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vagabondedlife · 4 years ago

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Kei Fujiwara’s name is hardly recognizable to most fans of Japanese cinema despite her crucial role in director Shinya Tsukamoto’s early cult classics. As Tsukamoto’s “right hand” woman in the 1980s, Fujiwara became closely involved in his underground theater troupe, Kaijyu Theater, and contributed to the productions of the experimental and DIY films The Phantom of Regular Size (1986), The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (1987), and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Her credits include actress, cinematographer, prop artist, makeup artist, and set-designer (her apartment was used as a primary set). She also engineered Tetsuo’s iconic phallic drill.

Born in Kumamoto in 1957, Fujiwara moved to Tokyo in her early twenties and discovered theater troupe director Jūrō Kara, who became her mentor. After a decade, she created her own troupe called Organ Vital, which underwent a series of evolutions but remains her life work. Her new project this year is Ibunkitan, a form of micro-nomadic theater, whose kanji characters mean “strange-listen-machine-story.” A private person now living in the reclusive mountains of Nagano, Fujiwara rarely gives interviews, but seemed excited to talk about her rarely discussed directorial debut, Organ (1996).

An avant-garde exploration of violence, pain and pleasure with an operatic amount of coagulated blood and extrasomatic body horror, Organ follows two detectives after they break into an organ harvester’s warehouse and collide with yakuza gangsters, a drugged doctor, and his eye-patch wearing sister Yoko, played by Fujiwara herself, who also produced and wrote the film. A cherished work among hardcore fans of Japanese cult cinema, Organ is still ripe for rediscovery. The film’s offerings of a full-bodied sensorial experience and an abusive questioning of cruelty prove tirelessly relevant.

Fujiwara’s work was recently revived at FFFest in New York City with a double feature of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Organ. Fujiwara prepared a special statement that was shared as an introduction. Following the screening, we had the opportunity to speak to the artist about her life, practice, and ideals in more depth. The conversation was held over the phone in Japanese.

NOTEBOOK: Is Ibunkitan a new Organ Vital?

KEI FUJIWARA: Yes, it’s a new Organ Vital. When I was young, I lived in the rural area. I always just read theater but never had the opportunity to see state-of-the-art theater. When I was in high school, I was always reading, and I picked up an Antonin Artaud book that featured this French term. It meant the vessels of life. When translated to English, I’m told it just becomes, “vitals of organ,” or something, but in Japanese it is called gozōroppu and to me signifies the corporal. That’s the name of my theater company, and it has always been that for me. Born into this three-dimensional world with bodies, we sense and express. That’s what’s interesting in life. Ibunkitan can be done in a very small space. We’ve done it in temples, in the corner of a shop, in salons. Our first performance was in March, and we’re planning to do another in November. We've been invited to perform my new Jomon-inspired piece in a live-house in the mountains in Nagano, so we’re preparing some woodwork for that now.

NOTEBOOK: You were working in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Kaijyu Theater production between working with Jūrō Kara?

FUJIWARA: Jūrō Kara, my mentor—when I was in Jōkyō Gekijo [Situation Theatre], he took a liking to me and wrote roles for me. A lot happened, and Kara said he would make a new troupe with me, but I had other plans, so I left once, and he said, “As my mentee, you can leave but wait for me to come get you.” That’s when I went to work with Shinya Tsukamoto on his plays and films. It was after Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989] that Kara started the new troupe “Kara-gumi” and I returned to work with him.

NOTEBOOK: How was it that you began working with Tsukamoto?

FUJIWARA: I had just left Kara and after a while a friend said that Tsukamoto was looking for someone to act in his plays. He was Tsukamoto’s classmate and an actor, and he made the introduction. I found Tsukamoto interesting and talented. So, I began working diligently as his right hand after that.

NOTEBOOK: I wanted to ask you about Tsukamoto’s 1987 film, The Adventures of Denchu Kozo.

FUJIWARA: Denchu Kozo and Tetsuo were actually both shot in my apartment where I was living at the time. You know all those cats? I couldn’t rent a normal apartment, so I had to live in a cheap nagaya tenement house on the verge of getting demolished. I just needed a place to live that permitted pets. Denchu Kozo and Tetsuo’s interior shots are all at my place.

NOTEBOOK: Are the scenes projected in the TV monitor in Tetsuo from Denchu Kozo?

FUJIWARA: Yes. They’re from Denchu Kozo.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: What turned you onto making Organ, if you were always only interested in theater?

FUJIWARA: That was because of my experience filmmaking with Tsukamoto. It prepared me for how arduous it would be. Theater is an impermanent art, and that’s why it’s such a luxurious art form. But film is like capturing a world in a crystal ball. The joy of creating film is like making your own universe. My staff members at the time— six men other than myself—were all talented, and I thought, “Everyone’s here, why don’t I just make it?” So, all the staff also became the actors, and that’s how we started filming. But it was so difficult at first. We used the atelier space we had and reformed it over and over and shot it like that. It was time-consuming. It became the warehouse set, the school set. It kept on transforming. We did it all in the same space.

NOTEBOOK: That seems like a very theatrical way of using space.

FUJIWARA: Yes.

NOTEBOOK: But first, you started writing it?

FUJIWARA: Yes, I first started writing it. I’m actually not very good at planning. I just think that if I put my mind to it, I can make it happen. So I wrote the script, and had the staff pool in their savings. Between the seven of us we had 200,000 yen, so I thought, “Great, if we have 200,000 yen and one reel of film is 5,000 yen, and even if we bought lights, we can make 30 minutes of footage.” As for the equipment, there are countless aspiring-filmmaker boys who have camera equipment lying around collecting dust, so we borrowed from them. As for the set, we were all used to making it for our theater. We were good at foraging free stuff to make things. That warehouse set in the beginning of Organ was made with an extremely cheap budget. Then we started filming. All those organs in that scene were worked from what was supposed to be our dinner for the day [laughs]. We used real food. We took some gelatin- and konjac-noodles and thought, “This can look like veins!”

NOTEBOOK: And then you had it for dinner?

FUJIWARA: Well, we ended up not being able to, because it was covered in fake blood! It was all about how little money we could spend and still make something, which was a valuable lesson for me.

NOTEBOOK: You’ve mentioned the Kenji Miyazawa poem, Ame ni mo makezu1.

FUJIWARA: Yes, I just really like Kenji Miyazawa. I like the way he thinks, and his philosophy. He’s a Buddhist, and as I haven’t studied Buddhism properly, I cannot say for sure, but I think his seimeikan, or view of life, is on par with that of Osamu Tezuka. Osamu Tezuka and Kenji Miyazawa are two gods with the same perspective regarding seimeikan. No matter how great their art is, Yoshihide Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki can never reach Osamu’s level. Osamu’s core is love. There’s only love. The way they think about life is totally different. I was reading manga before I was literate [laughs]. I like Osamu Tezuka, but also Sanpei Shirato. And in my teens, I liked Daijiro Morohoshi. He’s an extremely interesting person.

NOTEBOOK: Do you think that your films need to be discovered?

FUJIWARA: They need to lock in perfectly with someone’s desire to watch it, or else watching it has no meaning. It just appears as a confusing, grotesque film.

NOTEBOOK: Please tell us about your make up and special effects.

FUJIWARA: Since Tetsuo, my method is always the same. I don’t have any background knowledge of special effect makeup. I just have a gut feeling of what can and can’t be used. Tsukamoto had these drawing storyboards for Tetsuo, like the steel body and the drill penis. For the latter, Tsukamoto just wanted to make something simple and said it would be enough if we could just pretend like it was moving, but I thought it would only be interesting if it actually moved. I didn’t have any hi-tech skills, so I thought, “That’s it!” I took the nearest working electric fan, dissembled it down to its core, used all the rubber and tape I had at home, sprayed it up and got it to go, vroom [laughs]! It was the same for Organ. I used household products, mostly kitchenware.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: What about your cinematography?

FUJIWARA: I had no background knowledge. The first time I started shooting was on Tsukamoto’s set. A lot of people who graduated film school and wanted to help were there, but Tsukamoto didn’t trust any of them. Just because you have technique doesn’t mean you can shoot well. He thought that the person wielding the camera needs a certain amount of power, of energy. So I, who had never touched a camera in my life, was given the camera and told where to press to get it rolling, and shot all of the scenes Tsukamoto was in.

NOTEBOOK: Do you still shoot with a camera lately?

FUJIWARA: Rarely.

NOTEBOOK: As the occasion for this screening was FFFest, Female Filmmakers Festival, could you comment about your experience as a female filmmaker?

FUJIWARA: Something men don’t have—there are two types: female filmmakers who focus their perspective on their immediate surroundings and daily lives, and those who focus on creating a worldview from the even more intimate bodily perspective. That’s what’s a little different from male filmmakers. Even in theater, most female directors write familial narratives, although I don’t [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: The podcast Ladies Horror Night, on the occasion of this screening, recorded an episode that raised the question of why you, a female filmmaker, didn’t include more female characters. I’m not sure about this pressure for female filmmakers to represent female subjects, as I think there’s power in the female filmmaker re-writing the male-centric story. Can you speak on this and how you came to write the police story in Organ?

FUJIWARA: When I think about seimeikan—our view of life—it appears to me that the moral judgment of good versus bad is not something universal, but just a rule that protects our lifestyle in society. It’s a regulation. We make regulations to protect ourselves. That takes the form of “good” and “evil.” But that’s not the good and evil that holds ground in nature. Animals kill other animals for their own predation, right? Humans, too, in the context of war, can kill other humans and become heroes. The concept of zen-aku, or the notion of good and evil, is just a societal regulation. The police represent upholders of this regulation. And then there are those who defy this regulation, who lie in a realm completely different from this conventional morality. Organ is a clash between these two groups. That’s how I formed the police narrative. As for why there are few female characters, well… In the case of females, expressing them requires—for many, not all—a focus on the micro world, the micro perspective, that is, if you pay attention to their priorities. In other words, if you have a goal and you want to finish something, but she says she needs to take a bath at this certain time and cannot participate, there’s nothing you can do. In my theater, only men can keep up with me. Because of this standpoint, if a woman were to express a woman, she would need to create a micro world. But when describing a police story, a macro worldview, the direction would lose focus.

NOTEBOOK: It would become more internal?

FUJIWARA: Right. That’s why there aren’t as many female characters. But the wife of Numata represents the reality for women. And also the female teacher who approaches the criminal but gets killed. Woman participated in this way. But it’s hard for them to take leading parts for the narrative. It’s hard to let them be there and have their perspective be represented, because their perspective is in a different dimension.

NOTEBOOK: What about the character you play, Yoko?

FUJIWARA: Yoko is outside of that realm. She’s an outlier. She doesn’t represent family or the household or the joy of daily life, because she didn’t enjoy any of those things. That’s why she can exist there.

NOTEBOOK: How did you direct your actors in Organ, was it different from how you usually direct them in theater?

FUJIWARA: It’s the same. The only direction I gave them in Organ was that they only get one shot. I don’t give actors multiple takes. If there’s a camera or equipment problem that requires another take or two, I’ll do it. But I won’t do it for the actor. The actor has one chance, the take. But, on the offhand that the actor makes a mistake and requires a take two, I tell them they need to buy their own film roll. That was the rule. So, no one ever made a single mistake. They were all dead serious, completely focused. They’re all broke and have no money to buy film.

NOTEBOOK: In that sense it’s theatrical.

FUJIWARA: Right, and I had one actress tell me that that it was brilliant. She said, “I do lots of work for TV and film, but everyone is so lukewarm and they do take after take, and think about it so leniently. But there’s none of that here. The one take is the real thing.”

NOTEBOOK: So, that urgency was good for the actors?

FUJIWARA: Right. They said they couldn’t afford to buy their own film.

NOTEBOOK: If you give theater actors the same direction for film, how does that work? The performances in Organ don’t come off as exaggerated; I doubt a viewer without knowing would assume they are all theater actors.

FUJIWARA: There’s no difference. In theater, my scripts are like music scores. The lines come out and dance, modulate, sing, calling on the innate sensation playing the instrument that is yourself on stage. The actor, with this music-score-as-script, has a multitude of possibilities of how to play it. In film, the scripted character is a part of the environment. They are simply material for the scene. I didn’t need to explain this to them, they naturally just became materials for the scene.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: That’s a good transition into my next question: can you talk about your music and sound design direction?

FUJIWARA: Music is difficult. What I say doesn’t get across, because I was working with new people. They hadn’t even seen any of my theater. I like German bands, something strong and hard. But even if they mimic the Germans, the Japanese can’t avoid making music that doesn’t sound soft and weak. One day I said, “Make it more powerful, something that alludes to the power of nature, more animalistic and sturdily-built,” and they said, “Okay.” The demo they brought to me literally had animal sounds, like elephants wailing and dogs barking, and I was like, “…That’s not what I meant” [laughs]. It didn’t get across. But there were some interesting sound bites that I could use. But Japanese band musicians can’t get over their own softness. I think what they have is different.

NOTEBOOK: So you’re not happy with the results?

FUJIWARA: Well, I’m the type of person that thinks, que sera, sera. So I wasn’t satisfied, but…

NOTEBOOK: You’ve mentioned that you a very easily scared person. But in Tetsuo and Organ, your characters say, “I won’t be afraid.” How do you interpret this difference?

FUJIWARA: When I came to Tokyo in my twenties, the first theater directors I met said they’d never met anyone as weak and sensitive as myself. They didn’t think I could live on a few years longer, much less do theater, and that I might find myself drugged up in a brothel in the near future. Kara was the only person that ever said to me that I was the strongest person he’d met. In other words, the fear and strength that I have appears to others as a weakness that can barely withstand life, but it’s just my highly sensitive nature they see. In actuality, I’m very strong. I feel very easily, so that seems weak, but my capacity for empathy is just very large. I feel others’ pain and sadness so strongly that I throw up thinking about them. That’s why I don’t watch TV or read the newspaper. Or else I would be crying all day [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: Watching Organ feels like you’re making the audience feel this extreme pain you describe.

FUJIWARA: Yes, that’s the result of the film. My second film, ID [2005], is even more so.

NOTEBOOK: In addition to fear and pain, pleasure is another large theme. After the screening, someone told me your film was grotesque but something about it was so pleasurable. How do you maintain that balance?

FUJIWARA: I think humans, in order to live, can’t cut those away from existence. If you deny desire, you’re not human. The existence of such things causes our misery, too. Thus, desire and slaughter are inescapable. My fear and sorrow regarding this, and my questioning what are they anyway. That’s what I wanted to portray.

NOTEBOOK: What’s interesting about your portrayal of violence is that Yoko uses the gun as a weapon but doesn’t shoot from it. The one time she tries to shoot at her father, it wasn’t loaded. She mostly hits with it.

FUJIWARA: When I act a role, it needs to be real for me to imagine it. I can’t shoot a gun just like that. I need to feel it. Whenever I do something I feel a corporal build-up that can’t just be released by shooting away.

NOTEBOOK: Shooting it would be too easy?

FUJIWARA: An action needs to be taken. The body and the heart are connected. It’s not that easy.

NOTEBOOK: What was the biggest challenge in shooting Organ?

FUJIWARA: The most difficult challenge was the first scene, in the warehouse. When the doctor and yakuza fend off the police while trying to dissect the man. That shoot was in the middle of summer, but we had to close off the warehouse because it was a night scene. It was hot, smelly, only men, and everyone’s body odor was suffocating the room. That was really difficult. At the time there were seven of us, and now there are three of us, just Takahashi, Mori and I. In Organ, all the actors take on multiple roles. Whenever they weren’t onscreen they were doing lights or shooting. We shot it scene by scene in order. I remember towards the end of the film, during the scene in the tunnel, when my role Yoko comes in on a bike and there’s a fighting scene, we couldn’t get a permit to shoot. We were able to shoot outside the tunnel on the road but not inside. But I badly wanted to shoot inside so we went at midnight, and the characters got all bloody and we were shooting, and the police came. They thought it was a real yakuza fight and took off the safety on their pistols and were about to shoot at us. We thought we were done for. The character Yasuda, who later falls into the ditch and gets stabbed with a Japanese sword, was responsible for getting the permits and he had all the documents on him. So, he came out from the ditch all bloody and with a sword in him, screaming, “We’re shooting a film!” terrifying the police even more. While he was negotiating with them we finished shooting the scene. The police just told us to be safe and left, but it was all thanks to him for putting his life on the line. We really thought we were going to get shot. Usually film shoots have large crews and it’s obvious, but in our case, all the crew were also the actors, so it was hard to tell, and the lights were hidden.

NOTEBOOK: What about the camera?

FUJIWARA: Yes, but it was a small 16mm Scoopic, and the police were so focused on the bloody actors they didn’t notice it. The police were terrified, but it was a great location and I just needed to shoot there no matter what.

#link #in case they delete it

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ouyangzizhensdad · 4 years ago

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As a mdzs/novel canon reader, how do you feel about the roles of Wen Ning and Wen Qing in mdzs vs cql?

I think one of the most important thing (for me) when thinking about how wn and wq are explored in cql is to remember the following two factors:

1. While the actress denied it, it seems that wq was indeed supposed to be a love interest for wwx in cql before fans made a fuss about it on social media: this is supported by the fact she was introduced as a main character in early talks of the series, the actress got the biggest $$ contract after xz and wyb, we got some leaked photos from set showing scenes that were filmed or were intended to be filmed but didn’t end up in the final cut of the series, and the simple reality that wq’s presence in the story was increased significantly (while her impact on the plot remained the same). Tbh that they chose to cast meng ziyi and introduced (and kept) a frankly bizarre (on a thematic and plot level) romance subplot between jc and her is proof enough for me that she was supposed to be a love interest for wwx (albeit a tragic one).

2. CQL fundamentally modified the role of the Wens within the narrative by changing the whole subplot about modao, which then altered the role of wq and wn to a degree, and with which characters they interacted and when.

For me, these had an impact on the overall quality of the storytelling, particularly in regards to wq and her character (under the cut because I don’t know how to be brief).

WEN QING:

1. Even if she had been instructed by the director to play wq as close to possible to the way she was portrayed in the novel, I don’t think Meng Ziyi could have done it; for me, she doesn’t have the right presence, physicality, etc. to achieve a good performance of wq. Novel wq has such strong boss energy; she is high-ranking officer even if she is removed from the fighting, the best doctor, and someone who was in charge of the yiling supervision office, and she’s constantly snapping at people (I love novel!wq.........). Meng Ziyi just does not manage to embody that powerful energy--she has that female lead type of presence, and it just doesn’t mesh with who wq is.

Wen Ning nodded, somewhat embarrassed, “My sister. She’s really powerful.”

She was indeed powerful.

Wen Qing could be considered a famous cultivator of the QishanWen Sect. She wasn’t a daughter of the QishanWen Sect’s leader, Wen Ruohan, but instead the daughter of one of Wen Ruohan’s cousins. Although they were far cousins, Wen Ruohan had always had a close relationship to this cousin of his. On top of that, Wen Qing was exceptional in the liberal arts and studied medicine as well. She was a talent, and thus she was rather favored by Wen Ruohan. She often followed Wen Ruohan to the banquets of the QishanWen Sect, which was why Wei Wuxian found her face familiar. She was a beauty, after all. He had also heard from somewhere that she had an elder or younger brother. But, perhaps because he wasn’t as talented as Wen Qing, not many people talked about him.

2. In my opinion, making the wq a more active agent in the wen plot also takes away part of what defines her arc and character in the novel, and what she represents as a figure within the conflict. Let’s remember, we are only introduced to wq in the novel after Lotus Pier was burned down and jc lost his core--she is absent until then, and that is the point: she is not involved in the conflict. While morally upright, she is someone who passively benefits from the ills committed by her sect and who only takes calculated risks to help reduce the suffering committed to others. She becomes guilty by association despite never actively hurting others or helping wrh’s cause. It feels more organic and complex than the throne-room!threats we see in cql, and having her carry on missions for wrh.

Wen Qing cut him off, “What the Wen Sect does doesn’t represent what we do. We don’t need to be responsible for the Wen Sect’s wrongdoing. Wei Ying, there’s no need to look at me like that. There’s a beginning to all debts. I’m the office leader of Yiling, but I was ordered to take the position. I’m a medic, an apothecary, I’ve never killed anyone, much less touched the blood of the Jiang Sect.”

It was true. Nobody had heard of any lives lost by Wen Qing’s hands. There were always many cases that people wanted her to take over. It was because Wen Qing was one of the Wen Sect’s people whose way of doing things was actually normal. At times she could even put in a few good words for people in front of Wen Ruohan. Her reputation had always been good.

/////

Lan Xichen responded a moment later. “I have heard of Wen Qing’s name a few of times. I do not remember her having participated in any of the Sunshot Campaign’s crimes.”

“But she’s never stopped them either, “ Nie Mingjue countered.

“Wen Qing was one of Wen RuoHan’s most trusted people, “ said Lan Xichen. “How could she have stopped them?”

Nie Mingjue spoke coldly. “If she responded with only silence and not opposition when the Wen Sect was causing mayhem, it’s the same as indifference. She shouldn’t have been so disillusioned as to hope that she could be treated with respect when the Wen Sect was doing evil and be unwilling to suffer the consequences and pay the price when the Wen Sect was wiped out.”

[...] One of the sect leaders spoke up, “What Nie-zongzhu said is quite right. Besides, Wen Qing is one of Wen RuoHan’s most trusted people. You’re telling me she never participated? Well I don’t buy it. Is there any Wen-gao without a single drop of blood on their hands? Maybe it’s just that we haven’t found out about it yet!”

3. Making wq interact with other characters before the qiongqi path incident also makes their motivations harder to understand. For instance, jc having feelings for wq makes his motivations and actions during the aftermath of the sunshot campaign more muddled, imo? In the novel, instead, jc’s unwillingness to help the wen remnants is used to showcase a foil between jc’s and wwx’s understandings of duty/responsibility:

“You burn this corpse right now and return to them all these leftovers of the Wen Sect. That’s the only way to make the subject die!” As Jiang Cheng spoke, he raised his sword again, preparing to attack.

Wei Wuxian clenched his wrist.

“Are you joking?! If we return Wen Qing and the others to them, they’d meet nothing but a dead end!”

“I doubt you’ll even return all of them. Why do you care what kind of end they meet? A dead end it is, then—what does it have to do with you?!”

Wei Wuxian finally lost his temper. “Jiang Cheng! What- What do you think you’re talking about?! Take it back—don’t make me give you a thrashing! Don’t forget. Who was the one that helped us burn Jiang-shushu’s and Yu-furen’s corpses? Who returned to us the ashes that are in Lotus Pier right now? And who took us in when we were chased after by Wen Chao?!”

Jiang Cheng, “I’m the one who fucking wants to give you a thrashing! Yes, they helped us before, but why in the world don’t you understand that right now any remnant of the Wen Sect is a target of criticism! No matter who they are, with a surname of Wen they have committed a most heinous crime! And those who protect the Wen are at risk of being condemned by everyone! All the people loathe the Wen-dogs so badly that the worse they die the better. Whoever protects them is against the entire world. Nobody would speak for them, and nobody would speak for you either!”

4. Adding more screen time for wq and more interactions with other characters prior to/during the sunshot campaign ends up adding nothing in terms of her arc or her impact on the plot. While wq is a secondary character in the novel, she is crucial to the plot: her skills and her agency shape so many crucial moments and events in mdzs. Take away pretty much any scene with wq in the novel, and the events of the novel have to change. However, when it comes to what has been added in cql to make her more prominent in the series, it does not feel like it brings anything of significance to the plot. In the end, what is the point of the hair comb moment? it never sways jc to help or feel really conflicted over not helping the wen remnants? it never changes anything about the way wq acts? jc doesn’t come to wq’s defense at jinlintai the way lwj does. At best, it just adds to jc’s manpain. In the end, what’s the point of having a cute moment between wq and jyl, except to reassure viewers that wq is a good person and cares for her brother (all things we known in the novel in spite of the absence of this scene). In the end, what is the point of spending screentime with wq looking for the yin iron in the cloud recesses, and wwx being suspicious of her, if anyway lwj and him stumble upon it by chance? If wq were the love interest, it would make more sense to just pad up her screen time in the series, and these moments would probably pay off more. But as it is, it just feels very aimless and even at times confusing.

5. i 100% headcanon novel wq as a lesbian and the fact that they even suggest she might have feelings for jc is an attack on my gay rights ):

WEN NING:

1. Gosh I love wn. I think his role in the novel is so important and i have too much to say to end up saying anything remotely coherent. I also have to say that I love the actor they chose. Of all the casting choices, I’d even say it is the best of the entire series in my opinion. He really captures the essence of wn and he looks so adorable. So cute.

2. Overall, i think cql did not change too much in terms of his arc and characterisation (the shy but fiercely protective person, coming to terms with what he lost, finding wen yuan and reconnecting with his history, finding a path of his own instead of following his sister/wwx). However I do find that some of the interactions are more meaningful in the novel. For example, making wwx and wn’s first interaction happen in the cloud recesses takes away the importance of wwx standing up against wn’s own sect members on their own turf. The fact that wwx and wn see each other more in the CQL verse also undermines the weight of wn’s choice and how significant wwx’s actions and words were to him, since he was ready to go against his sect for someone he’d met once. Once!!!! It says so much about wn and what his life was like--and how much impact wwx’s acts of kindness and care could have. If I let myself I would just end up quoting back most of Poison - part 4.Okay, I will just quote this part:

Red seeped through Wen Qionglin’s face to even the bottom of his ears. There was no need for others to beckon him away; he fled self-consciously. Wei Wuxian chased after him, “Hey, don’t run! Uh… Qionglin-xiong right? Why are you running?”

Hearing his name called from behind him, Wen Qionglin finally stopped. Head hanging low, he turned around. It seemed as though shame rippled from his head to his toes as he stammered, “… I’m sorry.”

“Why are you telling me you’re sorry?”

“You… You recommended me… but I made you lose face…”

“How did it make me lose face? You haven’t really shot in front other people, have you? You were nervous?”

Wen Qionglin nodded. Wei Wuxian continued, “Have some confidence. Let me tell you the truth—you shoot better than everyone in your sect. Out of all of the disciples whom I’ve seen, no more than three people are better in archery than you.”

3. I do wish wn as the ghost general was scarier and more violent in cql, but they tamed all of the horror/violent/gory aspects of the novel so it was to be expected. I just love contrasts.............

#mdzs meta #asks #cql vs mdzs #wen qing #wen ning #Anonymous

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lilaccatholic · 4 years ago

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Ugh, this article from Vanity Fair (copied below the cut for those of you who have run out of free articles for the month) about how many old Hollywood stars were forced into abortions to keep up their “images”—with some of them being absolutely destroyed by the procedure—is absolutely horrifying. How anyone can look at this and not see how these poor women were abused and manipulated is beyond me.

Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. While patriarchal political powers connive to block women’s legal access to abortion in 21st century America, in Old Hollywood, abortions were far more standard and far more accessible than they often are today—more like aspirin, or appendectomies. How and why did a procedure that was taboo and illegal at the time become so ordinary—at least, among a certain set?

Much like today, in Old Hollywood, the decisions being made about women’s bodies were made in the interests of men—the powerful heads of motion pictures studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and RKO. As Aubrey Malone writes in Hollywood's Second Sex: The Treatment of Women in the Film Industry, 1900-1999, “If you want to play in this business, you play like a man or you’re out. And if you happen to be a woman, better not mention it to anybody.”

From the very infancy of America’s film industry, abortions were necessary body maintenance for women in the spotlight. Birth control, including prophylactics, were about as new as “stars” themselves—movie performers who went overnight from being “Little Mary” or “The Vitagraph Girl” to “America’s Sweetheart” or “Sex Goddess.”

“These newly wealthy men and women didn’t know how to control their money, their bodies, or their lives, spending, cavorting, and reveling in excess,” writes Anne Helen Petersen in Scandals of Classic Hollywood. In the working environment of the Hollywood studio system, society’s 19th-century sexual segregation had fallen away. Women—flappers, It girls, sirens and seductresses—were spared their destiny in the kitchen, and for the first time, they earned large incomes they could spend on whatever and whomever they wished. Many believed the publicity they read about their own erotic powers, and they went toe-to-toe professionally with men. Sparks were bound to fly.

And so it became necessary for the studios to implement reformatory measures to prevent stars from destroying their value through scandal. In 1922, Will H. Hays Hays collaborated with studios to introduce mandatory “morality clauses” into stars’ contracts. Consequently an unintended pregnancy would not only bring shame to these top box-office earners—it would violate studio policy. “[I]t was a common assumption that glamorous stars would not be popular if they had children,” writes Cari Beauchamp in her book on powerful women in Old Hollywood, Without Lying Down.

These clauses may have extended to an actress’s right to marry. According to Petersen, rumor had it that “Blonde Bombshell” Jean Harlow couldn’t wed William Powell because “MGM had written a clause into her contract forbidding her to marry”—a wife couldn’t be a “bombshell,” after all. When Harlow became pregnant from the affair, she called MGM head of publicity Howard Strickling in a panic. Shortly thereafter, according to E.J. Fleming in The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, “Mrs. Jean Carpenter” entered Good Shepherd Hospital “to get some rest.” She was seen only by her private doctors and nurses in room 826, the same room she had occupied the year before for an “appendectomy.”

In the 1930s, vamp and man-eating thespian Tallulah Bankhead got “abortions like other women got permanent waves,” biographer Lee Israel quips in Miss Tallulah Bankhead. When virtuous singing sensation Jeanette McDonald found herself pregnant in 1935, MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer told Strickling to “get rid of the problem.” McDonald soon checked into a hospital with an “ear infection,” according to Fleming’s The Fixers.

Many of these Silent Sex Goddesses either fell victim to their own hedonism, fell out of favor, or burned out, such as Theda Bara and Clara Bow. Others, like Joan Crawford, kept going. Kenneth Anger writes that Crawford was a “gutsy jazz baby” who marched through the “twin holocaust of the Talkies/Crash unscathed” to escape her dirt-poor origins. “Joan knew where she came from,” he continues, “and did not want to go back there.”

Get 1 year for $15.Join Now In 1931 Joan Crawford, estranged from her husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr., became pregnant with what she believed was Clark Gable’s child and Strickling arranged for an abortion. Rather than reveal the truth, Crawford told Fairbanks that during the filming of Rain on Catalina Island, she slipped on the deck of a ship and lost the baby.

Crawford’s rival Bette Davis also willingly chose to have abortions for the sake of her career. Davis was the breadwinner for her entire family—her mother and sister, and her husband, Harmon Nelson, whom she married in 1932. If she’d had a child in 1934, she told her biographer Charlotte Chandler in The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, she would’ve “missed the biggest role in her life thus far”—that of Mildred in Of Human Bondage, which earned Davis her first Oscar nomination. Other great parts—“Jezebel, Judith, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Margo Channing”—may not have followed, either. “But I didn’t miss any of these roles, and I didn’t miss having a family,” she said. Later in life, Davis had three children.

Her first child, Barbara Davis Sherry—known as B.D.—was born when Davis was 39. As biographer Whitney Stine notes in I’d Love to Kiss You: Conversations with Bette Davis, “she was proud of the fact that, after her abortions, she could have a baby at last and a career, because her mother had always insisted that she couldn’t have both. She never tired of reminding [her mother] that she could be a mother and an actress.”

“A child could wait; her career could not.” That’s the reasoning Jean Harlow’s mother gave about her daughter’s own abortion at age 18. Ava Gardner, too, expressed a similar sentiment when discussing her abortion, which she had when married to Frank Sinatra—unbeknownst to him. “‘MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies,’” Jane Ellen Wayne quotes Gardner saying in The Golden Girls of MGM. “‘If I had one, my salary would be cut off. So how could I make a living? Frank was broke and my future movies were going to take me all over the world. I couldn’t have a baby with that sort of thing going on. MGM made all the arrangements for me to fly to London. Someone from the studio was with me all the time. The abortion was hush hush . . . very discreet.’”

But things didn’t work out quite so well for Judy Garland. Famous primarily for playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and struggling to maintain both her weight and her image as an ingenue, Garland was never free to make her own choices.

“Married or not, the MGM girls maintained their virginal image,” Wayne observes, and this was especially true of Garland. In 1941, at age 19, she married the bandleader David Rose without the approval of MGM, and within 24 hours was ordered back by to work. When she became pregnant by Rose, her mother, Ethel, in cahoots with the studio, arranged for Garland to have an abortion. Audiences loved her as a child—not as a mother. In 1943, Garland became pregnant from her affair with Tyrone Power, according to Petersen. Strickling arranged for her to have an abortion. Arguably, these incidents affected Garland psychologically; eventually she became the first public victim of stardom.

Tyrone Power also got Lana Turner pregnant. Again, Strickling arranged for an abortion. Power was one of a constellation of male stars—such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin—whose unbridled dalliances left women paying the price, according to The Fixers. (The phrase “In like Flynn” alludes to Errol’s ease at bedding women—and his good fortune at being acquitted of statutory rape of two teenage girls.)

Strickling, who was by now referred to as a “fixer,” had his hands full with Turner. The “Sweater Girl” allegedly found herself pregnant by bandleader Artie Shaw in 1941, and Strickling arranged an abortion during her publicity tour of Hawaii. The procedure took place without anesthesia, on her hotel bed. Turner’s mother covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her daughter’s cries. A studio doctor, paid $500 that was then deducted from Turner’s paycheck, performed the procedure. A week later, she was back on set filming Ziegfeld Girl, according to The Fixers.

Some actresses struggled with whether or not to keep their child. Mexican screen siren Lupe Velez committed suicide in 1944 because she was pregnant by her lover Harald Ramond, who wouldn’t marry her. A devout Catholic, she declined to call “Doctor Killkare” (“the joke name for Tinseltown’s leading abortionist,” according to Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon), and downed 75 Seconal instead, according to Hollywood Babylon.

The decision was equally tragic for Dorothy Dandridge. Otto Preminger had directed her in Carmen Jones and made her a star. When she became pregnant by him in 1955, he refused to divorce his wife and marry her. Dandridge was forced to have an abortion; the studio demanded it, according to Scandals of Classic Hollywood, not only because a child would compromise her image as the sexy Carmen Jones, but also because Preminger was a white man. And, while miscegenation laws were repealed in California in 1948, nationwide they were still very much in place.

Ironically, the rebel of her day was Loretta Young—not because she had an abortion, but because she refused to have one. A devout Catholic, Young journeyed abroad in 1935 to recuperate from a ‘mystery illness,’ after she found herself with child by Clark Gable under shady circumstances—and avoided the press. She gave birth to her daughter at home in Los Angeles. Young initially gave the child up for adoption—and then, a few months later, officially adopted her, according to The Fixers.

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, women were at their most desirable and their most powerful—but it still didn’t afford them the right to choose when it came to governing their bodies. Hollywood’s production codes extended to women’s reproduction. In the hundred years or so that have passed since the birth of American cinema, everything has changed—though, then again, perhaps nothing has.

#tw abortion

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cyberfairyblog · 4 years ago

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Some more stuff about Vanessa Marbles or marble idk XD

Contains spoilers for a 30+ year old show ft. My fancharacter Vanessa Marbles-Whittaker. Rambling, oc x canon (romantic and platonic), some meddling with canon events, and j*ll*an m*rsh*ll bashing

- i'm thinking about her placement in Odyssey & I'm entertaining the thought of having her "debut" be in 1989 bigbrainmeta

- She arrived in town like right after Connie and Eugene got fired

- So that makes her older than Jason in terms of episodes; she appears a whole 3 years before him 😂

- That first year she did genuinely like her nunnery but didn't really interact with her fellow nuns much keeping them at a distance

- It wasn't until year 2 she started having doubts. Nothing bad happened it just that there was a nagging feeling that she tried to stifle

- Vanessa is afraid of heights that's why she travelled by train instead of plane. She gets nervous by bridges & mountains even a tall hill is enough to make her stomach churn

- She got the job at Whit's End to help herself learn to befriend people & because the show needs more responsible adults lol

- For a time there was rumors about her being a vampire which she took in stride because having sensitive skin she walks around with an umbrella

- Eugene helps her with technology and how to operate the Imagination Station

- "Is that a time machine?"

- "No it's a holographic imagery generator meant to emulate time periods from prehistory all the way to even the future! Well not the future future, still has to figure out how to predict outcomes but I'm working on it."

- Vanessa dead ass got lost at the generator part

- She legit said that she was surprised they didn't blow up Odyssey given how powerful that machine is this around the Novacom arc

- Jason was a total enigma to her like 'who is that crazy fellow' and someone tells her that he's Whit's son & she's like oh. OH John didn't tell me he had kids smh

- They didn't get along at first and had poor communication though Vanessa really did try to be fair

- The funniest moment was when Jason accidentally revealed himself to be NSA and Vanessa revealed herself to be a Blackgaard - THE Blackgaard's daughter

- "Wait so you're mad at me for being a spy but yet you hid THIS from us?"

- "Well yes but actually no, at least you have the entire government on your side everyone literally hates my family jason!"

- Vanessa is very protective of her mother and Uncle Edwin

- She's a somewhat decent actress, she has stage fright sort of but swallows it in order to help her uncle get his play off the ground

- Despite switching to Protestant she still upholds a lot of Catholic values since she was raised as one

-She doesn't have much contact with her mother's side of the family due to strain from her parents divorce again divorce frowned upon in strict Catholic families

- She did give jason a gift for his engagement to Tasha but after that fiasco he tried giving it back to her and she told him to keep it

- In an alternate universe (let's call it marbleverse for future reference) jason proposed to her (having already broke up with Tasha years ago) and she declined not ready for marriage. they hurried up after novacom tho lmao

- Vanessa inherited a Blackgaard Castle located in Connellsville which she retooled as "midnight manor" a haunted house/vacation home

- Vanessa prefers Eugene with his hair down because seeing his eyes creeps her out

- "Six feet apart j*ll*an, six feet apart." Vanessa like everyone else with a brain dislikes villain marshall

- "Hello again it's me Vanessa! Double-S Vanessa, Double-T Whittaker!" She jokes this after she meets j*ll*an the second time

- Vanessa doesn't interact with child characters all that much but a part of her character arc is becoming a cool aunt to jason's cool uncle

- Some kids and connie helped set up a date for jason/vanessa totally not suspicious they knew what was going on and decided to play along; discovered they actually enjoyed each other's company

- During his time as The Stiletto Jason left roses and candy and other tokens around for her to find, which she eventually figured out was a sign of him being alive

- She was mad, relieved, overjoyed at his presence & the rare time you see her cry

- Only other time she cried was when Tom Riley passed because she admired the man

- Meta-wise Vanessa prefers jason's old look though she likes all of his designs

- Vanessa did get her own public access show which was crucial to the novacom arc

- Afterwards she suggested the idea of reforming the boxes into teaching tools, using them as art projects

- Vanessa was so sus of Monica Stone like "you think im not watching you lady?? Think again! I know you, i am watching you!"

- Vanessa and connie are like sisters considering she's an only child; in fact connie waa another close friend she made in odyssey

- If Chris (the narrator) gets sick or unavailable Vanessa fills in for the intro and such is introduced in her workshop painting

- She canonically has a guardian angel named Mariposa who sometimes appears; Mariposa works under Malachi and her human disguise is Posie

- After leaving the nunnery the first thing she did was buy a trendy wardrobe like miniskirts, boots, she was happy she didn't have to were ultra-conservative attire anymore

- She has a pet doberman named angela who ironically hates everyone in town

- If vanessa wasn't with jason her next choice of love interest would've been Richard Maxwell

#canon x oc #oc: vanessa marbles #otp: hidden cafe #adventures in odyssey #adventures in odyssey radio show #aio #oc x canon

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magicalhideoutengineer · 5 years ago

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Taken from Inside the Magic: The Making of Fantastic Beasts

Porpentina Goldstein

At first glance, Porpentina Goldstein or 'Tina' Goldstein is a no-nonsense, career-driven New York witch. Indeed. She is the first of a magical persuasion to spot that Newt might be more than a passing tourist.

Dressed in her usual smart but inconspicuous mix of above-the-ankle trousers, grey overcoat and balck cloche hat, she trails him into the bank; there, she is appalled to witness the wizard use hhis wand in broad daylight and promptly arrest him. Newt is clearly an exposure risk to the secretive MACUSA. He may also be a chance for Tina to redeem herself.

Tina has run into her own problems at MACUSA. 'She's recently been demoted,' explains Katherine Waterston, the NewYork-based actress who is bringing this complicated witch to the screen. 'She's gone from being a detective to the lowly work in the Wand Permit Office. Basically stamping passports.’

Up until her downrturn in fortune Tina wasa Auror, a wizard detective tasked with investigating crimes. But as director David Yates explains, 'She had done something really bad.' What her crime might be is revealed over the course of the movie. 'Like Newt,' he says, 'she is a wee bit of an outsider.’

Waterston finds her character fascinating. Nothing is quite what it seems. Tina is really proud to be a part of MACUSA. She still hopes to make something of herself there. Yet she also slinks about New York doing her own investigation like a private eye from an old-schoolcrime movie.

'Tina has good instincts,' hits Waterston. 'She is good at her job. But when push comes to shove, she will abandon the rulebook.' She is a woman of great potential, but she just hasn't found a way to realize it yet, with pretty bobbed hair and a stern gaze.

Yates was taken with Waterston from the moment she walked into the first audition. She displayed similar qualities to Eddie Redmayne. 'Very much like Eddie, she can be quite deeply intense in a good way, and she can be very, very funny. She's got a great physical ability at comedy, which is quite rare. She's also a really powerful actor. I loved that combination.’

Waterston doesn't count herself as any kind of expert on the history of Harry Potter. She had seen some of the films, read some of the books, but admits she hadn't got a completely lost in the world. She also thinks that may not be a bad thing.

'I felt in a fortunate place,' she says, 'because I wasn't so obsessed that I had a lot of preconceived notions, but I was familiar enough to have a sense of the tone of the world.’

She also had a plenty of opportunity to pick the brains of J.K Rowling, who provided a wealth of knowledge on Tina.

'You just want to curl up by the fire withher and hear her stories,' sighs Waterston happily. 'She sees a whole, incredibly detailed universe.’

Two key relationship will emerge in Tina's busy corner of that universe. Firstly, with her sister Queenie, played by Alison Sudol, with whom she shares a small Brownstone apartment.

Tina and Queenie lost their parents to a Dragon Pox when they were young, and at different times have been a parent to one another. 'in their loneliness they've fallen into that dynamic,' says Waterston. Tina, she admits, may be a bit more the father, and Queenie the mother, cooking these wonderful meals. Queenie is as vivacious as Tina is restrained, yet they couldn't be closer.

'It feels true to me, the way Tina and Queenie relate to one another,' insists Waterston. Having only just met, she and Sudol developed an instant chemistry as they shot the scene of the Goldsteins preparing dinner for Newt and Jacob. It was their first day working together and they had to glide about the kitchen casting spells with their wands as if it was second nature.

'We kind of scrambled to figure it out –whose chore is whose?' recalls Waterston. 'I'm sort of setting the table with my wand and she's preparing the meal. We developed a little, superstitious salt-over-the-shoulder thing, just to give the audience a sense of their life together.’

Then, of course, there is Newt. Someone Tina can't quite figure out. Not at first. 'Part of what I love about Tina is that she's flawed,' says Waterston. 'Things don't work out for her. She meets Newt and she suspects there is something to him, but she doesn't know exactly what.’

Throughout the first film, as she watches him interact with his fantastic beasts and sees the way he is, Tina will come to view Newt in a different light.

'With Katherine's character, it is sort of a slow-build connection,' says Redmayne, 'these two people, who are outsiders yet passionate people, begins to glimpse things in one another.’

Waterston describes it as a love story albeit in an unconventional way. They have a lot of to deal with in the meantime – escaped beasts, death sentences, going on the run, tackling the outbreak of dark magic – and yet Newt sees all the potential in her that she has trouble seeing in herself. 'At first, she thinks he's dangerous and untrustworthy, and potentially kind of cute too,' she says. 'Then as the relationship evolves you start to notice parallels between them. I mean, both are very passionate but not very good at expressing themselves.’

She pauses, trying to capture one of the themes of the film: 'It can be lonely being an oddball until you find another oddball.’

Tina's Costume

'Tina Goldstein is a little bit gawky. A little bit not quite there in her body and just a little bit off in her costume. She was sort of a modern girl, and I made an acting decision to put her in trousers from the start, which was not so common in the period. She had an element of what the Aurors wore but not really. Hence the trousers. She was hiding a lot and doing her own private-eye things. So I gave her a trenchcoat with a really big collar she could tuck her head behind doing this kind of stealthy spying work.’

Tina's Wand

When it came to her wand, Katherine Waterston requested some 'heft'. She wanted to make Tina's spell-casting forceful, as if magic was something she takes very seriously. 'Tina's was nice,' says Pierre Bohanna. 'Quite simple and quite classic.’

The Goldstein Department

Named for the dark sandstone bricks used tobuild Manhattan's famous townhouses, most Brownstones were converted into apartments in the 1920s. Not wealthy, the Goldsteins occupy a couple of rooms within one such conversion.

Furthermore, Tina and Queenie will prepared inner for their guests with the help of familiar spells. Jacob, recovering from a nasty bite from a Murtlap, wonders whether he is having a hallucinogenic episode. ‘He's chucked onto this sofa and the girls suddenly swish their wands around and plates fly from everywhere and food is being chopped,' says visual effects supervisor Christian Manz, 'and we go into incredible detail about baking an apple strudel magically. But it feels workaday, it feels normal to them.’

'We've got little napkins flying like birds, we've got a book jacket that move around,' he recalls. Irons work on their own accord, a clothes-horse revolves to ensure both sides face the fire, and there is a lovely dress on a mannequin that Queenie is mending remotely.

The idea, says actress Katherine Waterston, is 'to give the audience a sense of the Goldsteins' life together that is very insulated and private.' Having two men visit, she insists, is a 'freak exception'.

#fantastic beasts #tina goldstein #katherine waterston #fantastic beasts and where to find them #fbawtftinterview #queenie goldstein #Goldstein Sisters #Newtina #fbawtftbook #Inside the magic #Goldstein Apartment

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traincat · 5 years ago

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I like MCU Spider-Man, but I agree with nearly all of your critiques. The 3rd film will have the same director and writers, so I don't expect the problems to be fixed, but I'm curious: do you think MCU Spider-Man is salvageable? If you could be completely in charge, how would you write the story and fix the problems?

Yeah, I don’t really expect the problems to be fixed in the third film, no matter how many times they promise it’s going to be something “different.” If I’m honest, besides the incredibly weak scripts, I think a big part of the problem is that Jon Watts is a bad director for a Spider-Man project. Which, to be fair, I think is actually why he was hired – he’s got a pretty short list of credits under his name. I mean, “Cop Car”? “Clown”? Nothing about his repertoire suggests he was going to give the studio the kind of artistic pushback they have a history of receiving from their more experienced directors. He’s basically the director version of Jell-O – easy to mold and bland to boot. The perfect guy to direct a car commercial I mean mainstream superhero film.

This is actually part of the reason I’m disappointed that the Sony-Marvel rights deal ended up sticking after all. I think that if the film rights had reverted entirely back to Sony, there might have been some damage control. We know that they intended to keep Tom Holland, if not the whole cast, for at least one more movie even if the rights had reverted entirely back to Sony so I don’t really get what the raising of arms was about. The rights reversion would’ve cut the apron strings with the rest of the MCU which would have been good, forcing both this Spider-Man to stand on his own two feet within his own narrative and also forcing the movie to focus solely on Spider-Man and on his cast. Sony’s recent Spider-Man films as of the time of writing this (I no idea what the hell they’re gonna do with Morbius and I don’t really care) have dealt with some element of “corporations are evil” – Oscorp pulling the strings in TASM/2 and Venom’s whole entire deal – and I would really like to see this version of Spider-Man be thrust into a plot where that’s the reality and that’s something he has to deal with and where he’s actually forced to defend normal people not just against a costumed villain with a grudge but against an entire system that is set up to exploit and abuse the vulnerable. I think that would have gone a long way towards if not fixing the damage inflicted upon the narrative, then at least course correcting it for the future. But that’s not happening now so whatever.

I find it kind of hard to think of what I would do if I was handed complete control of MCU Spider-Man with the caveat that I had to go forward using the two previous films as my background just because I dislike so many of the choices they made so much. On the other hand, I do like money and inflicting my own opinions on a captive audience, so. I think I would want to scale back the stakes a lot – keep Peter in New York for the entirety of the movie’s plot and film mostly there if at all possible. I would want to cute the ties to all Iron Man cast members so sorry, Jon Favreau, but you’re out, while at the same time redirecting the film’s focus into something more oriented in Peter’s civilian community. Bringing in a character like Leo Zelinsky, a Holocaust survivor who works as a tailor specializing in super-clients, would be a really good way to give Peter and the audience a personal connection to Peter’s Queens community while also tying this Peter back to the Jewish subtext of Spider-Man, and it could work in a plot where cut the Iron Man cast – this Peter isn’t an experienced craftsman when it comes to creating his own costume, so bringing in Leo Zelinsky would make sense, and a costume created by the both of them could be quite meaningful if it was played out well.

I would definitely want to give May Parker much more screentime and rework her relationship from the “big sister” role (the writers’ words, not mine) to that of Peter’s mother, someone who realistically worries about the dangers of Spider-Man but also provides a strong moral backbone for him. I’d want to establish the exact circumstances of Ben’s death – I don’t know exactly what I’d do, but given this Peter’s development has failed to track with most other Peters I would definitely want to switch Ben’s death up somehow to kind of shed some light on that. Peter and May would have to talk about him. I would definitely want to bring Peter’s classic college friends group closer together, starting with Peter and Flash since I really like Tony Revolori as an actor. I find this MJ to be an incredibly inscrutable character, and not in a good way, so I’d want to shed some better light on her, her family circumstances, and what makes her tick. I’d bring Liz back and give her some of her comic counterpart’s fire (perhaps literally, given Ultimate Liz’s Firestar status) and also I’d get Betty’s actress a brunette bob stat. There would definitely be a bigger focus on women and on Peter navigating complicated friendships with women, not just letting him have a romantic interest and that’s the end of that. I’m very conflicted on what to do with Ned Leeds because I think Jacob Batalon has some of the best screen presence of that cast, but I find it hard to get past the “Ganke Lee with a minor Peter antagonist’s name pasted on him” aspect of the character. Honestly? I might rework Ned’s role to go full villain, skipping directly to the Hobgoblin with the shadow of the Green Goblin and the Kingpin behind him. That would solve my problem of wanting to give Batalon massive amounts of screen time and a big role but absolutely detesting the reworking of Ned Leed’s into the best friend sidekick position. I would say I’d want Ned to then have a romantic subplot with a young Richard Fisk, who would be here for some reason (it’s not like it’s the worst continuity crime the MCU would have ever committed) but I don’t want yet another Disney’s first ever gay character spotlight moment to be given to the villains, so. It would take some finangling. Maybe I would reinvent Aunt May’s one time fiance Nathan Lubensky as a woman so we’d have some nice balance.

And we defend not one single bank within the movie.

Alternatively, I go mad with the power and reveal that this entire cast is made up of clones created by the Jackal, thus explaining all the Ben Reilly-inspired costumes, and subject everyone to my five movie Clone Saga adaptation dreams.

What I would really want to do given full creative control and being told I could wipe the slate clean and restart Spider-Man within the MCU, no questions asked, would be to have Peter as a retired superhero who was active underground years and years before Iron Man or the Avengers were ever on the scene, and have his daughter Mayday be the young teenage Spider-Man of the MCU, someone fresh and new who carries her father’s legacy while living in a world saturated by the Avengers legacy.

Or I’d just kill Peter and bring in a great team to do a Miles movie. I maybe think about this theoretical where I can get my claws into things a lot.

#*replies #traincat talks comics #traincat talks homecoming #mcu critical/#Anonymous

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imaginesforjohnnydepp · 4 years ago

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Violette pt 2

spring 2016

He dreamed about her again, just like last night and the night before. Johnny hadn’t seen Violette in eighteen years, and he thought it was very odd but was still very curious. Is she remarried with kids of her own? Is she still in the medical field? Johnny still had the note she left him along with her rings; they were tucked away in a box somewhere in a storage unit, he didn’t want to throw them away, so he took out a storage unit some years ago.

Why was he thinking about her now, of all times? He loved Violette once, of course he did, it was impossible when she made it so easy. She was gorgeous and funny and sweet and smart, a southern girl with a cute accent, and was a wonderful cook who loved him and supported him every early in his career. He thought back to their marriage, how wonderful it was for ten years before he fucked it up. He loves his kids and is grateful for Vanessa for giving him two kids who adore him, but Johnny hated what he did to Violette in the process.

He thought that if he ever had kids, Violette would be the mother. They tried for their own, and when that didn’t work, they considered adoption until his career took off and he was always away filming one movie or another, and then he met Vanessa at that party. Johnny remembered the look on Violette’s face when he told her that Vanessa was pregnant, he never forgot it. She tried to shrug it off, but as weeks passed and Vanessa’s stomach got bigger and bigger, he saw the toll it took on her, no matter how she tried to hide it: Violette began losing weight, she stopped eating (at least around him), she always looked tired no matter how early she went to bed. And the first time she met Vanessa.

The women were friendly with each other in the way that kids would be when introduced to each other in a play group by their parents for the first time. He thought everything was going well, Violette was talking about turning one of the spare rooms into a nursery, she bought stuffed animals and clothes and supplies, helped assemble the crib. Johnny saw her reaction in the marriage counselor’s office when the counselor said he had to cut off Vanessa and his child if they wanted the marriage to work; Violette never had a good poker face, and in another setting, he thought she would make a good actress with her ability to display her emotions on her face, how she always made him feel something, something he told her plenty of times. He didn’t think she’d actually leave.

Of course it was a possibility, but he couldn’t bear the thought of Violette leaving, but one day Johnny came home, all of her stuff was gone, and there were divorce papers, rings, and a letter in a manila envelope on the bed. It was a no-fault divorce, and all she asked for was a court order to take back her maiden name, and nothing more, even though she was entitled, and the judge told her she had to take it. The divorce took six months, and she would always transfer the money back every month since she already had a job waiting on her in Louisiana, and that was the last time he’d see or hear from her. It was seven in the morning, and he had a meeting with his lawyer Laura at ten so he decided to get ready, grabbing his phone off the charger and heading into the kitchen for breakfast. As he poured the milk into his bowl of Cheerios, his phone rang; who could be calling at this hour? “Good morning Laura.”

And Laura jumped right into it: “I did a Google search for your ex wife Violette Becnel and fortunately, I didn’t have to do too much digging. She is a pediatrician in New Orleans and she went on Facebook to defend you. I’m on her Facebook page right now if you want to hear what she said.” Johnny almost dropped the milk at the news. Why didn’t he think to do a Google search before? “Yeah, sure.” The thought of Violette out there rooting for him filled him with joy.

“The statement is pretty long so prepare yourself” My heart breaks at the news of the death of my former mother-in-law Betty Sue. She was a wonderful, kind, amazing woman, and I will miss her dearly, and I send my thoughts and condolences to the Depp family, and since I’m on the topic of Depp, I would like to make one thing clear. Johnny Depp and I were married for 10 wonderful years, and while no marriage is perfect, not once was he ever abusive towards me. I don’t believe he is capable of such a thing, and this version of him that is being portrayed in the media is not the Johnny I know. I wish him and his family the best in this trying and difficult time. His mom loved Violette, his entire family loved Violette, and they were just as upset about their divorce as he was. “Do you think she’d be willing to testify?” Johnny didn’t think she would come to defend him after he publicly humiliated her, but she was never the one to hold grudges.

“I can send her a message, but I don’t know how long it will take for her to respond.” He swallowed a bit of cereal before responding, “that’s fine. Thanks Laura-- wait! Do you think you can leave my number for her too? So she knows it’s legit?” And also because he wanted an excuse to talk to her. “Sure, if that’s what you want. See you later Johnny.” Johnny hoped that Violette answered Laura’s message, there was still a lot of things he wanted to tell her, things he had to tell her.

Violette

“Do you think you’ll have to testify?” Violette’s mother Claudia asked, cutting into her omelette. “If it comes that, then yeah, but I have a hard time believing Johnny could hurt someone like that.” After Violette wrote the post, she instantly had a barrage of comments, some calling her an abuse apologist, others saying she was bribed by Johnny with money, and others siding with her, and her messages were a mess. “None of this makes sense, there has to be somethin’ deeper going on,” her sister Angela. She woke up early this morning to do a little research; from what she saw, Amber was leaving him (after the death of Betty Sue), and if Johnny didn’t do what she wanted, she would publicly lie about him according to Doug’s article.

Violette then read an article that contained a statement by the police department, which completely contradicted the statement made by Amber’s team. Then Amber filed for divorce with no mention of spousal abuse; Violette knew Doug and she knew he wouldn’t lie about anything like this, and this was all she needed to know to see that Johnny was innocent. “I still can’t believe your fool ass stickin’ your neck out for him,” Angela grumbled. “Lawyers re probably gonna call on me anyway, so I might as well get it over with. Ain’t no way he touched her.” She saw the new set of pictures, “evidence” of the abuse but Violette didn’t see anything out of the ordinary except for a red mark on her lip, with no visible swelling or bruising.

“Johnny is innocent, and I know you know that.” Her mom and Angela both loved Johnny; her mom treated her like a son, always letting him sneak a piece of food during the holidays, and Angela just loved having a brother. “Please, I know you’re not happy about how our marriage ended, but none of that matters right now, that was years ago. What matters now is that he’s being accused of something he didn’t do,” Violette pleaded with her mom and sister. Surely they had to know that he was innocent, even if they weren’t exactly his biggest fans. “Well... it does sound out of character for him. And I read that woman was arrested for hitting her ex wife,” Angelea came to her decision.”

“If Johnny was really out here beatin’ up on women, I’m sure Betty Sue would smack him back to Kentucky,” Violette’s mother agreed. The family of three finished their meal, with Angela picking up the bill before going their own ways; Violette did her errands, going to the sore and doing laundry. It was a little after two when she finished, and she wanted to take a nap before she went to the hospital to check on the new baby tonight. Violette always loved seeing the new babies after they were born, loved seeing them grow into little beings with each check-up, and they always looked happy to see her. She was always a natural with kids and they seemed to gravitate towards her no matter where she was; Violette sometimes babysat the kids who lived in her building.

It was closest she got to motherhood. That and being aunt to Angela’s kids, her niece and nephew, but they were all grown up with lives of their own. Violette ironed her scrubs while she waited for her Facebook page to load; she wanted to leave a message on her book club’s wall about suggestions for their next read. Her last post had gone viral, and was still attracting attention and comments, all of them gone unanswered, and she was glad she never downloaded the app. Her messages were full, and at the top of the old messages, was a new one highlighted in blue by a woman named Laura Wasser; she clicked on it.

The message read: My name is Laura Wasser, I’m a lawyer representing Johnny Depp, and I was wondering if it would be okay to speak to you about a possible written testimony to be given to the court. Below are my cellphone number and email address, and Johnny’s phone number in case you have any questions. Feel free to reach me at any time.

There was an email address and two phone numbers, both with Los Angeles area codes. The name sounded familiar, so Violette clicked on Laura’s page; she really is a lawyer who lives in Los Angeles. She dialed one of the numbers, and the line rang three times before someone answered, a man’s voice. “Hello?” A voice she hadn’t heard in years.

“Johnny? Johnny is that you?” So maybe Laura is the real deal. “Violette? How are you?” To say she was freaking out would be an understatement. Eighteen years without speaking to her the ex husband who cheated on her, and how here she is, talking to him. “I should be the one asking you that. Are you okay? How are you holding up? How’s your family?” Words kept falling from her mouth and she couldn’t make herself shut up.

“Violette, Violette, calm down. Not everything’s fine but we’re managing. Let’s not talk about that right now. I... I had to talk to you.” He wanted to talk to her? “About what?” “Just to apologize... for everything.” “Really, that was a long time ago and... I’m past that now. There’s no need to apologize.”

This had to be some kind of dream, maybe she fell asleep at her desk in her office while doing paperwork, because there’s absolutely no way she’s speaking to her ex husband. Violette had to change the subject, and fast. “I got a message from your lawyer. She gave me your number, but I didn’t think it would actually be your number but I had to check.” “Listen, you don’t have to testify if you don’t feel comfortable with it--” “No, Johnny, I want to. I know you’re innocent and I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

She really did feel bad for him, and to be going through this after his mom dies with the entire world thinking he’s some violent drunk who beats women. “None of this is your fault, it’s mine. I was so fucking stupid to think of starting something with her.” “It’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault. You were in love, and we’ve all done stupid things when we’re in love.” Violette winced as she automatically though of her former ex fiance Anthony. He had three kids with three different women, but she didn’t care because she was sure he was the one.

Her mom and Angela didn’t like him, and she turned into a different person completely, watching movies and shows she never liked, neglecting her collection of 19th century novels and changed her personality, all for a man who came up with excuses to get out of wedding planning. “Do you need testimonies from my mom and sister as well?” She knew her mother wouldn’t hesitate to defend him, even if they were mad at him. “I’ll check with Laura first but I want to ask you something.” “Sure, go ahead.”

“If it’s not too much trouble... I was wondering if you would... like to meet up?” This wasn’t something she was expecting. What would they even say to each other after all this time? Violette always wondered what she would do in the very unlikely case she’d run into Johnny, and after their divorce, she moved back home so there wouldn’t even be a chance of that ever happening. “I don’t even live in California, but sure, we could do that. If you want, you could come to New Orleans. I have an extra room in my apartment, and I don’t think anyone would bother you.” What in the fuck is she thinking?

What is she going to do, being in the same room with her ex husband? “Are you sure? I can get a hotel room or something. I don’t wanna put you out or anything.” “It’s no problem, really. I’ll be at work the whole day anyway.” Violette hadn’t lived with a man in years, and it would be quite an adjustment to live a man who saw her naked almost every day. “I’d like that. Thank you Violette.”

“No problem. Just let me know when you’re comin’ down.” “I will. Talk to you later?” She smiled as she unplugged her iron. “Talk to you later Johnny.” She hung up the phone and grabbed a hanger to hang up her clothes; she had an extra shirt in her car for when she got off. It was now fifteen minutes after and she wasn’t due until six, so she had enough time for a long nap.

Once in her room, Violette changed into a tank top and shorts and slipped under the covers. It was only as she drifted off that she remembered that she opened up her two-bedroom apartment to Johnny and that they’d be sharing the bathroom that was connected to her room.

@takemepedropascal

#johnny depp imagines #johnny depp imagine #johnny depp x oc

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purplesurveys · 4 years ago

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961

What was the most unsettling film you’ve seen? Unsettling films are my jam, man. To name a few, there’s Eraserhead, Room, Midsommar, Eyes Wide Shut, Misery, and most recently, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Eraserhead takes the cake though. That movie always makes me queasy...

What unethical experiment would have the biggest positive impact on society as a whole? I’m a firm believer in nothing good ever comes out of unethical practices. I’ll never forget reading about an experiment where a group of newborn babies were given basic needs like food and being bathed, but weren’t shown any affection whatsoever and it was meant to see if humans can survive with just the most basic physiological needs. By the end of the experiment period half of the babies were dead. The results were honestly a lot bleaker than how I’ve put it, but I don’t wanna be a downer lol. Suffice it to say that experiment haunted me for days after reading it.

When was the last time you were snooping, and found something you wish you hadn’t? It was around a week or so ago, I’m pretty sure.

Which celebrity or band has the worst fan base? My sister is into K-pop and I hear insights from her all the time, but her one constant is that BTS breeds the most annoying, toxic fans. I’d have to agree. Ariana Grande’s fandom was also annoying at one point, but I haven’t heard much from them making a mess these days.

What are you interested in that most people aren’t? Autobiographies.

If you were given a PhD degree, but had no more knowledge of the subject of the degree besides what you have now, what degree would you want to be given to you? Why would I deserve a PhD on something I’m clearly not qualified for...I’m not sure I’m following this question right, but I don’t feel like thinking too hard about it.

What smartphone feature would you actually be excited for a company to implement? I’m happy with the features that are widespread now, but I wish companies adhere more to countries other than the common ones like US, UK, Australia, etc. I always see ads about phones being able to tell you how much movie tickets cost or track boarding passes, but those are all irrelevant here. It makes a lot of Apple’s basic apps useless on this side of the world haha.

What’s something people don’t worry about but really should? Long-term effects of poor habits like not getting enough sleep or drinking too many cups of coffee. I know because I’m guilty of this.

What movie quotes do you use on a regular basis? “I won’t think about that now, I’ll think about it tomorrow,” but I usually say it to myself, especially when I feel stressed.

Do you think that children born today will have better or worse lives than their parents? Better, but idk if that’s just me being biased because my generation will be the next parents lol. I just think that a lot of Gen X parents still have a lot of dated prejudices and mindsets that my generation was able to learn better from. For example my mom doesn’t like using people’s preferred names, especially if they’ve transitioned -_____- and I know I’d never want to set such an example for my kids.

What’s the funniest joke you know by heart? I know I’ve come across hilarious ones but I always fail to come up with one when asked on the spot.

When was the last time you felt you had a new lease on life? LOL RIGHT NOW

What’s the funniest actual name you’ve heard of someone having? It’s more stupid than funny and I know I’ve already mentioned this before, but Covid Bryant as a first and second name still takes the cake for me. My sister went to school with a girl whose name is just her surname backwards, and for a time I was really weirded out by it. But in the times I’ve seen her she really owns her name and never looks bothered by it, so I quickly stopped caring.

Which charity or charitable cause is most deserving of money? For me it would have to be organizations for animal welfare.

What TV show character would it be the most fun to change places with for a week? Post-El Camino Jesse Pinkman. I wouldn’t want to live through his chaotic shit from Breaking Bad, but his fate after El Camino is something I’m super envious of.

What was cool when you were young but isn’t cool now? Flip phones, Blackberry phones, Roshes, Frappuccinos.

If you were moving to another country, but could only pack one carry-on sized bag, what would you pack? Phone, laptop, their chargers, important IDs, some of my favorite tops and jeans, underwear, essential toiletries, wallet, a family photo, a journal and pen, earphones, certain knickknacks to remember Gab and my dogs by. Minus the clothes, all of these are pretty tiny so I think these would all fit in the bag just fine.

What’s the most ironic thing you’ve seen happen? I don’t know. I’m not really a fan of rating the most/worst this and that stuff in my life, either. I feel like I unnecessarily rack my brain too hard for them when I take surveys to have a chill time.

If magic was real, what spell would you try to learn first? Probably something that’d keep my dogs from dying.

If you were a ghost and could possess people, what would you make them do? No thanks. I’d be the chillest ghost tbh, I’d like to just sneak up on people’s business and hang out but never interfere in them.

What goal do you think humanity is not focused enough on achieving? Climate change, global warming, alleviation of poverty. Corporations and the few people who actually have the power and money to change things only ever come up with short-term shit like donations and never look at the big picture. What problem are you currently grappling with? So many personal ones. But just like the recurring theme of my surveys so far, “I don’t want to get into it.”

What character in a movie could have been great, but the actor they cast didn’t fit the role? As much as I love Kristen Stewart, I heard she was cast as Princess Diana for an upcoming film and I’m not really feeling that decision. They could’ve gone with a British actress for starters?????? The movie is still in production but it is pretty annoying to think about lmao.

What game have you spent the most hours playing? Probably GTA: San Andreas as a kid.

What’s the most comfortable bed or chair you’ve ever been in? Luxury hotel beds are always so fluffy and comfortable.

What’s the craziest conversation you’ve overheard? Omg one time at a coffee shop Gabie and I sat beside this older couple that obviously was going through some heavy SHIT. There was a lot of animosity and tension between them and I caught the lady silently break into tears a few times. I never overheard anything but then again they sat in silence for hours until the lady finally walked out on him. Never knew what it was about but I’ve always guessed that the man did something crappy, like cheat, and was discovered. It was a really sad sight and a crazy situation to witness and I think I felt even more sorry because they were obviously in their 50s or 60s. I hope the woman is in a better place now as she looked rough as fuck that evening.

What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked? I wore a lot of hats when I was in my college org, and that was on top of balancing my acads as well.

What movie, picture, or video always makes you laugh no matter how often you watch it? That scene from Friends where Ross plays the keyboard for Chandler, Phoebe, Monica, and Rachel.

What artist or band do you always recommend when someone asks for a music recommendation? It depends on what music they’re into and if I have actually have a recommendation in mind for them. I obviously can’t suggest Paramore to someone who mainly listens to metal.

If you could have an all-expenses paid trip to see any famous world monument, which monument would you choose? I’m down for any monuments that are super ancient like Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Giza.

If animals could talk, which animal would be the most annoying? I’d go with frogs, but only because they get annoyingly loud in the evening.

What’s the most addicted to a game you’ve ever been? Playing The Sims, Mario Kart, Rock Band, or games in the Burnout franchise.

What’s the coldest you’ve ever been? Japan was so fucking cold when I was there. Didn’t do my research and ended up being dressed poorly, and I was so cold I could barely talk to my parents or fully enjoy my time. Sagada was also nearly unbearable in the early morning.

Which protagonist from a book or movie would make the worst roommate? Not from a book or movie, but BoJack Horseman. Diane can also be in the running as I always found her too whiny. I get that she had her personal shit to deal with, but I don’t think living with her would be good for my own sanity and mental health.

Do you eat food that’s past its expiration date if it still smells and looks fine? It annoys my chef dad to death that I don’t lol. No matter how great it looks, I’d bounce. I once ate expired Kit Kats that tasted like cardboard and that scared me off of expired food forever.

What’s the most ridiculous thing you have bought? I once bought a stupid novelty soap that to this day I’ve never even opened. It’s in one of my drawers, and I plan to just throw it out at some point.

What’s the funniest comedy skit you’ve seen? Not a fan of these but one that got to me is Dear Sister from SNL.

What’s the most depressing meal you’ve eaten? A few years ago there was a local breakfast place that offered red velvet pancakes for a limited time and I was all over that crap, so I went and ordered. The actual pancakes ended up not being any bigger than my palm, and I remember not being able to hide my disappointment once the server placed the dish on my table haha. I felt so scammed. I had to order something else to feel full, because those pancakes were stupidly small.

What tips or tricks have you picked up from your job/jobs? One of my superiors, when she was presenting a pitch to our director yesterday, kept asking questions and picking at the director’s brain so that she can get suggestions and answers straight from the director herself and so that she didn’t have to do any brainstorming anymore. I thought that was a pretty nifty and clever hack.

What outdoor activity haven’t you tried, but would like to? Hiking a mountain!

What songs hit you with a wave of nostalgia every time you hear them? Umbrella by Rihanna feat. Jay-Z.

What’s the worst backhanded compliment you could give someone? Idk, anything can be the worst depending on the context. I’m not a fan of giving those, though.

What’s the most interesting documentary you’ve ever watched? Unsolved Mysteries’ Dupont de Ligonnès episode was a lot of fun to watch.

What was the last song you sang along to? I think it was Thinking of You by Katy Perry? but I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t sung along to anything in a while.

What app can you not believe someone hasn’t made yet? I don’t really download and use a lot of apps other than the basic ones, so I don’t care too much.

When was the last time you face palmed? Last night.

If you were given five million dollars to open a small museum, what kind of museum would you create? I’d give it away to the Martial Law museum currently being made near my university so that it can do more to show the atrocities of the Marcoses. And so that I can piss off my pro-Marcos relatives.

Which of your vices or bad habits would be the hardest to give up? Uh hating myself, if that counts.

What really needs to be modernized? Public transportation systems in this country.

#survey #surveys

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mulanxiaojie · 5 years ago

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The high-profile remake, with an all-Asian cast, a PG-13 rating and a politically-charged star, was always going to pose major risks. Then the coronavirus upended its entire release plan.

Liu Yifei, star of Disney's live-action remake of Mulan, lives in Beijing, but she is originally from Wuhan, epicenter of the coronavirus. In January, the 32-year-old actress left China for Los Angeles to begin press for the film, weeks before the virus' outbreak, which has now infected more than 77,000 people, killed more than 2,500 and wreaked havoc in her home country. She says she doesn't have any family or close friends personally affected by the disease — she left Wuhan when she was 10 — but the epidemic has added an impossible-to-foresee variable to her film's March 27 worldwide release.

Liu pauses when asked about the outbreak. "It's really heavy for me to even think about it," she says. "People are doing the right thing. They are being careful for themselves and others. I'm so touched actually to see how they haven't been out for weeks. I'm really hoping for a miracle and that this will just be over soon."

In China, Liu is a household name, nicknamed "Fairy Sister" for her elegance and beauty. Modeling since age 8, she broke out in the 2003 Chinese TV series Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, a commercial hit in China and the highest-rated Chinese drama in Taiwan at the time, and hasn't stopped working in film and TV since, earning fashion partnerships with Adidas, Shiseido and Armani along the way.

Disney and director Niki Caro selected Liu from more than 1,000 aspirants from around the world to star as Hua Mulan, the Chinese heroine who disguises herself as a man to fight in the Imperial Army in a film carefully designed to appeal to Western and Chinese audiences alike. But now there's a question of when Mulan will be released in China. With the coronavirus shutting down all 70,000 of the country's theaters since Jan. 24, it's unclear — and more unlikely every day — that multiplexes will reopen in time for its planned release. (Several high-profile U.S. films, including Universal's Dolittle and 1917 and Searchlight's Jojo Rabbit, saw their February releases scrapped.) "It certainly has worldwide and global appeal, but there's no denying that this is a very important film for the Chinese market," says Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "It's a huge blow for Disney if it doesn't release in China." Disney president of production Sean Bailey says he's "looking at it day by day."

Of course, this puts added pressure on the $200 million budgeted film — the priciest of Disney's recent live-action remakes — to perform in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Liu, who is enveloped in her own storm of controversy based on a political social media post about the Hong Kong protests, says she is trying hard not to think about all that. "It would really be a loss for me if I let the pressure overtake my possibilities," says the actress, who learned English when she lived in New York as a child for four years with her mother, a dancer, after her parents' divorce.

Even before the outbreak of the virus, Mulan — the first Disney-branded film with an all-Asian cast and the first to be rated PG-13 (for battle scenes) — would have marked one of the studio's riskiest live-action films to date. While the original 1998 Mulan was a critical and commercial hit, garnering a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination and grossing more than $300 million worldwide ($475 million today), it faltered at the Chinese box office. Part of the reason is that the Chinese government stalled its premiere for nearly a year because of lingering anger over Disney's 1997 release of Kundun, Martin Scorsese's Dalai Lama movie that dealt with China's occupation of Tibet. By the time Mulan reached theaters in late February 1999, most children had returned to school after the Chinese New Year holiday and pirated copies were widely available. For the new film, the plan was to counter piracy by releasing the movie in China the same day as the rest of the world, a strategy that's no longer possible.

The film also has tested the ability and tolerance of Disney — which aims to be ideologically neutral — in managing global political fallout. In August, Liu stirred up a major controversy when she reposted a pro-police comment on Chinese platform Weibo (where she has more than 66 million followers) at the height of the violence in Hong Kong. Her action was seen by critics of the Chinese government as supporting police brutality; soon after, the hashtag #BoycottMulan started trending on Twitter. Liu, who has American co-citizenship from her time in the U.S., was harshly criticized around the world for supporting oppression.

"I think it's obviously a very complicated situation and I'm not an expert," she says now, cautious in the extreme. "I just really hope this gets resolved soon." When pressed, Liu, whose answer seemed rehearsed, declines to say much more, simply repeating, "I think it's just a very sensitive situation." (Bailey also deflects when asked: "Yifei's politics are her own, and we are just focused on the movie and her performance.")

"Most Chinese celebrities choose to avoid posting such political statements because of the risks to their careers internationally," says Dorothy Lau, a professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. But though Liu's post drew criticism globally, some experts believe the political drama could actually result in more support for the film in China. "At the time, the government came out in various publications supporting the film very strongly," says USC professor Stanley Rosen, who specializes in Chinese politics and society. "There's a real impetus on the part of the Chinese government to make this work. I'm sure the government is going to try to show that the boycott has had no effect." And while her comment might still anger filmgoers in Hong Kong, where the recent live-action Aladdin took in $8 million, that market is tiny compared to the mainland (total 2019 Hong Kong box office was $245 million compared with China's $9.2 billion). "Most people outside Hong Kong have likely forgotten about this controversy," says Rosen. "But the Chinese government does not forget these things."

The fact that this version of Mulan is a large-scale war epic inspired more by the ancient Chinese ballad than the original animated film may also help win fans in Beijing, but the choice carries its own significant risks: The film needs to satisfy Chinese audiences raised on the legend while not disappointing a generation of fans in Asia (and elsewhere) for whom the animated film is foundational. "People would come in to audition and would say, 'Sorry, I know this is really unprofessional, but before I start, I just want you to know, the animated movie was the first time I saw someone that looked like me speak English in a movie theater,' " says producer Jason Reed. "The stakes couldn't be higher."

Mulan also represents a leap of faith in the film's director, Caro, whose previous two films boasted budgets of about 10 percent of Mulan's (The Zookeeper's Wife and Disney's 2015 sports drama McFarland USA were each in the $20 million to $25 million range). Caro, 53, was not Disney's first choice. Before hiring the New Zealand filmmaker, the studio targeted directors of Asian descent, including Taiwanese Oscar winner Ang Lee (he was busy promoting Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) and Chinese helmer Jiang Wen. Still, Caro showcased a knack for representing cultures outside of her own with her 2002 debut Whale Rider, which follows a young Maori girl who wants to become chief, a role traditionally reserved for men.

The feminist story of Mulan resonated deeply with Caro. "When I first started wanting to be a filmmaker, there was so little precedent for women doing this [big studio] work," she says. She has now directed the most expensive live-action film by a woman, joining only a handful (Kathryn Bigelow, Ava DuVernay and Patty Jenkins) who have helmed films costing more than $100 million. "Patty changed the game with Wonder Woman. It was like a shot of adrenaline for me as a filmmaker," says Caro, who assembled a mostly female-led crew, including cinematographer Mandy Walker, costume designer Bina Daigeler, makeup designer Denise Kum and first assistant director Liz Tan.

To those still upset that an Asian filmmaker didn't get the job, Caro responds: "Although it's a critically important Chinese story and it's set in Chinese culture and history, there is another culture at play here, which is the culture of Disney, and that the director, whoever they were, needed to be able to handle both — and here I am."

Soon after Caro's hiring, rumors about the movie began to swirl online. Years of studios centering Asian movies around white protagonists (from Scarlett Johansson's Ghost in the Shell to Matt Damon's The Great Wall) meant the threat of whitewashing loomed large. An early report online claimed that the first draft, penned by Elizabeth Martin and Lauren Hynek, featured a white male protagonist.

"This is the first time I've been on a big touchstone movie with the internet what it is today. And I had a Google alert set, so I'd see these things, 'Oh, there was originally a white male lead, or they're casting Jennifer Lawrence,' and they were all just made up," says Reed, who adds that there may have been two non-Chinese characters in the initial script, but both were secondary roles.

The rumors may have been unfounded, but the fallout was real: The Lawrence-as-Mulan story sparked a 2016 petition, "Tell Disney You Don't Want a Whitewashed Mulan!" drawing more than 110,000 signatures.

Ironically, as that rumor swirled, Caro struggled to find an actress to play Mulan. The global hunt began in October 2016, when Caro sent a team of casting directors to each continent and virtually every small village in China. They were looking for an actress who could play Mulan across three phases, from a young woman unsure of her place to a soldier masquerading as a man and, finally, as an empowered warrior. She had to be fluent in English, handle the physical demands of martial arts and deliver the more emotional moments with Mulan's family. "She's a needle in a haystack, but we were going to find her," says Caro. "It's impossible to make this movie without this person."

Though the studio cast a wide multinational net, Bill Kong — a veteran Chinese producer known for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Monster Hunt who was brought on as a producer on Mulan — advised Caro that in order for this film to play well in China, not just anyone of Asian descent would work. "The first thing I told her was, 'Hire a Chinese girl. You can't hire a Japanese girl to do this,' " he says.

Actresses who made it past that initial audition were brought to Los Angeles, but, after vetting several promising candidates for months, Caro decided to start over. (The search dragged on for so long that Disney delayed the original November 2018 release date.) Eventually, Liu, who had been unavailable during the first pass because of a TV show in China, was able to audition.

"I was determined that whoever played Mulan was not going to be fragile and feminine," says Caro. "She had to pass as a man in a man's army." So the director and a trainer put Liu through a 90-minute physical assessment, with extreme cardio and weight exercises. Other actresses fared less well. "Boy, did they flame out," says Caro with a laugh. But Liu "never complained once, never said, 'I can't.' She went to her limits."

With Liu, Disney also found an actress who could speak English, was familiar with martial arts from her TV work in China and, most importantly, was known to the Chinese market.

While Liu spent three months training for the role in New Zealand, Caro finished up her own extensive research. She took multiple trips to China and spoke to dozens of experts — including the world's foremost specialist on Tang dynasty military strategy. She also studied the 360-word Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan, which first told the young heroine's story. The legend, which originated in the fifth or sixth century CE, is a tale as familiar in China as the story of Joan of Arc or Paul Bunyan in the West, and it's been adapted many times into plays, operas and films.

"I certainly wasn't aware of how deeply important it is to Mainland Chinese — all children are taught it," says Caro. "She is so meaningful that many places I went, people would say, 'Well, she comes from my village.' It was wonderful to feel that profound connection — but also terrifying."

As soon as the first trailers rolled out, so did the grumblings about factual inaccuracy, like the choice to situate Mulan's family in a tulou, a traditional round structure that housed several clans. These homes were mostly present in southern China, in what is now Fujian province (Mulan is said to be from the north), and would not have existed at the time she lived.

"I told [Caro] to not be too concerned about the historical accuracy," says Kong. "Mulan, though very famous, is fictional. She's not a historical person."

Disney tested the film thoroughly with Chinese audiences, including its own local executives. In an early version, Mulan kissed love interest Chen Honghui (Yoson An) on a bridge when they were about to part. "It was very beautiful, but the China office went, 'No, you can't, that doesn't feel right to the Chinese people,' " says Caro. "So we took it out."

Caro and the writers, Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (the husband-and-wife team behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World who rewrote the original script), also had to consider the passionate fans of the 1998 film. Most Disney remakes, like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, have remained loyal to the tone and structure of the animated source material while adding a new song or character. Departing from that formula wasn't a swift decision. "We had a lot of conversations about it," says Reed. Ultimately they wanted "to tell this story in a way that is more real, more relatable, where we don't have the benefit of the joke to hide behind things that might be uncomfortable and we don't break into song to tell us the subtext."

They swapped the musical numbers and funny animal sidekicks for a large-scale war epic in which Mulan takes her father's place in the Imperial Army. "It's a woman's story that has been told for centuries but never by women, and we felt like it was really time to tell that story," says Silver. The question is whether Generation Z and millennials, who fell in love with these animated tales as kids and helped boost Aladdin to its $1 billion global haul, will embrace the direction. "To be honest, we really go by our gut and what creatively excites the team here," says Bailey. "I think it shows that there can be different approaches to these [movies] that have validity."

When word leaked that Mushu, the silly dragon sidekick (originally voiced by Eddie Murphy), would not be included, some fans expressed disappointment on social media. But the character's disappearance makes sense in the Chinese context. "Mushu was very popular in the U.S., but the Chinese hated it," says Rosen. "This kind of miniature dragon trivialized their culture."

Unlike its Marvel-branded films, Disney live-action movies must appeal to significantly younger audiences. Yet Caro wanted to make a real war movie. "You have to deliver on the war of it," she says, "and how do you do that under the Disney brand where you can't show any violence, gratuitous or otherwise?" She took advantage of the film's stunning locations, like setting a battle sequence in a geothermal valley, where steam could mask the fighting. "Those sequences, I'm proud of them. They're really beautiful and epic — but you can still take kids. No blood is shed. It's not Game of Thrones."

Disney's past live-action performance in China is a mixed bag. Both The Lion King ($120.5 million there) and Jungle Book ($148 million) enjoyed strong showings. Aladdin earned only $53 million, while 2017's Beauty and the Beast took in just $84 million (though it earned $1.3 billion worldwide).

Of course, the expectations for Mulan in China are much higher. "They will eventually release it in China," Dergarabedian notes. "It's just a matter of when and what effect that might have." Some analysts forecast that the film could match the success of the Kung Fu Panda series. The third movie, released in 2016, earned north of $144.2 million and became the country's biggest animated film ever. It was praised for being a Hollywood film that understood and showed respect toward the Chinese culture. Panda, however, had the advantage of being a Chinese co-production, which guarantees a larger share of the market — an advantage Mulan doesn't have.

Caro thinks about the film's fate there in more than simply financial terms. "Of course it's vitally important that it succeeds in China," she says, "because it belongs to China."

#mulan #live action mulan #disney #chinese #article #interview #china #liu yifei

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missdelphinilestrange · 5 years ago

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1ST RULE — tag some muses you would like to know better.

@crucioslut @tmvoldemort @lokilaufeysonslytherin @thestrongestmagic

2ND RULE — BOLD the statements that are true for your muse.

current muse. Bellatrix Black - Bellatrix Lestrange

fc. For this blog there is no face claim

occupation. Student at Hogwarts, War Lieutenant / Dark Witch, Lieutenant to the Ruler of the Wizardry world, Delphi’s mother

age. 47 years old - Born. 1951 - 1998

Sexuality. Bisexual

APPEARANCE:

i am 5’7 or taller

i wear glasses

i have at least one tattoo - Azkaban tattoo on my neck, and a small rose tattoo on my left shoulder with this saying “i’m as pretty as a rose as long as you can look past the thorns that are my flaws” (not many know about the last tattoo)

i have at least one piercing - both my ears are pierced, along with the top of my left ear

i have blonde hair

i have short hair

my abs are at least somewhat defined - only because I workout a lot

i have or have had braces

PERSONALITY:

i love meeting new people

people tell me that i’m funny - humor is the only way I can really cope with my childhood trauma, so I’m often told I’m funny

helping others with their problems is a big priority for me - usually only with my sisters, or very close family. when Sirius broke out of Azkaban, I gave him a bit of my food that way he would have a bit of energy before going on the run, but I told him to tell no one I helped him

i enjoy physical challenges - it’s something that’s always been enjoyable for me, because going to the gym used to be the only way for me to escape my strict and controlling parents

i enjoy mental challenges - I’ve always been very intelligent above my years, and I set records in Hogwarts for perfect scores in all classes for my OWLs and NEWTs, so even as an adult, it’s fun to get a challenge

i’m playfully rude with people i know well - I’ve always been playfully rude or sarcastic to people I know well, because I can’t do that around my strict parents since they always said “sarcasm isn’t ladylike” or “acting like that won’t get you a husband” and my close friends and family know that I’m unruly and they accept me for that, which is why I act different in public than I do around my close friends and family

i started saying something ironically & now i can’t stop saying it - I always say “just because I kill people doesn’t mean that you can” to my youngest sister whenever she gets mad at someone. Ever since I watched Toy Story 2, whenever someone asks if I’m calling them a liar, I always say “well, if the boot fits” and then they usually punch me

there is something i would change about my personality - I wish I had the ability to stop rolling my eyes at every person I don’t like

ABILITIES:

i can sing well - singing as a child always helped me deal with whatever I was going through, so I started taking singing lessons

i can play an instrument - piano, guitar, flute, and violin

i can do over 30 push–ups without stopping - I often did push-up competitions with my friends and cousins as a child, and from that, I’ve gotten quite strong

i’m a fast runner - I used to run away from my problems as a child: quite literally, because when my parents would scream at me I’d start running away, so I learned to have a lot of stamina from a young age and run really fast

i can draw well - I always liked to draw pictures of my little sisters, and I ended up getting really good at it

i have good memory - I have really good memory, but a terrible attention span

i’m good at doing math in my head

i can hold my breath underwater for over a minute - This is because I used to go underwater while swimming and pull people down by their ankles just to scare the shit out of them because it’s funny. I stopped doing that though when I got kicked in the face

i have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling - this is because they’re either weak, or I cheated by kicking their shins which distracted them

i know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch

i know how to throw a proper punch - I’ve always been very strong, and I learned how to punch by doing boxing with one of my older cousins. many people talked bad about Andromeda after she was removed from the family in the summer before my seventh year at Hogwarts, and since I knew how to punch really well, I ended up sending a lot of kids to the hospital wing that year (probably a few hundred). After Sirius was removed from the family, I got in a lot of fights with my fellow death eaters because they were talking shit about him and it made me mad. Needless to say, people don’t DARE talk bad about anyone in my family anymore.

HOBBIES:

i enjoy playing sports - Quidditch

i’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else - During Hogwarts, Slytherin Chaser for Quidditch

i’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else

i’ve learned a new song in the past week

i work out at least once a week - I started working out as a kid (about 8 years old) because I wanted an excuse to get away from my parents. Then, when I was 10, the reason I worked out was because I was skinny but I didn’t have much muscle. When I was 12, the reason for me working out was because I was insecure about how short and skinny I was, and I wanted to be stronger that way I could beat the shit out of anyone that made fun of me for it.

i go on runs at least once a week - running was the way I got away from my problems as a kid, and I guess it just stuck with me

i have drawn something in the past month - I drew a picture of my little girl, Delphi, playing with the flowers in the garden

i enjoy writing - writing helps me to get rid of all the stress and anxiety that I always try to hide

i do or have done martial arts

EXPERIENCES:

i have had my first kiss - first year, I kissed Rabastan to see if Rodolphus would get jealous. It backfired and Rabastan ended up in the hospital wing. I guess Rodolphus was jealous.

i have had alcohol - when I was in my first year, a seventh year I was friends with sneaked a bottle of whiskey into the dormitory during one of the house parties. I’m just amazed we didn’t get caught

i have scored the winning goal in a sports game - in my second year during quidditch, right before the other team caught the snitch, I scored ten points, and because of that my team still won even thought the other team had the snitch

i have watched an entire season of a tv show in one sitting

i have been to an overnight event - Slumberparty at a friends house

i have been in a taxi

i have been in the hospital or er in the past year - I had to visit someone I beat up that way he wouldn’t press charges. In my defense, before I even hit the guy, he tauntingly said “what are you gonna do, hit me?” so it’s his own fault for being dumb enough to say that

i have beaten a video game in one day

i have been to another country - Germany, France, Italy

i have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

RELATIONSHIPS:

i am in a relationship - Voldemort and Rodolphus

i have a crush on a celebrity

i have a crush on someone I know

i have been in at least 3 relationships - 100s throughout Hogwarts years

i have never been in a relationship

i have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them - Admitted feelings for Voldemort

i get crushes easily - especially throughout Hogwarts years

i have had a crush on someone for over a year - Voldemort

i have been in a relationship for over a year - Rodolphus and Voldemort simultaneously

i have had feelings for a friend - many times, especially during Hogwarts years

MY LIFE:

i have at least one person i consider a best friend - Narcissa

i live close to my school - only during Hogwarts years

my parents are still together - for some unknown reason, but yes

i have / had at least one sibling - two: Andromeda and Narcissa

i live in the United States

there is snow right now where I live

i have hung out with a friend in the past month - Narcissa

i have a smartphone

i have at least 15 CDs - Mostly classical music, but a few are American muggle music (but no one knows about the muggle songs, and they never will)

i share my room with someone - only during thunderstorms: sometimes thunderstorms are scary due to childhood trauma, so those nights are usually spent cuddled next to Narcissa for comfort and safety

RANDOM STUFF:

i have break danced

i know a person named Jamie

i have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce - as a child, the French piano teacher the Black family hired Jakob Fínêtyeá

i have dyed my hair - multiple times. once because Sirius and Lucius teamed up and put brown hair dye in my shampoo, and followed me around for weeks calling me Andromeda. the second time my hair was dyed was recently when Lucius put purple hair dye in my shampoo and followed me around calling me Nympadora Tonks

i’m listening to one song on repeat right now - “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance because I’m emo as hell

i have punched someone in the past week - Lucius when he put purple hair dye in my shampoo and followed me around calling me Nympadora Tonks. Narcissa then yelled at me because I broke Lucius’s nose

i know someone that has gone to jail - me, and majority of my family / friends

i have broken a bone - (as an adult, running an errand that required to go to Hogwarts) the reason was because someone was talking behind Sirius’s back saying that he’s a disgrace to the Pureblood name, and I got in a fight with that kid. Sirius saw that both of us were bruised and bloody, but I didn’t tell him why, and I never will

i have eaten a waffle today - yes because I have a terrible sweet tooth

i know what I want to do with my life - as a student: teacher, artist, actress, ministry worker: unspeakable or working with magical objects. as an adult: writer, lieutenant death eater, artist, spell maker, singer, musician (not many people know about any of my jobs other than being a lieutenant death eater)

i know at least 2 languages (fluently) - English, German, French, Italian, Gaelic, Russian, Greek, Latin, Spanish (I come from a very culturally knowledgeable family, and intelligence is very important, henceforth why I know so many languages)

Idea From: @tmvoldemort

#bellatrix black #bellatrix lestrange #bellatrix #harry potter #hp #muse

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luckynovak · 5 years ago

Photo

❝ AND WHAT ABOUT ME, MOM? WHAT ABOUT THE DAUGHTER WHO'S STILL HERE? LYDIA WAS TAKEN BUT YOU? YOU LEFT. ❞

— PARS UNA: the rumbling.

Lucky doesn’t want to believe the rumors floating just outside her social circle. Her mother’s name is one very few dare to utter to the actress’s face but they certainly didn’t mind mentioning her behind her back from time to time. Lately however it seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Lorraine Jacobs, playwright extraordinaire, back on the West coast to turn one of her infamous plays into a motion picture. At first it felt too outrageous to be true. Lorraine Jacobs hated Hollywood and she’d sworn to never step foot in Los Angeles county again regardless of it being where her children resided and yet it was all true.

She couldn’t be sure what hurt more that her mother moved back for a job opportunity rather than to mend faces or the fact that she had to find it out through complete and utter strangers congratulating her for the early Oscar buzz her mother’s play turned movie was getting. By the time Lucky’s manager sat her down with news that the director assigned to the project was interested in screen testing her for a part she had already reached her limit. “Excuse me?” She all but shrieked manicured fingers digging into the expensive leather of his couch. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. No, no, fuck no.” What exactly was her mother thinking? That she could make up for years of abandonment by spoon feeding her daughter a role in her movie? Did she really think so little of her own flesh and blood?

“Luce, listen, I know how you feel about your mother but this is a golden opportunity,” Jonathan attempted to reason, large hands reaching forward to engulf the one angrily tapping on the surface of his coffee table. “Even if the role you're given is small, it’ll do wonders for your career. It could be the big break you were looking for.” It barely takes her any time at all to pull herself out of his grasp. Her slender frame ricochets from the couch, golden hues burning as they search for the purse she’d abandoned somewhere in his office during their weekly meeting. She should have known something was up when he offered to read through scripts with her rather than just handing her a stack of them and sending her off. “How many times do I have to tell you that I want to earn my big break?” The question leaves her laced in thinly veiled venom. Disappointment etched into her features just as she finds her abandoned bag by a half-dead fern.

“I don’t want it handed to me because my father knows someone or because my deadbeat mother rolled back into town and wants to rid herself of some guilt. Now if you’ll excuse me I have somewhere to be.”

— PARS DUORUM: the explosion.

How she managed to track her mother’s location couldn’t be spoken for. In fact much could be said about the last hour and half of her life. It passed by in a blur of was anger, hurt, and sheer force of will to hunt down the person responsible for her current less than pleasant head space. Ironically enough her mother had only been located fifteen minutes away from the set Lucky traveled to each day. Some may have been comforted by the knowledge of their mother being so close but it only fueled her anger. Tinder to the ever growing fire within the pit of her stomach. Lucille barely gets through the small talk it takes to trick the front desk into providing her a key to her mother’s room and the entire elevator ride up to the woman’s hotel suite is spent perfecting the monologue she had pieced together in the car ride over.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Lucky demands to know the moment her mother swings open the door. She crosses through the threshold without permission, brushing past the older woman with more force than needed. “You can’t just waltz back into town expecting to placate me with a role in your movie. Don’t tell me you think that makes up for a decade and a half of skirting your duties as a mother?” There isn’t a pause long enough for Lorraine to answer, like an automatic with a finger on the trigger, the words kept spewing from her mouth. “You know what’s so funny to me?” Lucky continued, the laugh following her question far from one of amusement. “ You didn’t even have the balls to offer me the role yourself. You had to do it through the director.”

The last couple words spill from pink painted lips in a sneer. Her gaze wild and angry as she runs her fingers through wavy brunette trusses not unlike the style being worn by the woman before her. She can feel the tears building up beneath her lids and attempted to will them away. The last thing Lucky wanted to do was shed tears in front of her mother. Even if they were ones caused by years of built up rage. “I’m not sure what you thought you would accomplish by coming back here but,” it’s then Lucky finds herself cut off for the first time since her abrupt entrance.

“I’m trying to accomplish a movie. That’s it. I’m sorry you worked up all this courage to come here and yell at me but your anger is misplaced.” If Lorraine’s intention were to calm her daughter down the sound of her voice seemed to be having the opposite effect. “If you got approached by anyone to do this movie I can assure you that it wasn’t my doing. In fact I strongly advocated against it.” Girl Rising had been a biographical play based on Lorraine’s real life. Once it became apparent that the success of the play could be repackaged into a successful movie she had been hounded to sign the rights away. Unable to part completely with something so personal she managed to negotiate a position for herself as co-screenwriter which gave her full control of the script but little control anywhere else.

When producers began to suggest that her daughter play the titular role as a gimmick to get even more eyes on the movie she had done her best to steer the conversation elsewhere but it seemed that her suggestion of other names hadn’t been enough to rid them of the idea completely. Hesitantly, as if she were holding out for Lucy to decide to leave, Lorraine shut the door behind the hurricane otherwise known as her estranged daughter. She maneuvers past Lucille to head directly to the mini bar. She needed something to subdue the headache forming in her temples. “You’re not going to take it right? It would make things extremely difficult for me in you did.”

Her mother might as well have slammed one of her Tonys into Lucky’s chest, it would have hurt a lot less than the damage being inflicted upon the actress’s heart by the callously dismissive words of the woman. In fact I strongly advocated against it. The statement repeats itself within her subconscious, ripping through her psyche much in the similar fashion to that of runaway freight train. How naive could she have been? Of course Lorraine wasn’t capable of extending an olive branch. She barely seemed capable of looking Lucky in the eyes since the disappearance of Lydia. Embarrassment floods through her system, olive features falling into expression devoid of any emotion as hazel hues silently watch the older version of herself cross the room. She barely manages to process the blow inflicted to her ego by her own mother before the woman delivers yet another.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she’s quieter now, her response barely above a whisper. The anger she had entered with suddenly depleted along with most of her energy. Slender shoulders slouch forward, the invisible weight against them threatening to crush her as her mind attempted to pick up the pieces of her heart in real time. She doesn’t mean it, a small voice promises somewhere from the labyrinth of her wounded soul. She loves you, she does, it continues to urge sweetly. All pretty lies meant to sooth her and maybe they may have if it weren’t for the cold gaze in her mother’s eyes as she waited for a response. It was easier to convince herself that the woman who brought her into the world actually cared for her when she wasn’t right in front of her looking anything but the loving mother of her memories. “It would make things difficult for you?”

“Is that all you care about? Yourself?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Lucille. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But you did mom, you did.”

God, Lorraine made it so easy to be hated, so why was it that even after all these years Lucky searched desperately her approval? Her love? Any ounce of affection she could drain from the seemingly cold hearted woman left in the place of the mother she once knew. She hadn’t always been so dismissive, cold, cruel and sometimes Lucky couldn’t help but wish that she had been. If she had been a monster from the start then maybe the actress would have been spared the heartbreak of losing a mother. “I've been making excuses for you my whole life and I’m tired. I’m so tired,” her voice breaks with the declaration. Resolve wavering the longer she stays in the presence of her Achilles heel. Hot tears spill over flushed cheeks as shaky fingers pick at the fabric of her skirt. “I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child and I hope I never do but what about me, mom? What about the daughter who’s still here?”

It’s a question she never dared to utter before this moment, yet as she spoke it she knew it had been one that haunted her ever since the departure of her mother all those years ago. “Lydia was taken, but you? You left.” Her sister held no blame in her departure from Lucky’s life, her exit had been forced upon her. Lorraine Jacobs on the other hand chose to leave Lucky behind and never look back and in the end that had done more damage to her heart than her twin sister’s disappearance ever had. “I never gave myself permission to hate you because I knew you were hurting but why should I care anymore? You clearly don’t care when you hurt me, so you know what?” Lucky asks as she lifts a hand to wipe away at her tears. “I think I will accept the offer to screen test for the movie. Consider it karma for being such a shitty mother.” With nothing else to say and no stomach to stick around long enough to allow her mother enough time to retaliated the actress spun toward the door and made her second dramatic exit of the day.

#𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 ━━━━━ * ∗ ∵ ▸ selfparas.#𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 ━━━━━ * ∗ ∵ ▸ featuring.#𝒇𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 ━━━━━ * ∗ ∵ ▸ lorraine jacobs ( mother dearest ).#guess who misses the dash & is feeling musey af #almost 2k words of just pure word vomit #but anyway time to finish nadia's sp #<3 #kidnapping tw #child loss tw #horrible parent-child relationship tw

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iron-fam-stan · 5 years ago

Note

iron dad au headcanons when tony stark recused nebula from abusive adoptive father thanos

Sorry that it took so long to answer! It's more of a fic than anything else.

(A/N It's a Human Nebula AU and I Headcanon her to look her actress Karen Gillian. She is like 10 give or take here)

----------

Nebula didn't really know what to think of the whole situation playing out in front of her. What she did know, was what she is feeling even if it was a mess of feelings twisting inside her like aggressive snakes fight for dominance.

Fear, confusing, relief, guilt, anger, revenge, panic and anxiety - just to name a few. These emotions made her stomach twist and her head hurt. More that it already did.

Nebula thanked the stars that the bleeding had stopped with the stitches. But most of her pretty red hair was now gone. Her beloved red hair that her father never dared to touch before.

Before this afternoon. In public even!! Which shocked nebula to the core. Normally her father took his anger, about his failed attempts of making "a better world" through what is basically genocide, out on his children in privat.

Most on her though. She always had been the punching bag and the tag along for financial gain. Nobody liked her, but she doesn't have anywhere else to go.

Her sister Gamora always had been her father's favourite and therefore got the least of his anger. Nebula resents her for it, but also wishes to be closer to her sister.

But Gamora doesn't seem to care. So nebula wouldn't dare bare herself like that.

So Nebula tried to survive. Tried to keep to herself. And as invisible as possible.

She studied hard and got good grades. She tried making herself useful. But Gamora always was better than her. Making Nebula a failure in being able to be as good as her sister.

But today her father really had snapped (pun intended). Nebula didn't really know nor understand what exactly set him off. Maybe it was a lot of things not going like her father wanted them to, or maybe she did something completely wrong without noticing or maybe both. Or Something entirely different.

Nebula never pretended to understand her father and his thinking process.

Nebula was stuck in her head she didn't hear her name being called. She jolts and looks up. Right into the eyes of the kind stranger that saved her.

Calling him a stranger would be wrong. Nebula knew who he was. The Tony Stark. One of the most famous person on the planet, a genius and the owner of Stark Industries. Her father's former biggest rival in terms of weapons.

Her father hated him and Nebula immediately liked him, primarily to spite her father but only to herself. She would never say that out loud.

But the more she watched him from afar the more she liked him more than her father and most of his associates. He may totally be drama queen. Nebula has seen enough of his public speeches and appearances to know that without anyone telling her. She always found it be distracting, but only has theories on what it was supposed to distract from. She could easily emphasize with that.

"Smurfette" Tony Stark kneeled in front of her. His famous sunglasses in his breast pocket. His eyes now free of barriers were soft and glassy and sad and kind and solely focused on her eyes and not the top of her head. Concern was clearly visible on his face.

Nebula felt she would burst in ugly tears and sobs if she even opened her mouth for a second. So she just looked at him confused.

'Smurfette?' she seems to ask with her face. Because Tony Stark points at her Smurfette shirt and smurf blue jeans she is wearing.

She totally forgotten about that. Smurfs, how she loved them. They were a big, blue happy family without anyone getting left behind. And Nebula always wanted a family were everybody loved everybody.

She holds back a sob. "Sshhh. Sssh. Nebula everything will be fine." Stark says softly to her. His hands hover awkwardly over her, because he isn't sure if she would be ok with him touching her. She shakes her head.

Nothing is going to be fine. As soon as she is going to be alone with her father again, everything is going to so much worse than is was already. A sob escaped this time.

"You're not going back to Thanos. Not as long as I am alive." Stark determined, unrestrained hatred for her father clearly audible in his voice. Nebula's head shoots up, her eyes wide with shock. "What would you think about me and my fiancee looking after you until we find a best solution for you. One that makes you feel safe and loved? How does that sound like?"

Nebula could only state. She was sure she misheard him or something. This can't be real. She always dreamt about a way out. But she never thought she would get. This has to be a cruel joke or something. Because why would someone ever care about her.

"Nebula? Hey. What do you say? Of course, If you don't want to live with me, I would find the best possible foster parents for you. Just say something, Smurfette." Stark says to her with a encouraging smile and so, so kind and loving eyes. "it's your choice."

Her head hurts, her eyes are watering and her whole body is shaking. But for some reason she believes him. Because he has been nothing but nice and kind and attentive and considerate to her without making her feel pitied. No makes her feel seen and worth at least some human decency.

And Nebula loved it. She only got a little of this kind of attention and she already decided she couldn't and shouldn't live without it. She trusts him. She didn't know why, but she does. She believes or wants to believe that he will find the best for her. Because he has been nothing but kind and nice and loving to her. So Nebula takes the plunge and throws herself into his arms and starts sobbing.

--------

I hope you like it!

#iron family #iron dad #tony stark #nebula #iron man #pepperony #avengers endgame #marvel #avengers #mcu #marvel cinematic universe #my fic #ask

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dislocatedskeleton · 5 years ago

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Fiona Apple’s Art of Radical Sensitivity

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world?

by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker

Fiona Apple was wrestling with her dog, Mercy, the way a person might thrash, happily, in rough waves. Apple tugged on a purple toy as Mercy, a pit-bull-boxer mix, gripped it in her jaws, spinning Apple in circles. Worn out, they flopped onto two daybeds in the living room, in front of a TV that was always on. The first day that I visited, last July, it was set to MSNBC, which was airing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book.

These days, the singer-songwriter, who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tranquil house, in Venice Beach, other than to take early-morning walks on the beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles venue where, since the late nineties, she’d regularly performed her thorny, emotionally revelatory songs. (Her song “Largo” still plays on the club’s Web site.) She’d cancelled her most recent tour, in 2012, when Janet, a pit bull she had adopted when she was twenty-two, was dying. Still, a lot can go on without leaving home. Apple’s new album, whose completion she’d been inching toward for years, was a tricky topic, and so, during the week that I visited, we cycled in and out of other subjects, among them her decision, a year earlier, to stop drinking; estrangements from old friends; and her memories of growing up, in Manhattan, as the youngest child in the “second family” of a married Broadway actor. Near the front door of Apple’s house stood a chalkboard on wheels, which was scrawled with the title of the upcoming album: “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.”

One afternoon, Apple’s older sister, Amber, arrived to record vocal harmonies. In the living room, there was an upright piano, its top piled with keepsakes, including a stuffed toucan knitted by Apple’s mother and a photograph of Martha Graham doing a backbend. Apple’s friend Zelda Hallman, who had not long ago become her housemate, was in the sunny yellow kitchen, cooking tilapia for Mercy and for Hallman’s Bernese mountain dog, Maddie. In the back yard, there was a guesthouse, where Apple’s half brother, Bran Maggart, a carpenter, lived. (For years, he’d worked as a driver for Apple, who never got a license, and helped manage her tours.) Apple’s father, Brandon Maggart, also lives in Venice Beach; her mother, Diane McAfee, a former dancer and actress, remains in New York, in the Morningside Heights apartment building where Apple grew up.

Amber, a cabaret singer who records under the name Maude Maggart, had brought along her thirteen-month-old baby, Winifred, who scooched across the floor, playing under the piano. Apple was there when Winifred was born, and, as we talked about the bizarreness of childbirth, Apple told me a joke about a lady who got pregnant with twins. Whenever people asked the lady if she wanted boys or girls, she said, “I don’t care, I just want my children to be polite!” Nine months passed, but she didn’t go into labor. A year went by—still nothing. “Eight, nine, twenty years!” Apple said, her eyebrows doing a jig. “Twenty-five years—and finally they’re, like, ‘We have to figure out what’s going on in there.’ ” When doctors peeked inside, they found “two middle-aged men going, ‘After youuuu!’ ‘No, after youuuu! ’ ”

Amber was there to record one line: a bit of harmony on “Newspaper,” one of thirteen new songs on the album. Apple, who wore a light-blue oxford shirt and loose beige pants, her hair in a low bun, stood by the piano, coaching Amber, who sat down in a wicker rocking chair, pulling Winifred onto her lap. “It’s a shame, because you and I didn’t get a witness!” Apple crooned, placing the notes in the air with her palm. Then the sisters sang, in harmony, “We’re the only ones who know!” The “we’re” came out as a jaunty warble, adding ironic subtext to the song, which was about two women connected by their histories with an abusive man. Apple, with her singular smoky contralto, modelled the complex emotions of the line for Amber, warming her up to record.

“Does that work?” Apple asked Winifred, who gazed up from her mother’s lap. Abruptly, Apple bent her knees, poked her elbows back like wings, and swung her hips, peekabooing toward Winifred. The baby laughed. It was simultaneously a rehearsal and a playdate.

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is a reference to a scene in “The Fall,” the British police procedural starring Gillian Anderson as a sex-crimes investigator; Anderson’s character calls out the phrase after finding a locked door to a room where a girl has been tortured. Like all of Apple’s projects, this one was taking a long while to emerge, arriving through a slow-drip process of creative self-interrogation that has produced, over a quarter century, a narrow but deep songbook. Her albums are both profoundly personal—tracing her heartaches, her showdowns with her own fragility, and her fierce, phoenix-like recoveries—and musically audacious, growing wilder and stranger with each round. As her 2005 song “Extraordinary Machine” suggests, whereas other artists might move fast, grasping for fresh influences and achieving superficial novelty, Apple prides herself on a stickier originality, one that springs from an internal tick-tock: “I still only travel by foot, and by foot it’s a slow climb / But I’m good at being uncomfortable, so I can’t stop changing all the time.”

The new album, she said, was close to being finished, but, as with the twins from the joke, the due date kept getting pushed back. She was at once excited about these songs—composed and recorded at home, with all production decisions under her control—and apprehensive about some of their subject matter, as well as their raw sound (drums, chants, bells). She was also wary of facing public scrutiny again. Fame has long been a jarring experience for Apple, who has dealt since childhood with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety.

After a while, she and Amber went into a small room—Apple’s former bedroom, where, for years, she had slept on a futon with Janet. After the dog died, she’d found herself unable to fall asleep there, and had turned the room into a recording studio, although it looked nothing like one: it was cluttered, with one small window and no soundproofing. There was a beat-up wooden desk and a computer on which Apple recorded tracks, using GarageBand. There was a mike stand and a Day of the Dead painting of a smiling female skeleton holding a skeleton dog. Every surface, from the shelves to the floor, was covered in a mulch of battered percussion instruments: bells, wooden blocks, drums, metal squares.

The sisters recorded the lyric over and over, with Apple at the computer and Amber standing, Winifred on her hip. During one take, Amber pulled the neck of her turquoise leotard down and began nursing her daughter. Apple looked up from GarageBand, caught her sister’s eye, and smiled. “It’s happening—it’s happening,” she said.

When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being unhappy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

In the nineties, Apple’s emergence felt near-mythical. Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart, the musically precocious, emotionally fragile descendant of a line of entertainers, was a classically trained pianist who began composing at seven. One night, at the age of sixteen, she was in her apartment, staring down at Riverside Park, when she thought she heard a voice telling her to record songs drawn from her notebooks, which were full of heartbreak and sexual trauma. She flew to L.A., where her father was living, and with his help recorded three songs; they made seventy-eight demo tapes, and he told her to prepare to hustle. Yet the first tape she shared was enough: a friend passed a copy to the music publicist she babysat for, who gave it to Andrew Slater, a prominent record producer and manager. Slater, then thirty-seven, hired a band, booked a studio in L.A., and produced her début album, “Tidal.” It featured such sophisticated ballads as “Shadowboxer,” as well as the hit “Criminal,” which irresistibly combined a hip-hop beat, rattling piano, and sinuous flute; she’d written it in forty-five minutes, during a lunch break at the studio. The album sold 2.7 million copies.

Slater also oversaw a marketing campaign that presented his new artist as a sulky siren, transforming her into a global star and a media target. Diane McAfee remembers that time as a “whirlwind,” recalling the day when her daughter received an advance for “Tidal”—a check for a hundred thousand dollars. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable!’ ” McAfee told me. They were in their dining room, and Apple was “backing away, not excited.” Because Apple was not yet eighteen, her mother had to co-sign her record contract.

The musician Aimee Mann and her partner, the musician Michael Penn, who was also signed with Slater at the time, remember seeing Apple perform at the Troubadour, in West Hollywood, at a private showcase for “Tidal,” in 1996. Mann glimpsed in the teen-ager the kind of brazen, complex female musicianship that she’d been longing for—a tonic in an era dominated by indie-male swagger. Onstage, Apple was funny and chatty, calling the audience “grownups.” After the show, she did cartwheels in the alley outside. Mann recalled Apple introducing the song “Carrion” with a story about how sometimes there’s a person you go back to, again and again, who never gives you what you need, “and the lesson is you don’t need them.” As Apple’s career accelerated, Mann read a Rolling Stone profile in which Apple spoke about having been raped, at twelve, by a stranger, who attacked her in a stairwell as her dog barked inside her family’s apartment. Mann said that it was unheard of, and inspiring, for a female artist to speak so frankly about sexual violence, without shame or apology. But Apple’s candor made her worry. Mann had experienced her own share of trauma; she’d also collapsed from exhaustion while on tour. “I was afraid of what would happen to her on the road,” she said. “It’s an unnatural way to live.”

In fact, the turn of the millennium became an electric, unstable period for Apple, who was adored by her fans but also mocked, and leered at, by the male-dominated rock press, who often treated her as a tabloid curiosity—a bruised prodigy to be both ogled and pitied. Much of the press’s response was connected to the 1997 video for “Criminal,” whose director, Mark Romanek, has described it as a “tribute” to Nan Goldin’s photographs of her junkie demimonde—although the stronger link is to Larry Clark’s 1995 movie, “Kids,” and to the quickly banned Calvin Klein ads depicting teens being coerced into making porn. When Apple’s oldest friend, Manuela Paz, saw “Criminal,” she was unnerved, not just by the sight of her friend in a lace teddy, gyrating among passed-out models, but also by a sense that the video, for all its male-gaze titillation, had uncannily absorbed the darker aspects of her and Apple’s own milieu—one of teens running around upper Manhattan with little oversight. “How did they know?” Paz asked herself.

Apple’s unscripted acceptance speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, in which she announced, “This world is bullshit,” further stoked media hostility. The speech, which included her earnestly quoting Maya Angelou and encouraging fans not to model themselves on “what you think that we think is cool,” seems, in retrospect, most shocking for how on target it is (something true of so many “crazy lady” scandals of that period, like Sinéad O’Connor on “Saturday Night Live,” protesting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). But, by 2000, when Apple had an onstage meltdown at the Manhattan venue Roseland, instability had become her “brand.” She was haunted by her early interviews, like one in Spin, illustrated with lascivious photographs by Terry Richardson, that quoted her saying, “I’m going to die young. I’m going to cut another album, and I’m going to do good things, help people, and then I’m going to die.” Apple’s love life was heavily covered, too: she dated the magician David Blaine (who was then a member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pussy Posse”) and the film director Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom she lived for several years. While Anderson and Apple were together, he released “Magnolia” and she released “When the Pawn . . . ,” her flinty second album, whose full, eighty-nine-word title—a pugilistic verse written in response to the Spin profile—attracted its own stream of jokes.

During this period, Mark (Flanny) Flanagan, the owner of Largo, a brainy enclave of musicians and comedians within show-biz L.A., became Apple’s friend and patron. (In an e-mail to me, he called her “our little champ.”) One day, Apple visited his office, wondering what would happen if she cut off her fingertip—then would her management let her stop touring? Flanagan, disturbed, told her that she could get a note from a shrink instead, and urged her to refuse to do anything she didn’t want to do.

As the decades passed, Apple’s reputation as a “difficult woman” receded. After she left Anderson, in 2002, she holed up in Venice Beach, emerging every few years with a new album: first, “Extraordinary Machine” (2005), a glorious glockenspiel of self-assertion and payback; then the wise, insightful “The Idler Wheel . . .” (2012). She was increasingly recognized as a singer-songwriter on the level of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. The music of other nineties icons grew dated, or panicky in its bid for relevance, whereas Apple’s albums felt unique and lasting. The skittering ricochets of her melodies matched the shrewd wit of her lyrics, which could swerve from damning to generous in a syllable, settling scores but also capturing the perversity of a brain aflame with sensitivity: “How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone?”

Today, Apple still bridles at old coverage of her. Yet she remains almost helplessly transparent about her struggles—she’s a blurter who knows that it’s a mistake to treat journalists as shrinks, but does so anyway. She’s conscious of the multiple ironies in her image. “Everyone has always worried that people are taking advantage of me,” she said. “Even the people who take advantage of me worry that people are taking advantage of me.”

Lurking on Tumblr (where messages from her are sometimes posted on the fan page Fiona Apple Rocks), she can see how much the culture has transformed, becoming one shared virtual notebook. Female singers like Lady Gaga and Kesha now talk openly about having been raped—and, in the wake of #MeToo, it’s more widely understood that sexual violence is as common as rain. Mental illness is less of a taboo, too. In recent years, a swell of teen-age musicians, such as Lorde and Billie Eilish, have produced bravura albums in Apple’s tradition, while young female activists, including Greta Thunberg and Emma González, keep announcing, to an audience more prepared to listen, that this world is bullshit.

Apple knows the cliché about early fame—that it freezes you at the age you achieved it. Because she’d never had to toil in anonymity, and had learned her craft and made her mistakes in public, she’d been perceived, as she put it to me ruefully, as “the patron saint of mental illness, instead of as someone who creates things.” If she wanted to keep bringing new songs into the world, she needed to have thicker skin. But that had never been her gift.

As we talked in the studio, Apple’s band member Amy Aileen Wood arrived, with new mixes. Wood, an indie-rock drummer, was one of three musicians Apple had enlisted to help create the new album; the others were the bassist Sebastian Steinberg, of the nineties group Soul Coughing, and Davíd Garza, a Latin-rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. Wood and Apple told me that their first encounter, at a recording studio two decades ago, was awkward. Apple remembered feeling intimidated by Wood and by her girlfriend, who seemed “tall and cool.” When Wood described something as “rad,” Apple shot back, “Did you really just say rad?” Wood hid in the bathroom and cried.

Now Wood and her father, John Would, a sound engineer, were collaborating with Apple on building mixes from hundreds of homemade takes. (Apple also worked with Dave Way and, later in the process, Tchad Blake.) The earliest glimmers of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” began in 2012, when Apple experimented with a concept album about her Venice Beach home, jokingly called “House Music.” She also considered basing an album on the Pando—a giant grove of aspens, in Utah, that is considered a single living being—creating songs that shared common roots.

Finally, around 2015, she pulled together the band. She and Steinberg, a joyfully eccentric bassist with a long gray beard, had played live together for years, and had shared intense, sometimes painful experiences, including an arrest, while on tour in 2012, for hashish possession. (Apple spent the night in a Texas jail cell, where she defiantly gave what Steinberg described as “her best vocal performance ever”; she also ended up on TMZ.) Steinberg, who worked with Apple on “Idler Wheel,” said that her new album was inspired by her fascination with the potential of using a band “as an organism instead of an assemblage—something natural.”

The first new song that Apple recorded was “On I Go,” which was inspired by a Vipassana chant; she sang it into her phone while hiking in Topanga Canyon. Back at home, she dug out old lyrics and wrote new ones, and hosted anarchic bonding sessions with her bandmates. “She wanted to start from the ground,” Garza said. “For her, the ground is rhythm.” The band gathered percussive objects: containers wrapped with rubber bands, empty oilcans filled with dirt, rattling seedpods that Apple had baked in her oven. Apple even tapped on her dog Janet’s bones, which she kept in a pretty beige box in the living room. Apple and the other musicians would march around her house and chant. “Sebastian has a low, sonorous voice,” Garza said, of these early meetings. “Amy’s super-shy. I’m like Slim Whitman—we joke my voice is higher than Fiona’s. She has that husky beautiful timbre, and she would just . . . speak her truth. It felt more like a sculpture being built than an album being made.”

Steinberg told me, “We played the way kids play or the way birds sing.” Wood recalled, “We would have cocktails and jam,” adding that it took some time for her to get used to these epic “meditations,” which could veer into emotional chaos. Steinberg recalls “stomping on the walls, on the floor—playing her house.” Once, when Apple was upset about a recent breakup, with the writer Jonathan Ames, she got into a drunken argument with the band members; Wood took her drums to a gig, which Apple misunderstood as a slight, and Apple went off and wrote a bitterly rollicking song about rejection, “The Drumset Is Gone.”

There were more stops and starts. A three-week group visit to the Sonic Ranch recording studio, in rural Texas—where some band members got stoned in pecan fields, Mercy accidentally ate snake poison, and Apple watched the movie “Whiplash” on mushrooms—was largely a wash, despite such cool experiments as recording inside an abandoned water tower. But Garza praised Apple as “someone who really trusts the unknown, trusting the river,” adding, “She’s the queen of it.”

Once Apple returned to Venice Beach, she finally began making headway, rerecording and rewriting songs in uneven intervals, often alone, in her former bedroom. At first, she recorded long, uncut takes of herself hitting instruments against random things; she built these files, which had names like “metal shaker,” “couch tymp,” and “bean drums,” into a “percussion orchestra,” which she used to make songs. She yowled the vocals over and over, stretching her voice into fresh shapes; like a Dogme 95 filmmaker, she rejected any digital smoothing. “She’s not afraid to let her voice be in the room and of the room,” Garza said. “Modern recording erases that.”

The resulting songs are so percussion-heavy that they’re almost martial. Passages loop and repeat, and there are out-of-the-blue tempo changes. Steinberg described the new numbers as closer to “Hot Knife,” an “Idler Wheel” track that pairs Andrews Sisters-style harmonies with stark timpani beats, than to her early songs, which were intricately orchestrated. “It’s very raw and unslick,” he said, of the new work, because her “agenda has gotten wilder and a lot less concerned with what the outside world thinks—she’s not seventeen, she’s forty, and she’s got no reason not to do exactly what she wants.”

Apple had been writing songs in the same notebooks for years, scribbling new lyrics alongside older ones. At one point, as we sat on the floor near the piano, she grabbed a stack of them, hunting for some lines she’d written when she was fifteen: “Evil is a relay sport / When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” “My handwriting is so different,” she marvelled, flipping pages. She found a diary entry from 1997: “I’m insecure about the guys in my band. I want to spend more time with them! But it seems impossible to ever go out and have fun.” Apple laughed out loud, amazed. “I can’t even recognize this person,” she said. “ ‘I want to go out and have fun!’ ”

“Here’s the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can,’ ” she said, referring to a song from “When the Pawn . . . .” Then she announced, “Oh, here it is—‘Evil is a relay sport.’ ” She continued reading: “It breathes in the past and then—” She shot me a knowing glance. “Lots of my writing from then is just, like, I don’t know how to say it: a young person trying to be a writer.” Written in the margin was the word “Help.”

Whenever I asked Apple how she created melodies, she apologized for lacking the language to describe her process (often with an anxious detour about not being as good a drummer as Wood). She said that her focus on rhythm had some connections to the O.C.D. rituals she’d developed as a child, like crunching leaves and counting breaths, or roller-skating around her dining-room table eighty-eight times—the number of keys on a piano—while singing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

But Apple brightened whenever she talked about writing lyrics, speaking confidently about assonance and serendipity, about the joy of having the words “glide down the back of my throat”—as she put it, stroking her neck—when she got them exactly right. She collects words on index cards: “Angel,” “Excel,” “Intel,” “Gel.” She writes the alphabet above her drafts, searching, with puzzle-solver focus, for puns, rhymes, and accidental insights.

The new songs were full of spiky, layered wordplay. In “Rack of His,” Apple sings, like a sideshow barker, “Check out that rack of his! / Look at that row of guitar necks / Lined up like eager fillies / Outstretched like legs of Rockettes.” In the darkly funny “Kick Me Under the Table,” she tells a man at a fancy party, “I would beg to disagree / But begging disagrees with me.” As frank as her lyrics can be, they are not easily decoded as pure biography. She said, of “Rack of His,” “I started writing this song years ago about one relationship, and then, when I finished it, it was about a different relationship.”

When I described the clever “Ladies”—the music of which she co-wrote with Steinberg—as having a vaudeville vibe, Apple flinched. She found the notion corny. “It’s just, like, something I’ve got in my blood that I’m gonna need to get rid of,” she said. Other songs felt close to hip-hop, with her voice used more for force and flow than for melody, and as a vehicle for braggadocio and insults. There was a pungency in Apple’s torch-and-honey voice emitting growls, shrieks, and hoots.

Some of the new material was strikingly angry. The cathartic “For Her” builds to Apple hollering, “Good mornin’! Good mornin’ / You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” The song had grown out of a recording session the band held shortly after the nomination hearings of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; like many women, Apple felt scalded with rage about survivors of sexual violence being disbelieved. The title track came to her later; a meditation on feeling ostracized, it jumps between lucidity and fury. Drumsticks clatter sparely over gentle Mellotron notes as Apple muses, “I’ve been thinking about when I was trying to be your friend / I thought it was, then— / But it wasn’t, it wasn’t genuine.” Then, as she sings, “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long,” her voice doubles, harmonies turning into a hubbub, and there’s a sudden “meow” sound. In the final moments, dogs bark as Apple mutters, “Whatever happens, whatever happens.”

Partway through, she sings, “I thought that being blacklisted would be grist for the mill.” She improvised the line while recording; she knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing. “It sounds bitter,” she said. The song isn’t entirely despairing, though. The next line makes an impassioned allusion to a song by Kate Bush, one of Apple’s earliest musical heroines: “I need to run up that hill / I will, I will, I will.”

One day during my July visit, Ames, Apple’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by, on his way to the beach. “Mercy, you are so powerful!” he said, as the dog jumped on him. “I’m waiting for her to get calmer, so I can give her a nice hug.” Apple had described Ames to me as her kindest ex, and there was an easy warmth between them. They took turns recalling their love affair, which began in 2006, when Apple attended a performance by Ames at the Moth, the storytelling event, in New York.

For years, Ames had written candid, funny columns in the New York Press about sex and his psychological fragilities, a history that appealed to Apple. They were together for four years, then broke up, in 2010; five years later, they reunited, but the relationship soon ended again, partly because of Ames’s concerns about Apple’s drinking. Ames recalled to Apple that, as the relationship soured, “you would yell at me and call me stupid.” He added that he didn’t have much of a temper, which became its own kind of problem.

“You would annoy me,” Apple said, with a smile.

“I was annoying!” he said, laughing.

They were being so loving with each other—even about the bad times, like when Ames would find Apple passed out and worry that she’d stopped breathing—that it seemed almost mysterious that they had broken up. Then, step by step, the conversation hit the skids. The turn came when Ames started offering Apple advice on knee pain that was keeping her from walking Mercy—a result, she believed, of obsessive hiking. He told her to read “Healing Back Pain,” by John Sarno. The pain, he said, was repressed anger.

At first, Apple was open to this idea—or, at least, she was polite about it. But, when Ames kept looping back to the notion, Apple went ominously quiet. Her eyes turned red, rimmed with tears that didn’t spill. She curled up, pulling sofa cushions to her chest, her back arched, glaring.

It was like watching their relationship and breakup reënacted in an hour. When Ames began describing “A Hundred Years of Solitude” in order to make the point that Apple had a “Márquezian sense of time,” she shot back, “Are you saying that time is like thirty-seven years tied to a tree with me?” Ames used to call her the Negative Juicer, Apple said, her voice sardonic: “I just extract the negative stuff.” She spun this into a black aria of self-loathing, arguing, like a prosecutor, for the most vicious interpretation of herself: “I put it in a thing and I bring out all the bad stuff. And I serve it up to everyone so that they’ll give me attention. And it poisons everyone, so they only listen to it when they’re in fucked-up places—and it’s a good sign when they stop listening to me, because that means that they’re not hurting themselves on purpose.”

Ames pushed back, alarmed. If he’d ever called her the Negative Juicer, he said, he didn’t mean it as an attack on her art—just that she could take a nice experience and find the bad in it. Her music had pain but also so much joy and redemption, he said. But Ames couldn’t help himself: he kept bringing up Sarno.

Somehow, the conversation had become a debate about the confessional nature of their work. Was it a good thing for Apple to keep digging up past suffering? Was this labor both therapeutic and generative—a mission that could help others—or was it making her sick? Ames said that he didn’t feel comfortable exposing himself that way anymore, especially in the social-media age. “It’s a different world!” he said. “You take one line out of context . . .” For more than a decade, Ames has been working in less personal modes; his noir novel “You Were Never Really Here” was recently made into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.

Apple said, “I haven’t wanted to drink straight vodka so much in a while.”

“I’m triggering you,” Ames responded.

“You are,” she said, smiling wearily. “It’s not your fault, Jonathan. I love you.”

When Ames stepped out briefly, Apple said that what had frustrated her was the idea that “there was a way out”—that her pain was her choice.

Zelda Hallman, Apple’s housemate, had been sitting with us, listening. She pointed out that self-help books like “The Secret” had the same problem: they made your suffering all your fault.

“Fuck ‘The Secret’!” Apple shouted.

When Ames came back and mentioned Sarno again, Apple interrupted him: “That’s a great way to be in regular life. But if you’re making a song? And you’re making music and there is going to be passion in it and there is going to be anger in it?” She went on, “You have to go to the myelin sheath—you know, to the central nervous system—for it to be good, I feel like. And if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted my fucking life and ruined everything.”

She recalled a day when she had been working on a piano riff that was downbeat but also “fluttering, soaring,” and that reminded her of Ames. She said that he had asked her to name the resulting song “Jonathan.” (The lovely, eerie track, which is on “Idler Wheel,” includes the line “You like to captain a capsized ship.”) “No, no,” he said. “I didn’t!” As Ames began telling his side of the story, Apple said, icily, “I think that water is going to get real cold real soon. You should probably go to the beach.”

He went off to put on his bathing suit. By the time he left, things had eased up. She hugged him goodbye, looking tiny. After Ames was gone, she said that she hated the way she sometimes acted with him—contemptuous, as if she’d absorbed the style of her most unkind ex-boyfriend. But she also said that she wouldn’t have called Ames himself stupid, explaining, “He doesn’t talk the way that I talk, and like my brother talks, and get it all out, like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? That’s stupid!’ I’m not necessarily angry when I’m doing that.”

The next day, she sent me a video. “We’ve been to the beach!” she announced, panting, as Mercy ran around in the background. “Because it’s her birthday!” Apple had taken Ames’s advice, she said, and gone for a walk, behaving as if she weren’t injured. So far, her knees didn’t hurt. “Soooo . . . he was right all along,” Apple said, her eyes wide. Then she glanced at the camera slyly, the corner of her mouth pulled up. “Orrrrr . . . I just rested my knees for a while.”

Apple goes to bed early; when I visited, we’d end things before she drifted into a smeary, dreamy state, often after smoking pot, which Hallman would pass to her in the living room. Late one afternoon, Apple talked about the album’s themes. She said, of the title, “Really, what it’s about is not being afraid to speak.” Another major theme was women—specifically, her struggle to “not fall in love with the women who hate me.” She described these songs as acts of confrontation with her “shadow self,” exploring questions like “Why in the past have you been so socially blind to think that you could be friends with your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by getting her a gift?” At the time, she thought that she was being generous; now she recognized the impulse as less benign, a way of “campaigning not to be ousted.”

The record dives into such conflicting impulses: she empathizes with other women, rages at them, grows infatuated with them, and mourns their rejection, sometimes all at once. She roars, in “Newspaper,” “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me / To make sure that we’ll never be friends!” In “Ladies,” she describes, first with amusement, then in a dark chant, “the revolving door which keeps turning out more and more good women like you / Yet another woman to whom I won’t get through.” In “Shameka,” she celebrates a key moment in middle school, when a tough girl told the bullied Apple, “You have potential.”

As a child, Apple longed to be “a pea in a pod” with other girls, as she was, for a while, with Manuela Paz, for whom she wrote her first song. But as an adult she has hung out mainly with men. She does have some deep female friendships, including with Nalini Narayan, an emergency-room nurse, whom she met, in 1997, in the audience at one of her concerts, and who described Apple as “an empath on a completely different level than anyone I’ve met.” More recently, Apple has become close with a few younger artists. The twenty-one-year-old singer Mikaela Straus, a.k.a. King Princess, who recently recorded a cover of Apple’s song “I Know,” called her “family” and “a fucking legend.” Straus said, “You never hear a Fiona Apple line and say, ‘That’s cheesy.’ ” The twenty-seven-year-old actress Cara Delevingne is another friend; she visited Apple’s home to record harmonies on the song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” (She’s the one making that kooky “meow.”)

But Apple has more complicated dynamics with a wider circle of friends, exes, and collaborators. Starting with her first heartbreak, at sixteen, she has repeatedly found herself in love triangles, sometimes as the secret partner, sometimes as the deceived one. As we talked, she stumbled on a precursor for this pattern: “Maybe it’s because my mother was the other woman?”

Apple’s parents met in 1969, during rehearsals for “Applause,” a Broadway musical based on “All About Eve.” Her mother, McAfee, was cast as Eve; her father, Maggart, as the married playwright. Maggart was then an actor on the stage and on TV (he’d been on “Sesame Street”); the sexy, free-spirited McAfee was a former June Taylor dancer. Throughout Apple’s childhood, she and her sister regularly visited the home, in Connecticut, where Maggart’s five other children and their mother, LuJan, lived. LuJan was welcoming, encouraging all the children to grow close—but Apple’s mother was not invited. Apple, with an uneasy laugh, told me that, for all the time she’d spent interrogating her past, this link had never crossed her mind.

Her fascination with women seemed tied, too, to the female bonding of the #MeToo era—to the desire to compare old stories, through new eyes. In July, she sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that reminded her of a surreal aspect of the day she was raped: for a moment, when the stranger approached her, she mistook him for Hendrix. During the assault, she willed herself to think that the man was Hendrix. “It felt safer, and strangely it hasn’t ruined Jimi Hendrix for me,” she said. Years later, however, she found herself hanging out with a man who was a Hendrix fan. One night, they did mushrooms at Johnny Depp’s house, in the Hollywood Hills. Depp, who was editing a film, was sober that night; as Apple recalled, he “kind of led” her and her friend to a bedroom, then shut the door and left. “Nothing bad happened, but I felt kind of used and uncomfortable with my friend making out with me,” she said. “I used to just let things happen. I remember I wrote the bridge to ‘Fast as You Can’ in the car on the way home, and he was playing Jimi Hendrix, and my mind was swirling things together.”

That has always been Apple’s experience: the past overlapping with the present, just as it does in her notebooks. Sometimes it recurs through painful flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be turned into art. The evening at Depp’s house wasn’t a #MeToo moment, she added. “Johnny Depp was a nice guy, and so was my friend. But I think that, at that time, I was struggling with my sexuality, and trying to force it into what I thought it should be, and everything felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting high, getting scared, and going home feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.”

Apple came of age in a culture that viewed young men as potential auteurs and young women as commodities to be used, then discarded. Although she had only positive memories of her youthful romance with David Blaine, she was disturbed to learn that he was listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book. In high school, Apple was friends with Mia Farrow’s daughter Daisy Previn, and during sleepovers at Farrow’s house she used to run into Woody Allen in the kitchen. “There are all these unwritten but signed N.D.A.s all over the place,” she said, about the entertainment industry. “Because you’ll have to deal with the repercussions if you talk.”

She met Paul Thomas Anderson in 1997, during a Rolling Stone cover shoot in which she floated in a pool, her hair fanning out like Ophelia’s. She was twenty; he was twenty-seven. After she climbed out of the water, her first words to him were “Do you smoke pot?” Anderson followed her to Hawaii. (The protagonist of his film “Punch-Drunk Love” makes the same impulsive journey.) “That’s where we solidified,” she told me. “I remember going to meet him at the bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and he was laughing at me because I was marching around on what he called my ‘determined march to nowhere.’ ”

The singer and the director became an It Couple, their work rippling with mutual influences. She wrote a rap for “Magnolia”; he directed videos for her songs. But, as Apple remembers it, the romance was painful and chaotic. They snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy. Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told me, he was coldly critical, contemptuous in a way that left her fearful and numb. Apple’s parents remember an awful night when the couple took them to dinner and were openly rude. (Apple backs this up: “We both attended that dinner as little fuckers.”) In the lobby, her mother asked Anderson why Apple was acting this way. He snapped, “Ask yourself—you made her.”

Anderson had a temper. After attending the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw a chair across a room. Apple remembers telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a good relationship.” She took a cab to her dad’s house, but returned home the next day. In 2000, when she was getting treatment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist suggested that she do volunteer work with kids who had similar conditions. Apple was buoyant as Anderson drove her to an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational-therapy ward, but he was fuming. He screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her seat belt, and shoved her out of his car; she fell to the ground, spilling her purse in front of some nurses she was going to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad partner, while behaving sweetly on the surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks, made her look unstable to strangers. (Anderson, through his agent, declined to comment.)

Anderson didn’t hit her, Apple said. He praised her as an artist. Today, he’s in a long-term relationship with the actress Maya Rudolph, with whom he has four children. He directed the video for “Hot Knife,” in 2011; Apple said that by then she felt more able to hold her own—and she said that he might have changed. Yet the relationship had warped her early years, she said, in ways she still reckoned with. She’d never spoken poorly of him, because it didn’t seem “classy”; she wavered on whether to do so now. But she wanted to put an end to many fans’ nostalgia about their time together. “It’s a secret that keeps us connected,” she told me.

Apple was also briefly involved with the comedian Louis C. K. After the Times published an exposé of his sexual misconduct, in 2017, she had faith that C.K. would be the first target of #MeToo to take responsibility for his actions, maybe by creating subversive comedy about shame and compulsion. When a hacky standup set of his was leaked online, she sent him a warm note, urging him to dig deeper.

One of the women C.K. harassed was Rebecca Corry, a standup comedian who founded an advocacy organization for pit bulls, Stand Up for Pits. Apple began working with the group, and, once she got to know Corry, she started to see C.K. in a harsher light. The comedy that she’d admired for its honesty now looked “like a smoke screen,” she said. In a text, she told me that, if C.K. wasn’t capable of more severe self-scrutiny, “he’s useless.” She added, “I SHAKE when I have to think and write about myself. It’s scary to go there but I go there. He is so WEAK.”

At times, Apple questioned her ability to be in any romantic relationship. Last fall, she went through another breakup, with a man she had dated for about a year. “This is my marriage right now,” she said of her platonic intimacy with Zelda Hallman. Apple told me that they’d met in a near-mystical way: while out on a walk, she’d blown a dandelion, wishing for a dog-friend for Mercy, then turned a corner and saw Hallman, walking Maddie. When Apple’s second romance with Ames was ending, she started inviting Hallman to stay over. “I’d have night terrors and stuff,” Apple recalled. “And one day I woke up and she was sitting in the chair—she’d sat there all night, watching me, making sure I was O.K. I was feeling safer with her here.” Apple fantasized about a kind of retirement: in a few years, she and Hallman might buy land back East “and move there with the doggies.”

Hallman, an affable, silver-haired lesbian, grew up poor in Appalachia; after studying engineering at Stanford, she worked in the California energy industry. In the mid-aughts, she moved to L.A. to try filmmaking, getting some small credits. Each woman called their relationship balanced—they split expenses, they said—but Hallman’s role displaced, to some degree, the one Apple’s brother had played. In addition, Hallman sat in on our interviews and at recording sessions; she often took videos, posting them online. They slept on the daybeds in the living room. Apple had made it clear that anyone who questioned her friend’s presence would get cut out. Hallman described their dynamic as like a “Boston marriage—but in the way that outsiders had imagined Boston marriages to be.”

Hallman said that she hadn’t recognized Apple when they met. Initially, she’d mistaken the singer for someone younger, just another Venice Beach music hopeful in danger of being exploited: “I felt relieved when she said she had a boyfriend in the Hills, to take care of her.”

“Oh, my God, you were one of them! ” Apple said, laughing.

After my July visit, Apple began to text me. She sent a recording of a song that she’d heard in a dream, then a recording describing the dream. She texted about watching “8 Mile”—“doing the nothing that comes before my little concentrated spurt of work”—and about reading a brain study about rappers that made her wonder where her brain “lit up” when she sang. “I’m hoping that I develop that ability to let my medial prefrontal cortex blow out the lights around it!” she joked. Occasionally, she sent a screenshot of a text from someone else, seeking my interpretation (a tendency that convinced me she likely did the same with my texts).

In a video sent in August, she beamed, thrilled about new mixes that she’d been struggling to “elevate.” “I always think of myself as a half-ass person, but, if I half-assed it, it still sounds really good.” She added that she’d whispered into the bathroom mirror, “You did a good job.”

In another video—broken into three parts—she appeared in closeup, in a white tank top, free-associating. She described a colorized photograph from Auschwitz she’d seen on Tumblr, then moved on to the frustrations of O.C.D.—how it made her “freak out about the littlest things, like infants freak out.” She talked about Jeffrey Epstein and the comfort of dumb TV; she held up a “cool metal instrument,” stamped “1932,” that she’d ordered from Greece. Near the end of the video, she wondered why she was rambling, then added, “Oh—I also ate some pot. I forgot about that. Well, knowing me, I’ll probably send this to you!”

Apple’s lifelong instinct has been to default to honesty, even if it costs her. In an era of slick branding, she is one of the last Gen X artists: reflexively obsessed with authenticity and “selling out,” disturbed by the affectlessness of teen-girl “influencers” hawking sponcon and bogus uplift. (When she told an interviewer that she pitied Justin Bieber’s thirsty request for fans to stream his new single as they slept, Beliebers spent the next day rage-tweeting that Apple was a jealous “nobody,” while Apple’s fans mocked them as ignoramuses.)

Apple told me that she didn’t listen to any modern music. She chalked this up to a fear of outside influences, but she had a tetchiness about younger songwriters, too. She had always possessed aspects of Emily Dickinson, in the poet’s “I’m Nobody” mode: pridefulness in retreat. Apple sometimes fantasized about pulling a Garbo: she’d release one final album, then disappear. But she also had something that resembled a repetition compulsion—she wanted to take all the risks of her early years, but this time have them work out right.

When I returned to Venice Beach, in September, the mood was different. Anxiety suffused the house. In July, Apple had been worried about returning to public view, but she was also often playful and energized, tweaking mixes. Now the thought of what she’d recorded brought on paralyzing waves of dread.

To distract herself, she’d turned to other projects. She accepted a request from Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the Showtime series “The Affair,” to cover the Waterboys song “The Whole of the Moon” for the show’s finale. (Apple had also written the show’s potent theme song—the keening “Container.”) Apple agreed to write a jokey song for the Fox cartoon “Bob’s Burgers,” and some numbers for an animated musical sitcom, “Central Park.” She was proud to hit deadlines, to handle her own business. “I have a sense of humor,” she told me. “I’m not that fucking fragile all the time! I’m an adult. You can talk to me.” But, before I arrived one day, she texted that things weren’t going well, so that I’d be prepared.

That afternoon, we found ourselves lounging on the daybeds with Hallman, watching “The Affair.” Apple had already seen these episodes, which were from the show’s penultimate season. In August, she’d sent me a video of herself after watching one, tears rolling down her face. That episode was about the death of Alison, one of the main characters. Played by Ruth Wilson, Alison is a waitress living in Montauk, an intense beauty who is grieving the drowning death of her son and suffers from depression and P.T.S.D. She falls into an affair with a novelist, and both of their marriages dissolve. The story is told from clashing perspectives, but in the episode that Apple had watched, only one account felt “true”: an ex-boyfriend of Alison’s breaks her skull, then drops her unconscious body in the ocean, making her death look like a suicide.

As we watched, Apple took notes, sitting cross-legged on the daybed. She saw herself in several characters, but she was most troubled by an identification with Alison, who worries that she’s a magnet for pain—a victim that men try to “save” and end up hurting. In one sequence, Alison, devastated after a breakup, gets drunk on a flight to California, as her seat partner flirts aggressively, feeding her cocktails. He assaults Alison as she drifts in and out of consciousness. She fights back, complaining to the flight attendant, but the man turns it all around, making her seem like the crazy one; she winds up handcuffed, as other passengers stare at her. Apple found the sequence horrifying—it reminded her of how she came across in her worst press.

Her head lowered and her arms crossed, she began to perseverate on her fears of touring. She ticked off potential outcomes: “I say the right thing, but I look the wrong way, so they say something about the way I look”; “I look the right way, but I say the wrong thing, so they say something mean about what I said.” She went on, “I have a temper. I have lots of rage inside. I have lots of sadness inside of me. And I really, really, really can’t stand assholes. If I’m in front of one, and I happen to be in a public place, and I lose my shit—and that’s a possibility—that’s not going to be any good to me, but I won’t be able to help it, because I’ll want to defend myself.”

Later, we tried to listen to the album. She played the newest version of “Rack of His,” but got frustrated by the tinny compression. She worried that she’d built “a record that can’t be made into a record.” When she’d get mad, or say “fuck,” Mercy would get agitated; wistfully, Apple told me that she sometimes wished she had a small dog that would let her be sad. Despite her fears, she kept recording—at the end of “For Her,” she’d multitracked her voice to form a gospel-like chorus singing, “You were so high”—and said that she wanted the final result to be uncompromising. “I want primary colors,” she said. “I don’t want any half measures.”

We listened to “Heavy Balloon,” a gorgeous, propulsive song about depression. She had added a new second verse, partly inspired by the scene of Alison drowning: “We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row / The bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know.” Apple, curling up on the floor, explained, “It’s almost like you get Stockholm syndrome with your own depression—like you’re kidnapped by your own depression.” Her voice got soft. “People with depression are always playing with this thing that’s very heavy,” she said. Her arms went up, as if she were bouncing a balloon, pretending to have fun, and said, “Like, ‘Ha, ha, it’s so heavy! ’ ” Then we had to stop, because she was having a panic attack.

Apple has tried all kinds of cures. She was sent to a family therapist at the age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she planned to kill herself and take Amber with her. After she was raped, she spent hours at a Model Mugging class, practicing self-defense by punching a man in a padded suit. In 2011, she attended eight weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, meditating from 5 a.m.to 9 p.m., with no eye contact—it was part of a plan to become less isolated. She had a wild breakthrough one day, in which the world lit up, showing her a pulsing space between the people at the retreat—a suggestion of something larger. That vision is evoked in the new song “I Want You to Love Me,” in which Apple sings, with raspy fervor, of wanting to get “back in the pulse.”

She tried a method for treating P.T.S.D. called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, and—around the time she poured her vodka down the drain, in 2018—an untested technique called “brain balancing.” Articles about neurological anomalies fascinated her. The first day we met, Apple spread printouts of brain scans on the floor of her studio, pointing to blue and pink shapes. She was seeking patterns, just as she often did on Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit-hole searches that she knew were a form of magical thinking.

Apple doesn’t consider herself an alcoholic, but for years she drank vodka alone, every night, until she passed out. When she’d walk by the freezer, she’d reach for a sip; for her, the first step toward sobriety was simply being conscious of that impulse. She had quit cocaine years earlier, after spending “one excruciating night” at Quentin Tarantino’s house, listening to him and Anderson brag. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,” she joked. She loved getting loose on wine, but not the regret that followed. Her father has been sober for decades, but when Apple was a little kid he was a turbulent alcoholic. He hit bottom when he had a violent confrontation with a Manhattan cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she remembers his bloody face, the nurse at the hospital. When I visited Apple’s mother at her Manhattan apartment, she showed me a photo album with pictures of Apple as a child. One image was captioned “Fiona had too much wine—not feeling good,” with a scribbled sad face. Apple, at two, had wandered around an adult party, drinking the dregs.

For decades, Apple has taken prescription psychopharmaceuticals. She told me that she’d been given a diagnosis of “complex developmental post-traumatic stress disorder.” (It was such a satisfyingly multisyllabic phrase that she preferred to sing it, transforming it into a ditty.) In December, she began having mood swings, with symptoms bad enough that she was told to get an MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor. In the end, Apple said, she had to wean herself off an antipsychotic that she had been prescribed for her night terrors; the dosage, she said, had been way too high. As she recovered, she felt troubled, sometimes, by a sense of flatness: if she couldn’t feel the emotion in the songs, she said, she wouldn’t be able to tell what worked.

Earlier that fall, she had given an interview to the Web site Vulture, in which she was brassy and perceptive. People responded enthusiastically—many young women saw in Apple a gutsy iconoclast who’d shrugged off the world’s demands. She won praise, too, for having donated a year’s worth of profits from “Criminal”—which J. Lo dances to in the recent movie “Hustlers”—to immigrant criminal-defense cases. But the positive response also threw her, she realized. “Even the best circumstances of being in public may be too much,” she told me.

By January, the situation was better. Apple was no longer having nightmares, although she was still worried, at times, by her moods. One layer of self-protection had been removed when she stopped using alcohol, she said; another was lost with the reduction in medication. And, although she was enthusiastic about some new mixes, she felt apprehensive. She could listen to the tracks, but only through headphones.

So we talked about the subject that made her feel best: the dog rescues she was funding. She paid her brother Bran to pick up the dogs across the country, then drive them to L.A., for placement in foster homes. She and Hallman followed along through videos that Bran sent them. The dogs had been through terrible experiences: one was raped by humans; another was beaten with a shovel. Apple felt that she should not flinch from these details. Rebecca Corry, of Stand Up for Pits, had given her advice for coping: “You have to celebrate small victories and remember their faces and move on to the next one.”

Then, one day, Apple’s band came to her house to listen to the latest mixes. The next afternoon, her face was glowing again. She had wondered if the meeting would be awkward—if the band might disagree on what edits to make. Instead, she and Amy Aileen Wood kept glancing at each other, ecstatic, as they had all the same responses. At last, Apple could listen to the album on speakers.

Afterward, I texted Wood. “Dare I say it was magical?!” Wood wrote. “Everything is sounding so damn good!” Steinberg told me that the notes were simple: “Get out of the way of the music” and let Apple’s voice dominate. Apple knew what she wanted, he said. He described his job as helping her to recognize “that she was her own Svengali.”

It reminded me of a story that Bran had told me, about working in construction. One day, when he was twenty-eight, he strolled out onto a beam suspended thirty-five feet in the air—a task that he’d done many times. Suddenly, he was frozen, terrified of falling. Yet all he had to do was touch something—any object at all—to break the spell. “Because you’re grounded, you can just touch a leaf on a tree and walk,” he said.

Seeing her band again had grounded Apple. She felt a renewed bravado. She’d made plans to rerelease “When the Pawn . . .” on vinyl, but with the original artwork, by Paul Thomas Anderson, swapped out. “That’s just a great album,” she told me. Looking back on her catalogue, she thought that her one weak song might be “Please Please Please,” on “Extraordinary Machine,” which she wrote only because the record company had demanded another track: “Please, please, please, no more melodies.”

In the next few weeks, she sent updates: she was considering potential video directors; she was brainstorming ideas for album art, like a sketch of Harvey Weinstein with his walker. She’d even gone out to see King Princess perform. One night, after petting Janet’s skull and talking to her, Apple went into her old bedroom: she was able to sleep on the futon again, with Mercy. She’d also got a new tattoo, of a black bolt cutter, running down her right forearm.

On the day that Jonathan Ames came over, Apple had pondered the exact nature of her work. Maybe, she suggested, she was like any other artist whose body is an instrument—a ballerina who wears her feet out or a sculptor who strains his back. Maybe she, too, wore herself out. Maybe that’s why she had to take time to heal in between projects. In “On I Go,” the first song she’d written for “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she chanted about trying to lead a life guided by inner, rather than outer, impulses: “On I go, not toward or away / Up until now it was day, next day / Up until now in a rush to prove / But now I only move to move.” In the middle of the track, she screwed up the beat for a second and said, “Ah, fuck, shit.” It was a moment almost anyone making a final edit would smooth out. She left it in.

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