in the wildhorn musical, btw—specifically in the pre-bway tryout in 2011—there’s this game the hatter plays.

everybody at the table writes down the thing they hate most about alice. and then the march hare reads all of it aloud, with the goal of breaking alice. (when the show transferred to broadway later that year, this scene was narrowed in focus such that it’s all coming from the hatter, but the essence remains)

you’re moody, unfocused, can’t take the pressure. can’t budget time, can’t manage money. rude! doesn’t stand up for herself, doesn’t play well with others, doesn’t like herself, doesn’t know why she’s here, doesn’t get the game, doesn’t play the game—

the white knight describes the tea party as “a mean spirited bunch of bullies who want to do away with everyone and everything but doesn’t have a clue what to put in its place.”

& the hatter’s goal in the musical fundamentally is to wear alice down and then take over.

:)

August 30: Station Eleven Thoughts, Letters + Comics

My revelation from earlier, re: Station Eleven, no longer seems particularly revelatory or much like anything I can expand to a larger point. It just really hit me all of a sudden that both Arthur and Miranda keep these non-traditional diaries, that his letters to V and her never-ending Dr. Eleven comics serve the same purposes for each of them. That’s why each work fails, in a sense, within its genre: the letters aren’t responded to, the comics are never finished. Because the point for Arthur wasn’t really to get a response; it was to write down his feelings. And the point for Miranda wasn’t really to write a complete narrative and then put it out to the world; it was to immerse herself in the process, and use this science fiction universe of her creation to work out her own problems and emotions. For both of them, the act of creating (writing/drawing) soothes them, and it also seems to set something free.

Another parallel between the two works--the letters and the comics--is that they subsequently escape their bounds and go on to influence others, past what the creator intended. Arthur’s letters are published without his consent. How much impact they truly had is to some degree not yet determined. At the very least, where I am in the story, the book has lead Clark to see himself in a different light--whether that affects his life later or is more Thematic than Plot Relevant, I don’t know. I assume it’s more thematic but I still have 100 pages left. Kirsten had the book at some point as well. Again, tbd (for me) if she finds it again. And the book was also the reason for Arthur and Miranda to meet one last time--which led to her giving Arthur her comics, which led to the comics ending up in Kirsten’s hands. So in other words, the ‘impact’ of the book might be both abbreviated (within the universe) and attenuated (plot-wise) but the letters certainly did reach farther than Arthur intended, and they did that because he wrote them as letters and sent them. The concept of letters is that they are sent. The concept of a diary is that it stays hidden. When he made his diary letters, the very format he chose meant he lost control of them and they subsequently found their way into others’ hands.

Similarly, a comic, like any creative work, is meant to be read. Even if not all creative works are finished and not all finished or unfinished creative works are shared with others, the default assumption, as the dinner guests in LA point out, is that the story will be concluded and then it will be made public. Miranda has no interest in doing that, because she recognizes on some level that the work is for her, not just the product but the process, but it goes on for so long that eventually even she has to see the boundaries of the form. Stories have endings. She could feel the ending of hers coming. And she went to the trouble of self-publishing two volumes, thus putting her diary-like work into a more traditional format: making it look more like the comic it ostensibly is than the diary it truly is. Once she does that, and disseminates the work even to one person, she loses control of it; it goes out into the world; it is read and remembered and preserved far beyond her own life or even her memory. The format she chose for her diary-like work is, as with Arthur’s letters, the vehicle by which she loses control of the work, but also the reason the work survives her. The difference is that letters ideally are not public, past the sender and he recipient, whereas art ideally is, and accessible to a much wider world. The dissemination of the letters was awkward and wrong. It was a violation. The preservation and respect for the art is touching and almost miraculous.

I wonder if there’s something here about the dissemination of Arthur’s diary in some way foreshadowing--except not really because of the format of the book--or existing as the miniature of the dissemination of Miranda’s work but that probably doesn’t actually track.

I wonder if Kirsten and August will reach the airport, meet Clark and/or find the book, and this will lead Kirsten to understand who MC was, to finally solve the mystery of her beloved comics and their connection to Arthur. That’s probably how I would play it.