"'It's too much,' 'It's too fantastic,' 'It's not to be believed' are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm." -Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp
"Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!" -Jay Morton, Superman radio serial
I was talking with my brother about a week ago about our mutual admiration of the new Daniel Craig James Bond movies. We both liked them immensely for similar reasons, and my brother summed it up nicely: "Everything that Austin Powers made fun of," he said, "they took out." Yes, absolutely. That was it. The two recent Bond movies had been unburdened of certain elements that had grown stale long ago, and had made the series fodder for parody. In much the same way, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were free of the sensibility that pervaded Adam West era Batman. Likewise, the new Battlestar Galactica has reformed a television show of no real repute into one of the best dramas around.
Genre fiction, that is, fiction that deals with out fantasies and fears of power, technology, the future, anxieties, and the wide world, has changed. It has changed because it has traded self-consciousness for confidence and, less and less, seeks to be viewed as camp. Instead, genre fiction now demands to be seen on its own terms. It does not seek to portray campy extravagance as its main draw, but now seeks an audience on its own strength.
These senses of self-consciousness and campy sensationalism have been, more than narrative content, the cheif definers of genre fiction over the course of its lifetime. Consider, for instance, Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut. Atwood's Handmaid's Tale portrays a nightmarish near future of sexual opression, and her Oryx and Crake imagines a post-apocalyptic world where a single human walks alone among genetically engineered primitives. Vonnegut freely populated his novels with aliens, time travel, and other such weirdness. However, in any bookstore one will generally find these authors in the general fiction or literature section rather than with the rest of the science fiction, because they lack sensibilities of genre fiction. They don't differ in narrative content, not much. It is only their sensibilities that are appreciably differrent.
However, genre fiction over the past few decades has gradually shifted away from this sensibility, an often self-limiting imposition of self-conciousness and flagrant campiness. Watchmen is often sited as being a significant part of this shift, a major event in which the creators "changed comics forever" and whatnot. It's often coupled with The Dark Knight Returns as ushering in a new form of "grim 'n gritty" comics, and the violence, sex, and general dark tone of the graphic novel are generally mentioned as being a big part of that.
But I think that dwelling on Watchmen's "grim 'n gritty"-ness misses the point. Certainly there were comics drenched in violence and sex before Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons introduced us to Rorschach and friends. Think about Tales From the Crypt and all of the other stuff that EC Comics did. Certainly their offerings were as "grim 'n gritty" as anything else.
So, there was already plenty of sex, gore, and darkness in comics by the time Watchmen came out. But, much of it was sex, gore, and darkness portrayed with just as much camp sensationalism as anything else. The stuff of Tales From the Crypt and other EC fare is brazen and almost humorous in it's trashy and sensationalistic portrayl of sex, violence, and darkness. It plays into lurid fantasies of sex anf violence just as clearly as Superman comics play into fantasies of physical stregnth and potency. If one thinks that only the "R-Rated" content of Watchmen is what makes it groundbreaking, than one seriously misses the point. Fare such as Spawn and The Punisher is not necessarily more daring than traditional comics, it is more garish.
So, Watchmen did not differ from other works of genre fiction in terms of its narrative content. What it differed in was its sensibilities. Watchmen's violence is not remarkable in its extremity, but rather its sadness. The sex is not remarkable for its presence or explicitness, but rather for its ordinary awkwardness. Almost paradoxically, Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan is probably the most sensationally powerful character ever put into comics, but the fantastic fact of his existence is not played up. He is presented unadorned by hype. Likewise, Battlestar Galactica's Cylon centurions are portrayed not as flamboyant or garish icons of technology (a la Robby the Robot), but rather as frightening and powerful weapons of war.
In Neuromancer, William Gibson doesn't spend much time at all on exposition, and therefore does not resort to campy sensationalim at all. He does not say "In the year such and such, the world has changed..." or any other kind of infodumping, and therefore never "showcases" or "sells" the setting he has made. Instead, he strides into his cyberpunk world with the same sort of narrative voice that an author would use with the real world, and inhabits his construction with conviction. Neuromancer makes dizzying reading because of this, but the narrative is successful in part because Gibson is so unapologetic about what he has created. He does not blink.
In recent years, Ang Lee's Hulk did an excellent job of stripping away the camp excess from the central fantastic character, and telling a story about a man who was filled with fear and anxiety. The film failed commercially because audiences expected to see one of the most camp-laden characters ever in action and got nothing of the sort. But, I think that it suceeded precisely because of that. Hulk is an excellent movie because it does not dwell on the excesses and outlandishness of its central character. Instead, it deals with him as a man. A huge, green, man, but a man nonetheless.
Which brings me to the other side of this whole process of genre fiction evolution: The general loss of self-consciousness and the infusion of confidence in the field.
Going back to the Hulk again, his debut issue proclaimed him to be "The strangest man of all time!" Such promotion has plenty of sensational sensibility, of course, but it is also extremely self-conscious about what sort of story it is. Self-consciousness of this sort, I think, can be limiting both on creators and consumers of fiction. It is most obviously limiting to creators because they may say to themselves, "Ok, I'm writing a science fiction story. It will include the following elements and expected cliches in the work, because that's just how it's done." Likewise, a consumer of fiction might say unconsciously "Ok, I'm reading a science fiction story. I will expect to encounter the following elements of and expected cliches in the work, because that's just how it's done."
The above examples may sound overly pithy and paint writers as hacks and consumers as intellectually lazy, but they do occur. I remember watching some random SF television show with an old girlfriend and she said, "When are they going to get to the space battle?" Indeed, I'd also wondered when the various spaceships were going to start shooting at each other, and they did indeed have a space battle by the end of the show. Both creators and consumers self-consciously fell in line with expectations.
Obviously such expectations limit what can happen in the narrative context of a work of genre fiction, and it takes an industrious creator to break free of those conventions, and sufficiently open-minded consumers to embrace them. When you have a movie where the big, green protagonist doesn't get to smash things, some people feel ripped off. In Watchmen, the heroes are powerless to stop the villain's grand scheme. The ending smacks of disappointment, and the conventions of the genre jarringly fall apart when the heroes fail and Moore and Gibbons allow the story to end on their own terms, rather than on the terms of convention.
But, that is not the only sort of self-consciousness that has pervaded genre fiction. There is plenty of science fiction, in particular the stories of Isaac Asimov and much of Star Trek, that says to the consumer "Hey, isn't this interesting!" Asimov's stories are often vehicles for him to showcase a certain kind of scientific scenario, and most episodes of Star Trek often have a sort of "what if this happened" kind of approach. I tend to find these "puzzle box" stories charming and intellectually engagin in their own way, but when consuming them I am always conscious that I am more engaged in the central philosophical or scientific problem of the scenario than with the meat of the narrative or the lives of the characters.
This is not to say that "what if..." or "puzzle box" fiction necessarily disengages the reader or viewer from the plot or characters. Nothing of the sort. 1984 is successful because it allows us to see through the experience of Winston Smith. Winston Smith, and his political anxieties, paranoia, and sexual longing, are as important to 1984 as the dystopic "what if" that pervades the book. If anything, the vividness of his experience makes the "what if" all the better illustrated. To borrow a phrase from activist politics, 1984 succeeds because it makes "the personal political."
In other words, it focuses on the characters, something that any high school English teacher would tell you is important. But in genre fiction, the focus has far too often been on the "what ifs" the "puzzle box" aspects of the story, and the sensationalism of the scenario. It takes a certain amount of discipline to focus on human affairs, I think when fantastic things are happening. But when a creator can pull it off, the fantastic things dazzle us all the more.
Night of the Living Dead is a good example of this. Essentially, it's a movie about a bunch of people who sit around a house and argue with each other. They are arguing, of course, about what to do about the zombies outside and how to survive, but the real focus of the story is on the fear, panic, and the difficulty of cooperation in extreme circumstances. This emphasis on emotional realism doesn't rob from the fantastic elements at all. When the the characters do face down George Romero's zombies, the situation is more intense because they have been established as real people. The zombies are not jokey things that the viewer may wave away- they are a threat to people whom we care about.
So, creators must, with confidence, imbue their characters and scenarios with life in the face of absurdity. Self-consciously dwelling on the scenario will only take you so far, and it may seem absurd to have the ridiculous and fantastic characters of genre fiction imbued with emotional life. After all, they are fantasies, and fantasies are often simplistic and archetypical. But, one must have the confidence that the inner life of a man in tights is just as compelling and just as legitimate as the inner life of a man in a suit. Battlestar Galactica is effective because it says to the viewer, with the full faith in its convictions, that the inner life of the cylons is interesting. The fact that they are reincarnating robots in space does not shake this conviction. The narrative imbues full confidence in its creation, rather than presenting them at a self-conscious distance, demuring its focus to the intellectualism of the central "what if" scenario, or the camp sensationalim of the narrative situation.
Watchmen, of course, takes its character seriously. They are not archetypes or pawns which the creators merely use to move the story forward. Nite Owl, Rorschach, Silk Spectre and the rest are treated with legitimate affection by the creators and readers. They are not McGuffins, and, despite their absurd circumstances, they are real.
And they are not the only ones. Thinking about genre fiction, several characters seem better realized, even in the face of fantasy, then ever before. The characters in the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings were unselfconsciously presented to us even in the face of a baroque fantasy setting like Middle Earth. James Bond was once a human cartoon (albeit an entertaing one), a tuxedo-clad archetype whose main function was to deliver the action, sex, and gadgets of the narrative situation. Now he's an actual character. I've already mentioned Battlestar Galactica, and Batman and the Joker have been wonderfully stripped of everything that once made them objects of parody.
This is all good for genre fiction, I think. To be fair, I have nothing against genre fiction that indulged in the campy sensationalism of self-consciousness that I've described. If anything, I find it endearing. But, much of it seems marked by a kind of innocence, and it does not demand to be taken seriously. If something does not demand to be taken seriously, then it invites disposibility, it invites itself to be treated like a commodity rather than art.
Genre fiction, I think, is not disposable, and potentially has as much narrative legitimacy as anything else. Over the past twenty or so years, creators, viewers, and readers have come to realize that. Watchman was a big part of that process, and the genre fiction available now is better than ever because of it.
That said, the movie is supposed to suck... But for the most part, genre fiction has been wonderful of late.
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