Third Villain

 

As you may know, I published a novel in 2020 called The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the transformation of Eliza (lifted from Shaw's Pygmalion)  from a girl of the streets into a lady who could pass for a duchess. There are three villains in the mix, two from the world of literature and one from history. There's one guy who did not make the cut for my third villain, though I was sorely tempted:

Rupert of Hentzau.

Not familiar with the name? Maybe this quote will jog your memory: 

For my part, if a man must needs be a knave, I would have him a debonair knave, and I liked Rupert Hentzau better than his long-faced, close-eyed companions. It makes your sin no worse, as I conceive, to do it à la mode and stylishly."

― Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

 Rupert is the youngest, most devious and dangerous member of the cabal of Six to replace the rightful king of Ruritania with his younger brother. Of the Six, only Rupert escapes royal retribution (to reappear in the sequel). Why, you may ask, did I reject this extraordinary villain for my pastiche?

First, the dates didn't match up. The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau are both supposed to have taken place in the late 1870s--early 1880s (there's a three-year gap between the two). More importantly, Rupert is mortally wounded and his body burned to ash in the second book. While my conscience might have allowed me to finagle a resurrection for the villain, an urn full of ashes is quite an obstacle to contend with. My story is set in 1912, just after the events set down in Shaw's Pygmalion and before the Holmes story His Last Bow. There's no way I could recast my timeline to accommodate young Rupert (who would have been awfully young for any events pre-dating Prisoner, in which he is supposed to be about twenty-two or twenty-three. I prefer my villains old enough to vote.

(If you've read the book, you'll know I did some mighty fine timeline tap dancing to include my secondary villain. But I think I played fair and square with the reader on that score. My conscience is clear.)

Second, Rupert was too imposing, too dominating, too clever a character for the role of tertiary villain. By his very nature (were I to do justice to him) he threatened to lead me astray from my original focus for my story. (I'm not sure he didn't overpower Hope's intentions for Prisoner. The sequel may have been the writer's revenge upon his villain for upstaging the action.)

But most important, The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle is a bit of a high-wire act. I knew it going in. I was bringing together characters and events created by three Victorian heavy hitters: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and Robert Louis Stevenson (as with assassins, three names always connotes danger). What the story needed was a net.

By a net I mean a story that is essentially a flight of fantasy needs a rudder, an anchor. It needs to be thoroughly grounded in reality. It is essential that the more fantastic your tale, the more grounded in reality your details must be. That's why The Hobbit, the tale of a strange little creature who goes dragon-hunting with a pack of dwarves, begins with a smoke and a tea party. And Bilbo runs off without a handkerchief! Where does The Wind in the Willows start? With spring cleaning! This is why I had to make sure that the alias Holmes assumes to go undercover was a real American Mafioso. And when I needed to delay a train journey I scoured the internet for a possible historical cause. And when I needed someone to impersonate Holmes, I brought in--sorry, you'll have to read the book for that one.

What I needed was someone a bit more prosaic, more grounded in reality than Rupert. I needed a real historic person. One whose interest in Eliza was matrimonial, though not necessarily for himself, someone liable to be taken in by the swirling rumors of her noble, perhaps even royal background.

So I went to work. And I turned up Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria. Rupprecht was 43 in 1912, and his first wife, Duchess Marie Gabrielle, had just died. Which meant that he would be looking for a new wife in 1912. Rupprecht, whose name even sounded like Rupert, who was slated to rule a kingdom nearly as mythical today as Hope's Ruritania was then. He married for a second time in 1921, after the war. Rupprecht was my boy. 

(He never did rule; after the first world war Bavaria was declared a republic. But when Hitler offered to restore the crown to him he turned it down and fled Germany. He was no Nazi.)

He was not right for the villain, though. Only for the predicate. The Prince of Bavaria wouldn't traipse over to England to hunt up a wife. He'd send a minion. But who?

That was where I got really lucky. Y'see, I found out the prince was assigned an adjutant in 1895--Lieutenant Otto von Stetten. For three and a half years von Stetten accompanied the prince on extensive trips across the globe. The lieutenant was 33, the prince 26. They must have become close.

Of course von Stetten was not still the prince's adjutant in 1912. By then Colonel von Stetten (he was to retire as a highly decorated general after the first world war) was a close adviser to King Otto (king in name only; he was considered mad, probably a victim of PTSD, and was deposed in 1913 by his cousin Ludwig, Rupprecht's father. Obviously Otto was skilled at handling ticklish matters.

Who better to seek out a new bride for the bereaved prince?

So I was able to introduce him thusly:

“Looming before me was the man undoubtedly their chief, though he resembled them no more than the hawk does the crow. His countenance was pale, with thin bloodless lips beneath a hussar’s moustache. His grey hair was cropped close under a bowler hat. His eyes were a calm grey sea beneath the welkin of heavy brows. He was carapaced like a turtle in a caped astrakhan greatcoat with blinding brass buttons. He paced back and forth in front of me, a malacca laid casually across his shoulder."

He became one of my favorite characters.

Did I miss my chance at Rupert of Hentzau? By no means. Count Rupert, in exile from Ruritania, could easily have traveled to England seeking revenge on Rudolph Rassendyll and locked horns instead with a younger Sherlock Holmes. But that, as they say, is a tale for another day.

EXT.

Calvin Trillin on writing

 

"I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if
his confidence is completely shot."

 --Calvin Trillin: journalist, humorist, deadline poet.

Favorite books:

Alice, Let's Eat

Uncivil Liberties

Enough's Enough: and Other Rules of Life

Bonus quote:

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates

 into hard work.”

As Trillin says: Enough's enough.

The magic circle

"That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world."

--J.R.R. Tolkien

 I'll tell you a secret: I don't believe in the willing suspension of disbelief. It's not that I've suspended my belief in suspension of disbelief; I never bought it,

 at least in the broad sense it's come to mean.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of Xanadu fame, first coined the term. He had a very specific meaning in mind. He was publishing Lyrical Ballads along with his buddy William Wordsworth. Wordsworth had the easy job: nature poems. Who doesn't like a good idyll? Coleridge's assignment was trickier: poems of the supernatural. He knew that would be harder for readers to swallow, so he composed a little apologia in his Biographia Literaria. These are his words on the subject:

"In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

Anyone who's read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner sober knows what he was going on about.  He was asking for a mulligan for descriptions of witches and werewolves and things that go bump in the night. This was a necessity in a newly enlightened age, though less so today.

But over the years the term has expanded radically to mean a conscious determination to dismiss rational judgement; necessary for the engagement and enjoyment of story in any medium, be it novels, plays films, or presumably opera and ballet. And mime. The storyteller must pull the wool over the eyes of his audience, so immersing them that they believe they're actually experiencing the events presented.

Horse-puckey.

You're talking about a psychotic episode there. Anyone who wholly buys into the "reality" of a story has serious mental problems. The willing suspension of disbelief is a shibboleth. I don't have to suspend disbelief to listen to Beethoven's Ninth, or look at Picasso's Guernica or read Joyce's Ulysses. The question of belief never arises.Tell me where dramatic contrivance is concealed in Greek tragedy, with its masks and buskins and chorus.

Tell me where it's concealed in Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. Or Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Or Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. It's right out there for every one to see--even marvel at. It's not realistic--but realism is only one style of storytelling.

Tell me how Shakespeare's asides or Woody Allen's monologues conceal dramatic contrivance. Tell me how it's concealed in Fellini's 8 1/2 or Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot.

Let's look at Some Like It Hot.  Certainly the other characters must believe Daphne and Josephine are real women, but that's not suspension of disbelief, that's a simple dramatic convention. It's a rule of the game. The rule of the game in opera? Everybody sings! All the time! Okay, we accept the rule, we enjoy the story. The rule in movie musicals? Gene Kelly sings and dances! Or did you think Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were perfectly believable as women?

Let's drop in on our buddy Thespis back in the 6th century B.C.E.

He steps out from the chorus. He starts speaking as, say, Agamemnon. This was the first time in the Dionysian ritual that became theatre. What happened on that historic occasion? Do you think the Athenians gasped and said, "My God, Thespis is gone, and in his place is Agamemnon"?

Or did they reason thusly: "Ah, new rule. Thespis here is supposed to represent Agamemnon. Cool."

Do you think those Greeks had no experience with sign and symbol, with one thing representing another? Do you think Greek boys had never said to each other, "Let's pretend I'm Achilles and you're Patroclus?"

"Willing suspension of disbelief" implies that there is a disbelief which needs to be consciously suspended. It further implies (though not as surely) that belief of some sort is a necessary element of enjoying a narrative, that it must somehow seem real, and that the creator's job is to create an illusion of reality.

Realism is a technique which has its uses and abuses, but is certainly only one of many valid styles of story-telling. It had its vogue in the theatre and literature right around the turn of the 20th century.  Those media have moved on. Unfortunately this was the same time as film was being birthed, and film got stuck in realism, partly because it was so good at it (although melodrama was also at its height, which meant music was played as background to the action, something completely unrealistic which persists in movies today). It's still trying to throw those chains off, but  some middle class movie-goers, steeped in realism, go into a fit when a black girl is cast as a mermaid. Hollywood, conservative to its core, gets nervous. Does realism still have its place in storytelling? Of course. But it's not the only arrow in our quiver.

Art as illusion occupies a very small space in the history of ideas. I don't need to suspend disbelief when Gene Kelly dances or Chow Yun Fat flies or Harpo Marx shakes a ton of silverware out of his sleeve.

The illusion of reality isn't necessary for narrative, whether it's a novel, a play, or a film. Painting was set free of it over a century and a half ago. Do you think Van Gogh needed to create an illusion in order for his audience to experience his pictures as he intended? Music has never had much use for it, except when cannons roar in the 1812 Overture and program music. Hell, Penn and Teller have proved it's not even necessary for a magic act.

People don't build movie theaters and bookstores to battle the scourge of disbelief. They do it because there are large audiences hungry to be entertained. People seem to be wired to enjoy stories, rather than the reverse. They don't listen to them grudgingly, and only the very bad story-teller can lose them. I know this. I watched Dude, Where's My Car all the way through.

Nor is belief a necessity in enjoying stories. When the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business all get through French customs by pretending to be Maurice Chevalier, my enjoyment has nothing to do with belief. And when the brawl in Blazing Saddles breaks out of its world into the set of a movie musical, my reaction was not disbelief. It was joy.

American Splendor juxtaposed the real Harvey Pekar with his avatars, the actor Paul Giamatti and the comic book character drawn by R. Crumb, and it NEVER pulled me out of the story. Audiences aren't looking for an illusion, they're looking for a story, and they seem to be willing to put up with a great deal to get it.

A rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into a bar -- we don't sit there thinking, sounds like a joke coming up, better suspend my disbelief, we think I hope this is a funny joke.

But--you'll say--but--something happens. Something special, when I enter a story. Some sort of transport into another world, another dimension. I can lay down my burdens and lie in the grass, staring up at strange stars.

I agree. 

We enter the magic circle. The sacred space. The pentagram.  That's how it began. I didn't make up this term. It's a term familiar to gamers, lifted from Johann Huizinga's seminal work Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture.  "We love when we play" as the band Yes put it. We're invited to play, not coerced. Participants are not passive, but fully engaged.

Huizinga says: "Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain."

 The magic circle is the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world. The border between worlds is porous. You can still see the outside world from the middle of the circle. You're still grounded. That's what gives you the courage to explore.

Rules are essential in this circle. They create the structures which will guide us. Certain rules are invoked at the beginning of a game or a story. Once those rules are set forth and agreed to by the participants, violations are deemed "cheating" and spoil the enterprise. The key is consistency. You must go directly to jail. Do not pass go. In storytelling, we call these rules genre expectations. Those expectations can be subverted, but they cannot be ignored. Each genre relates its own tensions to be resolved. They each have their own internal logic. 

Chekhov's rule: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. 

Jane Austen's dictum: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Logic and realism are not the same. If you tell me in the first act that Spiderman can spin webs, then I'll believe it's logical in the second act for him to stop an el train with his webs. But I won't find it logical in the third act if he flies across the city after Doctor Octopus -- because that wasn't in the rules you set for the game. I'll feel cheated. But in neither case is the reality of a man who spins webs even a question.

The only time belief or disbelief enters into the appreciation of a narrative is when the narrator begins with: This is a true story. Because what we expect from a narrative is that it establish its own rules and remain consistent to them, not that it "suspends disbelief".

There's no question of belief or disbelief in a game. There are conventions, rules (sometimes loose, sometimes absolute) that govern all play -- and storytelling is play.

When you opened that Monopoly board for the first time, you read the rules, you fought over who would be the race car, who would be the dog. You got excited, caught up in the game. When someone broke the rules, you accused them of cheating. Maybe an actual fight broke out.

But you never really thought for a second that you were a Scots terrier with a hotel in Atlantic City.

Reading is as engaging as gaming. It is not a passive experience. The reader brings an entire world to the table. The writer's contribution is a thin slice of that world, laid thereon. Reading fully engaged is as exhausting an enterprise as any tennis match or 10k marathon.

Am I saying that storytelling is a game? Yes, I suppose I am.

 Lastly, I see no reason to posit a suspension of disbelief because, as some people put forward, a story provokes an emotional response. "Ode to Joy" provokes an emotional response. So does "Guernica". So does playing a game of monopoly or chess, or watching a baseball game. None of these activities ask me for belief; none of them try to foist an illusion upon me.

If you want to argue a "willingness to pretend", I'm right there with you. If you want to argue that a work of art needs to have an internal consistency to satisfy its audience, you've got me as an ally. But "the willing suspension of disbelief" lends itself too easily to a pernicious belief held by too many aspiring storytellers that a rigid adherence to the tenets of realism is the only way to write.

Horse puckey.

 

Is the algorithm the terrorist?

An echo in the echo tunnel

After the horrific event in New Orleans in the early hours of New Year's Day, along with its bizarre echo in front of the Las Vegas Trump International and the theories floated around the radicalization of Shamsud-Din Jabbar(a native Texan, army veteran, realtor--one of us, not one of "them"), a question troubled my mind: how is it that social media helps madmen find their brethren while isolating

the sane?

In other words:

Is the algorithm the real terrorist?

Is the answer to my first question as simple as this: because the sane do not engage in the constant fruitless and exhausting disputes that social media encourages and promotes? Designed to be fruitless, mind you, because consensus in debate would clear both combatants and rubberneckers from the field. Because the sane, or at least the untroubled, get on with their lives and are therefore less profitable to the tech overseers and their uber-capitalist plantation owners who want to enslave our eyeballs?

And if so, should coders be considered in loco parentis and held legally responsible for the algorithm's crimes of inciting violence? Are there grounds for a class-action lawsuit against these bad actors that could bring them to heel? Would such an action be wise?

Be aware that there is already precedent. Twenty-five survivors of the racist mass shooting in Buffalo committed by Payton Gendron have filed suit against Reddit and Youtube. Gendron anticipated this question in his manifesto:

Where did you get your current beliefs? 

Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person. I read multiple sources of information from all ideologies and decided that my current one is most correct.

If social media's main product is its users' eyeballs, can it be prosecuted in civil or criminal court for producing and marketing a corrupted and dangerous product, e.g., terrorists? The lawsuit against Reddit and Youtube characterizes their algorithms as "defective products." Terrorism as a bug, not a feature.  But is it? You can read the article here on NPR.

I don't normally use this space as a political forum, and I don't intend to now, but I will take the soapbox in a heartbeat against my favorite nemesis of late: artificial intelligence, in this case the recommendation algorithms which govern the net, because I've learned a new term today: 

Algorithmic radicalization.

We've all been warned about walling ourselves off in online echo chambers, opinion bubbles. The warnings are always worded as if constructing these hives were a conscious decision that we make. After all, whether online or off, we tend to bond with the like-minded, don't we? 

But we're not really living in echo chambers, which bring to mind a cave where we're cozy and comfy, with our favorite pillow and some snacks, a static situation, unfortunate, perhaps, but understandable. That's a misnomer, and a dangerous one. Instead, recommendation algorithms have created echo tunnels, where we are walled in on every side, where we need to keep burrowing down to find the safety which social media promises but never actually affords us.

Algorithmic radicalization is the concept that recommender algorithms on popular social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook drive users toward progressively more extreme content over time, leading to their developing radicalized extremist political views. It doesn't happen to everyone, of course. Not every kid on the playground takes the dope offered by their friendly neighborhood dealer. But we have to consider those who do, and become addicted. Like any addiction, they need more dope to satisfy our cravings. And the dope in this case is likes.

A series of Wall Street Journal articles, based on documents fed to them by corporate whistleblowers, dubbed the Facebook Files, exposed the internal impetus of their tinkering with the algorithm: 

Engagement Uber Alles.

Keach Hagey outlined the soma in a WSJ podcast titled The Outrage Algorithm:

 "So that's like a really different way of filtering what you see. It's not based on what you would actually most like to see or what's most relevant to you or what's highest quality. It's what will get the most comments. And the result of that, it turns out that what gets the most comments is really divisive, outrageous stuff, especially stuff that provokes political anger."

Facebook unironically calls this "meaningful social interaction."

And what engages users, gets them hooked, even better than sex? Say it with me: 

Rage.

And what's the perfect fuel for rage? Misinformation. It engages those who spread it, those who believe it, and those who fight it. Three in one.

Oh, FB's Civic Team came up with ways to stop misinformation, stop it cold. They tested them. They worked. Zuckerberg vetoed them. In 2020 the Civic Team was disbanded. The team's former head, Samidh Chakrabarti, tweeted this:

"When you treat all engagement equally (irrespective of content), increasing feed engagement will invariably amplify misinfo, sensationalism, hate, and other societal harms. I wish this weren't the case, but it is so predictable that it is perhaps a natural law of social networks."

If you'd like to hear the entire episode, go here.

And why a natural law? 

Because social media is zeroed in on one target.The algorithmic gold mine is the limbic brain, the tweenbrain, the amygdala, the same area that lights up when we keep jabbing that joystick in a video game, dopamine beating against the brain like rain, lulling it to sleep. The drumbeat of fight-or-flight dulling our ability to respond, desensitizing us to empathy and pain. 

According to Anna Lembke's book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence:

"Then there's novelty. Dopamine is triggered by our brain's search-and-explore functions, telling us, "Hey, pay attention to this, something new has come along." Add to that the artificial intelligence algorithms that learn what we've liked before and suggest new things that are similar but not exactly the same, and we're off and running."

Whenever a user receives a like, share, or a comment on a post, they get a hit of dopamine. And by strange coincidence those three things are the metrics for engagement on Facebook. Engagement equals ad dollars. So social media does everything it can to keep those dopamine hits coming.

Excessive levels of dopamine can lead to stress, anxiety, poor judgment, insomnia, aggression, even hallucinations.Which may lead to driving down Bourbon St. --on the sidewalk on a busy night. If you want a picture of the terrorist's accomplices, I'm able today to release one:

Stay vigilant.

Of course terror existed long before social media. But its embrace throughout most of history was voluntary, more or less. It is now being forced upon its practitioners all unaware, all in pursuit of the monetization of attention. Brain-washing techniques suitable for fashioning suicide bombers have been adapted by recommendation algorithms to drive up advertising dollars. Musk and Zuck are cashing in on terrorism.

(And now Zuck has fired his fact-checkers in the name of "free speech": the Musk Model. Bring on the misinformation. Ka-ching!)

(And now they've found evidence that Matthew Livelsberger, the soldier who exploded the Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas had an accomplice--ChatGPT, which helped him in the planning. So,yes--the algorithm is the terrorist.)

From Poem to Screen

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though; 

He will not see me stopping here 

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer 

To stop without a farmhouse near 

Between the woods and frozen lake 

The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake 

To ask if there is some mistake. 

The only other sound's the sweep 

Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. 

But I have promises to keep, 

And miles to go before I sleep, 

And miles to go before I sleep. 

 

    “Cecil, who’s on line two? Bob Frost?” 

    “Bobby, how’s it hanging, baby? How’s Vermont? Sap still rising?” 

“Oh, mending walls, eh? Make sure you get a good contractor. This guy Sophie got on the guest house, he’s a goneph. I swear, I’m pouring money down a rat hole.

*

 "So what have you got for me, baby? A new poem? Pitch me! Two ears, no waiting.” “Stopping in the Woods on a Snowy Evening? Great title. Says it all. Three teen-age couples, cabin in the woods, axe-murderer, chop, chop, chop, big box office, I can smell the money, these kids can’ get enough of the crap!

*

 “No – no axe-murderer? Sex frolic? No teen-agers? Guy stops in the woods, woods fill up with snow. So his car breaks down, what, he’s pitted against nature, there’s wolves, maybe a bear, maybe Dick and Perry, or it’s Deliverance New England style?

*

    “No car. He’s got a little horse. You mean he’s – no, a real horse. Okay, yeah, I’m still with you, Bob. What’s that about the horse?” “The horse thinks he’s queer for stopping. 

*

    “Have you shopped this to A24 at all?” “No, no, I’m just not sure how we play that beat, the – oh, he gives his harness bells a shake. Yeah, a nice touch. I’m sure Tom Hanks could pull it off. He was golden with that soccer ball.”

*

    “Bob, is there a girl, maybe back in the city, I’m thinking a Selina Gomez type, she and Hanks have had a fight, hot Latin temper, Hanks bangs out the door headed for the woods in the snow, now she’s worrying like crazy, she calls the cops, they send out maybe Javier Bardem or Christoph Walz---

*

      “The woods are lovely, dark and deep … no, that’s nice. I know Chris Nolan is looking for another project before he starts Oppenheimer II. You might want someone with indy cred.

*

      “Promises to keep? Hey, nobody’s breaking any promises. You’re signed for a three-poem deal, baby. I’m just saying, I think the studios are looking more for something like Fire and Ice. That was huge for us last summer.

*

      “Miles to go? Tell me about it. I’m up to my neck every day. You should see what Walt Whitman sent us. Way over budget, two hours too long, the guy’s got final cut, there’s no talking to these prima donnas.

*

      “If you’re having any problems that way, listen, my doctor put me on this new shit, I’m sleeping like a baby now. Yeah, I wake up every three hours and cry. No, really, I got extra, don’t mention it, it’s in the mail.

*

     “Bobby, Bobby, why don’t you put something together, a treatment, have your people send it over to us, you know we want to see it. Who have we got left who knows how to bring in a poem on time, with end-stopped rhymes? Think about the Selina angle, that’s all I’m asking. Talk to you soon, Bobby.

*

      “Who’s on one, Cecil? Sylvia Plath? I am so not ready for that psycho-drama. Tell her I’m in a meeting, I’ll call her back as soon as I get out. And get me Rob Browning on the line. I need a re-write on this piece of shit dramatic monologue Michael Bay is hot for.”