David LeGault writing as The Malcontent: Essay in French Means Try

 

The Malcontent is a pseudonymous Essay Daily feature in which we invite writers to put on their black hats and write against the things that we all seem to love. You know: puppies, nature, Montaigne, Didion, Baldwin, Seneca, even love itself. In our private, cranky hearts, we wonder how much good universal praise does anyone. 

As Edward Abbey puts it in Desert Solitaire: “Nobody particularly enjoys the role of troublemaker. But when most writers are unwilling to take chances, afraid to stick their necks out on any issue, then a few have to take on the burden of all and do more than their share.” 

Who would you want to take down? How about Didion? Montaigne? Let's take some shots at the pillars of the genre. Pitch us your own malcontent piece here.

 

---

Essay in French Means Try 

The French verb “essayer,” in English, means "to try." [1]

Your post reminded me that the French word essayer is the verb to try. So to write an essay is to write an attempt: at understanding, at giving meaning, at making a human connection. [2]

The word “essay" comes from a French word meaning “to try," and was first used by Montaigne to describe the short, simple, personal things he wrote to try to understand himself. [3]

The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” which means “to try” or “attempt.” [4] 

To essay stems from the French word, essai, which means, simply, “to try.” The essence of an essay is the trying. [5]

It dates back, according to some, to 16th century French writer Montaigne and to the French root of the word “essay,” which means to “attempt” or “try.” [6] 

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt." In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing. [7] 

You might also know that essay can be a verb, with its most common meaning being "to try, attempt, or undertake": [8]

In French, the word essayer means “to try.” Essays, then, are attempts to make meaning out of real experience, and to situate that experience within larger cultural, historical, and philosophical frameworks. [9]

The word essay comes from the word assay, which means, to try. [10] 

Essay Writing: The word essay comes from the French word essayer, which means “to try” or “to attempt.” [11]

This wonderful word derives, as anyone who writes on the subject is legally obligated to note, from the French essai, an attempt or experiment, Michel de Montaigne's metaphor for his testing of the question "Que sais-je?" [12]

That’s where the word “essay” comes from—the French verb, essayer, means to try. [13]

An essay remains true to its etymological springs—essai, essayer, assay (attempt, experiment, weigh up, test, investigate)—even though its waters have flowed far beyond them. [14]

The essay, derived from the French term essayer meaning "to try" or "to attempt," is not only a beloved sub-genre of creative nonfiction, but a form that yields many kinds of stories, thus many kinds of structures. [15]

The meaning of “Essay” is “To Try.” [16]

The Personal Essay. From the French verb essayer, which means “to try.” [17]

As you likely know, the word essay derives from the French word essayer, which means to try. [18]

At one time, assay and essay were synonyms, sharing the meaning "try" or "attempt." In the 17th century, an essay was an effort to test or prove something. [19]

I’d be remiss not to point out that the word “Essay” means “to try” in its French origins. [20]

French writer and minor noble Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) coined the term that has lasted so long, by naming his ramblings, roving, contradictory, prickly, warm, self-examining, doubting, and always smart prose inquiries “tries.” He was just trying to get what he thought down on paper, letting each “try,” or essay find its own shape. [21]

The term essay comes from a middle French word, essai, which means a test or trial or experiment—an attempt. Therefore, I think that since every essay is an attempt, it is also inevitably an apprenticeship to failure. [22]

Only the most restrained of writers has ever commented on the form without pointing out that the word for it comes from the French verb essayer, “to try.” [23] 

__________

[1] The thing about it is that, yeah, it did sound pretty cool and profound the first time I heard it.

[2] The thing about it is that it is always presented as new and exciting, despite the fact that everyone knows it.

[3] The literary equivalent of telling somebody that CPR compressions can be done to the Bee Gees song, “Staying Alive.”

[4] It took me less than an hour to make this list. It could undoubtedly have been much longer if I really wanted to essay (meaning try). 

[5] There’s a pretty good chance that if you’re the sort of person who reads a blog dedicated to the essay, you’ve already come across at least a couple of these. 

[6] It’s possible that I am quoting at least one or two of you directly.

[7] And you know better. 

[8] I think what bothers me is that everyone presents this fact as if they just discovered it, as if they haven’t already read it somewhere else at least a dozen times.

[9] Even in your intro to creative nonfiction syllabus, it is pretty condescending. 

[10] It’s even worse when you’re presenting this to an audience of your peers.

[11] And it’s not like we couldn’t do this for any number of words of French origin.

[12] Baguette in French means stick, which is interesting, I guess, but it doesn’t change my appreciation of what a baguette is or even what it should be.

[13] The word for digging clay from the ground is winning. This does not change the way I think about this act.

[14] This last factoid comes from a failed essay about how much time I spent as a child digging in the creek running behind my parents’ home. I discovered it while committing the essayist’s sin of using dictionary definitions to try and dig up (winning!) some profound symbolic meaning based on etymology. Which is to say I’m not above this sort of laziness in my writing, though I hope it gets deleted somewhere between the first and final drafts.

[15] Because it’s not even true that we are publishing our attempts.

[16] Attempts are the essays that don’t go anywhere: the writing exercises, the killed darlings, the discarded drafts languishing in a desktop folder.

[17] Attempt implies that failure is as possible as success. I don’t believe I’ve seen enough failures in writing to really consider that an active part of what the essay is. With that said, I kind of wish it was.

[18] A former professor was asking about my work, and he said it seemed that what I was really writing about was failure. Given the actual subject of that book, this is probably more a comment about my personality than anything else.

[19] So maybe that’s the closest we’re going to get to a thesis: not only has this etymology passed the point of cliche and gone into the realm of hackery, it’s not even a good explanation of what we’re doing here. 

[20] Imagine how much longer this list could be if I wasn’t too lazy to open a book, if I did anything other than type this essay’s title into Google and hit copy/paste a bunch of times while watching Murder, She Wrote.

[21] Imagine how much better we could be if we just explored topics without trying to think of how our Literature fits into the tradition of a dead French philosopher.

[22] The thing I’ve always loved about the essay is that it defies categorization, that its very nature opens to experimentation in ways that other genres cannot. So I will never understand why everyone’s trying so hard to be the next Montaigne, navel gazing in a tower. What purpose does this serve except to close us off, to become only the thing that other essayists read? Can we please drop this etymology and find some other way of articulating that we are writing toward some unknown, trying to find meaning in all of this?

[23] With that said, I’m still way more likely to quote Montaigne than ever refer to writing as a hermit crab.  

---

 

David LeGault is the author of One Million Maniacs, a book on collecting. He's currently at work on a book of essays on and about games. Other work can be found at www.onemillionmaniacs.com. 

The Malcontent is a (usually) pseudonymous Essay Daily feature in which we invite writers to put on their black hats and write against the things that we all seem to love. Want to pitch us a malcontent piece? Email resident Malcontent Kevin Mosby. 

Emilio Carrero writing as The Malcontent: Who's Afraid of MALCOLM & MARIE?

 

The Malcontent is a pseudonymous Essay Daily feature in which we invite writers to put on their black hats and write against the things that we all seem to love. You know: puppies, nature, Montaigne, Didion, Baldwin, Seneca, even love itself. In our private, cranky hearts, we wonder how much good universal praise does anyone. 

As Edward Abbey puts it in Desert Solitaire: “Nobody particularly enjoys the role of troublemaker. But when most writers are unwilling to take chances, afraid to stick their necks out on any issue, then a few have to take on the burden of all and do more than their share.” 

---

The film Malcolm & Marie ends inside the eponymous couple's bedroom. Through the window, you can see the couple standing outside together, backs turned to the camera, worn out from a hellish, movie-long night of arguing. They are staring out at a morning fog that has settled around the house as the song "Liberation" by Outkast starts to play. The opening lines of the song are synced up with the film so that as the lyrics start, the film cuts to black just as Andre 3000 says: "And there's a fine line between love and hate." A fine line is right, and what those lines get drawn for the sake of and for whom—whether its romantic or professional relationships—turns out to say as much about film criticism as it does about the film Malcolm & Marie. After all, lines not only draw boundaries but also seek to establish and affirm what lies inside them as much as what lies outside of them. For film criticism, a movie like Malcolm & Marie that breaches that line is as well-deserving of love as it is hate.

     A few days after watching the film, I mentioned how much I loved it to a friend. "Oh, no. Not that film,'' they said and rubbed their forehead. Though I knew the film was combative and incendiary, I still didn't exactly know what "that" referred to at the time. A quick search on the internet changed that. A quick search, which turned into a long search, revealed a wildfire of anger surrounding the film. And it's strange to stumble upon rage after-the-fact, to step outside the world of a film and see that the discourse surrounding a film has been doused in indignation and dismissal, as if the film needed to be warded off, enclosed and sequestered, a controlled burn meant to save what exactly? Whom exactly? 

     Negative reviews come and go, so it wasn't this aspect that felt especially noxious about the mainstream reviews of Malcolm & Marie, but rather how incensed and contemptuous the reviews were, how deadset they seemed on dismissing and obliterating the film as quickly as possible. But anxiety, like fear, leaves a residue. And the residue of rage from many mainstream reviews of Malcolm & Marie was clear. When traced, the rage pointed to a specific, professional anxiety about film criticism that the movie had breached, a line overstepped. To my mind, this professional anxiety boils down to a specific question: is film criticism legitimate in an exploitative, consumer-driven society?

     I have always been skeptical, if not annoyed, by film reviews, because although there are many mainstream critics who are capable of nuanced and thoughtful opinions on films, let's be honest, so many reviews deliver a product for their readership—that is, a distilled evaluation of a film—a review-as-ideology—that tells their readership "what the message is," and, as a result, whether the film is any good, worth watching, worth spending money on, or, most disturbingly, whether it aligns with unexamined moral values. (Not surprisingly, Malcolm & Marie's director and lead actress discussed our culture's ideological needs in an interview). And I'll happily argue that the U.S's exploitative, consumer-driven society plays a major role in all this, if not the prevailing one.

     But even though mainstream criticism has often struck me as overly evaluative and narrow-minded, the undercurrent of emotions from many reviews I read of Malcolm & Marie weren't. And this is exactly my point: it is not the negativity from these reviews that was disappointing, but rather how anxiety and rage overtakes so many reviews of the film, blindly steering them past the opportunity to write openly and honestly about the volatile nature of romantic and professional relationships in American society. And although this anxiety and rage is disappointing, dismissive, blinding, even vitriolic, it is not uncomplicated. In many ways, these emotions are rooted in the same questions that Malcolm & Marie is exploring. 

     Take these concluding lines from a New York Times review: "Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions [my emphasis] are raised, only to lie fallow…'I promise you, nothing productive is going to be said tonight,' Marie says near the beginning of the movie. Sadly, she’s telling the truth." The review briefly alludes to  the "serious questions" that the film raises about the volatile nature of race and gender and neoliberalism within professional and romantic relationships, but ultimately the review steers past these questions and dismisses the movie. It is fitting that the review does so by implying that the movie achieves nothing resembling "productivity." It's a rhetorical move that many reviewers made, one meant to undercut the film's legitimacy, its artistic worth and value, and in doing so, tries to lessen the validity of the questions the film raises about film criticism's legitimacy. In short, it's a rhetorical how-dare-you. 

     If we look at this disappointed and snarky review from Rolling Stone, we get this: "Turn the movie off at the 20-minute mark and you can ultimately still say you’ve seen the entire thing...You’ll have missed out some accomplished lighting and camera-work, some good jazz, and a pleasing tour of a pretty incredible house. But despite the actors’ efforts, you won’t have learned much more about either of these people." Here, the review clearly wants you to know that the movie is not worth your time because it was, at least to this reviewers' eyes, a pointless, tortured thesis statement of a movie. Right or wrong, what's interesting is that by calling the film a "thesis statement," it points to the belief that the entire film (and the many people who worked on it) was made purely to deliver an incendiary argument. To whom was this argument developed and made for we might ask? To whom was the film created to incense and attack? Much like the main character Malcolm, reviewers seem to be plagued by a paranoia of legitimacy.  

     And from The Atlantic: "What ensues is a series of monologues, diatribes that go nowhere. He rants about her flaws, and then it’s her turn to tear him apart. On and on it goes, with the actors’ rapid-fire delivery producing nothing fiery in substance. This is not a reckoning. It’s a waste of talented stars..." Apparently, the film promises a reckoning—romantically? professionally? culturally?—and ended up "wasting" the talent of its stars and "producing" nothing substantive as a result. I can't help but wonder if the perceived failed reckoning is not so much about Malcolm and Marie's personal relationship as it is between the professional relationship of filmmaking and film criticism? 

     I could keep going, but the point is not whether these critiques have merit or not. (I even agree with some points these reviews, as well others, have made about the film.) The point is to underscore the trend of anxiety and rage that spills out when mainstream critics talk about this film. In his Big Picture Podcast, Sean Fennessey summed up the context for this anxiety and rage about the film by saying: 

Critics have really come hard at this movie. I haven't seen a pan-fest, a fuck-you to a movie like this in a while, and that is an interesting reaction… Criticism [is] a profession that in many cases is very imperiled by the state of the way that culture is consumed, the rise of fan culture relative to the merits of criticism, the way that the media has been completely distorted and somewhat destroyed over the course of the last twenty years, the way that the internet has, y'know, annihilated people's ideas of what is and isn't good, what is and is not quality thinking. Critics obviously are under fire in a meaningful way so a movie like [Malcolm & Marie] feels like an even stronger attack than it might have ten or fifteen years ago. 

     With this context in mind, anxiety and rage makes sense. It makes sense to feel this way if you understand the film as an attack on your profession, a razored-edge pointed at the neck of your profession, and it is even more understandable to feel this way when taking into account the self-conscious, personal snipes that the film takes at a real-life critic. These autobiographical snipes are regrettable and shitty, and whether they are vindictive or not, they come off as petty and incendiary rather than doing the hard work of being genuinely thought-provoking. All that being said, the origins of critics' feelings are not purely a reaction or retaliation to a personal attack. The origins of these feelings—the crux of their anxiety and rage—is about legitimacy.

     Because anxiety is about dissonance, and professional anxiety is the dissonant feeling that comes from being made to feel that what you do is not actually legitimate: that your contributions are not worthwhile, necessary contributions to cultural discourse as a result of the many ways that culture has changed as Sean Fennessey mentions. And rage is the feeling that comes when a privileged, white-male director pokes, prods, winks, and attacks this anxiety. What results is the reviews we got. 

     You can call these resulting reviews many things—reviewing in bad faith, fuck-yous to Levinson, a refusal to dignify trolling/white-male angst, an archive of paranoia—but whatever the term that's used, I'm ultimately left wondering, what happens to a profession when it is unable to grapple with the discomforting aspects of itself? What happens when a profession gets consumed by a crisis of legitimacy, and in doing so, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of reductive, evaluative, willfully dismissive criticism?

*

The most infuriating consequence of all this—what eats at me especially as I read "positive" reviews of subsequent films—is that the brilliance and ingenuity of the film's black artists (Zendaya and John David Washington) was ignored, dismissed, barely acknowledged because critics felt incensed and/or attacked by the provocative aims of the film. (Of course, we could get into our culture's obsession with self-authorship that critics (and artists!) internalize, and how this idea gets latched onto in so many reviews, and how that is partly to blame for the obsession with the white director of film (the self-author), which ignores the obvious collaboration that films have always required, a collaborative effort that Zendaya, Washington, and Levinson have talked about and championed, but we'll leave that for another time.))

     Take these two sentences that appear in The New Yorker's review of the film: "The actors’ skill is in the foreground, and it’s impressive—it’s the one thing worth watching the movie for (remarkably, this is Zendaya’s first major dramatic-movie role)." As someone who appreciates Richard Brody's work and also loves films, it would be nice if the "one thing worth watching" in the movie was given more than a few sentences in a review. 

     The irony of all this is that while anxiety and rage fuel so much criticism of the film, these emotions are also what fuel the film itself. Something that, even to my amateur eyes, seemed abundantly obvious and yet glaringly neglected in so many reviews. 

     Anxiety and rage are a volatile mixture in Malcolm & Marie, a mixture that alchemizes into simmering and deadening silences; loving and mean-spirited back-and-forths; exhausting and enlivening monologues, and even fun, surprising, bodily gyrations. Some parts of the film feel rushed and nascent, as many critics have observed, unsatisfying despite their ambitions and can end up feeling like undeveloped thesis statements. And yet there are other moments in the film that are deeply poignant, funny, sensual, and, ultimately, devastating. Anxiety and rage can be this way sometimes, difficult to manage and control, and so the film, in all its beauty and flaws, is a testament to the difficult and beautiful artistry made possible by channeling volatile emotions like these. 

     Take, for instance, the memorable knife scene that happens toward the end of the film. It's a stark and stunning example of how anxiety and rage can be channeled into a scene, because we see how these emotions don't become black holes that the characters get sucked into, but rather they are the generative foregrounds for Macolm and Marie's exchanges. Instead of these emotions merely consuming, they are harnessed into a beautifully volatile moment of poignancy, philosophy, humor, anger, violence, and love. 

     The couple has been arguing about why Malcolm didn't cast Marie in his debut film, which leads into a philosophical argument about whether authenticity matters in filmmaking. Malcolm throws one of his many barbs at the ways in which critics (and people in general) try to talk about art by resorting to ambiguous terms such as "authenticity." (Malcolm does this several times in the film—obfuscate the issues at hand by abstracting the conversation into disembodied questions of artmaking, a byproduct, some might argue, of the film's white-male angst, which isn't a "problem" so much as it is something that feels underdeveloped/neglected in the film). Regardless, the film brings us into an uncomfortable and poignant moment in which the couple is confronting their unresolved issues about the casting process for Malcolm's film. They accuse one another of narcissism, self-harm and sabotage, debate the purpose of filmmaking, and ignore the uncomfortable truths of their relationship. Finally, at a loss for words, they scream at one another. They separate and retreat into different parts of the house.

     But it doesn't end. Their anxieties and rage are inexhaustible. 

     Marie grabs a knife from the kitchen and confronts Malcolm who is lying on the floor listening to music. She squats down to the ground and confesses to him that she is not doing well, that she has done horrible things during their relationship:

Do you remember those antidepressants I was on? I’m not on them anymore. I’m not doing well. I’m really, really not doing well. I’ve never been clean. And I don’t plan on getting clean. I’m a piece of shit. I’m a liar… I cheated on you. I fucked your friends. God, I feel like I’m crazy… I’ve stolen from your mother. And you know what the fucked up thing is? I don’t even care. I don’t mind. Because I deserve it. Tell me where the fucking pills are. Tell me where the pills are.

     Malcolm is afraid, genuinely afraid for the first time in the film, and it's clear that he's rethinking all of his rhetoric up until now—in part out of worry for he and Marie's physical safety, and in part because the consequences of his words and ideas, his blind theories about the world, are now being embodied, made real vis-a-vis a real-life confrontation with the woman he loves. 

     However, just as the scene has drawn us into this deeply uncomfortable and threatening moment, wherein the camera is ground-level with the actors talking on the carpet, it makes a turn. Marie sets the knife down. She tells Malcolm that she was just acting. She was just performing to make a point about authenticity: "And that, Malcolm, is what authenticity buys you." 

     This admission gives us one of the more hilarious moments from Malcolm in the film: "Well, damn! Why didn’t you do that in the audition?"

 

 

 

     There are many incredible things about this knife scene. But what's worth talking about especially is Marie, who as a character was ignored, dismissed, and/or neglected in so many reviews, which is infuriating but also not surprising.  First, I'll mention Zendaya's acting, in which she displays what seems to be a signature of her characters—simmering melancholy. Her handling of Marie's maelstrom of emotions is unapologetically direct and refreshing—never disingenuously understated nor ambitiously hyperbolic. But moreover, this scene truly brings to a head the power dynamics of Marie’s position as the black female muse in the film. 

     This position is a fraught role for any actress to take on, and this coupled with the Old-Hollywood feel of the film, and we have some giant histories looming in every scene—the most palpable being the hyper-masculine ways in which women have historically been used and talked about in filmmaking and the ways that black bodies have been (and continue to be) appropriated and pushed to the periphery in the film industry (which filmmaking and film criticism are both complicit in). The power dynamics that stem from these histories are complex and worth talking about (both in terms of the film and in the real-life film industry), though sadly no reviews I read attempted to sift through these power dynamics, especially in regards to how filmmaking and film criticism are both complicit in these histories, which to this amateur's eyes and mind seemed to be one of the major "points" of the entire film. Well, fine, I'll do it. 

     The power dynamics between the couple are deeply fraught in this knife scene, mainly because what they are arguing about—artistic license, the politics of ownership and authenticity, the shortcomings of artists and critics—truly have life and death consequences, especially for marginalized people working in the film industry (both in terms of financial security as well as physical and mental wellbeing). And so the knife Marie holds is not just a threat but also a way of confronting (both seriously and playfully) the fact that Malcolm has been able to successfully convert Marie's suffering (her drug addiction as well as the shit she's dealt with as a black woman in America) into capital through his filmmaking (the acclaim of critics, money and a privileged lifestyle, future job opportunities like The Lego Movie! etc.). Marie, on the other hand, seems deeply ambivalent about the whole enterprise of filmmaking (which makes sense given her experiences) while at the same time wishes she could have been a part of the film, which interestingly seems to be just as much (if not more) about the fact that she and Malcolm didn't make the film together as it is about her being famous. But Malcolm, throughout the film, is blind to Marie's feelings because of his rampant anxiety about legitimacy, about critics taking him seriously as a director rather than as a black director, a wish to be ahistorical, to be praised and validated through some kind of lens of artistic purity, (which, again, filmmaking and film criticism are both complicit in perpetuating) and some might argue that this notion of artistic purity is a white-male notion of purity, and so this is what makes their conversations fascinating—Malcolm's blindness to the forces that are torturing Marie are also the forces that are torturing him—race, class, gender, the politics of phenotype. In short, these power dynamics are as deeply woven into the lives of Malcolm and Marie as well as they are the critics they are talking about, and the film captures this messiness beautifully at times, as in this knife scene. 

     With that all being said, a shortcoming in the film, at least to me, is that Marie is essentially one step ahead of Malcolm throughout, mainly due to her acute awareness that the politics of phenotype are inextricably tied to the hard realities of our neoliberal society. I am thinking now of the way she dresses down Malcolm's neoliberal obsession with self-authorship and personal genius:

 

You say the film is about shame and guilt...Correct? Your words, not mine. All right. Well, I have a question for you, Malcolm. Whose fucking shame? Whose guilt? What the fuck do you know about shame and guilt? You have two parents, no bad habits other than being a fucking prick, and a college education. Your mother is a therapist. Your father is a professor. Your sister works for a think tank in D.C. But out here, on these streets, these smiling fucking rich people, they think you know what it’s like to scrap. Think you fucking lived it. Give me a break. You’re more privileged than the white girl who works for the LA Times, who thinks she’s doing a public service by lifting up your mediocre ass.

 

     Beyond that hilarious last line, this moment underscores how much further ahead intellectually Marie is than Malcolm. Which only feels shaky in the world of the film because of how Malcolm is framed in the movie as a highly-educated, critically-acclaimed, budding auteur, and yet he seems clueless to very obvious things about the politics of filmmaking, and so through the couples' exchanges we're left genuinely questioning the nature of Malcolm's "brilliance" and "auteurship."Perhaps this is intentional, perhaps it is an added layer to the film in which we see how "auteurship" and "intelligence" can be just as much a capitalist invention as anything else (which, for the last time, is an invention that filmmaking and film criticism are both complicit in). But if Malcolm is indeed a great-though-ignorant director, then his obvious and glaring shortcomings serve to only further prove that trying to essentialize the purpose of films is always a failing proposition that filmmakers and critics need to have a more honest and genuine conversation about. Is this not what the film was getting at? What do I know? I'm no critic. 

     This is why film criticism's anxiety and rage is so unfortunate when it comes to Malcolm & Marie. Because they miss out on beauty. They miss out on serious questions. They miss out on important conversations. Overtaken by anxiety and rage, the reviews come off as more interested in preserving the legitimacy of their profession than acknowledging and grappling with the issues the film portrays about the terrorizing effects of legitimacy in the film industry that are entrenched by the politics of race and gender and class. In neglecting these forces, the crisis of legitimacy for critics doesn't go away but rather is put-off for another day and time, for another future movie that explores these questions in ways deemed "productive" and "worthwhile." 

     Maybe Marie is right when she tells Malcolm: "All of y’all are a bunch of hookers and hoes." The conversation takes place a little more than halfway into the film. It's a lovely moment—not only because it is a much-needed pallet cleanse from the exhausting, rage-filled (and physically impressive) soliloquy that Malcolm has just delivered about the shortsightedness of critics—but because Marie's line is arguably long overdue, halfway into film. Given the context of their conversation—in which actors, actresses, filmmakers, and critics are all mentioned—her blunt barb, both declarative and funny, cuts through the bullshit. Her statement lays bare the uncomfortable, consumer-driven truth about filmmaking in U.S. culture—one in which, as Marie says, "all of you are guilty." 

---

Emilio Carrero is a recent postdoctoral fellow in English from the University of Arizona. His work has been published on Terrain.org, Brevity's Nonfiction Blog, and Guernica, and is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online. He was a 2020 recipient of the Richard Salinas Scholarship from the Aspen Words Institute, and is a 2021 recipient of the Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Nonfiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is currently working on a memoir. 

The Malcontent is a pseudonymous Essay Daily feature in which we invite writers to put on their black hats and write against the things that we all seem to love. 

The Malcontent: Keep Essays Weird

Dear Readers,

If you've been with us a while, you know that one of our recurring features is The Malcontent, in which we invite writers to put on the black hat, be a villain, embrace their dark sides, and pseudonymously say whatever they want to say about whatever. When you wear the hat, you wear a persona. Well, one always wears a persona when we essay (the essay I being a subset or a superset of the writer I). When we put on the black hat and play The Malcontent, we're just more explicit about this role-playing.

Sometimes the world of creative nonfiction is just a little too nice, since so many of us are both readers and writers of essays, and since in nonfiction we operate (apparently) without the safety net of plausible deniability with regard to our Is.

That's mostly great, and it feels good to be part of a network of mostly supportive writers and editors and reviewers and publishers. BUT: we also understand that anger or irritation can be a tool. Sometimes writing under a pseudonym can unlock our ability to say some things about subjects that the rest of the world sometimes believes are sacrosanct. Or sometimes we aren't in a position personally or professionally to want to take the chance in expressing an unpopular opinion or speaking back to power—or whatever.

Thus the black hat awaits. Put it on and be a little sharper, darker self for a little while. When you wear the hat, people only see the hat, not the face underneath it.

As such, Malcontent pieces are published pseudonymously as The Malcontent or, if the author prefers, under the author's name ("Jonathan Franzen writing as The Malcontent"). It's up to the writer. (We will never reveal who is writing as the Malcontent unless she chooses to reveal herself.)

If you want to try on the hat, you know where to find us. So, without further ado, here's our latest Malcontent.

*

I'm writing this in a fit of anger in the middle of the night. A friend just wrote me asking my advice. Their ridiculously good first book will be published by a University Press that I will refrain from naming here. They have run into a "sticky point" with the editors there regarding the layout of one of their essays (which uses footnotes).

Here's what my friend wrote:

They're telling me formatting footnotes is too complicated and they don't "do it" as a press. They've suggested either stacking all the notes in the back of the book, stacking them at the end of each chapter, or inserting them beneath each corresponding paragraph [in the essay]. 

Since you've recently read the book, I wonder if you have thoughts. Should I cut them and incorporate them into the text as much as possible? Is the flipping back not as obstructionist as I think? Are there other formatting possibilities you can think of that I might recommend?  

Here is my response, edited a bit to redact some identifying information (I don't want to get in my friend's way here—this is a first book and I'm not writing this with their permission—but I do want to talk about some shit for our readers, who are often enough writers, and who may in fact run into similar issues in advocating for the formal decisions in their own essays as they move from manuscript to publishing, and also fuck this press and fuck this editor):

*

So what the fuck? A university press can’t fucking lay out footnotes? It’s not that complicated. I mean, it’s more complicated than endnotes or not doing them all, but that was part of the form of the piece when they accepted the book. I mean, you know I’m not always a big fan of footnotes if they can be done another way without losing meaning, but I don’t see how that essay wouldn’t be harmed by changing it to endnotes or incorporating them into the text. I mean, fucking do some book design, you assholes! It’s just one essay! It's just fucking footnotes! A university press ought to be able to accommodate a common academic convention.

Plus, I mean, [University Press] has published [multiple significant experimental essay anthologies] that were filled with weird formatting stuff. This is way easier. In fact, in [recent experimental essay anthology], they published two essays, both with footnotes.

What I’m saying is that you should 100% push back on this bullshit, which I think you already know from your email. If you think the footnotes have to stay footnotes, they have to stay footnotes. I talk about the difference in workshop all the time: there's a big difference between readerly interaction with footnotes (that readers see on every page and can choose to read or not, and they flip back and forth only between text blocks on one spread) and endnotes (which require the reader to find the end of the essay and flip back and forth across pages. Endnotes are way easier to ignore (which is not what you want here, I don't think). You can explain to them (more gently than this, probably, but be direct) that the design of the essay is part of the meaning of the essay, and you can’t change the design for convenience without fucking up the meaning of the essay, and they need to figure it the fuck out. They agreed to publish this essay; you shouldn't be obliged to change its meaning for them to publish it.

It may well be that if you explain it to them gently that they need to figure it the fuck out, they’ll figure it the fuck out. It’s not that hard. It’s not as easy as some of the book design they might be asked to do, but this is not an outlandish request. You’re not asking for only green M&Ms. You’re not being a diva here: you’re protecting your turf as a writer, which is the making and control of meaning, and that sometimes meaning includes making design choices.

They knew what this essay looked like when they accepted it for publication. They looked at it and said, hey, this is cool. We believe in this and want to publish this. If they didn't "do" footnotes, why the fuck did they accept it? I mean to say that it is not optional to strip it of its formatting and assume that doesn't change anything. An editorial suggestion would be one thing, but it's not okay to just flat-out say that this isn't something they "do" (and it's even more egregious when they've done it—and much wackier shit—before). That's coercive and it's stupid.

I’ll email their asses if I need to, but this is a pile of crap. You may need to escalate this to someone more senior at the press (and I can help with that if you want; if they won't listen to you, maybe they'll listen to me, one benefit of having an established career). As you can tell this is something I feel pretty strongly about, because it’s something I’ve run into a lot of times in my own work in various ways, being told by someone in production who doesn't understand that sometimes the tools of production are the writer's tools—design is writing—and they can't just treat an essay as "content" that can be done whatever with however is most convenient for their workflow. It's not hard. It's just slightly more complicated, and it speaks to how a lot of presses are used to treating writing (as content, not as art), and it really pisses me off.

To be fair, I guess, a lot of writers also don't treat their writing as art and don't stand up for the aesthetic choices they make, but sometimes that's also because they don't feel like they can. And it really pisses me off that an editor would do this to a younger writer with a first book. You may not feel like you have agency here but you do. And I know from our conversations about this essay and this book that you know exactly what you're doing with this essay and its formatting decisions. I also know that you're not someone who's going to just give that up, and so I want to underline for you—and for whoever reads this—that you totally should not. I mean, you don't need to be an asshole about it (yet). (But clearly I feel like I do, because I've been taken advantage of in the past by editors who figured I wouldn't stand up for some of my aesthetic or design decisions, and in some cases I didn't, and in some of those cases they were right, but in some of those cases I was wrong not to assert myself. And, you know what, if I could take that back, I would, and that's partly why I'm writing this here.)

For their part, it's not just an obnoxious use of their (perceived) power. It's also just flat-out wrong (they literally do do footnotes: see the [redacted example]) and, what's more, it's lazy. I know it's not simple to format text in a way that goes against their house style, and I'm sure it’d be easier for them if you changed the whole way the essay works to get along, but you know what, that’s fucking on them to figure it out. They have typographers. They have a production department. They may be just a university press, but formatting an essay with footnotes is an achievable goal. And it's a fucking academic style, a common one, and what's more, it's the style of the art you've made and fought for in the past.

Best case scenario: you just need to push back here and I think if they understand you feel strongly about this they’ll figure it out.

But honestly, I feel strongly enough that if it comes down to it and they just can’t figure out how to do it (like seriously, wtf), have them send me the blank pages with all the typography choices (font, leading, text block size, etc) in an indesign file and I can lay it out in 45 minutes for you and send them back the properly typeset pages, and they can go on with their bullshit limited workflow.

It takes a little bit of care to do it right, sure, but I don’t think they can treat this as optional. I’m serious: I’m happy to do it if they won’t. They just need to layout the rest of the book and send me the indesign file and fonts and text and it’s not a big deal to do the footnotes. I can do it in an afternoon.

But it's also the larger point that's bullshit: they must have someone on their staff (or, fuck it, hire a freelancer for $200) who can figure this the fuck out. If not, what are they doing publishing academic or artistic work in the first place? And what are they doing offering to publish your work knowing how it looked.

I mean, I understand that production costs money, and a more complicated production might cost a little more money, but a publisher should be prepared to publish the work they accepted. Or if not, that should be part of the editorial conversation before anyone is asked to sign any contracts. That didn't happen here, so they don't get to just not "do" it.

I have often needed to just design my own pages very often in the past. That's worth it to me (plus that way at least I know it's done right), but letting the writer mess with a file once it's in design is something that many (most?) presses really hate doing.

They don't like to let the writer have access to the design. That's not what the writer is supposed to do, I was made to understand. The writer just writes the text. Their people design the text. (Implicit in this is that the text is just the words, and nothing else is the text, not the formatting or the design or the spacing or the leading or the whitespace, or whatever other cool imaginative shit the writer may be employing.)

I was told, with my first book, when I complained about something as small as the font (one of the very few points of agency I felt like I had), that "our designer has been typesetting books longer than you've been alive." Which may have been true, but, you know what, their typesetting sucked. The font obscured meaning. It did not amplify meaning.

Good typography should amplify meaning or at least get the fuck out of the way of meaning. That's the same case with design. If it doesn't serve the writing, what the fuck does it serve?

But I didn't feel then that I had the agency to say what I'm saying now, which is probably why I'm saying it now, and fucking loud: I knew better. I know better. You know better. That would have been a great OK Boomer moment. Maybe it still can be one for you.

The issue you're having with [University Press] is specific to you, but it's also not. It's a power dynamic that I see all the time (and as someone who runs a small press and also does most or all of the book design and layout, I'm also aware of the limitations on the production end, but in no world would I ever consider just telling an author that we can't do a simple formatting thing because it's not something we "do." That conversation ought to be, at the very least, a conversation, which goes two ways. When we have a weird formatting thing that the author does, I try to figure out how to make what we do accommodate what they do, and that's what University Press ought to fucking do. I mean, they have people they pay to do design. They have a paid staff.

It's also just stupid not to "do" footnotes. I mean, I know footnotes aren't always the best design choice for an essay (it's hard to get out of that DFW shadow, most obviously, in the literary essay) but that's not what they're saying.

And what you should say back to them, or at least what I'm trying to say back to them is a resounding FUCK YOU.

Maybe you should say something gentler, like hey, I totally understand where you're coming from and I understand that this isn't a common thing to have to deal with in production, but in this essay footnotes are the way I make meaning. I can explain why they are the most efficient and effective choice if necessary, but, tl;dr, they're part of the art, they can't be shifted to endnotes without...and fucking FUCK YOU this shouldn't be hard for a University Press to figure out how to do this. This decision is just not negotiable.

Or just direct them to this essay and maybe it'll make the point for you, and you can be the good cop if you want to be the good cop. I'm fine with being the bad cop. I haven't been the bad cop often enough. I like wearing aviators: I look good in them.

What I really want to say, though, is to you, and to everyone else who wants to try out the tools of design in their essays: design means, and design decisions mean, and as the writer you can take control of that. Or not. You don't have to! You can just leave it alone and write regular text! It's fine to leave it alone! Writing regular prose isn't easy either! But it's also fine to play with whatever tools you find, and you see them on the screen in your word processor so why shouldn't you fucking play with them, and especially when you get them to do something cool, something that maybe can't be done any other way, well, you do you. And you should stand up for that you. And an ethical publisher should publish your work well. Some publishers will, even if these assholes won't.

As you can tell, if it comes to it, I'd be totally happy either to solve this problem with an hour of design or blow them the fuck up if you want me to. I'm happy to name names if I need to. This is important.

Besides, [University Press], you don’t get to be a press that’s publishing formally innovative nonfiction without being willing to fucking publish formally innovative nonfiction. Which is a way of saying that if you want to publish art, then you have to publish art and not strip the art out of it.

That may mean being a little bit more flexible with your process or understanding that production may take a little longer or be a little more expensive.

Production shouldn't be the throttle of imagination. That just leads to boring books and bad art. And that's not what publishing or writing (which can include designing/typesetting) ought to be about. I hope you make the right decision here, [University Press editors].

*

At this point, the Malcontent took the black hat off, took a couple breaths and calmed down. Their usual midwestern reserve returned, kind of, for now.

---

The Malcontent is an Essay Daily feature in which we invite writers to put on the black hat, be a villain, embrace their dark sides, and pseudonymously say whatever they want to say about whatever. (Our only guideline is that we try to avoid punching down.) If you want to try on the hat, you know where to find us.