C.M. Stone's Blog

Stop Ruining Your Turkey (Dry-Brined Turkey and Herb Butter Recipe)

I know what you’re about to do. You’re going to scroll past the preamble down to the recipe, because every food blogger on the planet spends twenty pages telling you some pointless, rambling story before getting to the only reason you ever clicked on their link in the first place.

But I have valuable information for you before we get to the recipe.

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve known a lot of people in my life who say they hate turkey, yet they still cook it every single Thanksgiving. Usually the main complaint is that it’s too dry. Many of these people are in my own family of origin and despite my interest in breaking the “traditional” way of cooking the turkey and do it right, that turkey still got basted, still had stuffing stuck inside of it, and still turned out dry.

Well, I’m married and cooking my own turkey these days and I can make turkey my own way. Now I can tell you everything you’re doing wrong and hopefully we can save these poor birds from desecration.

DO NOT open the oven. You won’t be able to tell how done the turkey is from a look. All you’re doing is letting heat and moisture escape, which will lengthen cooking time and further dry out the meat. A thermometer is your only way to check how done it is.

DO cover your turkey. If you have a small turkey or a very large dutch oven, this is a wonderful way to do it. Otherwise, creating a tin foil tent and keeping that sucker sealed up tight is the next best thing.

DO NOT stuff your turkey. No. NO. Get that stuffing away from that turkey right now or so help me… The stuffing will add extra cooking time to your turkey, wick moisture out of the meat, and increase the the chances of food poisoning by creating a nice, insulated, moist place for bacteria to survive. At best, you’ll end up with soggy stuffing. Yuck.

DO put aromatics inside your turkey. A handful of parsley or sprigs of rosemary are perfect. Maybe a few roughly chopped raw cranberries. You could also take half a lemon, squeeze some of the juice in, then quarter it and set those inside. Whatever you pick, it should have a strong flavor and scent and leave plenty of air space for cooking around it. Your stuffing can go in another pan, cooked with drippings from the turkey. (Also, this should go without saying but: don’t eat your aromatics.)

DO NOT start out with the heat high and then lower it later. I’ve seen a lot of recipes along those lines and it’s just a terrible way to cook a lean meat like turkey. The idea is that you’re searing the outside of the turkey to get a golden brown skin and to lock in moisture, but searing with hot air doesn’t work the same way as searing against a hot pan. Plus, the skin won’t be crispy if it gets roasted at the beginning instead of the end.

DO cook at a low temperature, slowly. You’ll remove the foil at about the halfway point in cooking and the skin will brown up just fine.

DO NOT baste. Most of those drippings at the bottom of the pan aren’t fats, so aren’t going to have the desired effect. You’re basically just washing down the skin, which is unlikely to penetrate the meat to add moisture back to it. Adding moisture during cooking is pretty difficult, so your goal instead should be to preserve moisture. The dry brine does the heavy lifting on that part.

DO butter your turkey. Yes, butter it. Before you cook it, dry the outside of the turkey and then cover it with herb butter (recipe below). At the halfway point when I uncover the turkey to let it start browning, I like to take some more melted butter and brush it on. Unlike basting or starting your turkey at a high temperature, this actually creates a moisture barrier to reduce the amount lost from the meat, while also browning up the skin and essentially frying it in place. Delicious.

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Photo by Libby Penner on Unsplash

I have had people express concern to me over all the salt in the brine and adding butter to the turkey. “Isn’t that unhealthy?” Look. You’re celebrating the genocidal theft of a continent from Indigenous people by stuffing yourself with mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, mac and cheese, bread, wobbly jellied cranberries in the shape of a tin can, and then following it all with pie. Putting a little extra salt and butter on a lean meat is the least of your worries here.

And finally, if you genuinely dislike turkey? If it’s not a matter of it being dried out, but you simply dislike the flavor? If you do not ever seek out sliced turkey on a sandwich? If turkey gravy is in no way enticing to you over chicken? Don’t cook a turkey. Just don’t. There are other meats, there are vegan options, there are so many other things you could be eating instead. Only eat turkey if you want to eat turkey. Tradition should serve us, not the other way around.

Now onto the only reason you ever clicked on this link in the first place.

Dry-Brined Turkey and Herb Butter



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Ingredients



1 fresh or thawed turkeyKosher salt1 tablespoon sugarFreshly ground black pepper2 sticks butter2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley1 tablespoon dried sage1 tablespoon dried thyme1 teaspoon paprika1/8 teaspoon cloves





Directions



Unwrap the turkey and remove giblets. Rinse with cold water, then pat dry. Combine 1/3 cup salt, sugar and 1 teaspoon pepper in a bowl. Rub all over the turkey and inside the cavity. Wrap tightly in a bag (a garbage bag honestly works quite well) and put on a rimmed baking sheet. Refrigerate at least 8 hours or overnight. Rinse well and pat dry.The night before roasting, mix the butter, parsley, sage, thyme, 1 teaspoon pepper, the paprika and cloves until combined. Let this sit overnight for the flavors to fully blossom. Reserve 4 tablespoons of the butter, then rub the rest under the skin on the breasts and legs, inside the cavity, and finally on the outside of the skin. Save the rest of the butter for brushing on the turkey while it cooks and your gravy. Place your aromatics inside the turkey. Let the turkey sit at room temperature 30 minutes before you begin roasting.Put the oven rack in the lowest position; preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Put the turkey breast-side up on a rack in your pan, tucking the wing tips under. Cover with lid or tin foil, tightly. Cooking time should be 15 minutes per pound. At your estimated halfway point in cooking, remove the lid or tin foil and brush on two tablespoons of your reserved butter.Turkey is done when a thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh registers 165 degrees F. Transfer to a cutting board and let rest at least 30 minutes before carving. Drippings from the pan can be used in gravy and dressing, which you’ll have plenty of time to prepare while the turkey rests. Whisk the remaining 2 tablespoons flavored butter in your gravy.

The actual spices you use in the brine can be mixed up, of course. I’m pretty fond of rosemary and citrus, but parsley, sage, and thyme are traditional. For a less traditional take, five-spice powder on turkey is amazing. Make sure whatever aromatics you put inside the turkey go with the other spices you’ve chosen.

Unless you or someone you’re cooking for has an actual aversion to flavor (some people do!), don’t cut back on the amount of spices. A turkey is a very large bird and requires a lot of seasoning, yet most people chronically under-season theirs.

There you have it. You have absolutely no excuse to cook another dry, bland bird this year unless that’s what you’re into.

My Torch

[image error]“Follow the path,” my guide told me as he took me through the dark woods.

“What happens if I stray?” I asked.

“If you leave the path, you’ll die.”

Sharp stones cut my feet. Branches caught my hair. Thorns striped me with blood.

“This path doesn’t seem very safe,” I said.

“If you leave the path, you’ll die,” he answered.

Shadows stalked me and predators nipped at my heels.

“Light this torch. The fire will keep them at bay,” he said.

I did as told and watched as they cringed back from the flame, but could see the single torch wouldn’t last long.

“Is there another torch?”

“No.”

“Will we get to the end of the path before it burns out?”

“No. We must move faster.”

We ran. My skin was torn in gaping wounds by the perils of the path, but I kept running.

“How fast do I need to run to get through safely?” I asked.

“You can’t run fast enough,” said my guide.

“You tricked me! Why am I on the path at all?”

“If you leave the path, you’ll die.”

I stopped running.

“Then I die no matter what I do. Why should I bother?”

“You must keep running,” he said. “If you don’t, they’ll catch you.”

I did not run. I found my own path and the woods were my torch.

Clawing Out of the Abyss

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After what appears to have been around three years of inactivity, I finally logged back into GoodReads and waded through my mail and friend requests.

I… have reviews? People actually read my books? This is very weird.

A lot of bad crap sort of poisoned my feelings about my career before it ever got off the ground. While editing my second book with Entangled my best friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer and my long-term partner and I split up.

I finished editing that book, somehow. Then the Outlaws series and Familiar with Salt of the Earth were written during a manic frenzy of grief after my best friend died.

Right around my wedding, I crashed and lost the ability to write at all, as exhaustion from trying to keep up with authors who somehow managed to publish books hundreds and hundreds of pages long every month or even every week finally caught up with me.

And then the depression kicked in. As the depression kept me from doing things I was supposed to be doing (posting interviews and promotional stuff for other authors, finishing the sequel to Familiar), guilt for letting people down hit me like a tidal wave, which made it that much harder to get anything done.

Thus DMs and emails went unanswered. I “forgot” my passwords for my accounts on GoodReads, Tumblr, etc. I wanted to disappear and wished I could make my books disappear as well. The thought of people reading them made me feel sick. I felt worthless, so surely my own books were worthless as well?

As I’ve been getting better, I’ve begun thinking about writing again. Like finishing the Familiar sequel, Dragon. Like finishing #ProjectTrashGods, an idea I’ve been kicking around for years. Or get my secondary world fantasy novels finished. Yet a lingering shame kept me back, feeling as though the books I wrote in my grief were surely so bad, so rushed, that I’d already ruined my shot at my career.

So I did something I’ve never done before and actually sat down to read my own books, post-publication. Because of the rush on Familiar and the Outlaws books, they’re in sore need of further editing. Typos slipped through and plots in need of more breathing room got shoved down into as small a space as possible just to get the book finished. Because of the collaborative nature of the Outlaws series (I wrote it with Sarah Christian), there are places where I would have done things much differently if I’d been writing them alone.

And yet…

And yet I found joy in them. There was joy in the characters flailing about in the ridiculous and often dangerous situations they found themselves in. There was joy in the grief and horror and trauma so many of them faced, along with the beautiful redemption and comfort they found with one another. Some clunky passages were sprinkled here and there that better editing could have helped with, yes, but also turns of phrase I get chills of pride over. I still want to write in the same way that I still want to breathe.

So keep your eyes open for Dragon. I don’t know when the release date will be yet, but I’ll keep you posted. An expanded new edition of Familiar is coming as well, newly edited and polished with the respect it always deserved. Other projects are chugging away. I’m also going to be reaching out to my writer community and hopefully making amends for the way I dropped off the planet.

In a lot of ways it feels like starting over, but if that’s what it is, at least this time I’ve got the benefit of knowing exactly how badly I want it.

Writing Doodles: Pudding

Every Monday, I post a new writing prompt to be used for a simple scene or description. Write for five minutes without revision or rest, set what you wrote aside after the five minutes are up, and then get on with your project. I like to use Write or Die to keep track of my time and keep me focused.

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This week’s prompt:

Write a conversation about food 

You’re welcome to post what you write in the comments, or you can keep it to yourself. No pressure and nobody’s expecting a masterpiece after five minutes. Here’s my doodle:

“Chastity, you don’t have to do this.”

She shook her head resolutely and continued whisking the bowl. “Yes, I do.”

“My mother has many servants. You don’t have to be one of them,” César said. “We can simply show up with ourselves and that will be enough.”

“No.” They had been married for two weeks, but it was the first time they would be guests at his parents’ hacienda since their marriage, and even if the social rules were different with this sort of money and in a new country, she knew what her own mother would expect of her and she would do it. Even if César thought she was being silly. “You don’t go to your mother-in-law’s home without something to give.”

Her husband sighed, resting his cheek on one fist. “We can bring a bottle of wine.”

“You can do that, too, but you bringing a bottle of wine bought with your money doesn’t prove I can take care of you.”

“And how are you taking care of me today?” He craned his neck to look into her bowl.

“Spotted dick.”

The choking sound from her husband made her stop beating for a moment, looking to him in alarm. “Are you all right?”

“What are you making?”

“Spotted dick. It’s a steamed pudding.”

“Is… is dick the word for pudding in England? That’s not pudding in America.”

She frowned, narrowing her eyes at him. “Spotted dog?”

He looked about at her various ingredients. “How about–I know this is a radical suggestion–currant pudding?”

“All right, fair enough. It probably doesn’t translate very well. Currant pudding it is.”

“Good, good. And I should point out that my mother hates currants.”

She sighed. Maybe cooking anything at all had been a mistake.

 

The characters used here are from Chastity for César Iturbide, an historical romance from a series I wrote with Sarah Christian. And if you want to know far more than necessary about the history of pudding and why Americans and Brits have different uses of this word wander over to the Food Timeline.

Writing Doodles: Hands

One of the hardest parts of writing is simply starting, especially when you have a big project to work on or something that’s personally important. Taking that leap to getting words onto the page is hard. I’ve known far too many people full of stories they never managed to finish because it felt like such a huge step to sit down and keep writing.

That’s why starting every work session with a writing doodle helps. If I was going to draw a picture, I might do a few quick sketches and squiggles and textures on the page before I actually began the work and this is the same thing. We do something that isn’t important to wake up our creativity and shake out any anxiety or self-doubt before the real work begins. Every Monday, I’ll post a new writing prompt to be used for a simple doodle. Write for five minutes without revision or rest, set what you wrote aside after the five minutes are up, and then get on with your project. I like to use Write or Die to keep track of my time and keep me focused.

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This week’s prompt:

Describe a character’s hands. 

You’re welcome to post what you write in the comments, or you can keep it to yourself. No pressure. Here’s my doodle:

Only the tips of Jimi’s fingers were callused. His palms remained smooth, which Abarrane had noticed the first time she shook his hand and whenever she paid any attention to his hands those smooth palms drew her eye. Nails as thick and hard as horn capped his fingers, but he kept them short and neat. Not with the use of a knife or blade or gnawing teeth, not as near as she could tell, but maybe a file. A file seemed like the sort of thing he’d use. Once had she ever seen his fingers bleed after he played for hours working out a new melody, the thick layer of outer dead skin worn of to reveal the tender flesh beneath. Yet the softness of his palms always confused her. His life was not a soft one, with constant travel and whatever it was that had led to him losing his leg, yet somehow his palms were protected from all that labor. As if he only ever plucked at the world with his fingertips, playing it as expertly as he played the charango, and never having to reach any deeper into it.

The Handmaid’s Tale: Flawed from the start

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As a home-schooled teen, I never had The Handmaid’s Tale as required reading. I was aware of the plot, thanks to my older sister trying to explain it to me once, but had little interest in seeking it out on my own. At the time, it wasn’t clear why that was, since I loved reading feminist literature and I loved science-fiction. There was simply something about it that rubbed me the wrong way, leaving me disinterested in ever picking it up.

Over the last few days I’ve marathoned through the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale and the book. If you’re worried about spoilers, turn back now.

Perhaps recognizing how difficult the story would get for a white author to deal with race under these circumstances realistically and that it wouldn’t be her story to tell, Margaret Atwood had all black Americans shipped off to a place called National Homeland One and never seen in the narrative. Atwood has famously said that she didn’t write anything that hasn’t happened before and she’s absolutely right. The domestic slavery and rape that Offred suffers have great historical precedent in America… as things black women have been subjected to. I think this whole setup was flawed from the start (people who survived centuries of slavery and oppression can be written off in a literal throwaway sentence?), but it was an attempt to deal with race. Not a great one, but an attempt.

The show went a startlingly different direction, with a sort of colorblind fundamentalism that is pretty laughable. In the show’s universe, racism has ceased to exist and the white heroine June (Offred’s real name) and her best friend Moira, a black woman, are subject to the exact same form of misogyny. Intersectionality doesn’t exist in this universe, for the only axes of oppression that matter are those white women are oppressed by. That a black woman would experience sexism differently is ignored, because the very concept of The Handmaid’s Tale must ignore it.

This is a story, as so many popular dystopias are, about a dark future where white people are treated like people of color. As Ana Cottle put it:

Atwood describes her novel as “speculative fiction,” meaning that she believes the events she depicts are a credible possibility. It seems to me the peak of hubris to “predict” events as a possibility that we have already seen come to pass, just to a different set of people. The Handmaid’s Tale suggests that the brutality of slavery alone is not impactful enough to serve as a universal wake-up call; instead, we’re only drawn to this “feminist” rallying point when the person enduring these heinous crimes is a college-educated white woman.

Falling fertility rates are a major plot point on the show (less so, or at least less explicit, in the book) and a justification for the whole Handmaid system. Usually when you run into worries about falling birth rates out here in the real world, it’s from racists and xenophobes terrified that native Europeans and white Americans are going to be “outbred” and immigration will dilute their culture. Yet because the show tries to pretend race doesn’t exist, how this fear actually plays out in the real world doesn’t influence anything. It’s pure fantasy infertility, where rutting Commanders do their duty to their nation out of a genuine need for babies.

There are beautiful moments of brilliant acting on the show, as well as gripping writing from Atwood in the book, but the foundations of the show are sand and the further the series goes, the more that becomes apparent. The moment it all fell apart for me was in the episode when the trade delegation from Mexico arrives and it’s revealed that they’re looking to trade with the Republic of Gilead for Handmaids. See, the city the Mexican diplomat is from hasn’t had a birth in six years! The rise of infertility has gotten so bad it’s reached apocalyptic levels. Entire nations will die without the fertile wombs of the tiny handful of Handmaids.

Look, people can be terrible. They’ll try to justify a lot. I get that. The patriarchal Republic of Gilead wants to dominate women and will do so in rather ridiculous, transparent ways with absurd explanations for why it’s necessary. Fine. I could grit my teeth and accept the world-building, while making mental notes about the terrible White Feminism of it all. But now you’re trying to tell me that Mexico–and it’s implied other nations across the world–is so desperate for babies that they’ll trade for… Handmaids?

Why? Why is a backwards nation that isn’t using fertility drugs or acknowledging sterility in men the one that people are looking to for answers in a crisis like this?

Even in the 1980s when Atwood wrote the original book, IVF already existed. She knew this was a matter of religious extremism, not practicality. Reproductive technology has advanced by incredible leaps since then. With a potentially species-ending rise in sterility driving innovation and changes in the law, embryo cloning would be trivially easy to perform in virtually any fertility clinic. From a few eggs, thousands of embryos could be cloned, to be farmed out to anyone with a uterus willing and capable of carrying them. Databases full of information on the genetic donors would have to be kept, for maximum genetic variability, much in the way breeding programs for endangered animals are undertaken. The desperate need for material from the minority who are still fertile could still lead to oppression, still be driven by sexism because eggs are so much more precious than sperm and carrying a pregnancy to term is a massive physical undertaking. (There is already plenty of precedent for this in the real world, as poor women are exploited as surrogates by people with far more power than them.) Any country not under the totalitarian control of religious extremists would be looking at these solutions and grappling with the ethics of saving humanity under these conditions.

But if they were doing that, then we couldn’t have white women fretting over being sold as slaves to other countries. We wouldn’t be taking real people’s real suffering and appropriating it for others. We wouldn’t be able to sidestep so much of the religious commentary necessary for this kind of setting. “As with The Handmaid’s Tale, I didn’t put in anything that we haven’t already done, we’re not already doing, we’re seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress… So all of those things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil,” Atwood maintains.

With its greater emphasis on infertility driving things rather than racist fundamentalism, perhaps the show-runners should have tried just a smidge more invention.

The biobag is not an “artificial womb”

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Artificial wombs and the immense impact they would have on society have been a fascination of mine since childhood. This fascination led to a lot of reading and understanding why it would be an incredibly complicated process to support an embryo outside of a uterine environment. I did research to try to understand the hurdles that would be involved, so that in my upcoming science-fiction novel I could offer at least an educated guess as to how this technology would develop. And that’s why I was quite shocked and confused when, two days ago, a friend sent me a video of a “real working artificial womb.”

“Bullshit” was my instant and uncharitable response. Then I watched the video and was very impressed with the engineering involved, but troubled at the fact that it was being framed as something it wasn’t. The biobag is amazing. It also isn’t an artificial womb.

But the headlines say something different.

Hope for preemies as artificial womb helps tiny lambs grow

Artificial Womb Works for Lambs, Study Shows

Scientists create ‘artificial womb’ that could save premature babies’ lives

I watched friends on Facebook have meltdowns in terror over the ethical problems in this (there aren’t actually many) and worry over how this strips away familial bonds (it doesn’t). Comments on these articles were worse. After using those incredibly sensationalized headlines that failed to remotely explain what was actually happening, most responsible articles did then go on to explain some of the science and admit that the biobag is essentially a glorified incubator and not a womb at all, but the initial video I saw didn’t and less responsible news sources didn’t. And now there are confused, worried people out there, worrying about something that isn’t worth worrying about.

Interestingly enough, the people reacting with concern seem to be better informed about what the word womb means than the journalists or editors involved in covering this story. Womb is another word for uterus, an internal organ that is still very much in need of a living being to support it. In humans, the uterus normally thickens its lining during each menstrual cycle, in preparation in case an egg gets fertilized. If a blastocyst successfully implants in the thickened uterine lining, congratulations! A pregnancy has been achieved. If this does not occur, then in most cases the lining is sloughed off: this is menstruation. Supporting a growing embryo (and later in its development, a fetus) is physically taxing, but millions of years of placental mammalian evolution means that this harrowing task doesn’t normally kill the pregnant person. Hooray for not dying! But childbearing still has dangers, physical and societal costs, and, yes, maternal mortality unfortunately still happens. It’s also a time of intense bonding for a lot of families, with incredible hormonal changes for pregnant and birthing people. For many people, childbirth has important spiritual and cultural aspects. Anything that might drastically alter how pregnancy and birth happen is going to work up a lot of strong emotions. To wrongfully imply that pregnancy is no longer a requirement for human reproduction is, in essence, clickbait.

The fetal side of the placenta is formed from the same fertilized egg as the embryo. When the fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall, it’s the fetal placenta that develops to support the new growing life as a conduit between parent and offspring. An artificial womb that could support life from fertilization to birth would have to support the fetal placenta. There would have to be a living structure–sometimes called the maternal placenta or the decidua basalis–for the fetal placenta to implant into. That’s how an embryo starts.

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But the biobag has no living structures to it. It’s a bag. There’s not even a pump (because the pressure would be too much for an undeveloped heart), with the lamb’s heart moving fluids through the umbilical arteries. This is a big, fancy, awesome incubator for premature infants. If it turns out to be safe and can be used on humans, it would be an incredible new medical technique for helping premature infants like my nephew who was born too early last summer. It would not (and physically could not!) be used with embryos. Viable preterm infants, such as those born at 23 gestational weeks, are the target patients for this. This is not about reproduction, but better protecting already existing tiny lives. Undeveloped hearts, lungs, brains, and other organs would be given a chance in a hospitable environment, drastically reducing the suffering and long-term health consequences that many born preterm face.

Despite those involved in the study stressing that use of this wouldn’t lead to babies floating in bags on the walls and would simply be set up very much like current incubators in use, bad science reporting keeps describing stuff that sounds like vat babies from space. It’s not. It’s less of a breakthrough than that, and also something that is very exciting that may save a lot of people a whole lot of suffering.

Hope

It’s been a hard year. True friendship is important–as important as family or a marriage–and it isn’t something I share lightly. Losing my best friend this year left its mark on me and I imagine Maggie’s loss is something I’ll reflect on for the rest of my life, like I do with my father’s death or my house burning down. Huge events like these have a tendency to stay with us as tattoos on the soul.

It was with that in mind that I wrote my latest book, Hope for Nolan O’Donoghue, about two people who’ve lost so much and find reason to hope again. One of the keenest pleasures of writing this book was that I didn’t write it alone. Sarah Christian is a historical romance author, writing clean westerns and these cute little gazettes about historical folk arts. She’s also my favorite collaborator. Usually authors are relatively solitary in their work, spreading out like carpenter bees and burrowing in to their own private nests. Convention going is a little more common among authors than carpenter bees (though biologists do describe them as “gregarious”!), but for the most part writing is lonely business. And while I enjoy my solitude and being alone in my thoughts quite a bit, that isn’t always the healthiest thing when you’re grieving.

Having someone to work with was just what I needed right now. Instead of being lost in my fear and survivor’s guilt, I had someone there cheerfully pushing me along. It was like a little fandom of two, as we plotted floor plans for Nolan and his brother’s houses, discussed what sort of art Tomás makes, fancast Ben as Idris Elba and agreed we were very much looking forward to his book for that mental image alone. Sarah brought the joy back to writing for me and I’m deeply grateful.

It’s probably no coincidence that this series follows similar themes. Grief and past hurts haunt all the characters, but the support of loved ones–both romantic and platonic–help them carry on. Romance novels can be accused of being unrealistic fantasies in many ways, but in this one? I found it remarkably accurate.

Thanks, Sarah. ♥ (And for everyone who isn’t Sarah: go check out our book!)

Hope for Nolan O’Donoghue

 

Title: Hope for Nolan O’Donoghue (an Outlaw’s Mail-Order Bride)

Genre: Historical Romance

Length: 144 pages

Release Date: October 1, 2016

Salt of the Earth

Seven virtues and seven outlaws…

When Hope Masterson is torn from her comfortable life in St. Louis, she has one way out. Falsely accused of a crime and grieving her murdered father, her only escape is to flee Missouri forever and marry a stranger in Dodge City, Kansas as a mail-order bride. All she asks for is a life of peace where she can heal from her heartbreaks, and a decent man entirely unlike the criminal who shattered her world.

Nolan O’Donoghue considers himself a decent man, but he most definitely is a criminal. An outlaw trying to leave his past behind, Nolan’s bought a ranch with his ill-gotten gains and all his new life needs now is a pretty little wife to keep the house. Hope isn’t at all what he expected when he sought a mail-order bride, but for her sake he vows to marry her even so and keep her safe. It might have worked, if his old gang hadn’t shown up on his doorstep, needing his help in one last heist.

Now Nolan is torn between a boundless loyalty to his fellow outlaws and the woman he’s sworn to care for. Can he break the law and still keep Hope?

The Original Ghostbusters Recap, Part 1

Before I pushed play I wondered if Melissa McCarthy would burst through a wall and torch my copy of the original Ghostbusters while I cried. The power of nostalgia is great and it sucks when something you loved years ago turns out to be terrible when viewed with fresh eyes (see: the Ruining My Childhood recaps on this blog), but can a reboot retroactively ruin something?

My memories of the movie from childhood are that it was a very funny and exciting adventure. My impression of Dana Barrett was that she was cool and tough and sexy and she formed my view of what a woman “should” be. I loved Peter Venkman because he was a smartass and “cool” to my kid eyes. I loved Egon Spengler because he was super smart and had things figured out. I was…vaguely aware that Winston Zeddemore and Ray Stantz were also characters, and I liked them because they rounded the whole thing out, but their personalities left no deep impression on me as a kid. My focus was probably primarily on Dana and Peter, heavier on Dana, and then on the cartoon it was all about Egon. Oh yeah, I watched the cartoon and loved it. I also loved Ghostbusters 2. At the age of seven, I created my first bit of fandom content and wrote a song titled “Ruby of the Zuul” which invented an intricate, mystical backstory to Zuul.

I was, in short, a big ol’ geek child.

But I hadn’t watched it in years. My only exposure over the last few years had been Cracked articles and videos on pop culture and the talk that sprang up in response to the reboot. With my memories from childhood dimming, I was starting to remember the movie more from quotes and other people’s opinions than my own view. For this rewatch, I grabbed my mom and my twenty-three year old brother. As near as we could tell, none of us had seen it in over ten years.

The movie begins with eerie music on a library exterior. Inside, it’s full of physical books and people and not a single device is in sight. I have a discombobulating sense of just how much the world has changed since this movie came out. A librarian is going through dark and narrow stacks to put books away. Behind her, books start moving themselves around on shelves when she isn’t looking. She passes a card catalog–ANCIENT HISTORY ZOMG–and it starts spewing cards. Now she finally notices that something is happening and is rightfully freaked out. She goes running through the stacks until she sees something and screams. There’s light, a blast of air blows her hair and… next scene.

Now we’re in a cruddy, cramped university lab. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) is testing a Paul Simon look alike and a blonde woman for psychic abilities with cards, electrocuting them when they’re wrong. Except he’s lying and saying the woman is right every time. He claims to be testing the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP, with entirely bullshit testing. This was funny as a kid, but this scene got more scoffs at the audacity of Peter’s behavior than real laughter in our viewing. After the guy leaves angrily, Peter starts touching the young woman and stroking her ego over her supposed power. At this point my mom and brother both started talking about how inappropriate this was and how neither of them remembered the sexual content of the movie. Peter gets upset when Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) shows up to tell him about the library event, because it interrupts his creeping on the woman, who is presumably one of his students.

From this scene, we get a sense of these two main characters. Ray has a childlike wonder, while Peter is cynical and self-serving to the point it’s not even clear if he believes in the paranormal at all or is just a con-artist using this for his own gain.

At the library, we get our introduction to Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis). He isn’t as effusive in his enthusiasm as Ray, but is clearly very into the paranormal, just in a more analytical way. Peter is a dick to Egon and Ray, being very dismissive about their work:

As a friend I have to tell you: you’ve finally gone round the bend on this ghost business. You guys have been running your ass off meeting and greeting every schizo in the five boroughs who says he has a paranormal experience. What have you seen?

When they get to where the librarian is recovering from her traumatic experience, Peter begins questioning her:

Peter: Alice, I’m going to ask you a couple of standard questions, okay? Have you or any of your family been diagnosed schizophrenic? Mentally incompetent?

Librarian: My uncle thought he was Saint Jerome.

Peter: I’d call that a big yes. Uh, are you habitually using drugs? Stimulants? Alcohol?

Librarian: No.

Peter: No, no. Just asking. Are you, Alice, menstruating right now?

Library Administrator: What has that got to do with it?

Peter: Back off, man. I’m a scientist.

Again, those “did he actually say that?” half laughs/half gasps in our viewing. It’s a misogynistic trope, but does set up the idea that Peter wants to rule out natural causes before looking into the supernatural. He’s a psychologist and recognizes that the human mind doesn’t always get the facts straight. Egon gets a reading of the ghost moving and they head down into the stacks to look for it, while Peter continues to look unimpressed. Egon and Ray find stacked books and Peter makes fun of them: “You’re right. No human being would stack books like this.” Our little viewing party is warming up, too, laughing more genuinely and more often.

Soon they find the slimy, snot-like ectoplasm on the card catalog, which Egon and Ray are totally geeking out about and I’m right there with them, because it’s such an iconic part of the universe. Peter is unimpressed. What’s interesting here is that when the movie was made, I think Peter was supposed to be a sort of voice for the audience, scoffing at everything ridiculous around them. But when you already love the movie, the joy and wonder from Egon and Ray is actually closer to your experience. Egon asks Peter to collect a sample of the ectoplasm, which he does, grudgingly. He also gets some on his hand and tries to shake it off, but flips it into his eye. We laugh, because it’s gross and we’re all secretly five-year-olds giggling over boogers deep down inside.

They find the ghost–who looks like an older woman floating in the air as she reads–and they all stand there in silent awe for a minute. Peter drags the other two behind a bookcase and demands they come up with a plan. This is a great moment that establishes their group dynamic and what Peter brings to it. Ray is the excited idealist, Egon is the technical genius, and Peter’s cynicism allows them to keep it all grounded in the real world. Ray suggests making contact. Peter goes to speak to the apparition and uses basically the worst opening ever: “Hello. I’m Peter. Where are you from? Originally.” We’re already laughing, but then the ghost shushes him and Peter tells the guys, “All right. Okay, the usual stuff isn’t working.” Since this is their very first ghost, the implication is clear. It didn’t just sound like a pick-up line. This is his pick-up line.

Ray says that he has a plan. He knows “exactly what to do” and advises the others to stay close to him and do exactly what he says. He leads them as the three creep up on the ghost. When they get close enough, Ray shouts, “GET HER.” The ghost turns on them and they run screaming out of the library.

As they’re walking back to the university and giggling over how terrible Ray’s plan was, Egon says he might be able to catch ghosts to study them indefinitely. Peter looks stunned, clearly thinking over the potential of this.

Peter: Spengs? You serious about this catching a ghost?

Egon: I’m always serious.

Peter: Egon, I’m gonna take back some of the things I’ve said about you. You… you’ve earned it.

And he gives Egon a reward candy bar.

Their high is short-lived, however, because when they get back to their lab the dean is clearing their stuff out. The board of regents has decided to terminate their grant and they are to vacate the university immediately. Peter demands an explanation and is given one:

Dr. Venkman, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of dodge or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy and your conclusions are highly questionable. You, Dr. Venkman, are a poor scientist.

After what we’ve seen of Peter, there really isn’t any arguing with this, is there? He does treat it like a hustle. His methods are sloppy. There’s no mention of his inappropriate flirtation with a test subject earlier, but that was pretty bad, too. Probably not a firing offense at this university, especially not at this time, but if nothing else it makes his research absolutely useless.

Outside, Peter is drinking while Ray paces in a panic over what’s going to happen to them now. Peter proves the dean right about him by saying that this is actually a business opportunity. Ray points out that Egon’s containment system would require a lot of money and wants to know where they could possibly get that kind of funding from now that they’re on their own. Peter feigns that he could not possibly know.

Except he does. In the next scene, a stunned and shaky Ray is walking out of a bank, having mortgaged the house he was born in, clearly having been talked into it by Peter. Egon makes a comment about how terribly high the interest will be over the next three years. It’s $95,000, at a 19% rate. Some wonderful person actually crunched the numbers based on this. Their loan was probably only $100,000. This is a horrifically bad start to a business venture, but Peter insists all will be well:

Will you guys relax? We are on the threshold of establishing the indispensable defense science of the next decade. Professional paranormal investigations and eliminations. The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams.

Whether or not Peter’s right will have to wait for another day. This is already one of my longest recaps if not my longest one, so I’ll continue it in another post. This far into the movie, we were all enjoying ourselves. It felt a little different from the nostalgia (Peter is far less of “the cool” Ghostbuster and more of “the jerk” Ghostbuster), but was still quite funny. Of the seven characters who’ve had lines so far (discounting the “shh” from the library ghost), two have been women. One was lied to and manipulated by Peter and one was asked about her period.

Since the Ghostbusters themselves are men, it’s no great surprise that male characters get the majority of lines in this movie. If this was something a director wanted to address, the easiest way to do that would be to make a movie where the Ghostbusters are women. Of Ray and Egon, we’ve seen nothing of their dynamic or roles in the film’s universe so far that means they have to be men. Peter fits a very specific straight male archetype with the way he interacts with women, but a Ghostbusters movie without that interaction wouldn’t suffer. And, regardless of what other movies exist, this one is still here and isn’t going anywhere.

I’ll try to get the next recap edited and up soon.