Sometimes, you just need to sit yourself down and watch a predictable movie. You know, the kind where you know the ending from the very first over-dramatized opening scene in which the music swells and the slightly awkward, outcast teenage girl catches a glimpse of the high school football team’s quarterback for the first time in the halls at school.
Sometimes, it’s calming to know the pattern of a story before it is even told to you. I remember making a remark to my mom after watching reruns of Full House together that every episode was the same. Life as usual, until something went wrong between some of the characters, and the episode would end with them making amends to the tune of some happy-emotional music in the background. She laughed and said, “But we keep watching, don’t we?”
In a world like today’s, where the political climate is as volatile and excruciatingly explosive as ever, sometimes we need a story with a happy ending. Sometimes we need to start a story knowing it won’t leave us in pieces at the end.
It’s human nature to want that, to desire it right from the get go. Order, disorder, order restored.
But real life doesn’t work that way. Real life is messy. Real life is those three things in a mixed up order, whichever order the universe desires.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Book Review, Percival Everett’s work is introduced by the interviewer with these words: “Perhaps the only consistent aspect of Percival Everett’s body of work is its unpredictability.” I haven’t done much reading of his work yet, but from what I have read, this has proved itself true. The ending of Frenzy wouldn’t exactly qualify as your typical rom-com progression of events.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the proposition that the suspicious pants tweet is Percival Everett, summed up. The more I learn, the more I begin to agree.
When a work takes everything we naturally crave and flips it on its head, shakes up the reader and reminds us that humanity doesn’t always restore order, that’s what a work means something.
Scrolling through Everett quotes led me to one from I Am Not Sidney Poitier: “It’s a bitch, ain’t it? The things we assume.”
This world survives because of assumptions. We survive because of assumptions. Those pieces of art that take those assumptions about what comes next and do the exact opposite? Those are the ones that make us think.
Frenzy gives us a god that craves sleep and deep emotions. Frenzy gives us a god who craves death.
I don’t think Everett and Nicholas Sparks would get along.