‘Clock’: Character Motivation and the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
It doesn’t matter if your story is thoughtful or interesting, if your character’s main motivation is dubious, it all falls apart.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
Sometimes the sheer volume of art being firehosed at us on a daily basis is stunning. So, so many films and TV shows and songs and TikToks and memes and posts and cartoons and parodies and—there’s just so much of it, it’s impossible to keep up. It’s not even possible to stay current1. And so you sometimes find yourself watching a movie that literally no one else is ever going to watch, a film that barely makes a dent in the thick sponge of popular culture. You watch it, you have a reaction to it, but how do you discuss it if no one else has seen it2?
It’s like being at a party as an older person: Half your conversation is taken up saying “Have you seen ...?” and then everyone shaking their head sadly, until you finally find a TV show that someone else at the party is also watching. And there is rejoicing3.
There won’t be much rejoicing around this episode of Writing Without Rules: Deep Dives, because I am about to dive deep into a movie you have almost certainly not seen. It’s one of those films that just sort dropped onto the streaming platforms with zero fanfare beyond a few half-hearted blog reviews. But it’s a half-baked, modern horror movie, so I was absolutely going to watch this movie as long as I didn’t have to pay anything extra for it4. And lo and behold, there it was, (semi)free for the watching!
I am talking, of course, about Clock.
Baby Fever
Clock stars Dianna Agron as Ella, a 37-year old interior designer with a hot husband (Aidan, played by the legit hot Jay Ali) and a career on the verge of going supernova (in a good way). But all her friends are breeders, and are either pregnant or have kids already, and none of them understand that she doesn’t want kids—not that she can’t have kids, but that she doesn’t want them. Although Aidan has accepted this, Ella’s dad (the always great Saul Rubinek) believes she’s throwing away her heritage, which includes their family’s survival of the Holocaust. In short, girl is getting pressured from all sides about not wanting to pop out babies5.
All this pressure leads Ella to contemplate participating in a a clinical trial run by Dr. Elizabeth Simmons (the always great Melora Hardin) where they don’t treat fertility issues, but rather the reluctance to have kids in the first place. In other words, Dr. Simmons believes that not wanting children is a disorder that can be fixed through a combination of drugs, hormone therapy, and the sort of wonky psychological mindfucks you only find in the movies6. Ella resigns from her big professional break, lies to her husband, and goes off for a 2-week stay at Dr. Simmons’ equally improbable, cult-like compound7, where shit reliably goes off the rails as she hallucinates, loses her grip on reality, and eventually does some terrible, terrible things.
There’s something there. The pressure to have kids is real; I only feel a glancing blow because I’m a guy, but I’ve had those interactions with people who just cannot understand why someone would choose not to have children. I’ve had people offer to let me hang out with their kids because I must be miserable without my own8. It’s very weird! So this is rich territory for some psychological horror.
And there are nice touches. The very tall, very scary old woman that Ella hallucinates is legitimately disturbing, and has an interesting explanation. There are subtle touches like the film’s color palette getting less and less distinct as the drugs Ella is taking sink into her brain9. Dr. Simmons is never really presented as anything but an ethical and sympathetic healthcare professional, which undermines many automatic assumptions. And there are flourishes, even in the early scenes, that imply Ella may not be totally reliable as a POV character10, which adds a nice level of doubt to everything that follows, making you wonder when, precisely, she actually started losing control.
But the whole thing fails despite these smart ideas and skillful flourishes, because Ella’s motivation for participating in the trial doesn’t work. And if that doesn’t work, nothing else does.
The Why Matters
The problem Clock has is that it does a little bit too good of a job selling Ella’s distaste for the concept of having kids. She really, really isn’t into it, and at several points in the early going makes it clear that she’s not conflicted about this—it’s not something she wants. She gets very angry with her father for pressuring her, and aside from some doubt that Aidan is as cool with it as he claims he is, there’s really very little doubt that Ella is very, very okay with a child-free life.
So her sudden decision to not just entertain the notion, not just explore the possibility, but to participate in an unproven therapy that, frankly, sounds a little creepy is just untenable. Everything that happens after Ella’s bizarre decision to blow up her career and risk her marriage fails to land, because her basic motivation is suspect. As a writer you have to pay attention to this stuff: I have certainly scrawled “T/K” in the motivation box when writing a first draft of something, but I (usually) go back and fill it in at some point1112.
The real tragedy here is that the film does work to give us the basic ingredients for Ella’s change of heart, it just fails to put them together. One scene explaining Ella’s internal thought process leading to her decision to believe she is, in fact, broken in some way instead of just someone who doesn’t want to have a child would probably be enough to fix the problem, so it’s a shame that this scene doesn’t exist.
Ah well. As a grown man whose sole dependents are five imperious cats and one possibly imaginary leprechaun who constantly urges me to drink more and burn things, maybe I’m wrong about this13. But then McSwiggens tells me that I’m never wrong about anything, ever, so I don’t know who to believe.
NEXT WEEK: Minx and all the dongs. ALL. THE. DONGS.
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Of course, I’m a middle-aged cis white man. I have never been current my entire life, and every time I thought I was momentarily cool turned out to be the symptoms of a minor stroke.
If you have also watched Clock, for god’s sake start a Tumblr or something so I know I’m not crazy and this film actually exists and isn’t some sort of procedurally-generated AI contraption.
If you’re under a certain age you may not believe that this happens, but trust me, it does. Back in Ye Olde Monoculture, everyone was watching shit like Dallas or The Simpsons. It made small talk very easy. These days I feel like I need a small booklet of memes just to understand most conversations.
Aside from, you know, hours of my very short life. I think I need to re-calibrate how I value my personal time.
I understand this feeling. I get pressured about my refusal to wear pants every day, usually by the authorities.
To be fair, what can’t be fixed with a combination of drugs, hormone therapy, and the sort of wonky psychological mindfucks you only find in the movies?
If clinical trials regularly occurred in gorgeous, remote, spa-like settings that included massages and gourmet meals, believe me drug research would be going like gangbusters.
For the record: I am the opposite of miserable. And every time I interact with anyone under the age of 17 or so, I am further confirmed in my decision to let the Somers name die with me. Except, you know, for all those other people named Somers out there.
There are also unsubtle touches like a shot late in the film of an injured penis that I did not need to see.
I mean, I spend most of my time these days trying to figure out which of my memories are real and which ones were implanted by the tiny leprechaun named McSwiggens who visits me at night.
In life as well as fiction, I find that “they were very, very drunk” often works as motivation when you can’t think of anything better.
I am increasingly certain “T/K” will be the title of my memoir.
Any time I argue with McSwiggens, an even tinier leprechaun appears in a puff of green smoke, shakes her shillelagh at me, and screams LET HIM FINISH!
McSwiggens... You see him too?