On Thursday, April 9th, a screening and Q&A was held in Tishman for the pilot episode of The Miniature Wife, a Peacock original based on the short story by literature faculty Manuel Gonzales.
The evening began with a slideshow presented by Gonzales, who attempted to weave a false narrative surrounding his life using the biographical information of a Disney cartoonist also named Manuel Gonzales. It was accompanied by images of his totaled mini-van.
After he dropped the act, he began talking about the process of writing his short story “The Miniature Wife.” In 2001, he wrote a story entitled “The Dollhouse.” 12 years later, at the suggestion of his editor, it was retitled “The Miniature Wife.” 5 years later, he became a professor at Bennington. 8 years after that, he said, it was April 9th, 2026. The brief synopsis of the story: pompous scientist shrinks wife to size of coffee cup.
Contrary to the typical structuring of these events, he opted to hold the Q&A pre-screening, as he said that he didn’t want to watch the pilot again.
In the Q&A, he began by outlining his main inspiration: The War of the Roses, a 1980s film starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. He also discussed his thoughts on adaptations in general, saying that when his work is adapted, he is both “excited about seeing what they do with it and [trying] to distance [himself] from any kind of emotional responsibility for it.”
He spoke also about his unconventional authorial leanings. He gave an anecdote about his graduate-school days, where he was attempting to write in a mode that wasn’t authentic but would garner the most support in a workshop setting. It wasn’t until he had the strange thought whilst getting dressed one morning—“What if I communicated whether or not I wanted to have sex by the clothes that I was wearing?”—that he began to write in a more authentic mode. After writing the short story, he revised it to make it more accessible, which didn’t go over well in workshop. That was the beginning of the realization that he must write for himself.
He went on to detail his inspirations for this particular story, including a failed attempt at buying an 18-dollar dining room table that ended up being dollhouse furniture, but mostly that he wanted to follow the concept of being shrunk to its logical ends.
After the Q&A, Manuel exited with a remark about how, despite having a TV adaptation of one of his stories on a major streaming network, he still drives a beat-up minivan, and that he only writes because of an internal drive that tells him he has to.
The screening was interesting — the show was a fair bit more played-for-laughs than the short story itself was (Gonzales was not involved in the writing of the screenplay). The soundtrack was goofy and stilted, and it seemed as if every line was intended to be a joke. While Gonzales includes a fair amount of his own humor in his stories, in the adaptation, it seemed to detract from the plot itself. The added B-plot of a missing short story was strange but vaguely interesting, and the affair was a centralized aspect of the plot not seen in the story. It felt as if the writers were attempting to create a justification as to why the viewer should dislike the wife. Overall, it was decent, though it perhaps would’ve been better off as a film.
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