Don’t Write What You Know
A couple of weeks ago I talked about how I’m surviving without cable - it involves essentially stealing programs that I’m supposed to be paying for. One of them is Showtime’s CALIFORNICATION. Featuring the low-key charisma of David Duchovney, CALIFORNICATION is a half-hour serial dramady about a novelist and screenwriter named Hank Moody who struggles with romance and writer’s block in the oversaturated sunshine of Santa Monica.
I’ve seen the first five episodes and I cannot figure out if I like it. Something bugs me about Californication, and I think it’s the tone. Every time I watch it I feel like I’m being condescended to. At the same time there is a air of sanded-down unreality to the show, as though they screenwriters didn’t do their research. Which is inexcusable, because it’s a show about a screenwriter. They could have just swapped stories with each other.
Hank Moody is a heroic figure. Sure he has flaws, but they’re terrific flaws, the kind of flaws we all wish we had. For one thing, he has poor impulse control which leads him to tell the truth amid the sea of Hollywood hypocrites in which he swims. It also drives him into the arms of a series of drop-dead beautiful women, many of whom are married to Hollywood hypocrites. Then after he’s slept with them, he devastates them in their phoniness with a sarcastic quip. He’s quick with his fists. He drinks heavily, he does a little coke now and then.
Hank has a few depressing but brilliant novels under his belt but his last one, GOD HATES US ALL, was turned into a stupid but hyper-successful movie called CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE, which galls him. He is apparently living off an endless supply of money from that hit, which allows him to alienate everyone he knows and still live pretty well. And of course, a few of the people he abuses can’t help but love the big galoot because, you know, he’s just Hank.
He carries a torch for his beautiful ex-wife and dotes on his 12-year-old daughter who wants the two parents to get back together. Is it my imagination or does every single thing about this situation ring false?
First things first. Nobody sleeps with writers. Sure it’s partially because almost no writers look like David Duchovney, but it’s also because writers tend to be quiet, passive-agressive types. Writers are not good with their fists. They ARE good with sarcastic quips. But for a writer to speak to an all girl class and then have them worship him like a rock star, like happened last week, that’s just crazy.
The reason Hank Moody has writer’s block is because if he was spending any time writing, the show would grind to a halt. There is nothing less cinematic than writing. Microbiology is more dynamic. I’ve never so much as seen a laptop in Moody’s condo. The one time he’s written anything on the show, it was at a display iMac at the Apple Store in Santa Monica.
I can imagine a scenario in which the show’s creators, Tom Kapinos for one, examined the dramatic options of doing a show about their own lives and realized quickly that there just wasn’t any money in that. So they built their writer from the best legends about other writers. Moody is Hemingway without the suicidal tendencies and in much better shape. Hemingway has done more to foul up the perception of what writers are like than anyone. Bastard.
If you’re a writer, making your hero a writer is a dangerous minefield and I advise against it. Either you’re accurate about the job and you’re being self-indulgent or you make it dramatic and you’re ridiculous. They’d have been wise to make Hank Moody a painter or a musician, to give themselves a little more distance. Well, I’m still going to keep watching because I like Duchovney and I like to watch beautiful women sleeping with him. I just hope next time I see him, Duchovney is playing a guy who does a job that no one involved in the production has.
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PostScript: I just now finally watched last Monday’s episode, which includes a scene of Hank at his laptop in his condo. Predictably though, he wasn’t writing. He was propping up something that he was reading. And he had been robbed by a pick-up earlier in the episode, who had stolen his guitar and vinyl records, but NOT THE LAPTOP! I think, like me, she hadn’t been able to spot it.
September 21st, 2007 at 6:33 am
I’ve said it before and I said it often: I don’t like books about writers, I don’t like plays about actors, and I don’t like films about film people. There are many reasons why: one of the main ones is that it’s incredibly lazy, hence the title of this entry.
“Californication” illustrates the principal pitfall of self-referential subject matter: the creators tend to project impossible, wish-list qualities onto the principals. The book “The World According to Garp” has long passages of fiction-in-fiction by the titular writer-character T.S. Garp. All the other characters and fake book reviews lavish fulsome praise on these passages as the best fiction ever written. But for God’s sake, it’s no better than the rest of the book, dig?
What screenwriter wouldn’t want to screw beautiful women, live in Santa Monica on royalties, and most importantly, not friggin’ write? Furthermore, what writer wouldn’t want this masturbatory fantasy embodied in David Duchovny?
There have been two great films about screenwriters, both over fifty years old: IN A LONELY PLACE and SUNSET BLVD. Both featured tormented writers, one with anger-management issues and another an abject failure. (A lot of people I know liked ADAPTATION, but not me: too cheeky, too “write-what-you-know.”) I sincerely doubt the egos that run the biz these days would allow themselves to be portrayed having such recognizable, common, human flaws.
September 21st, 2007 at 4:10 pm
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September 22nd, 2007 at 4:35 am
addenda: your PS may indicate the producers might be trying out a wink-wink in-joke: never show Hank actually writing, EVER. Sort of like never seeing Tim Allen’s neighbor’s face.