166 Jay Bodnar Reviews You Can Use: Bigfoot edition ~or~ Can We Please Stop With the Goddamn Emo Books Already?

Bigfoot (Drawn & Quarterly)
by Pascal Girard

I don’t even know how to begin this.  So far, in my very brief tenure as a writer for this esteemed site, I have yet to write any negative reviews.  My thoughts on that were, “why would I waste my time reviewing things that I thought sucked?  I should spend my time pushing all things cool into your collective heads.”  I mean, the boring and mediocre have a million fans and detractors, did I have to be among them?

Mind you, it’s not that I’m not reading garbage on occasion, it’s just I chose not to bother you with it.  That is, until now.

Bigfoot by Pascal Girard is in a long line of books I should not be reading, but on occasion, because of my fondness for the publisher, (in this case, Drawn & Quarterly) I sometimes take chances on a book I should not.

Why bother telling you this?  Well, it was also brought to my attention that maybe part of a reviewers job is to tell people what you don’t like, because if an audience likes what you do like, it stands to reason you can sway some people away from the other stuff and save them some time and money.

I’m going to spoil everything about this book. Everything. I need to, in order to explain why I disliked it as much as I do.  If you plan on reading it, or have it and have not yet read it, you have been warned.

I'm just going to use pictures of other Bigfoots.

The book starts out with Jimmy (the main character) being made fun of everywhere he goes because his “best” friend Frechette uploaded a video to YouTube, without his permission, of jimmy dancing in his room.  He becomes a viral sensation: T-shirts and everything.  Jimmy hates it.  At school, Jimmy meets a girl Jolene whom he develops a crush on, takes extracurricular drawing classes to be around, but is too shy to ask out.  In the meantime, Jimmy’s uncle believes he has caught footage of Bigfoot on his cell phone while camping and wants Jimmy to help him upload it to YouTube, because he mistakenly believes Jimmy uploaded himself onto it on purpose.  Jimmy wants nothing to do with it, but his uncle does it anyways.

Frechette meets two townie tramps and tries to hook Jimmy up with one of them.  Jimmy, while not super into her, fantasizes about the chubby chick Frechette was trying to push in him. Later, Jimmy doesn’t go for it, other than a quick make out session one night, mostly because of his feelings for Jolene.

Jimmy’s uncles video blows up. He is interviewed by the news, and it is brought up that he is related to “Disco Jimmy.”  Within a week, another video pops up on Youtube of a kid dancing like Jimmy, but with a Bigfoot mask on.  Everyone thinks its Jimmy, which infuriates him to no end.

The next weekend, Jimmy is hanging out with Frechette at one of the townie girls’ houses and accidentally walks in on Frechette fucking one of the girls. Frechette tells Jimmy to come in anyway (he’s into it– Frechette is kind of a piece of shit.)  Jimmy and Frechette leave after this incident, and Frechette tries to convince Jimmy to get the keys to his uncle’s campsite so they can bring the two townie girls up there to fuck them.  Jimmy is completely not into it.

While walking they run into Jolene, the girl Jimmy likes. Frechette starts to hit on her and invites her to go camping with the two of them. Jimmy again declines, but Jolene begs him, so he caves in.

So the three of them go camping, and Frechette acts like Jimmy isn’t even there, and very immaturely and tackily flirts with Jolene, and she totally digs it.  Which is pissing off Jimmy, because, well, you know.  This goes on into the evening until Frechette starts dancing with Jolene in the cabin, and Jimmy asks to talk to him outside.   Jimmy tries to talk to Frechette about not hitting on Jolene, and in the midst of their conversation realizes that Frechette was the person making fun of him in the YouTube video of a guy dancing with a Bigfoot mask on.  Frechette fesses up, Jimmy punches him, Jolene comes out to scold Jimmy, and Jimmy walks off in the woods to cool off.  When he gets back Frechette is fucking Jolene.

They go home the next day in silence.  Then the epilogue:  a couple weeks? months? later, Jimmy runs into Jolene on the street.  She tells him Frechette stopped talking to her after they had sex.  Jimmy is nice enough to her. She then hands him a picture she recently drew of him.  It was a picture she was asked to draw about the first thing that popped in her head.  It was Jimmy. Aw.  She hands it to him, walks away. Jimmy smiles.  The end.

End spoilers(?)

Ok, so what’s wrong with that?  I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it: every story needs conflict.  It might not have to be world shattering decisions, but drama, comedy– every genre needs conflict to move along.  This entire story has no conflict. This schmuck, Jimmy, just goes along with everything that happens to him.  He is the biggest non-character I have had the unfortunate opportunity to read in almost five years. If a story can be completely negated by something incredibly easy, where no hard decisions would have been made, it doesn’t work for me. It’s not really drama to just have the character make no decision.

The story could have been ten pages long: Frechette is a total piece of shit.  Jimmy could have just not been friends with him.  This is abundantly clear by the first three pages when you find out that Frechette put him on YouTube in the first place.  Plus, throughout the entire book, Frechette makes Jimmy uncomfortable, and goes out of his way to make him uncomfortable.  In what world is this the moving force of your drama?  A stupid kid who lets himself be abused? If this were to happen in my neighborhood growing up, a black eye or a busted lip would be the result of that shit, minimum. And I wouldn’t let him stick around to fuck up my life further.

Another way this book could have been pared down to ten pages:  just ask the girl out. One of two things would have happened: she would have said yes, and yay! or she says no.  And then you know, and you can start looking and eventually meet someone down the road you will like.

So I guess my problem with the book is it’s really, really lazy. You can see the plainest ways to stop the drama, which is pushing the narrative forward. If it were at least funny I could give it some leeway for attempting humor instead of approaching logic. There is no reason to keep reading the narrative: no “problem” that’s really a problem, a main character that barely does anything.  What the hell is this book?  I feel I could have gotten the same story out of reading a bunch of gossipy teenagers’ tweets over a slow weekend.

Let’s, for fun, break down the three main characters in into real life comparisons, so that if you know anybody like these three people you can avoid them:

Jimmy is this new breed of shoegazing idiots that just kind of meanders around, not doing much.  You literally know nothing about this kid other than he masturbates, lets people walk all over him and is shy.  In real life you should just avoid these Michael Cera haircut, American Apparel wearing kids, because they will bring nothing into your life, other than getting annoying crushes on your girlfriends and then act as if you have done them a great disservice by not bending over backwards to accommodate their awkwardness.

Jolene is the kind of girl who is easily impressed by anyone showing her the least amount of attention.  So, in return, they fall for the most insincere shit possible.  But they feel put upon when they find out they were just that week’s lay. I wouldn’t care about these people if they were just in it for the sex, but the fact they think they were special?  I can usually tell within five minutes what kind of person I’m dealing with– they couldn’t tell a line of bullshit and feel disrespected. It’s ridiculous. I’m not saying date the emo kid, but you don’t have to fuck the clearly obvious gash hound either.  And you know, if this has happened to you, like more than once, you’re probably unintelligent.  Book smarts can only get you so far in life.

Frechette.  We all know womanizers, guys whose mission it is to say the most unbelievable shit to a girl, just line after line after line to get to the goal.  And they’re really sad people in the long run, because after treating woman as objects for so long, they usually end up missing the girl they should be with, the one that could make their life good, because they’re so hardwired to keep accumulating. Or, if they do settle down, they’re always the guys that end up getting divorced, because they don’t learn how to work through arguments.  They have kids who hate them, and the only friends they end up with are guys they can walk all over, because no normal person is going to put up with their shit. It’s sad.

Now I’m not trying to regulate sex in any way. I’m pro sex (read my porn article.) But while I acknowledge it as an important part of all our lives, the above characters always piss me off, because they either abuse it, or let it wither and die, and neither are acceptable to me. This book is full of the kinds of people you should avoid in real life, and as it turns out, in boring fiction.

Oh, also, $20 to be this bored and irritated? No good.

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Writer’s notes

1. I know everybody is excited about the upcoming Marvel and DC super-hero movies.  But am I the only one stoked about a new Judge Dredd Movie?
2. This week soundtrack:

• The Dirtbombs- UltraGlide in Black
• Early Man- Death Potion