Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??
Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.
To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.
Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.
It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.
It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.
I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.
I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.
We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.
We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.
I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)
I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.
I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.
I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.
As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.
She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."
This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.
There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.
So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.
I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?
What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.
I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.
"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.
"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...
"Confetti."
And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.
Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.
I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.
I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.
And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.
So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."
It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.
I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.
"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.
And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."
I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."
Why not shoot it and see what happened.
I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.
I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.
Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.
It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.
By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.
Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.
Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.
And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.
Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.
I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.
The line, for me, represents a lot of things.
It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.
It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.
And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.
The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.
It's the love that stays.
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Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?
I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?
In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".
Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.
This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.
Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.
The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.
[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]
There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.
This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.
[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]
As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.
But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?
Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.
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I’m actually serious about this, if at all possible, right now is a very good time to request queer books from your local library. Whether they get them or not is not in your control, but it is so important to show that there is a desire for queer books. I will also say getting more queer books in libraries and supporting queer authors are pretty fantastic byproducts of any action.
This isn’t something everyone can do, but please do see if you are one of the people who has the privilege to engage in this form of activism, and if you are, leverage that privilege for all you’re worth.
For anyone who can’t think of a queer book to request, here is a little list of some queer books that I think are underrated and might not be in circulation even at larger libraries:
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown
Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco
Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals by William Wright
The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley
God Themselves by Jae Nichelle
IRL by Tommy Pico
The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers by Mark Gevisser
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
The New Queer Conscience by Adam Eli
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow
Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser
Queer Magic: Lgbt+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World by Tomás Prower
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon
Hi Honey, I'm Homo! by Matt Baume
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
The Companion by E.E. Ottoman
Kapaemahu by Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu
Sacrament of Bodies by Romeo Oriogun
Witching Moon by Poppy Woods
Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist
Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi
Peaches and Honey by Imogen Markwell-Tweed
Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color by Christopher Soto
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[Closed/ Valentines RP] “More power Vs True love”
One day On a very Dark, Saddened , and Hardened night of February… One Man by the Name Reaper infinite was Being Corrupted by the power he has been using for Far too long and way too much…
….As the demon inside was at the Brink of Breaking out as it wants to use the power to gain even more power and use the power to Terrorize all life…as Reaper has a Choice… Break out the demon inside him or Fight for True Love….
Reaper has been feeling so much pain and suffering from the Corruption that feeds on The Dark Power that he has Been using Since The Time that Time itself has Started…
…This is where it all Started In the Beginning of Reaper’s Life that has been Shattered and the Point where he started using the power of Darkness…
….He was Born in a Time where Time itself has even started and He had a Normal and Grateful and even Happy Life then he met someone who he loves deeply and Heart warming until that very Moment he was Severed…Disconnected…and Devastated…that the one he loved the most has her Soul and Love Taken away by the monsters who thought that they had the Power to do what they please…
….Until Reaper uses a forbidden power that if Used will Curse and or Give a Life long Consequence as he used the power to Brutally Kill his enemies One by One Relentlessly and Mercilessly in a Whole Year….
….Then at the very end he Buried the soul who will give him the Happiness and love and Care in the entire Universe and Space Time continuum…
as Many Millennials had passed…Reaper has Changed Drastically and was Having Nightmares of his past and Nightmares about his Lover and his Mother and Father….as He wanted to End his life but he knows he cannot because of His immortality that he had when he was born…
…Then a few years has passed… Until he Was Walking and wandering around the Earth… He Never Eats…Nor Ever drinks anything…. Until he sees Someone who is In need of Some kind of Help by Men who was Acting and Touching and harassing her Inappropriately as his eyes widen a little and he was surprised to see someone so familiar that she had Many Fox Tails, Fox ears, Blue Eyes, and A Familiar Symbol on her arm…
…As Reaper intervened the Men they try to push him back but didn’t do anything as Reaper is still standing and they felt the Force that Reaper has around him as they were shocked and try to fight him but was Easily defeated as Reaper used Non combatant skills and Strength to defeat them…
…Then after the Fight the men Ran away never Coming back and Never Going near the One who they were Harassing and Acting and touching inappropriately… as Reaper was wearing a Dirty, Scruffy, Scratched, and Ripped Black Coat and he even Reveals his very own face when the hood that he was wearing from the coat was pulled down by the wind…
….His eyes were Dark Red, His hair is Messy and Black, his Skin color was American White, and Was Much Taller almost as Nearly as taller than a Tree as he pulls out his hand to help the Lady to stand….
“Take my Hand….Let Me Help you up….” He says in a Tired, Exhausted, American English and British Accent as he speaks he awaits a response from the Lady…as she then speaks…
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