Writing Right with Dmitri: It's Extraordinary What You Can Learn from Cheap Fiction
Created | Updated Jun 4, 2017
Writing Right with Dmitri: It's Extraordinary What You Can Learn from Cheap Fiction
Do you want to understand a country or people? An era? Don't read their great writers. Don't pay attention to their deathless works of art. Listen to their bad pop songs. Watch their cheap television. Rummage through their trash for tabloids and garishly-illustrated paperbacks. You will discover their secret desires.
You're not your Nobel Prize winners, humanity. You're your cheap hacks. Because, let's face it, who reads great literature? A handful of eggheads, that's who. Are they running things? I think not. (Have you looked at the White House lately?) Who decides what's in, what's out? What the crooked-pinkie crowd in Cologne used to call, contemptuously, 'die breite Masse.' Bet you can guess who that is. So if you want to understand human behaviour, check out the pop culture.
That doesn't mean pop literature/cinema/television/music reflects reality. Au contraire, mon enfant. It just reflects what Joe and Peg and the kids wish would happen. Yes, children. Game of Thrones is outing your secret desires. Be ashamed. Be deeply ashamed.
In 1973, George Mikes (pronounced 'MEE-kesh') wrote a very funny novel called The Spy Who Died of Boredom. Mikes, Hungarian by birth and British by choice and Soviet intervention, explained many things about the mindset of the East Bloc. For instance, that they couldn't possibly believe that in the US, information was freely available at the public library. His spy has to encode the government brochures on microfilm and pretend he obtained them some other way. (Compare this to Our Man in Havana.)
One of Mikes' revelations to the Western world was his description of Soviet 'capitalist porn'. According to Mikes, these samizdat works described people having sex on the 133rd floor of a luxury high-rise. The women were always dripping with diamonds, especially when having sex. They ate and drank only the most expensive food and beverages. . . who cared about the plot? Conspicuous consumption was the theme here. I reckoned he was right: in 1980, the only thing Romanian schoolchildren wanted to ask me about the US was 'Who shot J.R.?'
Right now, you have a wonderful opportunity to learn about life in post-Soviet Russia. Just watch The Sniffer (Nyukhach), a Ukrainian series in Russian. (Very popular in Russia, which must be the only thing the two countries have in common these days.) The hero is one of those 'defective detectives' whose superpower is his acute sense of smell, and whose weakness is allergies, such as cats. By Russian standards, he is fabulously wealthy. He throws around dollars and euro notes like confetti, and probably uses rubles for packing filler. When he wants to go bowling, he rents the whole place for an hour or so. (Note: bowling and paintball appear to be high-status pastimes in the new Russia. This would amuse the guys down at the Grange.) He appears to live in a glass-and-metal box of a building over a private parking garage. Imagine moving into a modern office building with giant, heavy-framed windows, and you'll be visualising it. (You always wanted to live in the university's new law library, right?) The Sniffer's furniture is IKEA on a monstrous scale, and his TV set is built into the wall. But his pride and joy is a red sports car. Oh, don't ask me what kind of car it is. It has wheels and runs. It has jaunty stripes on. It's a car, who cares?
Apparently, the audience does, passionately. In one scene, which takes place in the depressing but high-status private parking garage, the Sniffer and his son get into the Car, which is lovingly filmed, with emphasis on the headlights. They drive off. The camera lingers. Western audience member waits for the revelation that an enemy is lurking in the garage. . . no such thing. They just like looking at the car and the garage.
I suspect capitalist porn.
Of course this isn't a realistic story, by any stretch of the imagination. These people have way too much money. There's as much violence as in a 40s film noir, and victims drop like flies. Now, the gunsel who showed up to attack the hero in episode 3, and looked exactly like Vladimir Putin. . . well, that we might believe. But, while this highly entertaining series in no way resembles life on any planet, it reveals by its very popularity that an awful lot of people would like it to be real. And that Eastern Europe is every bit as materialistic as Western Europe, so there.
I recommend you give the show a watch for educational purposes. The star, Kirill Käro, is from Estonia, and looks like Damien Lewis, only even more menacing, if that's possible. What do you mean you don't speak Russian? That's what subtitles are for. Don't be a wuss. If you pay attention, you can pick up new Russian cuss words. He uses that one that ends in '-your mother' exactly once an episode. Okay, I checked the audio options: if you prefer, you may listen in Polish or Spanish. I've had exactly three semesters more Russian than Polish, so I'll stick with that, because Spanish dubbing goes way too fast for me.
Having looked at a foreign country's pop television, you can take a clearer look at your own. What would a visitor from Mars have to say about the top UK/US offerings? Judging from prime time, what do people desire? Money? Country houses? Cool clothes? Gadgets? What constitutes 'capitalist porn' in your country?
No, I'm not recommending you feed your fellow humans' appetites for such things. I'm suggesting you should know about them, so that you can exploit them for your own nefarious writing purposes.
Also, I want to know: would anybody here ever want to live in The Sniffer's house? Which fictional detective has the best digs, in your opinion?
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