VARIATIONS Issue № 3
On delays, expansions to the Newsletter, and M. Night Shyamalan
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the third issue of my online newsletter. Also, a Happy Belated Independence Day/4th of July to all of you!
So, you’ve probably noticed it’s been a little while since my last Variations entry and that very few new articles have been posted here in the past three months.
I apologize for the lack of updates. This was not at all what I’d planned for April, May, and June. Though I’ve posted a few pieces here and there in the past three months, my publication schedule for Substack and Medium largely fell apart because of unforeseen events in my personal life. I don’t want to get into much detail, but I will say that moving in the midst of a pandemic that can continuously destabilize every single facet of your life has proven to be quite difficult and time-consuming.
Apartment hunting, for instance, was a tough task before travel became heavily restricted or contingent on vaccination and it became virtually impossible to actually visit the places you potentially want to call your new home.
Things have settled down now somewhat, so I was able to return to writing and finish up my follow-up article to the Deleted Scenes essay I put up back in May. In a way, these two essays were meant to help set up a more accessible piece focusing on a big-budget blockbuster film released earlier this year - Godzilla vs. Kong.
The idea was to illustrate the sort of forensic examination discussed in the two preceding essays by analyzing available evidence of how the movie had changed from development to release, inferring an earlier version of the picture in the process.
Unfortunately, I feel that I’ve missed the window to publish that piece and so I’m going to table it for the time being. I intend to return to it eventually, however, and I do believe putting it off for a little while will help it in the long term, as more and more information seems to be leaking about what happened behind-the-scenes with the big crossover film in the so-called “Monsterverse.”
Coming Soon
A couple of years ago, I became a fan of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, recognizing that he is a great filmmaker, whose works have often received undeserved derision from (American) film critics. To coincide with the release of his latest film, a horror/thriller/fantasy picture called Old, on July 23, I will be publishing a number of pieces pertaining to his recently completed Eastrail 77 trilogy, which consists of the superhero-esque movies Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016), and Glass (2019).
The first essay coming up will be a reprint of an older article that I wrote in defense of the third installment upon its premiere in 2019. Following that, I intend to publish about three new essays (across both Substack and Medium) that will examine how and why the overarching story of the three movies had changed over time. These are articles I’ve been researching (and writing bits and pieces of ) for a long time, so I am happy to finally have the opportunity to fully unveil them.
In addition, I want to finally get to the three remaining Servant S2 reviews (on Medium). Though it’s been a few months since the season ended, the completist in me demands that all S2 reviews be done, which will then allow me to tackle the first season and/or other series. At the moment, I believe that 2.07, 2.08, and 2.09 will have been reviewed by the end of August.
So, what’s happened to the Publication?
I’ve decided to make some notable changes to Textual Variations by creating sections/mini-newsletters, which became possible on Substack in May.
For one thing, I am trying to kickstart a series of looser and simpler blog-like posts that can discuss any media-related subject that comes to my mind. The simple fact is that I’ve realized that I’ve continued to predominantly write here on Substack in a near-academic style, which is good for quality, yet not very good for volume. So, I’m hoping to increase my productivity by publishing more articles that are less formal and polished.
These are planned to appear under the banner of Variations, which now has its own specific section on the publication. To put it another way, the range of articles appearing in/as “issues” of Variations will now expand to include more media-related thoughts, reactions, ideas, short reviews, etc. The creation of this new section will, I believe, free me up to write posts in a more conversational style.
The longer, more professionally written essays are not going away though. Those that focus on film versions and the evolution of ongoing long-form stories will now appear under the category called Unstable Texts, while those that do not fit the variation theme (eg. Itunes as a film viewing platform) will appear under Other Essays.
Finally, I’m going to add a section called Reprints, which will be dedicated to reposting older articles of mine that have been previously published elsewhere but are no longer available. (This is where the first article on Glass will appear.) Some of these simply disappeared into the ether of the internet, while others might be works I’ve chosen to willingly remove from the initial site of posting for one reason or another. In any case, I look forward to sharing these works with audiences once again.
So, to summarize, posts published on Textual Variations will now be split into four categories (though all will appear on the main page):
REPRINTS
Other sections and other types of content, may be added at a later time. We’ll see how this new format works first.
End notes:
I can’t predict how everything will turn out but I am quite motivated to get my Shyamalan pieces ready over the course of the next two months. At the same time, I will likely post about topics that occur to me at the spur of the moment.
In any case, I hope to improve and expand this publication over the rest of the summer. So, until next time, dear readers!
Best,
Mikhail Skoptsov
P.S. What happened to the links?
You might recall that the front page used to have a sidebar with links to various pages, such as my Medium page and my Twitter account. Unfortunately, I had to remove them in order to restore my front page article images, which had mysteriously vanished. It turned out that Substack article images from the front page disappear when there is too much text appearing at once, so the links had to be sacrificed, sadly.
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Looking forward to your take on Shyamalan. I haven't gotten around to him myself.