One of my favorite comedies right now is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The central characters in it are all utterly horrid examples of humanity- each episode is about their various petty squabbles, arguments, idiotic schemes, jealousies, weaknesses, and manifestations of stupidity. The main cast fights, bickers, make horrible decisions, hurt each other, hurt innocent bystanders, and generally act in a contemptible fashion.
But, because the show is made by some very talented people, I still like them.
Even as the creators of It's Always Sunny send up their characters as objects of ridicule and mockery, you can tell that they still quite like their characters. As nasty as Mac, Dee, Dennis, and Charlie can be- they still manage to grab a certain amount of my affection. I know that in each episode they will do awful things, but it's a testament to the skills of the actors, directors, and writers that even as they are objects of farce they are also full, real characters whom I am capable of feeling something for.
Likewise, Alec Baldwin's character on 30 Rock is oftentimes toweringly evil and self-centered. Jack Donaghy is something like a better-coiffed Dick Cheney in his demeanor and outlook. However, as much as he's portrayed as a villainous caricature of a certain type of conservative exec, Baldwin & Co. don't forget that for us to keep coming back to 30 Rock, there has to be some humanity there. As much as I'd loathe Jack Donaghy in real life, he remains a real person worthy of empathy in addition to being a figure of fun.
The deft injection of affection and empathy into farce and satire- the streak of love that runs through ridiculous and mean humor- that is what's missing from Portlandia. That absence of underlying reality- that the people on screen should be people in addition to jokes- is why the show will probably fail.
I've only seen the first episode and a few of the promo shorts, but what I've encountered so far is not inspiring, and so far I have a certain loathing for the show. This is not because Portlandia is insulting my hometown- quite the contrary, I would love it if we had our own version of Northern Exposure. The problem is that Portlandia doesn't lampoon this place especially well.
The first episode starts with a clip that's been going around quite a bit, a song about how "the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland." You've probably seen it already, but here it is:
As far as a big opening number, this doesn't work at all. Fred Armisen was born in the sixties, and Carrie Brownstein in the seventies. Both of them were in the twenties and thirties in the nineties, and, presumably, enjoying what the youth culture of the time provided. They seem flabbergasted, in the opening song, that some amount of youth culture is still extant, like an old hippie amazed that young people still listen to Led Zepplin.
Yes, current hipster/alternative culture grew out of nineties grunge. Which reacted to, and grew out of eighties new wave and hair metal. Which sprang from seventies punk-rock. Which owed a lot to hippie music from the sixties. Who were preceded by greasers in the fifties. Who in turn were preceded by beatniks in the forties.
Arguing that any kind of youth/pop/alternative/creative culture is similar to what preceded it is facile, annoying, and utterly non-funny. The best humor is smart, and hits upon unthought-of truths. When one says of a comedian "he's saying what we're all thinking!" we're talking of comedy's ability to express what was known, but never voiced. Portlandia's introductory song expresses the obvious and holds it up as if it's some kind of profundity.
That was only the opener, though. Sitting down to watch the first episode, I hoped that there would be something more inspiring, something that would actually, you know, make me laugh, something that would make me go "yeah, that is true," and nod in amused recognition.
This did not happen. The sketches seem clunky and joyless, and the whole show occupies a kind of forced, airless space. Not even a Steve Buscemi cameo was able to inject some life into the proceedings.
The central problem was that throughout the episode none of the characters portrayed by Armisen or Brownstein seemed to be real people. I had no sense of connection whatsoever with any of the people whom they portrayed. This is not because they were playing idiots- the crew from It's Always Sunny have roundly proved that one can play an idiot and still connect with the audience- it was because they seemed uninterested in injecting humanity into their characters. (While on the subject of sketch comedy- there's more drama, feeling and reality in a single College Humor sketch than any single section of Portlandia. The CH crew also prove that you can mercilessly mock your characters and still get the audience to like them.)
I do want this show to do well. I want it to dramatically improve, take on some new talent, and become a kick-ass sketch comedy show that makes me laugh. I want to hear jokes about how everyone has food allergies, wears stupid hats, has weird facial hair, and eats doughnuts that have bacon on them. My hometown is, I admit, filled with things that can be hilariously mocked.
But I want them mocked well, and with a little bit of love, and joy, and fun. I want to smile while I see my tattooed neighbors insulted. So far, prospects don't look good.
Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Television. Show all posts
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Protagonist Syndrome
I recently started watching Carnivale with my girlfriend, and rather like it. I know that it's one of those shows that ends without complete resolution, but I enjoy the aesthetics of it and the inclusion of supernatural elements that are at once flashy and subtle. I have one problem with it, though: I can't stand the protagonist. He's boring, stupid, and lacks a sense of curiosity about the obviously interesting setting he's in. Worst of all, I can tell that the writers and directors of the show want me to identify with him. I identify far more with the carny hucksters and weirdo psychics, though. I want the show to be about them. The protagonist is dead weight.
This is a common problem.
Protagonists are supposed to be people we identify with, and all too often writers and directors interpret that as "let's put some boring guy at the center of the action." And it is usually a guy. And he's almost always boring. Think about it: Who's the most interesting character- Luke Skywalker or Han Solo? Frodo Baggins or Aragorn? Charlie Bucket or Willie Wonka? Johnathan Harker or Van Helsing? Jack or everyone else on Lost? The list goes on. All too often, perfectly interesting pieces of fiction have their weakest link front and center. Protagonists tend to be watered down, terminally decent, utterly good and rather boring schlubs who somehow get laid despite not having any edge to them at all. Frequently, they are outshone by the supporting cast, who are actually allowed to have a certain dimension of weirdness and even a personal demon or two. Protagonists, though, tend to be empty balls of uncompelling boredom.
What should a protagonist be like, though? How about Willie Lowman, someone who evokes our sympathy and pity even though his plight is different than ours. How about Dr. Frankenstein, whose ambition and lack of responsibility to his work is applicable to pretty much anyone who's wanted to create something? How about Holden Caufield, who continually struggles for authenticity and who goes crazy while he does it? How about Orlando who retains his/her mercurial identity even though so many other things change? How about Satan in Paradise Lost, who bravely defies stated authority? These characters are all awesome protagonists. They are weird, yes, and oftentimes kind of nasty, but their authors made them real, above all else.
Protagonists don't have to be decent, "normal" ciphers of characters. They shouldn't be the one character in the given medium without dimension or depth. I can tell what the creators of various shows and movies are trying to do- they want to provide an empty slate that the audience can project their identifications onto. That's hugely aggravating, though, because instead of having a person at the center of the action we have a void. The protagonist should carry a story, but all too often they seem to drag it down.
This is a common problem.
Protagonists are supposed to be people we identify with, and all too often writers and directors interpret that as "let's put some boring guy at the center of the action." And it is usually a guy. And he's almost always boring. Think about it: Who's the most interesting character- Luke Skywalker or Han Solo? Frodo Baggins or Aragorn? Charlie Bucket or Willie Wonka? Johnathan Harker or Van Helsing? Jack or everyone else on Lost? The list goes on. All too often, perfectly interesting pieces of fiction have their weakest link front and center. Protagonists tend to be watered down, terminally decent, utterly good and rather boring schlubs who somehow get laid despite not having any edge to them at all. Frequently, they are outshone by the supporting cast, who are actually allowed to have a certain dimension of weirdness and even a personal demon or two. Protagonists, though, tend to be empty balls of uncompelling boredom.
What should a protagonist be like, though? How about Willie Lowman, someone who evokes our sympathy and pity even though his plight is different than ours. How about Dr. Frankenstein, whose ambition and lack of responsibility to his work is applicable to pretty much anyone who's wanted to create something? How about Holden Caufield, who continually struggles for authenticity and who goes crazy while he does it? How about Orlando who retains his/her mercurial identity even though so many other things change? How about Satan in Paradise Lost, who bravely defies stated authority? These characters are all awesome protagonists. They are weird, yes, and oftentimes kind of nasty, but their authors made them real, above all else.
Protagonists don't have to be decent, "normal" ciphers of characters. They shouldn't be the one character in the given medium without dimension or depth. I can tell what the creators of various shows and movies are trying to do- they want to provide an empty slate that the audience can project their identifications onto. That's hugely aggravating, though, because instead of having a person at the center of the action we have a void. The protagonist should carry a story, but all too often they seem to drag it down.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Hooray For Context!
First: "Why can't you just enjoy it for what it is?" this has been a common complaint levied at me and other people who get overly analytical about popular entertainment. My father said precisely this when he complained about my comparisons of Avatar to Dances With Wolves. He contended that movies need to be viewed as separate, independent entities. (This was also something I heard a lot from an ex who liked fluffy romantic comedies.)
Second: "All it has going for it is character recognition." This was a gripe by a member of a book group I go to. He said it in reference to two things. The first was Fables, a comic book series about fairy tale characters in the modern world, and then about the new Star Trek movie. "If you were to present these stories without their popular characters," he said, "they wouldn't work."
In both of the above examples, it seems that people want to experience art or entertainment as singular and unrelated to the cultural context around it. Each thing must be taken on its own merits without prejudice or stereotype, seen on its own terms. This attitude is oddly noble but ultimately impossible to realize.
This attitude of experiencing art and entertainment as singular and context-less is noble because it is open-minded, and wishes to find the potential good of a given work. To attempt to see something without context or connections is often an attempt to see it as something intrinsically good. Or, in the case of my book group companion, it is to demand intrinsic goodness only in a work. In either case, there is a deeply held belief that cultural objects should carry some spark of inherent awesomeness, and that spark must be searched for without prejudice.
To some extent I think that is a good thing, and abandoning prejudices about art and entertainment is often a good idea. However, one cannot really abandon context and really see cultural objects as singular. Ask yourself: Could you have gone into the new Star Trek movie and pushed aside all of your visions and notions regarding Kirk, Spock, the Enterprise, etc.? Could you have seriously said "For the next two hours I will forget all of the reruns I saw as a kid, all of the movies, everything I know about Star Trek"? Unless you have a pathologically selective memory, the answer is probably no.
Good artists and entertainers know this. When they know that an audience will see everything in context of everything else, they will play with that and use that. Star Trek was great because it used audience expectations effectively, exploiting the feeling of recognition and connection to wonderful effect.
Two entirely different examples of artists exploiting context for effect are Psycho and Scream. Both of these movies placed prominent actresses, Vivian Leigh and Drew Barrymore, front and center on their movie posters, precisely where you would expect the main character to be, flanked by supporting casts. In both of these movies, though, the top-billed actresses are killed off before the major action takes place, confounding audience expectations. Would the shock in either of these movies have worked if the audience hadn't seen the movie posters or didn't know who the actresses were? No, but they didn't really have to. Hitchcock and Craven knew what people would be expecting because of ad campaigns and movie conventions, and exploited those expectations for effect.
(Tangentially related: My enjoyment of Inglorious Basterds was greatly hampered by the difference between the movie's trailer and the film itself. I was expecting lots of fun violence a la Kill Bill, but got a spaghetti western. A pretty good spaghetti western, yes, but I kept waiting for the grand guignol promised by the trailer.)
Embracing context and expectations, though, is wonderful. Instead of seeing a pile of things not judged on their own merit, one sees a grand interrelated network of things. Every action movie is related to every other action movie. Comedies are connected to other comedies, horror flicks to other horror flicks. Cognates, similarities, and variations abound. One can see the same convention tweaked over and over again, sometimes badly, sometimes well. Embracing context means that you like synthesis and variation, you accept that things combine and mutate. One can never really see something "on its own terms," and I, for one, have no problem with that.
Second: "All it has going for it is character recognition." This was a gripe by a member of a book group I go to. He said it in reference to two things. The first was Fables, a comic book series about fairy tale characters in the modern world, and then about the new Star Trek movie. "If you were to present these stories without their popular characters," he said, "they wouldn't work."
In both of the above examples, it seems that people want to experience art or entertainment as singular and unrelated to the cultural context around it. Each thing must be taken on its own merits without prejudice or stereotype, seen on its own terms. This attitude is oddly noble but ultimately impossible to realize.
This attitude of experiencing art and entertainment as singular and context-less is noble because it is open-minded, and wishes to find the potential good of a given work. To attempt to see something without context or connections is often an attempt to see it as something intrinsically good. Or, in the case of my book group companion, it is to demand intrinsic goodness only in a work. In either case, there is a deeply held belief that cultural objects should carry some spark of inherent awesomeness, and that spark must be searched for without prejudice.
To some extent I think that is a good thing, and abandoning prejudices about art and entertainment is often a good idea. However, one cannot really abandon context and really see cultural objects as singular. Ask yourself: Could you have gone into the new Star Trek movie and pushed aside all of your visions and notions regarding Kirk, Spock, the Enterprise, etc.? Could you have seriously said "For the next two hours I will forget all of the reruns I saw as a kid, all of the movies, everything I know about Star Trek"? Unless you have a pathologically selective memory, the answer is probably no.
Good artists and entertainers know this. When they know that an audience will see everything in context of everything else, they will play with that and use that. Star Trek was great because it used audience expectations effectively, exploiting the feeling of recognition and connection to wonderful effect.
Two entirely different examples of artists exploiting context for effect are Psycho and Scream. Both of these movies placed prominent actresses, Vivian Leigh and Drew Barrymore, front and center on their movie posters, precisely where you would expect the main character to be, flanked by supporting casts. In both of these movies, though, the top-billed actresses are killed off before the major action takes place, confounding audience expectations. Would the shock in either of these movies have worked if the audience hadn't seen the movie posters or didn't know who the actresses were? No, but they didn't really have to. Hitchcock and Craven knew what people would be expecting because of ad campaigns and movie conventions, and exploited those expectations for effect.
(Tangentially related: My enjoyment of Inglorious Basterds was greatly hampered by the difference between the movie's trailer and the film itself. I was expecting lots of fun violence a la Kill Bill, but got a spaghetti western. A pretty good spaghetti western, yes, but I kept waiting for the grand guignol promised by the trailer.)
Embracing context and expectations, though, is wonderful. Instead of seeing a pile of things not judged on their own merit, one sees a grand interrelated network of things. Every action movie is related to every other action movie. Comedies are connected to other comedies, horror flicks to other horror flicks. Cognates, similarities, and variations abound. One can see the same convention tweaked over and over again, sometimes badly, sometimes well. Embracing context means that you like synthesis and variation, you accept that things combine and mutate. One can never really see something "on its own terms," and I, for one, have no problem with that.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
A Seriously Geeky Post About Star Trek
I saw the new Star Trek movie this week, and I thought that it was quite good. I'm not really going to write much about it, though. I'd rather talk a bit about Trek in general.
I have no idea when I started watching Star Trek. Sometime in middle school, maybe. Perhaps earlier. I don't know if I saw the original series or The Next Generation first, but regardless, it had a big influence on me when I was young. I don't just mean in terms of aesthetics or taste- I'm talking about my actual worldview with regards to politics and philosophy and such. Star Trek, in part, made helped make me the liberal humanist that I style myself as today. Yes, I really mean that.
Back before the horrible prequels, I remember constant debates among young nerds about which was better- Star Trek or Star Wars. I occasionally went back and forth in these debates, but I most consistently said that Star Trek was better. I didn't think it was necessarily better because of the acting or writing, but because of its ideas. At the end of Star Wars, Luke turns off his computer and just "uses the Force." He lets himself go and only uses his instincts. I can't really see a Star Trek character doing the same thing.
As intuitive and gut-trusting as characters like Kirk and Riker were, they didn't rely on pure emotions or suppositions. They thought about things, and characters like Spock and Data were often chimed in as the voice of reason. As good as Kirk's instincts were, he was still reasonable and unimpulsive. He wouldn't have turned off his computer while fighting the Death Star, and that's why I always sort of preferred Star Trek- it was, as Spock would say, logical. The things that saved the day were always things like expertise, clever applications of technology, or diplomacy. There was no room for Star Wars' woo-woo mysticism. The very presence of Spock sums it up nicely- the character that served as the sage and voice or morality was also the most logical.
It's easy to accuse Gene Roddenberry of being optimistic about all of this. His future is bright, shiny, and almost utopian. However, I have to give Roddenberry credit for this in a way. Not only did he believe that technology would advance, but that ideas and social norms would as well. So much SF simply maps on the values of the present to an imagined future. In Roddenberry's view of the future, though, humans have gotten over racism given up smoking, to name two examples.
Yes, smoking. Back in the sixties, NBC thought it was odd that no one on the Enterprise smoked, like normal sixties people. There was a bit of pressure on Roddenberry to include weird space cigarettes in the show, but he refused, maintaining that by the 23rd century, us humans would know better. Not only would people of different ethnicities work side-by-side, they would do so in a healthy environment. Looking around now, we have a black president and smoke-free bars, only forty years later. Roddenberry's optimism wasn't entirely baseless, it seems.
Many of Star Trek's episodes (both in the original series and the Next Generation) were basically geeky problem-solving sessions. The Enterprise would encounter something like an alien being, a machine, a new society, etc., that was hitherto unknown. The crew would scratch their heads about it and theorize about how it worked, usually while sitting around a table. After a bit of action and a few dead redshirts, there would be some kind of deunoument usually brought about by the ingenuity of one of the crew members. Kirk would would use his wits, Picard would flourish out some clever diplomacy, Geordie or Scottie would spout technobabble and make the ship do something impressive, McCoy or Crusher would make a startling biological discover. In any case, the crew would use their newly found revelation to get out of the jam, and then there would be a nice little meditation on the interesting scientific, social, or philosophical consequences of what just happened.
I loved this stuff. I still do, in fact. (Thinking about it right now, I'm struck by how much Trek resembles Isaac Asimov's short stories. It all has this "Hey, guys! Isn't this interesting!" quality to it.) It makes for fun episodic television and appeals to a certain kind of person who thinks way, way too much. It is not, however, "rollicking" or "fun." The sort of speculation and head-scratching that happened on Star Trek certainly invited parody, and if it wasn't done well it just came off as heavy-handed. More than heavy-handed. Leaden. William Shatner expounding on the significance of things in general can be just as easily tedious as it can be charming.
As the franchise regressed, I eventually get really, really bored of Trek. I didn't really like Deep Space 9 or Voyager, and I actively loathed Enterprise. Insurrection and Nemesis were both sort of tepid movies, and I didn't come to expect anything new or fresh from the franchise. When the new movie was announced, I just sort of said "meh." I was very surprised to see that not only did it not suck, it was actually good.
The new movie succeeds because it seems to have the same kind of ideological underpinnings of the original Trek- Enlightenment values in space- but keeps them as just the underpinnings. The characters who save the day are still a diverse scientists, geniuses, and all-out supernerds, and the bad guys are a bunch of militaristic, tribe-like nationalists. The movie, though, doesn't get preachy about it. The original principals are there, but it has none of the heavy feeling that seems to descend when William Shatner puts his hand on his chin and broods behind his eyebrows. Instead, it was really zippy. Zippy! It was a movie that went "Zoom!" in the best way possible. Watching a fun, zippy Star Trek movie is kind of like seeing a really geeky guy getting over his own awkwardness and start dancing. I like Star Trek again. This feels sort of weird, being all suffused with nostalgia. Zoom!
I have no idea when I started watching Star Trek. Sometime in middle school, maybe. Perhaps earlier. I don't know if I saw the original series or The Next Generation first, but regardless, it had a big influence on me when I was young. I don't just mean in terms of aesthetics or taste- I'm talking about my actual worldview with regards to politics and philosophy and such. Star Trek, in part, made helped make me the liberal humanist that I style myself as today. Yes, I really mean that.
Back before the horrible prequels, I remember constant debates among young nerds about which was better- Star Trek or Star Wars. I occasionally went back and forth in these debates, but I most consistently said that Star Trek was better. I didn't think it was necessarily better because of the acting or writing, but because of its ideas. At the end of Star Wars, Luke turns off his computer and just "uses the Force." He lets himself go and only uses his instincts. I can't really see a Star Trek character doing the same thing.
As intuitive and gut-trusting as characters like Kirk and Riker were, they didn't rely on pure emotions or suppositions. They thought about things, and characters like Spock and Data were often chimed in as the voice of reason. As good as Kirk's instincts were, he was still reasonable and unimpulsive. He wouldn't have turned off his computer while fighting the Death Star, and that's why I always sort of preferred Star Trek- it was, as Spock would say, logical. The things that saved the day were always things like expertise, clever applications of technology, or diplomacy. There was no room for Star Wars' woo-woo mysticism. The very presence of Spock sums it up nicely- the character that served as the sage and voice or morality was also the most logical.
It's easy to accuse Gene Roddenberry of being optimistic about all of this. His future is bright, shiny, and almost utopian. However, I have to give Roddenberry credit for this in a way. Not only did he believe that technology would advance, but that ideas and social norms would as well. So much SF simply maps on the values of the present to an imagined future. In Roddenberry's view of the future, though, humans have gotten over racism given up smoking, to name two examples.
Yes, smoking. Back in the sixties, NBC thought it was odd that no one on the Enterprise smoked, like normal sixties people. There was a bit of pressure on Roddenberry to include weird space cigarettes in the show, but he refused, maintaining that by the 23rd century, us humans would know better. Not only would people of different ethnicities work side-by-side, they would do so in a healthy environment. Looking around now, we have a black president and smoke-free bars, only forty years later. Roddenberry's optimism wasn't entirely baseless, it seems.
Many of Star Trek's episodes (both in the original series and the Next Generation) were basically geeky problem-solving sessions. The Enterprise would encounter something like an alien being, a machine, a new society, etc., that was hitherto unknown. The crew would scratch their heads about it and theorize about how it worked, usually while sitting around a table. After a bit of action and a few dead redshirts, there would be some kind of deunoument usually brought about by the ingenuity of one of the crew members. Kirk would would use his wits, Picard would flourish out some clever diplomacy, Geordie or Scottie would spout technobabble and make the ship do something impressive, McCoy or Crusher would make a startling biological discover. In any case, the crew would use their newly found revelation to get out of the jam, and then there would be a nice little meditation on the interesting scientific, social, or philosophical consequences of what just happened.
I loved this stuff. I still do, in fact. (Thinking about it right now, I'm struck by how much Trek resembles Isaac Asimov's short stories. It all has this "Hey, guys! Isn't this interesting!" quality to it.) It makes for fun episodic television and appeals to a certain kind of person who thinks way, way too much. It is not, however, "rollicking" or "fun." The sort of speculation and head-scratching that happened on Star Trek certainly invited parody, and if it wasn't done well it just came off as heavy-handed. More than heavy-handed. Leaden. William Shatner expounding on the significance of things in general can be just as easily tedious as it can be charming.
As the franchise regressed, I eventually get really, really bored of Trek. I didn't really like Deep Space 9 or Voyager, and I actively loathed Enterprise. Insurrection and Nemesis were both sort of tepid movies, and I didn't come to expect anything new or fresh from the franchise. When the new movie was announced, I just sort of said "meh." I was very surprised to see that not only did it not suck, it was actually good.
The new movie succeeds because it seems to have the same kind of ideological underpinnings of the original Trek- Enlightenment values in space- but keeps them as just the underpinnings. The characters who save the day are still a diverse scientists, geniuses, and all-out supernerds, and the bad guys are a bunch of militaristic, tribe-like nationalists. The movie, though, doesn't get preachy about it. The original principals are there, but it has none of the heavy feeling that seems to descend when William Shatner puts his hand on his chin and broods behind his eyebrows. Instead, it was really zippy. Zippy! It was a movie that went "Zoom!" in the best way possible. Watching a fun, zippy Star Trek movie is kind of like seeing a really geeky guy getting over his own awkwardness and start dancing. I like Star Trek again. This feels sort of weird, being all suffused with nostalgia. Zoom!
Friday, March 6, 2009
Thoughts on Watchmen and Genre Fiction
"'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.
"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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)