![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl"
Jun. 20th, 2017 08:53 am(Spoilers for "Better Call Saul" s3 finale ahead.)
This is the story of either an odd coincidence, or something weirder and deeper. You decide.
It all started yesterday morning at the bank, when I was taking my favorite customer down to the vault. (A short digression: I work in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and most of the bank's customers do not share my interests. This gentleman is different. He's an illustrator, a bit of a bohemian, and we have many interesting conversations about literature and comic book artists.)
So I took him down to his safety deposit box and he started to talk about Ray Bradbury. (I love Ray Bradbury. I blazed through most of the Bradbury catalog when I was a kid.) I asked him if he'd read any of Bradbury's stories that were outside of RB's usual SciFi/fantasy pigeonhole.
I mentioned two: "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" (a surprisingly nasty social satire) and "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," which I guess you could call a crime story, but it's really about madness and obsession.
[The premise couldn't be simpler: a murderer stops to clean up his crime scene, but slips into (deeper?) madness, obsessively cleaning every inch of his victim's apartment. It's much darker than Bradbury's usual fare, but his command of language and pacing remains unbeatable.]
Last night, I watched the season finale of Better Call Saul. The dramatic center of the episode was when Charles McGill, the protagonist's brother, spiraled down into insanity, ripping apart his beautiful home to find the last trace of electricity that was slithering under his skin from behind the walls. (Michael McKean took you completely into Chuck's head. I know it's silly to call this a career-defining role for McKean, because he's literally been in everything over the last 40 years. But Chuck McGill is right up there with Spinal Tap for me. Just give him the Emmy already.)
In the post-episode discussion on AMC, McKean joined Saul co-creator Peter Gould in breaking down the episode. Gould said that Chuck's demolition derby was inspired by the scene in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation," when Gene Hackman destroys his house looking for a bug that may or may not have been planted. But McKean said he used a literary source for inspiration:
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl."
I hadn't thought about that story in years. I was completely unspoiled about the episode. Odd coincidence? Or is it, like my wife said, that sometimes ideas are just hanging in the air, waiting for someone to pull them down.
In "The Girl Who Died," the Doctor said that deja vu is you remembering something that hasn't happened yet. Do we have flashes that break us out of linear time? Do we all have the capacity to see beyond the illusion we've created for ourselves?
This is the story of either an odd coincidence, or something weirder and deeper. You decide.
It all started yesterday morning at the bank, when I was taking my favorite customer down to the vault. (A short digression: I work in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and most of the bank's customers do not share my interests. This gentleman is different. He's an illustrator, a bit of a bohemian, and we have many interesting conversations about literature and comic book artists.)
So I took him down to his safety deposit box and he started to talk about Ray Bradbury. (I love Ray Bradbury. I blazed through most of the Bradbury catalog when I was a kid.) I asked him if he'd read any of Bradbury's stories that were outside of RB's usual SciFi/fantasy pigeonhole.
I mentioned two: "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" (a surprisingly nasty social satire) and "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," which I guess you could call a crime story, but it's really about madness and obsession.
[The premise couldn't be simpler: a murderer stops to clean up his crime scene, but slips into (deeper?) madness, obsessively cleaning every inch of his victim's apartment. It's much darker than Bradbury's usual fare, but his command of language and pacing remains unbeatable.]
Last night, I watched the season finale of Better Call Saul. The dramatic center of the episode was when Charles McGill, the protagonist's brother, spiraled down into insanity, ripping apart his beautiful home to find the last trace of electricity that was slithering under his skin from behind the walls. (Michael McKean took you completely into Chuck's head. I know it's silly to call this a career-defining role for McKean, because he's literally been in everything over the last 40 years. But Chuck McGill is right up there with Spinal Tap for me. Just give him the Emmy already.)
In the post-episode discussion on AMC, McKean joined Saul co-creator Peter Gould in breaking down the episode. Gould said that Chuck's demolition derby was inspired by the scene in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation," when Gene Hackman destroys his house looking for a bug that may or may not have been planted. But McKean said he used a literary source for inspiration:
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl."
I hadn't thought about that story in years. I was completely unspoiled about the episode. Odd coincidence? Or is it, like my wife said, that sometimes ideas are just hanging in the air, waiting for someone to pull them down.
In "The Girl Who Died," the Doctor said that deja vu is you remembering something that hasn't happened yet. Do we have flashes that break us out of linear time? Do we all have the capacity to see beyond the illusion we've created for ourselves?
