Make Hollywood Weird Again

Lately, in the 17–23 minutes before I fall asleep after writing one of these essays, I’ve been watching the still-new HBO show Dune: Prophecy. The series takes place about 10,000 years before the recent Dune movies, shares their aesthetic (if at a slightly lower budget), and revolves around the early effort of the Bene Gesserit, the witchy sisterhood of galactic power brokers whose leaders are played by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams, to establish itself as a permanent force in the imperium.

Is Dune: Prophecy any good? Should you watch it? Don’t ask me! I fall asleep partway through each episode, and I don’t really understand what’s going on, but I think that in itself is a reason to watch: The show is willing, on occasion, to be weird.

Most of the weirdness comes in small doses. There are mass nightmares and glowing eyes in the dark; there’s technology that feels like magic; there are opaque rituals and sexy futuredrugs. Much of the weirdness comes from the actor Travis Fimmel, who plays Desmond Hart, the witches’ main antagonist, a bearded, long-haired soldier who appears to have survived being consumed by a giant sandworm on the planet Arrakis, where’s Dune’s famous space-folding spice drug is produced. Fimmel’s Desmond Hart is twitchy, wild-eyed, threatening, and as terrified of who he’s become as he is terrifying to those he confronts. He could slice you stem to stern with a curved knife he keeps in his jacket pocket (which seems rather dangerous, unless there’s a proper sheath hidden in there), or he might massage his temples and cause your body to set itself on fire from the inside. He looks filthy, even when he’s just woken up and gotten dressed in boots and leather duster. He’s like a prophet of yore, driven by forces not even he can explain. When he’s onscreen, you never know what will happen or—more important—why.

This is the kind of weirdness I love. Hollywood—movies, TV, streaming—is a highly professional place. Stories are workshopped for weeks, months, years before they ever get a green light, then they’re worked over even more in writers’ rooms and producers’ offices. Everyone talks about acts, structure, beats. Cold opens draw us in, characters are established in a speedy handful of defining moments, and cliffhangers hang at precisely the right moment and emotional pitch. Hollywood stories are fictional engineering at its peak.

But that engineering, as effective as it is for crafting great dramas, is driven by fear: We cannot let the audience be confused, because then they may get bored and go do something else. Therefore, in most of Hollywood storytelling, nothing can be weird. Everything must be explained, some of it along the way, all of it, surely, by the time the credits roll. Sure, some plot holes may remain, but those tend to be oversights in otherwise hyper-controlled productions. No one wants viewers scratching their heads, unless the answers are promised in next week’s episode or next year’s sequel. This is the way.

This is also, increasingly, a boring way. As much as I appreciate a well-honed approach to storytelling, the slavish devotion to coherence becomes predictable. We always know that the key to a character’s struggles will be found in their backstory, that a seemingly overlooked detail will resolve a major plot point, that everything we witness is there onscreen for a reason. Those strategies may be satisfying in general, but they make every series, every movie feel the same. It’s like sudoku: Everything always adds up.

I want weirdness. I want stories that refuse to fully explain themselves, either because the creators DGAF about explaining things or because they trust that the audience will simply submit to their vision and accept what’s happening. Weirdness is a rejection of Hollywood’s hyper-professionalism, a recognition that the traditional rules restrict creativity and ultimately bore the audience they’re hoping to captivate. Weirdness represents a creator’s confidence in their own powers; you don’t get there without having mastered the old rules. Weirdness is irreproducible—the moment you copy it, it ceases to be weird. And weirdness often fails. Not everyone gets it, or wants to get it.

My two favorite examples of weirdness from recent years are Raised by Wolves (HBO) and The OA (Netflix). The former, which was executive produced by Ridley Scott, begins with a pair of humanoid androids raising a group of human children from birth on a hostile, seemingly unpopulated alien world, and then evolves into a conflict between Atheists and Believers attempting to colonize the planet. For a sci-fi series, things are fairly grounded—the technology is advanced, but it’s not magic—and the characters’ motivations are familiar: food, sex, security, power. But so much is left unexplained. What do the Believers believe? (One of them is ya boy Travis Fimmel, in a similar wilderness-prophet mode.) Why is there so much evidence that humans were on this planet thousands of years ago? Wait, did that woman just get turned into a tree? Is she in the tree or is she the tree itself?

The OA, meanwhile, started off with your standard “intriguing Hollywood mystery”: A blind woman (Britt Marling, the series’ creator) returns to her family after years held captive by a kidnapper, her sight miraculously restored. But by the end of the first season, we get to see a group of teenagers before a magical dance number that stops a school shooter in his tracks and, I think, opens up a portal to another dimension. By the finale of the second season, which revolves around an eerie multi-million-dollar house in San Francisco, the show is breaking the fourth wall—and the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, basically all the walls. I know this sounds vague and nonsensical, but that’s weirdness for you: It sticks in your mind more as a feeling than as discrete plot points.

It’s notable, too, that neither of these shows lasted more than two seasons. Weirdness has its limits. Audiences—or maybe executives—want coherence, and are willing to put up with fractal insanity for only so long. That’s fair. If Raised by Wolves went on for two or three more seasons, it might have felt compelled to explain the tree lady. The OA, meanwhile, went out in a way from which it could never continue. It was the most final finale I’ve ever seen.

How do we get more weirdness on our screens? Well, usually, Hollywood has to go through a crisis. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, the collapse of the old studio system, the rise of television, and the political and economic instability of the Vietnam/Watergate era shook Hollywood’s sense of itself. No one in charge knew what worked anymore, so they tried new things. They tried anything. And that’s how directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola rose to prominence—studios were willing to take a chance on movies like Taxi Driver because who knows, maybe the kids like that kind of stuff these days? This lasted into the early/mid 1980s, when Hollywood figured out the formula for blockbusters and stopped innovating for a couple of decades.

The streaming boom of a decade ago was a similar crisis: No one in charge knew what might work there, but there was money to be made, and production was easier and cheaper than ever, so they threw a Neapolitan volume of spaghetti at the wall. Some of it stuck, some of it didn’t. I ate the noodles off the floor.

Now the streaming formula has been cracked, too; the pasta is being cooked in smaller pots, following best practices for consistency, and so as not to break the budget. You won’t see much weirdness on your screens until the streaming economy—or the broader economy—fails. And that’s why I treasure any weirdness I can find these days.

And it’s worth noting that, once in a while, people can make weirdness work. One of the best movies I saw last year was Problemista, directed by Julio Torres, who stars alongside Tilda Swinton. It’s about a poor young Salvadoran immigrant (Torres), who desperately wants to be a toy designer in New York but whose legal situation in the United States is precarious; he winds up working for Swinton’s character, who is trying to organize the artworks of her late husband, whose body is cryogenically frozen. The movie’s tone is spectacularly even: Whether the action is absurd (the movie spends a lot of time discussing database software FileMaker Pro) or depressingly serious (iirc, Torres’s penniless character winds up turning tricks to earn enough to Fedex the database files to Swinton’s), everything is just accepted. Weirdness is the default mode of existence for them, perhaps questioned when it makes their lives difficult but never rejected or even really acknowledged¹. This is their reality, and who among us ever really questions our own reality?

Unlike The OA and Raised by Wolves, Problemista was a success. (I bet it’ll win an award or two in the next couple of months.) That’s because Torres, a former writer for SNL, is really good at being just weird enough. His work—which includes the series Los Espookys and Fantasmas—hangs together internally, providing enough lubricating plot explication that the fundamental weirdness slides in without friction. Only afterwards, when you’re walking out of the theater or falling asleep post-binge, do you feel some residual narrative discomfort and wonder what the hell you just saw, and how something so strange could be so good. How? you’ll ask. And why?

Torres’s weirdness isn’t always perfectly calibrated. On late-night talk shows, he’s been doing “impressions” of colors that I find insufferably twee—the kind of joke that makes his friends laugh, but no one else. Except, I guess, for the studio audiences and YouTube followers who love it. But while I don’t find that gimmick amusing, I appreciate it nonetheless. At least he’s not following a formula. And if he can make it work—that is, if he can be weird, build a following, and earn money for himself and his professionalist collaborators—then maybe others will experiment, too, and the next time Hollywood collapses (any day now!) we’ll see more weirdness on the way. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. The difference between weirdness and absurdity is important to note: Weirdness is the nature of the fictional world, so characters live within it. Absurdity, meanwhile, calls attention to itself—characters react to it, either with questioning and skepticism or somewhat ironic embrace.

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