Empress Theresa: Chapter Twenty-Four Analysis

This chapter actually has a pretty catchy opener with a very brief, single sentence about how the New York Times ran a headline that says, ‘Theresa Hartley Eyes North Korea.’ This is a pretty effective device, and would not look out of place in a lot of thriller novels. Perhaps in the twenty years that it took Boutin to write this book (yes, it seriously took that long. So he claims) he did a little bit of homework. If only minimal, as the rest of the book is still an incredible drag.

Theresa gets summoned to the White House by President Stinson, but Theresa decides that she’d rather meet with a general at Palin’s office at West Point. Who the hell is Palin? This character was not introduced or established at any other point in the story. I guess Boutin didn’t learn much in all those years besides openers. However, directly afterward Stinson says she’ll send General Walters, who Theresa doesn’t know. Turns out he’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is another character who had absolutely no buildup.

Through absolutely no narration or exposition that is committed to the page (not even a horizontal rule), Theresa is suddenly at Palin’s office to meet with Walters. Palin, despite being a veteran high-ranking officer, has trouble keeping up his military decorum in the awesome presence of Theresa. This fawning over Theresa is kept mercifully short as Walters gets straight to business and asks what Theresa’s plan is. Theresa’s answer is to liberate the people of North Korea. That brings me back to my previous quote from a film whose title still escapes me, ‘That’s not a plan. That’s a goal.’ Theresa does, however, elaborate that she’s going to get HAL to disable all weapons in North Korea so that the South Korean Army can move in and wipe out the oppressive North.

This sounds like a winning plan to Theresa, but she didn’t stop to think about the fact that people inevitably get killed in wars. This means that there will be a lot of dead North Koreans if Theresa’s plan is successful. Theresa refuses to resort to any violent means, so she tries to come up with another plan. But what were those threats to destroy the entire Middle-East if they attacked Israel. Nor did she seem to care about the lives of anyone who would get caught in the explosive excavation between Africa and Antarctica. She said that was their own fault for getting caught up in the mayhem. How many personalities does Theresa have!?

In order to not kill anybody, Theresa comes up with her Plan B: to disable all of their weapons, then go to North Korea and take over the government herself. Holy what the fuck!? Is this Theresa’s plan for blitzkrieg!? Will she be forming the fourth reich!? What qualifies her to run an entire country herself!? That was the entire premise of the movie ‘Duck Soup,’ where an incompetent, know-nothing jackass is given authority over an entire nation, and he accepts it thinking, ‘Hey, how hard can it be?’ Pretty hard, because the definition of the phrase, ‘duck soup’ means something that sounds easy, but is actually incredibly difficult.

The infinitely more interesting Marx Brothers aside, Theresa keeps hammering out the details of her plan. It was to liberate the North Koreans, but now she’s talking about how she would have absolute authority over North Korea to make them free. That’s not how it works. It’s beginning to sound like Theresa would make the entire country into one of those benevolent dystopias from something like 1984 or ‘Demolition Man.’ Truly, she has become the tyrant that we knew she would turn out to be. And I can assure you that any foreshadowing of Theresa becoming a tyrant was done completely by accident.

Theresa begins to make preparations to disable North Korean weapons. From their sidearms all the way up to their atom bombs. There is a glaring typo here where Theresa explains that HAL ‘feels t 6hroughout’ things to understand their mechanisms. There are several typos in regards to spelling and punctuation, but that would be just like pointing out how many times the paragraph alignment gets messed up. Also prevalent are the sheer amount of non-sequiturs in this book. For anyone who doesn’t know, a non-sequitur is a spoken statement or logical conclusion that doesn’t logically follow the information that came before it. Here’s my favorite one so far right here in this chapter:

“It'll take months to describe these to HAL” I complained to Steve.
“You can give it up.”
“Forget it. You can’t go into North Korea with me. They might take you hostage and get me to do anything they want. If people don’t understand that they can drop dead.”

It looks like Boutin wrote one sentence, got up to do something else for a few hours, then sat down again after forgetting what he was supposed to be writing.

Finally, Theresa enlists in the army. This is supposed to be her ‘hero moment,’ but it falls flat as did all of her other ‘hero moments.’ This is because instead of watching Theresa go into battle, we then get a long, boring exposition about how she trains HAL to recognize which North Korean weapons to shut down. Boutin seems to have gotten the message that the rest of us don’t like numbers as much as he does, because there are shockingly few as we go into meticulous detail about which weapons are disabled by HAL. Strangely, it’s described as a peculiarity of mathematics how HAL can’t disable all weapons at once. Yet it can stop all the winds in the world and mine materials from space in a matter of hours.

It turns out that we were misled before. Theresa hasn’t joined the army yet. She only plans to do that when it’s safe to do. This means after she’s done dismantling every weapon that exists in North Korea, so that she won’t get hurt on her way to rule the country with an iron fist. Once she does enlist at Fort Myer, Theresa’s joining is toasted with some twelve year scotch. The chapter closes with her being scheduled to go to the White House that afternoon, even though she was hesitant to go at the beginning of the chapter.

Even though nothing actually happens in this chapter, I can only guess that the point of this chapter was to make us know what a true patriot Theresa is, even though she spent almost the entire story in Europe. She doesn’t like North Korea, and wants to run it the way that Boutin most likely would. More likely, it’s to show any critics what would happen if Theresa did become the ruler of a nation. How she would be a so-called ‘benevolent tyrant.’ If there is anything benevolent about Theresa, I will eat a brick. Because even though she tries to put on a show of pacifism, compassion and humanity by not wanting people to get killed, we already know that she has no qualms at all about people getting killed because of her powers, as I’ve pointed out before. Any attempt to make Theresa seem likeable is pathetic and pointless, and doesn’t make the book any more enjoyable.

 Remember that movie, ‘Duck Soup’ that I mentioned? That movie has stood the test of time, and is still entertaining ninety years after its initial release. It is considered to be one of the finest comedy movies of all time, because it’s still funny even in this day and age. Many people who teach comedy writing use it as an example in their lessons, along with ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’  That is because there is much to glean from them just by watching them carefully and critically. Even if you don’t watch them from an academic point of view, these movies are just damn entertaining. Empress Theresa will never be entertaining, except to a small niche of people who enjoy things like ‘The Room’ or The Eye of Argon. Examined critically, they can only serve as a lesson for what not to do. How not to write a main character. How not to craft a plot. How not to treat your audience. And the list goes on.

Four chapters to go. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.