THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX
PREPARATION FOR EVERY
EVENTUALITY (AND SEVERAL
ALTERNATE UNIVERSES)

There are a lot of different kinds of intelligence: emotional intelligence, business savviness, common sense, street smarts, and book smarts, for starters—but there’s also that little extra something that some people have, enabling them to solve the unexpected problem, unexpectedly. MacGyver style. Some people think that our dreams play a crucial role in honing that ability since they allow us to play out scenarios that are unlikely at the best of times and nonsensical at the worst; but we don’t need to wait for night to fall before we start our homework. Instead, we can turn to science fiction and to Hollywood, where there’s never any shortage of wildly outlandish situations for us to consider . . .

Teenagers are known for their rebelliousness, but high school, for its part, just loves its rules. From what you can wear to how you can dance to whom you can eat with at lunch, you’ve got to know the boundaries. Together, these two contradictory impulses can be problematic, as students will always want to stand out and break the rules, but also fear compromising whatever status they may have already achieved. Black Hole takes that existing tension and ramps it up a billion by focusing its attention on the twin be-alls and end-alls of teenage life: sex and insecurities.

The setting is a small suburban town in the state of Washington, circa “the ’70s.” The situation here is normal (in the SNAFU sense), with one extra twist: There’s an STD going around, called “the bug,” which results in skin that sheds like a snake’s hide, a little talking mouth that doesn’t go where mouths belong, and a cute little tail, among other things. So basically a horror movie version of your worst dream, ever. All of which begs the question: What happens now? Yeah, that question, always. This incredible graphic novel earned Charles Burns a basketful of Harvey’s and an Ignatz, and remains one of the all-time great comics. Check it out, and prepare for the coming of drug-resistant STDs from hell. (Seriously, do that.)

Lesson learned: Make fun-times with other humans at your own risk.

“The witch Yubaba” is a phrase that, personally, makes me want to hide in a jar of succulent jelly beans for a thousand million years. (Jelly beans, because delicious and comfortable; succulent, because we need moisture to live and to consume more jelly beans.) This witch Yubaba is dangerous, and she lives in a truly dangerous world—a world in which not even universal blockbuster-hood can be counted on to keep the main character’s parents from turning into pigs in the opening scene. But fear not: It all ends well. Everything returns to normal, more or less. So there’s that. But once you’ve seen No-Face, you can’t really ever go back. This is a movie that turns everyone into a Not-Child.

Lesson learned: Don’t ever, EVER, take anyone you even sort of like to an abandoned amusement park. Also, if you do make that mistake, try and remember who you are. (Easier said than done.)

Things that seem awesome to ten-year-olds on summer afternoons: unlimited Coca-Cola Classic; free movie passes; free pizza, forever; and immortality. But then, upon reflection, maybe not—because that fizzy, greasy, movie-laden summer already seems pretty boring by September 1, let alone 13 or 14 centuries from now.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but death is a pretty nasty customer. It kills us and frightens us and keeps us from being the gods that we feel we really kind of, sort of are. But not-death? That is not so cool either, when you really stop to think about it. That mind-blowing realization is at the center of Tuck Everlasting, where a normal American family happens upon a source of eternal life and then has to deal with the consequences. But this book is more than just a punch line; it’s a chance to dwell in a world and with a family that are dealing with the repercussions of that dream, for better and for worse.

Lesson learned: Don’t trust men in yellow suits, and don’t make decisions you can’t ever take back. From the playground to the Supreme Court, take-backs are essential.

Most dystopian films and novels rely on simply upping the quantity of mean people and mean technologies in order to show how bad things can get, but Children of Men takes that same idea of a hostile future and puts the culprit inside our bodies as well. In this future, women can no longer have children. And in the film adaptation of P.D. James’s incredible genre novel, Alfonso Cuarón manages to reflect the intimacy of this particular brand of pessimism by making the camera an almost living participant in the drama. Theo, the cynical main character played by Clive Owen, has been enlisted to help the earth’s great hope—a miraculously pregnant young woman—make her way to science, safety, and protection. It’s not an easy journey, but it’s definitely a trip worth making. The dystopian future has never felt so real, nor so close.

Lesson learned: When times are dark, don’t wait for help. (Also, keep your eye on the camera. Where’d that dude come from?)

Zombies are metaphors, above all else. Whether that makes them more undead or less undead, you can be the judge; but it also, definitely, makes them ripe terrain for artists—for the people who trade in metaphors and meaning (and not always entertainment). Prior to Zone One, Colson Whitehead was an artist first and an entertainer second. With Zone One he sought to blend those two impulses, and what readers wound up with was a zombie-survivor novel that, for once, hadn’t had its brain ripped out and eaten. Whitehead’s essayistic style doesn’t make it any easier for us to figure out what exactly is going on and what exactly it will take to stay alive, but at the same time, in the end, those aren’t such easy questions anyway.

Lesson learned: Hope is for the hopeless.

The main difference between our world and the world of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is the presence of what are called “tesseracts.” I mean, there are also a number of oddly named old women, and “The Black Thing,” and, of course, a Charles Wallace (Nota bene: There is nothing in this universe more charming or hilarious than a child who has the name of an accountant), but tesseracts are the real difference-maker. Once you go tesseract, you never go back. Or, well, you do, or you can, but it’s not an easy journey. The space-time commute alone is pretty rough, but then there’s the IT, the red-eyed man, and the space beasts to worry about as well. A Wrinkle in Time bears a lot of similarities to other books and movies nowadays, but that’s because so many recent hits—from The Golden Compass to The Never-Ending Story to Lost—have borrowed from this iconic story. It’s as old as time (it even begins with the words, “It was a dark and stormy night”), but as fresh as tomorrow’s news.

Lesson learned: When confronting strange new enemies, remember what it is that makes you human.

There’s no time-travel in The Handmaid’s Tale, and no zombies, and no alterations to our fundamental biology. And as Margaret Atwood has herself pointed out, this fictional world differs in no essential ways from our own; but still, this is not our world . . . yet. The country of Gilead, where the narrator Offred serves as a handmaid (a woman who is responsible for bearing the children of the society’s “Commanders”), has an extremely rigid caste system that prohibits her from reading, let alone making her own decisions and living her own life. But Offred is smart, resourceful, and curious. These are all dangerous qualities for a woman to have in Gilead, but there it is. The manner in which she manages to make a life for herself in such a circumscribed existence is both incredible and very believable. And that blend of traits is also, presumably, what enabled this novel to receive a nomination for the Booker Prize and win the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Lesson learned: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. (Not an easy task in a world where husbands and wives are prohibited from having their own children. Not an easy task where everyone is, speaking literally, a bastard.)

There are two types of people in this world: people who separate things into two categories, and people who don’t. (I am in the former group, as it happens. Which brings me to the point.) There are two types of things in this world: things that sound like what they are, and things that don’t. Flatland falls firmly into the former group, taking its place there alongside words and phrases like “jumbotron,” “salamander,” and “Macho Man Randy Savage.” Flatland is a book about a place (aka “a land”) that is, by nature, flat. It exists in two dimensions. But the precision of the title belies all of the profound insights—insights into both society and dimensions—that Edwin Abbott provides in his novella. In Flatland, men are polygons, women are points, and the “square” who writes this story runs afoul of the authorities for insisting that there really is a place that contains another, third dimension. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And in the land of two dimensions, it’s pretty hard to understand what a “sphere” could possibly be. Geometry has never felt so alive.

Lesson learned: When a line is coming at you, it looks like a point. This is worth bearing in mind if you have infuriated any two-dimensional women recently. “Oh, what a cute little dot, and oh my God I’m being stabbed to dea—[is killed].”

At first glance, Misfits sounds no different from any number of other recent sci-fi projects. A young group of ne’er-do-wells are struck by lightning and develop superpowers. (“Seen it!”) And this familiar scenario is only made slightly more interesting by the fact that each of these super-powerful traits seems tied, in some way, to personality.

Then again, none of Jane Austen’s books open with an especially original concept or offer an especially original plot; instead, Jane Austen is great because her characters are so compelling, her observations so acute, and her worlds so vivid. Misfits has a different set of attributes, but the show is equally reliant on quality. Each episode operates as a complete unit, with its own themes, rhythm, and plot—but each episode also sheds light on the larger questions of the series, such as: why these kids, why now, who’s the masked man, and where are they going to hide all these dead bodies. It’s dark, it’s hilarious, it’s imaginative, and it’s on the BBC—so it’s probably coming to America before too long.

Lesson learned: Don’t ever sell your superpowers.

For the most part, holidays get the movies they deserve. Christmas gets melodramas; Labor Day gets blockbusters; and Groundhog Day gets forgotten—because who cares about groundhogs! (No one. Skyhogs are where it’s at.) But even though these animals are pathetic little dirt-scrabblers, and even though Mother Nature laughs at our attempts to figure out her plans, Harold Ramis still found a way to extract real meaning from this nonevent. How did he do this? Well, he modeled it after a Christmas movie, of course! After weatherman Phil (played by Bill Murray in much the same way that he had recently played Scrooge) realizes that he will be forced to repeat Groundhog Day endlessly, unless he can figure out some form of escape, he begins to try to live that day perfectly.

Lesson learned: This Bill Murray fellow has a future in comedy!