Inception: Further Thoughts

Between them, Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, and, in the comments to my post about it (starting here), Brian Francis Slattery, have talked me over to their reading of Inception--the film and the concept at its core--as a metaphor for storytelling and the artifice of filmmaking (which probably means that my original take on the film, as an SFnal story about learning the world, is, if not off-base, then probably no more productive than obsessing over whether Cobb is still dreaming in the last scene).  As I say to Brian, however, I think that as an analogy to storytelling, dreaming is a very poor fit.  Niall is right to point out that most of us don't dream as vividly and imaginatively as the more common filmic represenation of dreams--vividly colored surrealist landscapes--would have us believe.  My dreams, the ones I remember at least, usually feature familiar settings and actions (though I did once dream that I was investigating the murder of Kermit the frog--I'm still pissed about being woken up before getting to the bottom of that mystery) that have been scrambled into illogic by my sleeping brain.  If it's unfair to condemn Inception for not being The Cell, however, it still seems valid to me to compare it to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the Buffy episode "Restless," both of which feature dreams that are entirely mundane in their settings and events (or, in the latter case, as mundane as settings and events in Buffy get), and whose strangeness is derived from the illogical manner in which the characters move within those scenes, and their atypical reactions to them.  Inception's dreams, meanwhile, are entirely linear and entirely logical, and though I accept that this is because storytelling, and not dreams, is actually the film's focus, the discrepancy only serves to highlight how strained the film's central metaphor is.

Niall, Adam and Brian argue that Inception is drawing our attention to the similar actions we perform in dreams and when consuming a story--accepting illogic as logic, filling in the interstices between 'scenes' in order to create a coherent story in our brains.  But to my mind these are actually two distinct and very different acts.  I mentioned the second season finale of House in one of my replies to Brian.  In the opening scene, House is shot, and spends the rest of the episode trying to diagnose a patient from his hospital room.  In the climactic scene, he has a revelation about the patient's illness while talking to his fellows, and the next scene shows them in a stairwell continuing to talk.  House turns around and asks: "How did I get here?  I was just in my hospital room," and realizes that he's still in a coma following his shooting.  It's a very neat and wrongfooting moment because it draws attention to an action that the audience performs automatically--filling in the gaps in a story so that it can form a coherent, lifelike whole in our minds--but it also draws our attention to the difference between dream and story, and the reason that reading Inception as a metaphor for storytelling strikes me as empty.  When House realizes the illogic of his experiences, he ceases to believe in his perceived reality, in the story happening around him.  I'm sure that most people have had the experience of being immersed in a dream and, as they draw closer to consciousness, realizing some logical flaw in it, at which point the dream dissipates.  Consuming story isn't like that.  Momentarily wrongfooting as it is, the metafictional gag at the end of House's second season doesn't cause the audience to stop believing in the show, because the audience was already aware of the story's fictionality.  Unlike dreams, we know that a story is unreal and accept that unreality.  We know, even if it's not something we think about very often, that we are active participants in the creation of the story, and that we are lending our intellectual and emotional faculties to something unreal.  It's a knowing, conscious act, not the unaware acceptance of the illogic of dreams.  Dream isn't a parallel for story; it's the opposite of it.

The other reason that I don't like this reading of Inception (besides, as I say to Brian, that I'm really not sure what Nolan is trying to say when he compares storytelling to what is essentially a mind-rape) is that it reduces the film to this metaphor.  The substance of the film ceases to matter because its purpose is merely to call attention to its own artificiality.  The experience of watching the film is not the point, and therefore it doesn't matter that this experience is so leaden, because the purpose of the film is the realization that comes hours or days after one has finished watching it.  This doesn't have to be an unsuccessful approach--once again I'm moved to compare Inception to Primer, which so completely avoids delivering anything like a satisfying viewing experience that it's almost necessary to watch the film twice in order to get anything out of the experience--but it does require more courage and intelligence than Inception seems to possess.  I agree with Niall, in other words, that an intellectual exercise can be thrilling in its own right, without appealing to the emotion, but Inception, to my mind, isn't.  That said, it's precisely because Inception is so substance-less that I'm growing more charitable towards it as I move away from it.  Like a dream, the experience of watching the film has faded away almost entirely, while the interpretation offered by Niall, Adam and Brian--so much more palatable in a few, well-written paragraphs than in a two hour film--lingers on.

Making Yourself Heard: You're Maybe Doing it Wrong?

Quoting from the most recent issue of Locus, Sean Wallace reports on the voting statistics of the Locus Awards (results here), which, as we discussed a few months ago, have for the second year running persisted in their policy of counting non-subscriber votes as half of subscriber votes.  The language is muddled (and continues to spin the unequal vote-counting policy as a response to alleged "ballot-box stuffing" in 2008), but a quick calculation gives us the following results:

Year	Total Votes	Subscriber Votes	Nonsubscriber Votes	% of Nonsubscriber Votes
2008	1012	385	726	62 72
2009	662	357	305	46
2010	680	306	374	55

The good news is that the overall number of votes has remained low, and that the significant drop in nonsubscriber votes between 2008 and 2009 has not been reversed.  The bad news is that there were more nonsubscriber votes in 2010 than 2009, and that their percentage is creeping back up to its 2008 levels (though this is also the result of the steady drop in subscriber votes over the last three years).  I'm not sure that this sends the right message to the award's administrators--the short passage Wallace quotes certainly suggests that they think this year's numbers are something to be celebrated.  If they believe that participants in their poll will tolerate being treated like second class voters, they'll have no reason to reverse this misguided and insulting policy.

Inception

Has there ever been a film as hotly anticipated, as burdened with expectations, as Christopher Nolan's Inception?  It's certainly hard to think of one, nor to credit all the things that we thought, believed, or hoped that this film would accomplish.  It would rescue one of the dullest and most underperforming summer blockbuster seasons in recent memory.  It would combine the best qualities of all of last year's science fiction films--the stunning visuals of Avatar, the originality of District 9, the enthusiastic fannishness of Star Trek, the detail-oriented fannishness of Watchmen, the attention to character of Moon--into a single perfect storm of SFnal moviemaking.  It would prove, once and for all, that a film that both demonstrated intelligence and demanded it from its viewers could triumph at the box office.  It would put an end to the plague of sequels and remakes that has blighted Hollywood's blockbuster production for the better part of a decade.  It would bring balance to the Force, cure leprosy, and make peace in the Middle East.  The conventional wisdom is that when you walk into a movie theater with such high hopes--and to the barrage of uninformed and unrealistic expectations the film raised you could add, this last week, its near-universal critical acclaim--disappointment it almost inevitable, but though I walked out of Inception feeling less than enthusiastic, I don't see my reaction to the film as an inevitable come-down from unsustainable build-up.  That would result in a review much like the one I wrote for District 9, which took for granted the film's by-then much touted strengths and concentrated on its weaknesses.  My reaction to Inception is actually something much more fundamental, and much more negative--I genuinely can't see what anyone sees in this film.

Many of the reactions I've seen to Inception have kicked off by noting that the film is less a science fiction movie than a heist film in SFnal garb.  I assume that these writers are consciously trying to ape to consensus that quickly built around Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight, that its superhero story trappings were merely set dressing on what was actually a crime story.  In reality, these reviewers are making the opposite sort of statement.  To say that Inception is a heist film is actually analogous to saying that the The Dark Knight is a superhero film.  It's trivially true--the film's plot revolves around the main character, Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb, assembling a crew, planning a job, and carrying it out--but for the purposes of making a meaningful statement about the film and the things it tries to do, not at all useful, if for no other reason than because Inception is a supremely bad heist film.  It lacks anything like the flare and pizazz of Ocean's Eleven, The Italian Job, or Duplicity--is in fact an almost leaden experience, to the extent that when a thin joke turned up halfway through the film, the audience I was seeing it with broke out in relieved, almost hysterical laughter, glad for even the slightest leavening of tone.  It completely fails not only to establish the unique personalities of its characters, but to spell out their individual roles in the heist, to the extent that at least two of them, Ellen Page's Ariadne and Ken Watanabe's Saito, join in the fun merely because they want to, not because they have an integral role to play that extends past the job's planning stages (and I'm also not clear why Yusuf, the chemist played by Dileep Rao who concocts the compounds that allow the characters to enter another person's dreams, needed to come along for the job instead of monitoring the crew from reality, though Cobb insists that he does).  Most importantly, it doesn't deliver the heist film's classic reveal, the missing puzzle piece or palmed card that suddenly makes sense of the entire plot, which locks together like the gears of an intricate but perfectly functioning machine.

So no, Inception is not a heist film dressed up as a science fiction film.  It's a science fiction film dressed up as a heist film, and I'm using the term science fiction here in its most literary, perhaps even Campbell-ian, sense.  Though the McGuffin that allows the characters to manipulate others' dreams and, through that manipulation, to extract or plant ideas in their minds is so thoroughly handwaved away that Ariadne, the token newbie, can't even put up a token objection when the idea is suggested to her, the story that Inception tells is a quintessentially SFnal one--a story about learning the world, learning its rules, and learning how to use them to your advantage.  Which may be the reason why there's been so much talk about the cleverness and convolutedness of what is actually one of the most straightforward, linearly-presented films Nolan has ever made.  There is in Inception none of the playing around with timelines or plotlines that made Memento and The Prestige such twisty delights.  Instead, the plot proceeds quite regularly from past to future (with occasional and very clearly signposted flashbacks).  There is, of course, the shifting between different layers of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, but beyond the deliberately wrong-footing in media res opening, these are also very clearly differentiated.  But for the question that lingers over the entire film and remains unanswered at its end--did Cobb ever truly make it out of limbo, or is his reality just another layer of dream--we never mistake dream for reality, or the different layers of dream for one another.  It's complicated, but it's not clever, and the reason that Inception is so demanding isn't that it's asking us to piece its plot together, but that it's asking us to learn, on the fly and with only the barest consideration for our confusion, the rules of how dream manipulation works.  It's info-dumping--a film made up almost entirely of info-dumps, whose characters exist primarily to ask or answer questions in a manner that provides those info-dumps to the viewer.  The classic science fiction story, in other words, and one that viewers who don't have grounding in the genre may lack the protocols to properly parse and digest.

It's fashionable these days to look down on the Campbell-ian method of science fiction, and the fact that it prioritized imparting information to the reader over engaging them with plot and characters, and though I'm partial to the occasional Stephen Baxter novel I'm certainly glad that science fiction has discovered more and more complicated tools to tell its stories.  But that's not the reason that Inception left me so cold.  If I wanted to sum up my disappointment with the film in a few lines, they would be these: a lot of people are praising Inception for being a more cerebral version of The Matrix, another film whose main character has to learn how to manipulate a reality whose underlying laws are different from those of our reality, but I can't help but see it as a less rigorous version of Primer.  When it comes to translating Campbell-ian science fiction to the screen, Primer is the still undefeated title-holder.  Its characters speak pure and very nearly incomprehensible info-dump, their emotional motivations are either dimly explained or boring or both, and the film's emotional climax comes when one character, having been explained the rules of the method of time travel discovered by his friend, figures out a way to manipulate those rules and expand the technology's capablities.

Inception desperately wants to be Primer but lacks both the courage and the rigor to go all the way.  Instead of completely downplaying its characters' humanity it tacks on a trite and poorly realized romantic motivation for Cobb, who is trying to break free of his guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard, the only castmember with anything like a vivid on-screen presence, mainly because she's given a lot of scenery to chew--a corrupted version of Cobb's wife driven by his feelings of responsibility for her death, she shrieks and threatens, and gets to be genuinely scary).  Even worse, the film's construction of its alternate reality and its rules lacks the elegance demonstrated by both Primer and The Matrix.  Early scenes make much of Ariadne's ability to manipulate the physics of the dream-world, and though these are visually stunning this ability plays no part in the actual heist.  There is only one sequence in which a character is seen to have fully imbibed the rules of the unreal reality--when Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), left behind in an intermediate dream level to guard his dreaming friends and wake them up when the time is right, finds himself in free-fall because in a higher dream-level, he is in a van that has just plunged off a bridge, and has to swim around, like an astronaut in a custom-tailored suit, dodging bullets from the protective manifestations of the heist target's subconscious while preparing the others to be woken up.

Worst of all, the rules of dream manipulation are self-contradictory and, eventually, just tacked on.  Early on we're told that if a person dies in the dream world they wake up in reality (or the next level up).  Then it's revealed that the compound the characters have taken in order to carry out the heist is too powerful, and that if they die they'll be thrust into limbo, an unconstructed dream state from which there is no escape, which will permanently scramble their brains, in part because they'll become incapable of telling reality from dream.  But when the characters do end up in limbo it seems like just another layer of dream, no more irrational and no less susceptible to their manipulation, than any other.  Most of them recognize that they are in limbo, and then it turns out that getting out of it is as simple as getting out of the other dream layers--you just need to die.  (For the record, all of these problems could have been resolved if the heist plot were better written.  Limbo only exists because Nolan needs something meaningful to threaten the characters with during the heist, having established that death will simply knock them out of the dream, but if each character had an integral role to play in the heist then their death, and disappearance from the dream world, would be a threat in its own right.)  Inception thus occupies a very unsatisfying middle ground--it is nowhere near clever enough to justify the scant attention it pays to the more traditional elements of storytelling such as character and plot.

What most interests me about my reaction to Inception is how little I care that it's been so well-received elsewhere.  Compared to my reactions to Avatar or Star Trek, films whose effusive reception came close to enraging me, I'm surprisingly sanguine about the praise that this film, which ultimately is so much less successful than either Avatar or Star Trek, has received.  I think the reason is that though I disagree with the praise that's been heaped upon it, there's still something satisfying in hearing that praise voiced.  People are praising Inception for being a science fiction film--not a Star Wars-esque fantasy in space, or a character drama that happens to take place in the future--and for doing SFnal things.  I think that it does these things badly, but it's still gratifying to see the effort lauded.  I don't know whether Inception is a sign of things to come--for Nolan, for summer blockbusters, for science fiction films--though in the latter two cases I suspect that it isn't, and in Nolan's case I hope not (and even if he does end up crawling up his own ass I can comfort myself with the knowledge that before he's free to do so, he has to make another Batman film), but the fact that in some small way, it has normalized some of the tools of science fiction in the minds of a much broader audience than the genre usually reaches is, I think, something to be celebrated.  Maybe some day someone will use those tools to make a blockbuster that is actually good.

Recent Reading Roundup 26

Looking over this list, I see that it creates a distinctly underwhelming impression of my recent reading--even the one book I really liked proved less impressive in hindsight.  That's not actually an accurate picture, because there's a whole pile of books that I'm planning to write about in the near future that I've been very pleased with.  But for the time being, here are some books I wasn't too crazy about.

1. The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers - This is only the second Powers I've read, and the first, The Anubis Gates, was more than a decade ago and thus one of my earliest forays into non-Tolkienian fantasy.  That, and the fact that The Anubis Gates is a fantastic book with a twisty time travel plot that is a joy to unravel, created some high expectations from Powers, which I thought this novel, in which the Romantic poets turn out to be entangled in relationships that are one part abusive, one part addictive with vampires who fuel their creativity and feed on their, and their families', lives, would easily fulfill.  Not so, however--where The Anubis Gates's plot is twisty but, ultimately, impeccably structured, The Stress of Her Regard is a floppy, maybe even flabby book, overpopulated and unfocused.  Powers introduces some interesting twists to the vampire mythology, even suggesting a strange sfnal explanation for their existence and bringing in such esoteric subjects as quantum mechanics to the heroes' struggle to escape their lovers/tormentors' attentions, but it's too much mythology for a novel as centerless as this one is.  I was more than halfway into the book before I really understood the rules of how its vampires worked, and even then Powers kept piling complications, provisos, and special cases onto those rules.  The novel's characters and their predicament, meanwhile, are nowhere near interesting or appealing enough to make puzzling out this mythology worthwhile.  The poets who turn out to be victims of the vampires--Byron, Shelley, Keats--are all on the nondescript side.  Powers is more interested in them as examples of the dissipated, doomed Romantic lifestyle than as artists and innovators (which was particularly hard to swallow in Keats's case given that the version of him presented in the movie Bright Star, where he is intelligent, driven, and serious about his poetry, is still vivid in my memory), but it takes writerly flare to create characters who are as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as the Romantics supposedly were, and Powers doesn't wield it in this novel.  The poets thus become a little dull, and sadly they are not overshadowed by the novel's fictional hero, Michael Crawford.  Powers deliberately constructs him as something of a loser, tormented by his many failures even before coming to a vampire's attentions, but he does too good a job, because Crawford just isn't a very interesting character even when he overcomes his self-doubt and starts kicking vampire ass, and the romance he develops in the second half of the book, which drives his final confrontation with the vampires, is unpersuasive (it doesn't help that I have a sneaking suspicion that the novel would have been a great deal more interesting had it been told entirely from the point of view of his love interest).  It's possible that The Stress of Her Regard is a lesser work best left to Powers enthusiasts, or maybe my recollections of The Anubis Gates are a little too rose-tinted.  I'm certainly a bit afraid to revisit it now, or to take another stab at Powers's bibliography.


2. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche - Marche's novel has an innovative concept that I found both exhilarating and worrisome.  The book is presented as an anthology of short stories from the fictional North Atlantic island nation of Sanjania, moving chronologically through folk tales, religious fiction, and pulp-style adventure stories to the more modern form of the short story, even as the nation undergoes the traditional hardships of a former colony, passing from colonial rule through more and less successful efforts at democracy and self-government.  It's a fantastically original and instantly appealing concept, but at the same time a self-defeating one.  The stories in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are not the point of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea.  Though Marche is a persuasive ventriloquist with a wide range of styles at his disposal (the blurbs on the cover compare him to David Mitchell, and though that's probably going too far the two are certainly in the same ballpark), to read any of the stories as short fiction in its own right is to miss the point of the book, which is the cumulative image they form of Sanjania.  But unlike a fantastic novel taking the same tack (the most obvious comparison that comes to mind is City of Saints and Madmen) the Sanjania that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea creates isn't a creation in its own right either.  Its purpose is to mirror reality, almost to the point of slavishness, and certainly to the point where any sense of unique Sanjanian-ness is lost amongst the real-world parallels.  So that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is almost an empty novel, an impressive achievement whose point escapes me--it certainly doesn't say anything about colonialism and the recovery from it that other, more traditional novels haven't already said.  It's an enjoyable reading experience, both because of the audacity of Marche's experiment and because of his success at it, but leaves very little residue behind itself.


3. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik - Novik's bestselling, mega-successful series is by now on its sixth installment and I've only just gotten around to reading the first.  Can't say that I regret the delay, but then I wasn't expecting to, and in fact His Majesty's Dragon delivered exactly what I thought it would--it is charming, very readable, a great deal of fun, and extremely lightweight.  What I wasn't expecting was just how much the novel would downplay the adventurous aspect of its alternate universe, in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought from the air on dragon-back, in favor of a comedy of manners that morphs, in the novel's long center segment, into the classic boarding school story, complete with the protagonist, Will Laurence, a naval captain who is drafted into the dragon corps when he imprints on a newly-hatched dragon captured by his ship, turning out to be preternaturally talented at his new role and being resented by the school's mean kids for outsider status and talent, only to be finally accepted by them as the bestest dragon-rider to ever ride a dragon.  A cross, in other words, between Harry Potter and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger, but one in which the dragon character, Temeraire, is as appealing and vividly drawn as the lead, and in which the relationship between them is sweetly devoted to the point of being almost romantic.  No wonder this book was such a runaway success--it rings nearly every one of fandom's bells, and quite nicely too--though I suspect that later books in the series move away from the school setting and spend more time on aerial battles, which in His Majesty's Dragon are almost an afterthought (the climactic one is won by Temeraire suddenly demonstrating a previously unknown ability that demolishes the enemy forces).  Not that I'm in any hurry to have those suspicions confirmed--I'm not sorry I read His Majesty's Dragon, but having seen what all the fuss is about I think I can give the rest of the series a pass.


4. The Book of Night Women by Marlon James - I'm not quite sure what to say about this novel.  When I read it a month ago I thought it was one of the most wrenching, overwhelming pieces of fiction I'd read in a long time, and a sure contender for best book of the year.  But only a few weeks after finishing it, I find that it's left almost no residue in my mind--I had to struggle, when sitting down to write this post, to recall its main plot points and characters.  That's a damning testimonial that I'm almost certain The Book of Night Women doesn't deserve.  I have no idea why it slipped from my mind so easily, and it could simply be that it's been a busy few weeks and that other subjects have occupied me.  Nevertheless, I can't recommend this book as wholeheartedly as intended to right after I finished it.  That said, this is still a magnificent novel, telling the story of Lilith, a slave in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century who becomes entangled with her master's family situation and with a plot on the part of the plantation's slave women to foment rebellion.  James narrates the novel in the slaves' patois, which is initially a jarring choice that makes the novel's early chapters a challenging read, but which soon comes to suit, and amplify, its angry, visceral tone.  The Book of Night Women is suffused with anger and hate--of the slaves towards their masters, whose every cruelty is described with grueling detail; of the masters towards their slaves, whom they resent for not being the docile animals they want them to be; of women towards men, who, black or white, exploit the advantages of their gender in horrific ways.  In the middle of all of this is Lilith, raised in relative privilege due to her mixed-race background, but still prey to the dangers that threaten the life, well-being, and sanity of a female slave.  She's a fascinating and infuriating character, at once vulnerable and terrifyingly powerful, intelligent and deliberately ignorant, proud and self-hating.  Over the course of the novel she confronts the horrors of powerlessness, and the arguably greater horrors of exercising power over others, and struggles to reconcile her feelings towards the masters and overseers, who treat her with a combination of disdain, lust, and occasionally love (which she finds hardest of all to deal with), and towards the rebel slave women, who try to recruit her to their cause and bump up against her vanity and pride, but whom she also admires for their ability to find and occupy positions of power on the plantation.  These are all, of course, terrifically complicated questions with no real answer, and inasmuch as Lilith can be said to grow, it is into the realization that she doesn't know how to live well--happily, honestly, and honorably--as a slave.  Add to this James's rich, almost overpowering descriptions of Jamaican plantation life, of the heat and hard work and suffering that the slaves (and occasionally the masters) endure, and you get a novel that is almost too much to process.  Which may be why I couldn't quite hang onto it, or maybe it's because beneath his impressive presentation James is saying familiar things about the corrupting influence of slavery, violence, and hatred.  That doesn't mean those things aren't worth saying again, or that The Book of Night Women isn't worth reading.


5. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock - This is one of the foundation works of the English fantastic, and as so often happens with these milestone books I find myself more impressed than won over.  Steven Huxley makes a reluctant homecoming from France, where he's been recovering from a war wound, after his distant, emotionally abusive father's death.  He discovers his brother Christian immersed in an obsession with nearby Ryhope Forest, the same obsession that consumed their father.  From Christian, Steven learns that the forest is a breeding ground for 'mythagos'--living, breathing manifestations of the communal myths of the various tribes and nations that have lived in England over the millennia.  One of these is a woman called Guiwenneth, whom both Christian and his father fell in love with.  After Christian leaves to look for her in the forest, Steven ventures in and creates his own version of Guiwenneth, with whom he also falls in love, and when Christian returns and kidnaps her, Steven must follow him into the depths of the forest.  The descriptions of Ryhope Forest, as a completely wild place in the middle of civilization, whose inside is bigger than its outside and contains living remnants of England's history, is well done, but the characters are not very persuasive.  The biggest problem is Guiwenneth and the plot's focus on her romance with Steven.  The very fact that all three Huxley men fall in love with this woman suggests that something ineffable, probably magical, is at work, and in his descriptions of their courtship Holdstock doesn't do much to dispel the impression that Steven doesn't so much fall in love with Guiwenneth as fall under her spell, and that Guiwenneth may have been made to love him (she is, after all, a manifestation of English racial memory activated by his presence in the forest).  So it's hard to become involved in Steven's frantic search for her, and though the novel picks up whenever the narrative gets out of his Guiwenneth-obsessed head, and especially when he encounters ancient tribes in the forest who tell him their myths and legends, these instances are relatively uncommon compared to the love story, which leaves Mythago Wood a rather uninvolving work as far as I'm concerned.


6. The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford - NYRB Classics has always been a terrific series, but their releases over the last year or so seem to have been calculated to appeal to my tastes and interests (and a lot of them have shown up in older, dog-eared editions at my used bookseller, which is how I came to read The Mountain Lion several weeks before the NYRB edition is due to be released).  In addition to The Mountain Lion, I've flagged Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, Frans G. Bentsson's The Long Ships, and any one of the three short story collections by Mavis Gallant.  Unfortunately, my first foray has proved a bit of a dud.  The Mountain Lion, a short and lyrical novel about a brother and sister in the who come to stay at their uncle's Colorado ranch in the 1920s, has some fine qualities.  Stafford's writing is lucid and beautiful, and she gets right in the heads of siblings Ralph and Molly, who don't quite fit in at home where their mother aims to raise them, as she has their older sisters, to be a gentleman and a lady, and to think of manners and politeness as the highest ideal.  Ralph and Molly, however, are rambunctious, adventurous children, and are drawn to their mother's stepfather, an uncouth, uneducated rancher whom she barely tolerates.  When their grandfather dies his son invites them to stay with him in Colorado, but the ranch doesn't proved to be the home they've always wanted.  It's too wild and too scary for children raised, however unwillingly, in a genteel environment, and for Molly, at least, the barrier of her gender proves insurmountable, which drives a wedge between the siblings, who up until that point have only had one another.  This is a promising story, but Stafford takes it in uninteresting directions--she makes the focal point of the schism between the children their shared horror of adulthood and of sexuality, which Ralph begins to question when his own sexual maturation begins.  This turns The Mountain Lion into yet another story about children who don't want to grow up because the adult world seems so crude and messy to them, and populated with so many unbearable people, which I think has been done more than enough (though in all fairness to Stafford her version, published in 1947, predates the canonical entry in this subgenre, The Catcher in the Rye).  It also forces Stafford in the direction of an unnecessarily melodramatic ending for Molly, who is too strong and too disgusted with adulthood to make the compromises with it that Ralph does.  One senses that there is something slightly autobiographical in the character of Molly, a bright, talented aspiring writer who is frustrated and furious at the realization that she has no home and no one who truly appreciates her, and it's therefore understandable that Stafford should have wanted to give her an ending that is grandly tragic without forcing her to compromise her principles, but a more interesting novel, I think, could have been written about that compromise.

Where's the Fun? Doctor Who Thoughts

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to put into words just why I've found the most recent and just-concluded season of Doctor Who so underwhelming.  What's standing in my way is the fact that somewhere around the second season I lost the ability to think or write critically about the show.  Oh, I've produced the occasional piece, but what they've all had in common was an emphasis on a single character or plot arc that I could get a handle on, while the show as a whole seemed to elude my grasp.  From the moment it exploded onto our screens in 2005, New Who's defining characteristic seemed to be its cheerful and relentless determination to ignore all the rules of good writing in favor of spectacle and, as Jackson Lake so accurately put it in "The Next Doctor," wonderful nonsense.  Russell T. Davies came out and said that he wasn't interested in coherent plots or nuanced characterization or subtle moments, that what he wanted was to elicit wonder by any means necessary, and that is exactly what he did in his five years at the show's helm, constantly cramming more gunpowder into his cannons in order to achieve ever-greater explosions (and compensate for the audience's growing desensitization).  To criticize Who in its third or fourth season for not making any sense and for substituting bombast for coherent writing seemed not only pointless but hypocritical, because that's what the show had been doing from day one, and whether you thought this was brilliant or horrible depended entirely on where your personal threshold between wonderful nonsense and just plain nonsense lay, and whether Davies had already crossed it.

So, when I come to assess my disappointment with Steven Moffat's first season at the series's helm, the first question that must be asked is, has the show actually gotten worse (worse, that is, from a series that wasn't trying to achieve, and was in fact actively avoiding, many of commonly accepted definitions of good TV) or have I simply had enough?  Has the switch to a new Doctor and a new companion simply been the shock I needed to lose all investment with a series that had long ago relinquished any claim on my interest, or has something actually gone wrong?  The answer, I think, is yes, in that Moffat has kept many of the series's most exasperating attributes, and jettisoned much of what allowed me to enjoy it regardless.  At some point, I stopped caring about Davies's stories except as delivery methods for the characters and some agreeably zany moments, and though Moffat and his writing room have delivered better writing, it's not so much better, or so different in its essence, from the kind of stories Davies delivered to make me care again.  Meanwhile the characters, main, recurring, and one-offs, which were often the show's saving grace under Davies's reign, have been allowed to fester.

These are both contentious points, so let's go through them one by one.  During most of Davies's run, Moffat was known as The One Who Could Plot.  Which I was on board with, because he'd written three of New Who's best stories, and even the Library two-parter had its moments.  Then I watched Jekyll, a miniseries that seems not to have been written so much as spewed onto the page, which changes the tenor, direction, and even genre of its story with each of its six episodes, and gestures at a dozen endings, none of which materialize.  It ought to be taught in screenwriting classes as an example of what not to do, and it made me take a closer look at Moffat's contributions to Who.  What I discovered was that Moffat actually wasn't very good at plotting, possibly because he didn't tend to do it very often.  "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Blink" have only the barest hint of a plot, and it's the same one for both of them--the non-linear relationship between a human and the Doctor.  What makes them special is their structure (which was also one of strong points of Moffat's previous series, Coupling), and the fact that they use time travel as more than a means of delivering the Doctor into the story and taking him out again at its end.  "Silence in the Library"/"Forests of the Dead" is, plot-wise, a mess, piling nonsensical last-minute saves on fast-talking gobbledygook on utterly arbitrary rules and limitations ("Don't think you'll regenerate!" is, I still believe, one of the series's most risible lines) in the best Davies tradition, but with a bit of Moffat-ish flare.  The only really well-plotted story Moffat produced under Davies's reign was "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," which is an un-Moffat-like story in many other respects as well--it gives the companion something to do instead of sidelining her, the prominent guest star is a man and not fixated on the Doctor, there's no timey-wimey stuff--and is an achievement that he has yet to recreate.

So no, Moffat isn't a good writer.  He's a clever writer, and that cleverness is on display at certain points in the season--"The Eleventh Hour," River Song making sure that the Doctor will be where she needs him, when she needs him by leaving him messages on galactic landmarks he's sure to visit at one point or another, the time-traveling jumble that is the first half of "The Big Bang" (though personally I could have done without the explanatory recap halfway through the first act--honestly, if viewers haven't figured out the concept of time travel by this point, there's probably no hope for them).  But for the most part what we've been getting is the Russell T. Davies special--very loud, very bombastic nonsense.  I've seen a lot of references to this season as having taken Who into the realm of fairy tale and relying on fairy tale logic, and I just don't see it.  Fairy tale logic is still logic.  Martha using the Master's mind-controlling satellite network to beam a wave of rejuvenating faith into the Doctor is fairy tale logic (and I still maintain that that ending could have worked if its execution were not so sentimental and over-literal).  The resolution of season 5--the Doctor's enemies band together in an elaborate, galaxy- and time-spanning plan to imprison him all based on the false belief that he's the only person who knows how to fly the TARDIS, and to do so they create a trap from Amy's memories including Rory whom Amy doesn't remember because he was sucked into the crack and erased from existence, except that Amy has remembered other people who were sucked into the crack and erased from existence, and despite having been erased from existence and her memory Rory is able to make Amy remember him just in time to become an Auton and kill her, only then he's fine again and helping the Doctor, and it turns out the only way to save the universe is for the Doctor never to have existed, so he winds back his entire life but still manages to leave Amy with a memory of himself even though it never happened, which is enough of a germ for River Song, who shouldn't remember the Doctor either or have a TARDIS notebook because unlike Amy, she didn't grow up with a crack in her wall pouring the universe into her head, to prod so that Amy can bring the Doctor back into existence by the sheer force of her main-character-ness, which somehow causes Rory to not only remember the Doctor as well but also remember his life as an Auton, including the two thousand years he spent guarding a prison that shouldn't have needed any guarding because it was absolutely impervious to harm and also impregnable unless you happen to be the person who is already inside, which seems like quite a design flaw in a prison made for a time traveler--is not.  That's just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that the speed and sheer tonnage of your throwing will obscure the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about.

None of this, of course, was unexpected.  It's one thing to write a single mind-bending, brilliantly structured episode to break the routine of a season of traditional Who-ish running-and-shouting stories, and quite another to be in charge of the whole season, and given that Davies served up this kind of overcooked mess on a regular basis for five years and only truly lost me in the last of them, there's no reason why Moffat taking the same approach should have been so alienating.  Except, of course, that there is.  The other thing that Moffat's Davies-era episodes were known for was their memorable and instantly beloved guest characters--Captain Jack made a great companion (if a significantly less great series lead) and Sally Sparrow's name was bandied about as a possible fifth season companion within seconds of the announcement that Moffat was taking over the show.  When I considered what kind of Who Moffat would create, I didn't seriously expect him to deliver a season of "Blink"s or "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances"s, but I trusted that he would write his Doctor, companion, and guest characters with the same wit and verve he had applied to the characters in these episodes, and that hasn't happened.  Or, to be more precise, the wit and verve are still there.  Moffat is still the best at writing characters that are instantly funny and appealing.  What he can't, or won't, do is develop them beyond that point.

You see this in the near-total lack of character continuity over the course of the season.  In "The Vampires of Venice" the Doctor happily sentences an alien race to extinction in order to preserve a single human city, while in the Silurian two-parter he's so invested in the notion of human-Silurian coexistence that he brushes aside the latter's genocidal tendencies and even the Dr. Mengele-like proclivities of one of their scientists, whom he embraces as a brother.  River Song was an Indiana Jones-like character in "Silence in the Library"/"Forests of the Dead," brash and secure in her own abilities, effortlessly in charge of her team.  In "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" she's more of a femme fatale, whose arrogance conceals insecurity and a deep fear that the Doctor will find out the truth about her past, but in "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang" that fear and insecurity are gone, even though this episode is the earliest of the three in her personal chronology, and the event she doesn't want the Doctor to find out about has already occurred.  In "The Beast Below," which is only her first outing with the Doctor, Amy displays a deep and unearned insight into his character, just as Rory does in "Vampires of Venice" when, only hours after meeting the Doctor, he identifies the dangerous effect he has on his companions. 

It's even more blatant in the series's lack of interest in developing any of these characters--you could spin River's personality changes as character growth, but only if the series seemed to be interested in her as something other than a means of kickstarting the plot and moving it along.  Even worse is Amy, who actually grows flatter and less interesting as the season draws on.  There's a lot of potential in her introduction in "The Eleventh Hour"--both the courage and attention to detail that bring her to the Doctor's attention in the first place, and the horrible way in which he screws up her life over the course of the episode--but it's never explored.  Amy doesn't grow or change over the course of the season.  Like River, she's used to move the plot, and at the end of the season she's actually the McGuffin, not because of anything she chose or did, like Rose in "The Parting of the Ways," but simply by virtue of having slept in a particular bedroom.  The closest the season comes to developing Amy is strengthening her romance with Rory, which would be aggravating even if Rory were not such a non-entity in himself, who needs to be transformed into a millennia-old killer plastic robot to become even the least bit interesting, and actually ends up backfiring on Amy, because there's no groundwork laid to make me believe her when she tells me that she loves Rory in "Amy's Choice," and what actually shows up on screen is a woman who is dismissive to the point of cruelty to the man she's promised to spend the rest of her life with.

All of this, of course, comes down to the Doctor.  It was obvious even from his Davies-era episodes that Moffat envisions the Doctor not as a close personal friend who forms deep bonds with his companions, but as a distant trickster figure who upends their lives but doesn't really engage with them because he's too alien.  So far, so good, and if the season had focused on those upended lives I probably would have enjoyed it, but instead what happens is that the Doctor isn't distant.  He's in the center of the frame, constantly, relentlessly, and he simply will.  Not.  Shut.  Up.  Moffat's Doctor is a truckload of mannerisms piled on top of funny gags and witty catchphrases, and some of this is very enjoyable ("I wear a fez now.  Fezzes are cool." or the obvious-but-impeccably-done slow burn realization when Rory turns up in "The Pandorica Opens"), but it also sucks the oxygen from everyone else in the room.  One of the Davies's Doctors' most enduring traits was how easily they fell in love, not only with their companions but with guest characters, whom they would rush to praise and make much of.  They noticed people.  Moffat's Doctor has his hands full just processing the never-ending, deafening churn of his own thoughts, and his writers have their hands full trying to depict that churn.  That leaves very little space for other characters and is probably the reason why, though there have been some wonderful single-serving characters this season, there's been so little character development--because the moment another character becomes prominent enough to gain the Doctor's attention, Amy, and later Rory and River, get starved out.  The better episodes of the season have focused on the Doctor's intense, one-on-one relationship with a single character.  In "The Eleventh Hour" that character was Amy, which is why it's the most nuanced glimpse we get of her as a person rather than a plot device, but "The Lodger" needs to lock her away in the TARDIS in order to give Craig room to breathe, and "Vincent and the Doctor" tries to give both Amy and Vincent the room they need but doesn't have it to give, and ends up short-changing them both.

The problem is that the Doctor is not a person.  He's a mass of mannerisms.  Matt Smith is quite good at portraying them, and the sense that the Doctor is a very old creature in a very young body, but that's still not a character.  We have no idea what this Doctor wants or fears and the season seems entirely uninterested in telling us about these things--the closest it comes is "Amy's Choice," but if you really need to dredge up a psychic echo of the main character's darkest impulses to stand on the set and explain the character to the audience then something has clearly gone wrong.  This Doctor is, quite literally, the oncoming storm--a strange, uncontrollable, unpredictable event that changes everything--but that's not exactly an audience identification character.  Which leaves the season bereft.  There's no one to care about, and the most memorable moments are not the ones when Moffat and his writers brilliantly pull off a story or tug at our heartstrings, but the moments in which they are especially clever.  That's not enough for me.

I feel a little guilty coming off so negative about Moffat's first season because, again, there's not much that he's done wrong that's worse than anything Davies did, and in some technical respects he has written a better season than any of Davies's.  A lot of my complaints come down to taste and personal preference, and I can certainly understand fans (and especially Old Who fans, which I gather the season has come into closer alignment with than the Davies years did) who prefer the Doctor as someone distant rather than a potential boyfriend, and who have no need for weepy moments between the companion and her family.  It seems obvious that Moffat has successfully written the Who that he is interested in.  It's just not the Who I want to watch.  I kept on with Davies's Doctor Who despite the fact that it wasn't, and had no interest in being, any good because even very close to its end there were moments of enormous fun in it.  The last season of Doctor Who has not been a lot of fun for me, and I'm not sure whether I'll be back for more.

The Pilots of Summer

Once upon a time, the summer months were a long, arid stretch bereft of new TV episodes, with only the occasional bit of counter-programming to break the monotony.  Then the whole concept of an October to May TV season proved unsuitable to the new, serialized paradigm, and cable channels discovered they could make a profit on a fraction of the networks' target ratings and could do even better if there was nothing else on, and before you knew it there wasn't one TV season but four, and no sooner does one batch of television series wrap up its season but another one starts up.  Which is distracting if, like me, you were planning to use the summer downtime to catch up on some older shows and maybe, you know, read.  Happily, hardly any of the pilots that have aired in the last six weeks have been any good, so my viewing schedule hasn't gotten much heavier (except, of course, for Futurama's welcome return, though I have to say that the first two episodes were only nice, and that they both featured a nearly-naked Leela much more prominently than I remember the show's previous incarnation doing).  Here are some thoughts.

• Rubicon - I'm really not certain why AMC decided to preair the first episode of their new series, whose season won't start until August.  I certainly can't imagine it drawing in an audience, because this is not a pilot.  It's the first chapter in a story, and as such is slow, expository, and gives only the vaguest sense of what the actual story will be like (I'm not even clear on what the series's name means).  It's clearly the work of someone who is banking on pre-loaded viewer loyalty to carry them through at least the series's first few hours, which is not an unfair assumption given the show's description--a conspiracy thriller from the people who brought you Mad Men and Breaking Bad--but makes prereleasing the pilot a puzzling and possibly counterproductive move.  What's on display is not completely without potential--the production values are high and James Badge Dale, fresh off a fantastic turn as one of the leads in The Pacific, is also good as the protagonist here, an analyst at at government think-tank struggling with the loss of his family (bit of a low blow, though, making the cause of that loss 9/11--unless it feeds into the series's plot I don't see the reason for it, especially as the story we've been told, that the character's wife had taken their young daughter on a birthday trip to the World Trade Center at 8:30 in the morning, doesn't really make sense) who suspects foul play when his mentor and former father in law dies in a train accident.  But that's as far as the first episode goes (it also introduces some of the main character's colleagues and a potential love interest, but this is too low-key a series, at least thus far, for any of them to really pop from the screen).  The show's pedigree, and the fact that it is so obviously setting up a slow-burn story, are enough to keep me interested, but I suspect that Rubicon is a show best banked and then watched as a continuous story.


• The Good Guys, Memphis Beat, and Rookie Blue - You can never have too many cop shows, I suppose, and to the credit of all three of these new series they each take a different and more or less original approach to their subject matter.  It's a shame none of them are any good.  The Good Guys won a lot of credit from me going in by giving Bradley Whitford a job, and a comedic one to boot, then squandered all that credit, and a hell of a lot more it didn't have, with its pilot episode, a broad, unfunny exercise in 70s nostalgia that only seems stranger when one considers that Whitford's character would have been a rookie cop in the early 80s.  The show is essentially a comedic Life on Mars without the time travel/coma angle--Whitford is the Gene Hunt character, a throwback who likes to bust heads and leap from moving cars, while Colin Hanks is his uptight, modern and polite partner.  The anachronism of the premise might be forgivable if the show were even remotely funny, or if the writing for the crime plots were tight and interesting, or if either character seemed like anything more than a caricature.  Sadly, none of these things are true.
  
  Rookie Blue is, as its title obviously suggests, a show about rookie cops, which is a concept with some potential (it nicely drove the pilot for Southland, another summer cop series from a few years ago whose viewpoint character was a rookie), but my heart sank when I caught a glimpse of its model-like cast--no series that casts policemen who are this beautiful, this well-groomed and this well-dressed is actually interested in telling cop stories.  And sure enough, Rookie Blue's pilot lays enough groundwork for love triangles and secret romances that its actual story, in which the main character mistakenly blows the cover of an undercover cop and then solves a murder, seems almost like a distraction.  Add to that a deeply unpleasant scene in which two rookies' confusion over which of them, the man or the woman, should search a transsexual woman, is played for laughs rather than the unfortunate reality it is, and I'm giving this show a pass.
  
  Memphis Beat is the best of the three.  It stars Jason Lee as (naturally) an over-involved maverick cop just trying to keep his home town together, clashing over his unorthodox methods with his new lieutenant (Alfre Woodard).  Both actors are good (Woodard in particular rescues her character from settling into the stereotype of the domineering black woman), and the show is clearly interested in giving its viewers a feel of Memphis as a city with its own traditions and history (something that, I've noticed, cop series show a particular affinity for: Justified may be the only series on TV to take place in the rural South, and The Mentalist acknowledges, as hardly any other show set in that state does, that there are parts of California that are nothing like LA).  But the pilot is slack and the actors can't make up for the inanity of the script, which quickly plumps for the cliché of the over-invested cop who is warned off a case, pursues it regardless, and suffers no consequences.  There's nothing really bad here, but also nothing good enough to keep watching for.


• The Gates - I had perhaps unreasonably high hopes for this series given that it was billed as a supernatural Desperate Housewives, and even having watched the pilot, which is a complete dud, I find myself wishing that another writer had been given this concept to work with, because there is some potential here.  Or, more precisely, there's some potential in one of the stories told in the pilot, which sees a new police chief arriving at the titular community and immediately becoming suspicious of his neighbors, who are, unbeknownst to him, vampires, werewolves, and witches (no, this premise doesn't make the least bit of sense--you would think that such creatures would police themselves rather than putting an unwitting human in a position of authority).  Most of the characters, including, sadly, the policeman and his family, are forgettable blanks whose dilemmas--the policeman's son steps in the middle of a couple in his new school, unintentionally angering a werewolf, his mother buys herbal remedies from a witch who may be trying to control her--are either boring or badly written or both.  The one story that really works features Rhona Mitra and Luke Mably as a vampire couple raising a human daughter.  They're desperate to stay at The Gates because the child would never survive among their own people outside of it, but Mitra's character, bored with suburban housewifery, has been killing humans, which might get them expelled.  It's not only a nicely played family dynamic, but it hints at the existence of an underside to The Gates that the pilot doesn't let us see because it's locked in the policeman protagonist's point of view.  The series would probably have been stronger ditching him and the obvious mystery angle it's aiming at and telling a straight up story about a community of supernatural creatures who want to be safe from humanity, but aren't quite willing to let humanity be safe from them.  Alas, it was not to be, and I don't think I'll be bothering with The Gates just to see where Mitra's story goes.


• Persons Unknown - Starting out with two major strikes against it--it is not only yet another attempt at crafting a Lost clone but its release appears to have been delayed to the summer (I saw a trailer for it as early as last fall)--Persons Unknown has, quite unexpectedly, won me over.  The premise sees seven strangers waking up in an empty hotel in an abandoned town, provided with food and clothing but prevented from leaving by various security measures (at present count, subcutaneous drug caches that release when the characters cross a specific barrier, microwave guns, and poisonous gas that is released when they try to tunnel out), observed by omnipresent cameras, and set various sadistic tasks--in one episode, a character receives a note in a fortune cookie promising her freedom if she kills another character; in another, the characters receive three gas masks to share between them, or fight over.  This is all sufficiently creepy that by the end of the pilot the associations I was making were more with The Prisoner than with Lost, and the show does Lost and most of its imitators one better by allowing its characters to talk to one another, revealing themselves and developing relationships through conversation rather than flashbacks.  Most of the cast is nicely drawn, if occasionally shading into stereotypes (the one black character is a devout soldier who witnessed torture in Iraq, but he's winningly portrayed and bucks slightly against his type by being a devout Muslim rather than Christian), and the lead, a woman desperate to get back to her daughter, who is now in the hands of her abusive mother, refreshingly avoids the trap of passive niceness that so many female leads on such TV shows fall into.  What I like best about Persons Unknown, though, is that it doesn't assume that its characters will immediately devolve into savagery.  Though we've seen them behave angrily and even violently towards one another, their baseline remains one of decency.  To my mind that's a more interesting kind of story than the ones that assume that in the absence of law enforcement and creature comforts, people will immediately begin raping and killing--it actually asks the question of how normal, moral people will behave when pushed to extremes.  Of course, this could all go to pieces (and may already be doing so--after two strong episodes, the third relied too strongly on most of the characters losing many IQ points, and even showed them trying to signal for help by building a bonfire on main street) and it's unlikely that Persons Unknown will make it past a single season, but for now I'm enjoying what I'm seeing.

Recent Movie Roundup 11

After a promising start to the year, it's been a dispiriting spring and summer at the movie theaters, and there's not much coming up that I'm looking forward to (well, Inception, of course, and probably Scott Pilgrim too though I doubt it'll have an Israeli release), but here are some of the films I've watched recently.

1. Julie & Julia (2009) - I can't be the only person who would have liked this film a lot better as a straight-up biopic of Julia Child starring Meryl Streep as Child and Stanley Tucci as her loving and supportive husband Paul.  The juxtaposition of Child's early career as a chef and cookbook author--her introduction to French cuisine when Paul, a diplomat, is assigned to the American embassy in Paris, her studies at a Parisian culinary institute, her meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she would write Mastering the Art of French Cooking--with the ballooning success of Julie Powell's blog and her struggles to meet the challenge she sets herself on it of cooking her way through the book in a single year, is profoundly unkind to Powell, but nowhere near as unkind as the portraits the film paints of the two women.  Child is, quite simply, a dame, a woman with a boundless and completely overwhelming zest for life, with enormous reserves of energy, generosity, and enthusiasm.  As portrayed by Streep, she doesn't simply make you want to cook and enjoy food, but to enjoy life and love and friendship as much as she does.  Powell, meanwhile, is an energy suck--a whiny, self-absorbed narcissist whose personal growth over the course of the film only seems to bring her to the point of being a functional adult (and it is anyway hard to feel much satisfaction at watching Amy Adams's version of Powell repair her troubled marriage when the real Powell went on to have an affair and wrote another book about that experience).  If Julie & Julia were trying to be an entirely different and much less frothy kind of movie (if it were, in other words, the harbinger of the upcoming trend of movies about the internet) it might actually have asked the questions that the forced comparison between Child and Powell raises--what, if any, is the value of a derivative work like Powell's blog (or this one) when set against an actual creative work like introducing a whole new way of thinking about food to a generation of Americans (or making a movie)?  One possible answer, of course, is that Powell's blog, and even more than that the movie itself, have helped to introduce Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking to a whole new generation (as a result of the film's release the book placed in the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in its fifty years in print), but that still doesn't make me any more interested in Powell's story.


2. Iron Man 2 (2010) - the second Iron Man film suffers from much the same faults as the first one: unremarkable villains, action scenes rendered inert by the absence of recognizably human participants (and possibly the director's indifference), and a tendency to walk right up to a genuine engagement with the geopolitical issues the character is rooted in and then scamper back to a comic book, black and white mentality at the last minute. It also has the same strengths as the first film, namely Robert Downey Jr. as the title character and writers who recognize what an asset they have in him, and who, no longer hobbled by the origin story structure that made the first Iron Man a bit of a slog, have created something delightful. Realism has been both the holy grail and the albatross around the necks of most of the last decade's crop of superhero films, but Iron Man 2 comes rather close to it when it recognizes that being a superhero, especially for someone as narcissistic and immature as Tony Stark, is essentially the same thing as being a mega-celebrity. The film, in fact, is mainly reminiscent of the second half of most musician biopics, in which fame and fortune go to the subject's head, they alienate their loved ones, and have to be reminded of the days when it was all about the music. Downey's performance is sufficiently unsentimental, never surrendering Tony's arrogance, that unlike, say, Spiderman 3, his journey to rock bottom and back again doesn't feel trite. My only real problem with the film is its treatment of Pepper Potts, who after a promising start--she takes over from Tony as CEO of Stark Industries and breaks off with him when his behavior becomes too erratic--decides that the pressure of running a company is too much for her, quits after a week, and ends the film in Tony's arms. My favorite thing about Pepper in the first film is that she seemed to have too much sense to get involved with someone as high maintenance as Tony, and though I suppose I should have known better it's disappointing to see that the writers didn't stick to their guns, and to their source material, on this matter.


3. Toy Story 3 (2010) - It's hard to even know where to start praising this film.  Should I begin by expressing amazement at the fact that Pixar have thoroughly beaten the second sequel curse, or at the even more astonishing fact that their films keep getting better and better?  Should I note how perfectly the film captures the magic and inventiveness of childish play, first in an opening scene that literalizes those flights of imagination, and later in a scene that simply shows us a child transforming the mundane into the magical?  Should I point out how the film deepens the dilemma that drives the first two films, of the toy protagonists' knowledge that their purpose is to provide the owners they love with the stimulation and support that'll help them outgrow their playthings and hasten their own obsolescence, and how it adds to it when Woody is forced to choose between loyalty to Andy and to his toy friends?  Should I talk about how, for the first time in this series, the feelings of the child characters are also given space, raising the question of the responsibility we owe to the childish things we've outgrown?  As usual for a Pixar film, there's meaty stuff here seamlessly combined with scenes that would warm the heart of a corpse and tug at its strings, and an impeccably structured, effortlessly involving plot featuring several incredible action scenes.  What's new to the franchise is the film's occasional forays into extremely creepy imagery--the monkey doll who stands guard at the preschool to which the dolls are donated, Mr. Potato Head's facial features wandering the playground while attached to a tortilla, a near-silent baby doll that deliberately evokes the uncanny valley reaction that early Pixar depictions of humans fell into unintentionally--that might make the film a tad too scary for its actual target audience.  But who cares about them.  Those of us who loved the original Toy Story as kids will find plenty more to love here.
   
   In fact, my only complaint against Toy Story 3 (aside from the fact that, like Up, it pays little attention to its 3D content and isn't worth the extra ticket cost) is that for the fourth or fifth year running Pixar has produced what is probably going to be the best film of the year, and that's a streak that paradoxically leaves me feeling a little dispirited.  I love Pixar's films, but every time I watch one it just reminds me of how poor and unimaginative most of Hollywood's other, adult-oriented, blockbusters are in comparison.  There's no reason why Star Trek and Avatar shouldn't have been as engaging and exciting as Wall-E and Toy Story 3.  Or rather, there is a reason, and it is that while Pixar encourages quality and fosters talent, in the rest of Hollywood creators have to struggle to bring some bastardized, watered-down version of their story to the screen, and the writers and directors who flourish are the ones who can best match some studio executive's notion of the cultural zeitgeist and best imitate last year's success story.  It's yet another manifestation of how poisonous the remake culture has become to the film medium, and while I'm glad there's at least one studio that seems immune to that poison, it would be nice if filmmakers producing material for adults could develop the same immunity.
   
   
4. Agora (2009) - Alejandro Amenábar's film, about the mathematician Hypatia and her involvement in the struggle for supremacy between pagans and Christians in 4th century Alexandria, is remarkable for doing two things.  It tells a historical story, rather than treating history as the backdrop to a romance or an adventure--by which I don't mean that it is accurate, and in fact Agora takes copious liberties with history, most notably the circumstances surrounding the burning of the library of Alexandria and Hypatia's age at the time of her death, but that it refuses to impose a genre and a narrative on the past.  And it is a story about a female scientist whose choice to dedicate her life to the pursuit of knowledge is portrayed as valid and understandable, and who does not long for and is not saved by the love of a man (well, strictly speaking she is saved by love, but it's a gruesome sort of love and an even more gruesome sort of salvation, as Hypatia's infatuated former slave strangles her before the Christian mob can stone her to death).  These are both such rare attributes in modern cinema that it's tempting to praise Agora simply for existing, and ignore the fact that it is such a mess.
   
   There's a lot of good here--Rachel Weiss is quite fine as Hypatia, and does a good job of conveying both the fierce intelligence she applies to her scientific pursuits and the naivete with which she regards the political and religious upheavals around her, and the film strikes an impressive balance between conveying a sense of history (especially in its recreation of Alexandria, which is vibrant and yet deeply foreign) and of immediacy and familiarity.  But the plot simply doesn't work.  It's crammed with too much stuff--Hypatia's pursues a workable model of the solar system; her slave Davos becomes a Christian zealot; her former pupil Orestes, the Roman prefect, tries to reconcile the Christians' demands for ever-greater control of the public sphere, demands which are backed with violent displays, with his own civilian authority and with violence on the part of pagan and Jewish groups; another pupil, Synesius, becomes a bishop and tries to make peace in the city, but is also compelled by the epistles of Paul, which call for women to be meek and subservient, to question Hypatia's role as Orestes's confidant and adviser--and precisely because of its admirable resistance to genre and to a neat narrative structure, these elements don't come together into a meaningful whole.  One almost wishes that Agora were made in a different medium--the longer running time of a televised miniseries might have given the different plotlines and characters more room to breathe (Davos, who is in many ways the film's viewpoint character, would especially have benefited from this breathing space--Max Minghella tries his best, but he's not quite up to making up for the script's deficiencies in handling the film's most conflicted character), and the theater's more tenuous relationship to naturalism might have freed the story from the demands of a three-act narrative, leaving it to draw more impressionistic connections between science and politics, and between the different axes of privilege and oppression that drive its events.  The unsuitability of its own medium becomes particularly glaring as Agora draws to a close and tries desperately to wring some semblance of triumph or solace from Hypatia's unhappy end--by having her discover the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, by having her accept the inevitability of her death at the hands of the Christians, and by the above-mentioned mercy-killing--an attempt that seems a little pathetic if you know the historical record.  Still, though the film's greatest accomplishment is to create the impression of the greater work it might have been, I'm still inclined to praise it for making the effort to do something different and more sophisticated than the usual Hollywood fare, with history and with women in science.

All Hat: Thoughts on Justified

Of all the many pleasures that television offers me, the one itch it rarely scratches is eloquence.  I love a beautifully written piece of prose, but there's something so much more satisfying about beautiful speech.  We live in a society in which eloquence is a vanishing commodity, and public speech and conversation have become homogenized and diluted.  It's rare for any of us to have even a small fraction of our vocabulary at our immediate, unconsidered disposal, or for unrehearsed speech to have a cadence or poetry that reflect the speaker's personality and the full breadth of their intelligence.  This is, of course, because true eloquence is rare even when it's prized and nurtured, but that's exactly where the scripted media, which offer a marriage of the performance of spontaneity and pre-written and -edited words, should come in.  Alas, most television characters just talk the way most of us would if we didn't have to pause for thought or backtrack over our mistakes.  It's a rare series that actually tries to invent its own patterns of speech or highlight those that break the mold, and I tend to love these unreservedly.  It's why I fell in love with Deadwood and Firefly, and to a lesser extent one of the major draws of Joss Whedon's other series and Aaron Sorkin's work--because they give their characters and the settings they move in distinct voices.  And it's what won me over to FX's new crime drama Justified.  The series has other strengths, and several weaknesses, but what made me a fan almost from day one was that everyone talked so pretty.

BOYD: In your dark imaginings, Raylan, what is it that you think I'm up to?
RAYLAN: Given the talent pool you got here, I assume you're gonna do what you always done, steal money and blow shit up.
BOYD: We will not be robbing banks.
RAYLAN: Could you be any more vague?
BOYD: All of us here, every single one of us, repaid our debts to society.
RAYLAN: No, no, no, no.  Not you.  Not by a long shot.
BOYD: Well out here, in our church, we can begin to repay our debts to God.  By righteous living, righteous action.
RAYLAN: Gotta go now.
BOYD: Are you sure you don't want a meal?  Our food is simple, but it's good.
RAYLAN: No, I stopped at a Hardee's on the way.  I wouldn't mind addressing the congregation before I went.  Would that be alright?
BOYD: [to his followers] Excuse me!  We have us a guest speaker today.  Please, have at it.
RAYLAN: Yeah. [pauses, doffs his hat] Dear Lord.  Before we eat this meal we ask forgiveness for our sins.  Especially Boyd, who blew up a black church with a rocket launcher, and afterward he shot his associate Jared Hale in the back of the head out on Tate's Creek Bridge.  Let the image of Jared's brain matter on that windshield not dampen our appetites, but may the knowledge of Boyd's past sins help guide these men.  May this food provide them with all the nourishment they need.  But if it does not, may they find comfort in knowing that the United States Marshals Service is offering $50,000 to any individual providing information that'll put Boyd back in prison.  Cash or check, we can make it out to them or to Jesus, whoever they want.  In your name, we pray.  [puts on his hat]  Amen.

(What's missing here, of course, is the acting, and as much as that the Southern accents, which are a rare commodity on TV as anything but a curiosity or a means of marking a character out.  Unfortunately, most of the Justified clips online are behind Hulu's US-only walls.)

The two men here make up one side of the cross-generational quadrangle of friendship, enmity, and strained family relationships that drives Justified's first season.  Raylan is Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant, whose casting is either an attempt to cash in on his Deadwood cachet or karmic compensation for the way the writers of that series sidelined his character in its second and third seasons; either way he does good work here), who in the series's opening scene guns down a drug cartel captain in Miami.  The shooting is, strictly speaking, justified--as Raylan repeatedly points out, the other guy drew his gun first--but it's complicated by the fact that Raylan had targeted his victim, warned him to get out of town or else, and all but goaded him to reach for his weapon.  His career now a political hot potato and with the cartel hot for vengeance, Raylan's superiors decide to stash him in his home state of Kentucky while the shooting is investigated, which brings Raylan back in contact with places and people he had hoped and planned to leave behind forever: there's Boyd Crowder, a boyhood friend with whom Raylan used to dig coal; Boyd's father Bo, who ran protection in his and Raylan's home town of Harlan; Raylan's father Arlo, a crook who sometimes worked for Bo; Raylan's ex-wife Winona, now remarried; and Ava, Raylan's boyhood crush who used to be married to Boyd's brother.  No sooner does he arrive in Kentucky than Raylan tangles with Boyd, who runs a white supremacist group and commits the bombing and murder referred to above in the series pilot before being shot by Raylan and experiencing a spiritual awakening as a result of his near-death experience, and his entanglement with the Crowder clan deepens when Bo is released from prison and sets about trying to regain his criminal empire, recruiting Arlo for the task and partnering up with the same cartel now out for Raylan's blood.

Interspersed with the season-long power struggle between Crowders and Givenses--Raylan tries to puzzle out what criminal scam underlies Boyd's newfound faith, Arlo tries to get back in Bo's good graces, Arlo and Bo try to manipulate and control their sons--are its standalone crime stories, the fugitive criminals, reluctant witnesses, and other various scraps that Raylan stumbles into (frankly, given the Marshals Service's not-too-sexy purview of witness protection, prisoner transport, and court security it's impressive that the show's writers have managed to find so many exciting stories to drop Raylan in).  In both of its aspects, Justified delivers a lot of talking and a lot of shooting, both of which it handles admirably.  The standalone episodes are less crime stories as they are windows into the lives of the people perpetrating those crimes, and it's through their eloquence that we get to know these characters not as criminal masterminds or black-hearted villains but as people who are often short-sighted and dim-witted (a comment I encountered today about the show called it a catalog of human folly, which sounds about right) but who have more facets to their personality than their criminal one.

Raylan functions as a witness to these characters' stories.  With a quiet, unruffled demeanor, bemused but not judgmental, he lets them tell their stories and tries to give them as much of an out from the predicament they've landed themselves in as he can.  This is not what the series pilot leads us to expect, from either the character or the show.  The pilot (based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, who created the Givens character and featured him in two novels, though the series apparently retools him quite considerably) introduces Raylan as a maverick, a cowboy cop who plays by his own rules and his own sense of justice.  The man he kills in the opening scene, we learn, viciously murdered an innocent bystander in front of Raylan, and as he admits to Winona in the pilot's closing minutes, he doesn't know what he would have done if the man hadn't drawn his gun--would he have killed him anyway?  These scenes create the expectation of a Southern-set Life on Mars, with Raylan playing the Gene Hunt role and rebelling against a too-polite, too-impersonal notion of justice that leaves out the traditional Western-derived values of right and wrong.  Certainly the season's early episodes, in which Raylan's affectation of a cowboy hat and his Old West-inspired demeanor are constantly commented upon (most notably in a scene in which he and a man he suspects of wrongdoing discuss the mechanics of the quick-draw), sometimes in admiration but more often in dismay, suggest a character who is not simply a fish out of water but out of time, a throwback to a bygone and perhaps mythical era.

So it's a surprise when Raylan turns out to be a thoroughly modern policeman, comfortable with the tools that technology and bureaucracy provide him (as opposed to Bradley Whitford's Gene Hunt-esque character in the new cop comedy The Good Guys, a 50ish man who complains that in his day he didn't have all these newfangled forensics tests and computers) and unruffled by the PC craze that prohibits him from planting evidence or beating up suspects.  Partly this is because the show's writers have rethought the character since the season started--as they say in the link above, they've started downplaying the hat and all that it implies.  But it's also a way of subtly distinguishing between Raylan's notions of how to use violence and those of the people around him.  Raylan is a fearsome shot--so many of the season's episodes end with him coolly surveying the prone figures of his opponents and calmly calling for an ambulance that the season finale seems to be poking fun at itself when it shows him making the call, then pausing and asking for a coroner's van as well--but seems to lack any sort of bluster or bravado.  In a mid-season episode he's assigned to guard a judge, known for his harsh sentences and for wearing a gun under his robes, who has been receiving death threats.  It turns out that the judge asked for Raylan especially because of the incident in Miami, which leads him to believe that he and Raylan are birds of a feather, fellow travelers on a crusade to rid the world of evildoers by any means necessary and with no remorse.  You can see Raylan's distaste at being thought the equal of this overzealous person, and when he talks the judge's attacker down rather than kill him, the judge, who has finally had a taste of violence, thanks Raylan for stopping him from killing.  Nor does the show balk at emasculating Raylan--when he calls out a pair of loud drunks at a bar, we expect him to deliver an ass-kicking.  Instead the two men not only trounce him but steal his hat (the absence of which is, hilariously, commented upon by every character he meets for the rest of the episode).  Instead of coming back for revenge, Raylan apologizes nicely and asks for his hat back.

Of course, another way of looking at this is that Raylan's even temper (for all that the pilot concludes with Winona telling Raylan that he's the angriest man she knows, there's precious little evidence of this in the series) and measured approach to violence are actually an amplification of his role as Justified's Western-style lawman.  The man in the white hat knows how to use violence but will only do so when it's absolutely necessary, and he is the only one who can infallibly distinguish between necessary and unnecessary violence.  It's a bit amusing that I should have picked up Justified in the same TV season in which I became a fan of The Good Wife, because if that series is an examination of different ways of being a woman, Justified often seems to be concerned with the construction of masculinity, particularly among working class men.  Raylan is the prime example, but name a (white) TV character actor from the top two or three tiers and they'll have shown up on this show at some point in the season to give their take on how to be a man.

The white supremacist dogma that Boyd spouts at Raylan is rife with slogans about reclaiming America for (white) Americans, but it's also a way for men who feel that the world has gotten away from them to reclaim their manhood.  When Raylan lambastes Arlo for his criminal career, his father angrily retorts that "You'd have rather seen me down in the mines my whole life, dead of black-lung like my old man," suggesting that for men of his class and background, masculinity comes down to a choice between a hard, poverty-stricken honest life and the 21st century stereotype of the Southerner as a hard-drinking, meth-cooking redneck.  Characters who are not from a working class background, meanwhile, run the gamut between living uneasily with new-style masculinity and playing gender expectations like a fiddle.  A witness that Raylan lost several years ago worked as a mob accountant and has since retrained as a dentist, but with both Raylan and his former employers on his trail he finds his inner Capable Man--capable of both outwitting his pursuers and committing murder--but ends up carrying this newfound badassness to its logical conclusion of sacrificing his life to save his girlfriend.  The state's attorney Raylan deals with plays the beta male to Raylan's alpha to the hilt, deferring to his judgment in emergent situations and privately expressing sympathy for the shooting in Miami, but he turns on a dime, using the same deference and friendliness to put Raylan at his ease, and then on the spot, when questioning him about another dubious shooting.  When Winona's husband Gary finds himself in trouble with gray market moneylenders he turns to a friend, a former footballer now living in luxurious retirement, to play the heavy with his creditors.  The friend, eager to recapture his past glory, quickly agrees, but when he returns home to decant a bottle of wine and prepare a gourmet meal for his family, the real tough guys are waiting for him.  Most interesting is Gary himself, who Winona defends to Raylan in that same episode as a man with vision and dreams.  This seems like a paltry defense in an episode that up until that point has portrayed Gary as foolish and even craven, but when Raylan catches up with him Gary tells him about the shopping area he was going to develop on the land he bought with the borrowed money, and something wonderful happens--the project sounds genuinely inspiring, the sort of place you'd like to be able to visit in your own town, and Winona's reasons for choosing Gary suddenly become clear (which makes it all the more disappointing when at the end of the season she out of the blue separates from him and starts pursuing Raylan).

(Of course, between its setting and this emphasis on masculinity one can't help but eye the show suspiciously when it comes to women, and that suspicion is sadly repaid.  With almost no exception women, both recurring and regular characters, are portrayed as driven by the men in their lives and making choices based on their relationships with men.  One-off criminal characters are almost invariably brought into the crime by the men in their life, and on two separate occasions they betray one lover to another, realize that the first lover will be killed because of their actions, and help Raylan in order to save him.  On the main cast, Raylan has a female colleague who is also black and who in a mid-season episode complains that he gains professional status by playing on the cowboy image that is unavailable to her because of her race and gender.  He dismisses that concern, which is very nearly the last we see or hear of this character for the rest of the season--one senses that the writers knew that they needed a professional women on the cast but had no idea what to do with her.  Raylan's stepmother has tolerated and even enabled Arlo's criminal activities for years, not because of greed or criminal tendencies on her own part but because she loves him.  Winona I've already spoken about, but Raylan's other love interest over the course of the season is Ava, who had the potential to be a very interesting character.  In the pilot episode Ava kills her abusive husband, which causes not an eyelash to bat as everyone agrees that he was a bastard who needed killing, and the state's attorney quickly makes her a deal for a suspended sentence.  But--and I say this with a full awareness of what a delicate subject this is and in the hopes of not sticking my foot too deep down my throat--Ava does not seem at all like the sort of woman for whom the battered wife defense was created.  She is spirited, independent-minded, and furious in her own defense and in the defense of others.  It's hard not to conclude that rather than being so emotionally tormented and so terrified for her life that the only recourse for Ava was to kill her husband, she simply had enough and killed him out of anger and wounded pride.  So it might be said that Ava embodies the concept of Old West justice much more powerfully than Raylan does, and much could have been done with this point.  Alas, she spends most of the season pursuing Raylan, and even gets kidnapped twice by people who want to get his attention.  It's possible to enjoy Justified despite its troubling treatment of its female characters because, like the men, these women are so vividly and vibrantly brought to life, but one almost wishes that the show's writers had given up on writing women entirely if they couldn't come up with more varied roles and motivations for them.)

Justified pokes and prods at its characters' concept of masculinity, but it leaves Raylan's alone.  This has the unfortunate consequence of suggesting that Raylan's is the true masculinity, the one to which all other men can merely aspire--unfortunate because Raylan's version of manhood is so very tenuous, based on a fictional construct probably garnered from TV shows, rooted in a culture a hundred years gone to which he has no personal connection (I don't know if they have cowboys in Kentucky, which is not a Western state, but they probably don't have them in mining towns), and quite obviously arrived at due to his burning desire to leave Kentucky and Arlo Givens in his rearview mirror. As I've said, Raylan often acts as the silent witness to other men's struggles with their manhood, only coming out of his shell when the season's overarching plot, involving the Crowders and his father, heats up.  It's only in these scenes that we see Raylan's polite exterior crack, and only in his interactions with Arlo that he comes close to earning Winona's characterization of his as the angriest man she's known.  But it's also in these scenes that the cowboy persona is most tamped down, so that the question of Raylan's anger and his relationship to violence is never really addressed.  The result is to make both the character and the series feel more than a little centerless, and the conclusion of the Crowder-Givens arc, which is essentially an hour-long shoot-'em-up, has much the same effect.  It feels like the endings to the season's standalone episodes writ large--a chance for Raylan to show off his cool head, quick draw, and superior marksmanship skills, and for the rest of the cast to show off their folly.  None of this is badly done, of course, but given the season-long buildup to the confrontation between fathers and sons, former friends and former enemies, one would have expected a bit more.

It's hard not to wonder whether Justified can't simply be summed up as a show with a lot of talking and a lot of shooting, both very well done.  Or, to put it another way, whether it isn't a series with more style than substance, whose writers are more successful at writing perfectly-crafted, quirky one-off characters for Raylan to smile indulgently at for a single scene or episode than they are at constructing a season-long arc.  That's not a bad thing, of course, and there's a lot that Justified does, and does well, that is all too rare on our screens--the fact that it is set in the rural South, that it depicts working class characters, that it's giving work, and good, meaty work at that, to so many character actors, that its writers know what pleasure can be wrought out of a story that lingers on the humanity of even its most incidental characters, and of course, that very eloquence that won me over.  But there's is constantly a sense that the series could do more--with Raylan, with the women in his life, with his notions of what a man is.  As I said at the beginning of this post, eloquence is a good way to win me over, but to truly win my heart you have to have something to say with all those pretty words.  Here's hoping that Justified finds it.