Head-hopping and crisis reading

Man Ray’s 1924 portrait of Kiki de Montparnasse.

Ah, the joys of an unprecedented global pandemic.

COVID-19 officially reached my town a few days ago, and the library where I work responded by temporarily shutting its doors on Tuesday. Now I, like so much of the world, am practicing social distancing and self-quarantining as a means of keeping both myself and others healthy.

In addition to the requisite stocking up on canned/dried foods, pet supplies, and, yes, toilet paper, I also prepared for the long isolation by picking up some extra books from both the library and local indie bookstore. I wanted things that felt fresh but would also tick off some boxes for my 2020 Reading Challenge. As a result, I’m currently reading authors who are largely new to me, even though some of them are quite famous within their genres.

Before I go on, I should admit that I’m probably a particularly difficult reader right now. Whether I’m turning pages at home or listening to an audiobook during a walk around my neighborhood, the story I’m consuming is always, on some level, in competition with the stir-craziness and anxiety constantly floating around the edges of my consciousness. So I’m trying extra hard to not make too many judgements about the authors or books I’m currently reading, and definitely won’t be naming names for any complaints I may have.

That being said, there is one issue that’s come up enough I felt I had to write a post about it, since it’s also something that can plague all writers. And that issue is head-hopping.

For those unfamiliar with the term, head-hopping just means jumping between characters’ perspectives within a single scene and usually applies to stories written in third person. Although there are still writers who will defend it as a stylistic choice, most industry professionals don’t agree. Many agents will even use the appearance of head-hopping as a means of identifying writers who are not yet ready to go professional.

Honestly, I’ve found that as reader I don’t always mind head-hopping, at least when it appears sparingly and in scenes with very few, well-differentiated characters. As an editor, however, I always point out head-hopping when I come across it—usually with a note about the degree to which it impedes my ability to follow a scene—because I know it can be a huge turn-off to industry professionals and many readers. In fact, I often encourage writers to start a new chapter when they switch perspectives, just to be as consistent and clear as possible.

So it’s been a surprise this week to come across not just one but several instances of head-hopping in a recent, well-regarded book by a best-selling author.

Far from being benign and easily understood, the hopping in this case truly is a hinderance to reader comprehension in part because the novel and its various scenes have MANY characters whose voices are not always radically different. Head-hopping in these instances, then, makes it difficult to determine whose perspective I’m reading and the story overall harder to follow. The fact that both the author and their editor either missed this or made the conscious decision to not take the time to change it is a little mind-boggling.

This kind of double-standard between what most writers are told they can do and what superstar authors actually do drives many a writer crazy. It can also lead new authors to believe they should be able to get away with the same mistakes as their heroes. And it is frustrating.

However, when I come across these issues in a published book by an otherwise solid writer, I always end up feeling bad for the author. Why? Because I know what I’m seeing is probably the product of industry-required speed over care. Once popular, an author and their editorial team can be under tremendous pressure to churn out new stories quickly, not giving them enough time to perfect their work before it hits shelves. And invested series readers will be willing to overlook a lot if it means getting more of their favorite characters faster. But once a book is published, that’s it. Authors then have to live with the errors of their novels and the way those errors may reflect back on them.

So my advice is this:

Always strive for perfection and clarity in your own work, but be gentle in your judgements of others.

Avoid head-hopping.

And, above all, do what you need to do to stay healthy, safe, and sane during this weird and difficult time.

Current mood. Photo by Alejandro Salazar.

"You" season two and the pleasure of the predictable twist

Cute or creepy? Victoria Pedretti is the perfect “Love.”

Screen shot from season 2, episode 1 of the Netflix original You.

Spoilers ahead.

Based on the duology of books by Caroline Kepnes, the streaming series, You, plays with and ultimately lays bare the creepiness of so many romantic comedies by following the perspective of the deeply romantic Joe as he uses that romanticism as an excuse to stalk, kidnap, and murder.

You’s brilliance lies not only in its critique of so many romance tropes, but in its perpetual implication of the viewer in this critique. After all, the “You” of the show’s title is not simply the shifting target of Joe’s obsession, but the viewer herself.

And I do mean herself.

Of course, like most good media, You can engage both male and female viewers. My husband and I, for instance, watched season two together. But the show originally debuted on Lifetime—a network overtly designed for female viewers—before being picked up by Netflix, and little of its voice or perspective has changed since the switch. What separates it from and elevates it above more cringe-generating, gender-specific offerings, however, is how it talks to its female audience.

Rather than pandering to women by stocking it with feminine clichés like shopping, baking, and the importance of love and family above anything else, You asks the viewer to actively question her reactions to its dreamy-creepy-charming-delusional-smart-manipulative-caring-murderous protagonist in ways that can be deeply disconcerting.

You’s very addictiveness is largely predicated on this deeper level of audience engagement, pulling viewers along by making us not only invested in the plot for what it will reveal about its characters and story, but for what it will ultimately reveal about about us. We ask not just:

Will Joe escape? Will he be redeemed?

but

Should I want him to escape? Should I want him to be redeemed?

And, most importantly: What does it say about me that I do (or do not) want things to work out for him in the end?

The challenge for season two was keeping these questions going after the horror of season one’s conclusion. After all, it’s extremely difficult to ask an audience to buy into a protagonist’s self-delusions after so baldly laying those delusions bare, especially when it happens in such a violent, traumatic, and conclusive manner, through the death of a character the audience has also grown to care about. You’s season two takes on this challenge primarily through four different tactics.

First, it creates a physical and psychological distance from the previous season by having Joe move from New York to Los Angeles. In so doing, the show runners can better control when and how viewers are reminded of previous events, and can again repackage those events as being primarily from Joe’s perspective.

Second, Joe briefly accepts—or seems to accept—that he has done unforgivable things and actively takes steps to become a better person, convincing even his latest kidnapping victim (!) that he really is a good person who sometimes does bad things when he feels he has no choice.

Third, Joe himself becomes the target of ex-girlfriend/survivor, Candice.

Finally, they introduce a very different obsession-interest in the character of Love, one that will lead to a very different ending. And this is where the heart of the season, and its “twist,” truly lies.

In the dryly pessimistic, anti-romance context of You, even Love’s name is a winking clue to the audience that she is not all she seems, and certainly is not all Joe believes her to be. The casting of Victoria Pedretti—who at the time was best known for her simultaneously innocent and creepy role in the supernatural-cum-psychological horror, The Haunting of Hill House—is another immediate cue that something is off with Love. Then, in the first episode, we listen to her size Joe up in much the same way Joe does to his potential conquests. She even goes on to tell him (and us) she believes they are essentially the same, with similar experiences of loss. When, also in the first episode, she reveals she’s already a widow, both Josh and I immediately assumed she had killed her husband and would prove to be a mirror to Joe’s own brand of psychopathy.

I very much looked forward to being proven right about this prediction, especially if it meant seeing Joe get the poetic justice he so badly deserves.

Because I was immediately invested in this possible outcome, I watched the season with rapt attention, looking for further clues about the truth of Love’s psyche. And there they were, in every single episode: signs that Love was in fact extremely manipulative and not quite what Joe believes her to be. And since her character is partly anchored in the fact of her husband’s death, these traits make her feel dangerous. In fact, there was so much evidence supporting my belief, and I was so sure about her character’s inevitable reveal, that, had it not happened, the season simply wouldn’t have made sense. In other words, a significantly different ending actually could have ruined the show.

So, when we finally learn Love killed both Joe’s neighbor and her brother’s pedophilic girlfriend, I felt rewarded with both relief and triumph.

Photo (not of me) by Abreen Hasan.

Let’s take a moment to break down why a predictable twist works (for me, at least) here, when in other instances it causes a story to fall flat.

1) As in any good twist, the writers carefully laid the groundwork for their reveal throughout the season. In You’s case, this groundwork runs on plot, character, and thematic levels, making the conclusion feel like both a logical and poetic extension of what we see throughout the season.

2) Similarly, this is a twist I actively wanted to see because it seemed like an appropriate comeuppance for Joe’s character. On the flip side, this also means I would have been (very) disappointed if, at the last moment, they had decided to go another way.

3) Characters like Candice, Love’s brother, and Joe himself introduced enough red herrings that the writers technically could have gone another, but less satisfying, way. Having the most earned twist be the real twist therefore offers a little ego boost to viewers who paid attention and called it much earlier in the season.

In other words, this twist works because it makes logical sense, makes thematic sense, and makes the viewer feel good about herself.

Unfortunately, the conclusion still didn’t completely stick the landing due to the incomplete payoff of all the clues sprinkled throughout the rest of the season. Most importantly, the implication that Love’s husband actually died due to natural causes just feels wrong when the fact of his young death was one of the first and most significant clues to the reality of her character. Not following through on this point just made the final, dramatic reveal feel oddly stunted and clumsy, like winning a race and then immediately falling flat on your face.

But maybe it will work better in the book.

Screen shot from season 2, episode 1 of the Netflix original You.