Reverse Documentary by Marisela Navarro
My rating: 2/5 cats
“Why did you film your kitchen sink?” Wade said.
“You don’t see the shine?”
“Yes, it looks a little shiny. What is that?” Wade sat back in his chair and folded his arms.
“It’s Jennifer. Ask Alexis about it.”
okay, i am writing a quick and dirty review for this book NOW, instead of doing all the things i ought to be doing because tadiana has cracked the whip and i am powerless to resist her will. also, judging by my turnaround time on actually reviewing these tor shorts, if i don’t do it now, it is unlikely i will get to it anytime soon and this one was so forgettable, i’d have to read it again and i don’t want to do that.
i was very close to giving this one three stars cats, which is how i usually rate things that were okay without actually angering me. but the more i thought about this, as i was re-skimming it to find a pull-quote for the placeholder review, i realized i WAS angry. not furious-angry, but at the very least peeved-angry.
in order to talk about my peeves, i am going to have to talk about story-specifics, so here be my warning:
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
okay, now that we have a barrier.
this story started out okay. the opening line was perfectly lovely: The ghost was easy to see but hard to describe. An anonymous color, like the shine of a coin found in sunlight, and it got my attention.
so we have this dude, dino, who is in the middle of making a documentary about some vandalized local trees when he first notices the ghost. the “ghost” is nothing more than a formless, sexless shine, but dino assumes it is the ghost of his recently-deceased girlfriend jennifer, who was killed in a car crash while cheating on him with another man. and assumes it is a ghost at all and not, you know, just a shiny thing that could be anything at all.
for the sake of the review, we will call it a ghost.
here’s the description of jennifer’s accident:
The police had delivered the news of her death. She’d been in a car accident with another man. The news was confusing, as though it had happened many decades ago, to a stranger. Red sedan, the officers said, as though it was the most boring detail of the story, not the surprise twist.
when i see the words “surprise twist,” it makes me think that there is going to be some sort of significance to the red sedan, some reveal of who it belonged to and who had been kissing his girl, but nope! never comes up again. i suppose we are meant to gather that the red sedan was a twist only in that it wasn’t her own car, but the car of…some other dude.
so whatever—moving on.
the story is told in a combination of regular narrative and excerpts from the documentary, which often strays from the topic at hand and becomes a kind of confessional or interview space for dino, who is asked many personal questions about things other than trees by wade, the person dino is ostensibly interviewing for the doc.
on camera, wade makes a suggestion:
“There’s a girl I want you to meet,” Wade said. His thumb twitched in the shot. Dino kept the film rolling. “My cousin Alexis. She moved here a few weeks ago. I think you’d like the things she says.”
alexis has been washing the graffiti’d trees, and dino is intrigued by that for some reason and wants to use her in the film.
they meet and alexis is OH SO QUIRKY!
Dino offered her gum, but she said she didn’t like peppermint.
“So what flavor toothpaste do you use?” he said.
“Strawberry,” she said.
strawberry toothpaste—wheeeeeee!
she’s also a mess, but messy girls are totes adorbs, right? such a free spirit!! and she’s full of anecdotes:
They took a break against an unpainted tree. Dino pulled out sandwiches and two bottles of beer from his backpack. Alexis was a messy eater (mustard everywhere) but he liked it.
She didn’t care about impressions, didn’t wipe the mustard from her mouth or hands while eating her sandwich. She held her beer with slippery fingers, and with yellow lips told Dino this bizarre story: When she was seventeen, a man with pale blue skin walked into the movie theater where she worked. It was just before Halloween, but the man was alone and dressed in regular clothes. The blue resembled real skin, not makeup, and he had a decent haircut. He handed Alexis a ten-dollar bill with words scribbled in black ink along the margins. She couldn’t read the language, although there was one English word, “catalysis,” mixed into one of the sentences. She stole the bill and studied it, tried to decipher the language. Over the years she sent photos of it to professional linguists, but everyone told her the words were gibberish. She didn’t believe them. Sometimes, she read the words like a chant or a spell and waited for bad things to happen.
they discuss fate, during which—negating what we have been told about dino’s appreciation of alexis’ messiness, He pulled her hand away from her sandwich and wiped it with a napkin.
which i guess is an appropriate thing for a man to do to a grown-ass woman on their first meeting. alexis learns about the supposed presence of jennifer’s ghost, inquires if she is a jealous ghost, and demands dino take her home, presumably for sex. which i guess is an appropriate thing for a grown-ass woman to do to a man on their first meeting. i mean, who’s gonna turn down the opportunity to make a ghost jelly?
things happen that make no sense and contribute nothing to the story etc etc etc and then the ghost starts poltergeisting shit at dino’s place, even though “she” had formerly been just an outdoor ghostie. guess she’s jelly after all.
alexis and dino bone on-camera outside against one of the vandalized trees.
“Leave the camera on,” she said. She pulled him close against her.
“I don’t think documentaries have sex scenes,” Dino said.
“This isn’t a sex scene. These are things that happen in the woods. The life of the woods. Isn’t that what you’re filming?”
these are things that happen in the woods, people.
alexis continues to express a desire to make a ghost jealous because NO REASON, and dino says profound shit to her like:
When you’re there, it feels like the world is ending. When you’re gone, it feels like the world is beginning.
wade helps dino edit the film, including the part where dino is boning his cousin because classy.
Dino made no attempt to hide the clip of them having sex. He wasn’t indifferent to Wade’s reaction; he was just too caught up in studying his own expression. Like the oven in the animated film, there was something perfect about his eyes and his mouth, but he didn’t know what it was. He wasn’t in love with Alexis. Something nostalgic about his face, and now that he saw it on screen, he remembered having felt it as he pushed against her, as he kissed her. Nostalgia.
wade protests blandly.
“You can’t put this in the film,” Wade said as he watched them.
“It was her idea,” Dino said. “You introduced me to her. Nice girl, like you said. You don’t have to watch.” He fast-forwarded through the scene.
“She’s been acting a little strange lately,” Wade said.
first of all, as he watched them. gross. that’s your cousin. at least pretend to feel outrage. second of all, dino’s response?
“It was her idea,” Dino said. “You introduced me to her. Nice girl, like you said. You don’t have to watch.”
not cool, dude.
but so anyway, wade tells a story about alexis throwing noodles at some waiter, claiming that she didn’t do it, but that “something” moved her arm which i guess we are to assume is the jelly ghostie who then locks alexis out of dino’s house in the rain while dino makes soup, which rainy suffering she endures, doing yardwork for dino while she waits—She hauled soaked logs into the fire pit to pass the time only to be eventually let in and immediately told to go home by dino, who has maybe had some sort of interaction with the ghost in an expanding-chest-warmth scenario. because dino’s a dick who doesn’t appreciate yardwork. and now it’s alexis’ turn to get jelly, although rightfully so:
She protested, saying this was just what the ghost wanted, that she hadn’t spent hours in the rain for the fun of it, it wasn’t even about him anymore, she didn’t even want to stay in the creepy house or be in his film, she was just trying to win the game. She wasn’t born on this earth to have some supernatural girl take over everything.
dino prioritizes dead chicks who cheated on him over living chicks willing to bone outdoors on camera, do chores, and wait for hours in the rain for him. dino’s a douche.
but he gets even douchier.
wade makes with the exposition:
Alexis told me you’re scared of her. She said you try not to show it, but whenever she visits your house you become nervous and constantly look out the window. You shut yourself in your room and won’t come out until she leaves. When she leaves you call her and immediately ask her to return.
but this teenage girl game-playing indecision gets even douchier because alexis is pregnant! maybe from tree-sex!
dino is instantly infatuated with the idea of fatherhood and full of poetic and douchey expectations:
Dino found himself wanting the baby more than anything he’d ever wanted in his whole life. He thought that when she was born (he was sure it was a girl), he would do all sorts of things that had never been done with babies before. He wanted to synchronize his breathing with her for all time, take her sailing around the world, learn French together. He wanted to grow all her favorites in little ceramic pots—her favorite color, fruit, song, book—they’d all be grown from scratch in the soil, alive in the house. He would choose the baby’s name from the paintings on the trees. He would film the baby’s second everything—her first word or first step would not be momentous; he’d commemorate her seconds instead. She’d grow up knowing first times are not the most special, so she would always look toward the future.
so alexis continues to live on her own, all pregnant and shit, but continues to do dino’s ghost-related housework:
Alexis, seven months pregnant, was on her hands and knees scrubbing Dino’s kitchen floor, the tip of her braid dangling and brushing against some telekinetic tomato splatter.
and
Alexis trimmed the grass on the mud animals. She gathered broken twigs from the front lawn and recycled them in the woods. She ignored the shine on the ground, how it anticipated each of her steps. She removed the water stains from Dino’s walls and ceiling with a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. The house locked and unlocked itself. The fetus grew.
presumably, while she’s doing all this, dino is just off drinking beers by jennifer’s grave and fantasizing about his daughter, but never about alexis.
and then blammo! the daughter is born and one day alexis is compelled to put her in dino’s arms and leave the house, leave town, and never see her baby again, while dino and iris live happily ever after, awakening from naps to find gifts presumably left by jennifer the friendly ghost and they all live happily ever after.
i mean, except for alexis.
the moral of the story is: if you cheat on your man and die, you get everything you want, but if you are a nice person who works your ass off for a man, you never get to watch your daughter grow up because ghosts are more appealing to dudes than an actual woman.
hooray!
i mean, what the FUCK is that story even supposed to be? and why does it get all jumbly with time at the end? and just WHY? and why is this weird-ass male fantasy garbage coming from a lady-writer? what is this WORLD????
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/11/09/reverse…
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