Hacker Cinema
The Chain
2019 · Film · 101 min
Directed by David Martín Porras
When Mike finds out that he has he same neurological disease as his father, he decides to enter a chain of assisted suicides, which operates under one rule: if you want to die, you must kill someone first.
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From the blog posts, it seems to me that he is not very keen on writing. I could be wrong. But when you start finding an excuse a day not to do what you theoretically think you should do, maybe the theory is wrong. Maybe he likes the idea of being a writer, but without being a writer.
Also, writing means many things. There are a lot of books, think of business books, that are written because it is the most effective way to provide a certain kind of information to a wide audience. Watching a video seems like a waste of time before, during, and after. Reading a book, most of the time, even if the information in it is ridiculous and of poor quality, does not seem like a waste of time. And there is "writing" like, say, Hemingway, James Salter thought about writing. Are we talking about "writing" the way Salter intended it or about "presenting information in a book"? Does "I like to write" means "I like to provide information" or it means "I like to use the written word specifically to present ideas"?
Rossellini, the famous director, said that he was not just a film director, but an artist and disseminator using whatever medium he thought was the most appropriate in order to show his ideas or his view of the world.
I have almost stopped reading recent books. I find them formulaic, winking at the "mythical" audience and what they want, which most of the time is cheap entertainment. There is an author I liked, Adrian McKinty, who had written a series of books set in Belfast at the time of the Troubles. It was a joy to read them. They were erudite and had a great rhythm. But he found himself forced to become an Uber driver to pay the bills--the books were not selling.
Then, with the support of Don Winslow and Winslow's agent, he was able to break through with a book, The Chain, which was so formulaic, poorly written and full of the adjectives and adverbs that make college-educated people drool, that I found it hard to recognize him as the same author of the series set in the Troubles era. It was very good for him and disappointing for me.
I am now reading novels written between the 1930s and the 1960s, and although each decade has its sins, I sense that most authors were not that much concerned about their audience, were not corrupted by literary agents and book clubs, but wrote what they, and not others, wanted to write.