Perdido Street Station Book Club: The End

Spoilers below the jump for those who aren't reading along or aren't finished. On Monday, I'll open up a discussion of what we should do next.

The first time I read this final chapter, I almost tossed my Kindle across the room in disgust. We've come all this way, through all this mess, and it turns out that it all happened because one of our putative heroes is a rapist? I was just furious, reading this after watching Lin get destroyed, remembering Derkhan's lost ear. The idea that the whole damn book was something of a red herring, that Mieville kept the attack out of the conversation, tricked us into thinking that garuda were somehow savage, into forgetting that Yagharek had been punished for some crime. I do think that some of that moral disgust is warranted. There's something I dislike about condensing this kind of fairly sophisticated moral discussion into the final moments of the book, into a literary choice to help us along the path to forgetting that Yagharek was guilty of something and to ignoring whatever that something might have been.

That said, on a second reading, I actually think this turns out to be a potentially feminist reading of the aftermath of sexual assault, and of feminist allies' responses to it. Isaac's initial reaction, before Yagharek's violation is translated for him, is to insist that whatever the garuda did, he redeemed himself by helping Isaac and Derkhan. But once that translation's made, he sees—and so do we:
What he saw most immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities. The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then...what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child? The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?
There's that doubt at the end, the phrasing provides implication that maybe Kar'uchai is stealing Isaac's choice to respect Yagharek by giving him this information. But really, I think it's Yagharek who stole Isaac's chances at respect, and stole his own chances to make his own reputation from a neutral baseline.

And I really like Kar'uchai's insistence that while being raped closed off future avenues for her, it did not change any of her interior self:
I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb'lin. I am not abused or defiled...or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was...judged....Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims.
It's a useful formulation, one that's made possible by the framing of Yagharek's crime. He stole something from her, rather than doing something to her. He was the one who changed. The future changed. Nothing in her essential self has been altered. I think it's worthwhile that Mieville leaves that gap between Kar'uchai's explanation and Isaac's ability to understand. In a way, it's his most successful creation of an alien in the book: it turns out the garudas are just as rational as humans are, perhaps considerably more just. But however much we want to make the conceptual leap to see things the way they do, the chasm between us, and them, remains.

But where does that leave the book? I wrote in the last piece how I feel Mieville is challenging us by asking us to accept a story with an essentially neutral impact. Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek are ultimately invisible. They don't change New Crobuzon society a whit. They're important only in that they allow New Crobuzon to continue exactly as it was before. They preserve all the city's choices. And we have to accept that ultimately, those choices may be terrible. This final section is a dramatization of that conceptual leap for us as readers, a personal articulation of a somewhat difficult act of storytelling consumption. I think in a way it's pretty cheap and exploitative to use sexual assault to make that point, and I think the choice of something so ugly and impactful is a reflection of the fact that the slake-moths don't quite work as monsters. If we truly felt their threat, their power to annihilate choice for everyone, forever, Mieville wouldn't have to bring us back down to the worst of behavior to make his point.

Flyboys

George Lucas is apparently making us more Star Wars prequels, just not about the Skywalkers. I have a hard time being shocked or enraged about this, but I also have little hope that it'll work. The folks who have filled out Lucas's byblows, the people who gave true life and breath to Wedge Antilles, who created Corran Horn, who have filled in the past and the future of the universe Lucas gave broad outline and intriguing details to, are uniformly not George Lucas. And he hasn't done exceptionally well creating new core characters himself. I can see, however, how he'd feel sort of stuck. If he can't create a compelling expansion of a universe that was his idea in the first place, how scary must it be to try to live outside of his greatest success?

That said, he did write an upcoming movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails. I'm reasonably hopeful for this, if only because the cast includes Andre Royo, the insanely talented David Oyelowo, who was fantastic in Spooks, and Elijah Kelley, who should have been snapped up by everybody after Hairspray. They're all in minor parts, but I could watch all three of them just about forever. And I think this is good subject material for Lucas. He clearly digs, and has a feel for, the camaraderie of fighter pilots. And frankly, I appreciate that he's lending his name to something that's going to get a lot of talented black actors work. For Lucas's sake, for the sake of Star Wars nerds everywhere who need him to move on, and for the sakes of these three actors, I hope the movie is a success.

Show Her the Money. Seriously.

I understand that Emily Nussbaum's column about what we demand from television creators is more about the creative process and the way folks incorporate feedback. But puzzlingly, she's ignoring a huge benefit of online fan communities and a greater interaction between fans and writers and creators: it creates new sources of revenue for creators, and in some cases, keeps alive careers that might have withered in days when television writers and creators were more anonymous, and less powerful as brands.

Joss Whedon may sing funny songs about exploring the creative process and releasing DVDs with deleted scenes:



But without such insatiable and quantifiable fan enthusiasm for his work, and without the work that Whedon's done, personally, to generate and prove that enthusiasm, the guy probably wouldn't get to keep creating television shows, much less be in a position to direct a huge Avengers movie (his horror movie, Cabin in the Woods, is lingering without a release dated). A show like Community is probably alive despite its poor ratings in no small part because it has an active fan community and Dan Harmon is willing to engage with that. Fans who are willing to buy DVDs with extras can make a show that might not have been previously commercially successful viable.

This is obviously good for creators, period, but it's also good for shows that might not attract huge audiences but that have artistic merit. If the the price creators have to pay for pursuing unusual visions or making more money or staying in the game is interaction, that doesn't seem like a dreadful thing to ask. Obviously, some folks can't handle criticism, or resent having to do the promotional or reach-out work. And some folks are happy to work relatively anonymously to create test-marketed fare and to make a fine living doing that. But I think Nussbaum should at least acknowledge some of the benefits.

Multiplicity

Dear Johnny Depp,

I love you, but you are no William Powell. And here are two scenes that should tell you why. First, multiple Depps in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End:



Depp tends towards twitchy, strange, he's a sublimely odd sex symbol if people are basing their fantasies on his roles rather than simply the image of him. By contrast, when William Powell runs into himself on a book cover, he's laconic, even cheerful:



Powell is debonair and witty. As Nick Charles, the role Depp is apparently eager to appropriate from him, Powell's deviance from the norm lies not in a willingness to be strange, but in his abilities and his reluctance to action. I think Depp's a poor match for the role, and that really any actor is: the class tensions, the cheerful alcoholism, the banter between husband and wife are all very specific to their era and I think would update poorly. And in any case, Powell and Myrna Loy are perfect. It's hard to imagine who'd have the gall to try to replace her, either.

Cheers,
Alyssa

Musings on Austen

I'd never actually read Sense and Sensibility until this weekend, but I'm glad I did. Its social satire isn't as sharply hilarious as Pride and Prejudice's or Emma's, perhaps because the rich people involved aren't simply behaving badly, they're doing bad things that have material consequences, whether it's forcing people out of their homes or into penury or denying them incomes that would help them marry and live more comfortably.

It's also an interesting book in that the male main character, Edward Ferrars, is weaker than the typical Austen hero. Mr. Darcy's flaws, for example, arise from a surplus of character, fine feeling and attachment to honor. Mr. Knightley's flaws are only flaws from Emma's perspective—they're obvious to the reader as evidence of character—and his only real trouble is not declaring himself to Emma sooner and allowing confusion to take root. Edward, on the other hand, exhibits less strength of character. He makes a rather silly engagement and fails to find a way out of it. And rather than pursuing his choice of career, he spends a lot of time hanging about and disappointing his mother. Austen does a great job of establishing why Elinor's a worthy object of his love, but doesn't do nearly so much to prove why Edward's worthy of  her affection: this is one area where Ang Lee's movie is really an improvement, fleshing out Edward's character considerably. Much like the regret I think many readers feel over Jo March not marrying Laurie, I sort of feel as if it might have been fair for Elinor to end up with Colonel Brandon.

And as a side note, is it me, or is Bones really just an extended Sense and Sensibility remake with Angela as Marianne, Brennan as Elinor, and many, many more corpses?

Poetry and Prose

My friends Tyler and Mike recently wrote unrelated but provocative blog posts about prose and poetry that together got me thinking. Mike, in a piece about the inarticulate distinctions between poetry and prose, argues that we should just all try to tell stories without drawing a significant distinction in craft or name between kinds of lyrical writing.  And Tyler writes what I think is my favorite piece so far on the futility of trying to turn For Colored Girls... into a traditional narrative movie. This is the key bit, to me:
Some literary work should not be made by into films. Or more pointedly, until studios are comfortable producing and marketing all kinds of films - films with traditional narratives, films without - they should stay away from work like For Colored Girls.
I think this may be a better articulation of the argument Mike is trying to make. It's entirely reasonable to argue that Paradise Lost has more in common with Alexandre Dumas' work than it does with e.e. cummings', and that Archy and Mehitabel, with its balanced dedication to the rigors of form and the demands of narrative lies somewhere in between.


There's no question that people who are doing narrative work are doing something different from people who are not. It may be that the form that work comes in is less instructive than the work's purpose, whether it's story-telling, descriptive, evocative, polemical, whatever. But I don't think that means we collapse all distinctions between poetry and prose. Perhaps we just realign them.



Forever Young

Given my music-video obsession, I feel a bit out of sorts that I haven't been able to come up with something to say about Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" clip:



The video's undeniably cute, and Smith seems like a talented kid, even if I am not exceptionally moved by the song, which is no "I Want You Back."



It just seems cute, and boppy, and fine, and I wonder if maybe that's the appropriate reaction for a 26-year-old to have to a music video starring a 9-year-old. She's a kid, and I'm not going to rush to anoint her either a musical genius or a no-talent who got a deal based on her parents' connections. I think she's neither, rather, she's a kid with some undeniable skills and the resources to execute them on a large scale.  I'll be curious to see what she grows into, and what she wants to be when she grows up, but I have a hard time putting the weight of my critical judgement on her, however well-backed she is. And I kind of like the idea of Jay-Z expanding into kids' music around the time that rumors start suggesting their might be a little Hov.

Bad for the Gays

I wanted to believe that I Love You, Phillip Morris was having trouble finding distribution because it was a sincere and moving look at a gay relationship. In fact, it looks like it might have had trouble finding distribution because it's probably terrible:



"Being gay is expensive." Really? That's your excuse for a life of crime? Having your boyfriend's prison attacker beat up is supposed to be super-cute and romantic? It's yet another story of a closeted Christian gay guy with a patsy of a wife, in this case, Leslie Mann, who needs to be saved from this kind of work? This looks like the Liar, Liar of gay prison romances. I'll pass.

Emotional Articulateness and Emotional Immaturity

Taylor Swift's at an interesting inflection point in her career. She's won critical acclaim and a lot of awards, and made an enormous amount of money by giving articulate voice to the rather universal experience of teenage girls discovering love, attraction, and sex for the first time. But she's also old enough, rich, and experienced enough that some of the music she's making is starting to sound less like wise perspective and less like immature griping and tunnel vision.

First, there's the simple fact that "Dear John" is widely believed to be about her relationship with John Mayer (and her possible first sexual experience being with him). If that's true, and Swift has frequently said her songs are based in real-life experiences, it's about as petty as tearing your ex a new one on C-SPAN. You are not some powerless chick who needs to humiliate someone to get revenge. You're a mega-star. And something like this looks pretty pathetic to an older guy, or to anyone else who has been through the experience of a thwarted love. We may fantasize about doing what Carrie Underwood did to her cheatin' man's car, but a woman who commits some kind of public destructive act against a guy who did her wrong doesn't actually win our approbation, nor should it:



Second, it's just a bad song. The song's theoretically about taking responsibility and reassessing her mistakes, but in the chorus, Swift puts it all off on the guy, and in a surprisingly poorly-written set of lines. "I see it all now that you're gone / Don't you think I was too young to be messed with / The girl in the dress cried the whole way home / I should have known." Seriously, "the girl in the dress"? That is clearly phrased that way to provide the rhyme with "messed with" and the right scansion between the false rhymes of "home" and "known." It's transparently sloppy lyrics writing.

And perhaps someone who keeps a list of traitors and is blindly optimistic about a dude with a terrible Hollywood bachelor reputation and thinks of guys' immature sexual behavior as "dark, twisted games" is too young to be dating older guys. But Swift has a lot of money. She lives on her own. She'll be 21 next month. She's had a number of relationships. At some point, she's going to be at a point on the learning curve when this kind of public self-pity isn't winning or universal, it's just annoying.

The Case for Botox

Nicole Kidman's face has restricted her range of emotion some in recent films, which is too bad, since she's a marvelous actress and I hate to see her fall out of the first ranks (to be fair, the spectacular failure of Australia cannot be blamed on her injectionist).  But the trailer for Rabbit Hole suggests she might be rather well-suited to take roles where characters are frozen by some overpowering emotion, in this case, grief:



She really does look excellent in this. That scene where she's hitting herself is in emotional territory most mainstream films fear to tread on, and I like that. I hope Aaron Eckhart's role ends up being a little less clean than he appears in this. The man's gone a bit too conventional on us. We need a bit of that Two-Face horror, that Erin Brockovich scruff back.

This Is The Way The World Ends

So, uh, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are doing August, Osage County? Nathaniel Rogers makes an interesting, if not wholly persuasive, case against casting Meryl Streep as Violet: I think the real problem is physical. Perhaps it's just me, but I saw Estelle Parsons in the role on Broadway and I think her diminutive stature helped amplify her performance. That so much venom could come from such a small person was fascinating and compelling. A larger woman, to me, would look more like a bully and less like a force of destruction (though to be fair, Violet is a bully, as well as a drug-addicted, broken black hole of a woman).

But my real problem is with Roberts. I think she's often best in roles where she's playing clever rather than intellectual, and I think Barbara definitely is an intellectual. I have trouble seeing Roberts sell lines like the fabulous "Oh, 'forsook' you and the horse you rode in on" from the first act. Roberts doesn't often sell depth or introspection well, though I don't think the trainwreck that was Eat Pray Love was particularly her fault. And she also isn't particularly adept at the uglier sides of anger. She was fine in Closer, but to me, that movie really belonged to Natalie Portman. And her anger in movies like Erin Brockovich or even America's Sweethearts tends to be righteous rather than born out of deep dysfunction.


There just needs to be more of a commitment to ugliness all around here. I can see Helen Mirren as Violet, she's got that sting to her. But I don't know who I'd put on-screen as Barbara. Maybe Deirdre Lovejoy. She sure deserves better than junk like Outlaw.

Not All Players Are Equal

I get why CBS and other networks might want to use Hulu as a portal to their own web-based video players. It makes sense to snag viewers who want to go to one site for all of their streaming entertainment, but to get them to a place where CBS presumably gets all the revenue from online advertising (even if there are costs associated with doing the work themselves). Except, CBS's video player is pretty seriously unreliable. It freezes up. It refuses to play video on the grounds that I've got some ad blocker installed on my browser (I don't) and has the same problem when I switch to another browser. I know this is the internet and streaming video's still a relatively new technological proposition. But man, no matter how much I like Hawaii Five-0, and I like it tremendously, the glitches are enough for me to want to wait and finish out the first season on Netflix. There's a definite viewer advantage to streaming these things through companies that just care about content delivery, and so have bothered to get it right.

Perdido Street Station Book Club Part VII: Invisible Cities

I'm sorry for not getting this up on Friday. It's been a busy and complicated couple of weeks in Alyssa-Land, but I promise this week will be better. And we'll finish this up on Friday. As per usual, spoilers below the jump. Please don't spoil the final chapter for anyone who hasn't gotten to it yet.
I found a lot of things about this section of the book either narratively unsatisfying or reflections of problems I've had with Perdido Street Station along the way. But I also think it's a reflection of the project Mieville's taken on with this novel, and I respect that.

In a lot of science fiction and fantasy, the heroes don't merely neutralize a problem. They take on a problem, and along the way, they make the world a better place. Luke and Han don't just blow up the Death Star, they begin weakening a tyrannical Empire that makes life worse for millions. Alanna of Trebond doesn't just kill Duke Roger, she makes Tortall a better place for women, sets the country on a path to a stronger ruler, and takes a stand for a more benevolent use of magic. Stories work this way because we want to believe in justice and progress. But they also condition us to expect it. We want satisfaction out of our fantasy, we want to see common people raised above their station, we want society to get a little bit better, at minimum.

Mieville is rejecting that need for satisfaction, for progress, for justice, for elevation. His characters are small figures. They are invisible to the city, and even in their greatest acts, on the margins of society. They will receive no recompense for their losses. The best they can hope for is to keep the city in neutral. That's profoundly unsatisfying, but what Mieville does in this chapter is dramatize it, show us that the characters feel some lack of satisfaction, some distance, some numbness. In a way, just as he rejects their importance and their potential, Mieville brings his characters closer to our experience of reading than he does at any other point in the book.

Take the title location of the story, for example. Early in the section, Isaac tells the Construct Council that getting to Perdido Street Station is important: "'Why do you not perform the operation here?' asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely. 'It wouldn't work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city's focal point, where all the lines converge. We have to go to Perdido Street Station.'" At last, it seems we're going to get a justification for the title of the novel. Something magical's going to happen at Perdido Street Station, our characters will get in touch with some sort of central power of the city. Except they never even make it there. "Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before...betrayal," Isaac thinks. "But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks."

And Mieville makes it clear that his characters were always distant from the center of power and respectability in New Crobuzon. Whereas in earlier chapters, they were rebels, artists, choosing their isolation, now, they're just misfits: "They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible. They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibs of shopkeepers and customers."

We never get a moment of heroic justification, either. This is a world with no swords in stones, no lightsabers. The characters' invisibility and seeming irrelevance is their strength. In this climax, Isaac brings down the slakemoths with what looks like junk, the ruins of his crisis engine: "Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish. Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare."

It's the same with the cable, the miraculous network the Construct Council's worshippers string across the city:
They moved the cable up and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains in the wall's structure, and joining twisting skeins of other pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The drab cable was invisible. It was nerve fibre in the city's ganglions, a thick cord among many.
Even the man who is sacrificed to kill the slake-moths is irrelevant, anonymous even though he has a name, chosen by Derkhan because he seems sick enough to sacrifice but healthy enough to survive to the critical point. He doesn't matter. He's just useful. And after the operation is complete, it's Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek's tininess, nigh-irrelevance, invisibility, that allows them to escape:
They might have walked past Isaac and his companions a thousand times. there was an infinity of holes in New Crobuzon. There were far more hiding places than there were people to hide. Motley's troops never had a chance. On nights like that one, when rain and streetlamp light made all the lines and edges of the city complex—a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers—it was an endless, recursive, secretive place.
All of this is only possible if the characters aren't elevated. They can live as long as they don't become heroes of the common people, if they avoid becoming legends like the fascinating, frustratingly deus-ex-machina-like Jack Half-a-Prayer whose convenient appearance is a total waste by Mieville, a rendering of a fascinating legend boring by making him invincible and his motivations for intervention entirely obscure.

And of course, their victory is in maintenance of the status quo. New Crobuzon is no more just, no more secure, for their intervention:
The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchment still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate. But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.
The only thing the city wins is responsibility for itself.

In a way, I thought, the contrasting perspectives of Derkhan and Pengefinchess as they say goodbye to each other beautifully dramatize the feeling we, as readers, have by the end of the chapter. The acquaintance has been glancing, the victory partial, futile, frustrating, null. And yet, there's some attachment. From Derkhan's perspective:
It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council's vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection. But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go.
Pengefinchess feels even less sentimental:
Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on. In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a great deal at Stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy....
I'll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I'll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about.
There's a value in that fleeting attachment, they both find, a lingering. They will all know that they participated in an extraordinary effort even if they reap nothing, or an exceptionally bitter harvest from it. They will have to live with that. And so will we. In a way, though, I wish Mieville had just ended the novel with this passage, which to me is a dramatization of what makes New Crobuzon random, and beautiful, and terrifying, and ultimately worth saving—in other words, the Weaver:
In the last room on the attic corridor, they found a militiaman sitting with his back to the wall, comatose and alone. A bizarre, beautiful glass flintlock lay across his lap. A game of tic-tac-toe was scratched in the wood by his feet. Crosses had won, in three moves.
Except really, it's all for nought.

Celebrity Comes Full Circle

The kind publicity people at Jezebel sent me an email about the fundraising drive the blog's doing for one of the couples on Teen Mom. While I think it's sweet to want to reward kids who seem to be making mature decisions, I personally (and everything in this paragraph should be interpreted as a personal explanation for why I can't promote the drive rather than as judgement on anyone's giving) have a pretty hard time getting on board with a giving effort that fronts the disclaimer "Obviously we can't guarantee that they'll use the cash to pay for college, but they've demonstrated their strong decision-making skills in the past, and we trust that they'll put the money to good use." Obviously people have the right to give their money to whoever and to give it however they choose, and I understand not wanting to be paternalistic. But I tend to believe charitable giving, as opposed to personal giving to someone you are close to, should support sustainable institutions rather than individuals and should have standards built in to ensure the money will be used well, if not for a very specified purpose.


But the thing I find really interesting about it is to me, this drive represents a coming-full-circle of celebrity in our reality culture era. Certainly, stardom's become a lot less about admiring untouchable screen deities than it once was. Someone like Lindsay Lohan has long been a vehicle for our moral disapprobation rather than an object of worship for a long time. But with this drive, we're treating celebrities as people we are responsible for, and can substantively help. Stars aren't just touchable now, they're weaker than we are. 

Taking Lives

Netflix has put more seasons of Spooks on Instant Watch, much to my delight (though for some reason, Season Five isn't available, which is rather vexing). I still think one of the best summings-up of the show comes from the Twitter feed of drsamueljohnson, who declared it an "Altar on which a patriotick Mummer-Troupe does save Britain by frequent Sacrifice of its attractive Members." The frequent deaths of key team members on Spooks makes sense from both a plausibility and an artistic sense: the willingness to kill anyone who goes into the field illustrates the danger of the work involved, and it serves to dramatize the fact that the show's bureaucrats, like Harry and Ruth, are in fact the most important members of the operation. But I do think the show raises important questions about circumstances under which it's effective to kill characters.


I think George R.R. Martin and Joss Whedon are both instructive cases to consider. Both use character deaths to illustrate the consequences of the enterprises their plots are concerned with. 


Whedon has a bad reputation for killing beloved characters, but he tends to use sacrifice of sweet souls, the closest things he has to innocents, to emphasize the cost of choices the people dearest to them make. Tara's death is a vehicle for Willow to go completely over the edge, but she's also killed because there are consequences to a world where magic and the laws of behavior are increasingly uncontrolled. Buffy could be just as dangerous as Warren if she wanted to accumulate power (Faith isn't that forward-thinking, I think), but having him accidentally cause his girlfriend's death isn't enough of an illustration of that. Having him commit murder when he's thwarted and angry is a more overt illustration of his unpredictability, anger, and power, and having him kill someone strategically marginal but emotionally central is a great illustration of his malignancy. Zoe and Wash want to have a normal marriage, but they've chosen a way of making a living that makes that essentially impossible. I agree that killing Wash the way Whedon did in Serenity was poorly planned, but I do think that ending their marriage was a useful dramatization of the pain that was an inevitable result of the gap between their hopes and their choices.


Martin, on the other hand, describes scenarios in which everyone in society, from kings to baker's boys, is in fairly serious danger of violent death. That makes the death rates of major characters in A Song of Ice and Fire actually rather reasonable, where I'd guess the death rates for characters in Spooks are actually somewhat high for covert operatives (though I'd be open to corrective if folks have better information). The problem is more that he's tended to undercut those deaths: characters we thought were dead turned out never to have died at all, or to have been brought back from the dead. At this point in the series, no death can be trusted to be final, or even to have occurred, so death has ceased to have the impact it had earlier in the novels (except in some rare cases like the Red Wedding). 


In other words, fictional death is a lot like fictional sex, I think. Each death, in each circumstance, is different. There's nothing wrong with killing one character or many as the narrative demands. It's just a matter of getting all the impact of each death right. Taking a life may not be as consequential on the page or screen as it is in life, but if you're going to kill someone in fiction, you ought to do it with mindfulness and style.

Let's Get It On

It's true that sex scenes are hard to write. But I think the explanation for that is simpler than a literary mystery: sex is hard to write about because sex is generally something that human beings don't understand terribly well. And capturing the irrationality of the truly erotic is only one of the writing challenges involved. Sex can be painful, vengeful, confused, comforting, sorrowing: it's not always about making the scene hot. Michael Chabon tends to do best when he's describing the moment before coitus begins, while George R. R. Martin, who writes a lot of sex scenes, does best describing the glow after completion. A.S. Byatt tends towards great metaphors or moments. Tamora Pierce writes scenes that are appropriate for an audience new to, or on the cusp of sex, attuned to anxiety and emotional resonance. No single author is going to master all the circumstances or natures of the sex scene, if only because there is no such definitive thing.

Hard Work

Unstoppable is, in certain ways, a completely formulaic action movie. It features an odd couple, divided by age and race. It involves a highly improbable but disastrous scenario. It taps into a contemporary disaster fear, in this case, nuclear, chemical, or biological detonation or release. It involves placing adorable children at risk:



But it is notable that the heroes are, rather than members of the military or intelligence services or virtuous white-collar citizens, blue-collar workers with considerable amounts to lose, at least in that they both have loving families. There's been a ton of buzz over the Chilean miners, and reports that there will be a Lifetime movie about them at minimum. But as captivated as the world was by the plight of workers who do jobs many of us would never consent to take, in America, we don't really like to watch movies that dramatize the risks folks who take those jobs accept. Whether that's because movies about people trapped in mines, or injured in industrial accidents, or hurt slaughtering hogs make us feel embarrassed or guilty, I don't know. But I suppose if we don't want to do these sorts of jobs, I suppose we don't want to think very hard about the fact that anyone has to do them at all.

Reality Is Relative

I feel sort of horrible about the fact that I'll end up watching the second half of the Real Housewives of Washington, DC reunion show tonight. I watched the show religiously for work this season, but it wasn't nearly as entertaining as the other installments of the franchise that I've followed (mostly New York, a little Atlanta). I tend to think it's because the show was a little too real. The animosities between the characters were real, they weren't motivated by pretend slights and misunderstandings. A marriage dissolved, and even if we didn't see the worst of it, the unpleasantness we did get on-screen was tremendously sour and snippy.

By contrast, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which premiered last week after the first half of the DC reunion show, is the kind of fluffy, stupid reality the franchise does best. These women's absurdly pampered lives have nothing to do with the rest of our experiences, but that's the fun of it, peeking in at a place we'll never be allowed and that we don't necessarily want to spend time in at all, a little amused, and a little envious, and dead sure that if we had that kind of money we wouldn't be nearly that tacky. We don't want reflections of larger realities from this franchise, we don't want genuine emotion, we want to spy, and to gossip.

As a side note, is there anyone who enjoys watching Andy Cohen on screen? I find him weirdly off-putting and tacky. I think it's partially the absolutely repulsive set for Watch What Happens, and part of it is this deeply-fake bonding with women he makes an extraordinarily good living making look bad on-screen, and who may hate him, but have to kiss up to him. There's just something sour about his appearances. He's over the line between real and fake, but too far in the wrong direction.

Young Love

I'm glad to hear that Kevin Keller, the gay character Archie comics introduced this summer, is getting a spin-off series. I just hope they give him a boyfriend, or at least a love interest.

I'm all for getting teenaged gay characters in all sorts of media. But I think it's really important that their struggles and character growth not be limited to struggles with basic acceptance, whether it's their own coming to terms with their sexual orientation, or their coming out to parents and peers. It's a more subtle kind of exclusion to lock gay teens out from dating, to suggest that simple self-acceptance and pride is the be-all and end-all of what gay kids can hope for while they're in high school. The only way to have gay characters who are fully integrated and accepted as full peers is to give them on-screen or on-page access to all the experiences their straight peers are having. And you're only partially to terms with your sexuality, no matter who you're attracted to, if you're only getting the attraction half of things, if you're barred from action.

Kevin might as well be asexual if the only plot lines they're going to give him are chowing down with Jughead, being besties with Betty, and refusing to date Veronica. If he's going to be a full member of the gang in a town where even the science nerd gets to date a bombshell redhead, where many of the characters essentially come in pairs, he's got to get a shot at romance too.

Back to the Future

So, I apparently missed that this Men in Black movie we're getting is a preview of sorts? And it's happening in 1969? I never actually saw the second movie in the series, but I'm kind of fond of the first. It's not an exceptionally strong statement movie about its time, or about New York, though.

It's got nods, of course: the familiar, almost cliche, setpieces at the Guggenheim and the old World's Fair grounds, the pawn shop and diner, and perhaps its best, most creative nod, the newsstand with the most reliable tabloids in the galaxy. I'm curious to see how this movie would handle the setting in 1969 other than by making Gemma Aerton an alien-fighting Joan Holloway. We all know Alec Baldwin looks like the Arrow Shirt Man and can play the imperious boss of a bunch of eccentrics with great aplomb, so he should be fine on that score. And I suppose going back in time allows aliens to be the Red Menace again, avoiding the somewhat tricky illegal immigration politics that made up the first movie's opening setpiece.

I think I'd like to see the movie to really commit to 1969 New York, now that I think about it, to have all the weirdness of the era be explained by strangers among us, to have a Mad Men-meets-The-Man-Who-Fell-To-Earth vibe. It never really made sense that a mysterious federal agency that controls alien immigration and emigration would be located in New York, rather than in Washington, even if the agency had an international mandate. The new movie should either justify that decision or roll right over it.

Gonna Love You Like I've Never Been Hurt

If Rihanna's got you feeling sort of flat and disappointed, at least we've got Robyn around to offer a master-class on emoting within a limited vocal range:

Indestructible (Edit) by robyn

This is a quieter, less defiant song than we've heard off the other volumes in her Body Talk project (speaking of which, how has she not smoked Glee and turned in a definitive cover of "Physical" as a nod to the title? Did she do it on tour, does anyone know?). And it may be her first uncompromising love song in this new iteration of her career. This is no poison-laced sugar like "Bum Like You" or failed affair like "The Girl and the Robot." It's wary, sure, but there's no compromise in the sweet series of lines that opens the song; "I'm yours / You're mine / Two satellites / Not alone. / No, we're not alone." There's a flatness later in the song, on the "Hands in the up in the air / Like you don't care," but the apathy's a nice contrast to the feigned apathy of the lyrics, and with Robyn, I trust her enough to believe that it's intentional.

Asking For It

The video for Rihanna's "Only Girl In the World" is quite pretty, but there's a lot in here that feels tonally off:



For a video with a color palate this cheery, you might expect that "Only Girl" would be a song about a love achieved. Instead, the whole thing's a request for the unnamed gentleman who's caught Rihanna's guy to make her "feel like I'm the only girl in the world," but it's not clear that she's going to get what she wants. Instead of the question, I think I found myself expecting a declarative statement: "you make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world."

But for a request, or plea, her voice sounds extraordinarily flat. I know the girl doesn't have much in the way of pipes—that's never been her strong suit. But she is capable of getting emotion in there with the metallic sounds: her voice doesn't sound that different here than it does on "Umbrella," but there's an intimacy in that promise that doesn't exist in this expression of hope.

Lady Doctor

I still haven't finished working my way through all the seasons of the er, regenerated Doctor Who, but I do think the idea of a lady Doctor is really quite a fine idea, for several reasons. First, it would reinforce the character's alienness, something I think is a bit lacking, to inject the idea of a fluid concept of gender into the Time Lords' makeup.

Second, I've written about the fact that there's something nice about how the Doctor gives female companions (and faltering guys, too, in the case of Mickey) an opportunity to just embrace adventure without any larger motivation, just for the love of the trip. I'd like to see a woman, or to be more precise, a female character on the opposite end of the equation, be the native wayfarer, the lonely captain, the person who extends a hand and asks "Coming?" Some io9 commenters suggested that such a gender switch might end flirtations between the Doctor and companions, but I think it would be intriguing if a female Doctor was the seductive, compelling figure, as long as the show managed to build in some of the same emotional restraints, rather than making her an intergalactic cougar.

It's always been one of my great disappointments that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies ended with Elizabeth stuck on an island, raising a kid. She clearly had the mettle to captain a ship, to set her own course. We need more female swashbucklers, whatever crafts they choose to captain.

Too Soon?

It strikes me as inevitable that a movie like Four Lions would be made in the UK before something similar would be made in America, and perhaps that such a movie will only be made in the UK:



This isn't quite a boggart situation: laughing at wannabe terrorists doesn't remove the threat of terrorism from the world. But a movie like this undermines the foundation for our outsized fear of terrorism and questions how well we understand who goes off to become terrorists and why. And that's useful if it gives us pause in enacting and supporting unwise security-oriented policies. I don't know whether in the long term it's more useful to treat people who would commit acts of terrorism as dangerous, deranged, and depraved, or merely as silly, as people who misunderstand history and their power to influence it. Is shame and lack of cool a more valuable deterrent than moral disapprobation?

I'm sure I'm over-thinking this. But I do think it's significant that we've got a movie from the recruits' perspective. And the idea of ordinary guys running off to jihad isn't far-fetched—Washingtonian's got a story in our November issue about five men from Northern Virginia who were busted in Pakistan for trying to join terrorist groups. There is no one reason why someone decides to go to war against the West: religious conviction, desire to do something significant, suicidal ideation, groupthink, disastrous momentum, a feeling of profound displacement. Understanding some of the less serious, considered, and rational reasons people make these kinds of decisions is useful, if an unfamiliar effort.

The UK has a better track record of looking ridiculousness in the face, calling it what it is, and finding humor in it anyway than we are, I think. And America's perspective on terrorism and the war on terror is still so invested that I think it would be hard for an American studio to find a movie like this compelling.

Will A Dance With Dragons Ever Publish?

For my A Song of Ice and Fire fans out there, io9's been publishing reports that that the long-awaited fifth book in the series, A Dance With Dragons is just five partially-completed chapters from completion. There remains a great deal of speculation that George R.R. Martin's writer's block is permanent, and we'll never see this volume, much less the end of the series. But I'm willing to bet that we'll get at least this book, if not the full series. This is why.

A Dance with Dragons is hugely overdue. The HBO adaptation of A Game of Thrones is an enormous marketing opportunity, both to reignite the excitement of long-standing but frustrated fans of the series, and to introduce a new generation of fans to the series who might be wary of starting into a new universe without guarantee that it is or will be completed. If Martin misses this opportunity, Del Ray might decide to walk away from the series as a whole, or to demand the return of the advance for A Dance With Dragons (they might even try to recover more than that, on the grounds that Martin's in breach of his contract to deliver a completed series). This is the most concentrated commercial pressure Martin could possibly be under. And his agent died recently, leaving him without an experienced, credible advocate to argue for more time for him.

One interesting challenge, though? Even with those five chapters incomplete, the manuscript's also at the limits of what Del Ray can publish in a single volume, size-wise. I don't know if that means we might be forced into an 8-volume series, or whether we'll just get a longer subsequent book (if we get one at all). But if they're thinking about publication details, I think that's a good sign, even if it means tricky logistics.

I Hear a Symphony

So, my buddy Tyler is finally back in the blogging game, and last week he hit on something I've been thinking about lately: why we don't have great girl groups (or really, boy bands) right now. He writes:
There doesn't seem to be even the pretense that we're getting music that uses multiple voices in harmony to convey some emotion or idea that can't be conveyed in the same way with one voice (or even one voice with background singers).  I think the artist, producer, or label that figures out how to do that in this historical moment when there's an entire generation that venerates artists whose whole appeal is the absence of any musical ability whatsoever will be wildly wildly successful.
From a marketing perspective the girl groups and boy bands of the nineties and aughts certainly functioned much more on the premise that they offered something for everyone—if you liked 'em blonde and sunny, dark and sensitive, or wholesome and generic, there was something for everyone. Groups, in a way, are geared towards the visual culture of our musical consumption. They're a full dance troupe, the cast of a video with multiple plotlines.


But they're also hard to keep together, as we've seen with the breakups of the Pussycat Dolls and Girls Aloud recently. In a group, rather than a proper band, not everybody has a definitive role that necessarily fits their skills and without which there would be a serious hole to fill. Nobody needs you, and if you can find a way to break out on your own, there's no compelling reason you need to stay. All of this is worse if your sound doesn't really gain anything from the multiple voices creating it. The incentives to find a way to go solo are significant if you're just a singer and dancer. Why be part of the crowd if you don't get anything out of it? The Supremes sound great, but it's not as rewarding to be Diana Ross's backup as it is to be Diana Ross.

History and Children's Movies

I was browsing Netflix idly the other night and ended up watching snippets of the 1997 animated version of Anastasia. I had fond memories of the movie, which I haven't watched since it came out, I think mostly because I thought the lyrics to the songs were unusually clever, and because I loved—and still love—historical fiction (any Ann Rinaldi fans out there? David Liss?). But revisiting this one, I actually think its whitewash of both the tsars and Bolshevism is actively immoral. All we see of Nicholas, whose reign began in a panic that killed 1,389, whose guards killed peaceful reformist protestors, who actively encouraged pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, is that he was the benevolent and charming father to the title character, who provided her with a beautiful and comfortable life:



There's not even remotely a suggestion that the royal family ought to be accountable for some of the dreadful things that happened on Nicholas's watch and at the direct order of his regime. And other than a reference to a fish-processing factory, a few tossed-off references to a "comrade," and an allusion that "since the revolution, our lives have been so gray," and the fact that it takes travel papers to get out of Russia, there's precisely no reckoning with the aftermath of revolution. In fact, the movie makes Russia look like a cute, gossipy, free-market country:



I understand that not all of history is immediately appropriate for children who are the target audience of movies like. But there's a huge difference between age-appropriate discernment and abridgment and actual whitewash. There may be a degree of difference between the tsars and the Nazis, or between the tsars and Stalin. But that doesn't mean I'd show my kids (should I ever have any) movies about Stalin's kids (hard to make, given some of their suicides and Stalin's notably cold attitude towards many of them) that didn't make clear that their father was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Some things, you can wait to introduce kids to until they can learn the whole truth.

Tough Women To Crack

I've said before that I think having Angelia Jolie play Cleopatra is a mistake, both from a distraction factor, and because Cleopatra may not have been an actual babe and an interpretation that explored her charisma would be vastly more interesting than ZOMG HOTTTT. The rumor that James Cameron is directing her gives me some vague hope for what I still think will be a silly project.

Cameron can't and won't make Jolie any less stunning. But he will likely make her more than just pretty. The character's got more backstory and substance to her than Rose DeWitt Bukater did in Titantic, and Cameron imbued that character with plenty of pathos and sentimental pale fire. He's not afraid of brusqueness and unpleasantness: the character sketches in Avatar may not have been exceptionally deep, but aside from Jake, there was much more to all of the women than there was to any of the men. Cleopatra will need a touch of unpleasantness, and probably a great deal more than that, to be compelling on-screen. Lately, I've been thinking of her as a somewhat-more-competent-but-less-crazy Cersei Lannister. I'd like to see Cameron and Jolie sell that.

From the Department of Ask And Ye Shall Receive...Sort Of

Apparently, there's a reasonable possibility of two live-action superhero television shows in the near future—an Incredible Hulk show that might have some continuity with Joss Whedon's Avengers movie and a Cloak and Dagger show.

I don't mean to beat this horse entirely into the ground, but they've got the wrong Hulk here. It's true that either a Hulk or a She-Hulk show or movie, or whatever, is just going to be extraordinarily difficult to pull off. The physical transformations are considerable, and nobody's really found a strong way to pull them off without looking hugely stiff or incredibly cheesy. The size factor alone is a major problem. One intriguing possibility, though, given that Mark Ruffalo's going to do motion-capture work that will result in the scenes with Bruce Banner in Hulk mode, would be to have Ruffalo do the Hulk show as a way to fine-tune both his performance and the technology for the movie.

I don't know that Ruffalo would want to lock himself down to a television show. His movie career's going far too well for him to need to escape into another medium, and the pay wouldn't be as good, unless for some reason he was craving a substantially more stable schedule and guaranteed paycheck. But the chance to see him once a week would certainly be something that would make me happy. And I think, whether he does a show or not, he's got promise as the Hulk. I think where Edward Norton went wrong with it was playing Banner as super mild-mannered, and creating this vast contrast between Banner and the Hulk. Ruffalo's very good at playing decent, thoughtful men with real cores of anger to them—it's one of the best things about his performance in Zodiac, the obsessiveness and rage in the good cop. I think there could be more emotional continuity and clarity to this performance. As long as they can get him good big green facial expressions.

Perdido Street Station Book Club Part VI: Back Alleys and Shortcuts

Same rules as always. Spoilers through Part VI below the jump. Spoil up to that point in comments, but not beyond, please. Previous entries in the series are here, or linked in this entry.

It's a short section, but it's one that illustrates my fundamental problems with the novel, things that have been evident to me since I started, but that haven't been dispelled by the subsequent writing, and that I haven't been able to tamp down. I care more about the things happening or shown at the margins of this novel than I care about the core characters and events. And despite the fact that he's a fine writer, Mieville spends vastly more time telling us things than showing them to us.

I think it was this description of the neighborhood near the Glasshouse was what really got to me:
It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare and traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. South Riverskin was also home to some of the city's small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bekman Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.
This, I think, is what I want to know about this universe. It reads to me like a description of a neighborhood like the ones where Coronation Street or Eastenders takes place. I'm curious to know about these people, how they came together, why they aren't living in the ghettos where most of their species gather, how they get along. And I want to know about them through their eyes, on their terms, rather than as places where a gang of elites—and they are elites, the scientist exiled from academia for his revolutionary thought, the accomplished criminal, the crusading journalist—pass through, that exists in this novel, for their purposes or obstacles, but not for itself. I'm tired of the anthropological descriptions of cactacae, of khepri, of vodyanoi. I want stories from within those communities, rather than tiny peeks through people who have left those communities in search of adventure, or as an act of explicit cultural rejection.

But I accept that's not the story we've got. I'm just yearning for something else. My larger problem, as it turns out, is with the writing. Some of this is plot-driven. As Isaac sneaks into the slake-moth lair, we find out that "He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble." But the problem is, we know this too. And we know, from Mieville's sacrifices of minor characters, that it's probably going to happen to other people, too. There isn't any of the horror of the unknown. In a way, like Isaac, we've gone rather numb, and that's what keeps us going, we're able to endure all the bad things that are happening to the characters rather than being paralyzed by terror for them.

And some of it's just descriptive. When the Weaver attacks the slake-moths again, literally the first thing Mieville does is absolve himself of the obligation to try to write a really compelling scene:
It was an elemental scene, something way beyond human ken. It was a flickering vision of horn blades moving much too fast for a human to see, an impossibly intricate dance of innumerable limbs across several dimensions. Gouts of blood sprayed in various colors and textures across the walls and floor, fouling the dead. Behind the unclean bodies, silhouetting them, the chymical fire hissed and rolled across the concrete floor.
What do flickering dimensions look like? Mieville has thought this through enough to decide that the Weaver and slake moths have different colored and textured blood but can't be bothered to tell us what those colors and textures are? What did Isaac feel watching it? Was it beautiful? What color is chymical fire? Do the bodies burn?

The reason that this is infuriating is that Mieville's capable of quite striking writing and description. When one of their company goes mad with grief, we get this terrific image: "The vanguard of the group were startled by this strange, darkly shining figure with hands crooked like a vengeful skeleton." But instead of trying to live up to this standard all the time, Mieville alternately chokes us on quality description or starves us of it.

A Pack of Dogs Took Over and Successfully Ran A Wendy's

So, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think 30 Rock might actually be on a bit of an upswing. I still think there are massive characterization and direction problems, but I think the show is returning to one of the writers' comedic strengths: lists. This might seem like a weird thing to single out, but the show is uniquely genius at lists, whether it's marketing categories ("They love him in every demographic: colored people, broads, fairies, commies. Gosh, we gotta update these forms.") or monologues and dialogues, where the show has always excelled at lists. One of the first notable such lists was Jack's second-season confession of love for C.C., which is both an internal and hilarious group list:





Jack[about C.C.] She is my lover. That's right. She's my liberal, hippy-dippy mama; my groovy chick; my old lady. She was our chief adversary during the Sheinhardt Wig hearings. She wants to tax us all to death and make it legal for a man to marry his own dog. But I think what we have is special, and I'm proud of her. And I'm not going to hide it any longer. I'm Jack Donaghy, damn it! And this is my woman.
[Others begin confessing their secrets.]
Man #1: I gave to NPR last year.
Woman: My children go to public school.
Man #2: I'm gay.
Man #3: I'm black.
C.C.: Jack, thank you so much. And I just wanted you to know that in 1984 I voted for Ronald Reagan.
Man #1: I murdered my wife.


The genius really comes from the fact that the joke goes full circle with C.C.'s confession—and then keeps going.


Later, there was Jack's Catholic confession:
I'm divorced. I take the Lord's name in vain often and with great relish. I hit my mother with a car, possibly by accident. [jump cut] ...I almost let him choke to death right there on the football field. I looked the other way when my wig-based parent company turned a bunch of children orange. I once claimed "I am God" during a deposition. [jump cut] and... I may have sodomized our former Vice President while under the influence of some weapons-grade narcotics. [sighs] It feels good to say that out loud actually. That one was weighing on me.
And then Tracy's brilliant recitation of his traumatic childhood:





I do think Jack's lessons to his future child may have been even better than this, though. The arc ran longer, was harder to sustain, and ended in a sweet and sour nod to Jack's relationship with Liz. That's the core thing the show needs to figure out and improve, and that it won't be great again until it resolves. But in the interim, and even if it never does, juxtaposition humor is hard. It's an accomplishment for 30 Rock to consistently nail it.

Unacceptable

It is a waste of a good Batman, both in casting and plot arc, to send the dude to New Orleans to fight a giant crocodile. I've said this before and I'll say it again. The only place it makes sense for this iteration of Bruce Wayne to go is Catwoman.

We've had the rise to responsibility. We've had the abuse of power (which I think worked because it was broadly topical, and an example of an abuse of power that the no presidential administration had tried). We need to return to Wayne's interior self. And frankly, given Rachel's death, and the messy transition of the recast from Katie Holmes to the superior Maggie Gyllenhaal, it makes sense to deal with both interpersonal relationships and gender. We haven't had a contemporary superhero who deals with real sexual darkness (the metaphorical abortion in X-Men doesn't count), much less a superheroine, and it's about time for both. There's an element of sadism and masochism in the kind of superheroics Batman represents. He beats people with his fists, he exposes himself to extreme danger without healing powers. And his character's just been stripped of both his chance for happiness and his illusions. Send the guy on a date where he's out of control and maybe in some danger himself. Show that the abuse isn't just potentially about the gadgets. Give us a woman who inflicts real damage when she scratches.

And most of all, don't waste the end of a sophisticated trilogy on a too-time sensitive New Orleans story. Nolan should keep making movies about the essential nature of Gotham. And the darkness in humanity, rather than in beasts.

Halo

I don't think I want to play: just don't have the time to get immersed right now, and I feel like if I was going to play, I'd want to be more experienced so I can enjoy it, rather than feeling like it's a frustrating learning experience. But I dipped into some very basic reading about the series since rumors of a movie are floating again, and I was wondering if any of y'all had read the books. Are they worth it? Will they give me a sense of Halo's universe and mythology in a way that won't feel flat? If so, let me know. I may give them a try.

Laughing All the Way

Back in August, BabylonSista said she thought Burlesque might enter the so-bad-it's-good canon. I just love how much money Stanley Tucci and Cher must be making from this:



One of the reasons I like Tucci so much is that I think he enjoys being paired with strong actresses. His sexual chemistry with Meryl Streep in full Julia Child mode was one of the best things about Julie & Julia: they took the tall-gal, short-guy pairing that could get played for laughs or awkwardly executed and turned it into a relationship that was sensual, funny, and tender, whether Streep was comparing hot pasta to grabbing a penis or the two of them were experiencing baby regret near Notre Dame. In The Devil Wears Prada, he was engaged in two separate platonic love affairs with strong women who needed his direction, rather than his salvation. He was the one who got burned. I sense here that he and Cher will have some serious and unexpected oomph, and he'll treat Christina Aguilera's character with more respect than anyone naive enough to be convinced they'll "make it" in Los Angeles actually deserves. The movie will still be a hot mess. But he'll always be worth watching, because he'll be treating the candy on screen like women. To put in that kind of effort on a fat, dumb, window-dressing paycheck is kind of charming. But I guess a house in France, or wherever, is a bit easier to enjoy when you can buy it still feeling some self-respect. I doubt Ben Stiller has that feeling very often.

Dubious Inspiration

Seriously? We're tapping this well again, folks?



Does Ronald D. Moore just have some thing about proving that old, bad, things would be awesome if they'd just been given to him in the first place? Having consummately proved that with Battlestar Galactica, doesn't he want to do something original? I do understand that we'll be going all the way back to the well of the 1960s with this one, but the even if the memory of this horrendous besmirchment of Kenneth Branagh's career isn't a formidable stumbling block for Moore, it should be. It was shameful, painful, sometimes racist, and most importantly for a movie with giant mechanical spiders, uninteresting.

Yesterday, At The Atlantic

I realize I haven't been posting these this week: my nice editor at The Atlantic has agreed to let me drop my posting frequency a bit so I can do longer pieces. This one is an example: on the complications of gay family life and Modern Family.

Curse and Blessings

So, after a long week, my college roommate and I got together to order Chinese food, drink beer, and watch something dopey and humiliating. Names will be withheld to protect the innocent, but I will confess that we ended up watching When In Rome.

It's an incredibly terrible movie. It features the world's least plausible wedding. Danny DeVito plays a sausage king. There is a New York restaurant where the meal takes place entirely in the dark. We are forced to endure Jon Heder as a magician. I began anticipating lines of dialogue full minutes before they were uttered. A CENTRAL PLOT POINT INVOLVES JOSH DUHAMEL HAVING BEEN HIT BY LIGHTNING. The only overarching virtue of the movie is to wish we'd get more adult movies that plausibly and interestingly involved genuine magic. The whole thing zips by in ninety minutes, leaving no room for any sort of emotional development whatsoever.

And yet, the whole thing is this fascinating exercise in acting. It's basically like watching a bunch of very talented people work their bored way through prompts they know they can nail. Duhamel really should do comedy more of the time: dude can move, and he could learn a few things from Steve Martin because he could actually, maybe execute. DeVito is really wonderfully impressive at expressing a lovely, momentary melancholy. Anjelica Huston is our most marvelously imperious actress working today—it really would be fun watching her square off with Helen Mirren in something. Kristen Bell is fine in the movie, but it illustrates the risky point she's at in her career where she's doing awful, put-upon, relatable-girl crap, when really she should be doing weird and substantive and funny things. Seriously, she and Sarah Michelle Gellar should team up to run a private eye's office or something, and find mutual career rehab.

When In Rome isn't remotely worth watching for the small, weird actorly pleasures it provides. Not everything can be elevated above its ridiculousness. But I do think this is one of the compensatory joys of watching like a critic. Sometimes, you just see the gem of craft buried away in the pile of trash, and you get to feel a magpie-like joy in having found it.

Pleased With All the Beats and Rhymes My Sisters Have Employed

Man, M.I.A. and Rye Rye may not be Queen Latifah and Monie Love, but this little slice of the eighties is a lot of fun, isn't it?


They've actually collaborated before on a similar track, "Bang," though I think "Sunshine" is a superior song:


However annoying I find M.I.A.'s politics, I do very much want her to be commercially and artistically successful, and I'm thrilled that she's supporting talented young women in hip-hop. Most of the time I just want art to be a meritocracy, but when it comes to hip-hop, I want women to have the right to be as stupid as Soulja Boy and to not have that affect perceptions of their female colleagues, for there to be a woman in the game as angry and as articulate as Eminem, as weird as Eminem. I want women to conquer so I get to the point where I feel like I can be discerning. Not that I don't have a lot of fun with Nicki Minaj, but I want her to be a guilty pleasure, rather than the best chance present chance for women to conquer the hip-hop charts and airwaves—it's pretty pathetic that she was the first woman to top the rap charts with a solo song since 2002.

On His Own

I think 127 Hours is going to be a tough commercial sale, given that it's both about a guy who cuts off his own hand to escape being trapped by rocks, and that it's a one-man show, but it's precisely for the latter reason that I'm excited to see it:



That kind of pressure is so rare. One of the most astonishing theater performances I've ever seen was Anne Scurria's turn as the Homebody in the premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul. The role involves opening the play with an hour-long monologue. Nobody else is on stage. The emotional range of the act is huge. I have no idea how anyone can perform a feat of memorization like that without even someone else on stage whose reactions or physical movements could provide points of reference, or how they can keep up the energy across the whole monologue. Something like 127 Hours is easier, of course, since James Franco gets takes so the whole thing can be done multiple times and chunked out. But still, the charisma to carry a whole movie's got to be considerable.

Good-Lookin' Aliens

io9 has a list of things that need to happen to make Zack Snyder's upcoming Superman reboot non-terrible. I have just one: remember that the dude's an alien, even if he doesn't need to get mopey about it. I feel some sympathy for directors who have to work with characters who look like often very good-looking human beings but are supposed to be fundamentally other in some way, even if they've got some good training in human behavior. It's far too easy to default to essentially human behavior that's just slightly off. That's actually one of the problems I have with Doctor Who: the doctor mostly seems like someone who was socialized in odd ways. You get the slightly-off "fantastic!" delivered at inappropriate moments:



But the Doctor's alienness isn't persistent. And the thing is, if you're not human, the world has to feel different. Your body temperature's got to be different, your skin might be more or less sensitive. Maybe your eyes process light differently. All of those things affect the way you move through your environment, your comfort levels. Even if you've got great training in social customs, these are things you've learned, things that aren't inherently yours.

So make Superman kind of strange, like Doctor Manhattan, like the Watcher. Make Lois Lane have to cross over a bit to really bond with him (I'm not hugely optimistic about the possibility of casting Natalie Portman in the role. Girl needs to stay away from any Star Wars-esque epic love stories, I think.). Make the central conflict force Superman to choose his alienness.

Raise Your Glass

So, I got to go to the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner on Saturday, by which I mean, I sat in the press pool, and got to be in proximity to Pink, which was pretty much a high point. And I'm curious to see how her video for this song:



which she says will be a supportive statement in favor of marriage equality, will turn out. I think we're at an interesting stage in the resurgence of music videos. Certainly, Lady Gaga's turned them back into event releases, but I don't know if they have the ability to swing anybody on anything. Certainly Gaga herself turned to straight broadcasts and conventional rallies when she wanted to get the message out about her opposition to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and it's not really clear that she had any particular impact on the debate. That said, I do think having gay characters and gay relationships in both the foreground and background of our popular culture is helpful. Even small emotional nudges are helpful.

Aspirational Romance

I've already voiced my discomfort with the theoretical meet-cute between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. But I wonder if my real problem with the damn movie is that I have no idea why I'm supposed to care about the tsuris between these two other than that they're quirky, a fact illustrated by the fact that he wants her to dance for his amusement in a foyer:


Most romantic comedies want us to care about the people involved because they are much better-looking avatars of ourselves and our problems, and those good looks give us dreams that perhaps things will turn out all right, if not perfectly, for our average selves. I suppose movies with quirky indie heroes and heroines are meant to give us hope that our lives will turn out a bit more interestingly, if you average us with people who sing "You Always Hurt the One You Love" in goofy inflections?

Perdido Street Station Book Club Part V: Chase and Race

Sorry for the delay, y'all. Hope everyone who gets it off is enjoying Columbus Day. The usual rules apply, of course. Spoilers through Part V of Perdido Street Station, but not beyond, appear below and in comments. Part I of this series is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, and Part IV is here. Part VI will appear on Friday.

I don't know how many of you have read Posession, but for those of you who haven't, I highly recommend it. I re-read it in between sections of Perdido Street Station, and was reminded of how much I love one of the most self-consciously literary lines in the book: "Since Blackadder and Lenora and Cropper had come, [the main characters' journey] had changed from Quest, a good romantic form, into Chase and Race, two other equally valid ones." To me, this is the section where Perdido Street Station embraces its transformation into a particularly black fairy tale. And while there's a lot going on, the grimness of the backstories here worked for me, for once.

Last week, we discussed the marvelous ending to William Goldman's The Princess Bride, in which he predicts the decay and disappointment of the expectations the fairy tale has set up for us so far. If that bracing brush with reality is meant as a tonic, Mieville's description of the origins of the central love story in Perdido Street Station is meant to keep the frame of the fairy tale while shattering the intentions behind it. Lin and Isaac may have come to truly love each other, but their coming-together, their love story, has its origins in drunkenness and transgression. It is not pure, even though it proves to be durable:
In the middle of showing off, laboriously signing a dirty joke one night, Isaac, very drunk, had clumsily pawed her, and they had pulled each other to bed. The event had been clumsy and difficult. They could not kiss as a first step: Lin's mouthparts would tear Isaac's jaw from his face. For just a moment after coming, Isaac had been overcome with revulsion, and had almost vomited at the sight of those bristling headlegs and waving antennae. Lin had been nervous of his body, and had stiffened suddenly and unpredictably. When he had woken he had felt fearful and horrified, but at the fact of having transgressed rather than at the transgression itself. And over a shy breakfast, Isacc had realized that this was what he had wanted. Casual cross-sex was not uncommon, of course, but Isaac was not an inebriated young man frequenting a xenian brothel on a dare. He was falling, he realized, in love.
Lin and Isaac are where the story begins, of course, lovers are always the central characters in fairy tales even if they don't begin that way. But adventure stories require, by necessity, an amusingly motley band of companions, and Mieville gives us two in this section: the band of handlingers who fight the slakemoths, and the crew that assembles around Isaac to meet with the Construct Council. The handlingers are a bit Dickensian, the waistcoat on the dog is a particularly nice touch:
The congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so, except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk. All the figures, human and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was twice the size of most, and even the dog sported an absurd little waistcoat.
Isaac's gang is a bit more rough-hewn, but as I suspect we'll discover, a bit more effective. "We are not going to get into this on our own. We are one fat scientists, a crook and a journalist," Isaac declares when the Construct Council is annoyed that he brought people with him. "We need some fucking professional backup. These are people who kill exotic animals for a damn living." They're not quite as well-drawn as Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini, but that's okay. Not everyone can be.

The two interesting deviations from fairy tale convention in this section come from two questions: what's the nature of magic? And how do we determine who the monsters are? Magic may not be the appropriate name for where the Weaver takes Isaac, Yag, Lemuel and Derkhan during their escape, but the elemental structure of the universe Yag sees when he opens his eyes is somewhat beyond science:

I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugeness with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web. Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry...each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings' motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief's laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.
This is something that's fascinatingly inaccessible to either the audience or to the authorities of New Crobuzon. It shows us, however, the meaning of some of the chaos we've witnessed along the way. And with it, the Weaver brings an inexplicable power and tragedy to the conflict. Just because she's helping Isaac, Derkhan, Yag and Lemuel doesn't mean they understand her, especially when she inflicts violence upon them.

"Derkhan shook slightly as she watched him. 'This Weaver saw fit to heal your earl, along with Lemuel's. Not mine....Why didn't it heal me...?' 'Derkhan,' Isaac said gently. 'I could never know.'"

The Weaver, to me, also inflects the power of being chosen, a key part of all fairy stories, with a pathos and confusion that's relatively rare. As it turns out, Isaac, Yag, Derkhan and Lemuel aren't chosen because they're skilled, or virtuous, or smart, or instruments of justice. It just turns out that the Weaver, for some inexplicable reason (and it's possible that the Weaver doesn't quite know why) likes the way they impact the universe. There is no validation in their chosenness, just luck, and chance, something that's made clear in the Weaver's letter to the editor in a New Crobuzon paper (which really may be my favorite joke in the book so far):
Sirs and Madam— Please accept my compliments on your exquisite tapestry skills. For the furtherment of your craftwork I have taken it upon myself to extricate you from an unfortunate situation. My efforts are urgently required elsewhere and I am unable to accompany you. Doubtless we will meet again before much time has elapsed. In the meantime please note that he of your number whose unfortunate animal husbandry has led to the city's present unfortunate predicament may find himself the victim of unwanted attentions from his escaped charge. I urge you to continue your fabric work, of which I find myself a devotee. Most faithfully yours, W.
And some higher cause like love, or justice, or virtue is difficult to discern in a city and in a time when it's difficult to determine who the monsters are. There are the slake-moths, of course, but I increasingly feel like they're sort of irrelevant, a device that brings together all the characters and gives them a threat that motivates interesting alliances and juxtapositions. But there are monsters who are worse, because there's a knowingness, a calculation to the evil they're inflicting on others. Among them is Mr. Motley, who has decided that Isaac is trying to corner a drug market from him, and leaves a dead man in Lin's apartment, her wings stuffed in his mouth, bearing messages of terrible intent and torture. It's not just Motley's violent impulses, or his power ("'Mr. Motley is the kingpin, Isaac,' he said simply. 'He is the man. He runs the eastern city. He runs it. He's the outlaw boss.'") that make him a monster. It's his wrongness, his misinterpretation of the situation, his stupidity, almost, that make him as terrible as he is. Slakemoths may come and go, but a city that has built part of its structures on men like Motley has put itself in terrible danger.

And there are lesser monsters, too. Vampir get drained by slakemoths, giving further weight and heft to the fear the city feels. And it turns out that Isaac's latest ally is a mechanical giant who speaks through a corpse and shows a somewhat disturbing interest in Isaac's crisis engine. The Construct Council may have helped Isaac and company off a slakemoth, but that doesn't make him comfortable company. Unlike A Song of Ice and Fire where there are knights, no matter how corrupt and dishonorable some of them may prove to be, in Perdido Street Station, we have only our morally compromised fat scientist who is involved only because he is the instrument of much of the city's woe, a target, and has an interest in his lover's well-being, a crook who is a simple mercenary, and an emotionally wounded journalist. None of them are pure. But the city's fate rests on them, without concern for honor or for glory.