Navdeep Singh Dhillon: An Unintentional New Father

Ever since my wife started her MFA in creative writing at the New School last fall, I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out with my daughter, who just turned one a few days ago. I watch her three nights out of the week, and I’m often asked how I get any writing done when I’m watching her.

The answer is simple: I don’t.

Initially, I attempted to balance the two, which did not end well. I was exhausted, didn’t get any writing done (I calculated once that I’d written 7 words, including pronouns, in five hours), and didn’t feel like I’d spent any time with Kavya. So, I decided to embrace spending time with my daughter properly, and a rather brilliant way of thinking about my writing (pat on back).

Call me a horrible father, but two of our favourite activities, regardless of the season, is to stay indoors and watch youtube, or something on the telly. And yes, we eat at the sofa, crumbs and all, much to Sona’s irritation (“I don’t know why there are crumbs on the sofa, Sona. Maybe YOU put them there from that pizza you had earlier in the week!”). We do, of course go out for excursions to New York, the mall, out for dinners, the park, coffee shops,  museums here and there, and the bookshop (an absolute must). But this is what we end up doing when it’s time for papa to “work.”

Maula Jatt, the best film to come out of Lollywood

And what do we watch? Movies. Television Shows. British Soaps (Eastenders yip yip). We also watch plenty of old school Bhangra videos that don’t feature scantily clad girls dancing around men wearing sunglasses inside strobe lit dance clubs. I’m raising a fiery Punjab di Sher Bachiye (little lioness), not a piece of furniture.

The reason I call this “work” is because that’s how I view it. Before Kavya, I never actually watched television for anything other than entertainment, and relied on novels, short-stories, and plays for sources of inspiration and narrative structure. Now, I still use those forms when she’s asleep (nothing beats a Shakespearean villain/hero, and nobody can create tension through dialogue and minimal description like Flannery O’Connor or Ernest Hemmingway). But I have come to truly appreciate the 3 act structure and A/B story of writers behind the television shows and movies I am drawn to. My novel has finally gotten off the ground, and I am attempting to create characters that move beyond stereotype, and have real depth to them. I tried reading some Shakespeare while watching Kavya, but she tried to eat and rip up the pages of his plays. Even e-books don’t work because then she climbs onto my computer and beats the keyboard and screen with all her might until she’s shown something more visually alluring.

The title of this post is a bit misleading because having a clear cut “goodie” and a clear cut “baddie” makes for a really boring story. There is a technique in screenwriting that I absolutely love the name of: “saving the cat.” There is a book out that is reasonably priced. In a lot of old movies, the screenwriter wanted to make sure the audience knew who to root for, so they would have the hero literally save a cat from a tree to show he was a nice guy. All of the genres coming out of Hollywood, especially romantic comedies, use this technique metaphorically. In “Love and Other Drugs” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. Jamie, the main character, is a womanizer, and uses sex as a way to escape his life. The blurb uses the phrase “addicted to one night stands.” This is not the kind of hero that people want to root for in a romantic comedy. But he saves the cat by declaring his love for Maggie, the female protagonist in this film, and completely ending his sex addiction. He is a good guy. And he is willing to be there for her as she goes through Parkinson’s. He is really a good guy. She’s the one that pushes him away and at the end of Act III, he rushes to stop the bus she is on and declare his love for her. The screenwriters, Charles Randolph, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herkovitz, did a remarkable job in taking a man with very sleazy values and still have him perceived as a hero by having him “save the cat.”

A truly good story, I feel, is one that doesn’t have clear cut goodies and baddies, but rather has complex characters. Even minor characters that have more to them than just the character traits assigned to them. Another great television show that embodies this is HBO’s True Blood, which me and Sona (and by extension, Kavya) are obsessed with. The character of Lafayette was supposed to get killed off in the first season (he is killed early on in the Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris), but through some steller writing, Lafayette is alive and kicking well into Season 4. That being said, I still love films that have clear cut goodies and baddies.

Mr. T. is Clubber Lang from Rocky III

In every Rocky film, the premise is that Rocky Balboa is a working class Italian-American with a lot of heart. And the villain is always over the top, with no sense of decency, and someone you want to hate. There isn’t an iota of goodness in him. So you really feel for Rocky when he gets his ass kicked, and root for him when he inevitably beats the villain in the last few minutes of the film. Last night, I was watching Rocky III with Kavya (and my wife wonders why she’s so aggressive!) which has one of my favourite villains from Rocky: Clubber Lang played by now preacher Mr. T. I would have loved it if he’d said, “I pity the fool!” But, alas, he did not. There is zero redemptive value in him. He is crass, loud, and obnoxious. And to top everything off, he killed Mickey, Rocky’s beloved coach.

Fast forward to the television series, “Heroes,” which really should have been named “Villains.” The premise of this show is that random people all over the world have some sort of super power and are attempting to understand their powers. The driving force behind creating such riveting characters is the way they handled morality. Some of the evil characters sometimes did nice things, and some of the good characters did horrible things, and you weren’t sure who to root for because, unlike the black and white world of Rocky or Harry Potter, there was no clear cut goodie or baddie.

As I’m watching these shows, I often make mental comparisons with some of my favourite villains from literature. I’ll cover two of my all time favorite ones, and reserve the others for another post:

1)

"Frankenstein"

An often overlooked villain is Frankenstein’s unnamed creature. Whenever I teach Mary Shelley’s novel (who was amazingly nineteen when she wrote it), fist fights almost break out when people start discussing whether his actions were justified, or whether he was inherently evil, and made the way he was because of his environment. The argument of nurture vs. nature was not new during Mary Shelley’s time, but because the creature is so eloquent and sounds civilized, despite doing such horrible things, he isn’t the stereotypical villain. And Dr. Frankenstein suffers such immense guilt, and all he really tried to do was create life for the benefit of human beings (with a bit of fame for himself). So he isn’t the cut and dry hero or villain either. And it’s that grey area that really piques the interest in these characters. Aside from the spectacular Hollywood film, “Frankenstein” with Robert Deniro and Kenneth Branagh, Hollywood usually makes Frankenstein the “monster,” complete with murderous tendencies for no reason other than the fact he exists, and has him making a series of grunting noises, rather than the poignant speeches he makes to his creator.

2)

Al Pacino playing Shylock "the Jew"

Hollywood’s rendition of Shakespeare’s Shylock in Merchant of Venice I thought was powerfully performed by Al Pacino, but I didn’t like the way they had changed the subtle nature of the original play. Hollywood made it very clear cut that Shylock was indeed the victim, despite the harrowing courtroom scene where Shylock is about to cut out a pound of flesh from Antonio. The word “Jew” is used an obscene number of times, and the hypocrisy is thoroughly underscored throughout the film. The play, on the other hand, uses much more finesse. Shylock is shown as a human being who is understandably bitter, but who wants to exact vengeance on the hypocritical Antonio for everything done to him, including the loss of his daughter, Jessica (who we see weeping at the end of the film).