The best thing a writer will ever learn how to do is edit. And I don’t just mean “go over your work and fix the spelling and grammar”. I mean edit in the sense that not all of your ideas are great and you should probably not try and force them all onto the page, lest you walk away with a confusing, incoherent mess of hackery most foul. Anyway, it turns out Kanye West never really learned to edit his work, but since he can rap, he can make movies, right? It’s not like being good at one thing won’t translate into being good at something drastically different, right? From Vulture:
- Cudi’s gang of car thieves is called the Lamborghini Dons (not mentioned in the movie, but Cudi told me this later). He formed it to honor his father, who was a car thief, too.
- She lives in a palace filled with taut golden strings. Her mother set them up so she could run and play while holding onto them, even though she’s blind.
- Those strings all lead to a single Game of Thrones–like throne, where she sits, surrounded by barriers as if in a prison.
- Cudi finds her there but is immediately tackled by guards and winds up in a prison with … Aziz Ansari.
- Somehow Cudi winds up in the desert, beaten and abandoned by guards.
- He wraps himself in a magic scarf and becomes a cocoonlike statue standing against the sandstorms for a good third of the movie. “It kind of mummified me,” Cudi told us of the scarf.
- To make the princess “see,” Cudi plucks the strings to make music. Each note brings up a bright light, kind of like the end sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And look, more crazy!
“The [seven screens idea] is related to a post–Steve Jobs, post-Windows era of where we’re always on a BlackBerry or a phone at a ballgame, at the movies, and you’re looking at seven windows when you’re online. And I’ve found myself even falling asleep at the theater unless I’m talking to somebody or I’m on the phone, and it’s because of the amount of information that we have at once. … I was very particular about having the screens be separate and having it where your mind puts the screens back together the way you can put memories together, the way that happens throughout the day and it all links back up.
I could make a joke about how the line between Tracy Jordan and Kanye West is becoming ever thinner, but instead I’ll offer Kanye some advice: it’s great to be avant-garde and all, but post-modernism for the sake of post-modernism, and which lacks any sort of heart at the center to hold everything together, is just going to end up as naval-gazing, insular weirdness. Just putting that out there.
About Jeremy Feist
