Commas and Ampersands

So I'm still on a Jason Pargin kick. This is definitely a Jason Pargin book (bizarre, convoluted, funny, much sweeter and kinder than you'd expect). Unlike most of his other books, there are no horror or SFF elements; this one is more of a straightforward(ish) satirical action/thriller/comedy. Also, Jason Pargin continues to have the best titles around. (The next book in the John Dies at the End series is There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs. I cannot wait.)

Anyway, back to this book.

Abbott is a 26-year-old Twitch streamer, incel, and part-time Lyft driver who shows up on a call to a parking lot, where he finds a girl about his own age with a mysterious black box, who introduces herself as Ether (clearly not her real name) and offers him $200K in cash to drive her across the country, on the condition that he a) does not ask her what's in the box, b) does not open the box, and c) leaves his phone and other electronics behind. Abbott, who still lives with his emotionally abusive dad, agrees on the principle that this will give him the ability and agency to move out (failing to realize that the money isn't really the issue; wherever you go, there you are, etc).

However, before he leaves, he broadcasts one last Twitch stream in which he tells his followers that he'll be gone for a few days on an errand. Since this is wildly out of character for Abbott, his followers and online friends immediately conclude that he's been kidnapped or is otherwise in trouble, and start a Subreddit to track him. Abbott, phoneless, is blissfully unaware that he and his companion are the subjects of an online media frenzy, or that they're being pursued by a growing number of people who are after the box and/or them, including a homicidal biker, a disgraced FBI agent with a specialty in online conspiracies who is convinced the box contains a nuclear bomb, and Abbott's dad, as well as a lot of online wannabe heroes.

It turns out that "black box of doom" refers not just to the box that is the book's Pulp-Fiction-style maguffin, but also (and perhaps foremost) online echo chambers that isolate people and turn their entire world into a popularity spiral in which they are terrified to voice their real opinions, and any controversy can blow up into a literally life-ending scandal.

I think the thing that makes this book work for me is that it's not terribly ham-handed and mostly just lets the characters be people (and genuinely isn't afraid to let them be terrible people now and then). The point is that we're all flawed; the point is that the world is better than you think; the point is that the people who think the only real world is offline and the ones who live completely within a screen are equally right and wrong. Abbott's online friends are real friends (one of them is one of the most helpful and resourceful people who gives them a hand on their increasingly bizarre and problem-prone road trip), and the people who say they're not, including Ether, are wrong; Abbott's dad, who is at least 50% of the reason why Abbott is Like That and thinks his son is wasting his life online and failing at Life, while successful by real-world standards is just as isolated, miserable, and emotionally repressed as Abbott is, but is also a Big Damn Hero when he has to be. Ether has embraced the ethos of living off the grid and insists that people are wasting their lives in the electronic world, but it was the online world that shaped her and created her biggest success and failures. You can make real connections online, but you also need to get offline and touch grass once in a while. It's not either/or.

This book also includes a chapter written by a conspiracy nut on a wall, lot of subreddit posts, and a climax that made me keep having to put the book down because I was laughing so hard. It's absolutely not going to be to everyone's taste, but I really liked it.

A brief, spoilery comment on pairings in the book:

about Abbott and Ether mostly

While Ether is definitely the first girl Abbott's ever had an emotionally intimate relationship with, they do not fall in love and in fact don't even really *like* each other for most of the book. By the end, they've risked their lives for each other a few times and are tentatively friends, but that's as far as it goes. I really liked that. (Abbott's dad and conspiracy theorist FBI agent Joan Key are definitely banging, however, and more power to 'em.)

I watched this over the last couple of days. (8 30-minute episodes on D+.) It's really unusual - not like anything else in Marvel's backlist. Somehow it felt like it belonged to a different era, like the type of superhero show that might've been made in the 70s or 80s. It's a comedy-drama-satire about two out of work actors trying to get a role on the superhero movie Wonder Man, which (in universe) is a remake of a cult hit show from a few decades ago. And that's about 90% of the plot. There is SOME other stuff going on which provides a superhero-related throughline for the movie, namely

spoilers for things revealed in the first couple of episodes

one of the actors (the protagonist) actually does have superpowers and is hiding it because in the MCU, super-powered individuals have to carry insane amounts of liability insurance to work in Hollywood and no production would hire him; and the other is spying for the government. So obviously both of these things provide the show's main sources of will they? won't they? who'll find out? tension.

But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.

I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.

I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.

( Some actual spoilers )

It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.