The Uses of Envy

I was a drama geek in high school and college, and I loved it.  I am a trained soprano (lyric coloratura, to be technical), and I loved that, too.  I haven’t acted or sung (except to myself, usually in the car) in a decade, and yet I don’t really miss either.

I get the occasional wistful feeling, especially when I sit in the audience at performances of the Ventura County Gilbert & Sullivan Repertoire Company, but I think that has more to do with the tendency of the G & S culture to create its own family, united by Patter Trio allusions and “How did you manage the ghosts in Ruddigore?” exchanges.

No, I have acted, but I’m not an actress, and I have sung, but I’m not a singer.

I am a writer.  Unfortunately, I’m not proud of the way I know that.

Play me a Kiri te Kanawa recording, and I rejoice.  Show me Meryl Streep inhabiting Julia Child, and I will laugh and marvel.  But let Steven Moffat end “A Scandal in Belgravia” with five simple words (“When I say run, run.”), or let Neil Gaiman make his return to Doctor Who with an episode titled “Nightmare in Silver”, and I turn green.

I want to have written that.

The longing is particularly acute in the Gaiman example, since titles are usually the hardest things for me to write.  There’s so much pressure on a title: genre, tone, theme, plot...it has to be everything.  In half a dozen words or less.  When that title popped up on iTunes, before I saw anything else, I felt a tiny thrill, a certainty that this episode, at least, was in good hands.  The “written by” credit only explained what I already knew.  So, being the mature person that I am, my interior dialogue immediately commenced: Boy (growl), it must be nice to be Neil Gaiman (snarl, hiss), with all that stinking talent and all (growl) - great, I can’t even come up with a synonym for ‘growl’...

This tends to continue, without synonyms, for an appreciable time, and with the resulting fodder for confession.

But if sin is an emptiness, a lack, then perhaps I can, at least, let it focus me on what I actually do lack.  First, I need to clarify for myself that I am not Neil Gaiman.  That is not the lack, because that is not what I was made to be.  There’s already somebody doing a darn good job of being Neil Gaiman, after all.  I need to focus on what Neil Gaiman has done that I can, and should, also do.

He has done the work.

That’s it.  That’s what I can emulate.  If I want to have written, I first have to write.  I will never measure up, but if I am doing my work I will have less time to measure.  And maybe I can turn envy into inspiration.  Or simply into gratitude.

As for that G & S nostalgia, it’s turning into a neat screenplay.  I even have a title.

Commitment

Long-term relationships are hard. You have to give your heart away without knowing how things will end. Even if they end well, at some point along the way, the other party will frustrate you, or let you down, or be just plain Wrong. It’s a lot to go through with no assurance of a payoff.

I’m talking, of course, about my relationship to television.

Though the cost factor means I often wait for DVD or Netflix, I’m usually willing enough to see a movie. At the worst, I’ll only have wasted a couple of hours, and I frequently learn things from bad movies. “That didn’t work” is easy enough, but “Why didn’t that work?” can be a delightful and illuminating puzzle. Most importantly, at the end of a couple of hours, I will know. I will know whether it worked or not; I will know what happened to the characters; I will know what the movie is trying to say.

TV isn’t like that. TV demands trust. TV builds expectations that, as the years go on, become more and more difficult to satisfy. How many perfect finales have you seen (other than Blackadder Goes Forth)? And when a show fails, whether the failure be minor or catastrophic, it hurts more. You know these characters - you’ve lived with them for months or years - so the betrayal can feel very personal.

I’m going through this right now with Once Upon a Time. It has never been my great love, but I had mostly been enjoying it, and Robert Carlyle is worth watching even when what surrounds him is less than ideal. But now, the whole Tamara and Greg subplot leaves me absolutely cold, they made a serious misstep with “Lacey”, and no one - I mean no one - is as stupid as Regina was in “The Evil Queen”. I will slaughter whole villages to find Snow White, then I will kill Snow White, and once she is dead the people will love me. I hereby challenge the writers to find me one actual person to whom that makes actual sense.

Is it possible for the show to recover? Sure. I sat through Season Three of Lost and was ultimately glad I did. It’s also possible, though, that it will not recover. If it doesn’t, I will not be devastated, but I will be disappointed.

And yet...

There’s a new man in my life. His name is Sherlock. It’s taken me two years to find him, and I owe a very belated hat tip to Joseph Susanka of Summa This, Summa That. I held off because I was afraid he would be great, and that his greatness would demand my attention. My trust. Another tiny piece of my heart. The funny thing is, when I finally sat down to watch him, that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. The fear and the desire can’t be separated. So far, they have both been satisfied, and therefore they have both increased. And very soon, I will reach the end of Series Two, glare at Netflix, and shout, “What do you mean I have to wait until September?!?”

Here it is, Mssrs. Moffat, Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman (and all the rest of you that I don’t have space to mention). Here’s a piece of my heart.

The game is on.