to make sense of all of the horrifying shit that constitutes your psyche that offers up the best possible picture of you. Your central disfunction is the canon around which all of your other traits are written, and needing the mental mortar of friends and collaborators to hold together the maddening stones of your deeply unwell mind into something resembling logical orientation is why you invite other people in in the first place. It’s a leap you’ll never take if you’re spending all your time deluding yourself into thinking it’s possible to maintain the high and perfect walls of a false self.

We would never have movies like The Monkey, Bottoms, the first half of Snack Shack, and so many others if people allowed their behavior to be reined in by silly concerns such as “the thing that I’m writing technically does not make any sense, and actually might be terrible.” Making imperfect things is the best way to find the company of deeply stupid fellow travelers, which is basically the entire point of life.

“But, oh, no,” says the moist diaper-baby, tiny baby hands balled up into laughably non-threatening baby fists, all while pacing back and forth in their Bluey-themed crib. “It doesn’t make any logical sense – might even be narratively irresponsible – to conflate grief and difficult family dynamics with a grim mayhem-monkey whose silly drum-drums cause people to explode!”. Listen, man, I’m glad you grew up on the set of Full House, but for those of us whose parents are on a watchlist somewhere that shit hits so close to home I had to google Oz Perkins to make sure he isn’t actually my dad. When you come from weird, nasty stock, only weird, nasty stories have any kind of effect on you.

You want a story that’s honed to thematic and tonal perfection? One unimpeachably aligned with respect to every structural consideration? OK, I’ve got you:

Enjoy your fucking cube, weirdo. If you need me I’ll be watching a movie.

The End

It’s not weird when janky shit happens. It’s weird when janky shit doesn’t happen. When was the last time that anything in your life made any kind of logical sense for any sustained period of time? The implication that the entire universe aligns itself thematically to your life’s current condition is weird, and actually kind of vain. The universe doesn’t care about you, or me! You might get diarrhea on the same day that the love of your life dies in a car accident! The universe’s only concern is attaining a state of maximum entropy, an endeavor under the auspices of which “the feelings of this lump of simian-shaped protein, who is usually mad about something” presumably does not factor heavily. When you lean into the dumb instead of demanding any kind of rigid moral attention you are rewarded with rich company: crass child gamblers, exploding real-estate agents, lesbians beating the fucking shit out of each other, whatever the fuck Tetsuo: The Iron Man is supposed to be about, and more. That’s not just art, baby. That’s life.