I recall an actor extolling the benefits of smoking. On screen, that is. He'd grown up in the old studio system, back when people smoked without apology. It all came down to keeping one's hands busy, giving the actor something to do when he wasn't actually doing anything:

Take out a pack, extract a cigarette, give it a couple of taps to pack the tobacco, search the pockets for a book of matches, find it, get one out, strike it, light the cigarette, wave out the match, take a puff, exhale smoke. And on it goes.

The thing is, even when people are "doing nothing," they're actually doing a lot. And neither do they stand around declaiming in soliloquies. And when they do, listeners aren't suddenly struck by blinding realizations and run off realizing the error of their ways.

(In other words, real political life is not like The West Wing.)

And yet the engine of a story has to idle occasionally. The protagonists can't be in pursuit of the plot 24/7. So what are they doing when they're not?

In real life, people are pretty boring. Middle class, suburban teenagers in particular are really boring. But you can't bore the viewer in the name of "realism." Hence that most reliable of genre fantasy plots: boring kid discovers he's not.

Harry Potter, Peter Parker, Luke Skywalker, to name a few.

The job of the teenage superhero is Saving the World, except Saving the World gets boring week after week too. It really does. Besides, what do they do when the world doesn't need saving? As Kate suggests, it's a problem solved "by simply giving the main characters jobs."

I'd argue that the appeal of action heroes like Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, and Clark Kent is due in large part to the fact that they all work for a living. At least when we first meet them. And the less real work they do, the less interesting they are.

I'd prefer to see more of Peter Parker using his superpowers to creatively enhance his job as a photojournalist instead of battling the latest comically absurd supervillain. In other words, less time spent saving humanity (sorry, humanity), more time making a living.

For the Y/A protagonist, being a student can qualify as a job. One of the best examples of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy's two jobs (student/Slayer) means that the mundane is constantly bumping up against the supernatural. This is great for story possibilities.

Manga and anime execute this formula to great effect.

In The Devil is a Part-Timer, our villain with a good heart has gotten stranded on Earth and has to get a job at McDonald's to make ends meet. Even funnier, being the competitive guy that he is, he works hard and cares about being successful at what he does.

So in-between destroying/saving the world, he's got to staff the late shift and keep the customers coming when a Kentucky Fried Chicken opens across the street. It's a much better way to humanize the protagonist than being nice to children and rescuing wayward pets.

(Though just to be sure, he does that too.)

When it comes to non-paranormal melodramas, the budding manga artist is a popular job for a teen protagonist. In Hanasaku Iroha, Ohana works at her grandmother's inn while attending school. In Kodocha, eleven-year-old Sana is a hard-working child actress.


Serious hobbies also qualify. The sports manga/anime is its own huge genre, but there the sole (even relentless) focus of the story is often the sport. There are exceptions: I'm thinking specifically of stories where the story is about something other than the "job."

I think Yawara falls into that category. Yawara Inokuma's grandfather has trained her since infancy to be a judo champion. But now a teenager, she's rebelling. There's plenty of judo, but the story is more about her relationship with her grandfather and classmates.

In K-On, five students at an all-girls high school form a band that turns out to be pretty darn good (almost despite themselves). The running joke is that they're always so busy doing other things that they only get around to practicing the night before a gig.

In Garden of Words, Takao wanting to become a shoemaker works because it keeps him from moping all the time and gives him a goal in life. And it being an odd thing for a teenager to be interested in makes him all the more interesting.

Genre fiction gets boring when it tries too hard not to be. The result is a storm of action and emotions, except that constant action is exhausting and emotions are effervescent. Forcing characters into regular contact with the ordinary world is what brings them to life.

Related links

The Devil is a Part-Timer (H)
Hanasaku Iroha (H CR)
Kodocha (Netflix)
K-On (H)
Yawara (Netflix)

Labels: anime, buffy, economics, superhero, television, thinking about writing

Blogger John Hansen came up with a great antidote to the demand for "realism" in young adult literature: story pitches that are "very realistic." They double as examples of "high-concept" plots (turned into haiku by Twitter's 140 character limit), although the irony renders these decidedly "low-concept."

You can browse the whole Twitter list at #VeryRealisticYA. It's perversely entertaining.

Girl can't decide between two boys. The boys realize the girl is shallow and become best buds.

Teenage girl meets 300 year old vampire. They have a hard time connecting because he's 285 years older than she is.

Teen doesn't sacrifice safety, family and normalcy to go to extremes against her government for some random scrub she just met.

Girl leaves home to save the planet. Parents file a missing persons report, police find her, bring her home. She's grounded.

Teens suspect crime has occurred. They inform parents and police and go back to being teens.

Girl thinks her life is over after her high school crush dumps her. She grows up. Can't remember his name ten years later.

High school doesn't have a strict popularity system, just various groups of friends that somewhat overlap.

Girl overhears CEO's sinister plot to rule the world. Turns out her startup's founder is just really full of himself.

The survival of the world depends on girl learning to control her powers. Girl can't. Everyone dies.

Actually, that last one has been written: Madoka Magica, which turns on the inability of teenage girls to understand or properly use the superpowers they've been given. It's the recognition of this mundane truth of human nature that elevates it above most in the "magical girl" genre.

Spoiler: everybody dies but Homura.

Which brings me to the importance of the ordinary in fantasy. Fantasy is fantastic only compared to ordinariness. Without it, fantasy gets lost in superlatives. That's why Batman is more intriguing than Superman. A too super superhero becomes his own Deus ex Machina.

It gets to the point where the only scary thing supervillains can do in Hollywood blockbusters is destroy large-scale infrastructure. Well, so can earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Natural disasters are not entertaining (except in PBS documentaries).

Man of Steel shares the same problem with Thor: The Dark World and every other superhero flick that ends with the piecemeal destruction of a major metropolitan area: they're boring. (Avengers succeeds thanks to Robert Downey Jr. and by being genuinely funny.)

Kate points out the necessity of characters like Spike (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who are mostly content with their plebeian tastes and plebeian goals. They don't want to destroy the world or conquer the universe. They just want to get on with life and enjoy themselves.

Fantasy needs to be grounded in characters who live in the here and now, who avoid world-shaking existential crises. There is, in fact, a whole genre in Japanese fantasy about otherwise normal people with a single unique characteristic that hardly anybody notices.

In Kamichu! the heroine is a minor Shinto deity. Everything else about her life in a fishing village on the Inland Sea is (almost) completely normal. Rather than "Stop the presses! Inform the world!" she's treated more like "Local girl makes good."

Someday's Dreamers is about social workers who happen to be witches. They work in a government agency like any government agency that social workers work for. Except, you know, they're witches.

This is the low key approach I wish Angel would have taken: a noir detective series about a P.I. who happens to be a vampire. Instead, the whole vampire meme came to dominate everything, thereby exhausting most of the decent story possibilities.

Luke contemplating the Tatooine sunset and worlds beyond.

A little normalcy goes a long way, not only in slice-of-life stories but in the big heroic journeys too. A key to what made the first Star Wars movie so good are the mundane motivations at the heart of the story: Luke wants to get off that hick planet and Han wants to earn a few bucks.

The Buffy model, in which the teenage heroine wants to keep being a "normal" teenager, has become de rigueur in YA fantasy. But unfortunately, as in Buffy and Angel, so is the constant resort to dystopian futures and apocalyptic plots.

That's what makes iZombie a refreshing change. Like Buffy, our heroine deals with everyday life and the challenge of being "normal" when she is anything but. As a champion of justice, she is decidedly small-scale, her superpowers not terrifically super, and difficult to handle.

Blaine turns over a new leaf . . . for about five minutes.

Upon becoming one himself, the low-life who accidentally turned her into a zombie, the very Spikey Blaine, contemplates his navel for about five minutes. And then leverages his old skills--dealing drugs--into a brand new one: the culinary brain wholesaling business.

He's still a sociopath, but a surprisingly entrepreneurial one, and that's infinitely more interesting than trashing Manhattan.

As far as that goes, instead of destroying Manhattan, I'd tell Loki to ditch Asgard and run for mayor of New York. You know, like Mayor Wilkins of Sunnydale on top of the Hell Mouth. A much bigger challenge and a way better night life.

Related posts

The Big Bad
Superbad is superboring

Labels: anime, buffy, criticism, magical girl, movies, superhero, television, thinking about writing

Last month, Google executive Alan Eustace made the highest sky dive ever, jumping from an altitude of 135,890 feet and breaking the sound barrier in the process. At 24 miles high, the sky above is black, the curve of the Earth is visible, and the near-vacuum and extreme temperatures requires a space suit.

And yet he was only a third of the way to the official edge of "space": 62 miles. It's another 40 miles to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). And then 100 miles on top of that to get to the ISS.

That may seem like a long way to go. It's not. The Earth's atmosphere is ridiculously thin. The diameter of the Earth is 8000 miles. A good pair of lungs will take you up another three miles. If a commercial jet aircraft--cruising at seven to eight miles--depressurizes, you'll need that emergency oxygen mask to stay alive.

If we generously define the atmosphere as ending at LEO and compare the planet to a baseball, the atmosphere would be thinner than a dime. Applying this analogy to breathable air only, the atmosphere is thinner than a sheet of paper.

Talk apples instead of baseballs, and the Earth's atmosphere is the mere skin of the fruit. This strikes me as a bad design flaw in the inhabitable planet design spec, though if the atmosphere reached any higher, nothing in LEO would stay in orbit for long.

This "skin of life" reinforces what a strange creature gravity is, simultaneously the strongest force in the universe--that can crush a star into a black hole--and the weakest. The paradox is so profound that physicists seriously theorize that gravity leaking into alternate universes saps its actual strength.

But gravity alone isn't enough to keep an atmosphere down on the farm. A small, rocky planet requires a molten core to power plate tectonics and a magnetic field.

The magnetic field forms radiation belts that deflect the solar wind around the atmosphere (the solar wind collides with the atmosphere at the poles and creates auroras).

Mars, by contrast, lacks both volcanic activity and a strong magnetic field. Gases stripped away by the solar wind aren't easily replaced. So sans the above, terraforming Mars is a lost cause.

The Saturnian moon of Titan is shielded by the magnetosphere of its mother planet. Locked in a close orbit to Saturn, tidal forces heat Titan's icy interior, creating an atmosphere denser at its surface than Earth's.

Titan's atmosphere is 98 percent nitrogen, its lakes liquid methane (-179 degree centigrade). But Titan could become beach-front property when the Sun enters its red giant phase five billion years from now and cooks the Earth to a cinder.

Though a gamma-ray burst could do us in long before then. Or a really big asteroid. Closer to home, there's always the Yellowstone Caldera.

It's a miracle we wake up every morning still breathing. The improbabilities of dying are balanced out by the improbabilities of existing in the first place. Like Dr. Who's Clara Oswald, Earth is, for the time being, the "impossible girl."

For all we know, the gods could get restless tomorrow and knock over our beautiful house of cards and play pinochle on our snouts. Which brings to mind the last scene from Cabin in the Woods:

Dana: I'm so sorry I almost shot you. I probably wouldn't have.

Marty: Hey, shh, no. I totally get it. I'm sorry I let you get attacked by a werewolf and then ended the world. [incredulous] Giant evil gods.

Dana: I wish I could have seen them.

Marty: I know. That would have been a fun weekend.

I'm with Marty. The only regret I have about the world ending one day is that I (probably) won't be there to see it. Throughout Buffy and Angel, Joss Whedon kept trying to end the world as we know it (an underlying flaw in both series). In Cabin in the Woods, the monsters take over and the world ends for good. Finally!

But to conclude on a more tuneful note:

Labels: buffy, deep thoughts, movies, science, space

For the NPR series "In Character" (describing how fictional people can affect the real world), reporter Jamie Tarabay describes how and why she found an alter ego in Buffy Summers while working as a foreign correspondent in Baghdad. Another great entry in the series is Mike Shuster's tribute to Philip Marlowe.

Labels: buffy, deep thoughts, television

A TIME magazine bio about Mormon fantasy writer Stephenie Meyer, author of the fabulously successful Twilight vampire series. My favorite quote in the article: "I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere."

I would put it this way: "I don't want to write about reality. I already live there."

Here's some commentary by William Morris about the novels from a Mormon perspective, with a bunch of additional links. More here, wondering if the male protagonists in Twilight are just too good to be true.

Similar thoughts back at A Motley Vision, with Anneke Majors recommending D.H. Lawrence and arguing that

I would much rather my teenage sisters read novels that would elevate their worldviews and deepen their respect and appreciation for human intimacy than see them swooning over the abusive, controlling vampire character of Edward Cullen.

So what makes this guy so compelling?

He's dangerous (a vampire!) but not really (he's good!). He is hot but doesn't care. He's rich but doesn't care and doesn't have to work for it. He is powerful but is helpless before Bella's charms after only a glimpse of her. He is attentive and loyal and thinks only of her.

And all a man asks of a woman is that she be "hot." Pretty dang easy in comparison to that, it seems to me.

Okay, I joke, I joke. But I do glean from the comments a fascination with a certain kind of stoic male sexuality, conforming to all the romance stereotypes: "Edward is expected to have all the self-control. Bella is not just passive, she is actively tempting and provoking him."

This was a theme in the first half of Buffy, and it ended badly. Buffy pretty much repeated herself with Spike, and the relationship was just as dysfunctional. Give Joss Whedon extra points for keeping it real.

Labels: buffy, criticism, lds, meyer, writing

The conservative sexual mores depicted in The Path of Dreams might strike people—who didn't grown up in a conservative religious community—as an odd offshoot of one of those weird chastity movements.

Two recent threads on Mormon blogs do a good job of encapusating the moral themes in the novel. This autobiographical post (and the accompanying comments) on The Exponent nicely sums up the primary point of conflict in the first half of the novel:

Had I made my marriage decision based on practicalities—financial and otherwise—the wedding would have been held years later. But . . . I wanted very much to sleep with this man I loved and I knew [sex] would happen soon rather than later.

This thread on the By Common Consent blog proves the old writer's adage that the sure way to create drama about something is to place obstacles around it (Buffy providing the all-time classic example: sleep with your boyfriend and he literally turns into the devil).

When it comes to fiction, difficult is good. Not so much in real life, as Harvey Mansfield observes in his review of Sex and the Soul by Donna Freitas, where students at conservative religious schools (such as Connor and Elly)

often suffer deep anxiety in their search for a mate. The boys find it troublingly difficult to put off sex, and the girls are fearful that they will have failed in college if they do not get a "ring by spring" (of their senior year).

Still, the license of Sex and the City is dullsville in comparison. Though as illustrated here, these two extremes might share something in common. Quips Jeremy Lott, "Not having sex means talking about it constantly."

Labels: buffy, lds, path notes, path of dreams, religion, sex

Joss Whedon, novelist Jodi Picoult, and rapper Percy Carey talk about writing for the comics in this NPR interview. Included at the link are excerpts from Buffy and Percy Carey's autobiography, Sentences. Confirming my previous note on the subject, Carey's B&W approach--using established manga techniques such as frame-in-frame and dropped backgrounds--is far more inventive and expressive. The four-color, traditionally-drawn, and rather prosaic Buffy version seems mostly to be illustrated text, like manga that are created from anime simply by printing the key frames. The demands of color and the temptations of photorealism are a drag on the "American" style.

Labels: buffy, manga, publishing

My Zhime ("My Otome Hime") is the alternate-universe sequel to My Hime. The sequel outdoes the original. It's not as cinematically polished as its predecessor, and compared to the gloomy angst that My Hime wallows in from the start, takes itself much less seriously (at first). This could tempt the viewer to take it less seriously as well. Yet it is, in premise and execution, the more substantive of the two series. In fact, My Zhime is (unwittingly) one of the more important contributions to the superhero genre in a long time.

My Hime takes place in the here and now at a private high school that turns out to house a secret academy for supergirls, who each manifest her powers through a unique mecha "child" (magnificently rendered in CGI). Both a Voldemort and a Lex Luther show up as protagonists during the series, along with the plot device from Highlander: "There shall be only one!" And it all works quite well as long as you don't stop to think about it too hard. But once disbelief ceases to suspend itself, things begin to sag into that same Earth-in-the-balance rut.

The same problem attends any superhero story that relies on a mad scientist/wizard/capitalist-with-utopian-Stalinist-inclinations to generate conflict. Like Smallville and Harry Potter, great dollops of teenage angst are served up to tide over the increasingly untenable bouts with the mad-scientist/wizard/capitalist-with-utopian-Stalinist-inclinations.

Good writing can make it work, as in Spider-Man. Or, as in Smallville, it can just make Lex Luther and his gang more interesting than Clark Kent (as Tolstoy might have put it: "All happy families are alike; but the Luther family is unhappy in its own, hugely entertaining way"). But ultimately, as in My Hime and Harry Potter and X-Men and Lord of the Rings, it's the mad-scientist/wizard/capitalist-with-utopian-Stalinist-inclinations plot device that hobbles the whole enterprise. Because A) there can't be that many of them; and B) they don't act like that anyway.

(From Caesar to Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler, history's successful madmen have all started out as crowd-pleasing populists, winning elections and accolades, operating in the open, and making their nefarious plans quite obvious to anybody who can read.)

My Zhime takes all the characters from My Hime and transports them across space and time to (literally) another planet. (For no other reason except artistic recycling, I guess—why let perfectly good characters go to waste?) It dumps a fair amount of the angst, along with the mad-scientist/wizard/capitalist-with-utopian-Stalinist-inclinations. Instead, it tries something different: sophisticated geopolitics and clever Machiavellian scheming. Though packaged so cutely it might not be apparent at first. The story is content to let the real machinations sneak up on you.

(My Zhime also comes up with the cleverest yuri device ever: exposure to prostate specific antigen zaps their superpowers. You really can't get married and also have a career.)

My Zhime begins with Arika Yumemiya traveling to Windbloom, searching for information about her mother, who was an Otome (the "Z" character is actually the first kanji in "otome," meaning "young woman" or "virgin"). Otome are graduates of the Garderobe Academy. The Academy matriculates girls who possess latent superpower abilities (echoes of Harry Potter and X-Men). Upon graduating, the Otome become National Security Advisors to heads of state (usually of their home countries), like Condoleezza Rice with Wonder Woman resources at her fingertips.

The relationship between the Otome and the head of state is ritualistic and contractual. Raising the stakes, in what would seem a nod to The Twelve Kingdoms, the Otome and head of state live or die together. That is, if the Otome is killed in conflict, so does her contract holder. Essentially, the Otome serve as the nuclear deterrence in the high-stakes international relations game.

Of course, there's always the possibility that a head of state will attempt a high-risk venture nonetheless, pitting his Otome against others. When this is pointed out to her, Arika objects in typical why-can't-we-all-just-get-along terms. "Welcome to the real world," she's told in turn. And what a welcome relief that is, the real world certainly missing from Harry Potter, for one (though present in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell). There doesn't have to be a "Big Bad" (as Buffy phrased is). Normal human conflict is more than enough to generate cinematic drama.

Frank Miller accomplishes this in The Dark Knight Returns, when he pits Batman against Superman, not in a contest of good vs. evil, but in a clash of personality and policy differences (and the fact that Superman's smug chops needed some busting). In the real world, conflicts in temperament combined with conflicts in geopolitical intent can have major international repercussions. No James Bondian need to concoct one power-crazed supervillain (or as in Bourne Identity or Enemy of the State, one power-crazed—and unbelievably efficient—government agency) after the next.

To be sure, season one takes too many opportunities to take the low road. Season two sobers up considerably and grows quite dark. But it works well because you realize that during the silliness of season one, all the necessary elements were put in place. No deus ex machina required. That's the impressive thing about the premise of My Zhime: it can handle it. My Zhime recycled the characters from My Hime and took things up a notch. Now somebody needs to recycle this premise and take things even further.

UPDATE: the conclusion of the series discussed here.

Labels: anime reviews, buffy, personal favs, superhero, yuri

Plastic Little has long suffered an undeserved reputation that its U.S. distributor has only encouraged. ADV's liner notes delightfully boast of its "graphic violence [and] gratuitous nudity." Okay, we'll stipulate that the nudity is indeed gratuitous (and at times just silly), but it's also innocuous. The violence is PG-13 at the worst. Not that Plastic Little is without its problems in other departments. But they're not enough to sink this ship.

Essentially, you've got two hours of plot distilled down to fifty minutes, as if they ran out of film stock halfway through the project. The result is a storyline (except for the aforementioned scenes of gratuitous nudity) stripped down to the bare bones: a microscopic setup, a few dabs of character development, and the action sequences. Another hour's worth of compelling questions are left unanswered: what Guizel is actually up to, besides being generally nasty; where all those ships came from in the big showdown; how a pet shop hunter came to be so heavily armored; whether or not Tita is a lesbian . . . .

Such trifling matters notwithstanding, Plastic Little exemplifies anime's unique ability to make the most of its female characters' sexuality, and at the same time present them as compelling and believable protagonists who can hold her own in any rough-and-tumble situation. As Antonia Levi observes, "[Women in anime] may be heroes or villains, saints or sinners, but they rarely blend into the background. And they rarely wear much in the way of clothing . . . . Men will watch because of the sex and women will watch because of the strength, or so the popular wisdom goes."

The popular wisdom is only half-right. Anime bucks the tried and true truism that girls will watch a movie about boys but boys won't watch a movie about girls--but for reasons more substantial than what in otaku-speak is euphemistically known as "fan service." When Captain Tita swings into action, it's no stretch of the imagination that her male crew willingly follows her into battle. And it's no stretch when she dukes it out with the bad guys and prevails. She is completely believable as a literal "leader of men," willing to act before it becomes necessary to react.

(Recall the rooftop standoff between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire and you can't help but cheer Tita's far more satisfying solution to the same dilemma.)

The paradoxical fact remains that in anime, particularly in action roles, female protagonists, far more so than their comparable Hollywood counterparts, do not rely "on the kindness of strangers" for their well-being. It's remarkably oxymoronic. Women in Japan pursuing a professional careers still have a hard row to hoe. Business is definitely a "man's world," the glass ceiling almost bulletproof. And the majority of married Japanese women with children drop out of the workforce to become housewives.

It sounds like a model neo-Victorian world. Well, not quite. Perhaps because Japan parted with its feudal past only a century and a half ago it has not fallen prey to the sloppy, wishful thinking that confuses equality with sameness, and sameness with the neuter gender, and thus expressions of femininity with powerlessness. To quote Levi:

Traditional Japanese women control the family budget, keep their husbands on strict allowances, determine most major purchases, and have the majority voice in how their children are reared and educated. Under some circumstances they not only keep their own [sur]name, but also bestow it on their husbands and children.

Levi points out that, in the standard Hollywood fantasy setup, the standard device is to get rid of the father. But in Japan, you get rid of the mother. Because the presence of a strong, responsible woman "would kill all the fun." Levi also observes that (to the extent that you lend credence to such things) Japanese girls score much higher on "self-esteem" scales than American girls, and muses that perhaps it is because "Japanese women derive considerable prestige from performing their traditional roles in a satisfactory way."

But what constitutes a "traditional role" points to more important differences between the superficially similar Victorian and Tokugawa-era social structures. A search through the historical antecedents reveals a rich repository of female role models that anime can draw upon. To begin at the beginning, Japan's creation deity, Amaterasu, is female. The miko, Shinto priestesses, are often cast as your all-purpose spiritual guides and ghostbusters (Inuyasha, Shrine of the Morning Mist, Kamichu!).

The historical record also reveals numerous examples of the female warrior, women such as Hangaku, Tomoe Gozen, and Masako Hojo, who were as fierce and competent on the battlefield as any man. Throughout the Tokugawa era, women of samurai lineage were trained in the martial arts, particularly in the use of the naginata, or halberd. Judo, archery, and kendo remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes.

The only comparable European counterpart is Joan of Arc, an exception that proves the rule by its exceptionality. This may explain the trepidation with which Hollywood casts female action leads, in stark contrast to even low-budget Hong Kong action films. The last film actor to fill such a role convincingly was Linda Hamilton in Terminator II. Television has done better with Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. "Before Buffy," Hillary Frey argues, "the only women who kicked ass on [American] television did so metaphorically, in the courtrooms or in the ER."

And in an analysis of the two series, Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek, borrowing from Camille Paglia, points to "the identity of sex and power [and] the permeation of eroticism by aggression" in a dramatic arena in which "the masculine hurls itself at the feminine in an eternal circle of pursuit and flight." Zacharek concludes, "In this dynamic there's no such thing as the weaker sex."

Yet the physicality demanded by this "dynamic" continues to prove problematic. I'm a die-hard Buffy fan, but it still takes a lot of clever camera work to make Sarah Michelle Gellar look good when she's whupping the bad guys. It's hard to come up with a single Hollywood actress who could hold a candle to Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, or Ziyi Zhang in that department.

Obviously, no anime character is checked by the limitations of an actor's physical training. But this is only half an excuse. Physical strength is a single facet of aggression. Gerard Jones sums up the anime melodrama heroine as follows: "[She] can be flirtatious, cute, embarrassed, silly, self-indulgent, and knowingly sexy. And if [she flies] into a savage rage against a villain [or boyfriend], it [is] likely to be a much more personal and more human reaction." Ryoko in Tenchi Muyo and Akane from Ranma 1/2 come to mind. Even the demure Yukino in His and Her Circumstances—you do not want to get this woman really pissed off.

More recently, Moribito and the Japanese version of Witchblade offer up adult women (rather than overgrown teenagers) as action heroes. In the former case, Balsa's compassion is not presented as a feminine impediment to her ability to fight, the Achilles heel that every villain predictably seizes upon. In the latter, even though Masane is sexualized in often eye-rolling ways, her switching in an eyeblink between "mom" and "superhero" does not strain belief in the slightest.

Denying to women the efficacy of affective as well as physical power are remnants of Victorianism, which, perversely combined with the more self-destructive trends in gender feminism, concluded that for women to achieve "equality" they must shed those feminine attributes that so easily give them power over men. Hollywood up to the early 1950s somehow escaped these influences, promoting actresses such as Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not), Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday), and Grace Kelly (Rear Window) who could be beautiful, sensual and tough as nails. Not to mention that Hollywood's first megastar, Mary Pickford, ran her own production company and was a founding partner of United Artists.

But over half a century on it can be argued that American popular entertainment has only recently again embraced the concept that beauty is not inimical to emotional or physical strength. Of course, a healthy libido has always been considered an asset for any man, real or fictional. The little girls who flocked to Britney Spears concerts and to Charlie's Angels movies, figured this out. And all the better that it shocks! shocks! their parents and moral guardians.

This dichotomy is obvious in the persona of Captain Janeway (Star Trek Voyager), repressed and dispassionate to the point of being sexless, ruling with all the rousing disposition of a 19th century schoolmarm. Her Captain Bligh demeanor should have gotten her shoved out an airlock shortly into the first season. Why, asks Stephanie Zacharek, in a similar vein,

is playing a depressive writer or an anti-death-penalty nun automatically considered superior to (or more difficult than) playing a kook (like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby), a prostitute (like Jane Fonda in Klute), or a femme fatale (like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity)?

Compare Janeway to Major Kusanagi, the purposely dispassionate protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, whose smatterings of feelings you actually do care about. And when she tells her (male) subordinates to jump, you understand why they ask "How high?" on the way up, and don't take their eyes off her on the way down. In the Ghost in the Shell television series (Stand Along Complex), Kusanagi's abilities as a commander are even more pronounced, easily making her the most competent law enforcement officer of either sex on either side of the Pacific.

The wretched original English dub of Ghost in the Shell drives the point home: the only way most American producers know how to depict a "tough woman" is to turn her into a tough (foul-mouthed) guy. With a push-up bra. Minnie Driver's pitch-perfect voice-over of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is proof that it can be done right. Calm, cool, and scarily in control. U.S. distributors should watch, listen, and learn.

Ironically, Rick Berman went a long way to correcting his own mistake on Star Trek Voyager with Seven of Nine, who all but took over the series from the moment she was introduced. Not surprisingly, Seven and her celluloid sisters-in-spirit—Xena and Buffy—would be quite at home in anime.

Perhaps even more illustrative is Kumiko Yamaguchi in Gokusen (voiced by Risa Hayamizu). Yamaguchi is a freshly-minted and idealistic high school math teacher at an inner-city boy's high school, a stock character in television drama and comedy. The catch is that Yamaguchi is the scion of an established yakuza family. And, no, she's not the good girl running away from her past. She's going to run the "family business" and (often literally) pound an education into the heads of her juvenile deliquents. There's never any doubt, whether in the classroom or holding a tight rein on her own gang members, who's in charge. And her femininity is never in question. She can knock 'em dead in a kimono, not just with her fists.

American television does seem to be growing up faster than film. Chris Carter and Gillian Anderson created a breakthrough character (half of one of the great television duos of all time) in FBI agent Dana Scully. Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi paved the way with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena. Andrea Parker's underappreciated "Miss Parker" in Pretender redefined the bad-guy-worth-rooting-for in ways that have not been matched since. Andromeda delivered a two-for with Rommie (Lexa Doig) and Valentine (Lisa Ryder). Joss Whedon answered the call again with (the shamefully short-lived) Firefly, featuring American television's toughest girl-with-a-gun, Gina Torres as Zoe.

Over and over, action series provide the best role models. Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter on Stargate. Jill Hennessy as medical examiner Jordan Cavanaugh and Jennifer Garner as superspy Sydney Bristow. Jolene Blalock (Enterprise), who stands out in her supporting role, is Seven redux, down to the body suit and the attitude. I was initially most encouraged by Hennessy, who at least initially was not compelled to apologize for the fact that, yes, she is an excessively gorgeous woman. Garner, in contrast, came across as excessively stoical (she's neither a Vulcan nor an android).

The contrast between Garner and Hennessy is illustrative. The argument can be made that Garner's Sydney Bristow started out working for a bunch of murderous conspirators, so it's no wonder that she should be a tad distant and humorless. But, then, being around someone who hates her job week after week isn't a whole lot of fun for the viewer, either. Here we get back to the either/or problem that so often plagues the female action lead: you can be one or the other, but not both. Yet the whole point of Captain Kirk's life (and Captain Picard's and Captain Archer's) was that he loved being a starship captain. There was never ever any conflict on that point.

Men have long been permitted to wallow in their eccentricities (or sexual peculiarities) without becoming any less acceptable in their roles, as CSI's quirky Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) demonstrates, or Mel Gibson's borderline psychotic protrayal of Riggs in Lethal Weapon, or Tony Shalhoub playing a neurotic genius in Monk. For several seasons, Joss Whedon populated Buffy with the most interesting female characters ever on television, but the pickings are sparse. The unconventional, competent and relatively angst-free woman Hollywood still has a problem dealing with.

Stephanie Zacharek got it right when she wished Hollywood's veteran actresses "the chance to get ahold of something more valuable than your typical ho-hum actorly prestige: I wish them more opportunities to wear bad-girl lace, without having anyone hold it against them." Or as Rowan Pelling puts it, "Why can't we admire and applaud strong women who are calling the steps of the dance? The qualities of the femme fatale are no longer prized by Hollywood or the wider world."

With the the exception of Buffy and the Scoobies, lead female action roles remain mostly consigned to sidekicks (Emily Deschanel in Bones) or (even rarer) lone wolves. Perhaps leaders of other women (Charmed), but not leaders of men. Leading is a supporting role, as illustrated by Epatha Merkerson's supporting role in Law & Order, Tamara Taylor's supporting role in Bones, Lauren Holly's supporting role in NCIS.

There is no better illustration of this propensity than a 2003 episode of Enterprise ("Twilight"), in which not only does T'Pol give up command of the Enterprise to care for an ailing Captain Archer, but it is also strongly intimated that she was not really cut out to command a starship. Not like those manly Earth men. Talk about a woman's place being literally in the home. Back to the future, indeed.

So there's plenty of room for give and take on both sides. While Hollywood goes about rediscovering what it knew about women sixty years ago and subsequently has fogotten, Japanese society would greatly benefit from applying to daily life what its manga writers and anime directors have long been bringing to its silver screen dreams.

Labels: anime, buffy, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, manga, sex, shinto, shirow, social studies, superhero, yakuza

Movies and television series imported to Japan often take the original title and convert it phonetically to kana. Even though Star Wars would yield a straightforward literal translation, it is rendered 「スター・ウォーズ」 ("Sutaa Waazu"). Spider-Man becomes「スパイダーマン」("Supaidaaman") and Bruce Almighty becomes「ブルース・オールマイティ」("Buruusu Oorumaiti").

Angel, on the other hand, is simply "Angel," because everybody knows what an angel is.

In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though, they got creative. Now, the whole concept of vampire slaying is not a unique one in Japanese F&SF, which is perhaps why they avoided both the kana-conversion and literal translation routes. Rather, the title focuses instead on what is culturally unique about this particular vampire slayer.

[Catholic iconography is widely (mis)used in Japanese fantasy to reference Christianity and Christian culture in general.]

Hence the Japanese title for the series:「バフィー／恋する十字架」. Reverse the translation and we get: "Buffy--Beloved of the Crucifix." Though the verb implies "smitten" or "head over heels," and can be read either transitively or intransitively, so other translations might be: "Buffy--Crush of the Crucifix." Or: "Buffy--Crazy about the Cross."

Pretty cool, I think.

Labels: buffy, japanese, personal favs, television

So what do you do when one of your favorite books is turned into an awful movie? Well, with the LA Times noting that "there isn't enough absinthe in all of Romania to obliterate the taste of this clunker," and a NetFlix reviewer warning that "if you saw the movie hoping for a live version of the book, you will be sadly disappointed," you set your expectations accordingly.

In the trailer, Blood and Chocolate is touted as coming from the "same people who produced Underworld." At first that would seem a fine recommendation, but it also means it was produced by the same people who made Underworld: Evolution. So, yes, these are people fully capable of turning good ideas into crap.

All the more surprising because Blood and Chocolate is not a long or terribly complicated piece of narrative fiction. As my brother puts it, it's as if somebody told somebody else about the plot, who outlined it for the screenwriters, who then had too much to drink and woke up in Bucharest the next morning with a bad hangover trying to remember what it was about.

About halfway through the movie I still clung to the hope that the one remaining thread from the original bolt of cloth (the relationship between Vivian and Aiden) might actually be woven into something vaguely resembling the fabric from the original story. That was when the director decided that the movie she really wanted to make was Die Hard.

In Romania. With wolves. I'm not even going to try to figure that one out.

Even if the film hadn't turned into a train wreck, it was doomed from the start from being crammed into the crumbling mold of hackneyed, goth Euro-noir sameyness. (Does every rave/dance club scene in these movies take place on exactly the same set with exactly the same extras and exactly the same club band? Sure seems like it to me.)

The genre has been heading this direction for a long time. Every Dracula film you've ever seen--including the ones with titles like Braum Stoker's Dracula--are goth Euro-noir corruptions of the original manuscript. It's a problem that parallels somewhat the "Shakespeare syndrome": namely, Shakespeare didn't sound like Shakespeare to Shakespeare's audiences.

Now, I'm as much a fan of "historically faithful" productions as the next dilettante. I consider Branagh's Saint Crispin speech in Henry V one of the greatest masterpieces of English rhetoric. But I think it takes more contemporary reworkings like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet or Ian McKellen's Richard III to capture the raw, original impact the plays.

Stoker wasn't trying to be gothic in Dracula. He was trying to be a post-modern. Writing today, he would best be compared to Michael Crichton. Dracula is chock full of bleeding edge science and technology: blood transfusions and telegrams that whiz around like email. You probably didn't know that the book includes an American cowboy armed with the latest Remington repeating rifles.

The only director who's gotten close to the spirit and pacing of the book Stoker wrote is Joss Whedon. Seriously. Buffy is the Dracula that Stoker intended all along.

The awful rendering of Blood and Chocolate is an additional indictment of the extent to which goth Euro-noir has taken over the theatrical horror genre, to the detriment of classic American noir. Which is odd, seeing that some of Hollywood's most successful television exports, from Twilight Zone to Miami Vice to X-Files, Buffy, Angel, and the CSI franchise, are American noir.

Noir originally arose out of economic expediency, shooting on black and white film with minimal lighting and sets. It reached its apotheosis as an art form with the Orson Wells classic, Touch of Evil. It wasn't really fully embraced again until Michael Mann brought Miami Vice to television, this time with cinematic style rather than economy as the motivation.

Goth Euro-noir arose out of the fall of the Berlin wall, after which producers realized that they could shoot in Eastern Europe for pennies on the dollar, getting a lot of bang for the production buck. Armed with a bunch of sepia and day-for-night filters, Romania and the Czech Republic and elsewhere become the universal stand-ins for the eternally gothic versions of wherever-you-want.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that Blood and Chocolate is a book written by an American that takes place in the modern American suburbs. As with Buffy, that's the whole point!

Simply put, Euro-noir is gothic, American noir is post-modern. Except for a few locations such as New York (Fox's New Amsterdam seems to be attempting a kind of crossover goth/American noir style), nothing in the U.S. is old enough to be authentically gothic. So American noir is all about the mood of the modern.

The Las Vegas of CSI itself is only a century old, and every building on the Strip gets torn down and rebuilt every twenty years or so. The ultra-new contrasted against the ancient night. The glowing Los Angeles cityscape in Angel. The perpetual sunsets in CSI: Miami. And in Buffy, Old Testament gods resurrecting themselves in the suburbs.

The short-lived Wolf Lake almost got it right (it got the wolves exactly right), but was sunk by an absurdly over-budget Hollywood cast. It should have learned from Buffy and stuck with Graham Greene and a bunch of up-and-comers. Wolf Lake suffered as well from the constrictions of "American hick horror," goth Euro-noir's diametrical opposite.

According to the typical American hick horror plot, take the wrong exit off the interstate and you'll find yourself at the mercy of some psycho sheriff and his slack-jawed cousins. Again, nothing wrong with that. Near Dark is a fine example of the genre.

But again, it misses the point when it comes to books like Blood and Chocolate and series like Buffy. These aren't stories about someplace else. These aren't stories about "I hope I never end up there" or "I wonder if it's in the travel guide." It's about right here. It's about the people next door. About finding the balance between light and dark, good and evil, so everything can get back to normal.

Of course it can't. But that's what the protagonists hope for. That's what gets them up in the morning. So they don't have to ride out of town in the last scene.

Labels: buffy, fantasy, movie reviews

My sister Kate offers the following analysis, which I find the most compelling yet.

I think [the appeal of yaoi] is about power.

First, I don't think the competition argument will work [that the reader perceives herself to be in competition with the protagonist], since many generations of romance critics have argued that a romance must have a female protagonist so women readers will have a representative in the story. I don't credit that argument with any substantial merit (although romance guidelines are absolute in this regard). My point is rather that this argument is just the flip side of the argument against a female protagonist.

I think part of the yaoi fascination is an age thing--hence the American Idol "scandal" over the long-haired teen, Sanjaya. Of course, Howard Stern is trying to keep the kid on, but I really can't believe Stern explains all the kid's votes. I don't really get it myself.

However, when I was a teen, I did find Mercutio more interesting than Romeo, and the villain of Duchess of Malfi more interesting than . . . well, there aren't any heros in The Duchess. But I found the villain most interesting (and still do). The Crucible was my favorite play. I preferred Luke Skywalker to Han Solo, Modred to Launcelot (still do), and I actually loved Faustus (the play), which didn't last since Christopher Marlow is pretty unintelligible.

I think yaoi utilizes that dark angsty persona so attractive to teenagers (male and female); more importantly, yaoi develops the problems that surround the dark, angsty persona, problems like "Should I sell my soul?" or "Should I satisfy ambition by betraying everybody?" or "Should I murder my uncle?" In other words, issues of power. And I think the attraction is that when all you've got is men, you don't have to worry about them breaking role and moving on and getting self-reflective and deciding all this power stuff is nonsense, thank you very much.

In fact, I still enjoy stuff like Nero Wolfe and Horatio Hornblower and Law & Order where the relationships are primarily between men and they discuss issues of power, primarily hierarchical power, and nobody feels apologetic about it.

Now, most people don't want a power-wielding-angsty persona around in real life (wouldn't Hamlet be a drag?), but we do like to surround ourselves culturally with old-fashioned chivalric and power-oriented ideas regarding honor and justice, etc. And one of the sad truths is that men still have a corner on that stuff (media-wise)--Buffy excepted. And I think women (like me) really, really dig this stuff and get tired of having to say things like, "Well, yes, but of course, it is too, too chauvinistic" or "Well, yes, but we all know that that sort of power is just wrong, and that's not how things should work at all." (Which is why the end of Buffy stank--it got apologetic.)

Which brings us back to yaoi, because once women are involved, those kind of explanatory, so-sorry statements become necessary, not because they really are necessary, but because the writers seem to think they are. But if it is just men then nobody has to excuse the blatant use of power. So teenage girls, who may feel rather powerless (since they have just seen their male counterparts gain weight, muscle and height that they don't have), may be drawn to material where real issues of power are played out without excuse or without the pretense that power isn't real, there and in your face.

Also, to be all feminine about it, I imagine there is the added plus of being able to read about power with relationships thrown in. I don't want to watch or read stuff that's the equivalent of a Risk game. Ahhhh, snore. But I love watching Nero and Archie work out their intensely bizarre relationship episode after episode.

What Kate calls the "competition argument" is an extension of the rather silly (when you think about it) notion, especially in Y/A literature, that in order for the reader to identify with the protagonist, the protagonist must be just like the reader. The success of anime and yaoi make it clear that these similarities are far more subjective and existential than objective and categorical.

There's no doubt that boys who watch My Hime are going to identify with Mai and not her little brother. And they identify with her because she's the one with the power (and the cool robot) at the center of the conflict.

Hmm, can you empower women and exploit them at the same time? My Hime sure does. But seriously, perhaps because Japanese society has managed to become post-modern while remaining in many respects unapologetically anti-feminist (coming in dead last whenever the U.N. measures such things among the developed countries), the realities of power don't get papered over with political correctness.

So even if the initial thought is no deeper than, "Girls are interesting (especially girls with big breasts)," the ends justify the means. Whatever the reason, Japanese mass media paradoxically produces far more believable female SF&F action heroines than Hollywood does.

Kate continues:

One of the interesting changes in romance novels over the past fifty years is the addition of the male perspective. Now it is very nearly de jure, according to my experts, to add a chapter or occasional paragraphs detailing the male perspective. It could be argued that this gives the reader insight into male thinking except I don't think the reader cares much. Rather, I think the male perspective serves as a balancing mechanism for the reader.

For example, seeing things from the male perspective prevents romances from being blatantly chauvinistic. If the male seduces the female (a la Pamela), it feels a trifle exploitative (although Pamela is a great book). But if the male seduces the female, and the reader knows that he really, really loves her and really, really cares and really, really finds her enchanting and really, really didn't mean to scare her, the reader becomes complicit in the seduction--that is, the reader approves of the seduction.

It isn't a conspiracy or anything; novel writing is, well, novel writing, not real life. People do not necessarily approve of domineering men seducing innocent women in real life. But romance novels drag relationships out of the day-to-day business of having to actually ask people what they think into the fantasy world of everybody kind of knowing without anybody actually having to ask.

Some writer I read somewhere once mentioned that Victorians loved mystery stories (Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins) because they got into all that Anne Perry stripping-away-the-rooftop stuff and peering into people's private lives. I think perspective in novels does the same thing. It lets us peek without having to ask. So, readers are all secret voyeurs. But we already knew that.

In yaoi, power relationships are defined right in the terminology: seme (from the verb meaning "to aggress") and uke (from the verb meaning "to receive"). They are, as you might expect, highly analogous to "male" and "female," but in their most traditional readings, pushing the power relationship to the same extremes (implicit domination and explicit S&M themes) that so infuriate old-school feminists about the "faux Regency" Harlequin genre.

Though Steven Pinker might point out that what these genres represent is, if anything, a civilizing reaction to our true natures rather than a reinforcement of them:

Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence [and power] . . . if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey.

What has changed, Pinker argues, bringing about a remarkable diminution in violence and the abuse of power in modern civilization, is a growing unwillingness to act on these fantasies combined with the ability (and license) to virtualize them at a safe distance from the real world. Go Nagai, a pioneering manga-ka in the hentai genre gets right to the point about his latest work:

I'd like this comic to serve as a brake for all those university professors struggling to keep control over themselves so they can read it and be satisfied instead of taking matters into their own hands.

In other words, while we may not want to celebrate it too openly, it just may be our embrace of the low brow--murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas (Shakespeare was a lot lower brow than he's given credit for), Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey--that is keeping civilization itself from tumbling over the edge.

Labels: buffy, deep thoughts, kate, social studies, yaoi

The kind of stories found in Cheese! (and for that matter, the typical Harlequin romance) highlight the curious differences shounen (boy's) and shoujo (girl's) manga and anime, especially in the ways they treat intimate relationships and the social implications of sex.

This is unrelated to any differences in explicitness. Like shoujo, when called for—to the extent that such things are ever "called for"—shounen manga and anime do not lack for gratuitous nudity and sexual innuendo. It's so ubiquitous that it's referred to by the derisive moniker, "fan service." But the irony about all this sexuality is how rarely actual physical relationships inject themselves into the narrative engines of shounen plots, other than as come-ons to the male id.

Or rather, how often the mere prospect of sex sends the id scurrying. It's a bait and switch gambit.

Even in fan-service fests like Ikki Tousen and Tenjho Tenge, where all of the secondary characters are sleeping around (exception noted below), the leads restrain themselves. In classic Friday the 13th fashion, promiscuity becomes a shorthand indication of moral decrepitude. Consider the ridiculous Girl's Bravo, where the town lecher Fukuyama makes all the sleazy moves while Yukinari plays the perfect gentleman, even when a voluptuous, naked babe materializes in his bathtub.

Three notable exceptions stand out: Bob and Chiaki in Tenjho Tenge, Saki and Makoto in Genshiken, and Seiji and Midori in Midori Days. In the first, Bob is a sidekick and Chiaki a secondary character. More importantly, the Bob and Chiaki relationship is presented as an established fact at the beginning of the series. Still, although tangential to the main storyline, it's the only interesting—and certainly the only mature—boy/girl relationship in the entire show.

In Genshiken, Saki is a "normal" girl who's fallen for Makoto, a hardcore member of Genshiken, the university anime and video game club. They're sharing a bed almost from the start (which is unusual enough), and are more or less making the relationship work, though encountering some expected obstacles in the process, as in a scene where Saki wonders aloud whether the sex life of a certain "hypothetical" couple is dictated by the broadcast schedule of a popular anime series.

There is a serious question whether Genshiken—which also makes it clear (though not cruelly) that the other club members lack significant others pretty because of their obsessive personalities—belongs in the shounen genre. Comic Party, for example, covers similar territory but follows every shounen story element to the letter, including the can't-get-to-first-base relationship between the leads.

Otherwise, shounen writers often resort to plot devices straight out of fantasy horror (of all things!) to keep the boy glued to the girl's side.

In Video Girl Ai, Ai pulls a reverse Poltergeist and oozes out of Youta's television screen. In Midori Days, Seiji wakes up one morning to find that a girl has replaced his right hand (flashback to Bruce Campbell replacing his severed hand with a chainsaw in Army of Darkness). The mad scientist in B-Shock forces Arata and Hatsune together with a kind of deadly proximity device, echoing a similar plot entwining Picard and Crusher in an episode of Star Trek: TNG.

Strangely enough—or not, when you think about it—these premises actually deliver a more mature level of plot and character development. Midori Days in particular. When "Mad Dog" Seiji finds that his right hand has been replaced by a doll-sized girl, a rather obvious crude joke springs to mind. But it doesn't go there. Instead, it addresses the practical issues of actually living together—in the literal sense of the word—forcing a guy accustomed to favoring brawn over brain to finally grow up and take responsibility for his actions.

However, with the goal of comparing fruits of a similar species, I'm more specifically interested in shounen titles that like their shoujo counterparts depict long-term, committed, and more or less voluntary male/female relationships, where the leads ostensibly want to get together and stay together. While sex may seem to be used to competing ends in the shounen and shoujo genres, I would argue that the same underlying theory is at play in both.

And that is: sex equals big-time commitment.

Consider the opposite: the stock, noncommittal "player" in Hollywood sitcoms. The current television season (and a single network!) alone supplies us with Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men, Daniel Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother, and David Spade in Rules of Engagement. But unlike the borrish Fukuyama in Girl's Bravo or the gangbangers in Ikki Tousen, they're all lovable scoundrels.

There's a lot more where they came from, not to mention the interminable on-again, off-again ditherings between Ross and Rachel on Friends that lasted the entire run of the show. On the other hand, the Chandler and Monica marriage hardly starved the series for material, and a more inspired handling of the Anya and Xander debacle on Buffy likewise would have injected much needed life into the series, badly flagging at that point.

But in these cases we're specifically talking about marriage. Hollywood is reflecting more than a grain of truth about the male psyche. What is unique about shounen manga is the extent to which sexual intimacy (and not even necessarily consummation) by itself is used as a proxy for commitment and marriage, following exactly the same formulation as that used by shoujo and Harlequin authors.

This makes the Hollywood man the odd man out. Though at the other end of the spectrum, it also makes the restrained shounen protagonist as utterly unreal as the tall, dark, handsome, rougish Harlequin leading man who sweeps a woman off her feet and abruptly settles down with her in marital bliss without breaking his stride.

Take two quintessential shounen relationship series as cases in point: Ah My Goddess and Ai Yori Yoshi. In both, men (they're in college, after all) are in long-term, committed relationships with bright, gorgeous women who adore them. And yet. Only subterfuge or stupidity ever lands them in a compromising position of any sort.

Far from providing fodder for ongoing plots, the eternally-stalled romantic relationship between the leads becomes tedious. Their characters are similarly frozen in amber. The best episode in the 2005 anime remake of Ah My Goddess has Urd (Belldandy's older, randier sister) being turned back into a schoolgirl for a day and initiating a relationship that progresses further in 24 minutes than anything Belldandy and Keiichi had done to date—without Urd twisting arms, that is.

The subtext about sex in shounen manga seemly plainly to be: look but don't touch; imagine but don't act.

You could even call it "chivalrous," albeit in a weirdly objectifying manner. But perhaps herein is revealed the substance of the paradox that Japanese cabinet ministers need to specifically address, rather than describing women as "baby-making machines" who aren't meeting their production quotas.

Welfare minister Hakuo Yanagisawa was responsible for that last indelicate quote. Deflecting calls for Yanagisawa's resignation, Prime Minister Abe valiantly vowed to deal with the declining birthrate by creating

a Japan where people feel at ease to get married and raise their children under a basic strategy of assisting children and families.

Strangely enough, shounen manga and anime are not necessarily antagonistic to "family values." When push comes to shove, it seems that what too many shounen protagonists really want is a sibling, not a spouse. The brave new frontier in Japanese popular entertainment may well be a non-hentai shounen genre in which the romantic leads shack up, get married, life goes on and the world doesn't end in an apocalyptic fireball.

Though if that's exactly the prospect that so frightens teenage boys in the first place, it's doubtful they'd ever accord it the requisite devotion to inculcate the message.

Related posts

Cheese! (part 1)
Cheese! (part 3)

Labels: buffy, cheese, manga, personal favs, sex

His uneven track record notwithstanding, I'm predisposed to like films by M. Night Shyamalan. I generally admire artists who, to paraphrase Stephen King, stay in touch with their own popular culture and aren't above crowd-pleasing when it's called for. And even more daringly, create entertainment without a pretentious intent to shock or offend, and with a modicum of good taste.

Shyamalan, you might say, has perfected the "family horror film," and all the power to him.

Back in the day, all horror films could be said to be "family friendly," at least in the PG sense. (And anybody younger just got bored.) The 1942 version of Cat People, for example. But then Hollywood discovered the R rating, latex makeup, and body casting, and the race to the gross-out bottom began. The 1981 American Werewolf in London and the 1982 Cat People, for example.

I liked both movies, by the way.

At least during the 1980s, it seemed that the horror schlockmeisters figured that as long as they were in the exploitation business, they might as well exploit everything (often with tongue wedged in cheek), and so even the early installments of slasher flick crapola like Friday the 13th were sure to feature plenty of gratuitously naked nymphets, which did make the gory parts measurably more palatable.

Hollywood has since become curiously puritanical about nudity, with the perverse result that there are far fewer gratuitously naked nymphets in horror flicks, but a lot more (now digitally enhanced!) beheadings and disembowelings and flayed flesh and gushing fountains of blood and the like. Funny, because I've always considered psycho-killing more morally reprehensible than an attractive woman taking her clothes off on camera.

But maybe that's just me.

Worse, this new and improved genre of "horror" is rarely entertaining and never scary. Startling perhaps, but popping a balloon behind your ear is startling too, and costs a few pennies a shot. This vivisectionist wasteland created the breach into which the more restrained and visually interesting J-Horror stepped, but then too much J-Horror can be a lot like spending an eternal winter in Seattle. All that damp grayness gets to be depressing after a while.

Nobody gets naked in an M. Night Shyamalan movie either, even a movie about a lady who apparently spends most of her life underwater. But that's okay because he spares us the gore as well. Thus forced to use his brain instead of special effects and cinematic cheap shots, Shyamalan creates scenes that are genuinely frightening. Far more so than can be found in any splatter flick.

Unfortunately, he shares a key failing with another auteur who did his best work early in his career. Shyamalan is a better storyteller than George Lucas, but his latest efforts have been similarly hamstrung by an overestimation of his own talent. Yes, impressive that he can write, produce, and direct. But the feat by itself is not a substitute for real artistry in any one category.

In Star Wars, with a little help from Akira Kurosawa, Lucas latched onto the narrative motif of the heroic journey, and then being informed of the fact after the fact, stirred condensed Joseph Campbell soup into whatever he was making, regardless of whether the recipe called for it or not. The result has been the same as throwing Thanksgiving dinner into a blender. Sure, all the necessary ingredients are there, but blah.

Even at his worst, Shyamalan is more clever than that. But relying on his own wits, he has increasingly become too clever for his own good, or rather, more clever than smart. This shows up as the sheer dumbness of hydrophobic aliens invading Pennsylvania in the middle of the summer (average humidity: 75%), or as in the case of The Village, sheer cluelessness about what his own script is saying.

As for the latter, I really don't think Shyamalan purposely intended to make a movie about using terror and xenophobia to terrorize a population into conformity with a warped utopian ideology based on economically-bankrupt notions of socialist self-sufficiency. It makes for a nice rationalization of the maniacal rule of Kim Il Sung, though.

Maybe he did, and like Lucas his conceptualization of evil never graduated beyond Sesame Street Manicheanism. But I'd rather think it just didn't occur to him. That's why, when it comes to plotting 101, it's a good idea to stick to the classics: because our ancestors have been there and done that and ironed out the kinks already.

A proven narrative structure also disciplines the storyteller. Shyamalan's most popular film, The Sixth Sense, and his best film, Unbreakable, both benefitted greatly from the traditional scaffolding holding everything in place during construction. Especially in the latter case, adherence to the comic book archetypes he took as his premise kept the storyline from wandering off into the tall weeds.

Which unfortunately is what happens in Lady in the Water, Shyamalan's most untenable and belabored film to date. The story is one familiar to horror and fantasy: the fairy tale or "bedtime story" that comes to life. It's a good idea. Shyamalan always starts with good ideas. It's the execution where he gets increasingly bogged down.

You see, it's not a real bedtime story or fairy tale. He's just making it up as he goes along. As Lucas did with the archetypal heroic journey, after a noteworthy start, he then rambles along as if taking a multiple choice test after studying the wrong cheat-sheet. He's got most of the right answers, just not in the right order or right context.

What's most disappointing about Lady in the Water is that there was no need to make anything up. World folklore is hardly starved for stories about mermaids and water sprites and the like. And the idea of having one show up in the swimming pool of a suburban apartment complex is delightful. Yet without a proven canon to refer to, Shyamalan is left to spend most of the movie trying to torture some smatterings of logic out of his own invention.

It therefore becomes necessary for his characters to be as clueless as himself. The one "expert" on this "bedtime story" turns out a Korean lady with no command of English. This makes for a few (low brow) comic moments, but also makes no sense, as none of the details of Shyamalan's fairy tale she provides have even the barest resemblance to anything even vaguely Oriental, or are linguistically consistent with the Korean language.

(To see a modern take on an authentic Korean fairy tale, check out Chunhyang.)

Nobody in the movie apparently knows how to use a library or access the Internet either. One of the many great things about Whedon's Buffy is that the "Scoobies" actually have to read and study and look stuff up to figure things out. But everbody in Lady in the Water is winging it because, well, Shyamalan is winging it. It shows.

The one bright moment in the movie comes when the grumpy theater critic who just moved in next door breaks fourth wall and muses about the odds of getting bumped off based on the structure of the plot and the MPAA rating. The scene is both funny and scary. But Shyamalan only uses it to show us how wrong, wrong, wrong those nasty movie critics are. Hardly a worthy use of his directorial talents.

That the scene is wasted as Shyamalan tries to do the exact opposite (but ending up doing exactly the same thing), while melodramatically snatching obvious plot elements from previous movies (enough of doctors with tragic pasts!), says to me that's it's time for him to humbly face his limits, hire a couple of good script writers, and get back to cementing his reputation as the Frank Capra of the family-friendly thriller.

Labels: buffy, movie reviews