Gang's All Here

14. Peter Clines. 2012.

One of my movie weaknesses is stories about rag-tag groups of misfits, coming together to solve a problem. I wouldn’t put The Great Escape on a list of my favorite films of all time, necessarily, I don’t think of it that way - and I definitely wouldn’t put it on a list of greatest films (unless we’re talking war films or something). But we had a copy on VHS when I was a kid, and I think I watched it more than any other movie we had. The only thing that competed was The Commitments, and looking back I think I loved both for the same reason. They’re both films about forming a gang, and then letting that gang do something impressive.

I love every part of films like this. I love a getting-the-gang-together montage; it’s second only to the montage where you get the gang back together. I love watching the gang hang out and make fun of each other. I love watching the gang practice and prepare for whatever the big project is - escaping from a prisoner of war camp, performing in a concert, pulling off a heist - and I love watching them start out rickety and get better at working together. I love watching each member of the gang show off their skills. And I love the climactic sequence when the gang’s schemes either come together flawlessly or fall apart. Can’t get enough of it.

Which is all to say, it is a little surprising to me and maybe will be surprising to others that I detest all of this stuff when it’s in a book. I do have a few thoughts as to why that is.

Peter Clines’ 14 is about a few things, specifically it’s about living in a creepy and possibly demonic apartment building, but it’s really a novel about a rag-tag group of misfits coming together to solve a problem. And I really didn’t care for it. I liked the mystery itself, I liked how it unfolded and how information was revealed. But I didn’t like the gang of apartment dwellers, and I didn’t like spending time with them as a gang. And there was a whole lot of that.

I think it’s a format that’s pretty dependent on likability, which is an especially difficult quality for even good writers to capture since it’s so context-specific and so easily affected by what the reader likes in a person. Charisma is an amorphous thing, and so is chemistry - I won’t say it’s impossible for actors to fake it, but I think it’s hard. It’s hard to fake comfort, or stimulation, or attraction of all kinds. And that’s what you need to make a gang appealing - you need to believe that they’re better together than they are apart, and you can’t just tell people this. An audience will see it, or they won’t. They’ll see how people can seem more alive, more engaged and more engaging, when they’re in each other’s company. We can tell when it happens to us in life, and when it doesn’t, so we recognize it in fiction.

When that chemistry is missing, or unapparent, you’re left with lots of scenes of people doing nothing. There’s little that’s more fun than hanging out doing nothing with people you like; if you don’t like them there’s nothing worse. Everyone in 14’s gang gets along really well, but I don’t know why, because I couldn’t see it. There were a lot of scenes of them figuring things out together, and just spending time together because they liked each other, and I didn’t care because I didn’t really like them. There was nothing notably wrong about any of them, to be clear. But there was no charisma, no chemistry, no indication of why they wouldn’t have gotten along just as well with anybody else. Everybody got along so well that there were no dramatic stakes even when dramatic things happened. I didn’t buy that any of these people cared particularly if the others lived or died, so I didn’t really care either.

I bet this would make a fun movie, though. If you cast a group of charismatic actors with good chemistry, I think it would work. But on the page, it’s flat.