Webspinna Battle

Adam Hardy
Tabitha Brower

Austin Kleon wrote, “Steal like an artist,” a phrase he maybe stole (like an artist). We obeyed, first with the textual poaching assignment, then with the Webspinna Battle. Ideas were easy to come by and hard to agree on. Probably subconsciously recasting myself in the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I suggested an elegant couple from the 40s, arguing desperately. Adam thought of a child playing, then fighting – maybe with another child over a beloved toy, maybe with his mother. I kept seeing myself in elegant black and he kept seeing himself in the mismatched rage and confusion of childhood. We came to a compromise we both felt good about: we would play an elegant couple in a child custody battle, and as the battle wore on, we would regress, becoming childlike and ridiculous in our fits of passion. Such were the inelegant origins of perhaps a slightly more elegant idea; we would have our cake and eat it, too.

Originally, we brainstormed for very specific characters. I wanted to use clips from The Queen of Versailles and the horrible ex-girlfriend from The Parent Trap; I was going to be nightmarish and a stereotype and care very, very little for the child for whom I was fighting. Adam searched fart noises and clips of immature men; he was going to be a man-child who cared more about his action figures than his kid. But it evolved into something gentler. We found Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer protesting gently, “I want my child,” and Dustin Hoffman’s concerned, firm “You can’t have him,” and let that be the heart of the piece. From there, we reasoned, we could descend into whatever madness we chose.

Typing and clicking and laughing and maybe getting distracted by too many Flight of the Conchords clips, we found insults and comebacks and adults throwing tantrums  - “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” one screams at her WiFi. Adam was comfortable with the idea of doing everything very freestyle, while I was nervous at the thought of it. So again, another comfortable compromise: we would pull everything together into one blog post, but remix and source and scratch those clips as we wished.

We tried to keep the emotional core firm; inserted amidst the Little Rascals insults and Andy Samberg screaming, “I’m an adult!” someone sobbed, hilariously but genuinely, “I just love him so much!” and Adam Sandler calmly defended his parenting abilities. At the end, though, we wanted to show how ridiculous the whole thing felt to us – not the Webspinna Battle, but the material. The parents we ended up creating were terribly, terribly flawed and childish. My character threw the marks of her adulthood at her ex, hurling earrings and a necklace and mascara; Adam’s pulled out the toys of his youth as weapons, chucking a Hot Wheels car and a shower of tiny campaign buttons.

At the very end, King Solomon decreed from centuries before us, “Cut the living child in two.” We desperately wanted some kind of doll to rip in half at the end, but memory and time failed us and we never got one. But there was something wonderful about inhabiting this half-world between adult and child, fiction and reality, experience by proxy and actual experience. By stealing like magpies,  a little here and a little there, something shiny and something that only looked that way, we built a nest of knick-knacks that I think we’d be proud to live in.