Cut the French plantation scene

begging on ALL FOURS

Hi friends—

Two things before I jump in:

• I spoke to

  Interintellect
  CEO
  Anna Gát ✨
  last week on her podcast, The Hope Axis, about my recent status series among other things. You can check it out here.

• We at quite useless (me) formally endorse Kamala Harris for President in the firm belief that the only role for which Donald Trump is suited is minor fictional character (and J.D. Vance isn’t even suited for that).

A still from the French plantation scene . . . ironically looks like the only part of the movie I would want to watch

At least ten but maybe even fifteen years ago, my husband convinced me to watch Apocalypse Now. Debatable and likely lost to the annals why on earth I agreed. I was, even then, a passionate partisan of peaceable over wartime narratives in basically any form, and I detested Heart of Darkness specifically. Quite possible it was part of a horse trade, how I got him to watch Little Women or something. It doesn’t matter. Somehow, personally skeptical but romantically game, I saw it—well, most of it, anyway.

Because I fell asleep. I cannot stress enough how unusual this is for me, with my goggling, infant-like susceptibility to screens. My husband was a little disappointed, but mostly sheepish. For he himself had made a mistake: it was not the original Apocalypse Now we’d watched, but Apocalypse Now Redux, the 2001 extended cut running nearly an hour longer—an eye-popping 202 minutes—thanks to the fatally soporific French plantation scene.

It’s become a running joke between us that you gotta cut the French plantation scene, a caution related to but distinct from too many notes. The latter is like Michael Scott’s red bar for non-essentials; the former, the “scary black bar” for “things that no one ever, ever needs”:

In Coppola’s defense, he did cut the French plantation scene the first time around—no doubt part of why it became the sort of classic amongst those who like such things to support a redux in the first place. A rabid pre-existing fan base will provide sufficient demand for extended cuts even when they are artistically inferior, and it’s hard to blame those involved for capitalizing. Certainly it’s no worse than the current mania for franchising.

Anyway, I have nothing else to say about Apocalypse Now. I don’t care enough about it to argue whether the French plantation scene is actually a “French plantation scene.” The movie serves the strictly utilitarian purpose here of illustrating a concept, with critical analysis reserved for a work of far greater personal appeal: Miranda July’s All Fours.

The cover is good.

All Fours is maybe the closest thing to a truly literary blockbuster novel that exists these days—reason enough for me to pick it up, though as soon as I did I also felt it to be unusually deserving. The novel’s early pivot from cross-country road trip to $20K motel room renovation in Monrovia, 20 minutes from the narrator’s house makes for a mesmerizing narrative shift from traditional to bizarre premise, one all the more novel for its unexpected unexpectedness.

And yet, the moreish weirdness for which July abandons a quintessential American storyline also manages to serve the most classic of plots: “will they fuck?” Specifically: will our wry bisexual perimenopausal narrator consummate her intense emotional affair with Davey, the much-younger man—and husband of her motel-room interior designer—who has formed the erotic centripetal force of Monrovia’s appeal?

Their mutual resistance is breathtakingly well executed. I didn’t even mind the tampon scene, which as a rule is emphatically “not my thing.” This better win the National Book Award, I thought as the narrator drove home to her husband and child, starved and on fire, so close to and so far away from them. Such a formidable way to end—except, there were still a lot of pages left. Even great novelists often struggle with endings, and it seemed strange to me that July would pass up such a promising one. But I still tingled with anticipation for another bizarre twist.

But, but—