A Series of Unfortunate Events

When life gives you lemons, read Lemony Snicket… 
OMG was that terrible? Ok let’s try that again:

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough.. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey…”

Back in the late ’90s so the story goes, a writer named Daniel Handler decided children’s books were too cheerful. “I mean, all the “Harry Potter” series did was occasionally kill off major characters,” he said. Handler was a Jewish boy whose father had fled Germany and the impending Nazi invasion, thereby raising him early on with an awareness of the Holocaust, “…the idea that the world could go suddenly wrong, and that it had no bearing on what sort of person you were… affected my writings.”

The Unfortunate Events tv series carries a PG rating because of issues like arranged marriage to gain access to inheritance, terrorist-developed biological weapons, and much deadpan (albeit all in a “child-friendly” story universe.) While visually the tv series diverges from the books, the dialogue and especially the narrative is almost verbatim. A voracious reader all through childhood, Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket is credited with the Unfortunate Events children’s book series that is now also a popular tv series:

“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come… In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.” – Lemony Snicket

“Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event… The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible…” 

Snicket’s is a thing about life that we learn early on – it takes very, very little for Trouble to find you. Sometimes, even nothing at all. Because for Trouble, this is fun! Trouble’s going hunting! So we decided hunting season on us was over  we got a heavy sandbag  we learned that a high threshold for pain is one of the best assets one could have we recognised the utmost importance of resilience in parenting.

Ever thought, when things get competitive (which is like, always, over everything these days <rolls eyes>) if you want Trouble not to see you – you know what you gotta do? You gotta be lousy at everything. 

There’s this old(ish) Disney movie Real Steel* after the 1956 book “Steel” by Richard Matheson, set in the year 2020 when people no longer do awful damage to their own craniums but instead program robots to trash each other. (BBC’s Robot Wars, anyone?) During this time, 12 year old Max Kenton scavenges for parts in the scrap yard to build his own fighting machine after the one he and estranged dad/ washed out human professional boxer Charlie (Hugh Jackman) enter into competition is irreparably damaged. He then comes across an obsolete training bot designed to take terrible beatings so the much more impressive-looking fighting showbots that boast cutting edge technology can be fine-tuned. To everyone’s amazement, Atom The Training Bot makes it all the way to the proverbial finals. Because the people who design the Fighting Bots are still well, human – instead of packing the toughness, they have first aimed to impress. Dazzle. And so the bot designed to take a beating only has to be able to land a few solid blows of its own before Cutting Edge But Relatively More Fragile technology buckles.

(To elaborate on human nature missing that “weak spot” in the cool Fighting Bots – One of the hardest things to do when coming up with derivatives investment products was, arguably, practicing restraint. Firstly, setting aside a tiny bit of your profits to buy cheap protection (“cheap” = no one thinks you need it… so why not leave your structure unprotected since everyone thinks you’re not gonna need that (albeit very cheap) option hedge because that market event is “never” going to occur anyway. Secondly, it sounds cool to say you are the first house on the street to be able to offer the client this particularly complicated new product. That however may also mean an increased risk of getting scalped because you can’t easily check the pricing. It also means little liquidity and your counterparts quoting a wider price because they have few other places to hedge the pieces with.

In other words, to get to say you’re the first one literally costs you money. Meantime as sure as that apple hits the ground every time on this earth, you cannot afford everything in any “package” of goods and bads, strengths and weaknesses.
There are only so many hours in the day or ingredients to cook with or funding to channel into a particular area or even simply energy and brain power you might have at your disposal before you need to go lie down and recharge. Resources you spend in one area are resources you no longer have for another. When you want to win badly, go on the offensive, it’s not so easy to spend something on buffering up your defense.)

Anyway this Eminem’s music video ‘Til I Collapse featuring Real Steel movie clips. (Good on that bull for trashing “Ambush” bot; serves them right for using a real animal humph.) Bit of trivia: Eminem is known for studying dictionaries in order to beef up his vocabulary for writing rap songs. In case you thought multi F-word using gangsta rap mega stars don’t need to put in hard work 😀

Hey Trouble, had your shot? Ever wonder if the roles were reversed, how much pain you could take? Oh. You aren’t Trouble. Then that wasn’t for you. My mistake.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

– German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller on the cowardice of certain German intellectuals and clergy following the rise of Nazi and their subsequent purging of specific targets (he includes himself; the above is his confession)

What can I say? Without (emotional, mental along with physical) toughness, all those carefully cultivated skills could end up for naught. Or worse. “Talent” might also make you a target. If you have any shred of ability, attractiveness, or some other.. “covetable asset”, you will probably soon learn that somewhere in this wide world there exist people who can find the littlest excuses to hate you, if they’re not well, using you. Because demons live among us!!! (Y-eah I tried. How can one not have a little fun. Where was I? Trouble will come for youuuuuu! :D)

There are only so many hours in the day. Time you spent bitching  at Starbucks is time you do not then have to beef up your own skills and resilience, do your homework, or even play a few video games <shrugs>

<pause>

Y-eah let’s leave Starbucks outta this. They are professionally required to provide good service and coffee. Without Judgement. (Poor Starbucks. 😀 )

About this time, I then came across the following microshort story on Bored Panda – a little like Screwtape, but in this case the humans need the demons to bring out the best in them:

(For real though kids, please don’t bring any more demons home, it’s already gotten messier in our world of late, and anyway who’s going to feed and walk them? No you may not park ’em all at Starbucks.)

And now back to Unfortunate Events (finally) and how we live in a fallen world:

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us… glimpsed the follies… misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women..” 

While refusing to have the baby may not be feasible, for future reference if anyone sees HN clinging to me going, “Mummymummymummymummy” it’s likely because she has done something “naughty”, prompting me to request she stand further away from me so I can pretend she is not mine. 😀

<pause>

What could possibly have led you to believe you’d get good parenting advice here? Snicket’s is better:

“If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”

Lemony totally gets it.

SPOILER ALERT

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

Violet (aged 14), Klaus (12) and Sunny (baby) Baudelaire* find themselves orphaned and heirs to their parents’ fortune, their parents’ home burned to the ground.

*named after French poet Charles Baudelaire who among others wrote the macabre and not-for-children collection of poems The Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire was also primary French translator of English writer Edgar Allan Poe’s works, possibly inspiring the naming of the Poe character in the Unfortunate Events series.

Through many unfortunate events as they then encounter various characters ranging from well-meaning (but often dumb of no real help) to predatory and attempting to steal their fortune, the Baudelaires find themselves in many strange challenging situations. One of the most eye-opening things about this “children’s show” is the extremely down-to-earth truth that “well-meaning” and “good-hearted” is of no bloody use if it is not savvy enough. Evil runs rings round them in most frustrating ways in the tv series.

Thus, Violet must use her talent for inventing, and Klaus his extensive bookworm-y knowledge, to get themselves out of trouble. (Sunny… chews things or plays with dangerous animals, also throwing new light on various situations even as the older Baudelaire siblings have already begun to take more things for granted as grownups do.)

“It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult…” 

The various crises the Baudelaires’ have to use their wits to escape from include a marriage onstage in a play that turns out to be legally binding (the documents used as stage props turn out to be real) in order to gain access to their fortune, the development of biological weapons in the form of botanical spores that cause deadly respiratory illness and Sunny also discovers that personality (and propensity) trumps simple ability, when evaluating a threat. W-hat’s that?

Sunny encounters the Incredibly Deadly Viper, assisting her older siblings (who have learned to distrust all potentially venomous snakes) with the epiphany that the huge snake, while equipped with deadly venom, is friendly and loves to play with children. Its keeper hauls it about in his arms like so much garden hose.

(On the other hand, the main villain in the film, Count Olaf, is neither particularly talented at inventing nor well read, nor does he manufacture his own deadly venom, but he uses others’ resources for his own gain. An interesting observation about nature and our blind spots – when evaluating a propensity to cause trouble or harm, personality overrides sheer ability. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t say, let my late 17kg Border Collie around the kids perpetually – just because she had the teeth didn’t mean she was always going to bite – in fact we paid attention to “training” the kids very early on to respect the dog’s need for space.)

As the episodes then progress, the Baudelaire children end up doing “terrible things” in the name of saving themselves. To be considered alongside the Complete History of Injustice, which the incompetent-but-well-meaning judge presiding the Baudelaires’ case clings ineffectively to, only to have Count Olaf wrest from her hands and burn. A powerful visual of the frustration people with a need must surely feel, at the perceived ineffectiveness of those in authority.

A reminder therefore, as you follow the powerful dialogue in the clip below, of the breadth and depth of so many, many varying shades of grey that make each party irrevocably convinced of their own position…… and of writer Daniel Handler’s own childhood influences that inspired him to create this series:

https://youtu.be/707LxTUvtMY

Epilogue:

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness… Well-read people are less likely to be evil.” Well d-uh. What did the different people spend their time differently on?

“No matter who you are…. what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read…Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another..”

It occurs to me that the narrator in the series bears quite some resemblance to the real “Lemony”; in fact, Handler has been so enthusiastic in his writing as to even change the lyrics of the opening credits every two episodes of the series… With the dialogue onscreen often word-for-word what is written in the books, d’you ever wonder why Handler doesn’t simply play himself onscreen? It implies that being in that role, being in front of the camera, is not what interests him, it is the writing itself.

 

ps: In the interests of full disclosure, there is a Real Steel game for Android and iPhone. Haven’t tried it yet..