Eventually, Doten realized that the trick was not to try to make Trump more outrageous. Rather, “it’s about the little granular details and strange turns that the speech takes.” Doten added: “He’s someone who has a very particular mode of speech — it’s very digressive, and the digressions have offshoots themselves, and those have other offshoots. And then you see him having to kind of battle his way back out to get to whatever point he was making. It’s really fascinating to work with the character on a monologue that has no center.”...
Here's a quote from the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote “Squeeze Me,” "a sendup of Palm Beach, Fla., society, prominently featured a fictionalized Mar-a-Lago": "How do you improve on the real-life Donald Trump?... How do you make it more outrageous? With Trump, you have to turn the dials all the way up just to get close to what he’s really like.” After January 6th, Hiaasen added an epilogue that says Trump "hunkered like a wheezing badger for weeks after the messy expulsion from Washington." Now, events have gotten ahead of his book again, and he's the one hunkering and wheezing.
I'd say the reason it's hard to write a good novel about Trump is that the choice of topic is likely to go along with political motivation and hatred of the character you're writing about — a real, living human being. Look into your own heart, novelist.
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"He’s someone who has a very particular mode of speech — it’s very digressive, and the digressions have offshoots themselves, and those have other offshoots."
"Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Ram", from Mark Twain's "Roughing It"...
I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached
a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from
setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure
which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of
the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him
get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one
thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep.
https://www.olypen.com/pnkdurr/reading/jimblaine.htm
Trump is out thinking the poor writers. It ain’t fair anymore than the blasphemer George Patton out thinking all the other Generals be they German, British or American Generals.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.
It's difficult for them to write about Trump because Trump is an anti-hero, which in American culture is in reality a hero. An underdog. A lovable scoundrel at times. At other times a protagonist of self-reflection by those around him. The scumbag that rescues his buddies and redeems himself at the 11th hour. He's William Holden's J.J. Sefton from Stalag 17. Luke in Cool Hand Luke. James Booth's Henry Hook in Zulu, etc.
That's why they have a hard time. To write about him fictionally is to deviate from the elitist's articles of faith, and that's dangerous. Shhh...you might end up making people like him even more, don't do that!
OMG that’s funny… well done Ann…
Truth is stranger than fiction… is about it.
I quit engaging inTrump debates quite a while ago.
Won’t do it any more.
I’ll just vote for him, if Intel doesn’t kill him.
In literary circles it's not enough to hate Trump. One must be seen to hate Trump, and it's dangerous to hate him insufficiently.
I have been reading Judi Dench's book about playing characters in Shakespeare, and she played Lady Macbeth as a woman who is desperately in love with her husband, not a villain, but somebody who does everything out of love. Another person who wrote about playing a villain as if he were the hero was Ethan Hawke, in Bright Ray of Darkness, where the protagonist plays a villain in Henry V, I think, and he doesn't realize his character is the villain until the play is put on as a warm up before high school kids in NYC, and the kids all cheer when he is killed. His fellow actors said that nobody wanted to tell him that he was the villain, because what he was doing was so great, nobody wanted to ruin it.
If you are going to portray Trump as Snidely Whiplash, or that guy in the monk outfit in The Smurfs, rubbing his hands in glee as his evil plots are put in train, it's not going to be very good. You are going to have to portray him honestly, which must include some sympathy for his points of view, and if doing that, you can't make him the villain? Maybe something is wrong with your perception of him.
For the same reason the left can't actually write Hitler convincingly. The closest they've come is Der Untergang (at the nadir of his public influence) and Look Who's Back. In the latter, the modern audience is supposed to be chilled by the realization that Hitler wouldn't merely regain his following in the modern era, he might actually increase it.
The American left could never write a Trump speech without either using mind control magic, or actually making his points easily understood by liberals. At which point the New York publishing houses would trash the manuscript and blacklist the writer.
Wouldn't it be a REAL challenge to write a novel based on Biden? Sinclair Lewis might have tried it, but he made Babbitt almost sympathetic, and that wouldn't work with Biden. Dante could have carried it off, but I don't think anyone believes in Hell anymore, do they?
The Godfather said...
Wouldn't it be a REAL challenge to write a novel based on Biden?
7/12/24, 4:41 PM
You could do it. In fact, it could become a very tragic story. Trapped in his own mind, missing his real wife and his dead children, increasingly enfeebled and torn apart by the machine he thought he was in control of. Best days long behind him, his old political gambits increasingly failing as his tramp "wife" and degenerate son prop him up.
I would feel some pity for him, except I also know that he is scum.
It's obviously easy to write fiction using Biden as the main character. Just look at all of the journalists doing it without any apparent effort or self-consciousness. Then again, the people lapping it up aren't exactly geniuses.
Now that we are the brink of nuclear war with perhaps more than one nation, he waxes about trumps dystopia come on now
Dante could have carried it off, but I don't think anyone believes in Hell anymore, do they?
==========
did not someone already write song and music for it : just play it backwards!
'hell is place on earth'
I think i mentioned one demented offering by robert gleason he changed the name of the protagonist but the fever dream is recognizable theres also a thinly dusguised bill maher character in there
One reason Trump is so funny.
He has a natural way to get to a 'call back' in standup comedy terms...
A few days ago Althouse demonstrated that she can write an authentic Trumpian monologue. Maybe her Cruel Neutrality is at work there.
I thought demille was more sane
https://robertgleasonbooks.com/books/the-evil-that-men-do/
Blogger RideSpaceMountain said...
It's difficult for them to write about Trump because Trump is an anti-hero, which in American culture is in reality a hero. An underdog. A lovable scoundrel at times. At other times a protagonist of self-reflection by those around him. The scumbag that rescues his buddies and redeems himself at the 11th hour. He's William Holden's J.J. Sefton from Stalag 17. Luke in Cool Hand Luke.
I agree. To write a novel about someone, you just about have to like them or, at least, know them well. I read a lot of WWII stuff, some of it fiction. The good ones have evidence of deep knowledge. I can't think of a good novel about someone you hate.
I can't be too hard on the guy. He wrote "Striptease" which eventually led to Demi pole dancing naked onscreen as the ultimate MILF.
I feel like I owe him. I won't post a link because I don't want to make the ladies here feel inadequate.
Also, Hollywood and Hollywood adjacent people calling Trump outrageous is a bit much.
the hook in that one, was the trial of the magluta kingpins, where they had bribed the jury, and the prosecutor went and drowned his sorrows and well you know the rest
in that terrible film, hudson hawk, richard grant plays a sort of manque as does john glover in the gremlin's sequel
I translate Mar-a-lago as Sea-in-lake. Trump is a fictional character come alive, a real showman.
I would like to ask ChatGPT to write a story about a wheezing badger but I'm afraid.
There is a set of novels that tell a very similar story to the Bidens, the Snopes trilogy.
Are there any good fictionalizations of Hitler? Mussolini? Amin? Stalin? Franco?
We got a Mao opera out of John Adams. There’s Hannibal Lecter. And the Boston Strangler.
But yeah; it is hard to fictionalize a sociopath and/or autocrat in a way that shows any empathy with the psycho killer.
I'd say the reason it's hard to write a good novel about Trump is that the choice of topic is likely to go along with political motivation and hatred of the character you're writing about — a real, living human being. Look into your own heart, novelist.
Bravo, Althouse.
"Look into your own heart, novelist."
Γνωθι σαυτόν isn't in his lexicon.
Aaaand.... Chuck brings Godwin's rule into play right away. What a surprise!
Trump always has a twinkle in his eye, says Scott Adams.
Trump often speaks figuratively, using lots of hyperbole, irony, and extreme metaphors, couched in a casual, colloquial speaking register. People in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut region might understand this “rhetorical” dialect. In the deep Midwest, like Minnesota, the dominate rhetorical style is extreme litotes, or deliberate understatement. Most people in this region just don’t get Trump’s speaking style. Irony is a foreign language in the North Central region. Trump’s central trope is hyperbole.
I’m not exaggerating, for real.
Trump often speaks figuratively, using lots of hyperbole, irony, and extreme metaphors, couched in a casual, colloquial speaking register. People in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut region might understand this “rhetorical” dialect. In the deep Midwest, like Minnesota, the dominate rhetorical style is extreme litotes, or deliberate understatement. Most people in this region just don’t get Trump’s speaking style. Irony is a foreign language in the North Central region. Trump’s central trope is hyperbole.
I’m not exaggerating, for real.
Trump may well be the most satire-proof character in human history.
The real problem with Trump is that he is very bright. He's also not very disciplined. Bright people tend to have minds that wander into digressions. It's tough for people to keep you with that. The difference between a Biden digression that winds up "well anyway" and a Trump digression is that Trump eventually circles back around to the point. Biden never gets there and gives up.
Dana Carvey does a very good Trump impression, and is able to discourse and digress and riff in a way that is funny, and true. He gets at the heart of Trump, and approaches it, as he does most of his impressions, with an open curiosity and a desire to find the "hook."
He doesn't have Trump saying stilly stuff; instead, he says normal stuff in Trump's bombastic style. It's great.
Donald Trump, as a great showman and entertainer, can jump from topic to topic and at the end find himself where he wanted to be when he began. How many people have there been that could pull that off?
Chuck said...
"Are there any good fictionalizations of Hitler? Mussolini? Amin? Stalin? Franco?
We got a Mao opera out of John Adams. There’s Hannibal Lecter. And the Boston Strangler.
But yeah; it is hard to fictionalize a sociopath and/or autocrat in a way that shows any empathy with the psycho killer."
I've often wondered about this.
Chuck. What's it like to be stupid?
Chuck said...
"Are there any good fictionalizations of Hitler? Mussolini? Amin? Stalin? Franco?
We got a Mao opera out of John Adams. There’s Hannibal Lecter. And the Boston Strangler.
But yeah; it is hard to fictionalize a sociopath and/or autocrat in a way that shows any empathy with the psycho killer."
I've often wondered about this.
Chuck. What's it like to be stupid?
"I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree."
LLR-democratical Chuck: "Are there any good fictionalizations of Hitler? Mussolini? Amin? Stalin? Franco?"
You performed a pretty good desperate "fictionalization" the other day when you cursed out the Althouse commentariat for noticing obambi grabbing the frozen biden arm and dragging him offstage and then offering up one of your patented Rupar-ing edited video slice to "back it up"!
Too funny.
Did you ever return to Althouse blog to apologize for that purposeful lie and cursing out Althouse commenters for noticing the truth?
I'm guessing......no. LOL!
Good news everyone!
Biden once again declares he was a "Full time professor at the University of Pennsylvania"!
The only remaining question is, which Joe Biden?
The Jewish Joe Biden?
The Puerto Rican Joe Biden?
The Black Joe Biden?
The Latino Joe Biden?
The Italian Joe Biden?
The Polish Joe Biden?
The [insert all other Biden identity claims here] Joe Biden?
"Full time professor at the University of Pennsylvania”
Resident Beiden is such a poor dumb fuck. Full Professor is a title to separate staff from associate and assistant prof. Full time professor is, I guess, to Beiden a full powered working all the time professor. Which he was not. Pitty the fool. How many grad students did Beiden mentor? How many got their PhD’s? Has there ever been a Full Professor who was not an advisor to a student?
If Beiden means he was paid at a full time rate, and did nothing but leave his boxes of secret documents all around, I agree.
“Chuck. What's it like to be stupid?”
The whole world waits.
Josephbleau,
"The whole world yawns"
FIFY
Somewhere in the comments in another post, I forget where, was a comparison of Trump to Archie Bunker. I think the comparison is apt. Archie was popular despite Norman Lear's best efforts to make him unlikeable, and Lear couldn't figure out why.
I've been saying since 2016 that both parties - especially the Democratic Party - underestimated Trump's popularity and overestimated Clinton's appeal (such as it was).
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