Books I Didn't Finish: Imaginary Friend

Here’s a quick post about a book I didn’t get too far into at all.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say up front that I started reading this with the expectation that it was going to be hate-read blog fodder. The negative reviews among horror fans drew me to it in the first place, and the more I read, the more fascinated I became. We’re talking about a book from an author who hadn’t published anything for twenty years after the critically-acclaimed book that made his reputation (The Perks of Being A Wallflower), moving from respectable literary fare into genre territory, and it was apparently turned down by his previous publisher who had a right of first refusal on anything new he wrote, and according to all the negative reviews it squanders a promising horror story by devolving into a heavy-handed Christian allegory.

Yes. That’s the kind of disaster I am here for.

Unfortunately there’s another big flaw in the book I didn’t anticipate, one that’s no fun at all, which is that Imaginary Friend is death-inducingly boring.

A big part of this comes from the writing style, which…look, I haven’t read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I’m just going to assume it has to be livelier than this. The prose in this book is the literary equivalent of unflavoured oatmeal, a heavy, tasteless mass that jams in your throat like cement. Here’s a sample of our protagonist arriving at his new school:

“Christopher got out of the car and approached the school. Dozens of kids were already milling about, saying hello after their summer vacations. These twin brothers were pushing and shoving and laughing. The smaller one had a lazy-eye patch. A couple of girls itched at their new school clothes. One of them had pigtails. When the kids saw him, they stopped and looked at him like they always did in new places. He was the shiny new thing in the store window.”

One of them had pigtails? It’s like I’m living the story.

Immediately after we get this zinger of an observation:

““Hey,” he said. And they nodded the way the kids always did. Quiet and mistrustful at first. Like any animal pack.”

Kids…are mean? They’re kind of like….wolves??? Gosh I’ve never seen that comparison before!

One more example, here you can really feel the tension of the domestic drama:

“There was one time back in Michigan that Christopher hid in the bushes so he didn’t have to go. His mother called his name over and over, but he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, she got really mad and said,

“Christopher Michael Reese, you get out here…NOW.”

She used his three names. And when she did that, there was no choice. You went. That’s it. Game over.”

Beep boop when parent uses full name that means they’re Big Mad, danger imminent. I also once was child, fellow human being.

Everything of Imaginary Friend that I could stand to read was like this, the author apparently plinking away at the keyboard on auto-pilot like he’s tunneling through bedrock, utterly disengaged with the subject matter but convinced that this is a project he needs to finish regardless. A big part of this is that Chbosky decided to write an entire novel from the perspective of a seven year old boy, but is apparently both one of those people who deleted all of their childhood memories at some point, and believes that young children are beings of pure stimulus with no interiority at all. Thus, Christopher’s perspective is like the viewfinder of a camera, passively relating everything he sees to the reader unfiltered and unchanged, without even the heightened emotion of childhood for colouring. The kid might as well be a robot.

Actually that’s not entirely true, he does have some thoughts in his head: he’s really, really, really devoted to his mother, in a way that kids in fiction often are when the author can’t think of any traits to give them beyond “is child, has parent.” If Christopher thinks about anything at all, it’s about how much he loves his mom and how he needs to become a big strong man to protect her. And…that’s it. Other than that he’s head empty, no thoughts 24/7.

The reason I’m so sure the child POV is the problem here is that we do get bits from his mom’s POV, and the writing immediately perks up. Not to a degree that would make me want to keep reading, but enough that someone, at some point, should have told Chbosky to trash the whole book and start over with an older protagonist.

But maybe even that wouldn’t have saved the book. The writing is still dull even when portraying the perspective of someone who the author regards as possessing sentience, the human interactions still feel like they’re being described by an alien who landed on Earth five minutes ago, the “creepy” scenes are still completely lifeless. There is zero passion or energy in evidence here. Maybe the Christian themes are what got Chbosky invested in the story, but I’m not sticking around to find out.

Short thoughts on Dune Part Two

A few years ago I watched Denis Villenue’s Dune adaptation and quite liked it, especially in comparison to the book. That movie only covered about two thirds of the source material, specifically the good parts, so let’s see how Denis can handle the part of Frank Herbert’s book that I really didn’t like.

(Spoiler warning: I’ll be talking about two fairly significant late-stage plot points in both the novel and this movie)

Part Two picks up pretty much immediately where the first movie left off: Paul Atreides has joined the Fremen of Arrakis in order to get revenge against Baron Harkonnen for slaughtering his House and family, his arrival plays into a religious messiah story planted into Fremen culture by the Bene Gesserit (all-female Jedi) as part of a long-term ploy to influence Imperial politics in their favour, Paul attempts to resist the messiah role because his Spice-influenced visions of the future have shown him that if he fulfills the prophecy it will start a galactic holy war that will kill billions of people. But when the Harkonnens bring in weird little freak Feyd Rautha to fight back against the Fremen uprising, not using the Bene Gesserit prophecy to his advantage starts to look less and less viable.

Also he smooches a hot Fremen girl.

In terms of the broad plot, this all plays out basically the same way as it does in the book. I’ve seen some people characterising the movie as a major departure from the original story, which isn’t really true—the major story beats are all the same. But those story beats are cast in a different light, which in some cases alters the tone of the story significantly. One major character serves the same basic role as they do in the novel, but whereas the novel casts their actions in a fairly neutral light, here they’re portrayed as explicitly sinister, to the point of arguably becoming an outright villain.

The same is true of Paul’s relationship with Chani: it plays out basically the same way as in the original story, but Chani’s reaction to what happens has been altered significantly in order to give her a more active role in the story. This is to the advantage of the movie as a whole, for reasons I’ll get into later.

Elsewhere, Part Two continues with the pragmatic adaptation choices that the first movie engaged in. For example, Denis and co clearly realised that the super-genius Twilight baby was never going to work in live-action. The solution they chose to get around this is still a little goofy—I just don’t think “psychic baby pulls the strings of galactic politics” is a concept that can ever not be kind of silly—but it works a lot better than any of the alternatives would have.

The movie also continues the balancing act played with the Harkonnens, where they’re somehow even more cartoonishly grotesque and inhuman than in the book, but simultaneously feel less like cartoon villains. The way both movies do this is by amping up the Geiger-esque alien body horror while de-emphasizing the lazy shorthands for evil that the book uses. The original story leans really heavily on gluttony, ugliness and sexual violence to make the Harkonnens seem evil; while these are all still present in the movies, or at least implied, we’re not expected to hate the Harkonnens solely due to those reasons. The fact that the Baron is fat and slovenly is probably the most human thing about him in the movie version of the character, given how alien his overall portrayal seems, whereas in the book his body and eating habits are used to dehumanise him.

This is not to say that the Harkonnens aren’t over the top. Like I said, they’re even more over the top than they were originally. It’s just that the movies are more thoughtful about which particular dials they amp up to eleven and which ones they take a more subtle hand with.

If you’ve looked up anything about Part Two you’ll have noticed that it’s over two and a half hours long. I said earlier that it’s adapting roughly one-third of the novel, plus a scattering of material from the preceding two thirds that didn’t make it into the first movie. That’s a lot of movie for not a whole lot of book. Is this another Harry Potter/Hunger Games/Twilight case of a movie adaptation unnecessarily splitting itself into multiple parts in order to milk more money out of the source material?

Actually, no. In my post about the first movie I mentioned that the book’s last section—the part adapted by this movie—feels like a rough, unfinished sketch. Part Two takes that sketch and fills out the details. A lot of the action in this part of the book basically happens off-screen, with the characters talking about things that have happened or are happening but not actually living through them on the page. In the movie version, we get to see everything actually play out. Feyd Rautha gets more of an on-screen presence to turn him into an active villain and set up the conflict between him and Paul more, the Fremen’s reaction to Paul and his messianic overtures get fleshed out to create some more stakes and drama, and there’s even some fun action set-pieces added.

All that said, the story follows the same outline as the book, and as such there are still things about the plot that I don’t like. Chief among them is Paul’s big gambit to lure the Emperor to Arrakis. As in the novel, Paul sends him a DM that says “fight me bro”, the Emperor comes down to Arrakis with his entire army, Paul and the Fremen ride in on sandworms and win easily. The only obstacle remaining after that is Paul’s duel with Feyd Rautha, which you know he’s obviously going to win because it happens near the end of the story.

And yes, I know the drama here is supposed to come from Paul and Chani’s relationship and how the choices he makes affect that—and to be fair the movie makes some changes that significantly increases that drama—but the thing is, I don’t care about Paul and Chani’s relationship. I can barely recall a single paragraph that Chani was in from the book; Zendaya’s movie version is a lot more memorable, but it’s not enough to make me give a shit about her and Paul’s love story. At the end of the day they both feel like people who fall in love because they’re the main characters of a fantasy story and that’s what’s supposed to happen.

What I am interested in is what the planned next movie—an adaptation of Dune Messiah—will do with Chani, as her reaction to what happens at the end of this movie is by far the biggest story change and based on what I’ve looked up about Messiah, pretty much guarantees that a hypothetical Dune Part Three will have to deviate significantly from the book. Based on how much more I’m enjoying Denis Villeneuve’s movies than the original novel, that can only be a good thing.

Movies I Didn’t Finish: Significant Other

Recently while browsing the Paramount+ selection, I stumbled on a movie called Significant Other, an exclusive-to-the-platform horror movie about a couple getting menaced by something in the woods. “Sounds neat!” I said to myself, and started watching.

Little did I know that what awaited me would be one of the most singularly memorable horror film experiences I’ve ever had. Not, I hasten to add, in a good way.

Our hapless protagonists are Ruth and Henry, a long-term couple whose relationship is picture-perfect apart from Ruth’s extreme anxiety. Henry has invited Ruth out on a multi-day backpacking trip in a remote forest, ostensibly in order to help her get over her fear of the wilderness but actually to help her get over her fear of marrying him. The proposal does not go well—in fact it causes Ruth to have a panic attack—and the next day the couple find their relationship strained to the breaking point.

Also, they’re being stalked by a shape-shifting alien, which I understand rarely helps relationship troubles.

For the sake of setting up how monumentally this movie trips over its own dick, I’m going to have to describe basically everything that happens up until halfway through, which is shortly before I stopped watching. Bear with me.

So it becomes apparent very early on that the alien is taking on the appearances of other lifeforms a la The Thing. In the opening scene we see it attack a dear with a distinctive broken horn, then Ruth sees the same deer staring at her spookily in the woods, then the next day she and Ruth find it dead with its head split open, covered in some sort of strange fungus-like growth. Obviously, the dead deer is the original and the spooky deer is the alien copy.

After the unsuccessful proposal, Henry goes off on a short walk by himself; when he comes back Ruth reconciles with him and they continue their journey. The next day, Ruth goes off to pee, finds a cave containing a mysterious blue liquid, and then is apparently attacked by something we don’t see. Cut to Henry, who finds her standing creepily in the woods. She acts strange and distant and is seen by the audience to be staring at him in a threatening manner when his back is turned.

Obviously, Ruth has been replaced by an alien imposter. The cinematography very much supports this conclusion: up to this point it had been taking a somewhat artsy tone, but from this point on things get downright trippy in places, signalling the dissolution of Ruth’s character and her transformation into something else. There’s some great tension inherent in the fact that we don’t know exactly how the alien operates, so we don’t know if the Ruth-alien is aware that it’s an imposter or if the copy of Ruth’s personality is struggling to maintain dominance over the alien’s mind. There is a sense that she’s highly unpredictable and could be a danger to Henry at any moment.

This suspicion is confirmed when she lures him to a cliffside and then throws him off to his death, before taking off into the forest and cracking her head against a rock. She’s found by an older couple and proceeds to act in a weird and unsettling manner, which just heightens the tension more.

Now, at this point I was pretty on board with Significant Other despite having had some early misgivings, like the over-reliance on fake-out jump scares. The movie had seemed to be setting up a scenario where Henry would be the alien imposter, even having ridiculously on-the-nose dialogue about him “becoming someone else”, so I was pleasantly surprised by the twist of Ruth becoming the villain. Very interesting. Let’s see where this goes.

Then Henry strolls into the clearing where Ruth and the older couple are camping, uses cheesy badly-rendered CGI alien powers to kill the couple, and explains to Ruth that he’s a scout for an alien invasion.

Oh no. It’s happening again. It’s horror villains who talk.

The double-reverse twist is that back in the cave Ruth found the body of the real Henry, who had been killed and then replaced by the alien on his post-friendzone walk. When she ran out of the cave and “Henry” approached her shortly afterwards, she somehow put together exactly what was going on and played along until she could figure out a plan to kill the alien and escape.

So first of all, that doesn’t make any sense. If I found one of my friends or family members dead in a cave and then shortly afterwards ran into them seemingly alive and well, I don’t think it would occur to me to assume that they had been replaced by some sort of shapeshifter. I would certainly not latch onto this idea with such certainty that I would then murder them without taking any steps first to confirm that my suspicion was true.

There’s just no believable way for Ruth to have put this together. I don’t buy it.

The other problem with the twist is that it only works because the movie cheats. Cutting away from Ruth before we see what happened to her in the cave is fine when it appears that this scene is the character’s death; once we learn what actually happened, it becomes apparent that the movie was just hiding information in order to make the twist work.

But okay, the twist is cheap and kind of silly and it kills the mood that alien-Henry talks and still has real-Henry’s personality, but I guess I can live with it. The movie squandered all that trippy cinematography on a predictable sci-fi thriller, but predictable sci-fi thrillers have their place. The situation is not unsalvageable.

Then the movie turns into a comedy.

To be clear, I don’t think the filmmakers intended for it to be a comedy, but I cannot see how anyone could watch the scene that follows and not view it as a comedy, so I must assume that at some point, someone realised that this Paramount+ exclusive horror movie had transformed into a comedy and was fine with that.  

So first of all, there’s a but where alien-Henry keeps trying to kill Ruth but is unable to due to Henry’s feelings for her surfacing. This is an inherently goofy idea, but it’s made worse by the fact that Henry’s actor plays the scene like a particularly hammy character in a Marvel movie.

Then, after he realises that he’s in love with Ruth, he chases her through the forest shouting “You don’t need to worry! I’m in love with you!”

I am fascinated by this scene. I’m fascinated by this movie, and I honestly don’t know how it flew so far under the radar because it’s rife for film critic dissection. Admittedly, the slower and moodier first half kind of disqualifies it as hate-watch material, but to me the fact that the movie actually seems good, or at least interesting, until it suddenly nosedives is all the more compelling.