December 11, 2024
The happens to be rule
In my review of Spy x Family, I argue that in the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—ultimately determines the direction of the narrative.
As Kate points out, Lloyd and Yor in Spy x Family are "decent, family people who just happen to be a spy and assassin rather than a spy and assassin pretending to be decent people."
Spy x Family puts Yor in the same moral position as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." The Yor-centered stories make clear that her targets are, by and large, reprehensible human beings.
Lloyd is more conflicted than Yor, but he is not an enemy of Ostania. He often ends up working tangentially toward the same goals as Yor and her brother, and does his level best to inflict as little collateral damage as possible.
The climactic ending of Code White being a case in point. Lloyd, Yor, and Anya end up saving the day for Ostania.
After all, his overall mission is to establish a diplomatic backchannel with Donovan Desmond. Killing him, he admits, would be easy, but would also not be in any of their interests (and certainly not Desmond's).
If the intelligence services in Westalis suspect that the Berlint Wall is about to collapse, then it would be in the self-interests of both sides for a moderate government to survive and steer the ship of state between the political extremes.
This is a far more politically and intellectually challenging task than saving the world on a weekly basis. Lloyd and Yor spend much of their undercover time picking off extremists on both sides.
When your job is preventing a world apocalypse on a regular basis, those kinds of qualms are bound to fall by the wayside. To start with, you're not going to have the time.
Lloyd's more real-world missions require that he keep his honne and tatemae in close alignment, even though they may seem as far apart as night and day. His ultimate struggle is to accept that he is a family man at heart.
Since the start of the series, his success as a spy and his success as a father have become inextricably intertwined.
The Forgers are a pair of eccentric but otherwise ordinary suburban parents (like Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mike and Vanessa Baxter from Last Man Standing) who happen to be a spy and an assassin.
The order matters. If you get the happens to be rule wrong, you may end up with the wrong audience tuning in. Nothing will doom a series faster than the feeling a bait and switch is going on.
The premise of Moonlight is right up my alley. But halfway through the first season, it turned into a melodrama about a vampire who happened to be a private detective rather than a police procedural about a private detective who happened to be a vampire.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But in a ratings-based world, the core values of the viewers (as expressed by tuning in to watch) must largely overlap with the values of the characters (as expressed by the writer and director).
The same things goes for message-based entertainment. If a show runner wants to preach a message, it had better be one the audience wants to hear or at least is able to ignore because everything else about the show is so good.
One of the great advantages of anime and especially manga is that quantity has a quality all of its own. You are all the more likely to find titles that match up the honne and tatemae of the characters in an order that matters to you.
Labels: anime, criticism, japanese, language, movies, thinking about writing
February 23, 2017
In a world
High-minded critics like to describe the low-minded readers of genre fiction using terms such as "wish-fulfillment" and "projection," summed up in the epithet "Mary Sue." This as opposed to the more serious task of deciphering the text for its socially-relevant "messages."
Not that there's anything wrong with that! (Says this unrepentant post-modernist deconstructor of Star Trek.)
But no story can ever be effective if read solely as a sermon. Sitting in the choir and being preached to is certainly the less demanding mental exercise. For readers to project themselves into a story, they must engage in world-creation and role-playing, as in the role-playing game.
As Kate explains,
I believes this better accounts for the attractions of the action movie and the romance novel. Sure, the average guy can enjoy pretending for two hours that he is John McClane in Die Hard, but he's also smart enough to know that, placed in similar circumstances, he would last about two seconds.
He also knows that, in the course of his everyday life, he will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid literally walking across broken glass in his bare feet.
The appeal of the action movie is imagining a world where beating up the bad guys or blowing up the Death Star (or two or three) solves the problem. Or in the world of romance, where
Nobody sums it up better than Don LaFontaine, the legendary master of the Hollywood movie trailer, who coined the expression, "In a world."
It's not this world but a made-up movie world, a hypothetical model of the universe, where alternative realities can be played out with the promise that "no animals were harmed during the making of this movie."
As G.K. Chesterton, that great defender of popular fiction, observed, "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
Or in Terry Pratchett's paraphrase, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
Not that there's anything wrong with that! (Says this unrepentant post-modernist deconstructor of Star Trek.)
But no story can ever be effective if read solely as a sermon. Sitting in the choir and being preached to is certainly the less demanding mental exercise. For readers to project themselves into a story, they must engage in world-creation and role-playing, as in the role-playing game.
As Kate explains,
The desire to exercise the creative impulse means that while people want to get swept away by Middle Earth or Asimov's robots or Ahab's Pequod, they also want to imagine themselves inside those worlds. Or at least imagine that world as a real experience.
I believes this better accounts for the attractions of the action movie and the romance novel. Sure, the average guy can enjoy pretending for two hours that he is John McClane in Die Hard, but he's also smart enough to know that, placed in similar circumstances, he would last about two seconds.
He also knows that, in the course of his everyday life, he will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid literally walking across broken glass in his bare feet.
The appeal of the action movie is imagining a world where beating up the bad guys or blowing up the Death Star (or two or three) solves the problem. Or in the world of romance, where
everyone has a one and only and recognizing that one and only transcends everything from orientation and gender to age and occasionally, in Japanese manga at least, blood relations.
Nobody sums it up better than Don LaFontaine, the legendary master of the Hollywood movie trailer, who coined the expression, "In a world."
It's not this world but a made-up movie world, a hypothetical model of the universe, where alternative realities can be played out with the promise that "no animals were harmed during the making of this movie."
As G.K. Chesterton, that great defender of popular fiction, observed, "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."
Or in Terry Pratchett's paraphrase, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
Labels: criticism, literature, social studies, thinking about writing, writing
December 15, 2016
Hearing what you see
Over at Popular Mechanics, Avery Thompson explains "Why You Can't Remember What Modern Movies Sound Like." Or rather, he presents the following arguments from the "Every Frame a Painting" blog and Dan Golding.
The former begins with man-on-the-street interviews, asking if anybody can hum a few bars from Star Wars. Everybody can. But what about the theme from any blockbuster Marvel movie made in the last decade?
Nobody can.
The culprit in this case is the "temp track." While a movie is being edited and the music is still being composed, the director uses excerpts from
existing compositions, often movie soundtracks, as stand-ins for what he expects the final product to sound like. Then he tells the composer: "I want it to sound like this only different."
When The Simpsons sets out to parody a musical but doesn't want to pay the royalties, the composer (usually Alf Clausen) will arrange melodies that are different enough legally while still being completely recognizable.
Similarly, many temp tracks end up sounding like the finished version. And some careless directors even forget about the "different" part and end up using the original temp track "by mistake." Either way, the result is an utter lack of originality.
Then again, counters Dan Golding, maybe not. Artists borrow from each other all the time. Or as Picasso (and Steve Jobs) put it, "Great artists steal." For Star Wars, John Williams borrowed from classical composers like Holst and the scores from old Hollywood westerns. Golding instead points to non-linear editing as the root cause.
Instead of a composition composed for an entire cinematic work, soundtracks can be created and performed digitally, and inserted in discrete units: five seconds here, ten seconds there. The soundtrack thus becomes another sound effect, creating mood and ambience with orchestrated sound, not telling a story through melody.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Then again, memorable movie soundtracks that spring to my mind do often predate the fully digitized non-linear era that came of age in the mid-1990s. Along with Star Wars (1977) by John Williams, Patrick Doyle's Henry V (1989) and Last of the Mohicans (1992) by Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones.
Chariots of Fire (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) by Vangelis were unique in being mostly digital scores that mostly predated non-linear editing.
On the other hand, the music in the original Star Trek television series is, well, "noisy." And it was orchestrated the old-fashioned way. Yes, the opening theme is timeless, but the stuff in the middle is often too loud and intrusive, manipulative and simply redundant.
Given the choice, I'll take the minimalist mood-shaping approach, music that creates ambience without encouraging you to pick up a baton or choreograph a marching band, even it means composers aren't using all the emotional arrows in their musical quivers.
Producers have concluded that if they're not making a musical or doing the American Graffiti thing, where the movie accompanies the soundtrack, less is more. And most of the time, they're right.
But that sorely lessens the chance of a composer and director coming up with the perfect combination that hits you right in the emotional solar plexus. As with Patrick Doyle's score, slowly building beneath Kenneth Branagh's Saint Crispian's Day speech, the right movie music has the power to raise a scene to a state of transcendence.
And speaking of borrowing from the classics, here is Bill Pullman's "Saint Crispian on the Fourth of July" speech from Independence Day. You won't remember the music but it heightens the impact of the words without overpowering them.
The former begins with man-on-the-street interviews, asking if anybody can hum a few bars from Star Wars. Everybody can. But what about the theme from any blockbuster Marvel movie made in the last decade?
Nobody can.
The culprit in this case is the "temp track." While a movie is being edited and the music is still being composed, the director uses excerpts from
existing compositions, often movie soundtracks, as stand-ins for what he expects the final product to sound like. Then he tells the composer: "I want it to sound like this only different."
When The Simpsons sets out to parody a musical but doesn't want to pay the royalties, the composer (usually Alf Clausen) will arrange melodies that are different enough legally while still being completely recognizable.
Similarly, many temp tracks end up sounding like the finished version. And some careless directors even forget about the "different" part and end up using the original temp track "by mistake." Either way, the result is an utter lack of originality.
Then again, counters Dan Golding, maybe not. Artists borrow from each other all the time. Or as Picasso (and Steve Jobs) put it, "Great artists steal." For Star Wars, John Williams borrowed from classical composers like Holst and the scores from old Hollywood westerns. Golding instead points to non-linear editing as the root cause.
Instead of a composition composed for an entire cinematic work, soundtracks can be created and performed digitally, and inserted in discrete units: five seconds here, ten seconds there. The soundtrack thus becomes another sound effect, creating mood and ambience with orchestrated sound, not telling a story through melody.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Then again, memorable movie soundtracks that spring to my mind do often predate the fully digitized non-linear era that came of age in the mid-1990s. Along with Star Wars (1977) by John Williams, Patrick Doyle's Henry V (1989) and Last of the Mohicans (1992) by Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones.
Chariots of Fire (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) by Vangelis were unique in being mostly digital scores that mostly predated non-linear editing.
On the other hand, the music in the original Star Trek television series is, well, "noisy." And it was orchestrated the old-fashioned way. Yes, the opening theme is timeless, but the stuff in the middle is often too loud and intrusive, manipulative and simply redundant.
Given the choice, I'll take the minimalist mood-shaping approach, music that creates ambience without encouraging you to pick up a baton or choreograph a marching band, even it means composers aren't using all the emotional arrows in their musical quivers.
Producers have concluded that if they're not making a musical or doing the American Graffiti thing, where the movie accompanies the soundtrack, less is more. And most of the time, they're right.
But that sorely lessens the chance of a composer and director coming up with the perfect combination that hits you right in the emotional solar plexus. As with Patrick Doyle's score, slowly building beneath Kenneth Branagh's Saint Crispian's Day speech, the right movie music has the power to raise a scene to a state of transcendence.
And speaking of borrowing from the classics, here is Bill Pullman's "Saint Crispian on the Fourth of July" speech from Independence Day. You won't remember the music but it heightens the impact of the words without overpowering them.
Labels: art, criticism, movies, music, technology
May 28, 2015
Dorama
One of the more common live-action "dramas" (dorama) genres on Japanese television is the "slice-of-life" melodrama, packaged in a nine to twelve episode (or so) standalone series.
These are little teleplays about "normal" people dealing with a big emotional crisis. The adjective "big" in this context is purely relative, as nobody a stone's throw away would be aware that anything was amiss (aside from the radioactive waves of angst).
All deeply felt, of course. Very "true to life." Very "heartfelt." Very "meaningful." Very "dramatic." But, I'm afraid, not very entertaining. Put another way, contemporary literary fiction is alive and well on Japanese television (that's not a compliment).
It's known in the Japanese entertainment industry as the "trendy drama" (as opposed to "traditional" episodic genre television: crime, medical, law, and samurai dramas. The "trendy drama" is
The target audience for the "trendy" drama has aged with the rest of the population, evolving a variety of sub-genres: the big business reorg; the big vote facing the small town council; the big divorce (again, "big" meaning not really).
I confess to harboring biases, as I generally avoid serials (as opposed to one-story-at-a-time series). The abbreviated format of anime and Asadora make them more watchable. A little nudging into the more traditional genre categories can help too.
Second To Last Love, for example, turns into a rom-com about two forty-to-fifty somethings who start out in May/September romances and end up with each other. I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper pushes all the standard cliches over the top and mutates into suburban horror.
I'm Home is a quiet psychological thriller about a businessman who's nearly killed in a gas explosion and wakes up having forgotten the last several years of his life. As he struggles to recover his memory, he discovers that he used to be a real jerk.
Importantly, I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper and I'm Home don't simply take a single story and chop it into a dozen segments; each episode comes to a resolution in a stair-step fashion.
Alas, the "trendy" treatment wrecks most good genre stories. Start with a murder mystery with enough plot to last maybe ninety minutes and stretch out to twelve hours? Boring doesn't begin to describe the experience. I stopped watching 24 after the first season too.
Or take Flowers for Algernon (it's gone from science fiction to literary fiction in fifty years) and turn what was originally a short story into ten fifty-minute episodes. Now you can stay bummed out for almost three months!
This approach is defended as "realistic." Which is also not a compliment. When it comes to narrative fiction, T.S. Eliot was right about "too much reality" being too much to bear. The real world is what I live in every day; calling it "fiction" doesn't turn it into entertainment.
The big attraction for the studios is that dorama are inexpensive to produce. Sets are simple, locations are everywhere, and the wardrobe could easily be whatever the actors wore to work. Thanks to digital video, most of the cinematography can be done in-camera.
(The technology really is a game-changer. A recent PBS documentary on the Father Brown series emphasized several times how "low budget" it is, implying low-six figures, but you'd never know from looking at it.)
I can see an artistic precedence in understated post-war Yasujiro Ozu films like The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon. Except that Ozu really does do slice-of-life, without a pile of concocted conflict plopped into the center of the script.
Ozu also spares us the buckets of angst, the inevitable big realization and the inevitable big resolve (again, "big" being relative). Watching Ozu, I'm often reminded of Dragnet, and how Jack Webb had actors read off cue cards or a teleprompter.
To save rehearsal time. And also to keep actors from "acting." Okay, that's a little extreme, but I get where Webb is coming from. The problem is obvious in bad dubs: too much acting. Too much emoting. Too much drama. Just too much.
Too much "reality" kills verisimilitude far faster than undisguised fantasy. Raymond Chandler had the right solution: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."
These are little teleplays about "normal" people dealing with a big emotional crisis. The adjective "big" in this context is purely relative, as nobody a stone's throw away would be aware that anything was amiss (aside from the radioactive waves of angst).
All deeply felt, of course. Very "true to life." Very "heartfelt." Very "meaningful." Very "dramatic." But, I'm afraid, not very entertaining. Put another way, contemporary literary fiction is alive and well on Japanese television (that's not a compliment).
It's known in the Japanese entertainment industry as the "trendy drama" (as opposed to "traditional" episodic genre television: crime, medical, law, and samurai dramas. The "trendy drama" is
a style of drama writing that originated in Japan during the late 1980's [that] focused on contemporary issues young Japanese were faced with everyday, such as love, family problems, and other social issues.
The target audience for the "trendy" drama has aged with the rest of the population, evolving a variety of sub-genres: the big business reorg; the big vote facing the small town council; the big divorce (again, "big" meaning not really).
I confess to harboring biases, as I generally avoid serials (as opposed to one-story-at-a-time series). The abbreviated format of anime and Asadora make them more watchable. A little nudging into the more traditional genre categories can help too.
Second To Last Love, for example, turns into a rom-com about two forty-to-fifty somethings who start out in May/September romances and end up with each other. I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper pushes all the standard cliches over the top and mutates into suburban horror.I'm Home is a quiet psychological thriller about a businessman who's nearly killed in a gas explosion and wakes up having forgotten the last several years of his life. As he struggles to recover his memory, he discovers that he used to be a real jerk.
Importantly, I'm Mita, Your Housekeeper and I'm Home don't simply take a single story and chop it into a dozen segments; each episode comes to a resolution in a stair-step fashion.
Alas, the "trendy" treatment wrecks most good genre stories. Start with a murder mystery with enough plot to last maybe ninety minutes and stretch out to twelve hours? Boring doesn't begin to describe the experience. I stopped watching 24 after the first season too.
Or take Flowers for Algernon (it's gone from science fiction to literary fiction in fifty years) and turn what was originally a short story into ten fifty-minute episodes. Now you can stay bummed out for almost three months!
This approach is defended as "realistic." Which is also not a compliment. When it comes to narrative fiction, T.S. Eliot was right about "too much reality" being too much to bear. The real world is what I live in every day; calling it "fiction" doesn't turn it into entertainment.
The big attraction for the studios is that dorama are inexpensive to produce. Sets are simple, locations are everywhere, and the wardrobe could easily be whatever the actors wore to work. Thanks to digital video, most of the cinematography can be done in-camera.
(The technology really is a game-changer. A recent PBS documentary on the Father Brown series emphasized several times how "low budget" it is, implying low-six figures, but you'd never know from looking at it.)
Ozu also spares us the buckets of angst, the inevitable big realization and the inevitable big resolve (again, "big" being relative). Watching Ozu, I'm often reminded of Dragnet, and how Jack Webb had actors read off cue cards or a teleprompter.
To save rehearsal time. And also to keep actors from "acting." Okay, that's a little extreme, but I get where Webb is coming from. The problem is obvious in bad dubs: too much acting. Too much emoting. Too much drama. Just too much.
Too much "reality" kills verisimilitude far faster than undisguised fantasy. Raymond Chandler had the right solution: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."
Labels: criticism, japanese culture, japanese tv, television, thinking about writing
April 13, 2015
The magic of the mundane
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
June 09, 2014
On Your Mark
As previously mentioned, singer Aska's arrest for meth possession had the silver lining of reminding Hayao Miyazaki fans of a music video he directed for Chage & Aska back in 1995. Alas, this flurry of publicity resulted in the video getting pulled from an upcoming box set.
The video was originally released with two Chage & Aska tracks: "On Your Mark" (Japanese lyrics) and "Castles in the Air" (English lyrics). "Castles in the Air" strikes me as much more relevant to the specific content and was probably written with the video in mind.
Miyazaki tells a complete story, albeit in a non-linear fashion. There are echoes of Castle in the Sky and the flying gunships go back to his first Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and even Blade Runner (that had a profound effect on the anime aesthetic).
Perhaps most tellingly, in the opening sequence of Nausicaa, a similar girl with wings appears in the "prophesy scroll."
All fused with the time-rewind plot device that dominates the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick, Edge of Tomorrow. (Incidentally, Edge of Tomorrow is based on All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, illustrations by Yoshitoshi ABe. Yes, there is an official translation.)
It's tempting to interpret the opening sequence in the video as a commentary on the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult and the subsequent police raids. But production of the video had already been completed by then.
In this interview, Miyazaki points to the 1989 Chernobyl meltdown (the massive sarcophagus looming above the abandoned town). He would have been aware of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. (If it bleeds in the U.S., it leads in Japan too.)
Of course, Occam's Razor also suggests that Miyazaki stitched the script together with whatever spare narrative parts were lying around at the time. He admits to sifting through the lyrics and making them mean what he wanted them to mean.
But for those of us who delight in deconstructing pop-culture sci-fi texts (regardless of authorial intent), you can find a summary of the story here and way too much analysis here.
There are several versions of the video floating around the Internet. You can find versions of "On Your Mark" on YouTube. Even if you don't understand Japanese (and frankly that doesn't help much either), it's a heckuva performance.
The video was originally released with two Chage & Aska tracks: "On Your Mark" (Japanese lyrics) and "Castles in the Air" (English lyrics). "Castles in the Air" strikes me as much more relevant to the specific content and was probably written with the video in mind.
Miyazaki tells a complete story, albeit in a non-linear fashion. There are echoes of Castle in the Sky and the flying gunships go back to his first Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and even Blade Runner (that had a profound effect on the anime aesthetic).
Perhaps most tellingly, in the opening sequence of Nausicaa, a similar girl with wings appears in the "prophesy scroll."
All fused with the time-rewind plot device that dominates the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick, Edge of Tomorrow. (Incidentally, Edge of Tomorrow is based on All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, illustrations by Yoshitoshi ABe. Yes, there is an official translation.)
It's tempting to interpret the opening sequence in the video as a commentary on the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult and the subsequent police raids. But production of the video had already been completed by then.
In this interview, Miyazaki points to the 1989 Chernobyl meltdown (the massive sarcophagus looming above the abandoned town). He would have been aware of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. (If it bleeds in the U.S., it leads in Japan too.)
Of course, Occam's Razor also suggests that Miyazaki stitched the script together with whatever spare narrative parts were lying around at the time. He admits to sifting through the lyrics and making them mean what he wanted them to mean.
But for those of us who delight in deconstructing pop-culture sci-fi texts (regardless of authorial intent), you can find a summary of the story here and way too much analysis here.
There are several versions of the video floating around the Internet. You can find versions of "On Your Mark" on YouTube. Even if you don't understand Japanese (and frankly that doesn't help much either), it's a heckuva performance.
Labels: anime, anime reviews, criticism, miyazaki, music, personal favs
May 19, 2014
Frozen
With Tangled (2010) and now Frozen (2013), Disney's once floundering in-house animation studios have equaled and even exceeded the standard set by Pixar. Of course, with John Lasseter in charge of both, that may have become a distinction without a difference.
Nevertheless, while Pixar continues to project an aura of artistic sophistication unmatched by its competitors—perhaps reflecting the lingering influence of its founder—Disney Animation productions strike me as more broadly human in their dramatic appeal.
And certainly more broadly comedic. Many of the laugh-out-loud moments in Frozen come from the efforts of the snowman Olaf to literally keep himself together. He's a one-man Calvin & Hobbes running through the movie, totally hilarious in a somewhat disturbing way when you stop to think about it.
Humor of a more urbane sort is provided by Anna (the redhead) and Kristoff. Disney has again tapped into the snap, crackle and pop of the great screwball comedies. To be sure, Anna, Kristoff (and the reindeer) are a copy of Rapunzel, Flynn Rider (and the horse). Hey, with repartee like this, more of the same is fine by me.
But don't get too distracted. As with the magician's slight of hand, the fun and froth on the surface mask a surprising degree of moral complexity beneath. (Too many Pixar movies, by contrast, prove less profound than they look.)
Frozen dares to lead with a pair of antitheses, not only bad consequences springing from good intentions, but ill-intentioned people successfully pretending to be good. Tangled gives us one too, but the audience is in on the deception from the start (that Rapunzel's "mother" is evil).
The ingenious touch is Elsa's barn-burner of a power ballad, "Let it go." It sounds at first like an anthem for the self-esteem movement. Except that, by the end, it's become clear that Elsa "being herself" will kill her sister and destroy her kingdom with a Midas-like curse that turns everything she touches to ice.
Elsa doesn't need to "let it go." She badly needs to get over herself. That's what the movie is actually about.
To be fair, Elsa doesn't understand herself or her own abilities. As she and her world change, what she has to "let go" evolves too. She's not the only one. Anna needs to grow up. Fast. Falling in love with some random guy at first sight is a really bad idea, especially when it's just an excuse to get out of the house.
There's a great scene where Kristoff says, "Maybe your sister wants to be left alone," and Anna replies, "Nobody wants to be left alone." Ah, spoken like every clueless extrovert who's ever lived.
Prince Hans, the object of Anna's initial affection, is a fairly complex fairy tale antagonist, the stereotypical nice guy who isn't. Though it wasn't as big a gotcha as I thought it'd be. Nice guys don't chain up the queen in a dungeon. But isn't he simply "being himself" and looking out for his own self-interests?
With twelve older brothers, he probably has self-esteem issues too. Well, tough nuts, kid. That doesn't justify being an exploitative, homicidal jerk. I appreciated how unsentimentally the tables are turned on him in the end. No instantaneous change of heart or slap on the wrist after "lesson learned," thank goodness.
Speaking of changes of heart, the one other failing in the film (aside from the missing backstory explaining Elsa's "gift") is the same one I noticed in Tangled: rushing through the "emotional resolve" (Rapunzel's reunion with her parents is cut too short), especially when the denouement starts on such a great note.
After all, Elsa has just brought her sister back from the dead. A few moments of reflection, a little hesitation, some sisterly recognition and encouragement (the first song in the movie, "Do you want to build a snowman?" poignantly establishes the depth of their relationship), would make the payoff all the more profound.
The movie wouldn't have suffered for running 1:43 instead of 1:42. Or 1:44 to work the backstory into something sequel-worthy. (Is this a sex-linked recessive trait that doesn't express in males? That would make both her parents and her sister carriers. Fascinating.)
And one minor linguistic quibble. No, not the droll anachronisms scattered throughout the script. I love those. A mere one word in the lyrics. Specifically, the vagueness of the antecedent in "Let it go" bugs me. Let what go?
Granted, as noted, that vagueness does allow the meaning to adapt to an ever-shifting context. Still, I think the Japanese translation improves on the original with the phrase ari no mama ("[take me] as [I] am"). Takako Matsu delivers a bravura performance.
Here's the English version sung by Idina Menzel. Quibbles aside, she does very well as Elsa.
Oh, and stick through the credits to the very end. First for the "legal disclaimer" that comes right after "Production Babies" (get out your magnifying glass). And then the abominable snowman makes a curtain call.
Nevertheless, while Pixar continues to project an aura of artistic sophistication unmatched by its competitors—perhaps reflecting the lingering influence of its founder—Disney Animation productions strike me as more broadly human in their dramatic appeal.
And certainly more broadly comedic. Many of the laugh-out-loud moments in Frozen come from the efforts of the snowman Olaf to literally keep himself together. He's a one-man Calvin & Hobbes running through the movie, totally hilarious in a somewhat disturbing way when you stop to think about it.
Humor of a more urbane sort is provided by Anna (the redhead) and Kristoff. Disney has again tapped into the snap, crackle and pop of the great screwball comedies. To be sure, Anna, Kristoff (and the reindeer) are a copy of Rapunzel, Flynn Rider (and the horse). Hey, with repartee like this, more of the same is fine by me.
But don't get too distracted. As with the magician's slight of hand, the fun and froth on the surface mask a surprising degree of moral complexity beneath. (Too many Pixar movies, by contrast, prove less profound than they look.)
Frozen dares to lead with a pair of antitheses, not only bad consequences springing from good intentions, but ill-intentioned people successfully pretending to be good. Tangled gives us one too, but the audience is in on the deception from the start (that Rapunzel's "mother" is evil).
The ingenious touch is Elsa's barn-burner of a power ballad, "Let it go." It sounds at first like an anthem for the self-esteem movement. Except that, by the end, it's become clear that Elsa "being herself" will kill her sister and destroy her kingdom with a Midas-like curse that turns everything she touches to ice.
Elsa doesn't need to "let it go." She badly needs to get over herself. That's what the movie is actually about.
To be fair, Elsa doesn't understand herself or her own abilities. As she and her world change, what she has to "let go" evolves too. She's not the only one. Anna needs to grow up. Fast. Falling in love with some random guy at first sight is a really bad idea, especially when it's just an excuse to get out of the house.
There's a great scene where Kristoff says, "Maybe your sister wants to be left alone," and Anna replies, "Nobody wants to be left alone." Ah, spoken like every clueless extrovert who's ever lived.
Prince Hans, the object of Anna's initial affection, is a fairly complex fairy tale antagonist, the stereotypical nice guy who isn't. Though it wasn't as big a gotcha as I thought it'd be. Nice guys don't chain up the queen in a dungeon. But isn't he simply "being himself" and looking out for his own self-interests?
With twelve older brothers, he probably has self-esteem issues too. Well, tough nuts, kid. That doesn't justify being an exploitative, homicidal jerk. I appreciated how unsentimentally the tables are turned on him in the end. No instantaneous change of heart or slap on the wrist after "lesson learned," thank goodness.
Speaking of changes of heart, the one other failing in the film (aside from the missing backstory explaining Elsa's "gift") is the same one I noticed in Tangled: rushing through the "emotional resolve" (Rapunzel's reunion with her parents is cut too short), especially when the denouement starts on such a great note.
After all, Elsa has just brought her sister back from the dead. A few moments of reflection, a little hesitation, some sisterly recognition and encouragement (the first song in the movie, "Do you want to build a snowman?" poignantly establishes the depth of their relationship), would make the payoff all the more profound.
The movie wouldn't have suffered for running 1:43 instead of 1:42. Or 1:44 to work the backstory into something sequel-worthy. (Is this a sex-linked recessive trait that doesn't express in males? That would make both her parents and her sister carriers. Fascinating.)
And one minor linguistic quibble. No, not the droll anachronisms scattered throughout the script. I love those. A mere one word in the lyrics. Specifically, the vagueness of the antecedent in "Let it go" bugs me. Let what go?
Granted, as noted, that vagueness does allow the meaning to adapt to an ever-shifting context. Still, I think the Japanese translation improves on the original with the phrase ari no mama ("[take me] as [I] am"). Takako Matsu delivers a bravura performance.
Here's the English version sung by Idina Menzel. Quibbles aside, she does very well as Elsa.
Oh, and stick through the credits to the very end. First for the "legal disclaimer" that comes right after "Production Babies" (get out your magnifying glass). And then the abominable snowman makes a curtain call.
Related posts
The magical girl
The Passion of the Magical Girl
Labels: anime, criticism, fantasy, japanese movie reviews, language, magic, magical girl, personal favs
December 12, 2011
Symbolic value
What can we learn from the great writers of literature about symbolism? First of all, to quit analyzing literature for symbolic value (the first rule of symbolism: do not talk about symbolism). As Sarah Butler reports in The Paris Review,
Amazingly, many of the famous authors wrote back. Ray Bradbury delivers a short, to-the-point lecture on the subject:
Speaking of Bradbury, in the comments, "Kevin" sums up what a lot of us felt in our high school and college English courses (redacted a bit):
But perhaps Norman Mailer sums it up most succinctly: "Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work."
That actually happened to me writing Serpent of Time. Well into the final draft stage, I started noticing some quite unplanned symbolism in the text. I did my best to ignore it because I didn't want it dictating the plot. But it's still there, and I'm now fully prepared to discuss it at length.
Hey, I've got two degrees in the humanities. I can deconstruct the unintended symbolism in my own stories too.
In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors. "Did they consciously plant symbols in their work?" he asked. "Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?"
Amazingly, many of the famous authors wrote back. Ray Bradbury delivers a short, to-the-point lecture on the subject:
I never consciously place symbols in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise, and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to let the subconscious do the work for you and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural . . . .
If people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I can't prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, he simply isn't there.
Speaking of Bradbury, in the comments, "Kevin" sums up what a lot of us felt in our high school and college English courses (redacted a bit):
I remember reading Something Wicked This Way Comes in high school. The whole lesson was centered on the symbolic meaning of every single person, place, or thing in the book. I knew there was no way the author meant every little thing to be a symbol.
But perhaps Norman Mailer sums it up most succinctly: "Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work."
That actually happened to me writing Serpent of Time. Well into the final draft stage, I started noticing some quite unplanned symbolism in the text. I did my best to ignore it because I didn't want it dictating the plot. But it's still there, and I'm now fully prepared to discuss it at length.
Hey, I've got two degrees in the humanities. I can deconstruct the unintended symbolism in my own stories too.
Labels: criticism, literature, serpent notes, serpent of time, writing
November 28, 2011
Tangled
As it turns out, he was completely right twice.
Like all good Disney animated features, Tangled has more to say to the adults in the audience than the kids (don't tell the kids that). To be sure, there's plenty of low-brow slapstick involving conking people over the head with frying pans (which I found hilarious) and a horse that acts like a dog (even more hilarious).
The hero (Flynn Rider) and heroine (Rapunzel) are pretty much the same only—well, the same—except with humor, panache, and a keen insight into human nature. These elements come together in a bitingly funny psychoanalytic montage that has Rapunzel harboring second doubts about disobeying her wicked witch of a "mother."
And even the wicked witch is less "wicked" (well, kidnapping and murder aside) than vain, manipulative and self-centered, dysfunctions exhibited under the guise of being "overprotective." If nothing else, Tangled makes for a perfect parable about overparenting.
As Card points out, the climax also contains a perfect example of "eucatastrophe," Tolkien's word for the point in the plot when it is darkest before the dawn, and then redemption springs unexpectedly from utter loss. Or as Milton puts it, "All this good of evil shall produce."
Of course, this is basic, by-the-numbers monomyth stuff, following the classic narrative arc that Robert McKee goes on and on about. Except that sticking to the basics is what makes these stories not only last but often improve in the retelling, like old Neil Diamond songs that get covered by hip bands and take on a new life of their own.
(Consider "I'm a Believer" as a case in point. We now have Neil Diamond covering Smash Mouth covering Neil Diamond covering The Monkees performing a song written by Neil Diamond. It's all good!)
But what again confirmed for me that popular entertainment is the place to find true "artistic genius" is the comic relief, especially Max (the horse). This isn't an actor mugging for the camera, but the writer (Dan Fogelman) and artists dreaming up a bunch of vaudevillian routines and then drawing them (albeit digitally), a skill I truly envy.
These powers of imagination are a tad lacking at the beginning and end of Tangled. The story clunks along getting started—more in medias res would have helped—and stumbles a bit finding the right note to end on. But those are tiny criticisms when the other nine-tenths of the movie is so wonderful.
Labels: anime, criticism, mckee, movie reviews, personal favs
October 10, 2011
In praise of caricatures
As I observed a while back, the supporting (stock) characters in How to Train Your Dragon are caricatures, but they come across as more "real" than flesh and blood actors in most live-action movies.
One thing that caught my attention early on was the running joke where the adults all speak with thick Scottish brogues and the kids don't. I think it's brilliant--because every teenager knows his parents speak a foreign language. They turned a caricature into a meaningful metaphor.
You can't play against types and expectations unless there are types and expectations to play against. This applies to storytelling. Just as cliche has great utility, so do caricatures. You can expend only so much time and so many words before getting a story underway.
It's the literary equivalent of the pyrotechnic crew adding gasoline to a cinematic explosion, because that's what people have come to expect. And it looks really cool. If "reality" is what you want, watch Mythbusters instead. As Sarah Hoyt puts it,
It's a balancing act at both ends of the scale. One of the great delights in genre fiction is starting with a stock character and watching as he first defines the caricature of a "bad guy," then moves beyond it, while doing what a stock character is supposed to--move the story forward.
A good example is Karl Urban in Red (he's McCoy in the latest Star Trek). For about 99 percent of the movie he is trying very hard to kill Bruce Willis. He starts off as a ruthlessly over-the-top stock villain, but slowly evolves into somebody we can almost empathize with.
This isn't one of those insipid gotcha! switcheroos, where the bad guys turns out to be the good guy (a truly uninspired dramatic device 99 percent of the time), but a simple recognition that making the bad guy a tad more interesting makes the good guy way more interesting.
To be sure, Karl Urban can't be more interesting than Bruce Willis. Especially in genre fiction, the protagonist is the character who changes the most or causes the most change. Bruce Willis goes from being a retired spy to action hero with a babe on his arm, plenty of change for an action flick.
Karl Urban doesn't have to do a one-eighty, just a ninety, or a forty-five. His character has to change enough to convince us of the open-ended possibilities in the big climax, and no more. Otherwise, the movie would be about him.
In Under Siege, Tommy Lee Jones gives us a caricature with two twists. Like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, he starts out as the sane thief pretending to be crazy. By the end, he really is nuts. But not without reason. He had this great plan and then Steven Seagal went and ruined it.
He's still the bad guy. We're not rooting for him to nuke Honolulu. But, yeah, I get where he's coming from, and that makes the cliffhanger ending all the more believable. Jones walks away with most of the movie in the process, but there's nothing wrong with that either.
One thing that caught my attention early on was the running joke where the adults all speak with thick Scottish brogues and the kids don't. I think it's brilliant--because every teenager knows his parents speak a foreign language. They turned a caricature into a meaningful metaphor.
You can't play against types and expectations unless there are types and expectations to play against. This applies to storytelling. Just as cliche has great utility, so do caricatures. You can expend only so much time and so many words before getting a story underway.
It's the literary equivalent of the pyrotechnic crew adding gasoline to a cinematic explosion, because that's what people have come to expect. And it looks really cool. If "reality" is what you want, watch Mythbusters instead. As Sarah Hoyt puts it,
Don't be afraid to give your characters outrageous characteristics or to make them larger than life. Even if you're writing "real life" you'll need to do that to some extent, or people will think they're blah and boring.
It's a balancing act at both ends of the scale. One of the great delights in genre fiction is starting with a stock character and watching as he first defines the caricature of a "bad guy," then moves beyond it, while doing what a stock character is supposed to--move the story forward.
A good example is Karl Urban in Red (he's McCoy in the latest Star Trek). For about 99 percent of the movie he is trying very hard to kill Bruce Willis. He starts off as a ruthlessly over-the-top stock villain, but slowly evolves into somebody we can almost empathize with.
This isn't one of those insipid gotcha! switcheroos, where the bad guys turns out to be the good guy (a truly uninspired dramatic device 99 percent of the time), but a simple recognition that making the bad guy a tad more interesting makes the good guy way more interesting.
To be sure, Karl Urban can't be more interesting than Bruce Willis. Especially in genre fiction, the protagonist is the character who changes the most or causes the most change. Bruce Willis goes from being a retired spy to action hero with a babe on his arm, plenty of change for an action flick.
Karl Urban doesn't have to do a one-eighty, just a ninety, or a forty-five. His character has to change enough to convince us of the open-ended possibilities in the big climax, and no more. Otherwise, the movie would be about him.
In Under Siege, Tommy Lee Jones gives us a caricature with two twists. Like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, he starts out as the sane thief pretending to be crazy. By the end, he really is nuts. But not without reason. He had this great plan and then Steven Seagal went and ruined it.
He's still the bad guy. We're not rooting for him to nuke Honolulu. But, yeah, I get where he's coming from, and that makes the cliffhanger ending all the more believable. Jones walks away with most of the movie in the process, but there's nothing wrong with that either.
Related posts
In praise of cliche
Playing by the rules
Labels: art, criticism, thinking about writing
September 26, 2011
It's not about the bad guys
Kate's review of Sherlock, the "modernized" BBC Holmes series, got me to thinking again about why I found it so annoying. The casting and the setup is perfect, but the early introduction of Moriarty--a Moriarty of such inexplicable means and motives--wrecked it for me.
What Orson Scott Card says about the "Red John" character on The Mentalist applies here: "He was made too powerful, with tentacles reaching everywhere, so that we began to wonder why he didn't just kill everybody and become king."
Like Card, if he doesn't stay dead (he didn't), I'll stop watching (I will), because "I don't tune in to watch the same repulsive villain week after week. I tune in to watch intriguing and enjoyable heroes" dispose of the bad guys.
I watched the pilot episode of The Secret Circle. It's the kind of show I want to like, but I'll give it a pass. Besides being yet another 90210-with-a-twist soap, the thought of hanging out with the same mean girls and angsty teenagers and evil, Machiavellian adults every week is tiring.
Recall that Buffy was about hanging out with the same interesting, resourceful and good kids and adults every week. The underlying conflict did not depend on Cordelia perpetually being a bitch or even Spike being evil. In fact, the series got better as their characters matured.
The X-Files was big on conspiracies, but structured so that most of the episodes had nothing to do with the big conspiracy arc. They were entertaining ghost or crime stories solved by the odd genius and his level-headed sidekick. Which should also be true of Sherlock Holmes.
And when the conspirators did show up, more often than not, Mulder was caught in between competing cosmic forces. He wasn't constantly being preyed upon, at the mercy of fate or crazies. When he did end up in somebody's cross-hairs, the means and ends justifying them aligned.
Even so, as the conspiratorial twists and turns compounded, it became necessary to explain why the Cigarette Smoking Man just couldn't bump off Mulder. (The Cigarette Smoking Man also showed up in a hilarious episode that explained why running the world is boring.)
The problem seems to comes down to a dearth of writers capable of creating truly smart villains, so they instead create sociopathic and really lucky ones. They turn the bad guys into amoral demigods, and that is surprisingly dull.
This is a persistent problem with superhero series, and one that doesn't need to exist in the first place. As Kate points out, the vast majority of Agatha Christie's criminals are "simple and believable." Their actual crimes are comprehensible in the given context and rather mundane.
Especially when it comes to the police procedural, it's not the crime or the criminal that's interesting, but how the hero solves the one and catches the other.
What Orson Scott Card says about the "Red John" character on The Mentalist applies here: "He was made too powerful, with tentacles reaching everywhere, so that we began to wonder why he didn't just kill everybody and become king."
Like Card, if he doesn't stay dead (he didn't), I'll stop watching (I will), because "I don't tune in to watch the same repulsive villain week after week. I tune in to watch intriguing and enjoyable heroes" dispose of the bad guys.
I watched the pilot episode of The Secret Circle. It's the kind of show I want to like, but I'll give it a pass. Besides being yet another 90210-with-a-twist soap, the thought of hanging out with the same mean girls and angsty teenagers and evil, Machiavellian adults every week is tiring.
Recall that Buffy was about hanging out with the same interesting, resourceful and good kids and adults every week. The underlying conflict did not depend on Cordelia perpetually being a bitch or even Spike being evil. In fact, the series got better as their characters matured.
The X-Files was big on conspiracies, but structured so that most of the episodes had nothing to do with the big conspiracy arc. They were entertaining ghost or crime stories solved by the odd genius and his level-headed sidekick. Which should also be true of Sherlock Holmes.
And when the conspirators did show up, more often than not, Mulder was caught in between competing cosmic forces. He wasn't constantly being preyed upon, at the mercy of fate or crazies. When he did end up in somebody's cross-hairs, the means and ends justifying them aligned.
Even so, as the conspiratorial twists and turns compounded, it became necessary to explain why the Cigarette Smoking Man just couldn't bump off Mulder. (The Cigarette Smoking Man also showed up in a hilarious episode that explained why running the world is boring.)
The problem seems to comes down to a dearth of writers capable of creating truly smart villains, so they instead create sociopathic and really lucky ones. They turn the bad guys into amoral demigods, and that is surprisingly dull.
This is a persistent problem with superhero series, and one that doesn't need to exist in the first place. As Kate points out, the vast majority of Agatha Christie's criminals are "simple and believable." Their actual crimes are comprehensible in the given context and rather mundane.
Especially when it comes to the police procedural, it's not the crime or the criminal that's interesting, but how the hero solves the one and catches the other.
Related posts
The Big Bad
Oh yeah, we're baaad
Superbad is superboring
Labels: criticism, kate, movies, superhero, television, thinking about writing
September 19, 2011
Sentiment vs. solutions
Call it the literary uncertainty principle, disentangling what people say about something you wrote from what you were thinking at the time you wrote it. It's like George Lucas learning that Star Wars was a retelling of the monomyth and then concluding, disastrously, that he'd done it on purpose.
I do know that my premise for the novel was that Rachel, having plowed through all the spiritual solutions and Kubler-Ross stages, had arrived at the "whatever works" stage, no matter how removed from reality (growing up, I witnessed a stalwart member of my Mormon ward hitting this wall and hard).
And third, because Downing makes a good point about the way the male mind approaches the world. As Chris (my publisher) comments,
I'm not saying the novel wouldn't have been enriched with developing the mother/daughter relationship a little more, but to me it's also a no-brainer that the relationship would be there, and it doesn't sound like something I want to read about.
There's a lot of truth in the Tim Allen school of male psychology: "I solve problems (preferable with power tools), therefore I am." When a man finds himself under assault by a tidal wave of emotion, screaming inside his head is the frantic plea: Is there a problem in here somewhere I can solve?
Though such preferences are equally influenced by by our subjective tastes when it comes to fictional representations of the world. Erica Friedman sums it up well:
What I want so desperately to see is stories of women who have made it past the scarring, have learned to not lose control of the situation, even when things are falling apart around her. A leader. A calm in the storm. Not the storm itself.
Alas, protagonists who are "the storm itself" have become a plague in action series and police procedurals, regardless of sex. Take the latest incarnation of Hawaii Five-O. Every male lead has "angst" and "issues." I much prefer Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett, whose only "issues" are with the bad guys.
Okay, I'm probably tilting too far the other way, but I'm totally on board with Kate that one of the most issue-free relationships on television is that between Major Samantha Carter and Colonel Jack O'Neill from Stargate SG-1, a big reason why Major Carter "falls into her own category of awesomeness."
Labels: angel reviews, books, criticism, television
August 04, 2011
Writing to be read
A while back I pointed out this pair of paens to the pulps. The Wall Street Journal recently examined the actual substance of the genre in Allan Massie's review of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, edited by Otto Penzler.
Massie writes fondly of a time when the point of storytelling was (strangely enough) to tell a story. The result was "their day's version of the modern action movie." Not always good, often quite awful, but the "masters of popular fiction always play by the rules. And rule No. 1 is to grab the reader at once."
Somerset Maugham, Massie reminds us, defended the pulps much as G.K. Chesterton had fifty years earlier. Their authors, Maugham noted, wrote stories that "defeated time." And yet the critics "have the ingratitude to throw [them] aside with a sneer and look down upon their authors. It is graceless."
My only beef with Massie's analysis is his claim that these "stories belong to a time when our culture was essentially literate. That time has passed." No, these stories belong to a time when writers wrote to be read. Now their children and grandchildren work in television, and write to be watched.
Massie writes fondly of a time when the point of storytelling was (strangely enough) to tell a story. The result was "their day's version of the modern action movie." Not always good, often quite awful, but the "masters of popular fiction always play by the rules. And rule No. 1 is to grab the reader at once."
Somerset Maugham, Massie reminds us, defended the pulps much as G.K. Chesterton had fifty years earlier. Their authors, Maugham noted, wrote stories that "defeated time." And yet the critics "have the ingratitude to throw [them] aside with a sneer and look down upon their authors. It is graceless."
My only beef with Massie's analysis is his claim that these "stories belong to a time when our culture was essentially literate. That time has passed." No, these stories belong to a time when writers wrote to be read. Now their children and grandchildren work in television, and write to be watched.
Related posts
Down with literacy
Angsty angst ruins everything
A scientific defense of fiction
Good books don't have to be hard
Labels: books, criticism, pop culture, publishing, thinking about writing
July 21, 2011
Literary fiction defined
1. Literary fiction is whatever English professors can teach without being ironic or apologetic. Novels will move in and out of academic fashion according to the prevailing intellectual trends.
2. Genre fiction that has become sufficiently obscure, inaccessible and fossilized in the public mind turns into literary fiction. (Shakespeare, Dickens and Chandler being three examples.)
3. People who read and write literary fiction attend "conferences" and read and publish in "journals." People who read and write genre fiction attend "conventions" and read and publish in "magazines."
4. People who write literary fiction earn tenure. People who write genre fiction earn royalties. (Though in purely monetary terms, the former is often more valuable than the latter.)
5. Literary fiction is whatever can be taught in high school without anybody getting in trouble with the parents, the school board, or local politicians. (Although 5 is a subset of 1, not all of 1 qualifies as 5.)
6. Literary fiction is that which everybody is expected to respect, but nobody actually reads. Genre fiction is that which nobody is expected to respect, but everybody actually reads.
2. Genre fiction that has become sufficiently obscure, inaccessible and fossilized in the public mind turns into literary fiction. (Shakespeare, Dickens and Chandler being three examples.)
3. People who read and write literary fiction attend "conferences" and read and publish in "journals." People who read and write genre fiction attend "conventions" and read and publish in "magazines."
4. People who write literary fiction earn tenure. People who write genre fiction earn royalties. (Though in purely monetary terms, the former is often more valuable than the latter.)
5. Literary fiction is whatever can be taught in high school without anybody getting in trouble with the parents, the school board, or local politicians. (Although 5 is a subset of 1, not all of 1 qualifies as 5.)
6. Literary fiction is that which everybody is expected to respect, but nobody actually reads. Genre fiction is that which nobody is expected to respect, but everybody actually reads.
Labels: criticism, literature, pop culture
June 27, 2011
The "truth" is worse
What he does get right in the process often ends up being right but in the wrong context. Which is not to say that I don't appreciate the effort.
To start with, Farmer is right that Trey Parker and Matt Stone treat the subject with kid gloves. The biggest reason is that they are mocking what they love, or at least like, which should be obvious from this classic Matt Stone quote: "I hate conservatives, but I really [expletive deleted] hate liberals."
Mormons are the kind of white, middle-class conservatives that are safe to dislike without wasting the emotional effort it takes to actively hate something. Farmer correctly concludes that Mormons are the new "retro-cool" group that anybody can make fun of, and Mormons should be very thankful for that.
But he goes off track when he complains that "Most egregiously, the play mischaracterizes Mormon theology," and then spends the bulk of his review telling us why in detail. Except that in a story like this, Parker and Stone only have to be in the ballpark. Getting the "look and feel" right matters a lot more.
In the mission field, the emphasis is on sealing the deal, not wading through the fine print. In places like Japan, where sectarian distinctions pretty much end at distinguishing between Catholicism (that has historical roots there) and everything else, the fine print evaporates into a colorless, odorless mist.
To be sure, Farmer's discussion of the nexus between Mormon theology and popular culture is more interesting than the rest of the review. I'd like to see him tackle the subject at length, quite apart from the The Book of Mormon Musical. But even there he tends to overreach.
Unlike evangelical missionaries who want to save you from going to hell, LDS missionaries want to help you reach your potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins. It would make a great, cheesy musical number.
Except even most Mormons wouldn't "get it," and those that did would likely be "offended" (meaning, not really, but as a sign of solidarity). Again, for the dramatic goals of this story, it doesn't matter. Getting the theology wrong in The Book of Mormon Musical is like getting the science wrong in Star Wars.
(Though while we're on the subject of accuracy, the rank of "co-senior" was common on my mission. And hell is exactly what is promised a "failed" missionary in Mormon culture. Such fears are in no way invented.)
I'm always amused by critics who care more about Mormon theology than Mormons do. Since such critics inevitably draw a blogospheric reaction from those Mormons who make a hobby of caring (and deeply), the combustible results may suggest that everybody cares, when the church only reluctantly does (in public).
Mormons don't have to care unless they really want to (in their own free time). Mormonism is surprisingly free-thinking in this respect: you can subscribe to almost any theory about God and the universe you want to if you don't (openly) buck authority. The church cares more about your behavior than your beliefs.
Which is why even conservative Christians are coming to the conclusion that Mormons are "mostly harmless." Because, the goofy theology aside, they behave well. When they grow up, at least.
Here's the real "problem" with the musical: based on everything I've read, heard and seen, Parker and Stone depict Mormon missionaries as far more naïve, idealistic, and well-intentioned than about ninety percent of the missionaries I have actually known (including me).
They don't go light on the theology. They go light on the dumb shenanigans Mormon missionaries and their leaders are capable of, that make the vulgar kids of South Park look urbane by comparison. The last thing the church wants is somebody writing a popular play about what really goes on in Mormon missions.
Which, again, makes The Book of Mormon Musical a godsend to the orthodox church. Look! Squirrels!
As cynical as my own missionary memoir is, I wrote it soon after my mission and left out the really weird stuff, mostly because my still-TBM self couldn't process how psychedelically bizarre the experience truly was. But here's an account of the same thing happening halfway around the world a decade later.
The first 15 minutes directly addresses the subject, and again starting at the 36 minute mark.
Imagine if Parker and Stone wrote a musical about that!
Related posts
The evolution
Blowing bubbles
Pelagius and the fools
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections
Labels: bomm, criticism, lds, religion, tokyo south, twilight
May 19, 2011
In praise of cliche
In a post about writing for an RPG called "The Battle for Wesnoth," Eric Raymond describes how modern definitions of "creativity" often send art off the rails.
Or as Terry Pratchett puts it, "The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."
We're all so marinated in the 20th-century idea that good art is required to challenge one's preconceptions and be original that it is perhaps difficult to receive this sort of deliberately derivative work as art at all. But it's worth remembering that standalone art intended primarily to express the artist's personal creativity is a very recent idea, not actually fully developed until the collapse of aristocratic patronage at the end of the 19th century and the "back to zero" impulse of modernism in the early 20th.
In most cultures at most times, quotation and bricolage have been as important to artists, or far more important, than individual creativity. Art was tied to and primarily generated for non-artistic purposes--as an evocative device for religions, as decoration for craft objects and architecture, as a peacock-tail display tactic for the wealthy and powerful. Individual creativity was restrained, additive, and incremental . . . too much originality would have separated art from its purposes and alienated its audience.
Or as Terry Pratchett puts it, "The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."
Related posts
Playing by the rules
In praise of caricatures
Labels: art, criticism, thinking about writing
May 05, 2011
A common comic enemy
Kate wondered recently why so many time-travel television episodes/movies include a variation of the line: "In the future, I can't believe a B-actor will be elected president!" Okay, maybe writers are frustrated elitists who hate actors, but don't the actors have any self-respect?
Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):
Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.
Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.
The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.
Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):
Just as hipsters today use white pejoratively, denoting sterile, bland, non-ethnic suburbia, so sophisticates in Cain's day enjoyed skewering Los Angeles--[then] America's whitest, most Protestant, most bourgeois big city--as an artificial tropic teeming with displaced rubes, an opinion Frank Lloyd Wright neatly encapsulated in his contemptuous remark, "It is as if you tipped the U.S. up, so that all the commonplace people slid down to Southern California." So conditioned, writer after writer churned out the same derisive commentary on Los Angeles.
Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.
Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.
The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.
Labels: criticism, kate, television, writing
February 24, 2011
Anime genre horror (2)
Horror is a popular genre in manga and anime, especially Twilight Zone-style short stories and an often preachy permutation in which a supernatural grim reaper deals out justice and balances the cosmic scales, an existential Death Wish. I'd put Kino's Journey in the former category, and xxxHolic and Hell Girl in the latter.
I enjoyed the feature-length xxxholic: A Midsummer Night's Dream because it told the story and wrapped everything up in an hour. Mushi-shi is one of the most inventive permutations, about an Edo Period "Bug Master" who controls swarms of supernatural insect-like creatures. Unfortunately, I kept waiting for some interesting relationships to develop, and none did.
With series, after a couple of episodes, no matter how slick and clever, seen one, seen them all (sorry, but the same goes for Twilight Zone episodes too). I want to watch it adding up to something, not be told it did. Give me "high concept," bubble-gum actioners or take the time to develop a character arc beyond "indifferent hero makes sure jerk gets what's coming to him."
No discussion of Japanese anime horror is complete without a discussion of tentacle porn. But like splatter flicks, it is too devoid of ideas to offend me other than aesthetically. It also doesn't interest me in the slightest, even after a prurient fashion.
I seem to recall that the original Demon City Shinjuku (1988) movie had some tentacle porn. I'm translating the novel right now for Digital Manga. I've only got forty pages to go and haven't encountered any tentacle porn, so it seems to have been "creative" addition. In any case, the book is a lot better.
Japanese writers don't let a paucity of knowledge about the subject get in the way of borrowing heavily from European tropes and Christianity in general. In fact, that is a source of a lot of the fun! (Peter Payne likes to point out that Japanese are similarly unoffended by ignorant Hollywood nonsense about Japan.)
Hellsing (original preferred) definitely qualifies. It's the Church of England versus the Vatican! With big guns! And vampires! I love it! Its Miltonesque protagonist proves that, indeed, the devil gets all the good lines. What if the devil decided to fight on the side of good, not because he got his soul back like Angel, but because evil was so utterly hackneyed and boring?
Witch Hunter Robin is yet another X-Files/Angel-type mash-up. Super-secret police organization for tracking down supernatural ne're-do-wells employs a real witch, who uncovers bigger conspiracy Behind It All and Must Be Stopped! Japanese SF/F writers love this formula. Again, it posits the Catholic Church as the omniscient, omnipresent Smoking Man.
You know you've arrived as a world-wide religion when it generates so many stories about world-wide conspiracies.
Someday's Dreamers is not horror per se. Yume is a witch, but as with Kamichu! and Kiki's Delivery Service, this is a given in the modern world. Think Harry Potter without the muggle divide and no vaudevillian bad guys. The series begins with Yume arriving in Tokyo from the sticks to get her witch's license, which has a lot more in common with social work than magic.
The animation is so-so and the episodes clunk along didactically at times, but the concept itself is executed almost perfectly (I define a great concept as one I immediately want to rip off).
Two oddly similar and very good non-horror, life-after-death dramas: Haibane Renmei and After Life (live action).
And for something completely off the supernatural wall, the manga Saint Young Men is about Jesus and Buddha hanging out together in Tokyo. It's iconoclastic but not sacrilegious (if you don't mind divine beings kicking back and poking gentle fun at each other), and is very sweet at times without becoming cloying.
I enjoyed the feature-length xxxholic: A Midsummer Night's Dream because it told the story and wrapped everything up in an hour. Mushi-shi is one of the most inventive permutations, about an Edo Period "Bug Master" who controls swarms of supernatural insect-like creatures. Unfortunately, I kept waiting for some interesting relationships to develop, and none did.
With series, after a couple of episodes, no matter how slick and clever, seen one, seen them all (sorry, but the same goes for Twilight Zone episodes too). I want to watch it adding up to something, not be told it did. Give me "high concept," bubble-gum actioners or take the time to develop a character arc beyond "indifferent hero makes sure jerk gets what's coming to him."
No discussion of Japanese anime horror is complete without a discussion of tentacle porn. But like splatter flicks, it is too devoid of ideas to offend me other than aesthetically. It also doesn't interest me in the slightest, even after a prurient fashion.
I seem to recall that the original Demon City Shinjuku (1988) movie had some tentacle porn. I'm translating the novel right now for Digital Manga. I've only got forty pages to go and haven't encountered any tentacle porn, so it seems to have been "creative" addition. In any case, the book is a lot better.
Japanese writers don't let a paucity of knowledge about the subject get in the way of borrowing heavily from European tropes and Christianity in general. In fact, that is a source of a lot of the fun! (Peter Payne likes to point out that Japanese are similarly unoffended by ignorant Hollywood nonsense about Japan.)
Hellsing (original preferred) definitely qualifies. It's the Church of England versus the Vatican! With big guns! And vampires! I love it! Its Miltonesque protagonist proves that, indeed, the devil gets all the good lines. What if the devil decided to fight on the side of good, not because he got his soul back like Angel, but because evil was so utterly hackneyed and boring?
Witch Hunter Robin is yet another X-Files/Angel-type mash-up. Super-secret police organization for tracking down supernatural ne're-do-wells employs a real witch, who uncovers bigger conspiracy Behind It All and Must Be Stopped! Japanese SF/F writers love this formula. Again, it posits the Catholic Church as the omniscient, omnipresent Smoking Man.
You know you've arrived as a world-wide religion when it generates so many stories about world-wide conspiracies.
Someday's Dreamers is not horror per se. Yume is a witch, but as with Kamichu! and Kiki's Delivery Service, this is a given in the modern world. Think Harry Potter without the muggle divide and no vaudevillian bad guys. The series begins with Yume arriving in Tokyo from the sticks to get her witch's license, which has a lot more in common with social work than magic.
The animation is so-so and the episodes clunk along didactically at times, but the concept itself is executed almost perfectly (I define a great concept as one I immediately want to rip off).
Two oddly similar and very good non-horror, life-after-death dramas: Haibane Renmei and After Life (live action).
And for something completely off the supernatural wall, the manga Saint Young Men is about Jesus and Buddha hanging out together in Tokyo. It's iconoclastic but not sacrilegious (if you don't mind divine beings kicking back and poking gentle fun at each other), and is very sweet at times without becoming cloying.
Related posts
Japanese genre horror (1)
Christianity is cool
Ghostbusting in Japan
Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, criticism, demon city, haibane, hellsing, magic, pop culture, religion, television
December 20, 2010
The static hero
The story structure of Yashakiden (I'm finishing the translation of volume 3) reminds me of The Hidden Fortress, the Kurosawa samurai actioner that helped to inspire Star Wars.
The Hidden Fortress was for Kurosawa a commercial effort (movie studios do have to turn a profit). He would reportedly arrive at work every morning, present his protagonists with a seemingly intractable situation, and charge his writing staff with getting them out of it.
The result is quite enjoyable, but believe it or not, Lucas actually improved on it (the last time that would ever happen) by giving Han Solo a compelling character arc.
In The Hidden Fortress, General Makabe (the great Toshiro Mifune) is pretty much cool, smart and heroic, like a 1950's superhero who is ultimately unaffected by the consequences of his daring-do, and who might catch a bad case of cooties hanging around girls too much.
Series television used to avoid character arcs, with the protagonist resetting at the end of each episode. Think of the original Star Trek and even TNG. And while too much character arc produces soppy melodrama, none results in plots summed up as, "And then a bunch of stuff happens."
Which is fine for a ninety-minute actioner. But what the hero does should affect him, hence the tried and true rule of fiction writing that the main character is the person who changes the most. (In Star Wars, this means the main characters are Darth Vader and Han Solo.)
Actually, I'd argue that Star Trek has what I'd call a "steady state" character spiral, a relationship between the three leads that grows and matures as the actors and writers settle into their roles. So might the Setsura/Mephisto pairing in Yashakiden, but at this point I can't tell.
For now, Setsura is an impassive superhero of the old school, a kind of aloof and detached Peter Parker taking arms against an uninvited sea of troubles. As in The Hidden Fortress, these conflicts present themselves as an obstacle course, which he will eventually and inevitably overcome.
At the end of volume 3, he does dispatch a vampire in a very clever way. But most of the fun for me is generated by the supporting characters.
To start with, the sidekicks, including the wily mayor of Shinjuku, an animatronic doll with a soul, a wisecracking crow (a direct descendant of Poe's raven), and a fat witch who will only save you if it pays well.
Then the victims, some of whom have very compelling mini-arcs of their own before getting bumped off like the red-shirts on Star Trek (don't get too attached to them). Lastly, the villains. Hideyuki Kikuchi has done an excellent job making the bad guys as fascinating as they are bad.
Through Kikuchi's best character of all is the setting itself, Demon City Shinjuku. More about that later.
The Hidden Fortress was for Kurosawa a commercial effort (movie studios do have to turn a profit). He would reportedly arrive at work every morning, present his protagonists with a seemingly intractable situation, and charge his writing staff with getting them out of it.
The result is quite enjoyable, but believe it or not, Lucas actually improved on it (the last time that would ever happen) by giving Han Solo a compelling character arc.
In The Hidden Fortress, General Makabe (the great Toshiro Mifune) is pretty much cool, smart and heroic, like a 1950's superhero who is ultimately unaffected by the consequences of his daring-do, and who might catch a bad case of cooties hanging around girls too much.
Series television used to avoid character arcs, with the protagonist resetting at the end of each episode. Think of the original Star Trek and even TNG. And while too much character arc produces soppy melodrama, none results in plots summed up as, "And then a bunch of stuff happens."
Which is fine for a ninety-minute actioner. But what the hero does should affect him, hence the tried and true rule of fiction writing that the main character is the person who changes the most. (In Star Wars, this means the main characters are Darth Vader and Han Solo.)
Actually, I'd argue that Star Trek has what I'd call a "steady state" character spiral, a relationship between the three leads that grows and matures as the actors and writers settle into their roles. So might the Setsura/Mephisto pairing in Yashakiden, but at this point I can't tell.
For now, Setsura is an impassive superhero of the old school, a kind of aloof and detached Peter Parker taking arms against an uninvited sea of troubles. As in The Hidden Fortress, these conflicts present themselves as an obstacle course, which he will eventually and inevitably overcome.
At the end of volume 3, he does dispatch a vampire in a very clever way. But most of the fun for me is generated by the supporting characters.
To start with, the sidekicks, including the wily mayor of Shinjuku, an animatronic doll with a soul, a wisecracking crow (a direct descendant of Poe's raven), and a fat witch who will only save you if it pays well.
Then the victims, some of whom have very compelling mini-arcs of their own before getting bumped off like the red-shirts on Star Trek (don't get too attached to them). Lastly, the villains. Hideyuki Kikuchi has done an excellent job making the bad guys as fascinating as they are bad.
Through Kikuchi's best character of all is the setting itself, Demon City Shinjuku. More about that later.
Labels: criticism, demon city, superhero, thinking about writing, yashakiden
December 06, 2010
The magic door
I previously mentioned the delightful romantic dramedy I'll Still Love You in Ten Years.
To summarize: imagine that Leonard Hofstadter and Penny (but make her a young editorial assistant) from Big Bang Theory get married. She de-geekifies him, he becomes rich and famous, they end up loathing each other. So he borrows his old professor's time machine and goes back to when they first met in order to break up the relationship.
(Incidentally, I identify completely. This is exactly how geeky introverts think.)
The restrained NHK style gets it exactly right, pushing the physical relationship off to the side and focusing on what makes people fall in love despite themselves, without getting too full of its philosophical self. Ten years ago, it would have made a great Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle. As a stage play, it'd be a nice answer to Saturday's Warrior.
There's only one small special effect in the whole series--a 1000 yen coin from 2020 disappears when the disrupted timeline is restored. We never see the actual time machine. We're only shown a small theoretical prototype in the professor's lab. It's simply stipulated that the time machine exists.
In other words, it's a magic door. That's all we need.
The "magic door" approach comes from an episode on Red Dwarf where the crew discovers a "space-time portal" that will permit them to travel back in time in order to warn themselves of the disaster that will befall them a few weeks hence.
Call it the Goldilocks problem in science fiction and fantasy: explaining too much or explaining too little. Fantasy with pretensions to "hard SF" often succumbs to the former (Star Trek). A good example of the latter is Jin, an otherwise excellent time travel drama from Tokyo Broadcasting System.
Dr. Jin Minakata (Takao Osawa) is a 21st century surgeon who gets caught in a "time slip" (as it's called in Japanese) and saves the life of Saki's (Haruka Ayase, on the left) brother before fully realizing where he is, and before realizing that he has just done something thought utterly impossible back then.
(Incidentally, Osawa and Ayase also pair up in Ichi, a pretty good Zatoichi spin-off, with Ayase playing against type as the blind-but-lethal swordswoman.)
Following the iron-clad rule that time travelers must travel to interesting times and immediately meet interesting people, as soon as he figures out he's in 1860's Edo (Tokyo), he promptly runs into Sakamoto Ryoma (exuberantly played by Seiyou Uchino, Rika's time-traveling husband from I'll Still Love You in Ten Years).
The episodic conflicts involve Dr. Minakata figuring out how to use his skills with mid-19th century technology. Though Japan had yet to go through its industrial revolution, it still had some of the best specialty steel, silk and ceramics makers in the world. So Minakata could have many of his surgical instruments custom made.
He next sets out to invent penicillin. Granted, the most drastic improvements in health over the past two centuries came from public sanitation. But the Edo government was about to collapse, so a major public works project wasn't in the cards. It's a clever choice, as is having a soy sauce factory handle the mass production.
Although the plots have to be manhandled a bit to set up the medical case for each episode, they're well-researched (at least I found them convincing) and completely fascinating. It makes for a good basic course in pharmacology and emergency medicine. I'd like to see what Dr. House could do in a Civil War-era hospital with 21st century knowledge.
The series conflict involves Minakata's 21st century fiancee, who is in a coma after an operation he convinced her to undergo. He has a photograph of the two of them, taken at her bedside. As he begins to treat one particular patient (the geisha on the right, who's the splitting image of his fiance), the photograph begins to change.
In time, his fiance appears to return to health. And then starts to disappear. Minakata concludes that if he cures his patient, a series of cause and effect will cause her to vanish from history. Add to this his knowledge that Ryoma was assassinated in 1867. Does he act in the present or preserve the future he knows?
It's an interesting set of conflicts and dramatically very well done. There's only one problem with the series: there's no magic door.
A magic door is vaguely implied in the pilot episode. But later, what was implied doesn't seem to exist. The premise gets shuffled off stage with a bunch of literary handwaves and pretty cinematic flourishes and a WTF metaphor about a fetus in a bottle that never made any sense (I don't think it made any sense to the director either).
Maybe Minakata hit his head and he's the one in the coma. Maybe he's not a man dreaming he's a butterfly, but a butterfly dreaming he's a man. Whatever. However clever it looks on paper, this "We're too good for concrete fantasy" business gets my goat. My magical realism better have magic. If here be dragons, I expect real dragons.
Though in this case I suspect they're trying to keep all their options open by not committing to any one plot device. Unfortunately, when it comes to the integrity of a narrative, that kind of halfheartedness never serves storytelling well.
The series is good enough that you can answer their hand wave with one of your own and keep watching. But lacking a physical hook on which to hang the premise--an earthquake, say, or an errant MRI machine--despite the satisfying conclusion, the protagonist's lack of other options detracts from the dramatic impact.
Perhaps the manga on which the television series was based handles it differently. And because most series television in Japan consists of a dozen episodes and that's it (or a dozen episodes a year, very frustrating with ongoing series), it's possible they could come back for a season two (and TBS has just announced there will be).
But they'd still have to come up with a magic door.
To summarize: imagine that Leonard Hofstadter and Penny (but make her a young editorial assistant) from Big Bang Theory get married. She de-geekifies him, he becomes rich and famous, they end up loathing each other. So he borrows his old professor's time machine and goes back to when they first met in order to break up the relationship.
(Incidentally, I identify completely. This is exactly how geeky introverts think.)
The restrained NHK style gets it exactly right, pushing the physical relationship off to the side and focusing on what makes people fall in love despite themselves, without getting too full of its philosophical self. Ten years ago, it would have made a great Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle. As a stage play, it'd be a nice answer to Saturday's Warrior.
There's only one small special effect in the whole series--a 1000 yen coin from 2020 disappears when the disrupted timeline is restored. We never see the actual time machine. We're only shown a small theoretical prototype in the professor's lab. It's simply stipulated that the time machine exists.
In other words, it's a magic door. That's all we need.
The "magic door" approach comes from an episode on Red Dwarf where the crew discovers a "space-time portal" that will permit them to travel back in time in order to warn themselves of the disaster that will befall them a few weeks hence.
"What is it?" Cat wants to know.
Lister offers up the typical technobabble explanations of it being a "interstellar dimensional space-time continuum" or whatnot. But with every explanation, Cat only gets more confused and keeps repeating, "But what is it?"
Finally Lister says, "It's a magic door."
And Cat says, "Oh, a magic door! Why didn't anyone say so!"
Call it the Goldilocks problem in science fiction and fantasy: explaining too much or explaining too little. Fantasy with pretensions to "hard SF" often succumbs to the former (Star Trek). A good example of the latter is Jin, an otherwise excellent time travel drama from Tokyo Broadcasting System.
Dr. Jin Minakata (Takao Osawa) is a 21st century surgeon who gets caught in a "time slip" (as it's called in Japanese) and saves the life of Saki's (Haruka Ayase, on the left) brother before fully realizing where he is, and before realizing that he has just done something thought utterly impossible back then.
(Incidentally, Osawa and Ayase also pair up in Ichi, a pretty good Zatoichi spin-off, with Ayase playing against type as the blind-but-lethal swordswoman.)
Following the iron-clad rule that time travelers must travel to interesting times and immediately meet interesting people, as soon as he figures out he's in 1860's Edo (Tokyo), he promptly runs into Sakamoto Ryoma (exuberantly played by Seiyou Uchino, Rika's time-traveling husband from I'll Still Love You in Ten Years).
The episodic conflicts involve Dr. Minakata figuring out how to use his skills with mid-19th century technology. Though Japan had yet to go through its industrial revolution, it still had some of the best specialty steel, silk and ceramics makers in the world. So Minakata could have many of his surgical instruments custom made.
He next sets out to invent penicillin. Granted, the most drastic improvements in health over the past two centuries came from public sanitation. But the Edo government was about to collapse, so a major public works project wasn't in the cards. It's a clever choice, as is having a soy sauce factory handle the mass production.
Although the plots have to be manhandled a bit to set up the medical case for each episode, they're well-researched (at least I found them convincing) and completely fascinating. It makes for a good basic course in pharmacology and emergency medicine. I'd like to see what Dr. House could do in a Civil War-era hospital with 21st century knowledge.
The series conflict involves Minakata's 21st century fiancee, who is in a coma after an operation he convinced her to undergo. He has a photograph of the two of them, taken at her bedside. As he begins to treat one particular patient (the geisha on the right, who's the splitting image of his fiance), the photograph begins to change.
In time, his fiance appears to return to health. And then starts to disappear. Minakata concludes that if he cures his patient, a series of cause and effect will cause her to vanish from history. Add to this his knowledge that Ryoma was assassinated in 1867. Does he act in the present or preserve the future he knows?
It's an interesting set of conflicts and dramatically very well done. There's only one problem with the series: there's no magic door.
A magic door is vaguely implied in the pilot episode. But later, what was implied doesn't seem to exist. The premise gets shuffled off stage with a bunch of literary handwaves and pretty cinematic flourishes and a WTF metaphor about a fetus in a bottle that never made any sense (I don't think it made any sense to the director either).
Maybe Minakata hit his head and he's the one in the coma. Maybe he's not a man dreaming he's a butterfly, but a butterfly dreaming he's a man. Whatever. However clever it looks on paper, this "We're too good for concrete fantasy" business gets my goat. My magical realism better have magic. If here be dragons, I expect real dragons.
Though in this case I suspect they're trying to keep all their options open by not committing to any one plot device. Unfortunately, when it comes to the integrity of a narrative, that kind of halfheartedness never serves storytelling well.
The series is good enough that you can answer their hand wave with one of your own and keep watching. But lacking a physical hook on which to hang the premise--an earthquake, say, or an errant MRI machine--despite the satisfying conclusion, the protagonist's lack of other options detracts from the dramatic impact.
Perhaps the manga on which the television series was based handles it differently. And because most series television in Japan consists of a dozen episodes and that's it (or a dozen episodes a year, very frustrating with ongoing series), it's possible they could come back for a season two (and TBS has just announced there will be).
But they'd still have to come up with a magic door.
Labels: criticism, introversion, japan, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, kate, magic, sakamoto, science fiction, television, television reviews, thinking about writing