Thesis Synthesis
I Love Boosters, and wearing a story's message on its [couture] sleeve
I very rarely miss a week to post on here, however the last ten days or so have been overwhelming — both personally, and creatively.
Firstly, I finally finished the next draft of my small town, gothic horror novel this morning! The Last Tuesday of the Month — now retitled The Sky Screams Tuesday — sits about 12,000 words less than it did before, and is much more streamlined and focused.
Almost too focused, I found myself wondering as I came to wrap up the latest version this morning.
Because I’m not delusional enough to think anyone reading this blog remembers anything about my myriad creative projects…The Sky Screams Tuesday is my reconciliation with growing up in central Illinois, and all the troubled revelations that comes with that.
Photo by Brendan Burton
It’s a Midwestern gothic tale at heart, about a small town overrun by ‘hauntings’ — encompassing visions of the dead, poltergeists that tear homes apart, possessions of the innocent at the hands of the most malevolent spirits, and a impenetrable dark shroud that eats away at the perimeter of a small town, and the sanity of those within.
Told from the perspective of 6 innocent bystanders, The Sky Screams Tuesday details the endless horrors that run rampant over the town of Weilog Bluffs throughout an entire month, leading to multiple nightmarish realizations regarding the town’s distant past, buried deep beneath the soil.
It is, brazenly, about towns that try to pretend like their foundations and rises to mediocrity were born of anything other than exploitation and attrition. It’s about all the people I grew up with, who assured me we were all just hard working, blue collar, good folks born from fellow good folks who would never intentionally hurt those not like them. It’s about my own tackling of the past, and coming to accept what atrocities my ancestors must have committed, just by virtue of the time and place in which they existed.
The Sky Screams Tuesday doesn’t beat around this bush. Not this version. It is very open about who these characters are and what they stand for. When the hauntings get worse and the citizens of Weilog Bluffs devolve into hopeless monsters, the novel doesn’t shy away from explicitly talking about which spirits are bringing them to do this, and what they want.
Which feels like it’s breaking some kind of literary rule — to speak the thesis aloud and point to it like a big neon sign off the highway. I feel like most contemporary literature AVOIDS addressing the thesis like the absolute plague. That ‘less is more’ always prevails, and that obscurity works better for suspense than clarity.
I can think of examples where that’s certainly true, but I can also think of endless examples where the opposite works. Stories that are unafraid to wear their message on their sleeve and make it abundantly clear where the story is headed.
I Love Boosters is the latest film from fearless auteur Boots Riley — the mastermind behind Sorry to Bother You.
On it’s face, Boosters is about a ragtag group of girls who steal high-fashion clothes from big name designers, and then turn around and sell them for discounted prices, both as a means of survival, and as a fuck you to the system by redistributing objects of great wealth to the less privileged.
The first half of Boosters plays on this idea repeatedly and effortlessly. It’s hysterical and unabashedly honest in its portrayal of honest thieves and the capitalist ghouls they steal from.
But then the film pivots, rather hard. Not unlike in Sorry to Bother You, there’s a very definable moment in I Love Boosters where the story no longer becomes about the obvious, and suddenly takes a left turn into both the absurd and the existential.
Minor spoilers (for the love of god, if you like weird, satirical, smart films from visionary directors, please go see this movie), but the TL;DR is that the girls discover a magical device that acts as simultaneously as a teleporter to a sweatshop in China, a ‘deconstructor’ that separates objects into their essential parts, and a ‘situation exaggerator’ (self explanatory).
At first, the device feels ridiculous. Like it’s just here as a Deus Ex Machina to minimize the amount of work the characters have to put in to resolve a situation. There’s an entire chase scene throughout the second act that revolves solely around the use and abuse of this device, resulting in Keke Palmer turning a cadre of pyramid scheme scammers into Hellraiser-like fleshless automatons.
But the great trick that I Love Boosters pulls off is that the device is ultimately not just there to resolve the plot (which, yes it is,) but it’s there as a VERY direct message to the audience. It’s about fashion yes, about capitalism and the value it arbitrarily assigns to objects, sure, but it’s also about creativity itself.
A key component of the plot in I Love Boosters is that Keke Palmer is/was a noted fashion designer, however, prior the events of the movie, antagonist and charlatan Demi Moore has made a name for herself as THE famous designer after stealing the works from Palmer and women of color like her.
The device, in turn, is meant to be a creative response to the actuaries and executives that act as both chokepoints and thieves themselves, as they covet and manipulate the creative endeavors of all — writers, actors, fashion designers, filmmakers — to reclaim them as their own and brand them as part of the ‘corporate output.’
And in the face of that, as the creatives, we have a few choices. We can deconstruct, we can teleport (outsource), or we can exaggerate the situation.
I Love Boosters has very little to do with stealing high end clothing by the end of it. I mean, it does, but it’s obvious that Boots isn’t REALLY talking about the simple act of reselling high end dresses by the end of it all. Boots is wearing his heart on his sleeve and speaking DIRECTLY to the audience, with a bald-faced, unabashed, harsh truth about HIS LIFE and his STRUGGLES, clearly in the film industry but also in the music industry and beyond.
And it simply works.
It’s hard to explain how, because a lot of folks might easily tune out during the second half of the film, but those who stick with it just seem to get what I Love Boosters is doing. It just feels so right and so rewarding to see where Boots takes the story after so much absurdism, satire, and ridiculousness.
I look now to June 20th — when I’m set to attend the Chicago Writers Conference, where I’ll be ‘shopping’ my latest manuscript to a handful of literary agents. Essentially doing the same in person as I’ve been doing online for the last 15 years, hawking myself to agents as a ‘personable, likeable' writer with a completed project in their hands that is any way marketable.
I don’t really have any confidence in this fairing any better than any of my online query crusades over the last decade. I’m too far down the rabbit hole and too jaded now to trick myself into thinking ANYTHING I write is worthy of being published, or that ANY agent will ever give me more than five minutes of their time.
But I still feel good about the effort to do this, and that this new version of one of my favorite manuscripts is one that I feel very proud of and happy to show to others.
And above all, I realized that I’m happy I’m not hiding the meaning of this story behind any veneers. The Sky Screams Tuesday is unambiguously me, and exclusively a story I could tell, in all regards. That alone makes me think it’s a worthwhile effort, and something that brings me comfort, peace, happiness, and understanding in a space where so often creative endeavors are robbed of such rewards.