Probably my favorite cultural event of the year is the Christmas Revels, which I go see with one of my best friends from college every December. The performance of traditional music and pagent ends with this poem by Susan Cooper, which I adore. It's called "The Shortest Day":
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Thanks for another year, folks. I'll see you in 2011, and best wishes for a joyous start to it this weekend.
This Is Not a Best Of Blog
I'm not really a be-comprehensive-and-rate-popular-culture kind of blogger, but this is, in no particular order, culture I am glad to have experienced in 2010:
1. Gyptian, "Hold You":
2. Get Him to the Greek
3. The father-daughter relationship in The Passage. Also, Kick-Ass.
4. Brandon Routh in Scott Pilgrim
5. Jane Austen's Fight Club
6. Mystery, Alaska, watched in Alaska
7. Nicole Scherzinger on Dancing With The Stars
8. Centurion
9. Rye Rye
10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
11. Seeing Spoon live
12. Finally watching 84 Charing Cross Road
13. Wolf Hall
14. The folks tweeting as Buffy characters
15. Toy Story 3
16. Homicide's sexual politics
17. Electro-metal covers of "Eleanor Rigby"
18. Doctor Who
19. Robyn, but duh
20. A Song of Ice and Fire, for which I owe you guys so much.
1. Gyptian, "Hold You":
2. Get Him to the Greek
3. The father-daughter relationship in The Passage. Also, Kick-Ass.
4. Brandon Routh in Scott Pilgrim
5. Jane Austen's Fight Club
6. Mystery, Alaska, watched in Alaska
7. Nicole Scherzinger on Dancing With The Stars
8. Centurion
9. Rye Rye
10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
11. Seeing Spoon live
12. Finally watching 84 Charing Cross Road
13. Wolf Hall
14. The folks tweeting as Buffy characters
15. Toy Story 3
16. Homicide's sexual politics
17. Electro-metal covers of "Eleanor Rigby"
18. Doctor Who
19. Robyn, but duh
20. A Song of Ice and Fire, for which I owe you guys so much.
Cryptonomicon Book Club, Part III: Adapt or Die
Part I is here. Part II is here. Standard rules apply below the jump: spoil up to, but not beyond, the section entitled "Phreaking." And for next week, let's read up to the section entitled "Conspiracy."
One of the things that's struck me most reading our most recent chunk of Cryptonomicon is the extent to which it is both about historical moments of innovation and change, and the extent to which it is itself a historical document. The sections that are about internet startups feel sort of quaint and anachronistic, both in the technology Randy, Avi, and others are using, and in the way they understand startups and business models.
This is a bit of a diversion from the point I'm going to get around to eventually, but Lee wrote in comments in our first discussion that "the breathless way NS goes about describing Avi makes me wonder whether he doesn't unself-consciously venerate these Silicon Valley VC types (making allowances for the fact that the bubble hadn't yet burst)." I think is this not quite accurate, and the Epiphyte Business Plan is the best example of this:
But really what this section of the novel got for me, and why I think it works even if the technology Avi and Randy are using feels dated, is that it's about moments when you change or die, the points at which we become different kinds of humans. Bobby Shaftoe feels the shift coming in the way he fights his war:
I'll be curious to see how this emphasis on evolution plays out. Obviously, we know from history if not from the novel yet that being overly-evolved—in other words, in touch with and accepting of his homosexuality—doesn't exactly play out for Alan Turing. And I think we're also reaching the point in the novel when it's going to be important for characters to be able to look back, without being captured by it. I assume that Randy's mysterious correspondent is Enoch Root, something Randy can't puzzle out yet because he can only see the new meaning of a root@ email address, rather than looking back (of course, Enoch Root isn't really a fathomable phenomenon by any set of rules, old or new). I'll be curious to see how Avi's Judaism sorts itself out. And of course, given Stephenson's focus on lineage, some understanding of these characters' pasts is going to matter in comprehending their future.
One of the things that's struck me most reading our most recent chunk of Cryptonomicon is the extent to which it is both about historical moments of innovation and change, and the extent to which it is itself a historical document. The sections that are about internet startups feel sort of quaint and anachronistic, both in the technology Randy, Avi, and others are using, and in the way they understand startups and business models.
This is a bit of a diversion from the point I'm going to get around to eventually, but Lee wrote in comments in our first discussion that "the breathless way NS goes about describing Avi makes me wonder whether he doesn't unself-consciously venerate these Silicon Valley VC types (making allowances for the fact that the bubble hadn't yet burst)." I think is this not quite accurate, and the Epiphyte Business Plan is the best example of this:
Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document....After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) w ill move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we ahve actually done anything.My suspicion is that Stephenson admires Avi's hucksterism, rather than him as a technologist, in the same way, as much as the Dentist is a parody, he is capable as hell. Stephenson likes survivors, especially when they're a bit off-kilter, be they morphine-addicted smart-aleck Marines, semi-autistic cryptographers who have affairs with German spies because what the hell, dreamy coders who make throwaway deals for buried treasure. I feel like he could have written one hell of a Western.
But really what this section of the novel got for me, and why I think it works even if the technology Avi and Randy are using feels dated, is that it's about moments when you change or die, the points at which we become different kinds of humans. Bobby Shaftoe feels the shift coming in the way he fights his war:
Shaftoe has killed Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time that this face-to face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old-fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. The demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy didx sort of get him thinking, and here he is now, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves.Of course, Bobby Shaftoe's probably more likely to make the transition to a new age because he's the kind of guy who will try out sushi and martial arts, just as Lawrence Waterhouse seems likely to make it because he's able to see the world differently at the precise moment when there is a need for his kind of differentness, when elites start to desperately need non-conformists. There's something remarkable about Yamomoto's revelation as he's about to die: the margin between the time you have to make these realizations is perilously thin, especially when the things that are changing about you aren't just sort of fundamental communications things like the rise of the internet, but matters of more immediate life and death.
I'll be curious to see how this emphasis on evolution plays out. Obviously, we know from history if not from the novel yet that being overly-evolved—in other words, in touch with and accepting of his homosexuality—doesn't exactly play out for Alan Turing. And I think we're also reaching the point in the novel when it's going to be important for characters to be able to look back, without being captured by it. I assume that Randy's mysterious correspondent is Enoch Root, something Randy can't puzzle out yet because he can only see the new meaning of a root@ email address, rather than looking back (of course, Enoch Root isn't really a fathomable phenomenon by any set of rules, old or new). I'll be curious to see how Avi's Judaism sorts itself out. And of course, given Stephenson's focus on lineage, some understanding of these characters' pasts is going to matter in comprehending their future.
Plate and Mail
I sort of wonder if this is the movie Pegg and Frost should have been making, rather than Paul:
Mashing up stoner comedy and fantasy is a good idea, and even sort of traditional, isn't it? The trailer did remind me that one of the impacts of being a) young and b) almost completely isolated from non-book pop culture in the 1980s was that I totally missed the cheesy, pre-advances-in-special-effects, live-action fantasy movies of the era. I did see Labyrinth in college, and though I get the humor in David Bowie's terrifying codpiece, I'm not sure I truly appreciated it, and of course I've seen The Princess Bride. Is it worth digging into the tradition further? Any suggestions about where to start?
Mashing up stoner comedy and fantasy is a good idea, and even sort of traditional, isn't it? The trailer did remind me that one of the impacts of being a) young and b) almost completely isolated from non-book pop culture in the 1980s was that I totally missed the cheesy, pre-advances-in-special-effects, live-action fantasy movies of the era. I did see Labyrinth in college, and though I get the humor in David Bowie's terrifying codpiece, I'm not sure I truly appreciated it, and of course I've seen The Princess Bride. Is it worth digging into the tradition further? Any suggestions about where to start?
Laughing 'Til You Cry
So, I'm torn over the news that Jason Segal intends to revitalize the romantic comedy by shooting to make a movie with the substance of Annie Hall. There are days I think romantic comedies really just need to be put out of their misery. And other days when I don't think Woody Allen's extraordinarily specific vision is enough to turn a genre around that continued on to disaster despite his best efforts.
But I do think something that Segal understands, and that Allen understands, and hell, that Adam Brooks understood at least in Definitely, Maybe is what's key to resurrecting romantic comedies. The funny bits aren't just the cute things, the moments that bring the protagonists closer to each other. They're the sad bits, Segal's naked penis, a mid-proposal confession of infidelity, the guy who falls for the Wicked Queen instead of Snow White. A lot of what's funny about falling in love is that it's awkward, and embarrassing, and weird, and hurtful, and it doesn't have an inevitable trajectory towards success.
It's profoundly disheartening that romantic comedies so drastically narrowed their comedic range, and decided that there was only one form of really acceptable ending, the successful monogamy that's the traditional finale of comedy. On the other hand, those are relatively easy—and ought to be relatively inspiring—things to fix. Creating decent female characters is a whole different challenge, of course. But different kinds of love stories lend themselves to different kind of lovers.
Chill, He's Just An Alien
I really have no idea what to make of Paul:
I have no idea, given how deeply they've become embedded into my understanding of clever-things-I-like, if I was as disoriented by the genre mashups that were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Maybe the problem with this is that I can't quite figure out what the clever juxtaposition is? Buddy comedy with alien movie, I suppose? I do like the insinuation that it's far more disturbing when people you think you know do slightly strange things than when entirely alien beings proceed in their own entirely alien way, and that first contact might prove to be no big deal. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are clever enough to pull off worse comedies, I suppose. I just hope there's something slightly more insane here than we're seeing in the trailer, some spark of inspiration that doesn't feel quite so derived from Men In Black.
I have no idea, given how deeply they've become embedded into my understanding of clever-things-I-like, if I was as disoriented by the genre mashups that were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Maybe the problem with this is that I can't quite figure out what the clever juxtaposition is? Buddy comedy with alien movie, I suppose? I do like the insinuation that it's far more disturbing when people you think you know do slightly strange things than when entirely alien beings proceed in their own entirely alien way, and that first contact might prove to be no big deal. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are clever enough to pull off worse comedies, I suppose. I just hope there's something slightly more insane here than we're seeing in the trailer, some spark of inspiration that doesn't feel quite so derived from Men In Black.
Nanjing Heroes
I feel like I don't mention the New York Review of Books enough on this blog. Next to the New Yorker, it may be the finest periodical in the country, and the attention that it gives to culture is even more sustained, but a lot of its archives are behind a paywall, and so during the period when my subscription lapsed, I wasn't always up to date and linking. All of which is to say that Perry Link's piece on China's journey to this year's Nobel Prize, in the form of a review of two contemporary Chinese books, is excellent, and you should read it while you still can. As much as the book is an explanation of those books, one a novel about the internet's impact on Chinese dissent and ordinary Chinese citizens, and one a history of famine in the Cultural Revolution, it's also an essay that I think powerfully explains China's meaning on American movie screens.
It's notable to me that for China's rise in the world, we haven't really figured out where China fits into our movies. The USSR no longer exists, but Russia is still a vague synonym for the enemy even though the Cold War is over. In action movies, skirmishes with China can be a pretext or a red herring, but they're not the main event, mostly because we haven't figured out what we'd want the main event to look like. A viable, independent Chinese democracy might be a compelling political and human rights goal, but it's not easy to translate uprisings on the scale that would be necessary to create true change into a cinematic structure with a few main characters (Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon may be the only extant story I can think of that would lend itself to such translation, and would have a built-in American audience). I don't think, despite worries about China's rising military and economic power, that American audiences would get super-excited about movies that had the American military clashing with China.
Because we can't separate the regime and the people on-screen, because we haven't figured out what we want the future to look like, we turn to the past. The fact that Christian Bale will be staring in a movie about the Nanjing massacre made by a significant Chinese director seems like an obvious detente. An English-speaking actor fronts a movie controlled by someone with semi-nationalist sensibilities (the same director did the opening ceremony of the Beijing games) in a movie that shows the Chinese as victims of dishonorable incursion, but suggests that Americans have a role to play in standing up for decency and the Chinese people. It'll be curious to see who it resonates with.
It's notable to me that for China's rise in the world, we haven't really figured out where China fits into our movies. The USSR no longer exists, but Russia is still a vague synonym for the enemy even though the Cold War is over. In action movies, skirmishes with China can be a pretext or a red herring, but they're not the main event, mostly because we haven't figured out what we'd want the main event to look like. A viable, independent Chinese democracy might be a compelling political and human rights goal, but it's not easy to translate uprisings on the scale that would be necessary to create true change into a cinematic structure with a few main characters (Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon may be the only extant story I can think of that would lend itself to such translation, and would have a built-in American audience). I don't think, despite worries about China's rising military and economic power, that American audiences would get super-excited about movies that had the American military clashing with China.
Because we can't separate the regime and the people on-screen, because we haven't figured out what we want the future to look like, we turn to the past. The fact that Christian Bale will be staring in a movie about the Nanjing massacre made by a significant Chinese director seems like an obvious detente. An English-speaking actor fronts a movie controlled by someone with semi-nationalist sensibilities (the same director did the opening ceremony of the Beijing games) in a movie that shows the Chinese as victims of dishonorable incursion, but suggests that Americans have a role to play in standing up for decency and the Chinese people. It'll be curious to see who it resonates with.
Second String
I often think that the careers of folks who started out as Daily Show correspondents is illustration of why supporting actors are so important. Take Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms is clearly the supporting actor in his own movie:
Without that slight blank, cheerfulness, though, the other characters wouldn't have the catalyst they need to turn in what looks like a reasonably amusing series of performances. On the opposite end of things, John Oliver is just a genius of disruptiveness as Professor Ian Duncan on Community:
His character doesn't fully gel with the dynamic of the cast, and his persistent loopiness might be too much if it was on the show all the time (I think Community's achieved a nice balance, after basically ignoring the character for most of last season). But it's excellent leavening, a reminder that the characters have turned a lot of weird things into a fairly consistent level of normal, but that the world around them is stranger still. It's beautifully proportioned.
I know everyone wants to be a star, for both one-off pecuniary and consistent-level-of-employment reasons. But artistically, there's a lot to be said about providing either the canvas or the splash of color that makes the work pop.
Without that slight blank, cheerfulness, though, the other characters wouldn't have the catalyst they need to turn in what looks like a reasonably amusing series of performances. On the opposite end of things, John Oliver is just a genius of disruptiveness as Professor Ian Duncan on Community:
His character doesn't fully gel with the dynamic of the cast, and his persistent loopiness might be too much if it was on the show all the time (I think Community's achieved a nice balance, after basically ignoring the character for most of last season). But it's excellent leavening, a reminder that the characters have turned a lot of weird things into a fairly consistent level of normal, but that the world around them is stranger still. It's beautifully proportioned.
I know everyone wants to be a star, for both one-off pecuniary and consistent-level-of-employment reasons. But artistically, there's a lot to be said about providing either the canvas or the splash of color that makes the work pop.
Daddys' Little Girls
Maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for slightly dilapidated amusement parks and mini-golf courses, but the trailer for Hanna looks rather visually gorgeous, doesn't it?
And that's before we actually get to the substance of the movie, Saoirse Ronan's ethereal teenaged (and perhaps genetically engineered) assassin. I loved the father-daughter dynamic in Kick-Ass, though I think it remains to be seen if this movie has the same unforced, loving naturalism to the relationship despite the enormously warped circumstances.
I do find this micro-trend of fathers-training-pint-sized-killers interesting, though. I wonder if it would be harder for the movies to portray fathers schooling their sons in extreme violence, conjuring up images of everything from John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo's deadly campaign around the Beltway in Washington to families of violent white extremists. When a man hands his son a gun and tells him to kill, he's recreating ancient tragedies and evils. But when a father hands his daughter a weapon, he gives her power, he himself defies gender expectations: in the semantics of our culture, they become admirable rebels, elevated by their deviance, rather than stunted cowards shrunken by their violence. It says a lot about the pace of our journey towards gender equality that giving a woman any kind of power is supposed to be liberating, no matter what she does with it.
And that's before we actually get to the substance of the movie, Saoirse Ronan's ethereal teenaged (and perhaps genetically engineered) assassin. I loved the father-daughter dynamic in Kick-Ass, though I think it remains to be seen if this movie has the same unforced, loving naturalism to the relationship despite the enormously warped circumstances.
I do find this micro-trend of fathers-training-pint-sized-killers interesting, though. I wonder if it would be harder for the movies to portray fathers schooling their sons in extreme violence, conjuring up images of everything from John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo's deadly campaign around the Beltway in Washington to families of violent white extremists. When a man hands his son a gun and tells him to kill, he's recreating ancient tragedies and evils. But when a father hands his daughter a weapon, he gives her power, he himself defies gender expectations: in the semantics of our culture, they become admirable rebels, elevated by their deviance, rather than stunted cowards shrunken by their violence. It says a lot about the pace of our journey towards gender equality that giving a woman any kind of power is supposed to be liberating, no matter what she does with it.
Mission Statement
Thanks to a tweet from Shani, I devoured this two-part series on dancehall music and homophobia in Jamaica over the weekend. I won't say anything else about it specifically because I really, really hope that people go read it. But to me, this is what's important and interesting about cultural criticism. I may bungle my way into arguments over movie trailers, or gush over Robyn, but really, for me, the primary question is what what we like says about who we are. What we spend our time and money on for fun is incredibly important, even, and maybe even especially, if we're spending time on things that are frivolous. And sometimes popular forms contain deadly serious content. If I could do this full-time, this is the kind of story I'd want to write.
How It Actually Happened
I really need to remember that when I go home to my parents' house for holidays or various and sundry other visits, I don't need to bring extra books with me. It's not just that they have a marvelous collection, but I find myself revisiting childhood books I haven't looked at in years. This time out, I teared up happily re-reading Louisa May Alcott's Little Men, an inferior successor to Little Women, especially in its moralism, but still a rather satisfying fable none the less.
What made this reading though was one of the gifts my parents gave me: Eden's Outcasts, John Matteson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. I've always known that Little Women and its successors are directly inspired and shaped by Alcott's life—that fact is directly alluded to in the book, when the immortal protagonist Jo March writes her novel-within-a-novel. But I don't think I knew the extent to which the specifics are simply biography in disguise. In Little Men, Jo tells a naughty girl enrolled in her school that:
It's incidents like this that make me question the imaginative power of fiction. There's no question that fiction lets us tell stories that might be too painful, or personal, to relate simply as the truth with names attached, and that fiction allows authors to create the follow-up to a perfect anecdote. If we don't go anywhere beyond "Got to. This America, man," in The Wire or the little girl found on a doorstep in Little Men, we miss the point. But I don't know that fiction set in our world and playing by the rules of it can be more extraordinary, or perfectly illustrative, than the gorgeous randomness of true life.
What made this reading though was one of the gifts my parents gave me: Eden's Outcasts, John Matteson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. I've always known that Little Women and its successors are directly inspired and shaped by Alcott's life—that fact is directly alluded to in the book, when the immortal protagonist Jo March writes her novel-within-a-novel. But I don't think I knew the extent to which the specifics are simply biography in disguise. In Little Men, Jo tells a naughty girl enrolled in her school that:
"I had a new pair of shoes once, and wanted to show them; so, though I was told not to leave the garden, I ran away and was wandering about all day. It was in the city, and why I wasn't killed I don't know. Such a time as I had. I frolicked in the park with dogs, sailed boats in the Back Bay with strange boys, dined with a little Irish beggar-girl on salt fish and potatoes, and was found at last fast asleep on a door-step with my arms round a great dog. It was late in the evening, and I was a dirty as a little pig, and the new shoes were worn out I had travelled so far."Turns out, Louisa May Alcott had the identical adventure. She ran away from home and was found by the town crier sleeping on a doorstep curled up with a friendly dog that had decided to turn protector. It's like the moment I had reading Homicide, when I found out that the opening scene in The Wire actually happened.
It's incidents like this that make me question the imaginative power of fiction. There's no question that fiction lets us tell stories that might be too painful, or personal, to relate simply as the truth with names attached, and that fiction allows authors to create the follow-up to a perfect anecdote. If we don't go anywhere beyond "Got to. This America, man," in The Wire or the little girl found on a doorstep in Little Men, we miss the point. But I don't know that fiction set in our world and playing by the rules of it can be more extraordinary, or perfectly illustrative, than the gorgeous randomness of true life.
Book Club The Next
Welcome back! I hope that those of you who celebrated Christmas had a wonderful holiday, and those of you who didn't, got a good rest, or had other good things happen, depending on your pleasure. Let's read up to, but not past, the section entitled "Phreaking," by Thursday. For the rest of the week, I'll be posting once or twice a day.
Christmas By Myself This Year
Nah, no grumpy Christmas for me. The blog will be off tomorrow while I bake a Merck's Cake, smell deep drafts of pine, and give an array of pop-culturtastic presents to the people I love the most. But I'll leave you with my new favorite Christmas song, courtesy the lovely and talented Amanda Mattos:
May all your Christmases bring such happy surprises. I'll see you all on a reduced schedule next week, and we'll continue with Cryptonomicon then.
May all your Christmases bring such happy surprises. I'll see you all on a reduced schedule next week, and we'll continue with Cryptonomicon then.
Underrated Holidays
I find Love, Actually about as effective as emotional crack, but if I had to pick my favorite holiday movie of recent years, I'd probably actually name the unfairly overlooked The Family Stone:
The movie's somewhat forgotten as part of Sarah Jessica Parker's efforts to find a role other than Carrie Bradshaw to carry her into the future. And there's an extent to which it's a goofy, fish-out-of-water movie. But it's also a surprisingly raw movie about the complicated emotions we all have about the holidays and our families, a movie that insists that mastectomy scars can be beautiful, and that isn't afraid of the ugliness and sadness inside of all of its characters. As a bonus, it features quite a fine performance from Rachel McAdams playing somewhat awful, and I think it's good for her. Anyway, highly recommended if you need to sneak away from your own family a bit, or if you could all use a good laugh and welling-up together.
The movie's somewhat forgotten as part of Sarah Jessica Parker's efforts to find a role other than Carrie Bradshaw to carry her into the future. And there's an extent to which it's a goofy, fish-out-of-water movie. But it's also a surprisingly raw movie about the complicated emotions we all have about the holidays and our families, a movie that insists that mastectomy scars can be beautiful, and that isn't afraid of the ugliness and sadness inside of all of its characters. As a bonus, it features quite a fine performance from Rachel McAdams playing somewhat awful, and I think it's good for her. Anyway, highly recommended if you need to sneak away from your own family a bit, or if you could all use a good laugh and welling-up together.
Fragmentation
I think we can all agree that a show about a group of gay sci-fi fans is a fairly niche product, even in an era where The Big Bang Theory is a significant hit. I also think, even given its niche nature, that it's a reasonably good idea for a television show. Identity, these days, comes not just from race and church and sex and nation. We define ourselves based on our politics, our interests, our places of education, our groups of friends, our sports teams.
What's interesting is less any individual thing we choose to define us, and how the disparate pieces of our identities come together and clash. It's fascinating that we live in a world where it may be more socially acceptable to be gay than to be a very serious and committed fan of science fiction, that fantasy sports can be the basis for an entire social network. Exploring affinities and how they affect our lives, friendships, marriages, and families is important work for understanding the power of our popular culture, and for understanding ourselves.
What's interesting is less any individual thing we choose to define us, and how the disparate pieces of our identities come together and clash. It's fascinating that we live in a world where it may be more socially acceptable to be gay than to be a very serious and committed fan of science fiction, that fantasy sports can be the basis for an entire social network. Exploring affinities and how they affect our lives, friendships, marriages, and families is important work for understanding the power of our popular culture, and for understanding ourselves.
Visual Power
Ta-Nehisi has an interesting point about the visual failures of big-screen comic book adaptations. I think the challenge, generally, is that things that don't have to meet the test of plausibility in the form of illustration do have to look plausible when real people are acting them out. You can't get away with the anatomical distortions illustrators get away with whether they're drawing top-heavy superheroines or the Hulk, unless you want to end up with the terrible versions of the Hulk we've seen on-screen, and it's hard to pull off aliens, feats of derring-do, and general strangeness that works on the page in real-life either.
TNC mentions the Lord of the Rings movies as an epic adaptation that does work, but I don't think the book-to-film leap there is quite analogous to the comics. Most of the things that people in those books do is within our realm of understanding and possibility. Fighting is essentially hand-to-hand or with familiar weapons. The animals and other races of humanoids in the books are variations on physical forms we're familiar with. There is some magic, but most of it's translatable, or on a smaller scale. Sure, sending water in the form of horses to drown some guys on horses is magic, but it's magic that amps up a potentially natural phenomenon. Ghosts come out of a mountain to fight human men, but they still look basically like humans fighting other humans. And when we read things in a book, we translate them with our minds.
When the possibility of what humanity can accomplish, and the nature of what humanity is changes, that's where it gets hard to translate the action with human actors. And when we're given a picture of what things are that is beyond what we conceptualize people doing, and then are asked to believe it again when it's just people doing it, it's hard to make the leap. Movies were always going to have trouble making what we were willing to accept as real on the page look real on the screen.
TNC mentions the Lord of the Rings movies as an epic adaptation that does work, but I don't think the book-to-film leap there is quite analogous to the comics. Most of the things that people in those books do is within our realm of understanding and possibility. Fighting is essentially hand-to-hand or with familiar weapons. The animals and other races of humanoids in the books are variations on physical forms we're familiar with. There is some magic, but most of it's translatable, or on a smaller scale. Sure, sending water in the form of horses to drown some guys on horses is magic, but it's magic that amps up a potentially natural phenomenon. Ghosts come out of a mountain to fight human men, but they still look basically like humans fighting other humans. And when we read things in a book, we translate them with our minds.
When the possibility of what humanity can accomplish, and the nature of what humanity is changes, that's where it gets hard to translate the action with human actors. And when we're given a picture of what things are that is beyond what we conceptualize people doing, and then are asked to believe it again when it's just people doing it, it's hard to make the leap. Movies were always going to have trouble making what we were willing to accept as real on the page look real on the screen.
Whole New Worlds
Charlie Jane Anders' exploration of the turning point in the eighties when science fiction movies took the leap and became franchises, rather than one-offs, is a wise look at the commercial developments that shaped the entertainment landscape we live in now. But as much as inevitable sequels to sci-fi movies generally trouble us these days, the move towards franchising also represents a truer understanding of the possibilities of science fiction.
Star Wars couldn't have ended with A New Hope because the story wasn't over: the Emperor was still in power, and the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion hadn't reached a crisis point. From a more traditional sense, it wasn't clear yet whether the narrative was a comedy or a tragedy, if it was going to end in what seemed like any of several possible romances, or in definitive defeat. But Star Wars didn't have to end, and Star Trek didn't either, because there were still possibilities left in their universes to explore.
The defining characteristic of science fiction isn't any one character, any one conflict, any one plot. It's that the story is set somewhere else, where the rules of that universe are not the same as our own in ways that are governed by advancements, or different possibilities, in science. Given that, it's equally valid to do a one-off story or a meandering, generation-spanning narrative. Good people working within the genre should know what they're doing, and what its—and their—limitations are. If your motivations for continuing a story are driven by profit rather than the needs of the particular story, you'll make bad stories. If you make a lot of money off a story that demands three movies, or a movie and a novel series, or a series of cartoons and a lot of comics, there's nothing wrong with doing good for your wallet and the world of story.
Star Wars couldn't have ended with A New Hope because the story wasn't over: the Emperor was still in power, and the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion hadn't reached a crisis point. From a more traditional sense, it wasn't clear yet whether the narrative was a comedy or a tragedy, if it was going to end in what seemed like any of several possible romances, or in definitive defeat. But Star Wars didn't have to end, and Star Trek didn't either, because there were still possibilities left in their universes to explore.
The defining characteristic of science fiction isn't any one character, any one conflict, any one plot. It's that the story is set somewhere else, where the rules of that universe are not the same as our own in ways that are governed by advancements, or different possibilities, in science. Given that, it's equally valid to do a one-off story or a meandering, generation-spanning narrative. Good people working within the genre should know what they're doing, and what its—and their—limitations are. If your motivations for continuing a story are driven by profit rather than the needs of the particular story, you'll make bad stories. If you make a lot of money off a story that demands three movies, or a movie and a novel series, or a series of cartoons and a lot of comics, there's nothing wrong with doing good for your wallet and the world of story.
Falling On My Sword
So, my post about The Tree of Life yesterday was cranky, and worse, inarticulate. I ended up sounding silly, and Simon, justifiably, slapped back at me for it. As an apology and explanation, I wanted to lay out a couple of things to do a better job of explaining both my preexisting assumptions and prejudices and what I find obnoxious about this particular trailer.
1. I tend to think of mass-market movies and film as discrete things: all I mean is that I think there's a difference that's conveyed by context. Film's a medium, and it includes things that I would gladly be hypnotized by in a museum, whether it's looping images of Sarah Palin speaking intercut with Alaskan native dancers or anything by Matthew Barney. If I'm hitting up a multiplex, I tend to expect something a bit more conventionally plotted.
2. That is not to say that I think artistic, experimental, plot-averse, etc. film should go sit in the corner, or anything. I'm all for a world where we see much more diverse things in mainstream movie theaters. But...
3. I think studios and directors have an obligation to sell audiences on those more unusual projects. And I think that pitch has to sell the project on the merits. Most of what I found so objectionable about the trailer for The Tree of Life is that it essentially seemed to tell viewers: "It's Brad Pitt! And Sean Penn! And it's deep! And we have arty images!" If Malick's actually doing something "radical," if this movie stretches back to prehistoric Earth (all things that have been reported out of it), then that campaign is both a cheat to audiences and an insult to their intelligence. Give us at least a sense of what we're going to see, and make a strong pitch for why we should want to see that. If that hideously pretentious voiceover in the trailer isn't part of the movie, it's very silly marketing. If it is in the movie, I reserve the right to consider it bad, pretentious writing.
4. Additionally, I, very personally, don't think any director is so visionary that they automatically deserve my time. The movies are a business, and if you're going to work through the studio system, and get $25 million to make a movie, then I don't think you're exempt from explaining what you're doing and can just expect audiences to just follow along (I'm speaking generally here, not necessarily about Malick). That said...
5. I'll probably, in perpetuity, watch anything Tony Gilroy makes, without explanation. And the reason for that is this. When I go to a mainstream theater to see a movie, I ultimately worship at the altar of the writing. I understand this is a specific preference, and it is not necessarily correct, and certainly not necessarily the most sophisticated way to watch movies. But I think it's worthwhile to be honest about it.
What I really want to see is brilliant plotting and dialogue, and I'm interested in how that gets played out in front of me. Gilroy's so compelling to me because he can stage something like the opening fight scene in Duplicity, which is a gorgeous piece of physical comedy, and sort of formally stunning in its severe color palate and battle lines of corporate suits, but that also serves the plot and the writing directly, making you wonder why these men are fighting, and alerting you that what follows is going to be both dead serious and very silly.
I love him because he can work with actors in such a way that a line like "I am Shiva, the god of death," can sound like perfectly natural speech out of the mouths of both an insane man and a perfectly sane one in Michael Clayton, that he imbues a child's explanation of a fantasy series with an incredible richness that gives a dignity to it, makes us feel the pull of that fantasy for the person reading it. His language shows us the semi-permeable barriers between madness and sanity and the divine, and he does it in movies about corporations.
I feel the same way about Preston Sturges. The physical comedy in the dining room scene in The Lady Eve is funny, but it's the verbal translation of the action that makes it brilliant. Something like this sequence:
Anyway, I'm way off-topic here. All I meant to say is that when it comes to the movies, rather than film as a whole, the rigor of the plotting and dialogue are the bones to me, and the execution and visual expression of those plots and themes are what matter most. If you want me to love something else, I'm open to it. But I want to be persuaded, rather than pandered to.
1. I tend to think of mass-market movies and film as discrete things: all I mean is that I think there's a difference that's conveyed by context. Film's a medium, and it includes things that I would gladly be hypnotized by in a museum, whether it's looping images of Sarah Palin speaking intercut with Alaskan native dancers or anything by Matthew Barney. If I'm hitting up a multiplex, I tend to expect something a bit more conventionally plotted.
2. That is not to say that I think artistic, experimental, plot-averse, etc. film should go sit in the corner, or anything. I'm all for a world where we see much more diverse things in mainstream movie theaters. But...
3. I think studios and directors have an obligation to sell audiences on those more unusual projects. And I think that pitch has to sell the project on the merits. Most of what I found so objectionable about the trailer for The Tree of Life is that it essentially seemed to tell viewers: "It's Brad Pitt! And Sean Penn! And it's deep! And we have arty images!" If Malick's actually doing something "radical," if this movie stretches back to prehistoric Earth (all things that have been reported out of it), then that campaign is both a cheat to audiences and an insult to their intelligence. Give us at least a sense of what we're going to see, and make a strong pitch for why we should want to see that. If that hideously pretentious voiceover in the trailer isn't part of the movie, it's very silly marketing. If it is in the movie, I reserve the right to consider it bad, pretentious writing.
4. Additionally, I, very personally, don't think any director is so visionary that they automatically deserve my time. The movies are a business, and if you're going to work through the studio system, and get $25 million to make a movie, then I don't think you're exempt from explaining what you're doing and can just expect audiences to just follow along (I'm speaking generally here, not necessarily about Malick). That said...
5. I'll probably, in perpetuity, watch anything Tony Gilroy makes, without explanation. And the reason for that is this. When I go to a mainstream theater to see a movie, I ultimately worship at the altar of the writing. I understand this is a specific preference, and it is not necessarily correct, and certainly not necessarily the most sophisticated way to watch movies. But I think it's worthwhile to be honest about it.
What I really want to see is brilliant plotting and dialogue, and I'm interested in how that gets played out in front of me. Gilroy's so compelling to me because he can stage something like the opening fight scene in Duplicity, which is a gorgeous piece of physical comedy, and sort of formally stunning in its severe color palate and battle lines of corporate suits, but that also serves the plot and the writing directly, making you wonder why these men are fighting, and alerting you that what follows is going to be both dead serious and very silly.
I love him because he can work with actors in such a way that a line like "I am Shiva, the god of death," can sound like perfectly natural speech out of the mouths of both an insane man and a perfectly sane one in Michael Clayton, that he imbues a child's explanation of a fantasy series with an incredible richness that gives a dignity to it, makes us feel the pull of that fantasy for the person reading it. His language shows us the semi-permeable barriers between madness and sanity and the divine, and he does it in movies about corporations.
I feel the same way about Preston Sturges. The physical comedy in the dining room scene in The Lady Eve is funny, but it's the verbal translation of the action that makes it brilliant. Something like this sequence:
See those nice store teeth all beaming at you. Oh, she recognizes you! She's up, she's down, she can't make up her mind. She's up again. She recognizes you! She's coming over to speak to you. The suspense is killing me. "Why, for heaven's sake, aren't you Fuzzy Oathammer I went to manual training school with in Louisville? Oh you're not? Well, you certainly look exactly like him, it's certainly a remarkable resemblance... But if you're not going to ask me to sit down, I suppose you're not going to ask me to sit down... I'm very sorry, I certainly hope I haven't caused you any embarrassment, you so and so."Is Veronica Geng decades before Veronica Geng, and it's incredible. Even Buster Keaton, who never gets to talk in his best movies, it's the writing that matters, the jokes on the title cards, the plotting that creates a mirror image of all the gags.
Anyway, I'm way off-topic here. All I meant to say is that when it comes to the movies, rather than film as a whole, the rigor of the plotting and dialogue are the bones to me, and the execution and visual expression of those plots and themes are what matter most. If you want me to love something else, I'm open to it. But I want to be persuaded, rather than pandered to.
The Band Isn't Getting Back Together
Given that Mark Wahlberg's career has really, truly taken off, moving both into comedy with The Other Guys and back into Oscar territory with The Fighter, I sort of doubt he and the rest of the gang will ever get back together to make The Brazilian Job. A sequel to The Italian Job was never strictly necessary, from a narrative or any other standpoint, but in that moment when Ocean's Eleven squeezed so much fun out of a light caper movie with a sophisticated cast, it would have been diverting. And more importantly, it might have given Jason Statham the opportunity, nay, required him, to be something other than grimly determined:
I still need to see The Bank Job at some point (is Statham only allowed to express emotion in movies with "job" in the title?), but even thought what he's been given to do is somewhat limited, the man has a body he can put to other uses than mayhem, and an ironical, winning smile. It's dull watching him stride away from explosions and fight people all the time—he's beyond aplomb and into boredom:
Maybe he can teach Ben Foster how to walk away from gas station conflagrations with his mouth set and his sunglasses firmly in place, and then go on to other things? And no, voicing Tybalt in the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet doesn't count.
I still need to see The Bank Job at some point (is Statham only allowed to express emotion in movies with "job" in the title?), but even thought what he's been given to do is somewhat limited, the man has a body he can put to other uses than mayhem, and an ironical, winning smile. It's dull watching him stride away from explosions and fight people all the time—he's beyond aplomb and into boredom:
Maybe he can teach Ben Foster how to walk away from gas station conflagrations with his mouth set and his sunglasses firmly in place, and then go on to other things? And no, voicing Tybalt in the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet doesn't count.
Warp and Weft
Perhaps I need film school training, or a finer sensitivity, but Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life just looks horridly pretentious to me:
Life is a miraculous, transcendent thing, for sure. And I assume that all of us, at some point, feel the world open up around us. But there's something a little precious and sensitive about a movie that's entirely about a perpetual sense of wonder. It doesn't make anyone exceptionally special to feel that they're tugged between their father and their mother's tendencies. I'm sure there's more to the world than this. But there also needs to more to the plot of the movie than the suggestion that we're all bound up in the glorious mysteries of the universe for it to be narratively interesting, and more visually than screen-saver like images of majesty.
Life is a miraculous, transcendent thing, for sure. And I assume that all of us, at some point, feel the world open up around us. But there's something a little precious and sensitive about a movie that's entirely about a perpetual sense of wonder. It doesn't make anyone exceptionally special to feel that they're tugged between their father and their mother's tendencies. I'm sure there's more to the world than this. But there also needs to more to the plot of the movie than the suggestion that we're all bound up in the glorious mysteries of the universe for it to be narratively interesting, and more visually than screen-saver like images of majesty.
And In The End, The Love You Make / Is Equal to the Love You Take
The idea of a Shakespeare In Love sequel is hideously stupid, and does a dishonor to one of the great romantic comedies of the last decade. The whole thing that made Shakespeare in Love terrific is that ultimately, it's a story of love denied, it gives a lie to the idea that the story ends happily. More romantic movies would do well to emulate that, to acknowledge the truth that most relationships don't end in permanent relationships, or even in permanent happiness, but that the temporary peace you find with someone is no less powerful for it.
If someone is going to make a Shakespeare movie, though, I wish they'd take a shot at adapting the Shakespeare narrative from The Sandman. Neil Gaiman's masterpiece is nigh unfilmable: the cast is too big, the narratives too numerous, and most of them don't make it from beginning to end, and honestly, some of them are just too strange to make it with a mass-market audience (I'm thinking largely of The Kindly Ones). It would reduce Gaiman's work to make Dream merely the agent of Shakespeare's genius, but it's probably one of the only ways to condense a movie out of the material. Otherwise, a high-budget television show is probably the only way to go. But I'm still not sure how anyone would pull it off.
If someone is going to make a Shakespeare movie, though, I wish they'd take a shot at adapting the Shakespeare narrative from The Sandman. Neil Gaiman's masterpiece is nigh unfilmable: the cast is too big, the narratives too numerous, and most of them don't make it from beginning to end, and honestly, some of them are just too strange to make it with a mass-market audience (I'm thinking largely of The Kindly Ones). It would reduce Gaiman's work to make Dream merely the agent of Shakespeare's genius, but it's probably one of the only ways to condense a movie out of the material. Otherwise, a high-budget television show is probably the only way to go. But I'm still not sure how anyone would pull it off.
Fading Away
I didn't particularly like Ghost World when I saw it:
I think it's entirely possible the movie hit too damn close to home for me. It was the summer after my senior year of college, and I watched it with one of my very few friends at the time. It was before either of us knew that we were going to grow up enough, and figure enough things out, to find a way through our lives that didn't involve a mysterious bus out of town.
But it's very sad to me to hear that Thora Birch's father might be costing her acting work. She was never quite that magnetic, but she could have been one of the heiresses to Winona Ryder's hard-edged alternative dreamgirl legacy, sharper than Natalie Portman's manic pixie dreamgirl. No matter your profession, all of us deserve to live independent lives and to negotiate appropriate space from our parents. If something happened to her to make her want or need her father around and playing a major role in her life, even a directive one, I hope she's all right.
I think it's entirely possible the movie hit too damn close to home for me. It was the summer after my senior year of college, and I watched it with one of my very few friends at the time. It was before either of us knew that we were going to grow up enough, and figure enough things out, to find a way through our lives that didn't involve a mysterious bus out of town.
But it's very sad to me to hear that Thora Birch's father might be costing her acting work. She was never quite that magnetic, but she could have been one of the heiresses to Winona Ryder's hard-edged alternative dreamgirl legacy, sharper than Natalie Portman's manic pixie dreamgirl. No matter your profession, all of us deserve to live independent lives and to negotiate appropriate space from our parents. If something happened to her to make her want or need her father around and playing a major role in her life, even a directive one, I hope she's all right.
Why HBO's Game of Thrones Adaptation Matters for High-Brow Television
Why, you ask? I lay it out in this week's Atlantic column. Y'all getting me addicted has probably been the best pop cultural thing to happen to me this year.
Cryptonomicon Book Club, Part II: The Begats
Part I of the book club appeared here. Usual rules apply. Spoilers up to, but not including or past, the section entitled "Lizard" below the jump.
One of the things I like most about this novel is that I have absolutely no idea where the story is going. I've resisted an urge I sometimes give into to check things on Wikipedia, and am requiring myself to remember names, and plot points. But that's only part of it. I genuinely can't predict what's coming next. I assume that Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse win World War II, but I can't be sure, because Japan is Nippon now, apparently, and so something happened along the way to throw the world at least very slightly and perhaps considerably off-kilter.
And this gets to perhaps what is my favorite part of the experience of reading Cryptonomicon: Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse might be important because they win World War II. But it might just be that they matter because they survive to produce Amy Shaftoe and Randy Waterhouse.
There's something almost Biblical in Cryptonomicon's concern with ancestry. Every time I hear certain names now, there are begats ringing out in my ears. We're working with a smaller number of generations, but there's a certain grandeur to the execution. And it functions well as a narrative device. There are an enormous number of movies in particular that begin with the entrance of the older version of one of the characters, arriving to narrate their own story:
It's a frame device that is an inherent spoiler. Once an aged narrator appears, we know that the character will survive everything they're about to tell us about.
Stephenson's decision to use lineage functions more subtly. The appearance of Amy and Randy suggests that Bobby and Lawrence survive for a while, but we don't know for how long. We don't know who their partners necessarily are, and it's not even clear how many generations removed from Lawrence and Bobby Randy and Amy are. The mere existence of Amy and Randy gives me fragile hope for Bobby's survival, for Lawrence forging a genuine and curious connection with someone that lasts long enough for a child to bear his name.
In terms of characterization, Stephenson clearly believes to a certain extent that lineage is destiny. Early in his description of Avi, he writes:
He does something similar in describing how Bobby's Uncle Jack landed in Manila that for me, conjures up a moment in Tony Kushner's short play "Reverse Transcription," when one of the characters describes the land in a Martha's Vineyard cemetery as "Forefatherly. Originary.":
But even as he's asking us to accept a rather grand notion of ancestry, Stephenson still directly acknowledges a very modern contradiction: an insistence that we, rather than genetics and ancestry, determine who we are and the shape of our lives, while at the same time the fact that we're forced to acknowledge that sometimes our families understand us better than anyone else. Bobby Shaftoe learns this when he comes home after being wounded:
What I really want to know is whether Lawrence Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe met, or whether they passed each other like a code and interpretation that never quite meet up, and if they met, what they meant to each other, and consequently, what all of these families mean to each other. It's as if there's some sort of underlying pattern to the universe. But Lawrence Waterhouse can't see it yet. And so far, neither can I.
One of the things I like most about this novel is that I have absolutely no idea where the story is going. I've resisted an urge I sometimes give into to check things on Wikipedia, and am requiring myself to remember names, and plot points. But that's only part of it. I genuinely can't predict what's coming next. I assume that Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse win World War II, but I can't be sure, because Japan is Nippon now, apparently, and so something happened along the way to throw the world at least very slightly and perhaps considerably off-kilter.
And this gets to perhaps what is my favorite part of the experience of reading Cryptonomicon: Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse might be important because they win World War II. But it might just be that they matter because they survive to produce Amy Shaftoe and Randy Waterhouse.
There's something almost Biblical in Cryptonomicon's concern with ancestry. Every time I hear certain names now, there are begats ringing out in my ears. We're working with a smaller number of generations, but there's a certain grandeur to the execution. And it functions well as a narrative device. There are an enormous number of movies in particular that begin with the entrance of the older version of one of the characters, arriving to narrate their own story:
It's a frame device that is an inherent spoiler. Once an aged narrator appears, we know that the character will survive everything they're about to tell us about.
Stephenson's decision to use lineage functions more subtly. The appearance of Amy and Randy suggests that Bobby and Lawrence survive for a while, but we don't know for how long. We don't know who their partners necessarily are, and it's not even clear how many generations removed from Lawrence and Bobby Randy and Amy are. The mere existence of Amy and Randy gives me fragile hope for Bobby's survival, for Lawrence forging a genuine and curious connection with someone that lasts long enough for a child to bear his name.
In terms of characterization, Stephenson clearly believes to a certain extent that lineage is destiny. Early in his description of Avi, he writes:
His father's people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto-Jews who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and eating jimson weed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was deeply impressive to businesspeople—Nipponese ones expecially—but there were these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco weed.The first couple of sentences read like a Michael Chabon novel, a stark and emotionally blunt description of escape, but then Stephenson swerves in a way I think is distinctive, translating the old West to contemporary business in a way that's strikingly original. He's a great juxtapositive describer in his writing. The "looked like Indians and talked like cowboys," line is one of my favorites in the book, based on a simple repurposing of a basic phrase, infused with meaning. But he's also found a way to make the Holocaust, the old West, and contemporary global business seem like a clear progression in a single paragraph, and in a single person.
He does something similar in describing how Bobby's Uncle Jack landed in Manila that for me, conjures up a moment in Tony Kushner's short play "Reverse Transcription," when one of the characters describes the land in a Martha's Vineyard cemetery as "Forefatherly. Originary.":
Nimrod...decided that he liked the pluck of these Filipino men, in order to kill whom a whole new class of ridiculously powerful sidearm (the Colt .45) had had to be invented. Not only that, he liked hte looks of their women. Promptly discharged from the service, he found that full disability pay would go a long way on the local economy. He set up an export business along the Pasig riverfront, married a half-Spanish woman, and sired a son (Jack) and two daughters. The daughters ended up in the States, back in the Tennessee mountains that have been the ancestral wellspring of all Shaftoes ever since they broke out of the indentured servitude racket back in the 1700s. Jack stayed in Manila and inherited Nimrod's business, but never married.The idea that ancestral land can pull you back from halfway across the world, even if you were born abroad, is an almost old-fashioned notion, one we associate with nostalgics and Zionists. But Stephenson isn't afraid of the scope of the lineages he's conjuring up. It's a long story he's telling, and a long game he's playing.
But even as he's asking us to accept a rather grand notion of ancestry, Stephenson still directly acknowledges a very modern contradiction: an insistence that we, rather than genetics and ancestry, determine who we are and the shape of our lives, while at the same time the fact that we're forced to acknowledge that sometimes our families understand us better than anyone else. Bobby Shaftoe learns this when he comes home after being wounded:
The family has been scrupulous about holding on to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military service....Bobby's not the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the Navy Cross....Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there....The only person he can stand to be around his his great-grandfather Shaftoe....He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never talks about the lizard.I'll be curious to see more of what the characters know about their own ancestry, and about how these various lineages cross over. The only real sense we've gotten of those interactions is in the story that Amy tells Randy about her father (a side note relevant to this discussion, I thought corvus's comment in our first discussion in response to the allegation that Amy is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, is a wise one: "I think she is really just meant to be the complete opposite of Charlene, and the obvious female descendant of her father and grandfather. However, that doesn't mean she is not just a wish fulfillment object for the male protagonist involved, instead of a character in her own right."), who shoved a man we'll later meet, who is one of the architects of the Vietnam War, off a ski lift.
What I really want to know is whether Lawrence Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe met, or whether they passed each other like a code and interpretation that never quite meet up, and if they met, what they meant to each other, and consequently, what all of these families mean to each other. It's as if there's some sort of underlying pattern to the universe. But Lawrence Waterhouse can't see it yet. And so far, neither can I.
True Romance
I wasn't crazy about The Tudors when I first gave it a shot, but I decided to try it again over the weekend. Fortunately, I got to the episodes involving the romance between Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor.
It helps that the actors involved are terrific. Gabrielle Anwar took a while to grow on me on Burn Notice—I find her somewhat alarmingly thin—but I think she's wonderful, tough and funny and very sweet when the part calls for it. I'm not as familiar with Henry Cavill's work, I honestly don't remember him in the oddly inert 2002 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. But he reminds me of a slightly rougher Matthew Bomer on White Collar, and that's a good thing.
I think they work together so well, though, in part because their developing romance stands in contrast to Henry's profligacies. I said the first time I watched the show that I was surprised watching Jonathan Rhys Meyers getting it on could be so incredibly boring. By contrast, there's a slow burn between Cavill and Anwar. Because we know history, we know essentially from the minute they meet that there's going to be a conflagration. But the show takes its time with them. When they finally do have sex, it's sort of supremely silly that they do so on a ship, in the middle of a storm. But at least juxtaposing their coupling with the force of the sea seems reasonably earned: they're equals, and equal in the seduction. And when Anwar murders her aged husband, the show justifies that too, showing us how hideous it must have been to go through the ritual of a formal bedding with a crowd of spectators, even if you weren't in love with someone else.
This isn't to advance some sort of prudish notion that love is always more narratively interesting than sex. Of course that isn't the case. But putting a bit of effort into staging sex and drawing out the emotions involved, no matter how fleeting the liaison, is always worth it.
It helps that the actors involved are terrific. Gabrielle Anwar took a while to grow on me on Burn Notice—I find her somewhat alarmingly thin—but I think she's wonderful, tough and funny and very sweet when the part calls for it. I'm not as familiar with Henry Cavill's work, I honestly don't remember him in the oddly inert 2002 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. But he reminds me of a slightly rougher Matthew Bomer on White Collar, and that's a good thing.
I think they work together so well, though, in part because their developing romance stands in contrast to Henry's profligacies. I said the first time I watched the show that I was surprised watching Jonathan Rhys Meyers getting it on could be so incredibly boring. By contrast, there's a slow burn between Cavill and Anwar. Because we know history, we know essentially from the minute they meet that there's going to be a conflagration. But the show takes its time with them. When they finally do have sex, it's sort of supremely silly that they do so on a ship, in the middle of a storm. But at least juxtaposing their coupling with the force of the sea seems reasonably earned: they're equals, and equal in the seduction. And when Anwar murders her aged husband, the show justifies that too, showing us how hideous it must have been to go through the ritual of a formal bedding with a crowd of spectators, even if you weren't in love with someone else.
This isn't to advance some sort of prudish notion that love is always more narratively interesting than sex. Of course that isn't the case. But putting a bit of effort into staging sex and drawing out the emotions involved, no matter how fleeting the liaison, is always worth it.
Dazed and Confused—And Starting All Over
I loved this piece my friend Alex Gutierrez wrote about the structural changes the advent of cell phones have caused in our one-crazy-night movies. She says:
The "One Crazy Night" movie genre—which includes films like Can't Hardly Wait, 200 Cigarettes, andSuperbad—is predicated on communication failure. In these films, the many members of the ensemble cast find it hard to reconnect once separated, hear inaccurate stories, and share crucial information too late. They're comedies of errors where problems could easily be solved with a text message, and trust me, even William Shakespeare would struggle with this same problem writing his lighter (and even some of his darker) fare were he alive today.I think she's right about all of this. But I do think the fact that we've got a modest resurgence in one-crazy-night movies at all is the slightly more interesting point. Folks who were, say, 21 in 1985 are 46 today. If I were midst-recession, old enough to be seriously concerned about retirement and providing for my family, I'd wonder what it would be like to get a reset on my life, to find the right person, to find the right career, to save better, to apply the knowledge I have now. There's no question that the nights can be crazier in the pre-cell phone age. But the fact that we need or want that kind of craziness speaks to a deeper emotional need, both by those of us who remember what it was like to be there, and those of us who never quite had the chance.
Outliving
However ridiculous it is as a franchise, can we all agree that it is somewhat delightful that a mincing one-off outlasted the purported and bland hero and heroine of the original Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and that the series has now become a showcase for exceedingly talented actors to have an enormous amount of silly fun? I mean, come on, how drunk do you think Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush and Ian McShane got while making this move (I leave Penelope Cruz out only because she was pregnant for much of filming. I'm sure she can put it away with the best of them):
I also think it's legitimately and seriously interesting how the British Empire has slowly become more and more important to the series, to the extent that Jack's now in London. As anyone who has read the terrific Republic of Pirates knows, the buccaneers lost, so that encroachment is both fitting and historically accurate. I'd be curious to see if the series ends with a truce, or a piratical withdrawal from the scene. Such a denouement would be emotionally appropriate, I think: Jack Sparrow's always been a little doomed, not really of this world even before he came back from the dead.
I also think it's legitimately and seriously interesting how the British Empire has slowly become more and more important to the series, to the extent that Jack's now in London. As anyone who has read the terrific Republic of Pirates knows, the buccaneers lost, so that encroachment is both fitting and historically accurate. I'd be curious to see if the series ends with a truce, or a piratical withdrawal from the scene. Such a denouement would be emotionally appropriate, I think: Jack Sparrow's always been a little doomed, not really of this world even before he came back from the dead.
Making The Movies
This "So You Want To Be A Journalist" video cracked me up, as a veteran of a trade magazine, as someone was once the kind of radical who staged protests at college administration buildings, and as a Theoretically Wise Person who often speaks to people who would like to be journalists when they grow up:
More importantly though, however crude this is as a medium, it's an important step forward in giving people tools to make movies. There are a tons of these floating around specific to various industries, and it's a fun little meme, but I'm sure there are people out there who are going to create more sophisticated narratives, and ultimately more sophisticated tools to let people make more movies with more iterations of interactions between the characters. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of stories people choose to tell when that happens, how fast the technology develops, and at what point, people just choose to make stories and share them with each other, bypassing mainstream entertainment altogether. I actually doubt that the last iteration will ever happen so completely as to put Hollywood out of business. But I'd be curious to see if such tools significantly lower the barriers to production and distribution, and if so, whether anyone else cares.
More importantly though, however crude this is as a medium, it's an important step forward in giving people tools to make movies. There are a tons of these floating around specific to various industries, and it's a fun little meme, but I'm sure there are people out there who are going to create more sophisticated narratives, and ultimately more sophisticated tools to let people make more movies with more iterations of interactions between the characters. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of stories people choose to tell when that happens, how fast the technology develops, and at what point, people just choose to make stories and share them with each other, bypassing mainstream entertainment altogether. I actually doubt that the last iteration will ever happen so completely as to put Hollywood out of business. But I'd be curious to see if such tools significantly lower the barriers to production and distribution, and if so, whether anyone else cares.
What Will It Take For Community to Survive?
As year-end lists have poured in, it's been nice to see Community top or near the top of so many rankings of the best thing on television. I'm in something of withdrawal over the show's hiatus already, and my thoughts are turning, rather grimly, of what it's going to take for the series to survive.
In some ways, Community reminds me of 30 Rock. Like its network sibling, Community had a strong first season, and then hit a string of undeniable comic and parodic genius in its second season. 30 Rock's generally considered somewhat less pop-culture obsessed than Community, but many of that second season's high points were hugely referential, and very much about creating shadow versions of events, whether it was Jack's failed attempt to reform Tracy's baseball team, or the episode-ending cast-wide rendition of "Midnight Train to Georgia."
Unlike 30 Rock, however, that creative streak hasn't resulted in a ratings bump for Community. 30 Rock took place during a strike-shortened second season, which may have helped its ratings rise from 5.35 million viewers per episode to 6.09 million: people were getting in all the original television they could before succumbing to a half-season's worth of cheap reality programming and re-runs. Community's average viewers have dropped from 5.54 million per episode to 4.64 million per episode. I'm sure a lot of that is due to Hulu and iTunes: even on weeks when I can't get to the television on Thursday nights, I'm definitely watching the show by other means on Friday.
So in this bold new world, what combination of real-time tuning in and alternate viewing is enough to keep a show on the air? I can see a world in which Community is limited to a perfect, four-year run. This is a series that's incredibly particular to the combination of actors involved, it's not a concept I want to see spun off with a new class of students. But I'd do almost anything that I, as an individual viewer, could contribute to make sure it gets those four years. I'm sure this is as much of a mystery for studios as it is for me. I just hope they decide to err on the side of the risk.
In some ways, Community reminds me of 30 Rock. Like its network sibling, Community had a strong first season, and then hit a string of undeniable comic and parodic genius in its second season. 30 Rock's generally considered somewhat less pop-culture obsessed than Community, but many of that second season's high points were hugely referential, and very much about creating shadow versions of events, whether it was Jack's failed attempt to reform Tracy's baseball team, or the episode-ending cast-wide rendition of "Midnight Train to Georgia."
Unlike 30 Rock, however, that creative streak hasn't resulted in a ratings bump for Community. 30 Rock took place during a strike-shortened second season, which may have helped its ratings rise from 5.35 million viewers per episode to 6.09 million: people were getting in all the original television they could before succumbing to a half-season's worth of cheap reality programming and re-runs. Community's average viewers have dropped from 5.54 million per episode to 4.64 million per episode. I'm sure a lot of that is due to Hulu and iTunes: even on weeks when I can't get to the television on Thursday nights, I'm definitely watching the show by other means on Friday.
So in this bold new world, what combination of real-time tuning in and alternate viewing is enough to keep a show on the air? I can see a world in which Community is limited to a perfect, four-year run. This is a series that's incredibly particular to the combination of actors involved, it's not a concept I want to see spun off with a new class of students. But I'd do almost anything that I, as an individual viewer, could contribute to make sure it gets those four years. I'm sure this is as much of a mystery for studios as it is for me. I just hope they decide to err on the side of the risk.
Fools and Wise Men
I Watch Stuff is approaching Russell Brand's latest with some reasonable suspicion. And I will be curious enough to see if the man who gave us Aldous Snow can make mainstream American audiences go see a movie about a supernatural temp agency—much less a movie about a grown man with a nanny. I find Brand fascinating because I think he's the most inherently British actor and comedian to really make it America recently.
Ricky Gervais is, of course, a particular kind of sour sad sack, but one that has a great deal in common with funny Puritans as well as the British tradition of assuming that things are inevitably going to go somewhat badly. Brand is, and I'm sure this is why he was cast in The Tempest, a particularly potent manifestation of British anarchic humor, a holy fool. He easily could have starred in The Young Ones, or taken Michael Keaton's part as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. We have clowns in America, but we mostly laugh at them. Steve Carrell, for example, often plays idiots who are simply and totally that. It doesn't make Brick Tamland less funny that he's just transcendently dumb, but his idiocy doesn't lead us to any deeper truths. Peter Griffin's not a holy fool, he's just an idiot, and not always an amusing one.
Brand, on the other hand, often seems to operate on the principal that if you go truly batty, truth lies on the other side of silliness or madness or extreme carelessness, and sometimes can be reached only by those means. It's the same principal that underlies some British humor: it's only when you push too far into the realm of absurdity or disgust that you can find and understand certain things. Jackass may be the sole American exception, and even then, there's more laughing at than with.
It Boys
It really is remarkable how tipping points work in Hollywood. Sam Worthington stars in Avatar, and without any particular consideration of his performance, he suddenly has to be in everything. Tom Hardy, despite years of solid British movie and television work, including a critically acclaimed arty turn in Bronson, shows up in Inception, and suddenly he's in everything from a Prohibition movie to a rumored gig as the supervillian in the next Chris Nolan Batman movie. It's just remarkable how fast it happens.
I generally think Hollywood is tougher for women than for men. There's a shorter window for when studios assume people want to see you fall in love and have sex, and a huge paucity of roles in which you're allowed to do anything else. But it must be somewhat odd to suddenly, after much struggle, be the guy a bunch of male directors want to project themselves into, and wonder how long it's going to last. Do you take the sudden bonanza of roles as a confirmation of your merit? Does it make you think the industry is random? Being a muse is an inherently unstable occupation, be you man or woman, model or actor. What does it mean to be an object of inspiration—and what does it mean when your patron decides there's nothing more that can be wrung from you.
I generally think Hollywood is tougher for women than for men. There's a shorter window for when studios assume people want to see you fall in love and have sex, and a huge paucity of roles in which you're allowed to do anything else. But it must be somewhat odd to suddenly, after much struggle, be the guy a bunch of male directors want to project themselves into, and wonder how long it's going to last. Do you take the sudden bonanza of roles as a confirmation of your merit? Does it make you think the industry is random? Being a muse is an inherently unstable occupation, be you man or woman, model or actor. What does it mean to be an object of inspiration—and what does it mean when your patron decides there's nothing more that can be wrung from you.
Forced Vacation
It's come to this: Hugh Jackman has found his Rollerball remake:
Despite the 2002 version of Rollerball's epic stupidity, I actually rather like it. It's am amusing test of Jean Reno's established reputation, and Naveen Andrews, Rebecca Romjin, and LL Cool J's abilities to recover and continue with their careers; a sort of weird look at an emerging reality show culture (people in 2002 really thought 2005 was going to be bad); and it helped Chris Klein go away for a while:
I think it might be good for Hugh Jackman to take a break, induced by a hit in his marketability. He's been in a fairly remarkable number of dreadful movies in recent years, and he works at a rapid clip, inflicting a lot of junk on all of us. He was marvelous in The Prestige, but that role doesn't seem to have inspired him to anything better. It's time he got punished for making stupid trash. He could use a failure, of the kind that makes people stop making excuses for him.
Despite the 2002 version of Rollerball's epic stupidity, I actually rather like it. It's am amusing test of Jean Reno's established reputation, and Naveen Andrews, Rebecca Romjin, and LL Cool J's abilities to recover and continue with their careers; a sort of weird look at an emerging reality show culture (people in 2002 really thought 2005 was going to be bad); and it helped Chris Klein go away for a while:
I think it might be good for Hugh Jackman to take a break, induced by a hit in his marketability. He's been in a fairly remarkable number of dreadful movies in recent years, and he works at a rapid clip, inflicting a lot of junk on all of us. He was marvelous in The Prestige, but that role doesn't seem to have inspired him to anything better. It's time he got punished for making stupid trash. He could use a failure, of the kind that makes people stop making excuses for him.
In A Galaxy Far, Far Away
District 9 was one of my favorite movies of 2009, so I'm certainly excited to hear that Sharlto Copley and Neil Blomkamp are working together again on another science-fiction movie. Nobody knows anything about the plot, except that the movie is supposed to be set a long time in the future on a planet far, far away, and that Matt Damon might get involved which raises two questions for me. First, how will Blomkamp do at drawing historical parallels when he's not working off a familiar, but fractured, backdrop like that of apartheid? And second, how will he do working with a major star, and how will Copley stand up against Damon? I thought Copley was remarkable in District 9, and I trust Blomkamp to write something good for him, but I have no sense of how he was against a more established cast in The A-Team.
If we're working just from the title, though, I'm intrigued. Presumably Elysium is meant to be allusive. I'd be very curious to see a science-fiction take on the underworld of heroes, even if I have no idea what it would look like. We live in an age where heroes are just men, rather than something of a different ilk entirely, and when they die, like us, they stay dead. I'll be curious to see if Blomkamp reaches back to past conceptions, or whether he comes up with an entirely different understanding of heroism entirely.
If we're working just from the title, though, I'm intrigued. Presumably Elysium is meant to be allusive. I'd be very curious to see a science-fiction take on the underworld of heroes, even if I have no idea what it would look like. We live in an age where heroes are just men, rather than something of a different ilk entirely, and when they die, like us, they stay dead. I'll be curious to see if Blomkamp reaches back to past conceptions, or whether he comes up with an entirely different understanding of heroism entirely.
Show Him the Money
James Brooks spent $120 million on How Do You Know. I'll let that sink in for a minute. That is a lot of money. No question the salaries involved are pricey, but let's take a look at this trailer again:
These are pretty average-looking clothes and sets, with the exception of Nationals Park, which I have to imagine the Lerners let Brooks use nearly for free for the sheer, giddy fact of the dreadful Washington Nationals being in a major motion picture. To put this in perspective, you could have paid the estimated $50 million in major star salaries it took to make this picture and still have almost enough money left over to make The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you'd had the full $120 million, you could've make LXG with slightly more decent CGI and maybe even turned it into a plausible project. In other words, this is just absurdly excessive. I understand that movies are art, and I'm willing to accept that directors should get some latitude to put their art together if they can raise the money. But this ain't Avatar, where James Cameron's developing new technology that will move the genre forward even if the movie itself is a bit of a mess, or a huge ensemble picture. It's just an apparently self-indulgent romantic comedy. And spending $120 million on that in a recession feels more than a little ridiculous.
These are pretty average-looking clothes and sets, with the exception of Nationals Park, which I have to imagine the Lerners let Brooks use nearly for free for the sheer, giddy fact of the dreadful Washington Nationals being in a major motion picture. To put this in perspective, you could have paid the estimated $50 million in major star salaries it took to make this picture and still have almost enough money left over to make The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you'd had the full $120 million, you could've make LXG with slightly more decent CGI and maybe even turned it into a plausible project. In other words, this is just absurdly excessive. I understand that movies are art, and I'm willing to accept that directors should get some latitude to put their art together if they can raise the money. But this ain't Avatar, where James Cameron's developing new technology that will move the genre forward even if the movie itself is a bit of a mess, or a huge ensemble picture. It's just an apparently self-indulgent romantic comedy. And spending $120 million on that in a recession feels more than a little ridiculous.
Cryptonomicon Part II
I realized I forgot to set the next benchmark for Friday's book club. Let's get up to the section entitled "Lizard." And if you didn't check in on the first week's discussion, I highly recommend reading your fellow readers' contributions! There are dudes doing awesome feminist analysis of the characters! Discussions of technology and society! Comparisons to Pynchon and Gibson! Seriously, y'all rule!
Manufactured Magic
So, looks like James Frey's paint-by-numbers fiction factory's produced at least one Hollywood movie that's actually going to make it to release:
I don't think there's any chance I'll see this except perhaps in support of Diana Agron's awesomeness—she's one of the few things about Glee that doesn't feel super-tainted for me. But I think it's fascinating that there is a difference between how we feel about engineered entertainment depending on whether it's on paper or film. When shops construct fiction according to formulas of what they think will be successful in books, it occasions a fair bit of disapprobation. Companies like Alloy Entertainment get criticized for producing trash—and worse, for degrading the idea of authenticity and authorship through the writing teams they sometimes use, for producing plagiarists like Kaavya Viswanathan.
I think it's notable that critics are, or have been, obsessed with Gossip Girl as a television show, when many of them might have dismissed the book series as cynically constructed chick-lit junk. We expect television and movies to be lab-produced to the extent that we can enjoy particularly successful executions of genres and cliches without feeling that we're debasing ourselves and an art form by enjoying them. We expect to be manipulated so we don't have to feel guilty about it. But literature is supposed to be special, and we treat anyone, like Frey, or Alloy, who understands that a lot of what we like is simple and formulaic and that there's money to be made in hitting our sweet spots, as if they're debasing something. Literature's supposed to stay pure. Television and the movies were born fallen.
I don't think there's any chance I'll see this except perhaps in support of Diana Agron's awesomeness—she's one of the few things about Glee that doesn't feel super-tainted for me. But I think it's fascinating that there is a difference between how we feel about engineered entertainment depending on whether it's on paper or film. When shops construct fiction according to formulas of what they think will be successful in books, it occasions a fair bit of disapprobation. Companies like Alloy Entertainment get criticized for producing trash—and worse, for degrading the idea of authenticity and authorship through the writing teams they sometimes use, for producing plagiarists like Kaavya Viswanathan.
I think it's notable that critics are, or have been, obsessed with Gossip Girl as a television show, when many of them might have dismissed the book series as cynically constructed chick-lit junk. We expect television and movies to be lab-produced to the extent that we can enjoy particularly successful executions of genres and cliches without feeling that we're debasing ourselves and an art form by enjoying them. We expect to be manipulated so we don't have to feel guilty about it. But literature is supposed to be special, and we treat anyone, like Frey, or Alloy, who understands that a lot of what we like is simple and formulaic and that there's money to be made in hitting our sweet spots, as if they're debasing something. Literature's supposed to stay pure. Television and the movies were born fallen.
Telling Your Own Story
Both ">before I went to Alaska and while I was there, I read and re-read a ton of Jon Krakauer this summer, and this weekend, I stumbled on an old copy of Under the Banner of Heaven, and started re-reading it. It's got a lot of the reporting that Krakauer's good at, but it strikes me as a substantially worse book than any of his adventure or wilderness writing. I think he wants to make the argument that Mormonism has violent tendencies, which is both theologically and historically unsubtle as an argument, and ignores a lot of religious scholarship and context about religious evolution. But more than that, I think it's a book that doesn't work because Krakauer doesn't have personal experience he can draw on in a useful way.
He's definitely the rare author where I think something personal always has to be there. But he's most valuable as a writer when he's getting us in touch with emotions that most of us will never have: the extreme aesceticism that leads someone to try to live off the land in Alaska, the need to try to climb the world's tallest mountains, the experience of having oxygen deprivation and learning that people you've spent weeks with are freezing to death around you, some of them perhaps dying because you didn't have the physical and mental capacity to help them. But I don't think it's that original to tell us that some people think Mormonism is a little, or extremely, odd. I think I read the book after I'd made a first good Mormon friend, and I remember at the time thinking how little Krakauer had to add to the larger argument over Mormonism's role in American society, no matter how good his reporting was.
Had anyone read his book on Pat Tillman? That strikes me as more in keeping with his understanding of extreme activity and manhood, but I'd like to know if folks think it's good before I give it a shot.
To Infinity, And Beyond
Michael Bay is an absurd human being and director, but if he uses his cozy relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex to get the country thinking about space exploration again with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I would be prepared to forgive him a multitude of Isabel Lucas- and Megan Fox-shaped sins (though not the Racist Robot Twins—some things are beyond the pale):
Seriously, though, it's always been my stupid, sad policy bugbear to wish that we were really serious about space exploration and colonization. I suppose if we're going to find new arsenic-based life forms here on earth, we probably don't have to go to Mars, and there are things that are bigger, more urgent priorities. But goddamn do I want to be the crazy journalist picked to settle Mars with a bunch of other nutty Americans and Russians, and hang out with Sufis, and see my kids grow up into slightly snotty-but-sweet-semi-immortals.
Seriously, though, it's always been my stupid, sad policy bugbear to wish that we were really serious about space exploration and colonization. I suppose if we're going to find new arsenic-based life forms here on earth, we probably don't have to go to Mars, and there are things that are bigger, more urgent priorities. But goddamn do I want to be the crazy journalist picked to settle Mars with a bunch of other nutty Americans and Russians, and hang out with Sufis, and see my kids grow up into slightly snotty-but-sweet-semi-immortals.
Late Pass
Maybe it's silly to pull the I Have Had a Lot Going On, Y'all Card in regard to this, but I just haven't had the time or been in an emotional place to give My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a serious, or any, listen over the past couple of weeks. But while I was traveling last week, I pulled up the video version for "Runaway," and man, is that quite the piece of pop. I honestly think part of what had dissuaded me from picking up the album was some of the critical descriptions of the chorus. Reviewers have tended to describe it, I think, as sort of triumphal or defiant, but it struck me as a kind of incredible lament. It's very much in keeping with Kanye's role as the man who expanded the emotional palette of mainstream rap, who very much created the space for Kid Cudi to exist, and for Cee-Lo to blow up in the charts for the first time despite his prodigious and deserving talent. But the song also just strikes me, in the particular way I listen, as of a piece with the nakedly, almost uncomfortably emotional tradition of which Robyn is a currently leading practitioner:
It also strikes me as unsurprising that Kanye would get to this point. The first song I really associate with him is Dilated Peoples', where Kanye essentially spends the track explicating, without shame, the ways in which he's not so good to women:
This is the guy who recognizes the consequences of his actions, the dude who broke Robyn's—or any other woman's—heart. I'd really like to see them work together. Robyn seems a hell of a lot happier in real life than Kanye is, but if they could talk about the emotional roots of their music in any kind of productive way, I'd love to see what they'd come up with.
It also strikes me as unsurprising that Kanye would get to this point. The first song I really associate with him is Dilated Peoples', where Kanye essentially spends the track explicating, without shame, the ways in which he's not so good to women:
This is the guy who recognizes the consequences of his actions, the dude who broke Robyn's—or any other woman's—heart. I'd really like to see them work together. Robyn seems a hell of a lot happier in real life than Kanye is, but if they could talk about the emotional roots of their music in any kind of productive way, I'd love to see what they'd come up with.
Thunder and Lightning
At long last, we have a Thor trailer. A disclosure: I'm predisposed to like this movie tremendously for three reasons. First, I grew up on an extremely heavy dose of the D'Aulaires mythology books, and so I'm rather predisposed to big gods-and-men stories (not that anything other than Mads Mikkelsen was acceptable about Clash of the Titans), but given I sort of think that even in the modern interpretations like Season of Mists, Thor gets shortchanged (though not, of course, in 1602). Second, I adore Kenneth Branagh, and I think he does quite well with semi-prodigal young men who go on to do great things, whether it's conquer France or man up and love worthy but complicated women (or, for that matter, get revenge on sinister hypnotists). And finally, I thought Chris Hemsworth was just a terrific surprise in Star Trek, and I'm thrilled to see him get a chance at a big, splashy role.
This looks rich, and cool, and delightfully eccentric in a way that's gone beyond most of the superhero movies we've seen recently. Our superheroes are mostly ordinary men transformed by circumstance, the machinations of others, or their own inventiveness rather than aliens or gods. Even the X-Men are just a variation on ourselves, however fantastic their powers. But Thor, like Superman, is firmly not of our world, and it'll be interesting to see how Branagh's handled that on a larger scale and how audiences react to it.
And I'm also curious to see what, exactly, Natalie Portman's role is other than as the doe-eyed chick who finds Thor laid out by some creepy-lookin' symbols in the ground. If we're going to be stuck with superheroes, rather than superheroines, in the movies, we really, really need their romantic leads to be substantive, as well as gamine. Branagh tends to do reasonably well with women, with the exception of Wild, Wild West, which is so aberrational that it can be explained only by brain fever. If he can turn Portman into a next-generation American Emma Thompson, he'll do us, and American cinema, a great service.
This looks rich, and cool, and delightfully eccentric in a way that's gone beyond most of the superhero movies we've seen recently. Our superheroes are mostly ordinary men transformed by circumstance, the machinations of others, or their own inventiveness rather than aliens or gods. Even the X-Men are just a variation on ourselves, however fantastic their powers. But Thor, like Superman, is firmly not of our world, and it'll be interesting to see how Branagh's handled that on a larger scale and how audiences react to it.
And I'm also curious to see what, exactly, Natalie Portman's role is other than as the doe-eyed chick who finds Thor laid out by some creepy-lookin' symbols in the ground. If we're going to be stuck with superheroes, rather than superheroines, in the movies, we really, really need their romantic leads to be substantive, as well as gamine. Branagh tends to do reasonably well with women, with the exception of Wild, Wild West, which is so aberrational that it can be explained only by brain fever. If he can turn Portman into a next-generation American Emma Thompson, he'll do us, and American cinema, a great service.
Considering Harrison Ford
I think one of the reasons I liked Morning Glory so much is that it was delightful to see Harrison Ford on screen in a role that didn't feel like an unfortunate retreat. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was so aggressively stupid in so many ways that it was hard to focus on his performance as a stand-alone. But I caught bits and pieces of the original Indiana Jones trilogy on JetBlue and cable this weekend, and I'd watched fragments of the Star Wars trilogy in the same way recently, and it got me thinking a bit.
Ford's often a somewhat angry or grumpy actor. He's got a preternaturally turned-down mouth and a brow that begs to be furrowed in curiosity or anger. When it comes to women, Ford's characters are vexed until he's moved to kiss them. Whether president or scientist, his men are concerned with weighty matters. He's almost always saving someone, even if that's not what he originally intended.
I think I'd forgotten, given how long it's been since I'd seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, just how sexy Ford can be. Don't get me wrong. Han Solo is pretty much my ideal man, and if there was ever a dude who was born to wear tight navy pants with Corellian bloodstripes, it was Ford. But Solo's sexiness is due more to characterization than to Ford just sitting around being hot. In Raiders, though, in the scene on the roof where he mostly spends a lot of time watching Karen Allen play with a monkey, Ford spends most of his time smiling with his shirt open a little lower than is strictly necessary, and he's just straight-up smokin'. I think it's the extended smile—as an actor, Ford tends to ration it, which is why it's both so wonderful and so surprising.
Given how ridiculously attractive he can look when he tries, it's kind of remarkable that Ford essentially eschewed romantic leading roles. They're scattered throughout his repertoire: there's Working Girl, Regarding Henry, Sabrina, and Six Days, Seven Nights. But even in those parts, Ford's not always a conventional hot dude who is either worth obtaining or a method of transforming the leading lady's life. Instead, he's a tough nut to crack—though of course in Sabrina, even he can't out Humphrey Bogart Humphrey Bogart. I suppose it's kind of admirable to choose to be something other than the hot dude. But I do wish he'd done genuine banter a little bit more funny. He deserved more partners like Carrie Fisher. And more smart women deserved a chance at cracking his particular on-screen tough nut.
Ford's often a somewhat angry or grumpy actor. He's got a preternaturally turned-down mouth and a brow that begs to be furrowed in curiosity or anger. When it comes to women, Ford's characters are vexed until he's moved to kiss them. Whether president or scientist, his men are concerned with weighty matters. He's almost always saving someone, even if that's not what he originally intended.
I think I'd forgotten, given how long it's been since I'd seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, just how sexy Ford can be. Don't get me wrong. Han Solo is pretty much my ideal man, and if there was ever a dude who was born to wear tight navy pants with Corellian bloodstripes, it was Ford. But Solo's sexiness is due more to characterization than to Ford just sitting around being hot. In Raiders, though, in the scene on the roof where he mostly spends a lot of time watching Karen Allen play with a monkey, Ford spends most of his time smiling with his shirt open a little lower than is strictly necessary, and he's just straight-up smokin'. I think it's the extended smile—as an actor, Ford tends to ration it, which is why it's both so wonderful and so surprising.
Given how ridiculously attractive he can look when he tries, it's kind of remarkable that Ford essentially eschewed romantic leading roles. They're scattered throughout his repertoire: there's Working Girl, Regarding Henry, Sabrina, and Six Days, Seven Nights. But even in those parts, Ford's not always a conventional hot dude who is either worth obtaining or a method of transforming the leading lady's life. Instead, he's a tough nut to crack—though of course in Sabrina, even he can't out Humphrey Bogart Humphrey Bogart. I suppose it's kind of admirable to choose to be something other than the hot dude. But I do wish he'd done genuine banter a little bit more funny. He deserved more partners like Carrie Fisher. And more smart women deserved a chance at cracking his particular on-screen tough nut.
Cryptonomicon Book Club, Part I: The Plausibility of Satire
Welcome to the first installment of the Cryptonomicon book club! I'm thrilled to be discussing this novel with you. The usual rules apply: the post and discussion below the jump will contain spoilers up to, but not beyond, the section entitled "Nightmares." Please don't spoil beyond that for your fellow readers, or for that matter, me!
There are a lot of things I like about this novel so far—the sense of history converging on a moment and on a group of people, the gentle treatment of Alan Turing, the virtuosic, Aspergerian description of the Pearl Harbor attack which captures the disorientation of that moment better than any account than I've ever read, the various ways masculinity are working in the book so far. And I'm sure I'll write about all of those things at some point. But I think the thing that's striking me most strongly about Cryptonomicon so far is how effective the satire is.
Let me back up for a moment. When I went through my big discovery of Don DeLillo a while back, I tore through Underworld and Libra, and then got to White Noise and hated it. I thought it was just too broad, too nonsensical. I got where DeLillo was going with the absurd academic department, the absurd panic. But the strokes were too broad to reveal any additional truth about the things DeLillo wanted to make fun of. I tend to feel the same way about much of Christopher Buckley's writing: there's a contempt and broadness in his look at politics that ignores the fact that there are emotional realities attached to institutions and events.
But I think one of the things Stephenson is doing beautifully in the book so far is keeping that emotional core at the center of his exaggerations, his overly-saturated scenes. For example, Charlene's research into beards and privilege is exactly the kind of thing that DeLillo does with Hitler Studies in White Noise. But in that novel, where the concept stands on its own as something that DeLillo seems sort of proud of himself for inventing because of its cleverness, there's a point to Charlene's absurdity:
Alan's sexual propositioning of Lawrence works the same way:
I think it's easy in a book of this scope for the humanity of the main characters to shift out of the focus, or to fall out of the picture in a meaningful way. But for all that it's a book about war, and code, and science, it seems that this is fundamentally a novel about understanding.
There are a lot of things I like about this novel so far—the sense of history converging on a moment and on a group of people, the gentle treatment of Alan Turing, the virtuosic, Aspergerian description of the Pearl Harbor attack which captures the disorientation of that moment better than any account than I've ever read, the various ways masculinity are working in the book so far. And I'm sure I'll write about all of those things at some point. But I think the thing that's striking me most strongly about Cryptonomicon so far is how effective the satire is.
Let me back up for a moment. When I went through my big discovery of Don DeLillo a while back, I tore through Underworld and Libra, and then got to White Noise and hated it. I thought it was just too broad, too nonsensical. I got where DeLillo was going with the absurd academic department, the absurd panic. But the strokes were too broad to reveal any additional truth about the things DeLillo wanted to make fun of. I tend to feel the same way about much of Christopher Buckley's writing: there's a contempt and broadness in his look at politics that ignores the fact that there are emotional realities attached to institutions and events.
But I think one of the things Stephenson is doing beautifully in the book so far is keeping that emotional core at the center of his exaggerations, his overly-saturated scenes. For example, Charlene's research into beards and privilege is exactly the kind of thing that DeLillo does with Hitler Studies in White Noise. But in that novel, where the concept stands on its own as something that DeLillo seems sort of proud of himself for inventing because of its cleverness, there's a point to Charlene's absurdity:
Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom of their relationship.That injection of intense melancholy, the end-stage of a relationship where you don't love each other any more and maybe even are beginning to hate each other but can't imagine the process of separation, makes the satire meaningful. Charlene is doing something ridiculous not just because academia is ridiculous, but because she can't find a rational way to break up with Randy, to signal her disgust, the difference between them. It's genuinely meaningful.
Alan's sexual propositioning of Lawrence works the same way:
One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of thing.
Lawrence decided he was probably one of those people.
Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged.This is gentler, without the real sniping at academia, but it's a light satire of social mores and Lawrence as well. But ultimately the message is that Lawrence, because of his lack of experience and social skills, actually behaves in a more compassionate, progressive way that other people Alan has encountered. It's a satire on past attitudes more than the people involved.
I think it's easy in a book of this scope for the humanity of the main characters to shift out of the focus, or to fall out of the picture in a meaningful way. But for all that it's a book about war, and code, and science, it seems that this is fundamentally a novel about understanding.
Classics for a Reason
I was feeling rather cranky about Charles Dickens and his influence after finishing Drood, but finally getting around to G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday has kind of restored my faith in the age (and actually in retellings of Paradise Lost, too, seriously shaken after His Dark Materials). Thursday is one of those books that falls in a funny interstitial space: classic, but not necessarily classic enough to be required reading; slight, but still somewhat time-consuming.
But it's very, very good, one of the funnier social satires I've read in a long time and perhaps, ever. It gets a what I think often doesn't quite work in Christopher Buckley's work, which is that Buckley's scenarios aren't necessarily crazy enough, they're creatures of the world he's parodying even as he posits himself as an outsider. Chesterton has as his subjects political anarchy and rebellion against God, and manages, even within that extraordinarily broad continuum, to be sort of delightfully zany. The novella has all the benefits of the age's ridiculousness, and very few of its disadvantages. If I'm being vague here, it's mostly because the book really benefits from the first sharp initial surprise, and then the surprises that become predictable but pleasurable. I highly recommend it if you're going to be on a plane for a couple of hours this holiday season. And of course, Cryptonomicon. Book club up next!
But it's very, very good, one of the funnier social satires I've read in a long time and perhaps, ever. It gets a what I think often doesn't quite work in Christopher Buckley's work, which is that Buckley's scenarios aren't necessarily crazy enough, they're creatures of the world he's parodying even as he posits himself as an outsider. Chesterton has as his subjects political anarchy and rebellion against God, and manages, even within that extraordinarily broad continuum, to be sort of delightfully zany. The novella has all the benefits of the age's ridiculousness, and very few of its disadvantages. If I'm being vague here, it's mostly because the book really benefits from the first sharp initial surprise, and then the surprises that become predictable but pleasurable. I highly recommend it if you're going to be on a plane for a couple of hours this holiday season. And of course, Cryptonomicon. Book club up next!
Super Digs
This look at Peter Parker's various apartments is quite charming. I would give quite a bit to have the furniture from his crash pad with Harry Osborn, particularly that awesome mid-century lamp and sideboard. Even if you have a lot of cool stuff to stash away somewhere, I have to imagine that even superheroes sometimes want the comforts of home in a lair.
Continuity and Chance
I think the integrated approach Marvel's taken to the big film cycle it has underway is fascinating, and this video of Jon Favreau talking about working with the studio's very interesting:
It seems to me like one of the biggest challenges the directors involved must face is how to preserve continuity and a sense of coherence in the universe they're sharing, even as they're telling different stories and facing that universe from different perspectives. Without someone like Leland Chee and the Star Wars Holocron (seriously, if you haven't read this, it's one of my favorite pieces about continuity and world-building) discrepancies and retcons are probably inevitable. That said, I think the opportunity to do that exploring and have those perspectives is artistically and commercially fantastic. If there were going to be more Star Wars movies, I'd love to see a Rogue Squadron series, if only because it would be nice to see the alternate take on the universe.
It seems to me like one of the biggest challenges the directors involved must face is how to preserve continuity and a sense of coherence in the universe they're sharing, even as they're telling different stories and facing that universe from different perspectives. Without someone like Leland Chee and the Star Wars Holocron (seriously, if you haven't read this, it's one of my favorite pieces about continuity and world-building) discrepancies and retcons are probably inevitable. That said, I think the opportunity to do that exploring and have those perspectives is artistically and commercially fantastic. If there were going to be more Star Wars movies, I'd love to see a Rogue Squadron series, if only because it would be nice to see the alternate take on the universe.
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