Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies
I agree with much of the standard reception of these three books, the weakest in A Dance to the Music of Time. They condescend to soap opera antics too readily; they contain too much plot and too much emphasis on dramatic turns of event; they require one to believe that Widmerpool, Pamela, X. Trapnel, Murtlock and Gwinnet are interesting figures, none of whom can carry a plot--except perhaps for Gwinnet, about whom the least is said and who remains the most inscrutable.
But the plotting was always going to be a problem, because what could possibly follow on World War II? What could be as dramatic, what could earn that drama? Especially since the main character cannot be young, or in too close contact with the young, and therefore is in no position to experience what was new in that period.
I think there's a more general problem of age and experience, which is to say that one's life becomes in certain respects more meaningful as one ages, but less eventful*; if you are conventional and succeeding at conventional life, the days are a succession of variations on the same theme, and if one decides, as Powell had Jenkins decide, that family life is not a fit subject for discussion--Isobel becomes slightly more of a visible presence in the last three novels, but their children are never discussed at all--there simply isn't very much to say. The only people who make waves at this point are the ones who have made a mistake of some or another kind, and given the novels' attitude towards people who remarry--"sometimes it doesn't work out, oh well, and sometimes it takes three or four tries to find one that sticks"--who live together but don't marry, etc, it's going to take a significant amount to make waves. For goodness' sake: Jean Templer goes off and marries a South American dictator, and it barely gets discussed.
The writing of the novels themselves belies the excuse that there's nothing left to talk about: Anthony Powell begins the series at approximately the same age and life experience as Nick Jenkins in Books Do Furnish a Room when he takes up an interest in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. The man who is behind the times and to whom nothing of particular interest happens anymore is the one who is just about the same as the one who writes so engagingly of the pre-war world. One may say, of course, that this is just so: one should expect that a large and self-contained chunk of life that had a very definitely end-point should submit itself to narrative quite easily, while the portion Powell lived while writing his books, lacking anything like a point or thrust, proves more difficult to write. The decision to omit the family from discussion as life might most intensely circle around family deprives one of obvious material. Nevertheless, it's hard not to leave the cycle wanting something more from its end than the explicit details of the Widmerpool-Pamela marriage; even "talking with the neighbors about the difficulties of the local quarry expanding" seems more promising.
*I had the very definite feeling several weeks ago of realizing that the large majority of internet controversies-of-the-day are being written about by people distinctly younger than me; I think the moderately self-aware person reaches a point at which they realize these controversies repeat themselves endlessly in only the most minor variations, none of them resolving one way or the other, and no one changing their mind. (Time changes most minds, but they don't realize that yet.) The energy wasted on these seems tragic, in its own way, but everyone finds a sustainable balance eventually, I suppose.
I remember a few years ago talking with an undergrad about what she was reading--Steven Pinker and the usual aspirant undergrad literature adventures--and realizing Pinker was just a placeholder for 'vaguely social-scientific book that promises to explain in excruciating detail some major aspect of being human, but fails to attain the needed rigor,' of which I have seen a dozen come and go since I was myself an undergraduate. That nothing original is likely to befall you is either a comfort or a curse, once you recognize it, but very intelligent people can go for a very long time without realizing it.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
Showing posts with label general musings on culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label general musings on culture. Show all posts
13.7.15
There are three active possibilities for Go Set a Watchman. In order of likelihood:
1. Everyone forgets about it in a few years. By all accounts, it is not a good novel, and what makes it notable is only the fact that it differs in tone and characterization from To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is properly considered either as juvenilia or as something close to a last novel/posthumous novel/unfinished novel. If the former, people will recognize that it is not particularly interesting on its own: Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby, or "The Waste Land" before Ezra Pound edited it. If the latter, it will go into the same camp as The Last Tycoon or Hemingway's last novels: for completists only. I mean, Jane Austen has juvenilia and posthumous fiction, and no one pretends like either is part of her mature work.
2. It kills off To Kill a Mockingbird in high school curricula, and thus kills the novel altogether. The complications to "Atticus" as a character deprive him of his moral force in Mockingbird, and it's an awkward thing to try and explain to cynical teenagers. The novel can't serve as a simple (not to say simplistic) morality tale, and it becomes a historical curio of a particular time and approach to racial issues, a mid-20th century Uncle Tom's Cabin, to speak of once-influential works on race in America that are no longer widely read.
[A wide distance of probability]
3. The attractions of a novel wherein the narrator is a thinly disguised version of the author who moves to New York City and discovers that even the nice-seeming southerners are terrible racists and her father's not the hero she once thought he was, is a perfectly fine sentiment of the moment, no matter how cliché it is in all details. It feels more real, which is to say dirtier and more degrading of the human spirit, and thus will be taken for the 'adult' version of the children's story. Assuming she is of sound mind (a big assumption, where all people with opinions have vested interests in those opinions being true), then it seems to indicate that Lee didn't understand the value, importance and meaning of her own book. This would hardly be the first time such a thing were true, but it'd be sad all the same.
1. Everyone forgets about it in a few years. By all accounts, it is not a good novel, and what makes it notable is only the fact that it differs in tone and characterization from To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is properly considered either as juvenilia or as something close to a last novel/posthumous novel/unfinished novel. If the former, people will recognize that it is not particularly interesting on its own: Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby, or "The Waste Land" before Ezra Pound edited it. If the latter, it will go into the same camp as The Last Tycoon or Hemingway's last novels: for completists only. I mean, Jane Austen has juvenilia and posthumous fiction, and no one pretends like either is part of her mature work.
2. It kills off To Kill a Mockingbird in high school curricula, and thus kills the novel altogether. The complications to "Atticus" as a character deprive him of his moral force in Mockingbird, and it's an awkward thing to try and explain to cynical teenagers. The novel can't serve as a simple (not to say simplistic) morality tale, and it becomes a historical curio of a particular time and approach to racial issues, a mid-20th century Uncle Tom's Cabin, to speak of once-influential works on race in America that are no longer widely read.
[A wide distance of probability]
3. The attractions of a novel wherein the narrator is a thinly disguised version of the author who moves to New York City and discovers that even the nice-seeming southerners are terrible racists and her father's not the hero she once thought he was, is a perfectly fine sentiment of the moment, no matter how cliché it is in all details. It feels more real, which is to say dirtier and more degrading of the human spirit, and thus will be taken for the 'adult' version of the children's story. Assuming she is of sound mind (a big assumption, where all people with opinions have vested interests in those opinions being true), then it seems to indicate that Lee didn't understand the value, importance and meaning of her own book. This would hardly be the first time such a thing were true, but it'd be sad all the same.
11.7.15
I'm not sure what, not quite 20 years ago, sent me off on the idea that I should spend my life reading too much and otherwise attempting to work my way through culture (I blame my parents), but I am fairly certain that today's experience was the sort of thing I had in mind: reading the first chapter of Foucault's The Order of Things, an extended interpretation of Velazquez's Las Meninas, and not needing to refer to the image because I have looked at it enough times to be able to follow the interpretation without additional reference to it.
20.5.15
A Long Post About Lost, Prestige TV, Comic Book Movies, and the Serialization of Everything
Lost
It's clear that my relationship to genre cultural properties has changed in the last ten years, and given enough time, it's clear that Lost is the reason for that change. I had a much larger appetite for them before, and almost none now. It's not entirely clear what exactly about Lost took me in that direction. But for need of a lot of something to watch, I've returned to it. I had a disparate reaction on this occasion to two of the most famous emotional beats in the story, and it might be worth exploring why. "Not Penny's Boat" had all of the resonance it did the first time. "The Constant" was a tremendous disappointment. This isn't surprising, since they were told in very different ways.
"Not Penny's Boat" is genuinely affecting because it builds over the course of several episodes before resolving. Desmond begins to get flashes that Charlie will die, and tries to save him; Desmond gets a particularly tempting vision and almost lets Charlie die. For his part, Charlie has to come to accept that his death is going to come soon and there's nothing he can do about it. The emotional punch comes because he gets to pick the cause for which he dies: he's found something worthy of that kind of sacrifice. Making that resolution changes him, frees him, to become someone who can be bold and active and self-sacrificing. He is free because there's meaning in his death. That allows him to be calm enough to save Desmond and communicate the important message that only he knows and then die.
"The Constant" is not genuinely affecting because it contrives its own problem and provides too pat of a solution. The "problems crossing between times" bit is introduced no earlier than the very end of the previous episode, and does not reappear again for another whole season (where it claims one single victim, conveniently not a major character). The life-threatening problem is given to two characters, one of whom only exists in order to pass along crucial exposition about the threat and how to get around it, and the problem for the main character is completely resolved by the end of the episode. This serious problem also, surprisingly, affected no one else involved in any travel to or from the island, and none of the numerous people shuttling back and forth between the freighter and the island for the rest of the season. The episode exists only for its endpoint--Penny and Desmond getting in contact with one another--and the rest is simply a means of getting the viewer there. It's emotional manipulation rather than storytelling, gesturing at rather than being something great.
The difference is that one of these is a storyline for a character's arc in a narrative, and another is a cool episode.
The difference between these matters because their reception says something about how we understand stories at this moment. Big cultural properties are (again) serialized: movies, books, tv shows are often now guaranteed out a certain distance into the future; like previous serials, they encourage looking at individual parts closely and wholes very rarely, and then only from certain narrow perspectives: we ask what the stakes are, whether the stories are internally consistent, whether they are, in each piece, entertaining. As a whole we might ask whether the story is worth the time invested, but these are judgments of the whole, rather than "we might omit 40 minutes/three episodes/200 pages without great loss" because the economics inform the structure of the content, rather than the content dictating anything at all. No one complains very much about mid-season episodes of a tv show that spin their wheels, because, as goes the usual critic's line, these come up of necessity in every season: even if there are only six episodes of plot, there need to be 13, or 22, or 24 episodes, so something has to fill that time. That you probably need to have seen all the other Marvel movies to understand the new ones is considered a feature, rather than a bug, and anyway, that's just how they make movies now.
When I was much younger I remember watching a few soap operas (hey, they were new tv in the summer, back when that was unusual), and particularly General Hospital when Luke and Laura were first re-introduced. Luke had been a bad guy at first, but now he was a good guy, because the show needed him to be one. The catch with a soap opera is that none of the stories can ever end, because the show must go on five days a week, and should ideally involve the same popular characters or actors. Consequently narrative logic must go out the window--filling out the time is the only thing that really matters--with characters changing allegiance and motivation all the time, and all the loopy narrative flourishes one associates with soap opera as a form.
Regular tv shows, movies, and multi-part books, lacking plot to fill out the allotted time and space, now indulge generously in melodrama and soap-opera antics (*paging George R.R. Martin*). Lost would disappear as a show if people answered each others' questions and didn't just go hiking off into the jungle every time they thought about doing something: the story needs these distractions as it needs the various other fancy-looking macguffins because the story can't hold out on its own. (As an experiment: try to summarize season 5 of Lost in one sentence. It is either impossible to do, if you try to include any of the details, or quite easy--"Ben tricks everyone into coming back to the Island, except in 1974"--which only exposes how superfluous much of it is.) Everything else is plot machinations for their own sake: Daniel and Charlotte get a romantic attachment which is entirely told and never shown, because Daniel needs some stakes for his own arc and the love of his life being threatened can provide them. Don Draper cycles through alcoholism and various women either because that's what he does or because it provides a few episodes of him looking seductive and cool and then a chance to blow it all up at the end, which will happen every season at fixed times that just so happen to coincide with the major parts of the season. (Friends, by contrast, didn't bother to get Ross and Rachel together, or break them up, at any significant moment in seasons 2 and 3 (February Sweeps, probably, but at least not as predictable). Then again, when you're a cultural phenomenon, you can do whatever you want and be certain you'll get a rating. That the MCU movies don't attempt this is probably also notable.) Loki gets himself captured in The Avengers, and it hardly matters whether his plan makes sense because it provides for Character Exposition and A Chance To Heighten The Themes Of This Movie. When movies, books, tv, engage in these kinds of stalling tactics, they kill actual organic character growth, but do so simply because the economics of the situation demand it. The skeleton shows in so many places now. One only has to look for it.
The flip-side of the soap opera-ization of things is that individual moments mean a lot less. No one soap character's great scene or arc means a lot when it's stacked up against others of wildly varying quality and changing motivation. Wasn't that time Don stopped drinking and recognized his problems really inspiring? Does "The Suitcase" mean less as an episode now that you know absolutely nothing about Don changed as a result of it? "The Constant" is a great episode if you have no idea what's going to happen to Desmond. Once you know it only serves to torture him with a bit of happiness before his life is ruined, how does it seem?
The single biggest factor contributing to the Golden Age of TV is the fact that no one can conceptualize of a creative model that works differently than this ("tell a fixed-length story until it's done and then end it?"). It used to be only comic book nerds that were suckers like this: the "even numbers are good" joke about Star Trek movies is an admission that 50% of them are bad; the hype for the new Star Wars movie seems to have forgotten that four of the six were disappointments. Now people are prepared to hold out hope for years and against all evidence that the results will be worth it, or that mediocre installments (the third of any series) are just the price we pay for the good ones.
Oddly, people seem more ready to see this in comedy than drama, where no great tv show of the last 15 years goes without criticism for losing its edge (some never regaining it) and where everyone can see the problems of The Hangover or Pitch Perfect making sequels that largely repeat the plot of the original films. The Office, for example, had one great idea--bring Jim and Pam together slowly, then keep them together--from which they got three seasons of very good tv. Once that idea was done, though, there was nothing behind it, try though they might to recreate that magic--more shocks and twists than one might reasonably expect of a faux-documentary about a paper company. Why did the show stay on the air through a number of increasingly bad seasons to the point that it poisoned its own legacy? Economics.
This matters because critical standards can do something to help explain and interpret what we're seeing. The overwhelming tendency of American aesthetics for the last hundred years has been to divide out entertainment from art, to push one lower and the other higher, until there is very little room in the middle. If a property is meant to be entertaining, this serves to silence all possible criticism; if it is entertaining, it has served its purpose. Art is reserved for those things that aim at something more complex than entertainment. But since these are the only two categories, things end up wildly misplaced: the bad Marvel movies are intended only as entertainment, the good ones compete with the best of film. Prestige tv often cannot reasonably be said to attempt to entertain, so it must be art, after a fashion. But there are trashy attempts at being artistic--Rain Man, Braveheart, the run-up to Oscar season in any given year--and joke-factory workplace sitcoms that transcend being merely entertaining (Cheers, for example). Attempting to be art does not necessarily make art; having the trappings of art isn't art, either; that no one has yet recognized The Dark Knight Rises to be the highest of camp is a great disappointment to me--it looks and feels and acts like a deadly serious movie but has a scene with a football player outrunning a sinkhole as it forms. That place between entertainment and art is so often vacant because no one recognizes it even exists.
Sorting this out is a lot of work. So much easier to let it simply wash over you, and like or dislike to your heart's content, and not worry about it. That, however, is a recipe for knowing what date "Untitled Female Superhero Movie" will open on ten years from now, because the identity of the superhero matters less than knowing that the right market segments will be served in a timely manner.
It's clear that my relationship to genre cultural properties has changed in the last ten years, and given enough time, it's clear that Lost is the reason for that change. I had a much larger appetite for them before, and almost none now. It's not entirely clear what exactly about Lost took me in that direction. But for need of a lot of something to watch, I've returned to it. I had a disparate reaction on this occasion to two of the most famous emotional beats in the story, and it might be worth exploring why. "Not Penny's Boat" had all of the resonance it did the first time. "The Constant" was a tremendous disappointment. This isn't surprising, since they were told in very different ways.
"Not Penny's Boat" is genuinely affecting because it builds over the course of several episodes before resolving. Desmond begins to get flashes that Charlie will die, and tries to save him; Desmond gets a particularly tempting vision and almost lets Charlie die. For his part, Charlie has to come to accept that his death is going to come soon and there's nothing he can do about it. The emotional punch comes because he gets to pick the cause for which he dies: he's found something worthy of that kind of sacrifice. Making that resolution changes him, frees him, to become someone who can be bold and active and self-sacrificing. He is free because there's meaning in his death. That allows him to be calm enough to save Desmond and communicate the important message that only he knows and then die.
"The Constant" is not genuinely affecting because it contrives its own problem and provides too pat of a solution. The "problems crossing between times" bit is introduced no earlier than the very end of the previous episode, and does not reappear again for another whole season (where it claims one single victim, conveniently not a major character). The life-threatening problem is given to two characters, one of whom only exists in order to pass along crucial exposition about the threat and how to get around it, and the problem for the main character is completely resolved by the end of the episode. This serious problem also, surprisingly, affected no one else involved in any travel to or from the island, and none of the numerous people shuttling back and forth between the freighter and the island for the rest of the season. The episode exists only for its endpoint--Penny and Desmond getting in contact with one another--and the rest is simply a means of getting the viewer there. It's emotional manipulation rather than storytelling, gesturing at rather than being something great.
The difference is that one of these is a storyline for a character's arc in a narrative, and another is a cool episode.
The difference between these matters because their reception says something about how we understand stories at this moment. Big cultural properties are (again) serialized: movies, books, tv shows are often now guaranteed out a certain distance into the future; like previous serials, they encourage looking at individual parts closely and wholes very rarely, and then only from certain narrow perspectives: we ask what the stakes are, whether the stories are internally consistent, whether they are, in each piece, entertaining. As a whole we might ask whether the story is worth the time invested, but these are judgments of the whole, rather than "we might omit 40 minutes/three episodes/200 pages without great loss" because the economics inform the structure of the content, rather than the content dictating anything at all. No one complains very much about mid-season episodes of a tv show that spin their wheels, because, as goes the usual critic's line, these come up of necessity in every season: even if there are only six episodes of plot, there need to be 13, or 22, or 24 episodes, so something has to fill that time. That you probably need to have seen all the other Marvel movies to understand the new ones is considered a feature, rather than a bug, and anyway, that's just how they make movies now.
When I was much younger I remember watching a few soap operas (hey, they were new tv in the summer, back when that was unusual), and particularly General Hospital when Luke and Laura were first re-introduced. Luke had been a bad guy at first, but now he was a good guy, because the show needed him to be one. The catch with a soap opera is that none of the stories can ever end, because the show must go on five days a week, and should ideally involve the same popular characters or actors. Consequently narrative logic must go out the window--filling out the time is the only thing that really matters--with characters changing allegiance and motivation all the time, and all the loopy narrative flourishes one associates with soap opera as a form.
Regular tv shows, movies, and multi-part books, lacking plot to fill out the allotted time and space, now indulge generously in melodrama and soap-opera antics (*paging George R.R. Martin*). Lost would disappear as a show if people answered each others' questions and didn't just go hiking off into the jungle every time they thought about doing something: the story needs these distractions as it needs the various other fancy-looking macguffins because the story can't hold out on its own. (As an experiment: try to summarize season 5 of Lost in one sentence. It is either impossible to do, if you try to include any of the details, or quite easy--"Ben tricks everyone into coming back to the Island, except in 1974"--which only exposes how superfluous much of it is.) Everything else is plot machinations for their own sake: Daniel and Charlotte get a romantic attachment which is entirely told and never shown, because Daniel needs some stakes for his own arc and the love of his life being threatened can provide them. Don Draper cycles through alcoholism and various women either because that's what he does or because it provides a few episodes of him looking seductive and cool and then a chance to blow it all up at the end, which will happen every season at fixed times that just so happen to coincide with the major parts of the season. (Friends, by contrast, didn't bother to get Ross and Rachel together, or break them up, at any significant moment in seasons 2 and 3 (February Sweeps, probably, but at least not as predictable). Then again, when you're a cultural phenomenon, you can do whatever you want and be certain you'll get a rating. That the MCU movies don't attempt this is probably also notable.) Loki gets himself captured in The Avengers, and it hardly matters whether his plan makes sense because it provides for Character Exposition and A Chance To Heighten The Themes Of This Movie. When movies, books, tv, engage in these kinds of stalling tactics, they kill actual organic character growth, but do so simply because the economics of the situation demand it. The skeleton shows in so many places now. One only has to look for it.
The flip-side of the soap opera-ization of things is that individual moments mean a lot less. No one soap character's great scene or arc means a lot when it's stacked up against others of wildly varying quality and changing motivation. Wasn't that time Don stopped drinking and recognized his problems really inspiring? Does "The Suitcase" mean less as an episode now that you know absolutely nothing about Don changed as a result of it? "The Constant" is a great episode if you have no idea what's going to happen to Desmond. Once you know it only serves to torture him with a bit of happiness before his life is ruined, how does it seem?
The single biggest factor contributing to the Golden Age of TV is the fact that no one can conceptualize of a creative model that works differently than this ("tell a fixed-length story until it's done and then end it?"). It used to be only comic book nerds that were suckers like this: the "even numbers are good" joke about Star Trek movies is an admission that 50% of them are bad; the hype for the new Star Wars movie seems to have forgotten that four of the six were disappointments. Now people are prepared to hold out hope for years and against all evidence that the results will be worth it, or that mediocre installments (the third of any series) are just the price we pay for the good ones.
Oddly, people seem more ready to see this in comedy than drama, where no great tv show of the last 15 years goes without criticism for losing its edge (some never regaining it) and where everyone can see the problems of The Hangover or Pitch Perfect making sequels that largely repeat the plot of the original films. The Office, for example, had one great idea--bring Jim and Pam together slowly, then keep them together--from which they got three seasons of very good tv. Once that idea was done, though, there was nothing behind it, try though they might to recreate that magic--more shocks and twists than one might reasonably expect of a faux-documentary about a paper company. Why did the show stay on the air through a number of increasingly bad seasons to the point that it poisoned its own legacy? Economics.
This matters because critical standards can do something to help explain and interpret what we're seeing. The overwhelming tendency of American aesthetics for the last hundred years has been to divide out entertainment from art, to push one lower and the other higher, until there is very little room in the middle. If a property is meant to be entertaining, this serves to silence all possible criticism; if it is entertaining, it has served its purpose. Art is reserved for those things that aim at something more complex than entertainment. But since these are the only two categories, things end up wildly misplaced: the bad Marvel movies are intended only as entertainment, the good ones compete with the best of film. Prestige tv often cannot reasonably be said to attempt to entertain, so it must be art, after a fashion. But there are trashy attempts at being artistic--Rain Man, Braveheart, the run-up to Oscar season in any given year--and joke-factory workplace sitcoms that transcend being merely entertaining (Cheers, for example). Attempting to be art does not necessarily make art; having the trappings of art isn't art, either; that no one has yet recognized The Dark Knight Rises to be the highest of camp is a great disappointment to me--it looks and feels and acts like a deadly serious movie but has a scene with a football player outrunning a sinkhole as it forms. That place between entertainment and art is so often vacant because no one recognizes it even exists.
Sorting this out is a lot of work. So much easier to let it simply wash over you, and like or dislike to your heart's content, and not worry about it. That, however, is a recipe for knowing what date "Untitled Female Superhero Movie" will open on ten years from now, because the identity of the superhero matters less than knowing that the right market segments will be served in a timely manner.
6.4.15
On Henry James and Proust, Finally
I have mentioned a few times a fondness for this poem by Ezra Pound--
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
--despite liking neither Ezra Pound nor Walt Whitman, for capturing the feeling of maturing taste. Pound once hated Whitman for being too close to what he himself wanted to do, and thus making him the thing to rebel against in order to assert his own identity. It's not a rejection of his old attitude towards Whitman, just a recognition that Pound's own situation is different now, and he recognizes he should act and feel differently.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, finally with some measure of success, started in on Henry James and Proust. I have no difficulty, when reading either, identifying those components that made me reject them when I was younger. James is perfectly happy to write eight long sentences around a situation without ever bothering to describe it directly; Proust finds his own thoughts fascinating and follows them without seeming care to edit. In both, nothing much happens at the page or approximate-chapter level.
And yet. Ever since tackling 2666 back in 2009, I have been reading longer, more complex novels, where the action subsides in favor of Proustian digressions and Jamesian sentences. With each thing I have read where one or the other author--or both--are mentioned as points of comparison, I have drawn closer. A half-read of Turn of the Screw two years ago affirmed the point--"I will like this, but now's not the time to read it," and we've finally opened up enough reading space to bring it about.
In books, in movies, in music, there's too early and too late. I would've hated Pavement at 18, but loved them at 28; I could've gotten into Jean Cocteau's movies much earlier, but had I waited any longer for Woody Allen, or even Ingmar Bergman, they would've passed me by. My attempt to read The Fellowship of the Ring in grad school fell flat--by then I could only see the flaws in the story, which are many.*
Too early is a special kind of pleasure, though: assuming the experience with James goes well, there are a dozen or two novels waiting out there for me; assuming Proust goes well, a few thousand pages of enjoyment. Nick Hornby wrote once about discovering Jackson Browne in his middle age--a guy with a long a pretty good recording career whom he had never listened to, and could approach new--new being that rarest of things for someone who professionally listened. Reading is an adventure, a lifelong adventure for those who take it seriously. If you read quickly and seriously, the question always remains what's next. And, at least for now, I know.
*Which is not to denigrate the love or respect that other people have for it as a fictional work. I merely assert that it has considerable flaws: starting out with 50 or so pages of historical backstory, for example, before introducing characters or a plot. If one reads it with charity--which is to say, with love--then these are not flaws but essential components of the whole. That sort of reading isn't possible for me--it's not the right sort of book, and I'm not the right sort of person. But if it makes you, dear reader, feel better, I can assure you I thought equally poorly of the grand excursus on history that ended War and Peace.
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
--despite liking neither Ezra Pound nor Walt Whitman, for capturing the feeling of maturing taste. Pound once hated Whitman for being too close to what he himself wanted to do, and thus making him the thing to rebel against in order to assert his own identity. It's not a rejection of his old attitude towards Whitman, just a recognition that Pound's own situation is different now, and he recognizes he should act and feel differently.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, finally with some measure of success, started in on Henry James and Proust. I have no difficulty, when reading either, identifying those components that made me reject them when I was younger. James is perfectly happy to write eight long sentences around a situation without ever bothering to describe it directly; Proust finds his own thoughts fascinating and follows them without seeming care to edit. In both, nothing much happens at the page or approximate-chapter level.
And yet. Ever since tackling 2666 back in 2009, I have been reading longer, more complex novels, where the action subsides in favor of Proustian digressions and Jamesian sentences. With each thing I have read where one or the other author--or both--are mentioned as points of comparison, I have drawn closer. A half-read of Turn of the Screw two years ago affirmed the point--"I will like this, but now's not the time to read it," and we've finally opened up enough reading space to bring it about.
In books, in movies, in music, there's too early and too late. I would've hated Pavement at 18, but loved them at 28; I could've gotten into Jean Cocteau's movies much earlier, but had I waited any longer for Woody Allen, or even Ingmar Bergman, they would've passed me by. My attempt to read The Fellowship of the Ring in grad school fell flat--by then I could only see the flaws in the story, which are many.*
Too early is a special kind of pleasure, though: assuming the experience with James goes well, there are a dozen or two novels waiting out there for me; assuming Proust goes well, a few thousand pages of enjoyment. Nick Hornby wrote once about discovering Jackson Browne in his middle age--a guy with a long a pretty good recording career whom he had never listened to, and could approach new--new being that rarest of things for someone who professionally listened. Reading is an adventure, a lifelong adventure for those who take it seriously. If you read quickly and seriously, the question always remains what's next. And, at least for now, I know.
*Which is not to denigrate the love or respect that other people have for it as a fictional work. I merely assert that it has considerable flaws: starting out with 50 or so pages of historical backstory, for example, before introducing characters or a plot. If one reads it with charity--which is to say, with love--then these are not flaws but essential components of the whole. That sort of reading isn't possible for me--it's not the right sort of book, and I'm not the right sort of person. But if it makes you, dear reader, feel better, I can assure you I thought equally poorly of the grand excursus on history that ended War and Peace.
4.3.15
Reader, I Think She Probably Should Have Taken a Few More Months to Think Over Her Options
Jane Eyre
Though I'm generally of the view that arguing over details of the plot is not a particularly interesting way of reacting to a book,* and better analyses involve considerations of structure, pacing, voice, composition, etc, here we go:
I don't see how anyone could possibly root for Rochester.
The absolute worst thing one could say about St. John would be to make him equal to Rochester in ill-treatment of Jane. Both are attempting to use her for their own ends, and want to cultivate her responses to them without informing her about what is going on. St. John, however, reveals his motivations much faster, of his own volition, and at least has them aimed toward a noble purpose. As Jane herself admits, but for his insisting on marriage without love, there's nothing wrong with his plan. (A significant 'but,' of course, though it seems less a fault of an unforgiving nature than a crucial mistake made by someone focused on his vocation/too young to think through all the consequences involved.) Rochester, by contrast, holds his peace until he is forced to reveal all, and would implicate Jane in a crime without her knowledge or consent--I presume his requirement that she wait a year and a day after the wedding to ask about the other woman in the house to be one that would make annulment impossible. He is, in other words, willing to run her great legal and social risks without informing her. That's not to say St. John is better--I think the obvious best outcome for Jane is to live at Moor House with Diana, and never marry.**
The novel itself is lively and modern, and the direct narration a good deal more sophisticated than, say, David Copperfield. It's rather, in its own way, a good commentary on the action delivered by one of its players, not unlike All About Eve. That it unfolds as a combination of the most unlikely happenstance is not a matter of great concern to me as a reader--Jane is discovered in the end by the family she did not know herself to have, but the knowledge is not at all essential to the action as it is happening.
*Not interesting because it involves arguing over a stipulated and limited set of facts (the text), which then involves one in the equally difficult games of guessing the author's intention (as something distinct from the actual words the author chose to write, and retained after editing; for which there might be supplementary evidence in notes and letters, but for which none often exists) or reading facts and relationships not written into those stipulated, an endless game. It is also almost always an exercise in wish fulfillment or enforcement of orthodoxy--making the novel into The Thing The Reader Wants It To Be, which is flattering to their own beliefs and prejudices, rather than The Thing That It Is.
**And, yes, I get that the point of the novel is that circumstances come about wherein Jane can freely choose Rochester, and we are meant to acknowledge it as a free and unforced choice, and that is a good thing. But we've also probably all had the experience of dealing with friends who make free and unforced decisions that are nevertheless poor.
Though I'm generally of the view that arguing over details of the plot is not a particularly interesting way of reacting to a book,* and better analyses involve considerations of structure, pacing, voice, composition, etc, here we go:
I don't see how anyone could possibly root for Rochester.
The absolute worst thing one could say about St. John would be to make him equal to Rochester in ill-treatment of Jane. Both are attempting to use her for their own ends, and want to cultivate her responses to them without informing her about what is going on. St. John, however, reveals his motivations much faster, of his own volition, and at least has them aimed toward a noble purpose. As Jane herself admits, but for his insisting on marriage without love, there's nothing wrong with his plan. (A significant 'but,' of course, though it seems less a fault of an unforgiving nature than a crucial mistake made by someone focused on his vocation/too young to think through all the consequences involved.) Rochester, by contrast, holds his peace until he is forced to reveal all, and would implicate Jane in a crime without her knowledge or consent--I presume his requirement that she wait a year and a day after the wedding to ask about the other woman in the house to be one that would make annulment impossible. He is, in other words, willing to run her great legal and social risks without informing her. That's not to say St. John is better--I think the obvious best outcome for Jane is to live at Moor House with Diana, and never marry.**
The novel itself is lively and modern, and the direct narration a good deal more sophisticated than, say, David Copperfield. It's rather, in its own way, a good commentary on the action delivered by one of its players, not unlike All About Eve. That it unfolds as a combination of the most unlikely happenstance is not a matter of great concern to me as a reader--Jane is discovered in the end by the family she did not know herself to have, but the knowledge is not at all essential to the action as it is happening.
*Not interesting because it involves arguing over a stipulated and limited set of facts (the text), which then involves one in the equally difficult games of guessing the author's intention (as something distinct from the actual words the author chose to write, and retained after editing; for which there might be supplementary evidence in notes and letters, but for which none often exists) or reading facts and relationships not written into those stipulated, an endless game. It is also almost always an exercise in wish fulfillment or enforcement of orthodoxy--making the novel into The Thing The Reader Wants It To Be, which is flattering to their own beliefs and prejudices, rather than The Thing That It Is.
**And, yes, I get that the point of the novel is that circumstances come about wherein Jane can freely choose Rochester, and we are meant to acknowledge it as a free and unforced choice, and that is a good thing. But we've also probably all had the experience of dealing with friends who make free and unforced decisions that are nevertheless poor.
16.2.15
In Which I Discover the Importance of Film Editing
Lord of the Flies
Overlord
Au Hasard Balthazar
Lord of the Flies is not a great movie: the quality of performance given by the children in it is too variable. But it is a good movie that ends on its strongest note. I was quite surprised after watching it to realize that many of the individual scenes features improvisation, including improvised dialogue. As a general rule, I hate improvised movies: Aguirre, the Wrath of God captures indolence and insanity but at the cost of narrative and viewer patience; Drinking Buddies and its mumblecore ilk hang on too little story to justify their meandering run times; Anchorman demonstrates that it might be very funny to be in the room with a bunch of humorous people trying to make each other laugh, but that hardly makes a movie. Lord of the Flies avoids all of these pitfalls. The question is why.
The answer became obvious when watching Overlord, which matches archival footage of World War II to the story of a British man who is called up for service and dies during the D-Day invasion. The director went to great pains to use equipment that would have been available in the mid-40s in order to match up the look of the different parts. The effect is astonishing: the parts don't roll off each other seamlessly, but there's a strong mutual sympathy between the two. It's a film that puts most of its focus not on story or cinematography but editing. The two halves work because each is slotted into the appropriate parts of the overall film, and it is clear that switches between the two are quite intentional. The same applies to Lord of the Flies: each individual scene has a purpose within the overall narrative, so the improvisations are good when they work to the end of that scene (and its place within the overall narrative), and may be discarded when they are not. That is to say, there is a principle that allows the director to decide what remains and what is cut, that principle is tied to the overall thrust of the film, and the director edits the film with these considerations in mind. The principle that affects whether a joke is cut in Anchorman is whether that joke is funny or not, which has very little to do with the narrative of the movie, such as it is.*
The high art version of this is Robert Bresson, who chose people who were not actors to get more instinctive reactions, and frames much of Au Hasard Balthazar around the reactions of a donkey. If the story is well-constructed and the editing purposeful, then the end product can be quite profound and beautiful.
Watching these was one of those rare moments when some new element of vocabulary makes itself known; I'm not sure I had ever thought about how a movie was edited before. But it adds something new to the conversation, a new way of understanding why we like what we do and why certain things are effective and others not.
*The Big Lebowski, which is also mostly concerned with whether its jokes are funny, gets a pass because it is obviously supremely scripted in the manner of most Coen Brothers films. It's the writing rather than the editing that exerts control, but the control is there all the same.
Overlord
Au Hasard Balthazar
Lord of the Flies is not a great movie: the quality of performance given by the children in it is too variable. But it is a good movie that ends on its strongest note. I was quite surprised after watching it to realize that many of the individual scenes features improvisation, including improvised dialogue. As a general rule, I hate improvised movies: Aguirre, the Wrath of God captures indolence and insanity but at the cost of narrative and viewer patience; Drinking Buddies and its mumblecore ilk hang on too little story to justify their meandering run times; Anchorman demonstrates that it might be very funny to be in the room with a bunch of humorous people trying to make each other laugh, but that hardly makes a movie. Lord of the Flies avoids all of these pitfalls. The question is why.
The answer became obvious when watching Overlord, which matches archival footage of World War II to the story of a British man who is called up for service and dies during the D-Day invasion. The director went to great pains to use equipment that would have been available in the mid-40s in order to match up the look of the different parts. The effect is astonishing: the parts don't roll off each other seamlessly, but there's a strong mutual sympathy between the two. It's a film that puts most of its focus not on story or cinematography but editing. The two halves work because each is slotted into the appropriate parts of the overall film, and it is clear that switches between the two are quite intentional. The same applies to Lord of the Flies: each individual scene has a purpose within the overall narrative, so the improvisations are good when they work to the end of that scene (and its place within the overall narrative), and may be discarded when they are not. That is to say, there is a principle that allows the director to decide what remains and what is cut, that principle is tied to the overall thrust of the film, and the director edits the film with these considerations in mind. The principle that affects whether a joke is cut in Anchorman is whether that joke is funny or not, which has very little to do with the narrative of the movie, such as it is.*
The high art version of this is Robert Bresson, who chose people who were not actors to get more instinctive reactions, and frames much of Au Hasard Balthazar around the reactions of a donkey. If the story is well-constructed and the editing purposeful, then the end product can be quite profound and beautiful.
Watching these was one of those rare moments when some new element of vocabulary makes itself known; I'm not sure I had ever thought about how a movie was edited before. But it adds something new to the conversation, a new way of understanding why we like what we do and why certain things are effective and others not.
*The Big Lebowski, which is also mostly concerned with whether its jokes are funny, gets a pass because it is obviously supremely scripted in the manner of most Coen Brothers films. It's the writing rather than the editing that exerts control, but the control is there all the same.
21.1.15
On Critical Judgments and the Band Responsible for "Heart Factory"
Since The Dissolve is discussing how critical views can change over time, I will expand on a related thought I expressed on twitter recently:
"Thesis: articles explaining why the new album by [hipster band] is good are the new explaining why the new Rolling Stones/U2 album is good."
Rolling Stone, rather famously, will give 4-5 stars to any album by either of those or any associated entity, which is why Mick Jagger's solo albums always end up with 4.5 stars. It's an abdication of judgment in the face of an unenviable situation for a reviewer. U2 and/or the Rolling Stones are good writers and good musicians, which means the majority of any album of new music either writes will be good; were they anonymous bands one might even be able to judge them as respectable. Each has hit some of the greatest highs of music, however, and so the question presented by a new album is now "is it good?" but "does it match up with Sticky Fingers/Achtung Baby?" The new albums never do, because how could they? Thus is born the face-saving compromise for all involved.
As 90s nostalgia has ramped up, and culturally significant but underappreciated bands have decided to go in for some easy money by releasing new material, there's been a tendency to give them a similar pass: if it's not their best work, but it's fine, who's to begrudge them for enjoying newfound popularity and commercial viability? It's entirely possible that all of these bands save the Pixies, the Stooges, and Guided By Voices (who were loose cannons at the best of times) made good albums, but it seems as likely that people were not prepared to hear--or admit--a harsher truth. And hey, I'll rep for "Thief in the Night" and "How Can I Stop?" as excellent Rolling Stones songs (which I think they are, and not just within the context of later-period Stones), so I'm aware of the manner in which we all become compromised.
Sleater-Kinney has a new album out, its first in about ten years, and people are falling all over themselves to praise it very much in the manner of a new Rolling Stones album. Feature articles talk about the band's relevance, which is almost always a discussion of its relevance in the riot grrrl scene in the mid-late 90s. The "best album since x" distinction is broken out, often with the same self-aware ironic dimension in which "their best album since Achtung Baby" is deployed. Reviews will quite strenuously note how much the band sounds like how it used to.
Having listened to the album myself, I would put it in the same "good but not that good" camp as The Woods.* It's not a classic Sleater-Kinney album, nor is it even the classic rock revivalism of The Woods. It does, however, sound very much like an album made by the people who were responsible for the Corin Tucker Band and Wild Flag, i.e. a bunch of perfectly good albums whose preferred musical textures were borrowed from classic rock and 80s power pop. In the end, a lot of the rough elements that made the band sound like themselves are not there, and there's an abundance of metaphor-songs, never the band's strongest suit.
(Here's how I know not to take these reviews too seriously: none of them mention the absence of the defining element of the 'classic' Sleater-Kinney sound, already becoming absent on The Woods: guitars in counterpoint. Most of the older material works--creates the tension it does--because neither the melody nor the rhythm is dependent on one guitar part, but passes it between the two. An ingenious solution to not having a bass player--as was the prominence of baritone guitar--but requiring considerably more time to develop.)
One can compare this reaction to that greeting the new Belle and Sebastian and Decemberists albums, which is decidedly mixed. I like Belle and Sebastian and have never cared much for the Decemberists, but I find these reviews to be more plausible because it seems likely that in a four- or five-year hiatus between albums, a band's sound will have changed, and not all of these changes will necessarily be good. I always find "this thing you're predisposed to like is as good as you hoped it would be!" to be the emptiest of critical stances, conflating "better than you might have expected" with "excellent," and retroactively causing me to revisit the things that came before.** If this is excellent, and of a piece with the rest of their work, then perhaps I mistakenly understood its merits, a train of thought that rarely redounds to the benefit of the thing being considered.
*Important footnote: I have been listening to S-K since 1996, when I included Call the Doctor as 'album of the year' in my junior high newspaper. Your attempts to hipster-than-thou me will fail.
**There's also the weird effect this has on a band's catalogue: previous albums tend to be viewed as 'of a piece,' which they very rarely are, and to simultaneously raise or lower the critical profile of albums as the narrative requires. The Hot Rock, All Hands on the Bad One, One Beat, and The Woods were divisive when they were released. It's possible that critics focused too much on individual flaws rendered less important in the context of a body of work, but it also seems just possible that taking the body of work as a whole reduces the need to think about its individual elements, much in the way that streaming an entire season of a tv show reduces critical attention to smaller but meaningful flaws in each individual element. Confession time: I find there to be no S-K albums that are listenable front-to-back: each of them has at least one wildly misconceived song ("Heart Factory" is the best example). They're still a great band, and their highs are very high, but they're not perfect. The last thing the indie world needs is to require the unquestioning loyalty of Phish fans.
"Thesis: articles explaining why the new album by [hipster band] is good are the new explaining why the new Rolling Stones/U2 album is good."
Rolling Stone, rather famously, will give 4-5 stars to any album by either of those or any associated entity, which is why Mick Jagger's solo albums always end up with 4.5 stars. It's an abdication of judgment in the face of an unenviable situation for a reviewer. U2 and/or the Rolling Stones are good writers and good musicians, which means the majority of any album of new music either writes will be good; were they anonymous bands one might even be able to judge them as respectable. Each has hit some of the greatest highs of music, however, and so the question presented by a new album is now "is it good?" but "does it match up with Sticky Fingers/Achtung Baby?" The new albums never do, because how could they? Thus is born the face-saving compromise for all involved.
As 90s nostalgia has ramped up, and culturally significant but underappreciated bands have decided to go in for some easy money by releasing new material, there's been a tendency to give them a similar pass: if it's not their best work, but it's fine, who's to begrudge them for enjoying newfound popularity and commercial viability? It's entirely possible that all of these bands save the Pixies, the Stooges, and Guided By Voices (who were loose cannons at the best of times) made good albums, but it seems as likely that people were not prepared to hear--or admit--a harsher truth. And hey, I'll rep for "Thief in the Night" and "How Can I Stop?" as excellent Rolling Stones songs (which I think they are, and not just within the context of later-period Stones), so I'm aware of the manner in which we all become compromised.
Sleater-Kinney has a new album out, its first in about ten years, and people are falling all over themselves to praise it very much in the manner of a new Rolling Stones album. Feature articles talk about the band's relevance, which is almost always a discussion of its relevance in the riot grrrl scene in the mid-late 90s. The "best album since x" distinction is broken out, often with the same self-aware ironic dimension in which "their best album since Achtung Baby" is deployed. Reviews will quite strenuously note how much the band sounds like how it used to.
Having listened to the album myself, I would put it in the same "good but not that good" camp as The Woods.* It's not a classic Sleater-Kinney album, nor is it even the classic rock revivalism of The Woods. It does, however, sound very much like an album made by the people who were responsible for the Corin Tucker Band and Wild Flag, i.e. a bunch of perfectly good albums whose preferred musical textures were borrowed from classic rock and 80s power pop. In the end, a lot of the rough elements that made the band sound like themselves are not there, and there's an abundance of metaphor-songs, never the band's strongest suit.
(Here's how I know not to take these reviews too seriously: none of them mention the absence of the defining element of the 'classic' Sleater-Kinney sound, already becoming absent on The Woods: guitars in counterpoint. Most of the older material works--creates the tension it does--because neither the melody nor the rhythm is dependent on one guitar part, but passes it between the two. An ingenious solution to not having a bass player--as was the prominence of baritone guitar--but requiring considerably more time to develop.)
One can compare this reaction to that greeting the new Belle and Sebastian and Decemberists albums, which is decidedly mixed. I like Belle and Sebastian and have never cared much for the Decemberists, but I find these reviews to be more plausible because it seems likely that in a four- or five-year hiatus between albums, a band's sound will have changed, and not all of these changes will necessarily be good. I always find "this thing you're predisposed to like is as good as you hoped it would be!" to be the emptiest of critical stances, conflating "better than you might have expected" with "excellent," and retroactively causing me to revisit the things that came before.** If this is excellent, and of a piece with the rest of their work, then perhaps I mistakenly understood its merits, a train of thought that rarely redounds to the benefit of the thing being considered.
*Important footnote: I have been listening to S-K since 1996, when I included Call the Doctor as 'album of the year' in my junior high newspaper. Your attempts to hipster-than-thou me will fail.
**There's also the weird effect this has on a band's catalogue: previous albums tend to be viewed as 'of a piece,' which they very rarely are, and to simultaneously raise or lower the critical profile of albums as the narrative requires. The Hot Rock, All Hands on the Bad One, One Beat, and The Woods were divisive when they were released. It's possible that critics focused too much on individual flaws rendered less important in the context of a body of work, but it also seems just possible that taking the body of work as a whole reduces the need to think about its individual elements, much in the way that streaming an entire season of a tv show reduces critical attention to smaller but meaningful flaws in each individual element. Confession time: I find there to be no S-K albums that are listenable front-to-back: each of them has at least one wildly misconceived song ("Heart Factory" is the best example). They're still a great band, and their highs are very high, but they're not perfect. The last thing the indie world needs is to require the unquestioning loyalty of Phish fans.
16.1.15
Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Still Don't Like Stanley Kubrick Edition
Long-time blog readers are aware of my general policy regarding cultural items I don't particularly like: they should be revisited periodically in order to see if I have different feelings about them. Sometimes my opinions really do change, or I am aware of aspects that previously escaped my attention. This goes more emphatically for those things held in high regard: a good consumer of culture should be at least open to the idea of having missed something important.
Steven Soderbergh posted a new cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seemed as good a moment as any to revisit the film, not least because the central feature of the cut is removing 50 or so minutes of runtime to bring the entire film under two hours. I am not a Kubrick fan. I've seen Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, not an exhaustive list but a reasonable number from which to draw conclusions. Those conclusions: most of the movies are too long--far too long. If they contain any moral point, they hit that point over the head repeatedly and without any nuance--the only film that works for is Dr. Strangelove, as a satire. The slow pacing and the emphasis on composition rather than dialogue is the primary reason the films seem stretched. As a compositor of images, Kubrick may be without equal--every film has striking shots and takes, many of them memorable and justly celebrated*--but they come too infrequently. (I prefer lots of dialogue and emphasis on the interplay of the actors, unless the film is going into avant-garde art-film territory.)
On Soderbergh's edit: it was shorter, which is something. It contains all the iconic moments, also something. It makes better use of the eye topos as a theme connecting the disparate elements of the story, something this film needs quite desperately. But it also cuts out much of the dialogue. It is perhaps most worrisome that an hour can be removed from the film and I was unable to identify exactly what was missing, aside from expository dialogue. So we'll put Kubrick back on the shelf for a while longer.
*The problem with this reliance of image is that most of them work so long as you don't focus too much on the thing being symbolized. The ending sequence of 2001--the baby and the earth--is shocking and striking, and works as a general means of connecting the broader themes of the movie. But what is that broader theme? Perhaps something about the fragility of humanity, the contrast between the origins of man and what looks (or looked) like our fate, the contrast between the serenity of nature and our own capability for violence. Why is that represented by a fetus and a shot of earth from space? Well, it's a striking image. Don't think about it too much.
Steven Soderbergh posted a new cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which seemed as good a moment as any to revisit the film, not least because the central feature of the cut is removing 50 or so minutes of runtime to bring the entire film under two hours. I am not a Kubrick fan. I've seen Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, not an exhaustive list but a reasonable number from which to draw conclusions. Those conclusions: most of the movies are too long--far too long. If they contain any moral point, they hit that point over the head repeatedly and without any nuance--the only film that works for is Dr. Strangelove, as a satire. The slow pacing and the emphasis on composition rather than dialogue is the primary reason the films seem stretched. As a compositor of images, Kubrick may be without equal--every film has striking shots and takes, many of them memorable and justly celebrated*--but they come too infrequently. (I prefer lots of dialogue and emphasis on the interplay of the actors, unless the film is going into avant-garde art-film territory.)
On Soderbergh's edit: it was shorter, which is something. It contains all the iconic moments, also something. It makes better use of the eye topos as a theme connecting the disparate elements of the story, something this film needs quite desperately. But it also cuts out much of the dialogue. It is perhaps most worrisome that an hour can be removed from the film and I was unable to identify exactly what was missing, aside from expository dialogue. So we'll put Kubrick back on the shelf for a while longer.
*The problem with this reliance of image is that most of them work so long as you don't focus too much on the thing being symbolized. The ending sequence of 2001--the baby and the earth--is shocking and striking, and works as a general means of connecting the broader themes of the movie. But what is that broader theme? Perhaps something about the fragility of humanity, the contrast between the origins of man and what looks (or looked) like our fate, the contrast between the serenity of nature and our own capability for violence. Why is that represented by a fetus and a shot of earth from space? Well, it's a striking image. Don't think about it too much.
9.1.15
The Beatles were my favorite band in the world for about a year, when I had one of those extended-length compilation albums, and back when I was working through R.E.M. albums every six months or so. It's not hard to see why they'd be the favorite band of someone who was young, since they embrace traditional songcraft, and their more experimental moments are within that framework, so nothing gets too out of hand. It's also not hard to see why a kid might prefer a best-of compilation to the actual albums of other bands. Selecting only the best gives a distorted sense of what a band was about.
That period ended definitively once I discovered The Who's Tommy. I have had limited interest in them since then, though I will confess some enduring weakness for "Rain," "Martha My Dear," "Strawberry Fields Forever," and a few others. The Beatles' problem is that for any particular thing they did in their career, their is another band that did the same thing, at a similar or higher level of quality, for a longer time.
The usual defense for this is "The Beatles did it first, though," which, aside from the various ways in which that's not especially true--since they were building at first on the Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley, girl groups, r&b, blues, etc*--is not much of a defense. If you were alive at the time, "first" holds some importance, but if you weren't, it's hard to see the value of "first" as opposed to "best." After all, Thespis was first, but he won't get many votes for best actor of all time.
I find this phenomenon interesting because it's one common manifestation of a tendency that shows up elsewhere. People sometimes appear to have thought over an issue once in their teenage years, and never quite revisited it since: religion, politics, books, movies and music. I've never quite understood it. During grad school I would occasionally check my work by engaging in the following thought experiment: what would be the case if I were completely wrong on this topic? What are the things I'd be missing, and how would I assemble that argument? It clips one's wings a touch and keeps one honest. My tendency to occasionally revisit things I believe myself not to like comes from the same place: assuming I think the same as I used to is dubious at best, and maybe this movie/author/music will sound different to me now. I have reduced the amount I read on the internet because I get a sinking feeling whenever I find something I agree with too much--am I agreeing because of the strength of the argument or because it's flattering my beliefs? And so also here: the Beatles are a perfectly good band to have as one's favorite at the age of 12, but if they're still the favorite at 30, something has probably gone wrong.
*And if you're concerned about racism, sexism, intersectionality, etc, there's something problematic about assuming that it hadn't been "done" until it was done by white men; this is also the problem with discussions of Elvis' novelty. The better defense of Elvis, of course, is that he was a good musician and entertainer who had one of the really excellent backing bands ever.
8.1.15
Satire: (Almost) Always a Bad Idea
It was either last week's earnest celebration of Festivus across the internet, or The Dissolve complaining about how the appreciation of satire in The Wolf of Wall Street will eventually be replaced by people who like the movie's excesses without irony or nuance that brought me around to the opinion that satire is almost always inadvisable as a rhetorical or narrative strategy. People are like to take literally all but the most extreme of situations, and so the probability that any individual satire will be lost on the population approaches 1 as time marches on.
The origin story of Festivus is a simple one: Frank Costanza is a terrible father, so he denies his son the pleasures of Christmas for no reason more complicated than his desire to not have to try too hard, and replaces them with a holiday whose entire purpose is to humiliate him and everyone else who happens to be around. This is bad. But, since we are on the internet, there are people who rally to Festivus as anti-commercial, or for the opportunity to complain about the ways other people have disappointed them. There's nothing in the original Seinfeld episode that makes it seem like this was a good idea: sure, Kramer likes it, but Kramer's ideas are also all bad, and sure, it's funny, but it's funny because it's absurd and horrifying.
The only successful example of satire that comes to mind is "A Modest Proposal," since no one is likely to think that eating human babies is a good idea, but even the savage Gulliver's Travels is most frequently reduced to the adventure and travel story it is nominally supposed to be, and handed most frequently to children who could hardly know what to do with it. Starship Troopers and RoboCop satirize so completely as to leave only the tiniest strip of plausibility for a non-satirical reading, and there is no shortage of people who think the former is pro-fascism and the latter an entertaining, violent romp.
It's slightly more difficult with violence, in fact, because violence has the appeal of spectacle, that people intellectually know they should disapprove of, but (sometimes) find to be satisfying on an emotional level. The college cult of Scarface and Goodfellas is happy to ignore any moralizing that might take place in either film; the careful, measured tones and ambiguity of The Godfather and The Godfather II (and II's flashbacks are already stripping out the ambiguity in favor of mythologizing) become the isn't-it-funny-that-we-sometimes-kill-people Sopranos, which is still a more artful creation than many. When people praise Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight, and talk about his most effective scenes, are they not always the ones where he acts most anarchically and with greatest violence? It might be intended as a satire of violence, but so much of the visceral thrill and humor comes directly from that violence.
The origin story of Festivus is a simple one: Frank Costanza is a terrible father, so he denies his son the pleasures of Christmas for no reason more complicated than his desire to not have to try too hard, and replaces them with a holiday whose entire purpose is to humiliate him and everyone else who happens to be around. This is bad. But, since we are on the internet, there are people who rally to Festivus as anti-commercial, or for the opportunity to complain about the ways other people have disappointed them. There's nothing in the original Seinfeld episode that makes it seem like this was a good idea: sure, Kramer likes it, but Kramer's ideas are also all bad, and sure, it's funny, but it's funny because it's absurd and horrifying.
The only successful example of satire that comes to mind is "A Modest Proposal," since no one is likely to think that eating human babies is a good idea, but even the savage Gulliver's Travels is most frequently reduced to the adventure and travel story it is nominally supposed to be, and handed most frequently to children who could hardly know what to do with it. Starship Troopers and RoboCop satirize so completely as to leave only the tiniest strip of plausibility for a non-satirical reading, and there is no shortage of people who think the former is pro-fascism and the latter an entertaining, violent romp.
It's slightly more difficult with violence, in fact, because violence has the appeal of spectacle, that people intellectually know they should disapprove of, but (sometimes) find to be satisfying on an emotional level. The college cult of Scarface and Goodfellas is happy to ignore any moralizing that might take place in either film; the careful, measured tones and ambiguity of The Godfather and The Godfather II (and II's flashbacks are already stripping out the ambiguity in favor of mythologizing) become the isn't-it-funny-that-we-sometimes-kill-people Sopranos, which is still a more artful creation than many. When people praise Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight, and talk about his most effective scenes, are they not always the ones where he acts most anarchically and with greatest violence? It might be intended as a satire of violence, but so much of the visceral thrill and humor comes directly from that violence.
30.12.14
On Ignoring Trends in Culture
I have a long-standing and often-mocked rule that once a particular cultural property becomes too popular, or too buzzed about, that popularity constitutes a prima facie reason to ignore it, or at least put it off. The rule has its origins in a kind of punk sentiment: "the only way to fill Madison Square Garden is with mediocrity." If 80% of cultural productions are middling-or-worse, and 90% only good, then increasing popularity is a sign that its qualities may have been misperceived, or may be nonexistent.
After all:
This also repeats itself at the top end: debut novels, films, television shows, and albums can all be extremely misleading about the merits of the people involved in creating them (see most first novelist's second novels, The Sixth Sense, Homeland, Turn on the Bright Lights). Sometimes the end result is a genuinely good first product that cannot be matched by subsequent output; sometimes popularity and critical success lead to re-tooling around purported strengths (TV shows with long runs tend to have radically different first and second seasons) that enable continued production but at a cost of some originality; sometimes extended runs reveal that there was only ever one idea in the first place and the creators' inability to develop something new actively tarnishes what came before.
Waiting--six months, a year, five years--is a pretty good way to avoid falling into these traps, and a good way to never feel burdened by the forces of culture: I'm in no rush to catch up on something, or avoid spoilers (another rule: anything where knowing how it resolves ruins the enjoyment of it is probably not worth one's time in the first place). It also more accurately replicates how we approach culture the rest of the time: no one particularly cares when I get around to reading Jane Eyre; I couldn't have supported Luis Buñuel in any form by the time I got to see The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or The Exterminating Angel, no matter how much I liked them; I didn't know about Javier Márias before 2011, and then went and worked through all his books in the usual way.
All of which is to say: you can have your Serial and your True Detective. Maybe I'll see y'all in another year or two.
After all:
The fact is, you can complain as much as you like about unnecessarily dark and male-dominated prestige drama, but the number one drama on TV has no prestige whatsoever: It’s NCIS, a twelve-year-old crime procedural, which is a rip-off of a rip-off of a rip-off of Law and Order, and which, as a procedural, is explicitly dedicated to working through the same beats in the same order in every episode. (By my count, there are eight crime procedurals on TV Guide’s list of the top 50 shows; I wasn’t sure whether Castle or Hawaii Five-O qualified, not having really seen them, so the number may be closer to ten.) The number one comedy is The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom so carefully observant of formal conventions — the three-camera set-up, the laugh track — it feels like slipping through a time portal to 1987, and which is explicitly predicated on the idea that intelligent people are funny because they are strange. Speaking of intelligence, the only news program on the list is Sixty Minutes. It comes in at #24, one slot below The Mentalist, and ten slots below The Voice.
This also repeats itself at the top end: debut novels, films, television shows, and albums can all be extremely misleading about the merits of the people involved in creating them (see most first novelist's second novels, The Sixth Sense, Homeland, Turn on the Bright Lights). Sometimes the end result is a genuinely good first product that cannot be matched by subsequent output; sometimes popularity and critical success lead to re-tooling around purported strengths (TV shows with long runs tend to have radically different first and second seasons) that enable continued production but at a cost of some originality; sometimes extended runs reveal that there was only ever one idea in the first place and the creators' inability to develop something new actively tarnishes what came before.
Waiting--six months, a year, five years--is a pretty good way to avoid falling into these traps, and a good way to never feel burdened by the forces of culture: I'm in no rush to catch up on something, or avoid spoilers (another rule: anything where knowing how it resolves ruins the enjoyment of it is probably not worth one's time in the first place). It also more accurately replicates how we approach culture the rest of the time: no one particularly cares when I get around to reading Jane Eyre; I couldn't have supported Luis Buñuel in any form by the time I got to see The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or The Exterminating Angel, no matter how much I liked them; I didn't know about Javier Márias before 2011, and then went and worked through all his books in the usual way.
All of which is to say: you can have your Serial and your True Detective. Maybe I'll see y'all in another year or two.
23.12.14
Thoughts inspired by this depressing but accurate look at the movies:
In retrospect, I'm grateful to my parents for the experience of going to see movies in the theater, and the care that went in to choosing those movies: the summer blockbusters with the highest production value and the most substantial stories, whether action, suspense, or comedy. Making a point, if haphazardly followed, of seeing at least one of the films nominated for Best Picture. Sprinkling in Merchant/Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations, and most particularly not treating it as a girly thing to do. These provided me with the realization, even if I wasn't always interested in it, that there was something more worthwhile and enduring than the crap I would consistently choose to watch it allowed--Home Alone, Ace Ventura, that movie where Arnold Schwartzenegger has a baby. That experience was, in some way, cultural literacy, or its origins. I plotted a conventional-but-interested course in high school and the first part of college, classics and indie films, nothing very substantial. Then I woke up one morning in college and realized I had no vocabulary in film at all, had the proper response to this (mild shame), and subscribed to Netflix.
Now, of course, we don't go to movies. We will see the random comic book adaptation or similar (Snow White and the Huntsman killed us of that habit), or the random prestige film, but two of the last three things we went to see in a theater were Richard Linklatter movies (both excellent). The third was American Hustle. We contemplate, but do not attend, the old films that the Carolina Theatre screens... and that's it. We can watch our favorites at home and branch out a bit with the help of Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. Film is not unlike the novel at this point: a person can choose to live entirely in the past, and do so happily; living in the past is entirely compatible with one's tastes changing, even changing radically.
Looking into the future is depressing: an endless march of slight variations on things you have already seen if you've been in a theater in the last 15 years. 'Good' and 'bad' are such relative terms now. No one would dispute that the X-Men movies tend to be, on the whole, better than the average comic book movie; the best of them (X2) could be described as 'fairly good," and the rest are ideas executed at various degrees of hamhandedness. If the argument for Days of Future Past is that it's more like the good parts of First Class than The Last Stand, how could anyone see that as more than a guarantee the movie is not a trainwreck? I liked The Lego Movie--who didn't?--but the prospect of four more fills me with dread. Is there the slightest chance that these are not all slight variations on each other? People once thought Pirates of the Caribbean was original, before the second film destroyed all that goodwill. And then they made two more. This is true even outside the realm of comic book movies: Anchorman 2 proves only that it was a miracle the first one was good at all. The key to the old system was choice, the ability to select from amongst a (relatively) diverse slate of genres and themes, and choice is the one thing that doesn't much exist now.
The lover of reading in me is moderately pleased by this state of things: if there's nothing worth watching, then there's nothing I'm missing, so let's all go read a book.
In retrospect, I'm grateful to my parents for the experience of going to see movies in the theater, and the care that went in to choosing those movies: the summer blockbusters with the highest production value and the most substantial stories, whether action, suspense, or comedy. Making a point, if haphazardly followed, of seeing at least one of the films nominated for Best Picture. Sprinkling in Merchant/Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations, and most particularly not treating it as a girly thing to do. These provided me with the realization, even if I wasn't always interested in it, that there was something more worthwhile and enduring than the crap I would consistently choose to watch it allowed--Home Alone, Ace Ventura, that movie where Arnold Schwartzenegger has a baby. That experience was, in some way, cultural literacy, or its origins. I plotted a conventional-but-interested course in high school and the first part of college, classics and indie films, nothing very substantial. Then I woke up one morning in college and realized I had no vocabulary in film at all, had the proper response to this (mild shame), and subscribed to Netflix.
Now, of course, we don't go to movies. We will see the random comic book adaptation or similar (Snow White and the Huntsman killed us of that habit), or the random prestige film, but two of the last three things we went to see in a theater were Richard Linklatter movies (both excellent). The third was American Hustle. We contemplate, but do not attend, the old films that the Carolina Theatre screens... and that's it. We can watch our favorites at home and branch out a bit with the help of Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. Film is not unlike the novel at this point: a person can choose to live entirely in the past, and do so happily; living in the past is entirely compatible with one's tastes changing, even changing radically.
Looking into the future is depressing: an endless march of slight variations on things you have already seen if you've been in a theater in the last 15 years. 'Good' and 'bad' are such relative terms now. No one would dispute that the X-Men movies tend to be, on the whole, better than the average comic book movie; the best of them (X2) could be described as 'fairly good," and the rest are ideas executed at various degrees of hamhandedness. If the argument for Days of Future Past is that it's more like the good parts of First Class than The Last Stand, how could anyone see that as more than a guarantee the movie is not a trainwreck? I liked The Lego Movie--who didn't?--but the prospect of four more fills me with dread. Is there the slightest chance that these are not all slight variations on each other? People once thought Pirates of the Caribbean was original, before the second film destroyed all that goodwill. And then they made two more. This is true even outside the realm of comic book movies: Anchorman 2 proves only that it was a miracle the first one was good at all. The key to the old system was choice, the ability to select from amongst a (relatively) diverse slate of genres and themes, and choice is the one thing that doesn't much exist now.
The lover of reading in me is moderately pleased by this state of things: if there's nothing worth watching, then there's nothing I'm missing, so let's all go read a book.
22.12.14
The Lazy Writer's Guide to a Blockbuster Movie
Guardians of the Galaxy
Actual dialogue from this movie:
There's an old bit about how the difference between amateur clowns and professional clowns is that the professionals will never paint their entire faces. Too much expression comes from the area around the mouth; obscuring it is unnatural. If the clown's goal is to look recognizably human and not, say, creepy, they know that restraint is sometimes appropriate. Attention to detail is a sign of professionalism and care about one's metier. If people think those details don't really matter, and you should just have fun and enjoy it, well, that's a vote in favor of creepy clowns.
The dialogue above is a representative sample and not nearly exhaustive. Nobody paid much attention to the details for this movie. Had they done so, there would not have been an incomprehensible rush of names at the beginning, that eventually resolved itself into a proposed genocide of one people by the representative of another for violating (maybe?) a peace treaty whose terms and purposes were not well-established, despite far too many Phanton Menace-lite scenes of diplomatic negotiation. There was also an Infinity Stone, not that the movie told its viewer anything about it other than it had a lot of power and maybe could only be harnessed by certain types of beings. As with all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there is no clear metaphysics, or physics, or economy, or politics, which all great science-fiction movies--even all the good ones--manage to establish. The sequels to Guardians have already been announced, lest the viewer be concerned someone might die: all the important characters will stick around for another two movies, no matter how 'dead' the viewer is to believe they are 70% of the way through the film.*
There are also the political complaints: a multi-ethnic, multi-species group of heroes led by a white man.** Four women characters in total: a dead mother, who lied about the main character's father's identity; the appropriate-for-a-13-year-old 'love interest,' who is just a female man except when she inexplicably isn't able to fight for herself and needs to be saved; a slave; one of the clear bad guys.
Drax has some generic "you killed my family" backstory that is delivered entirely in dialogue, without any useful details. It's as though no one thought to do the Gladiator-style flashback, which requires no actual action sequences and takes up perhaps five minutes. Everyone else in the group goes along for the ride for reasons that are never made clear, or quickly abandoned. There's also no character development, a rising problem in science fiction and comic book movies. No one has even the most basic of character conflicts: no one has to make any difficult choice, never mind being troubled by the conscience of a Mystique or Nightcrawler. Has any character learned any lesson aside from, perhaps, "believe in yourself" or "trust in your team"?
And this leaves aside the question of whether this is a worthwhile type of movie to be making in the first place, but what it sets out to do, it does poorly. Why was it so successful? Why is it so well-regarded? Because it was explicitly not as gloom-filled as many other MCU and science fiction movies.
*I am not dumb. If someone is "dead" and the movie has an hour left, they are not dead. If Agent Coulson wasn't dead, ain't nobody in any Marvel movie ever going to be dead. So that's some metaphysics, at least.
**Professor X might run the X-Men, but he clearly has some ambivalence about it.
Actual dialogue from this movie:
"Put it down, you fool, or you'll destroy us all!"
"You're scared because you're soft!" [Pounds chest] "In here!"
"The time has come for you to renounce your paltry gods" (bonus: mangled pronunciation makes it sound more like "poultry gods")
[Hero miraculously survives] "But you're mortal! How?!"
There's an old bit about how the difference between amateur clowns and professional clowns is that the professionals will never paint their entire faces. Too much expression comes from the area around the mouth; obscuring it is unnatural. If the clown's goal is to look recognizably human and not, say, creepy, they know that restraint is sometimes appropriate. Attention to detail is a sign of professionalism and care about one's metier. If people think those details don't really matter, and you should just have fun and enjoy it, well, that's a vote in favor of creepy clowns.
The dialogue above is a representative sample and not nearly exhaustive. Nobody paid much attention to the details for this movie. Had they done so, there would not have been an incomprehensible rush of names at the beginning, that eventually resolved itself into a proposed genocide of one people by the representative of another for violating (maybe?) a peace treaty whose terms and purposes were not well-established, despite far too many Phanton Menace-lite scenes of diplomatic negotiation. There was also an Infinity Stone, not that the movie told its viewer anything about it other than it had a lot of power and maybe could only be harnessed by certain types of beings. As with all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there is no clear metaphysics, or physics, or economy, or politics, which all great science-fiction movies--even all the good ones--manage to establish. The sequels to Guardians have already been announced, lest the viewer be concerned someone might die: all the important characters will stick around for another two movies, no matter how 'dead' the viewer is to believe they are 70% of the way through the film.*
There are also the political complaints: a multi-ethnic, multi-species group of heroes led by a white man.** Four women characters in total: a dead mother, who lied about the main character's father's identity; the appropriate-for-a-13-year-old 'love interest,' who is just a female man except when she inexplicably isn't able to fight for herself and needs to be saved; a slave; one of the clear bad guys.
Drax has some generic "you killed my family" backstory that is delivered entirely in dialogue, without any useful details. It's as though no one thought to do the Gladiator-style flashback, which requires no actual action sequences and takes up perhaps five minutes. Everyone else in the group goes along for the ride for reasons that are never made clear, or quickly abandoned. There's also no character development, a rising problem in science fiction and comic book movies. No one has even the most basic of character conflicts: no one has to make any difficult choice, never mind being troubled by the conscience of a Mystique or Nightcrawler. Has any character learned any lesson aside from, perhaps, "believe in yourself" or "trust in your team"?
And this leaves aside the question of whether this is a worthwhile type of movie to be making in the first place, but what it sets out to do, it does poorly. Why was it so successful? Why is it so well-regarded? Because it was explicitly not as gloom-filled as many other MCU and science fiction movies.
*I am not dumb. If someone is "dead" and the movie has an hour left, they are not dead. If Agent Coulson wasn't dead, ain't nobody in any Marvel movie ever going to be dead. So that's some metaphysics, at least.
**Professor X might run the X-Men, but he clearly has some ambivalence about it.
12.12.14
Desert Island Top Five 30 Rock Episodes
I have a working theory that people can only ever be experimental across a few different types of culture. For the sake of balance, or time, there will be some area where they are utterly conventional. TV is that place for me: I'd subsist happily on a diet of Cheers, Friends, and 30 Rock without much complaint. The auteur-driven work that's more critically acclaimed sets itself up to be immune from criticism: if it's a drama that is occasionally funny, it gets credit for changing up the tone; if it's a comedy that spends as much time in drama, it's 'grounded'; if it's experimental, it doesn't matter whether the experiment succeeds or fails. None of this is particularly inspiring to me--watch as the loner genius man solves a gristly murder with the help of his only friend, bourbon. Just have a lot of jokes, and let most of them be funny.
"A Goon's Deed in a Weary World": Season 7 is an exercise in wish fulfillment, of which this episode--Kenneth becomes president of NBC, Liz meets her kids--is the highlight. Sad and happy at the same time.
"Rosemary's Baby": for a brief period, it seemed like Alec Baldwin would be able to do whatever he wanted. If his five-accents-in-two-minutes scene isn't right up there with his cameo in Glengarry, Glen Ross, someone isn't keeping score correctly.
"Leap Day": Ah, the made-up-holiday episode. Inspired.
"Cleveland": The song in this episode is the peak of 30 Rock music, which is saying something for a show that gave us "Muffin Top" and "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," among others. It's also impressive that the season finale plot begins five or six episodes before this one--30 Rock never did a lot of plotting, but this is intricate and well-played.
"The Head and the Hair": the low-key early-episode fake-out and build: "we all have uncles who are cops" indeed.
I have a working theory that people can only ever be experimental across a few different types of culture. For the sake of balance, or time, there will be some area where they are utterly conventional. TV is that place for me: I'd subsist happily on a diet of Cheers, Friends, and 30 Rock without much complaint. The auteur-driven work that's more critically acclaimed sets itself up to be immune from criticism: if it's a drama that is occasionally funny, it gets credit for changing up the tone; if it's a comedy that spends as much time in drama, it's 'grounded'; if it's experimental, it doesn't matter whether the experiment succeeds or fails. None of this is particularly inspiring to me--watch as the loner genius man solves a gristly murder with the help of his only friend, bourbon. Just have a lot of jokes, and let most of them be funny.
"A Goon's Deed in a Weary World": Season 7 is an exercise in wish fulfillment, of which this episode--Kenneth becomes president of NBC, Liz meets her kids--is the highlight. Sad and happy at the same time.
"Rosemary's Baby": for a brief period, it seemed like Alec Baldwin would be able to do whatever he wanted. If his five-accents-in-two-minutes scene isn't right up there with his cameo in Glengarry, Glen Ross, someone isn't keeping score correctly.
"Leap Day": Ah, the made-up-holiday episode. Inspired.
"Cleveland": The song in this episode is the peak of 30 Rock music, which is saying something for a show that gave us "Muffin Top" and "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," among others. It's also impressive that the season finale plot begins five or six episodes before this one--30 Rock never did a lot of plotting, but this is intricate and well-played.
"The Head and the Hair": the low-key early-episode fake-out and build: "we all have uncles who are cops" indeed.
11.12.14
Well, that misfired. The general idea: if you have to justify your writing as though its a niche concern, there will be a pressure to share and, thus, to overshare. But all of those niche concerns are pretty universal, and I do wonder if articles on, say, parenting, would be better if they began with the assumption of their subject matter's universality and importance; it's a slight but important shift between "I've had a problem with my child with x" and "a lot of parents have a problem with x". Writing from a third-person, objective perspective is not always earned, but there's no reason it shouldn't ever be used.
8.12.14
On Superman Being Boring
What follows is something that I have occasionally tweeted about, worked out as a full-length case.
In the midst of--let's not call it a 'creative renaissance'--the tremendous amount of money being poured into comic book movies, it has frequently been noted that there has never been a good movie about Superman. Perhaps the first two qualify, the ones made in the late 70s/early 80s, but none since. The recent attempts have all been relative commercial flops. The last film's attempt to make his story more interesting outraged fans by having Superman kill General Zod as its climax, after a long battle in which Superman shows an uncharacteristic disregard for the lives of innocent bystanders. People will say that the reason for the failure of these movies is that Superman is a boring character (e.g.), that having essentially limitless abilities means all challenges to his power are doomed to fail and essentially meaningless. No drama, no story.
The failure to make Superman into a compelling figure is a good sign of the general failure of imagination in the comic book renaissance, because, italics required: Superman is a heroic figure cast into America's exact position in the world, capable for doing whatever he wants, for all practical purposes, but also living with a moral code that places severe limitations on the use of that power. Superman's moral code serves as a critique of the powers that be in our world, who are prepared in certain circumstances to compromise their principles in the name of results. Precisely because he can do whatever he wants, Superman recognizes the fragility and importance of every human life; he will go to ridiculous and wholly gratuitous efforts to protect them. This is in direct contradistinction to every other comic book movie, where one Sacrificial Family Member or Love Interest comes to stand in for humanity as a whole. When 'ordinary people' are mentioned or considered, it's as a mass--in The Dark Knight, the great validation of common morality is about the behavior of people in a group; in Spider-Man, the New Yorkers who aid Spidey at a critical moment are just schmoes who could be anyone (and these masses will become mobs whenever narratively convenient).
The idea that comics take a certain dehumanization of the average person, that they approach a line of fascist worship of power for its own sake, has its definitive characterization in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Not surprisingly, giving someone great power--or practically infinite power, or power that can be redefined according to the needs of the story--makes them into a vehicle for wish fulfillment. But the line between killing/injuring in general and killing only bad guys is an exceedingly thin one. Killing an enemy combatant in a legally declared war is a lot closer to killing someone because you can than choosing to do neither, and if there's any distinction at all, it is in the specifics of the moral code in play. The unwillingness to use any means to win, no matter how important the situation, is one of the things that allows us to identify the good people, if any. The unwillingness to use power just because they can, and because it would be more convenient, is one of the things that makes them good.
The counterpoint is Harry Potter, where the good guys are notable for putting themselves at a strategic and tactical disadvantage because they, in anything but the most exigent circumstances, refuse to make use of the most powerful spells, because they value the humanity of individual human persons, do not like threatening the lives or wellbeing of innocents, Muggle or not, and recognize the tremendous horror of violence as experienced in the loss of loved ones. Molly Weasley can use these spells, when her daughter's life is threatened. Snape can, when it is necessary for the eventual victory of the cause, and Harry can, when it is literally the only option. But death is represented as loss, and other losses matter, too: Snape, Sirius Black, Dumbledore, even Dobby--all of them are treated as real tragedies in their own right, apart from consequences, and there's something equally sad about the fate of Neville's parents, or Hermione's. Each of the losses matter, and each has weight.
It's hard to imagine a comic book universe in which the Malfoys are allowed to live, and are treated with dignity because underneath their evilness is real familial affection, which redeems them in the end (bad guys whose goodness is not just the eventual winning impulse but definitive); so also with Snape. It's easy to imagine the opposite of Snape--the person who was good but goes to evil--but not the bad, or lost or misguided person, who is redeemed. This is also because his final redemption is in his death, which means he has to die in a definitive and irreversible way, which is Not Permitted in comic book and serialized fantasy/science fiction these days.*
*Contrast with Mystique in X-Men, whose small moments of redemption can only ever be temporary, because her role is "person who might be good or bad, we don't know" and is perpetually thus.
In the midst of--let's not call it a 'creative renaissance'--the tremendous amount of money being poured into comic book movies, it has frequently been noted that there has never been a good movie about Superman. Perhaps the first two qualify, the ones made in the late 70s/early 80s, but none since. The recent attempts have all been relative commercial flops. The last film's attempt to make his story more interesting outraged fans by having Superman kill General Zod as its climax, after a long battle in which Superman shows an uncharacteristic disregard for the lives of innocent bystanders. People will say that the reason for the failure of these movies is that Superman is a boring character (e.g.), that having essentially limitless abilities means all challenges to his power are doomed to fail and essentially meaningless. No drama, no story.
The failure to make Superman into a compelling figure is a good sign of the general failure of imagination in the comic book renaissance, because, italics required: Superman is a heroic figure cast into America's exact position in the world, capable for doing whatever he wants, for all practical purposes, but also living with a moral code that places severe limitations on the use of that power. Superman's moral code serves as a critique of the powers that be in our world, who are prepared in certain circumstances to compromise their principles in the name of results. Precisely because he can do whatever he wants, Superman recognizes the fragility and importance of every human life; he will go to ridiculous and wholly gratuitous efforts to protect them. This is in direct contradistinction to every other comic book movie, where one Sacrificial Family Member or Love Interest comes to stand in for humanity as a whole. When 'ordinary people' are mentioned or considered, it's as a mass--in The Dark Knight, the great validation of common morality is about the behavior of people in a group; in Spider-Man, the New Yorkers who aid Spidey at a critical moment are just schmoes who could be anyone (and these masses will become mobs whenever narratively convenient).
The idea that comics take a certain dehumanization of the average person, that they approach a line of fascist worship of power for its own sake, has its definitive characterization in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Not surprisingly, giving someone great power--or practically infinite power, or power that can be redefined according to the needs of the story--makes them into a vehicle for wish fulfillment. But the line between killing/injuring in general and killing only bad guys is an exceedingly thin one. Killing an enemy combatant in a legally declared war is a lot closer to killing someone because you can than choosing to do neither, and if there's any distinction at all, it is in the specifics of the moral code in play. The unwillingness to use any means to win, no matter how important the situation, is one of the things that allows us to identify the good people, if any. The unwillingness to use power just because they can, and because it would be more convenient, is one of the things that makes them good.
The counterpoint is Harry Potter, where the good guys are notable for putting themselves at a strategic and tactical disadvantage because they, in anything but the most exigent circumstances, refuse to make use of the most powerful spells, because they value the humanity of individual human persons, do not like threatening the lives or wellbeing of innocents, Muggle or not, and recognize the tremendous horror of violence as experienced in the loss of loved ones. Molly Weasley can use these spells, when her daughter's life is threatened. Snape can, when it is necessary for the eventual victory of the cause, and Harry can, when it is literally the only option. But death is represented as loss, and other losses matter, too: Snape, Sirius Black, Dumbledore, even Dobby--all of them are treated as real tragedies in their own right, apart from consequences, and there's something equally sad about the fate of Neville's parents, or Hermione's. Each of the losses matter, and each has weight.
It's hard to imagine a comic book universe in which the Malfoys are allowed to live, and are treated with dignity because underneath their evilness is real familial affection, which redeems them in the end (bad guys whose goodness is not just the eventual winning impulse but definitive); so also with Snape. It's easy to imagine the opposite of Snape--the person who was good but goes to evil--but not the bad, or lost or misguided person, who is redeemed. This is also because his final redemption is in his death, which means he has to die in a definitive and irreversible way, which is Not Permitted in comic book and serialized fantasy/science fiction these days.*
*Contrast with Mystique in X-Men, whose small moments of redemption can only ever be temporary, because her role is "person who might be good or bad, we don't know" and is perpetually thus.
18.11.14
One little thing to add to the discussion around Bill Cosby, who has taken some heat about a number of long-standing allegations of sexual assault. The new swarm of attention started when the comedian Hannibal Buress decided to do a little attention-grabbing shout-out on stage. Though a lot of the subsequent attention has focused on why a man completely unrelated to any of the incidents has credibility when the original accusers were ignored, and many have underestimated how career-boosting this move might be for Buress,* it remains a remarkable thing to do. It's the very rare example of someone with a public platform--a man with a public platform--using the sensationalist tastes of the internet-media complex to bring attention to an issue that is actually important.
See also Chris Kluwe on that troubling internet phenomenon: he will say a number of things that need to be said about the way women get treated because he has the unimpeachable confidence that, as a man, no one is going to attempt to hurt him as they have hurt the women who have done the same.
When you're in a position of power, or relative power, there are a lot of options: a problem can be ignored, or it can be subjected to an analysis that makes it partially the fault of all involved, it can be understood as a call to dignified suffering on the part of those who are hurt, it can be made the fault of those who provoked a response, or one can look with incredulity on the behavior of people who are like you to people who are not. The thing about being an educated white male heterosexual Christian in America is that while there are both many people who are like me and many who aren't, my thoughts, opinions and perspectives are going to be more respected on average than those people who are 'other' in some relevant respect. For people like me, Buress and Kluwe have to be the model: when a situation is intolerable, you have to use your position, no matter that you've done nothing to deserve it and it's not quite fair that you have it, in order to do something. For a few years now, the central question I ask myself about an issue is: "would any consequences flow to me if I chose to ignore this?" When the answer is 'no,' that's a sign that I should be concerned, that this is a place for moral inquiry to begin.
* "Fearlessly dedicated to the truth no matter the consequences" is a good look for a comedian, see also Chris Rock, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, and the long run of Lewis Black.
See also Chris Kluwe on that troubling internet phenomenon: he will say a number of things that need to be said about the way women get treated because he has the unimpeachable confidence that, as a man, no one is going to attempt to hurt him as they have hurt the women who have done the same.
When you're in a position of power, or relative power, there are a lot of options: a problem can be ignored, or it can be subjected to an analysis that makes it partially the fault of all involved, it can be understood as a call to dignified suffering on the part of those who are hurt, it can be made the fault of those who provoked a response, or one can look with incredulity on the behavior of people who are like you to people who are not. The thing about being an educated white male heterosexual Christian in America is that while there are both many people who are like me and many who aren't, my thoughts, opinions and perspectives are going to be more respected on average than those people who are 'other' in some relevant respect. For people like me, Buress and Kluwe have to be the model: when a situation is intolerable, you have to use your position, no matter that you've done nothing to deserve it and it's not quite fair that you have it, in order to do something. For a few years now, the central question I ask myself about an issue is: "would any consequences flow to me if I chose to ignore this?" When the answer is 'no,' that's a sign that I should be concerned, that this is a place for moral inquiry to begin.
* "Fearlessly dedicated to the truth no matter the consequences" is a good look for a comedian, see also Chris Rock, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, and the long run of Lewis Black.
On Lists, and the Popularity Thereof
The internet is filled with lists. Leaving aside economic motives for producing web content that people will find objectionable, good-faith lists have to embody two related requirements: they position the writer within the ranks of people who follow whatever is being listed, and they serve as a signal to people who have no familiarity with the genre what those in-the-know consider to be worthwhile. Lists on Gawker sites exist to start arguments. Lists on Buzzfeed or The Toast exist to make the reader feel hip should they get all the references. Pitchfork's lists are good exercises in both functions: within a community, they signal the willingness to accept or reject the hype for different musicians; outside that community, they function as a comprehensive guide to what is good in certain genres of hipster-approved music. Book rankings, like Modern Library's 20th Century Novels list, or film rankings, like those of AFI or Sight and Sound, are exercises in canon-making, but allow people to make certain claims about themselves based on where they disagree with the ranking.*
Given these two functions, this ranking of Sonic Youth albums is quite odd. The purpose of the list is, as the author announces it, to establish his credibility as a superfan, hip and knowledgable.** If he did not expressly announce this, making Daydream Nation--the generally agreed best Sonic Youth album--#6. One does not bury an obvious #1 unless Making A Statement. The list, however, culminates with Dirty, which contains five or six of Sonic Youth's most accessible, poppy songs. In other terms: it's like making a list that situates itself as bold and contrarian by asserting II to be the best Led Zeppelin album, not IV, or that Steven Spielberg the best director--neither implausible nor original.
*Let me tell you sometime about my feelings on The Best Years of Our Lives, or, say, Faulkner.
**It is also to make the bizarre argument that Sonic Youth is best when it's Thurston Moore's band which, given Moore's recent shredding of the principles he built his stardom around, is an odd choice, to say the least.
Given these two functions, this ranking of Sonic Youth albums is quite odd. The purpose of the list is, as the author announces it, to establish his credibility as a superfan, hip and knowledgable.** If he did not expressly announce this, making Daydream Nation--the generally agreed best Sonic Youth album--#6. One does not bury an obvious #1 unless Making A Statement. The list, however, culminates with Dirty, which contains five or six of Sonic Youth's most accessible, poppy songs. In other terms: it's like making a list that situates itself as bold and contrarian by asserting II to be the best Led Zeppelin album, not IV, or that Steven Spielberg the best director--neither implausible nor original.
*Let me tell you sometime about my feelings on The Best Years of Our Lives, or, say, Faulkner.
**It is also to make the bizarre argument that Sonic Youth is best when it's Thurston Moore's band which, given Moore's recent shredding of the principles he built his stardom around, is an odd choice, to say the least.
5.8.14
"First of all, it’s not my job to make people feel better about liking something that is really, really popular"
Agree wholeheartedly:
I found that bit of the review to be accurate, and the worldview it describes a bit confusing. Through many years of reading, watching movies, listening to music, etc, I'm not sure that I've ever had the coercive expectation that people like the things I like. I can remember being an R.E.M. and Rolling Stones fan in high school and carrying around the expectation that I'd be the only one and that was fine. In some ways better, of course, for all the usual reasons of snobbery, which has its own pleasures.
This is not to say I don't have opinions--any reader of this blog will know better than that--nor that I don't have an internal hierarchy of aesthetic pleasures. I just can't imagine having my day ruined because someone disagrees, because most people will probably disagree. And that's fine. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 seems to me a masterpiece, and I am happy to put together an argument to that effect. But I can just as easily imagine thinking it good but not particularly liking it, or envision those technical and substantive choices in constructing the book that I find compelling not being the sort of thing to which someone else might respond, and I can even conceptualize rejecting 900-page books on principle. I like the book for objective reasons and for subjective reasons about the point in my life when I read it. That combination won't be replicated for anyone else, so even someone who thinks well of the book will do so for different reasons.
If there's a cause for this sort of attitude (see also what happens when I mention to certain people never having seen The Wire or Breaking Bad), it's the idea of a aesthetic object as a cultural signal. It's hard to get worked up about someone's feelings on any one particular book when your universe is "books, obviously, though some and not others"--any particular one is fungible, and not liking one book may be balanced by liking another--or many others.
There may be another kind of friendly fascism at work here too, but let me at least try to say some nice things first. I realize that there’s no way to mollify the devotees of the Marvel movie universe, who not only demand total box-office domination (which they’re definitely going to get, at least this weekend) but also total toadying subservience to the tide of Irresistible Marvel Fun. First of all, it’s not my job to make people feel better about liking something that is really, really popular. There are a whole lot of places you can get that, and honestly that desire for universal affirmation is kind of bizarre.
I found that bit of the review to be accurate, and the worldview it describes a bit confusing. Through many years of reading, watching movies, listening to music, etc, I'm not sure that I've ever had the coercive expectation that people like the things I like. I can remember being an R.E.M. and Rolling Stones fan in high school and carrying around the expectation that I'd be the only one and that was fine. In some ways better, of course, for all the usual reasons of snobbery, which has its own pleasures.
This is not to say I don't have opinions--any reader of this blog will know better than that--nor that I don't have an internal hierarchy of aesthetic pleasures. I just can't imagine having my day ruined because someone disagrees, because most people will probably disagree. And that's fine. Roberto Bolaño's 2666 seems to me a masterpiece, and I am happy to put together an argument to that effect. But I can just as easily imagine thinking it good but not particularly liking it, or envision those technical and substantive choices in constructing the book that I find compelling not being the sort of thing to which someone else might respond, and I can even conceptualize rejecting 900-page books on principle. I like the book for objective reasons and for subjective reasons about the point in my life when I read it. That combination won't be replicated for anyone else, so even someone who thinks well of the book will do so for different reasons.
If there's a cause for this sort of attitude (see also what happens when I mention to certain people never having seen The Wire or Breaking Bad), it's the idea of a aesthetic object as a cultural signal. It's hard to get worked up about someone's feelings on any one particular book when your universe is "books, obviously, though some and not others"--any particular one is fungible, and not liking one book may be balanced by liking another--or many others.
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