(Not So) Recent Reading Roundup 32

I've amended the title of this latest and long-delayed entry in the recent reading roundup series because some of these reads are not recent at all.  Some of them have been waiting for months for me to get around to writing about them, and it feels appropriate to finally get around to doing so now, when we're in the run-up to Passover, a period of spring cleaning, of clearing out the winter's various accumulated stuff, and making room for new messes.  Not that most of these books are messes--I wouldn't have spent months intending to write about them otherwise--but it feels good to clear the decks.

• Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan - This book seemed like it would be right up my alley, since I've been waiting for several years for McEwan to write another great novel (following a few minor ones--Saturday, On Chesil Beach--and the utterly unappealing Solar, which I didn't even bother to read), and the premise--a female narrator relates her career as a junior MI6 agent in the early 70s--seemed like it would be a lot of fun at his hands.  And for most of Sweet Tooth, it really felt as if McEwan was on the verge of doing something very interesting.  The narrator, Serena Frome, is a smart but not very driven woman coming of age just at the point when women are starting to feel that they ought to aspire to professional accomplishment.  She's smart enough to get into a Cambridge maths program, but too uninterested in the material, and in hard work, to do anything more than coast to a third.  A romance with a professor with intelligence connections leads to her being offered a job in MI6, where she's assigned the titular operation, whose purpose is to promote authors whose work is perceived as pro-West.  In the guise of the representative of a literary grant, she meets and becomes involved with one of the operation's assets.  Especially given Serena's warning in the novel's opening sentences that she is about to tell us the story of how she tanked her intelligence career, this development creates the expectation of looming disaster, but along the way Serena's narrative touches on politics, literature, mathematics, and romance, and in its background there are sinister events and inexplicable orders from Serena's superiors that give off an unmistakable whiff of John Le Carré.  In other words, a typically McEwan-ish stew of the cerebral and the melodramatic--at one point, Serena explains to her lover the Monty Hall problem, and he's so enchanted by it that he uses it in a story; this, to anyone who is paying attention, ought to be a clear indication of where the story is headed (unfortunately, it wasn't enough for me)--that creates the expectation of one of his trademark crescendos of wit and emotion.
  
  What soon becomes even more compelling about Sweet Tooth, however, is Serena's voice, and our growing sense that for all her protestations to the contrary, she doesn't know herself very well.  As Serena presents herself, she is unambitious, unimaginative, conventional, and narrow-minded.  She's an avid reader, but her tastes are almost childishly narrow, disdaining any sort of experimentation or literary device and reading solely for narrative momentum.  In university and at MI6, she is surrounded by the best and the brightest, and especially by women who are bucking to be taken seriously and to break through the glass ceiling, while she's happy to just get by.  The more one gets to know Serena, however, the more one senses that this self-deprecating image of herself is, while not entirely inaccurate, also the result of a rather massive case of imposter syndrome.  Serena talks down her aptitude for maths as merely a facility with numbers, but she also makes it clear that no one in her entire educational career, either before or during university, had ever tried to develop her abilities beyond that point--that, like the story of the dog riding a bicycle, they were all so stunned by the sight of a beautiful young woman solving quadratic equations as if it were nothing that it never occurred to them that anything ought to be done to advance her abilities further.  Though she mocks her youthful political naivete, it's Serena, almost alone among the MI6 agents we meet, who recognizes that the Cold War--and with it operations like Sweet Tooth--has become a quaint joke, and that it won't be long before the intelligence services redirect their efforts towards Northern Ireland.  And while Serena accepts almost meekly her MI6 superiors' censure for becoming involved with an asset, which they predictably perceive as typical female weak-mindedness, when we learn the real reason for Sweet Tooth's failure, it's that a male colleague of Serena's, frustrated in his affections for her, blew the operation (for which he suffers no professional repercussions while Serena is fired).  At several points in the novel, Serena evinces sharp political instincts and a drive towards self-advancement that leave us wondering how much of her failure to make anything of herself is down to her fundamental laziness (which, for all her narrative's seeming unreliability, is clearly part of her character), and how much because she unthinkingly accepts the assumption of everyone around her that she is little more than a pretty face.
  
  Going into the end of the novel, I was hoping for some acknowledgement of how unreliable Serena is as a narrator (and perhaps also of the literary pun that is telling a spy story whose main character suffers from imposter syndrome).  To my utter shock, however, McEwan pulled a completely different switcheroo--one that seemed rooted mainly in his conviction that what worked so well in Atonement will work even better the second time--which requires us to take Serena's narrative not only as the gospel truth, but as a searing, insightful, thoroughly accurate portrait of her character.  It's been several months since I read Sweet Tooth, and I'm still not certain whether I read it entirely against the grain, or whether McEwan genuinely wasn't aware of how closely he'd written his heroine to resemble the ways in which women in high-powered professions undermine and question themselves, or whether I'm meant to question his final revelation and find it, as well, unreliable (if so, that's a reading that I haven't encountered in any of the novel's other reviews).  While I don't think that Sweet Tooth would have been a great novel without its twist ending--for all the queasy discomfort of realizing how thoroughly Serena undermines herself, and despite its spy novel touches, the narrative overstays its welcome, and none of the characters are as compelling or as well drawn as McEwan is capable of--that ending makes it little more than a problem novel, a stew of fascinating parts that come together into a disappointing whole.


• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - Gilbert and Gubar's seminal work of feminist literary criticism, first published in 1979, starts from a fairly straightforward premise: the patriarchal, rigidly conformist world of the Victorian upper and middle class defined "proper" female behavior, attitudes, and patterns of thought so narrowly and rigidly that to deviate from them was perceived not simply as wrong, but as an expression of madness.  Female writers, many of whom were deviating from those conventions simply by putting pen to paper, and eager to keep themselves from being tarred with the brush of madness, frequently chose to represent their discomfort with the strictures of correct female behavior through doubling, by paralleling their sane heroines with madwomen, whom the narrative, though officially repudiating, could also perceive with sympathy.  The style is more academic than I'm used to, and I found the essays dealing with works I hadn't read (such as a chapter on misogyny in Milton's Paradise Lost, which apparently spurred outrage and apologia among Milton scholars) tough going.  There's also a strong disconnect between what Gilbert and Gubar are looking for in literature (and thus what they define as "good" literature) and what I do--unsurprisingly, given their premise, they fall on the latter side of the Austen vs. Brontë divide, and in their relatively limited discussions of Austen's novels they treat the absence of a madwoman figure in her novels (or indeed of any sense that her characters have darker thoughts and urges), not just as a failing but as an indication that Austen was merely paving the way for writers who were more able to express the frustrations of women suffering from confined intellects and emotions (this, to me, is to discount the importance of sarcasm in Austen's novels, and its role as an outlet for anger and unacceptable feelings and attitudes).  Despite that disconnect, I found The Madwoman in the Attic eye-opening.  Where it deals with works I'd read and read about, I found Gilbert and Gubar's discussions insightful and illuminating.  The chapter on Frankenstein suggests facets of the novel that I had never considered, as well as offering some insight into its author's life that made me want to learn more about her.  The discussion of Wuthering Heights makes a novel that I have dismissed for years as overwrought melodrama seem so intriguing and carefully thought out that I was tempted, when I finished the chapter, to go back and reread the book and try to see what I'd missed.  In particular, I was struck and intrigued by the argument that the proliferation of women novelists in the 19th century was rooted not only in the perception that the novel was a lower, more commercial artform, but in the fact that the author of a novel is, by definition, an observer, someone who stands back and relates a story in which they are not an actor, which would have suited a female temperament trained to be unassuming and silent (in contrast, a writer of poetry--a form that in the 19th century was perceived as the more artistically legitimate--places themselves, and their thoughts and emotions, at the center of the poem).  I know that in the decades since it was published The Madwoman in the Attic has been criticized for some typically second wave flaws, but as a window to the thought process of 19th century women writers, its argument is so compelling and so well constructed, and sheds so much light on some of that period's most important works, that it feels essential to anyone interested in those works and their authors.


• Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson - The latest beneficiary of the decade-old craze for European authors who wrote about WWII and the Holocaust as they were happening or in their immediate aftermath, and who have been rediscovered and brought into translation by publishers looking for the next Irène Némirovsky or Hans Fallada, Keilson seems to have been trying to dismantle one of the core tropes of Holocaust fiction before it even came into being.  In his short, sharp novella, a couple in Nazi-occupied Sweden, Wim and Marie, take in and hide a Jewish refugee less because they feel any burning desire to oppose the Nazis, and more because it's the done thing--as Wim's sister explains, everyone else already has a Jew.  But this is perhaps to make the characters seem shallow, which isn't exactly Keilson's project.  While Wim and Marie take their refugee in because they feel that this is what "good" people ought to do (a recurring theme throughout the novel is Wim and Marie's need to assure themselves and each other that they, and their neighbors, are "good," that is not Nazi collaborators), they are quite zealous in their protection of him, and are taking great risks to do so (though, as it turns out, those risks aren't as great as they might have been--almost every other official in the town is also "good," and when the couple makes a serious blunder that might have got them executed, a local constable covers for them).  Nevertheless, their relationship with the refugee, Nico, remains carefully polite, and it's obvious that everyone involved is disappointed by this, while also trying very hard not to make a big deal out of the discomfort and inconvenience of living in such close quarters with someone they have failed to bond with.  Mainly, what Wim and Marie reminded me of was a modern-day couple who have sponsored a third world orphan and, though realizing that their feelings aren't what's important here and determined to do right by their charge, are disappointed to realize that doing so hasn't suddenly imbued their lives with meaning.  The novella begins with Nico's death from pneumonia, which leaves Wim and Marie reeling and uncertain how to react--are they at fault?  Have they failed, somehow, in their effort to do the right thing?  Is it wrong to feel relieved that their lives are now their own again?  Should they be sadder at the death of a man who never managed to become part of the family?  How, most importantly, do they get rid of the body?  It's a crackerjack premise, but somehow the execution left me cold, perhaps because the title turns out to be entirely descriptive.  From its premise you'd expect Comedy in a Minor Key to be a searching character drama, or alternatively, a farce, but instead its emotions and characters are deliberately drawn on a very small scale, and even in such a short work this proves numbing.  It's hard, in the end, to care about Nico's death, about Wim and Marie's frustrated desire to do good, and about the threat to all their lives.


• Dodger by Terry Pratchett - In a landmark shift in his career, Terry Pratchett has stepped away from the fantastic genres and written a work of historical fiction--albeit a pulpy type of historical fiction that is essentially YA-inflected literary fanfic.  Set in late 19th century London, Dodger sees the teenaged title character, a sometimes thief who makes his living by trawling the sewers for lost money and jewelry, rescuing a young woman from a beating and getting caught up in a political scandal that brings him into contact with the city's social and political elite, including of course Charles Dickens.  The whole thing is told with typical Pratchett-ish verve and energy (albeit, sadly, also with the awkwardness and paucity of language that have become typical of Pratchett's later novels), and the novel's emphasis on letting Dodger show us his world and the complicated, and usually exploitative, systems through which Victorian London's poor moved feels so like what he's done many times in his Ankh Morpork novels that it's easy to forget that Dodger is not a fantasy.  It also drives home how much Pratchett's project with Ankh Morpork and the social conscience that infused the Discworld novels owes to Dickens, who here appears almost as a Pratchett stand-in, a shrewd trickster-ish figure who both manipulates Dodger and is manipulated by him, sometimes acting as his guide to middle- and upper-class London and sometimes being guided by him in London of the poor, but always pushing the young hero towards what he hopes will be social change.  (It's a bit strange to see Dickens treated so positively in fiction given how much he is out of favor at the moment, with multiple biographies focusing on his failures as a husband and father; and, of course, the real Dickens wasn't as revolutionary as Pratchett's Dickens, who among other things sanctions crimes and misdemeanors in order to protect the woman Dodger rescues at the beginning of the novel.) 
  
  As the novel draws on, however, and as Dodger becomes acquainted with more influential people and a more important player in the political crisis unfolding around him, it also becomes clear that Pratchett has not only failed to find a solution to, but may even be unaware of the fact that he is about to find himself tangled up in the problem of Oliver Twist.  He has written a novel whose primary purpose is to shed a light on the appalling, inescapable conditions in which millions of Victorian London's poor languished, and which often led them to turn to crime as their only means of survival.  But the main character in that novel is someone who leaps out of that poverty through a combination of pluck, their own exceptional nature, fortuitous coincidence, and the benevolent interference of those more fortunate than they are (and while Dickens had the justification of writing to expose injustices occurring at the moment, Pratchett seems to be writing almost as a history lesson--there's little in the novel that encourages a comparison to our own era, and our own tendency to abandon the poor).  Unlike Pratchett's previous novel Unseen Academicals, in which he addressed not only the practical but the psychological hurdles that impede social climbing, in Dodger Pratchett treats it almost as a matter of course.  The upper class people Dodger meets evince a suspiciously modern-seeming indulgence towards his crude origins and rough manners (in contrast, most of them have no problem with the notion that a women might be unwillingly returned to a husband who has already tried to kill her), and few of them are condescending or patronizing towards him.  Dodger himself suffers few qualms about leaving the world he's known his whole life for one that is completely foreign and towards which he has been taught both awe and resentment, and in fact his habits of thought prove almost endlessly elastic, and he is perpetually capable of examining and discarding his received preconceptions and prejudices (of which he has fewer than we might expect--his mentor is a Jew who fled the pogroms, and at one point the two characters pause to note that they have no problem with gay people).  It's not a bad thing, I suppose, that an Oliver Twist-type story features a character who is inured to self-defeating habits of thought, preternaturally talented at extra-legal activities that just happen to come in handy when he decides to fight for the oppressed, and progressive-minded in ways that wouldn't be out of place among 21st century middle-of-the-road liberals.  But then, all these traits--combined with a predictable story and a rather slack sense of humor--combine to make Dodger utterly inessential, and  given that we already have one Oliver Twist, that feels like a fatal flaw.  Dodger was also a landmark for me--the first Pratchett book that I've bought as an ebook, no longer feeling the need to own it in hard copy (much less hardcover).  There's nothing in the book to make me think that this was the wrong call.


• Art in Nature by Tove Jansson - Jansson, best known as the creator of the Moomins, has been enjoying a resurgence in the last few years, as her work for adults is translated into English.  NYRB Classics have brought out her novels The Summer Book, Fair Play and The True Deceiver, and now her short stories are also beginning to appear.  In all of them she emerges as a sharp, witty writer, a keen observer of humanity with the knack of capturing a character or situation with a few well chosen sentences, but one whose acidic sense of humor is never allowed to run rampant--there is a profound benevolence that underpins almost all of her stories and novels.  As its title suggest, the stories in Art in Nature are often concerned with the lives of artists and the practical considerations of artistic work.  In "The Cartoonist," Jansson presumably draws from her own experiences of being overwhelmed by the international success of the Moomins when she tells the story of an illustrator who is brought in to take over a successful children's cartoon after its creator has a nervous breakdown, and who finds himself overwhelmed by the demands of the never-ceasing work, the feeling that the cartoon's original creator is still present, and the overpowering sense of responsibility towards the cartoon and its juvenile audience.  In "A Leading Role," an actress invites her mousy, pathetic cousin to her country house in order to copy her mannerisms for a role, and ends up learning about the true nature of the character.  In "The Doll's House" (originally the title story, though it's easy to imagine why the translators chose to change this), a retired antiques dealer endangers his marriage when he becomes obsessed with building an enormous, elaborate, intricately wrought dollhouse.  In that story, as in several others, Jansson is surprisingly upfront about depicting gay relationships--though she never quite says that the men and women in her stories are lovers, she comes so close to that point as makes no difference, and matter-of-factly addresses the difficulties that such couples face, as in "The Great Journey," in which a woman caring for her powerhouse of a mother who is now fading into dementia is caught in a trap of indecision, unable to explain to her mother that she loves another woman, but unwilling to take the trip that was her mother's last wish without inviting her lover along.  Art in Nature is a short collection, but every story in it is expertly wrought and compelling, and it leaves one wanting more of Jansson's writing--happily, there are several novels, and at least one more collection, that I haven't yet read.

More Than Words: Thoughts on Bunheads, Season 1

Television, we're often told, is a writer's medium.  The combination of limited budget and little scope for fancy visuals, and the need to keep feeding the hungry beast of continuous story--be it a serialized drama, a character-based soap, or even a procedural--serves to prioritize the writer's toolbox.  It's the reason, I think, that television so easily amasses obsessed, engaged fandoms, and that TV criticism has become such a vibrant, quickly proliferating field.  Even the most inaccessible and deliberately opaque TV series usually comes down to the basic tools of storytelling--the progression of a story, the development of a character, the emergence of a theme--that are fun to talk about and easy to put into words (by "easy," I mean requiring little formal training or specialist knowledge, which is a category of critic in which I obviously include myself, and to call this kind of criticism easy is by no means to ignore how often it can also be intelligent and insightful).  In the last few years, however, I've had the sense that this is slowly changing.  A few months ago, in a review of a second season episode of American Horror Story, AV Club reviewer Todd VanDerWerff suggested that our ideas of what constitutes "good" storytelling, with their emphasis on coherent plots, believable characters, and "realistic" behavior, have become restrictive, and that it's equally possible for television to reach its viewers through gonzo, over the top storytelling choices, or through television's audio-visual aspect (which a show with "horror" in its title would be perfectly situated to take advantage of).  I was dubious about this argument where American Horror Story--whose second season struck me as having a thoroughly conventional core of story, padded by the series's trademark outrageousness for outrageousness's sake--was concerned, but as a broader point I think it bears consideration.  There are, for example, more shows, like Hunted, Banshee, and most of all Utopia, that seem to be trying to achieve an emotional effect less through dialogue or performance, and more through visuals and atmospherics. And if American Horror Story feels like a bad example of a series that short-circuits "the rules" of storytelling to reach directly for the viewer's emotions, a much better--and to my mind, more successful--example would be the comparatively little-watched, little-discussed Bunheads.

Bunheads, which premiered in the summer on ABC Family and wrapped up its first season last week, marks the return to television, after several years' absence, of Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.  Depending on how you choose to look at this, this is either yet more proof that "respectable," mainstream TV is becoming increasingly inhospitable to female producers and characters, relegating the creator of a successful, critically-acclaimed, but female-centric series to the kiddie league, or yet more proof that ABC Family is slowly becoming one of the most interesting channels on TV (it gave us The Middleman, a show that it is almost impossible to imagine airing anywhere else on TV, and though I haven't watched either one, I've heard very positive things about its shows Huge and Switched at Birth).  The series begins with former ballet dancer, turned aspiring Broadway star, turned Vegas showgirl Michelle (real-life Broadway superstar Sutton Foster, utterly stunning here), suffering yet another blow to her determination to keep plugging away at her career when she shows up to audition for Chicago only to be turned away by the director without even a chance at a tryout.  In this despondent state (and under the influence of a great deal of alcohol) she impulsively marries a long-time admirer, Hubbell (Alan Ruck), who sweeps her off to his small California home town, called Paradise, where Michelle discovers that Hubbell lives with his mother, imperious dance studio director Fanny (former Gilmore Girl Kelly Bishop).  No sooner have the two women grudgingly agreed to try to make their newfound family work than Hubbell is killed in a car accident, leaving Michelle the sole owner of Fanny's home and studio.

It's an awkward premise, and the pilot has to work overtime to get all its pieces in place, but, especially given its emphasis on four of Fanny's teenage students--Sasha (Julia Goldani Telles), the star pupil who is turning to bullying and mean girl-ness to compensate for a rapidly deteriorating home life, Boo (Kaitlyn Jenkins), a wallflower whose dreams of dancing professionally may be scuttled by her body type, Ginny (Bailey Buntain), a high-strung perfectionist who spends the season making her first real mistakes, and Melanie (Emma Dumont), who mostly plays a supporting role in the other girls' stories, the show having reached its limit for main characters before it came time to give her one of her own--it's easy to assume that this is all in service of setting up a template, in which Michelle joins Fanny as a dance instructor, gaining stability and self-confidence from her mentorship of the young dancers, and forming a family with Fanny, with whom she spars but also comes to respect.  What's interesting--and, at least to begin with, quite frustrating--about Bunheads is how much it resists this template.  It takes Michelle the better part of half a season to even consider becoming a teacher, and even after she does, the school doesn't give the series a structure.  Bunheads, in fact, lacks structure entirely.  Its first season is loose and meandering, with subplots coming in and out of focus, secondary characters popping in and out of the main characters' lives, and a prevailing sense of aimlessness.

Some of this comes down to practical considerations--for budgetary reasons, most episodes feature only two or three of the four young dancers, and Bishop is only contracted as a recurring character, so Fanny disappears for weeks on end, and the relationship between her and Michelle, which we might have expected to give the series its backbone, is instead more of a background presence.  Equally, at least part of Bunheads's shapelessness is a result of the show finding its feet.  In the first half of the season, there's a strong sense that the show is trying to make Paradise into another Stars Hollow, complete with a raft of quirky, larger than life inhabitants, and much of the second half of the season is concerned with backing away from this Gilmore Girls imitation, paring down the recurring cast (and replacing most of it with another former Gilmore actress, Liza Weil, who is one of the season's best additions), and focusing the show's stories away from the town's quirkiness and towards the main characters' emotional arcs.  But even with these factors taken into consideration, there's no denying that Bunheads has very little interest in committing to a structure.  It seems perfectly happy to float in and out of its characters' lives, dropping minor climaxes and crises on them, introducing incremental change, but usually bringing them back to where they started.  The season finale, for example, feels almost deliberately anti-climactic.  Bookending the pilot, it sees Michelle trying out for the chorus in a new musical, and having a great audition only to be told that the open call was a union formality, and that the roles have already been cast.  Meanwhile, the four girls are nervously and somewhat curiously studying up on sex, which prompts Fanny to give the class an excessively frank sex ed talk.  It's not that nothing important happens in the episode, but if you're looking for a final statement about the season, the characters, or how Michelle's presence in Paradise has changed her or the town, you won't find it here.

This, however, is to create the impression that Bunheads is a naturalistic character-based show, along the lines of Treme, and nothing could be further from the truth.  Bunheads is a comedy, and more specifically an Amy Sherman-Palladino comedy, which means that it is heavily stylized, and often suffused with a kind of hyper-realism that means that every character's attributes, good and bad, are turned up to eleven--the controlling Sasha gets her own apartment, and immediately becomes a Martha Stewart-esque domestic goddess; flighty Fanny turns out to have been managing the school's finances through a system based on hat-boxes, into which she sorts bills that she plans to pay, wants to pay, and plans to ignore; Hubbell's former girlfriend Truly (Stacey Oristano) is a master craftswoman who, as she tells Michelle, "[knows] everything about everyone except myself," while her sister Millie (Weil), is a ruthless businesswoman who surmounts every one of life's difficulties by sneering, "Please, I own property."  The dialogue, similarly, is vintage Sherman-Palladino, riddled with rapid-fire, Who's On First-style exchanges that quickly ascend to the realm of surrealism.  So Bunheads is a show that is consciously, deliberately artificial, and that at the same time rejects the artifice of structure and shape.  It's pretty easy to call this bad writing--and as I've said, at least in the first half of the season I think that this is a reasonable explanation a lot of time--but the result as a whole is so weird, and weirdly compelling, that I'm not inclined to dismiss it so easily.

Especially when you consider that I've left out what is perhaps Bunheads's most interesting--and, given Sherman-Palladino's reputation as a wordsmith, most surprising--attribute, the fact that it is often willing to stand back and make its points through something other than dialogue.  Bunheads is a show about dance, and it has a cast of talented dancers--Foster, of course, but also the four girls, and Fanny's students are often supplemented by professional dancers--which means that it often features dance interludes.  As you might expect from Sherman-Palladino, there has been a dance-and-talk scene, and productions such as Fanny's environmental-themed spring recital, "Paper or Plastic?", or Michelle's take on the rat dance from The Nutcracker.  But where Bunheads differs from shows like Glee or Smash, which also intersperse drama with performance, is that it's willing to let those performance stand on their own, as dance is supposed to.  In "Paper or Plastic?" and the rat dance, Fanny and Michelle explain their meaning, giving the dance a narrative.  But when Fanny's students perform at Hubbell's memorial, it's left to us to understand their meaning--and more importantly, to understand that the kind of art they're performing doesn't have to have a story, or a clearly-expressed message.  The show ups the weirdness quotient even further when it introduces dance interludes that clearly do not occur in the show's reality--as when an episode that centers around Sasha's troubled home life ends with her dancing to They Might Be Giants's "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," or when the season finale, which has focused on the girls' conflicted and sometimes sorrowful feelings about sex, ends with a gleefully risqué number set to "Makin' Whoopee."  You could argue that these scenes are happening in the characters' minds, but what I think is happening is something both simpler and more interesting--I think they're the show acknowledging that it is possible to convey emotion through something other than storytelling, and that in a show that centers on an artform that is precisely about that effect, it's only fair to try to achieve it.

Something else that makes the performance scenes in Bunheads different and special is how often the emotion that underpins them isn't--as it usually is in Glee and Smash--exhilaration, but sorrow.  When Ginny asks Michelle to help her prepare an audition for the school play in which she's to sing a song about longing and heartbreak, Michelle berates and harangues her through a technically flawless rendition, then steps in and actually performs the song, knocking Ginny's, and the audience's, socks off.  But as stunning as that performance is, it's clear that Michelle is putting a lot of her own disappointment and frustration into it--she has just learned that a friend who has been given a once-in-lifetime professional opportunity to turning it down to get married--and that what was missing from Ginny's version was a true understanding--the kind that can only come from experience--of the emotions that underpin the song.  When Michelle's brother Scotty (Foster's real-life brother Hunter, himself a Broadway performer) shows up, he and Michelle have a screaming, knock-down fight about their past and their childhood, but in a show of reserve that has become typical of Bunheads, Sherman-Palladino follows that fight up not with conversation but with music--Scotty finds Michelle strumming the ukelele that was the pretext for their fight, and instead of saying anything, simply joins her in a beautifully melancholy performance of "Tonight You Belong To Me," affirming their connection but also the sadness that underpins it.

In fact, the song and dance interludes are merely making explicit what the show's storytelling hints at more subtly--that what Bunheads, for all its comedic, quirky exterior, is really about is sadness, disappointment, and failure.  Michelle's story, after all, is the story of a woman with tremendous talent and ability who has somehow managed to squander them, and every opportunity she's been given.  And when she latches on to a Manic Pixie Dream Guy and his promise that he can fix her life through the power of his love for her (even more than on Gilmore Girls, Bunheads sidelines the men in its characters' lives in favor of their relationships with one another, but it's particularly interesting to note how neatly Hubbell is slotted into a role usually reserved for a woman--that of the saintly, lost love interest whose sole purpose, in life and in death, is to make the main character's life better), he vanishes into thin air and she finds herself once again forced to rely on herself--and, once again, getting in her own way and doing her utmost to destroy and undermine everything good in her life.  Fanny, meanwhile, is a woman who gave up the ephemeral life of a dancer for something concrete when she chose to have Hubbell, only to have it snatched away from her (though here Hubbell's Manic Pixie tendencies, combined with Bishop's limited presence on the show, undermine the note of tragedy--after the season's first few episodes, it's not really believable that Fanny is grieving the loss of her only child).  And while it seems almost too brutal to tell a story about teenagers whose main theme is disappointment, there is some of this too on Bunheads--on the day of her audition for a prestigious summer dance program, Boo discovers that her mother has already bought a cake that says "Better Luck Next Year," and the season ends with Michelle comforting a sobbing Ginny, who has lost her virginity to a boy who hasn't called or spoken to her since it happened.  It's the kind of sadness you could only withstand in a comedy, unleavened by anything except the characters' matter-of-fact determination not to be defeated by it--in the season finale, having followed Michelle to her audition, it's Boo who drags her friends out to join the auditioning dancers, not caring that their chances of being "discovered" are slim at best--but that determination isn't defiant or brave.  Bunheads avoids the temptation (often indulged by Glee and Smash) to romanticize or make heroic the choice to pursue a dream that almost certainly won't come true, and it does so by having the characters acknowledge their sadness and disappointment only when they allow those emotions to shine through their performances.

As of this writing, Bunheads's future is uncertain, and its chances of a second season are not high (this is the flipside of ABC Family's intriguing bent towards experimentation--The Middleman and Huge also lasted only one season each).  Which means that I can't recommend it wholeheartedly--unlike other one-season wonders, there's nothing sufficiently complete about its first season to make watching it in the knowledge that there will be no follow-up a satisfying experience--but nevertheless it is one of the most interesting and promising new shows of the last year.  It has a brilliant cast (I haven't said enough here about the young castmembers and how terrifyingly talented--as dancers and singers as well as actresses--they all are, but it's hard to imagine another show that will give them the same scope to show off their talents), it's very funny and very moving, and the song and dance scenes are beautifully done (as you might imagine from the number of them that I've linked to here--almost every one feels like something worth sharing excitedly).  But most of all, it's a show that is doing something that I don't think any other show currently running is doing.  There are a lot of shows right now that center around art and artists--Treme, Glee, Smash, Nashville.  I tend to single Treme out as being the only one of these shows that treats art as work, something that has to be perfected and constantly improved, not something that falls into the characters' laps through their god-given "talent."  There is some of this in Bunheads--it is, after all, a show about a school--but it also does something that neither Treme, nor any of these other shows, with their emphasis on music that spells out the characters' thoughts and feelings, even try to do.  It treats art, and particularly dance, as something that can't, and shouldn't, be put into words.

At Strange Horizons: Introducing Short Fiction Snapshot

This week on Strange Horizons, we're launching a new reviews department feature: Short Fiction Snapshot, where every other month we'll be dedicating a full-length review to a piece of short fiction.  Here is my editorial explaining my goals and hopes for this project, and here is the first installment, discussing Charlie Jane Anders's "Intestate," from Tor.com. 

One of my hopes for this project is that it will become a short fiction discussion club, along the lines of the ones on Torque Control, Locus Online, and Everything is Nice.  So if you're interested, please go and read "Intestate," and add your thoughts in the comments to my review.

Winter Crop 2: More Thoughts on Midseason Shows

The pilots of winter continue to pour in, and I think we can identify a trend: fall is when the respectable doctor and lawyer shows premiere; winter is when TV puts on fancy dress.  This latest bunch of shows includes fantasy, thrillers, science fiction, and lots of weirdness.  Not all of it works, unsurprisingly--in the time between starting this post and publishing it, the most rancid of the shows I've written about has already managed a much-deserved cancellation--but there's a lot that's new and different here alongside the tediously familiar and underworked, and that's something to be grateful for.

• Do No Harm - I have no idea if this is true, but in my head the thought process that went into greenlighting Do No Harm went something like this: "hey, that other show loosely inspired by Stephen Moffat's 21st century modernization of a 19th century story that has entered the cultural currency, and which we turned into a procedural, is turning out pretty well.  It's sure to work even better a second time, especially since Jekyll was a hot mess where Sherlock is only intermittently awful, so the bar is set much lower!"  And yet, somehow, Do No Harm manages to fail to clear that bar.  It, in fact, fails to clear the basement, and were it not suffused with a weirdly forgiving attitude towards domestic abuse I might even call it hilariously awful.  Steven Pasquale plays Jason Cole, an impossibly successful, conscientious, and caring neurosurgeon whose dark secret is that he is also Ian Price, a hedonistic psychopath.  Jason and Ian split the day between them, the former taking over their body at 8:25 AM, the latter at 8:25 PM, but for five years Jason has been drugging himself every night in order to keep Ian at bay (to his colleagues, Jason has put it out that he has diabetes, and thus "can't operate at night"; this has in no way retarded his ability to climb to the peak of a profession where he might reasonably be expected to be available 24 hours a day to deal with life and death situations, and the only doctor who questions Jason's competence or, indeed, his bullshit story is treated by the show and the other characters as a villain).  Now Ian has developed a resistance towards the drug, and is reemerging to wreak havoc--and, in light of his years-long incarceration, vengeance--on Jason's life.
  
  The main problem of the pilot... no, that's not right.  There are no end of things wrong with the pilot, each of which might reasonably be called a show-destroying problem, but the problem with the pilot as a piece of storytelling meant to introduce this new spin on the Jekyll and Hyde concept is that Ian is almost entirely absent from it.  We get a lot of scenes in which Jason freaks out over the damage Ian could do to his life and to the people unlucky enough to come across him, but absolutely no sense of what sort of monster Ian is and what he actually wants (it most certainly doesn't help that Pasquale, though marginally capable of conveying Jason's inoffensive blandness, is utterly incapable of being in any way menacing).  From what little we see of him in the pilot, what Ian mainly seems to want is to smack Jason's love interests around.  These include his current crush Lena (Alana De La Garza), who the pilot briefly intimates was raped by Ian, only to back down and reveal that he humiliated her after she decided not to have sex with him, and his former fiancee Olivia (Ruta Gedmintas), whom Ian attacked and mutilated (the pilot ends with the "surprise" "discovery" that, unbeknownst to Jason, Olivia has had his baby, because obviously, if you find yourself pregnant by a man who is desperate to control you, and whose unexplained medical condition--a condition that may, for all you know, be hereditary--so frightens you that you've cut off all contact with him, the obvious thing to do is take that pregnancy to term).  The main purpose of both of these attacks seems to be first to give Jason the opportunity to look pained and contrite, and secondly for the women to reassure him that Ian's excesses are not his fault.  If it weren't for the prevalence of domestic violence in the pilot, I might say that despite its awful execution Do No Harm had the potential to go in interesting directions--the very absence of Ian from the pilot might indicate that future episodes would have expanded his point of view and revealed him to be a more nuanced figure than Jason gives him credit for.  But the fact that the show uses the abuse of women as a shorthand for evil without even giving those women (or the audience) the satisfaction of being able to hate their abuser, when topped by the aforementioned awful execution, means that I had absolutely no interest in seeing whether Do No Harm would have proceeded down that path.  Its cancellation after only two episodes is richly deserved.
  
  
• The Following - Since we're on a roll with imagining the elevator pitch for all these new, high concept shows, I have to assume that The Following was pitched as "Silence of the Lambs, the TV show" (not to be confused with the Hannibal Lecter prequel series Hannibal, currently in the works).  The basic premise is that a month before his execution, serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy, utterly wasted) escapes from prison and kidnaps his sole surviving victim, thus justifying the reinstatement of Ryan Hardy, the profiler who caught Carrol, and who is now a physically ravaged, alcoholic wreck (Kevin Bacon, somewhat less wasted than Purefoy since the show so far has given him a little more scope to be vulnerable, irritated, and even, in flashbacks, charming, as opposed to Carrol's unremitting creepiness, but still far better than this show deserves).  The pilot pulls off its one interesting twist when Carroll kills the kidnapped victim halfway in and is recaptured, so that it can reveal that the real menace comes from a cult that he has amassed over the internet, who are now carrying out an increasingly widespread campaign of murder and mayhem in homage (or, possibly, with a more prosaic purpose in mind) of their master.  The main purpose of this seems to be that the show can now posit an endless supply of attractive, intelligent, capable young people who have nothing better to do with their lives than commit impossibly inventive murder on Carroll's behalf, while maintaining the back-and-forth between Purefoy and Bacon, which is where the Silence of the Lambs comparison comes in.  The problem (no, again, one of the problems) is that, at least to me, the best thing about Silence was how prominently it featured smart, competent women at every level of its story--not just Clarice Starling, but her roommate and fellow agent, her mother, the senator whose daughter Wild Bill kidnaps, and even the kidnapping victim herself, who does a great deal to keep herself alive.  The Following, meanwhile, not only relegates women almost exclusively to the role of victims, it makes the crux of Carroll's philosophy and his reason for killing some twisted interpretation of the romantic ideal (ascribed to Poe, though I wouldn't exactly trust this show to present a nuanced and meaningful interpretation of the author's work and themes; despite which, by the end of the pilot I think I would have been perfectly happy never to hear the name "Edgar Allan Poe" ever again) in which a woman is a passive object of beauty--beauty that reaches its fullest expression at the moment of her death.
  
  For all its tongue-clucking over this philosophy, The Following is still a series in which lots of young women are murdered by people who tell them that doing so will perfect them.  And while there are female characters on the show--Annie Parisse, whom I enjoyed in shows like Rubicon and The Pacific, is amusingly dry as Ryan's superior officer, and Natalie Zea, finally released from two years of character assassination on Justified, plays Carroll's ex-wife, with whom Ryan is in love--none of them are sufficiently active or central to counteract the show's perception of women as objects to be worked upon (Zea's plotline, in which her son is kidnapped by Carroll's acolytes, is particularly thankless).  The sole exception is Valorie Curry as one of Carrol's chief adherents, but even leaving aside how problematic it is that the only woman with any real agency on your show is a villain (who first expresses her agency by killing her domineering mother when the latter makes a pass at her new boyfriend), at no point in The Following's first two episodes is there any indication that either the character or, indeed, the show, are aware of the contradiction of a woman coming into her own in the service of a man who believes that her highest purpose is a beautiful death.  I do realize that I'm in the minority in finding Clarice Starling and the women around her the most interesting thing about The Silence of the Lambs.  As the forthcoming Hannibal, and indeed Thomas Harris's entire output following the film's success, indicate, for most people this is Lecter.  But Joe Carroll is no Hannibal Lecter (and James Purefoy is no Anthony Hopkins), and absent both that magnetic presence at its center and the more intriguing handling of female bonds and relationships in the original novel, all that's left in The Following is a too-familiar serial killer story that revels in its bloodiness a little more than I think even its creators realize.  It's a show that manages to be both boring and creepy.


• The Americans - It's pretty easy to imagine the elevator pitch for The Americans, meanwhile, and to imagine that it on its own was enough to get the show greenlit.  Soviet spies masquerading as a suburban American couple in the early 80s is an instantly compelling premise, one that has intriguing associations with post-9/11 TV and its musings about enemy agents living among us (it's also an idea that seems to have taken pop culture by a storm just recently--Elementary had a somewhat implausibly timed episode centered around it, and I'm sure I've seen it elsewhere as well).  There are lots of interesting directions in which you could take a premise like this, and if The Americans's pilot--a tense, fast-paced hour that crams seemingly impossible amounts of story into its running time without feeling rushed or overwhelming--has a flaw, it is that it seems, at various points, to be gesturing at every one of them, so that at its end there's very little sense of what, beyond a spy thriller in which our point of view characters are not only the "bad guys," but also doomed to failure, the show is trying to be.  In some scenes, it seems to be a show about how American culture is perceived by communist infiltrators.  "There's a weakness in the people," Elizabeth (Keri Russell) tells Philip (Matthew Rhys) (the two are forbidden from speaking Russian or using their real names, even in private) when they first arrive in the US, and when, in the pilot, he points out that the children they've had to maintain their cover are Americans and she expresses the hope that they won't buy into the American dream completely, Philip ruefully reminds her that "this place"--the suburbs that provide them with their perfect camouflage--"doesn't produce socialists."  In other scenes the show seems to be about the toll that living a lie for so many years has on the liar, though this theme is intriguingly attached to our heroes' new neighbor, an FBI agent (Noah Emmerich) who spent years undercover with a white supremacist group before being reassigned to the counterintelligence desk.  And in others still it seems to be circling that Cold War standard, the spy wondering whether all their schemes, lies, and deception were really good for anything, as Philip begins to worry that he and Elizabeth will be exposed, and suggests that they should get ahead of the problem by defecting.
  
  Still, these are all hints, and at the end of the pilot it's hard to get a sense of either the show and its characters.  Rhys has a showier part than Russell, swinging from vulnerability as he contemplates the unhappy set of options his future offers and utter ruthlessness as he tries to complete his assignments and thus stem that future's tide, but along the way he lies to various people so expertly and convincingly that it's hard to know which of these extremes, if any, to believe.  Elizabeth's defining characteristic, so far, is that she's loyal to the motherland, to the point of preferring death to defection, but the show hasn't given her much space yet to explain that loyalty (and, since the pilot includes the revelation that she was raped during training by a high-ranking KGB officer who had been taught that he could "have [his] way with the recruits," it in fact seems to be making compelling arguments against that loyalty).  Loyalty, in fact, seems to be the closest thing The Americans has to a unifying theme--Elizabeth and Philip's loyalty to their country, their ideals, their mission, and, increasingly, to each other and the family they've made--and loyalty doesn't have to be rational or explainable to have a profound effect on our lives.  It does, however, need to be felt, and with characters whose profession is lying, whose past is hidden not just from us but from each other, and who have chosen such an insanely self-sacrificing path in life for reasons we don't know yet, it's hard to empathize with that loyalty.  Still, if at this point in its run The Americans feels opaque, there is enough nuance and detail in its writing and acting to suggest that that opaqueness is deliberate, that the show's creators know the answers to the questions raised by their characters' choices and actions, and are choosing to reveal only slowly the full complexity of their world and backstory.  In the meantime, The Americans is also a highly entertaining and twisty spy story, which suggests that if nothing else--though I do have hopes that the show will turn out to be much more than this--it's going to be a lot of fun.


• House of Cards - Arguably, this show is more interesting for its business model--in which DVD-rental service turned streaming video vendor Netflix has gone into producing original programming, which it is offering free of charge--than its actual substance, which is slick and well made but so far not terribly exciting.  Based on the British miniseries of the same title (which I haven't seen), House of Cards boasts a star-studded cast headlined by Kevin Spacey as Francis Underwood, majority whip for the newly installed congress whose hopes of being named Secretary of State are dashed by a president who needs his skill at wrangling congressmen to advance his legislative agenda.  A humiliated Underwood begins plotting his revenge--which includes derailing the confirmation process of the person who has taken his place and the president's education reform--and begins by leaking sensitive information to an ambitious young journalist (Kate Mara).  The whole thing is very well made, with Spacey acting as the audience's tourguide to Washington's political swamp (even speaking to the camera to introduce the movers and shakers and explain the underlying currents), and an excellently chilly Robin Wright as Underwood's wife, whose charitable activities are driven by an ambition no less naked than her husband's, and whose bond with Spacey is rooted mainly in their shared lust for power.  In the pilot episode's best moment, Spacey turns to the audience after a galvanizing exchange with Wright and says "I love that woman.  I love her more than a shark loves blood."  It's a trite line, but Spacey sells it not only because he's so good, but because Wright is so convincing in her ambition and ruthlessness.
  
  For all its swiftly moving and engaging plot, however, the pilot can't quite get around the fact that what Underwood is doing is rather odious--for the sake of soothing his hurt pride, he's throwing a much-needed reform under the bus.  You could get behind a character who did something like this (or get behind watching them get their comeuppance), but they'd need to be a lot slicker and smarter than Underwood is, and their opponents would have to be a lot oilier and more crafty, making for a satisfyingly nasty battle of wits.  For all the intelligence that Spacey radiates, House of Cards hasn't written Underwood, or his opponents, as these clever figures--it strains credulity that Mara's story wouldn't be traced back to one of the few people who had the information about the proposed education bill, and who has a motive to strike at the administration, and for that reason it makes no sense for someone as politically savvy as Underwood to have made such a brazen move (for this reason, Mara's plotline is more successful--she's smart enough to be compelling, but inexperienced enough for her blunders to be believable).  As this astute article from The AV Club points out, Netflix's decision to release the entire season at once might have been the best thing for House of Cards, which when watched on a more measured schedule is eminently put-downable, but I'm not sure that even with the entire season laid out before me I'm willing to put out the time to see if the show gets more interesting, or if the various balls thrown in the air in the pilot episode, which tease stories other than Spacey and Mara's central one, will make for more intelligent storytelling.  It's good to see new streams for televised content opening up, but House of Cards isn't making a compelling argument that Netflix can make an essential contribution to the medium.


• Borealis - First things first, let's have a big round of applause for Canadian TV, for being the only people in the anglophone world still making future-set science fiction.  That said, Borealis--actually a two-hour pilot that hasn't (yet?) been ordered to series--is what you get when you give a TV budget to someone who's watched their Firefly DVD box set once too often and doesn't have too many new ideas of their own.  This isn't to say that the show--which takes place in a raggedy, semi-legal outpost in the Canadian-controlled section of the Arctic several decades in the future, as various nations and the future version of the UN scrabble for control of the frozen wasteland that may contain the Earth's last supplies of fossil fuels--is bad, but hardly any of its beats (and there are quite a few, and even more characters, in the pilot) come as a surprise.  You've got your grimy, run-down, lived-in future.  You've got your grizzled, banged-about-by-life, semi-criminal anti-hero just trying to carve out a place to call his own but nevertheless moved by a latent sense of justice to fight for the little guy.  You've got a bunch of has-beens and wastrels who congregate around him, and a few with a bit more sense who nevertheless find themselves won over by his innate heroism.  You've got a hooker with a heart of gold, and a plucky, idealistic love interest who thinks our hero is an oaf but nevertheless lands herself in hot water which only he can get her out of.  And you've got a stuffed shirt lawman who disdains his backwater posting and the uncivilized brutes he has to police, and who insists on ignoring the realities of his situation and working by the book, even if that causes the most trouble and mayhem.
  
  Again, none of this is badly done, and the actual premise of Borealis, which combines political intrigue, nationalistic chest-beating, environmental issues, and frontier values, is an intriguing one that could be spun in interesting and complicated directions.  As the show's lead, Ty Olsson cuts a charismatic figure, a bruiser who, while he may not have much more to him than the cynical-but-secretly-idealistic Mal Reynolds type he was clearly envisioned as, is brought to life with energy and verve.  The rest of the cast is less well-drawn, but by the end of the pilot we have a strong sense of how the community of Borealis is constructed, where its pressure points are, and where new sources of tension might come from.  It's a setting that could easily play host to interesting stories, especially after the introduction, in the pilot's last half-hour, of its sole original touch, a UN official whose goals and loyalties are not immediately obvious, who is more savvy than the other representatives of authority that Olsson's character clashes with, but not obviously corrupt or immediately evil (this character is also the only woman on the show who doesn't fall into the obvious and too-familiar types I listed above).  On the other hand, not even this character could entirely keep my patience from flagging at the pilot's too-familiar beats, and the fact that its central political dispute is resolved through a cage match--one that, naturally enough, acts as an exorcism of Olsson's career-ending defeat--doesn't exactly bode well for the series.  Right now, then, Borealis could go either way--a smart piece of SF about politics in the age of resource scarcity, or a much, much lower-rent SFnal Deadwood.  I'd be interested to hear that more episodes of the series had been ordered, but I'm not breathless with anticipation.


• Utopia - This, on the other hand, is one of the most intriguing TV shows I've seen in a while, and though I'm absolutely convinced that it'll devolve into an unholy mess by its end, I'm having far too much fun right now to care.  On paper a conspiracy thriller about four strangers--former medical student Becky (Alexandra Roach), bored office drone Ian (Misfits's Nathan Stewart Jarret, quite winning here), conspiracy nut Wilson (Adeel Akhtar), and eleven-year-old estate yob Grant (Oliver Woollford)--brought together by their fascination with a creepy comic book allegedly drawn by a mental patient, who find their lives dismantled when they come into possession of the comic's second installment, Utopia quite wisely puts most of its eggs in the weirdness basket.  This is a creepy, atmospheric show, shot in a style that feels one part Wes Anderson, one part Richard Kelly, with urban and suburban landscapes and minutely decorated interiors used to claustrophobic, often surreal effect (it's one of the handsomest, most cinematic TV series I've seen in a while, and certainly from the UK).  Plus, of course, there is a secret conspiracy on our heroes' trail, which means lots of scenes in which they or those unfortunate enough to know or be related to them are menaced or much worse by a pair of villains straight out of the Croup and Vandemar template (intentional or not, the Neverwhere reference only solidifies the sense that Utopia is less a conspiracy thriller and more a Gaiman-esque urban fantasy about ordinary people falling off the edge of the familiar world and into an alternate version that exists in its cracks and crevices).
  
  The flipside of this, of course, is that Utopia has a story that it is slowly ladling out.  On top of the four main characters (one of whom doesn't join the group until the end of the second episode), we have a mysterious figure who has been fighting the Evil Conspiracy since her childhood and is related to the comic's creator, but who may be as evil as the people she's fighting, and a civil servant who has been blackmailed into buying massive supplies of a dodgy flu vaccine right before a mysterious outbreak of exactly the strain it's meant to prevent, and indications that at least some of our heroes aren't who they pretend to be.  Usually I like it when shows tie their convoluted plots together, and get annoyed when they deliver massive build-up and then can't pay it off, but with Utopia I find myself wishing for the show not to tie its plot strands together, not to replace portent with revelations.  Utopia works because it is so weird and moody.  To actually reveal what the conspiracy is about would not only cut into that sense of weirdness, but would almost certainly not be as satisfying.  I might be saying that because I've only watched two episodes and am still won over by the newness of the show's style, and maybe in a few episodes more I'll start wanting some resolution and a story that makes sense.  But I can't help but feel that a story like that--unless it were incandescently, improbably good--would be a let-down from what the show is right now.  Utopia is probably the closest we're ever going to get to Donnie Darko, the TV show, and for the time being that's all I really want it to be.

Review: Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer

My review of Angélica Gorodischer's Trafalgar, originally published in 1979 and now published in English by Small Beer Press, appears this week in the Los Angeles Review of Books.  Trafalgar is a strange book, not at all what I was expecting it to be and quite unlike anything else I've ever read.  It's certainly worth a look, though, and has me very curious to read Gorodischer's previously translated work, Kalpa Imperial.

Intrinsic Value: Thoughts on Pride and Prejudice

This week marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, which seemed like the perfect excuse--if any were needed--to reread it.  It also seemed like a good opportunity to write about it, especially since it's the only Austen novel I haven't written about in the course of this blog's existence (well, to be precise, one of the very first Austen-related entries posted to this blog--and the one of its earliest entries of any kind to gain real popularity--was about this book, but "4 Popular Misconceptions About Pride and Prejudice" is, as its title suggests, a response to the way others tend to perceive the book, not an essay about my own reactions to it).  Here I was more hesitant, however.  In fact, when I realized, a few years ago, that my ad hoc essays about Austen's novels were turning into an irregular series, it didn't occur to me that Pride and Prejudice would one day be included in it.  The book felt like too great an edifice, too familiar and too well-loved--unlike Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, which I returned to on this blog for the first time since my teens in order to confront a novel I hadn't cared for originally, or Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, which I reread in order to work out my difficulties with an otherwise beloved work--for me to be able to find anything new or meaningful to say.

That feeling only became stronger when I looked back through my records of previous years' reading and discovered--to my utter astonishment--that the last time I reread Pride and Prejudice was in 2003.  It seemed impossible that a novel that was so fresh in my mind when I sat down with it a week ago is also one that I haven't revisited in a decade (in comparison, during that same period I reread Sense and Sensibility twice and Persuasion three times).  But then, it's not as if I've lived a Pride and Prejudice-free life during that period.  There have been the adaptations--flawed ones like Bride and Prejudice and Joe Wright's Wuthering Heights-style film, as well as more viewings than I could count of Andrew Davies's excellent miniseries (one adaptation I haven't gotten to yet is the increasingly interesting-sounding Lizzie Bennet Diaries--being a completist, I'm waiting for the series to be over before I start).  Even more than that, Pride and Prejudice has been so present in the conversation--about Austen and pop culture in general--during all that time, never allowed to fade from my consciousness.  Unlike Austen's other novels, it felt like a work that had been fully processed and digested, one that, for all the enjoyment I still took from it, no longer had the power to surprise me.

But of course, Pride and Prejudice did end up surprising me.  Sometimes in the ways that strike me anew every time I reread it, like how well-paced is the first half of the novel, which is essentially about setting up quite a few characters and subplots in preparation for the first proposal, and how comparatively overloaded are its final chapters, in which one almost seems to feel Austen panting as she squares away every single subplot before finally being allowed to finish the story.  And sometimes in ways that I'd never noticed before, such as the fact that until the very moment of Darcy's fateful slight against her, Elizabeth isn't singled out as a point of view character--before that moment she is one of the five Bennet daughters, discussed by their parents and treated by the narrative as a single entity.  Or the realization that though a lot of commenters have noted the similarities between Elizabeth and Darcy and Much Ado About Nothing's Benedick and Beatrice, one of Austen's cleverest choices in the novel is to split the savory and unsavory aspects of that play's secondary couple between two different pairings--Lydia and Wickham are Hero and Claudio as the mercenary, opportunistic match, forced to marry in order to save her from the reputation-destroying effects of his actions, while Jane and Bingley are Hero and Claudio, the young, innocent lovers nearly torn apart by the evil designs of those around them.

None of this, however, was something I could build an essay on, and it wasn't until about a quarter of the way into the novel, when Elizabeth and Darcy were brought into constant contact with each other during her stay at Netherfield to nurse Jane, that something new occurred to me about Pride and Prejudice.  It's generally accepted (note how I avoided the obvious joke there) that the pride and prejudice of the title refer, respectively, to Darcy and Elizabeth.  He's proud of his birth and intelligence, which leads him to behave dismissively towards anyone not deemed worthy of his company, and to interfere in their lives.  And she's prejudiced because of his slight against her in their first meeting, which leads her to interpret his behavior in the worst possible light even when he's trying to be ingratiating.  There is some truth to this, obviously.  Pride is of course the defining trait through which Darcy is discussed throughout the novel, and for all of Elizabeth's rationally stated reasons for disliking him--the ones that are justified, such as his interference in Jane and Bingley's affairs and his behavior during the first proposal, the ones that turn out to be false, such as his alleged disinheriting of Wickham, and the ones that she ends up sympathizing with while still decrying, such as his openly disdainful attitude towards her uncouth family and neighbors--there is an irrational core to her actions that has no real justification.

There's a reason, I think, why the famous slight at Elizabeth and Darcy's first meeting, for all that it looms over the novel (and over the common perception of it) is never brought up again after it occurs, as if even Elizabeth realizes that you can't actually decide to hate a person for unwittingly insulting you that one time (and especially in a way that even the novel treats as the thoughtless, peevish expostulation of an introvert desperately trying to tamp down their anxiety at being forced into company with so many strangers).  Elizabeth even seems to go out of her way to avoid mentioning the insult.  It's not in the laundry list of Darcy's faults she lays at his feet during the first proposal, when they both seem to be going out of their way to hurt each other's feelings.  And a few days earlier, when Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam jokingly solicit her for an example of Darcy's bad behavior among strangers--when, at a point where her dislike of him is nearly at its highest (she hasn't yet learned how much Darcy did to break Jane and Bingley up), Elizabeth has the chance to make him look genuinely bad--she instead says archly

The first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know, was at a ball--and at this ball, what do you think he did?  He danced only four dances!  I am sorry to pain you--but it was so.  He danced only four dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain knowledge, more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner.

And yet, in her unguarded moments, there is a profound bitterness that underpins Elizabeth's attitude towards Darcy.  "I like her appearance," she says when catches sight of Miss de Burgh, whom she believes to be intended as Darcy's wife.  "She looks sickly and cross.--Yes, she will do for him very well.  She will make him a very proper wife."  It's in moments like this that we catch a glimpse of the genuine nastiness that lies at the root of Elizabeth's humor, and particularly her needling of Darcy and refusal to take him seriously--a nastiness that can't be explained by any single act on Darcy's part (and again, at this point the worst that Elizabeth knows of him is that he deprived Wickham of his inheritance) as much as it can be by a determination on Elizabeth's part to dislike him.

For all that the spark that ignites Elizabeth's dislike of Darcy can be described as prejudice, however, the further I read into the novel the more it seemed to me that Elizabeth and Darcy's flaws and failings were actually much more similar than the conventional wisdom surrounding the novel would have it, and that they both end up at the nadir of the first proposal through very similar behavior.  It's not that Darcy is pride and Elizabeth is prejudice, so much as that they are both pride, and that the novel's plot is the narrative of those two egos first clashing against each other, and then learning to accommodate one another.

When you think about it, there's something almost shockingly self-regarding about Elizabeth's behavior in the first half of the novel.  Not many of us would be able to convincingly laugh off as bald-faced an insult as she receives from Darcy in the novel's opening chapters (for all that, as I've discussed, it's clear that that insult does rankle her deep down), and throughout the novel's first half she continues to laugh off his and his friends' disapproval of her choices, behavior, and general person, even when she's surrounded by that disapproval at every turn--when she stays at Netherfield, and later when she's a guest of Lady Catherine de Burgh at Rosings.  It's hard not to feel that Caroline Bingley has a point when she describes Elizabeth as possessing a "conceited independence."  Caroline, of course, means this as a criticism, whereas we might take it as a compliment, but either way there's no denying that Elizabeth's belief in her own worth, especially in the face of disapprobation from people like Darcy and Lady Catherine, whom the rest of her acquaintance treats with obsequiousness and servility, is surprising and unusual in someone of her age, gender, era, and class.

That Elizabeth's ego is healthy enough to allow her to ignore the criticism of those she deems unworthy makes her a very similar type of person to Darcy, for all that their respective senses of pride are treated very differently by the characters around them--Darcy, as a wealthy man from a highly connected family, is considered justified in his pride, while Elizabeth, an unmarried woman with little money, few connections, and relatives in trade, is not.  Austen herself, however, takes a very similar approach, of mingled criticism and approval, to both characters' pride.  Darcy's belief that his birth and station justify his pride is punctured throughout the novel, not only by Elizabeth's pointing out how un-gentlemanly his behavior towards her has been, but by the realization that his upper class social circle offers no more guarantees of good company than Elizabeth's crass Meryton crowd--after rolling his eyes at Mrs. Bennet and her younger daughters' behavior, Darcy is shown to be justly embarrassed when Lady Catherine turns out to have equally bad manners, and the relatives that he and Elizabeth turn out to love and admire the most are the Gardiners, a lawyer and his wife.  But at the same time, the novel, through Elizabeth's changing perspective on Darcy, slowly comes to validate his sense of worth.  By its end, though Darcy has learned to be more circumspect and tolerant of Elizabeth's aggravating relatives, Elizabeth has learned some of his disapproval of her family--including her father--and is actively shielding him from their presence.

At the same time, though much of Elizabeth's point of view in the second half of the novel, and particularly after she receives Darcy's letter, is focused on her shame at her past behavior, and particularly her realization that she has put too much stock in her ability to judge and evaluate character, the end result of this is by no means to diminish her pride.  She speaks to Lady Catherine in their final confrontation with the same tone of independent self-regard with which she confronted Darcy during the first proposal.  "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner," she tells him, and "you are not entitled to know [my concerns]; nor will such behavior as this, ever induce me to be more explicit," she tells Lady Catherine.  In both cases, Elizabeth has too much of an awareness of her own worth to be willing to tolerate those who ignore it, and the novel validates that behavior.

But then, Pride and Prejudice is full of people who think they know their own worth, whose behavior is guided by pride.  People like Lady Catherine, Mr Collins, and Caroline Bingley, who take the most profound pleasure in the belief that they are better than some meaningful segment of their acquaintance.  There are, in fact, more of these than there are genuinely humble characters like Bingley or Jane.  Darcy and Elizabeth are singled out for Austen's authorial approval of their pride because, unlike many of the novel's other characters, it is rooted in more than their social status, and because they take it seriously.  Unlike characters like Mr Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, who know that they are better than their surroundings but ignore that knowledge in order to get along or get ahead, Darcy and Elizabeth aren't willing to sell out their pride for the sake of convenience (this is more obvious in Elizabeth's case, but Darcy too is faced with situations where it would be easier to fall back on his social status than to reach for what he knows himself to deserve--as Elizabeth thinks when she considers that Lady Catherine might appeal to Darcy's pride to prevent him from connecting himself with the Bennets and with Wickham, "If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all").  Charlotte in particular is a character that readers often feel is treated too harshly by her author for her decision to marry Mr Collins.  Wright's adaptation even includes a scene in which she angrily and tearfully chastises Elizabeth for her disapproval of that decision, exclaiming that this is her last chance for a future and financial stability, but this strikes me as getting it backwards.  If anything, Elizabeth is the one who should be desperate to get married.  She's the one who has no financial future except as a wife (something that she seems almost unrealistically unconcerned with throughout the novel), while Charlotte is the daughter of a wealthy minor baronet whose recently purchased estate is not entailed away from his daughters as Mr Bennet's is.  Charlotte doesn't need to get married; she wants to, and to achieve that goal she is willing to put up with a husband she despises, and to kowtow to Lady Catherine and her daughter.  Both Charlotte and Elizabeth know that there is more intrinsic value in being Miss Lucas or Miss Bennet than in being Mrs. Collins, and that nevertheless society will always attach greater status to a Mrs than a Miss.  Only Charlotte chooses the social construction of value over what she knows to be its true form, which is why both Elizabeth and Austen disapprove of her.

Still, you can get into a lot of trouble with that notion of intrinsic value, and especially in a novel published 200 years ago.  How can Elizabeth and Darcy be justified in feeling their own worth so strongly, if they alone are the determiners of that worth?  Austen's answer is that as well as having well-developed egos, Elizabeth and Darcy have strong superegos.  They may not be guided by convention, but they do have a sense of right and wrong.  We see this, of course, when they're both confronted by their bad behavior at the novel's midpoint, and instead of retreating into their pride, acknowledge their own faults and seek to correct them.  Elizabeth, for example, believes that Darcy will never renew his advances towards her because his pride would be too wounded by her refusal to allow him to humiliate himself in a second attempt, but Darcy is more affected by his realization that a lot of her accusations towards him were justified; his pride is satisfied not by forgetting Elizabeth but by seeking to become a man she'd approve of.  But we also see it in the moments where Elizabeth and Darcy's flouting of convention stops short--at the point where, to their mind, convention ends, and morality begins. 

Elizabeth is often compared to Mary Crawford, another character who is lively and has a tendency to poke fun at social mores, and like Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park's final crisis takes the form of an elopement between two morally bankrupt characters.  The crucial difference between Elizabeth and Mary is that Mary treats this failing too as a social convention--her response to her brother's elopement with a married woman is to begin to scheme how to restore their social status, while giving no thought to the possibility that they might have actually done something wrong.  Elizabeth, meanwhile, is morally horrified by her sister Lydia's elopement with Wickham, and embarrassed by Lydia's lack of embarrassment over it--"I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands," she tartly informs the self-satisfied Lydia.

The problem here is that, no matter how expertly Austen stacks the deck, as readers in 2013 we can be reasonably expected to be more sympathetic towards Mary's stance than Elizabeth's, and particularly in the case of Lydia and Wickham, in which a young girl is punished for being led on by an older, unscrupulous man by being forced to spend the rest of her life with him.  In the chapters dealing with Lydia and Wickham's marriage, Austen juxtaposes Mary Bennet's pronouncement that "loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable--that one false step involves her in endless ruin" with Jane's comforting reply to Elizabeth's castigating herself for not exposing Wickham once she learned the truth about him (including the fact that he had once tried to seduce and elope with Darcy's sister Georgianna) that "to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable."  Though we're clearly meant to view Mary as a blowhard (and along with her, Mr Collins, who writes to Mr Bennet to self-importantly pronounce that "The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this"), it was hard for me not to be reminded of very recent incidents in which the presumption that sexual predators (which, in the circumstances of the novel, Wickham most certainly is) feel bad about their past indiscretions and deserve a clean slate was treated as more important than the right of women not to be thrown, unsuspecting, into their company.  If the most blatant example of Elizabeth's intrinsic value is the fact that she largely agrees with this stance (though, in fairness to her, she continues to feel guilty for not exposing Wickham, and upon learning of his upcoming marriage to Lydia exclaims "Yet he is such a man!"), that value can seem hard to accept.

On the other hand, maybe the most blatant example of Elizabeth's (and Darcy's) intrinsic value isn't what they do, but what they don't do.  As much as it is a novel about pride, self-regard, and knowing your own worth, Pride and Prejudice also reminded me of Persuasion, a novel about being part of a community.  Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Elizabeth is an intelligent, refined woman in a community that is beneath her.  Darcy, too, is spending a lot of his time among people, like Bingley's sisters, who are merely flatterers and posers.  (If I like both of these characters better than Anne, it is because Austen acknowledges their tendency towards self-gratifying superiority, while in Persuasion I felt that I was reading it into the character against her author's intention.)  Their journey over the course of the novel is not only about finding each other, but forming a new society, with Jane and Bingley, Georgianna, and the Gardiners.  But Pride and Prejudice is not only about knowing when to detach yourself from company that is beneath you; it is also about knowing when not to choose detachment.  Elizabeth and Darcy both start the novel as people who take the greatest pleasure from standing back and observing others, often with satirical intent.  But as we and they soon come to realize, there's no such thing as being completely detached from society--the novel's characters are divided into those, like Mrs Bennet and Lydia, who don't care that they are making a spectacle of themselves, and those who think that they are standing back, observing and judging everyone else, but don't realize that they are being observed and judged in turn--as Darcy clearly doesn't realize that while he was falling in love with Elizabeth, he was creating a terrible impression on her and her friends.  The sole exceptions are the cynics, people like Mr Bennet, who cuts himself off from the world in his study and only emerges to comment on the silliness of everyone around him, and Charlotte Lucas, who is a much more clear-eyed observer of humanity than Elizabeth, seeing, for example, that Jane is being too reserved in her expressions of affection towards Bingley, and realizing Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth sooner than any other character in the novel (including Darcy himself).  If there's an illustration of their intrinsic worth in Elizabeth and Darcy's behavior, it is perhaps in the fact that they once they realize that they must be part of society even when it disgusts them, they don't give in to that cynicism.

It would have been very easy for both Elizabeth and Darcy to fall into the same trap as Mary and Henry Crawford--two people who so flatter each other's sense of worth, and their belief in being superior to everyone around them, that they exaggerate each other's worst qualities and become fit for nobody else's company.  To an extent, Elizabeth and Darcy are spared this fate through luck--his sister is too young and nervous to amplify his pride the way Mary does Henry's and vice versa, and her sister is the sort of person who hates to think ill of anyone, and instead encourages Elizabeth's better nature.  But throughout the novel Elizabeth and Darcy are repeatedly confronted with the opportunity to form that sort of alliance of snideness with a potential romantic partner--Caroline Bingley and Wickham both try to encourage Darcy and Elizabeth's sense of superiority, and try to bond with them over the shared joy of poking fun at others' foibles.  Both characters indulge in this sort of mean girl cattiness for a time--Darcy's "I should as soon call her mother a wit"--but ultimately they recoil from it, and learn to take more pleasure in the company of people they can respect.  And as Elizabeth says to Darcy when he laments his bad behavior at the end of the novel, it's in that refusal to fully give in to bad impulses that their own value is best expressed.  The fact that they can recognize the intrinsic value of others, and learn to seek out their company without regard to social class or convention, is the best proof of Elizabeth and Darcy's own worth.

It occurs to me that these three novels--Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion--are ultimately explorations of different aspects of the same question--the dilemma of being smart, sensitive, and observant among people who are, for the most part, none of these things.  Where is the line between refusing to participate in the stupidity and crassness of the people around you, and just being disdainful and rude?  Where is the line between convention and morality?  Where is the line between detaching yourself from society in order to find your own level, and doing so in order to bask in your own superiority?  To sum it all up, where is the line between knowing your own worth, and being too wrapped up in it?  (It may or may not be a coincidence that these are also the three of Austen's novels in which the hero, as well as the heroine, undergoes a process of change and growth, though of the three, Pride and Prejudice is the only one in which the hero can be said to have his own point of view.)  I don't think I'm reading too much into it by assuming that this is also a question that would have occupied Austen in her own life, and I think that, in Pride and Prejudice, she may have given it her most complete (if, perhaps, too neat) answer.  Unlike Mansfield Park, it's not a novel that gets bogged down in the question of style versus substance, in somewhat piously decrying the kind of flashy wit that made Austen the writer she was.  And unlike Persuasion, it is a novel willing to expose its heroine's faults and even leave them in place--if somewhat counteracted by her situation--at its end.  And it's a romance that still feels the most satisfying, the most heartfelt, the most equal, and the most uplifting to both of its partners, than any other in her novels.  As much as it sometimes seems that I am too steeped in Pride and Prejudice to learn anything new about it, it's good to be reminded--if only once every ten years--of just how fine a novel it is.

Recent Movie Roundup 17

'Tis the season for lots and lots of interesting movies to finally make their way to the movie theater, and for me to glut myself in preparation for the long hot months of box-office friendly summer.  Weirdly, though, almost every film I've watched recently has been a lush, visually adventurous and not entirely successful novel adaptation.  Must be something in the water.  There are some more straightforward films coming up (Argo, The Silver Linings Playbook, Flight, though also fare like Les Miserables and Holy Motors), but for the time being here are my thoughts on this strangely similar group of movies.

• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - One of the things I most admired about Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was that the films felt less like straight-up adaptation of the book and more like a synthesis of the material into a new form.  I liked some of the choices expressed in that synthesis more than others (and there were others still that I just plain disliked) but I appreciated the sense that Jackson was creating his own entity, one that was clearly connected to the book, but could still stand on its own.  The example I like to give is a scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Boromir speaks longingly to Aragorn about the beauty of Minas Tirith, his fears for it and his desire to return to it.  It's a crucial scene in the film's process of humanizing Boromir, making him a more sympathetic figure, despite its tragic flaws, than he is in the book, and it also plays up Aragorn's own ambivalence about taking his place as king by opposing it to Boromir's devotion.  What I didn't realize until I reread The Lord of the Rings, however, was that though that conversation isn't in it, Boromir's dialogue is, as a bit of description of the White City.  By putting that description in Boromir's mouth, Jackson not only brought a bit of Tolkien's language into the film, but used it to humanize and complicate both Boromir and Aragorn in a way that Tolkien never intended.  There's nothing as wittily subversive as this in An Unexpected Journey, an adaptation that, if I can't quite call it slavish--there is too much extraneous material here, and too much deliberate shifting of the novel's themes and tone, for that term to apply--seems to be trying to replicate the novel on a page-by-page basis.  The result, given that Tolkien's original takes the classic children's book form of a series of episodic, nearly self-contained adventures, is a movie that feels shapeless and meandering, and whose tone shifts seemingly every half hour, from comedy to melodrama to farce to horror to action, and back all over again.
  
  And yet for all that, I found myself enjoying An Unexpected Journey very much.  I suspect that for viewers who haven't read the original book, the film will be a slog, because it lurches from one set piece to another with not only no end in sight, but no overarching structure that might give a sense of where its stopping point might come.  If you know the book, though, and are able to recognize that now we're doing chapter 5, it's a lot easier to sit back and let the film wash over you, and having done that I found it utterly charming, and for the most part successful in capturing the tone of the book and knitting its world believably to the darker one of the Lord of the Rings films.  So scenes like the dwarves' arrival at Bag End, or their capture at the hands of three dim-witted trolls with culinary pretensions, are as funny as they are in the book, while Bilbo's encounter with Gollum is suitably creepy and horrifying, and the various action set-pieces or eye candy are thrilling and breathtaking.  Tying it all together is Martin Freeman, who, for all of An Unexpected Journey's flaws and self-indulgence, justifies this project all on his own, the role of Bilbo being perfectly suited to his combination of bumbling fussiness and iron-hard core (for all my complaints about Sherlock, it can't be denied that that show gave Freeman the perfect platform from which to demonstrate how well he can embody this combination, so much so that An Unexpected Journey may very well owe a debt to Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss).  Even in its most shapeless and seemingly pointless moments, the film is at its strongest when it focuses on Freeman's Bilbo and his mingled joy and horror at what he discovers when he steps off his doorstep, and his slow growth towards the eccentric, high-spirited adventurer of the Lord of the Rings films is, as it was in the book, the film's heart.
  
  Less successful are those scenes in which Jackson and Co. try to tie The Hobbit together with The Lord of the Rings, both tonally and plot-wise.  These range from the harmless--a scene in which Gandalf and Galadriel worry that the enemy is growing stronger, which features a surprise guest appearance that I am stunned the production managed to keep secret--to the tedious--Elijah Wood was apparently flown to New Zealand and put in full Hobbit makeup solely so that he could unnecessarily tie together Bilbo's reminiscences and the opening scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring--to the silly--Sylvester McCoy as Radagast the Brown, who races around on a sled pulled by giant rabbits and gives CPR to animatronic hedgehogs, might have worked in a more lighthearted film, but given that it's Radagast's job to sound the first alarms about Sauron's return the contrast between his character and the story he's placed in is jarring--to the utterly tone deaf.  In the last category you'll find the entire sub-plot about Thorin's interim antagonist, Azog the Orc (if this is ringing no bells for fans of the books, that's because it's almost entirely an invention) and the parachuted-in theme of the dwarves' longing for home following their dispossession by Smaug.  As I predicted when I reread The Hobbit a few years ago, these are both attempts to get around how unromantic the dwarf characters are, the fact that their motivation is not honor or homesickness, but a simple desire for wealth.  But the film's attempts to recast the dwarves, and particularly Thorin, as heroic figures is brought short by the sheer mass of trite cliches it employs--Thorin is being pursued by the one-handed Orc who killed his grandfather; Bilbo feels unappreciated by Thorin, who derides him for his softness and lack of martial abilities; Thorin is tortured and angsty, often striking heroic, manly poses against the skyline while the other dwarf characters exposit his manpain.  Richard Armitage gives it his best shot, but the scenes that focus on him hew so closely to most hoary and oft-derided tropes of the epic fantasy genre that they often slide into unintentional comedy (the rest of the dwarves, who are allowed to be intentionally comedic, fare better, and the film even goes some way towards giving them their own quirks and personalities).  It's at these points that An Unexpected Journey's slow pace and meandering structure feel most onerous, and I'm a little concerned that as the story approaches the confrontation with Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies, the films will sink even further into this po-faced, cod-Lord of the Rings mode.  For now, however, I'm content to be satisfied.  If An Unexpected Journey lacks The Fellowship of the Ring's coherence and epic sweep, it feels sufficiently of a piece with it, and, equally, sufficiently its own, more lighthearted creation, to be worth watching, and maybe even feeling cautiously optimistic about this new trilogy.
  
  
• Life of Pi (2012) - Personally, I've always found Life of Pi, the Booker-winning novel, to be wildly overrated.  It's a fun adventure, but to my mind it belongs on the same shelf as The Hobbit, as a YA-friendly story that adults can also enjoy, not the weighty philosophical treatise that its critical reception would seem to suggest.  Ang Lee's film of the novel is visually stunning, both in the early scenes depicting young Pi's life in India, growing up in his father's zoo and embracing three different religious creeds, and in its long central segment, in which Pi is shipwrecked and left adrift on a lifeboat with only a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker for company.  Lee's images are both surreal--as when a young Pi reads a comic book about the Hindu pantheon, and a panel about Shiva containing the universe in his throat opens up and swallows the viewer--and hyper-real, especially when he focuses on the wild creatures that define Pi's early life and his struggle for survival on the lifeboat.  In both cases, his visuals are masterful (and, as many reviewers have noted, make expert use of 3D--Life of Pi is one of the few films I've seen where the 3D feels essential to the film and its enjoyment), and even go some way towards justifying the novel's more egregious set pieces--I've never, for example, been able to work out the point of the interlude on the carnivorous island, but Lee realizes it so well (particularly the bemusing behavior of the massive herds of meerkats that populate the island) that in this version of the story it didn't rankle as much.  In its best moments, Life of Pi uses visuals to create the sense that Pi is in another world that is nevertheless part of ours--that he is seeing manifestations of nature, the ocean, and its creatures that hardly any human ever sees.  The tradeoff for all this beauty, however, is that the movie never feels very urgent.  In the novel, despite the framing story that reveals that Pi survives his ordeal even before we know what that ordeal was, there's a sense of tension stemming from his seemingly impossible situation, trapped on a lifeboat with a creature that will soon see him as a meal.  The methods Pi devises to not only survive but ensure Richard Parker's survival are clever and engaging, but the film treats them almost perfunctorily, clearly more invested in its visuals than in the business of Pi's survival.  When he experiences setbacks, such as when a wave washes away all his supplies and fresh water, there's no real sense of danger, and when he accomplishes some task necessary to his survival, there's no sense of accomplishment.
  
  This slackness is forgivable in the film's middle segment, however, since the visuals make up for any lack of urgency on the storytelling side. Less successful is Lee's handling of the novel's famous twist ending, in which Pi is challenged by representatives of the company investigating his shipwreck to give them a believable story, and after a moment replaces the tale of survival alongside a tiger with a gruesome, depressing story of cannibalism, murder, and man's inhumanity to man, asking them to choose the story they prefer.  I've always found that ending--and particularly its insistence that it represents a meaningful statement about religious faith--glib and supercilious, but what I did appreciate about it was that Martel played fair with his readers.  He never insisted that everything we'd been reading about for hundreds of pages had been a fantasy, and that the more horrible story had to be the truth, which made it possible for people like me, who didn't care for the facile moral that belief in God is nothing more or less than choosing the more appealing story, to continue to enjoy the novel for the tension it creates between two equally unlikely, equally fantastic survival stories.  Lee's Life of Pi, perhaps as a way of giving Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenage, castaway Pi, something to do after several hours of rather blank green screen acting (and, it must be said, very trite dialogue as he "converses" with Richard Parker), replaces the somewhat matter of fact, unadorned manner in which the alternate story is delivered to the insurance investigators with a long, detailed and emotional monologue that leaves no doubt that Pi is telling the truth--no one, much less a boy who has been deprived of human contact for months, could invent, from whole cloth and a moment's notice, such a gruesomely detailed story, and deliver it with so much emotion, grief and guilt (or, to put it another way, to believe that Pi, having lost his family so horribly, could invent an even more horrible way to have lost them, is to make the character almost monstrous).  Sharma nails the scene, in which Lee steps away from his visuals and simply remains fixed on his lead's face, but that accomplishment also means that the film leaves all its thematic eggs in the "choose which story you prefer" basket, which as I've said I find unsatisfying.  I suppose I can't complain that Lee has remained true to the spirit of the novel, even if I didn't care for that spirit, but I would have liked it if he'd left me the same escape hatch Martel had.
  
  
• Cloud Atlas (2012) - By the time I got around to watching the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer's gonzo, impossibly ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell's novel, the negative verdict on it had already been so decisively rendered that my expectations were buried somewhere beneath the Earth's mantle.  This turns out to be a good way to approach Cloud Atlas, which, while undeniably an unsuccessful mess of a movie that fails even to come close to doing justice to Mitchell's stunning novel, is nevertheless watchable and, for a film that is nearly three hours long and switches almost frenetically between six different plotlines, time periods, and genres, surprisingly fleet-footed (in that sense it is strangely similar to The Hobbit).  Some of that feeling of lightness no doubt stems from the fact that the film dispenses with Mitchell's nested structure, in which each of his six narratives begins, is interrupted--sometimes mid-sentence--by the next narrative, which is interrupted in its turn, and then all six narratives resume, in opposite order of their beginning, in the book's second half.  Instead, Cloud Atlas switches between its six plot strands with what feels almost like randomness, but if that description conjures up images of Magnolia-style mosaic movies transitioning leisurely from one narrative strand to another, it fails to do justice to Cloud Atlas's mayfly-level attention span.  It's only rarely that the film will remain with one of its plotline for more than a single scene, and sometimes it switches from one to the other for only a few lines of dialogue--at times, even interrupting an intense chase or action scene in order to check in on the more sedate goings-on in another story.
  
  What this means is that Cloud Atlas is a movie that is hard to get bored in, since if one of the stories, or even some part of it, doesn't interest you, it can be counted on to switch to another before long, and piecing the various strands' together requires enough effort to keep the viewer engaged (to the extent that I found myself wondering whether viewers who hadn't read the book wouldn't find themselves a little lost).  But the constant switching between storylines also has the effect of leaving some of them feeling underpowered, and of compounding what is otherwise an already quite powerful sense that the filmmakers themselves find some of their stories significantly less interesting than others.  It's not entirely surprising that these are the plot strands that don't lend themselves easily to high-octane, action storytelling--the Pacific journey of the young lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) in 1849, as he befriends an escaped slave and is slowly poisoned by the ship's doctor, the self-satisfied ramblings of Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) in 1938, who attempts to stave off financial and social ruin by becoming the amanuensis of an aging composer, and the misadventures of Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent), a publisher who in 2012 escapes his creditors only to be entrapped into checking himself into an old age home from which there is no escape.  Cloud Atlas is a great deal more interested in the stories of crusading investigative journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), who lands in hot water when she discovers irregularities at a soon-to-be-opened nuclear plant in 1970s San Francisco, of "fabricant" Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), a genetically engineered fast food server in 22nd century Seoul who learns to think independently and becomes a figurehead for the anti-corporate revolution, and of post-industrial tribesman Zachry (Tom Hanks) who, hundreds of years in the future, helps Meronym, one of the few humans who still remembers history and technology (Berry again), to reach a communications outpost from which she hopes to signal Earth's long-lost colonies.
  
  Even here, however, the Wachowskis and Tykwer none-too-subtly skew Mitchell's original stories more strongly towards the adventurous and the action-filled.  The Sonmi story is particularly prone to this, as if the directors saw the production designers' sketches of a squalid, neon-lit urban jungle and couldn't help but reach for a sub-Blade Runner type of story, but in the Zachry plot as well there is a tendency to lose sight of the story's center--which is Zachry's struggle with his evil urges, whom he anthropomorphizes as a devil figure he calls Old Georgie (Hugo Weaving)--and instead to glorify martial ability, so that when Zachry fails to heed a warning from Sonmi (whom he reverse as a goddess) not to kill a helpless enemy, that moment, which in the novel is a failing that haunts him for the rest of his life, is quickly forgotten as he and Meronym join forces to fight off other marauders.  Even in the moments--such as most of the Luisa Rey strand--in which Cloud Atlas hews to the events of the novel and resists the urge to embroider or intensify them, it loses sight of Mitchell's playfulness, his quite deliberately tongue-in-cheek use of genre.  Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a heartfelt novel, but not an earnest one.  The different tropes of genre that it employs in each of its narratives--and which it calls attention to by having each of its protagonists consume the previous narrative as a piece of fiction, a device that the movie employs only haphazardly and with little emphasis--have a distancing, skeptical affect that Cloud Atlas the movie lacks, and which in turn makes its message--about the universality of both suffering and kindness--come off as trite instead of meaningful.  Similarly, the choice to hammer in and literalize Mitchell's theme of reincarnation and repetition by having the same actors recur, sometimes crossing race and gender lines, in different plot strands runs the gamut from distracting--watching the film sometimes feels like a scavenger hunt, an attempt to spot a familiar actor under tons of makeup--to deeply problematic, in the scenes in the Sonmi segment in which Sturgess, Hanks, and Weaving are made up to look (unconvincingly) Asian.
  
  There are things to watch for in Cloud Atlas, but they are more in the way of moments.  Whishaw shows yet again that he is incapable of delivering a performance that is less than entirely magnetic, managing to make the self-absorbed, self-destructive Frobisher almost compelling despite the film's relative lack of interest in his plotline, and Bae ably conveys Sonmi's transition from naivete to steely resolve, and feels in many ways like the heart of the film.  Broadbent, meanwhile, manages to imbue a character that even in the novel felt the least thought out with humanity, and in his turns in the other plot strands--as a sadistic sea captain, or as Frobisher's employer and eventual nemesis--he is equally compelling and believable.  But for almost every good point in the movie, there is an equally bad one--Hanks is too old to play Zachry, who in the book is an inexperienced young man, even if you accept the film's reconfiguration of his relationship with Meronym as a romance, and though Berry is perfect for Luisa Rey, she's got too little to do as Meronym to be anything more than a font of information with which to torment and confuse Zachry, while other actors, like Weaving or Hugh Grant, are lost beneath bad makeup and even worse accents.  It's hard not to admire the film's scope, and as I've said it is by no means onerous despite its length and multiple storylines, but what it amounts to is a messy, admirable, often very ill-considered failure.
  
  
• Anna Karenina (2012) - The only one of these films whose original novel I haven't read (I know, I know), Anna Karenina is also the first of Joe Wright's lavish, hyper-melodramatic adaptations starring Keira Knightley that I've come to without having read and loved the original work.  Which might be an advantage as far as this film and I are concerned, since I found Wright's Pride and Prejudice and Atonement hopelessly overwrought, and hobbled by a tendency to file away anything spiky or unsentimental about their original works and turn them into a sweeping tearjerker.  For all I know, Wright has played the same trick on Anna Karenina--I somehow doubt Tolstoy's novel would be such an enduring classic if it were merely the tragic romance that Wright makes of it--but even taken as a tragic romance, his version of the story outstays its welcome.  The story of the eponymous heroine's irrational, obsessive love for the dashing but weak-willed cavalry officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who I kept expecting to turn into Tom Hiddleston, perhaps because I've been reading about Hiddleston's turn as a very similar character in the well-received The Deep Blue Sea just recently, and perhaps because Taylor-Johnson's efforts at conveying just the right mix of passion and selfishness falls short of what I know Hiddleston is capable of), to which she loses everything--her family, her place in society, and finally her life--loses steam about halfway into the movie, and by the end of it I felt most interested in, and sympathetic towards, Anna's husband (though I have to say it rather depresses me that we've already reached the point where Jude Law is playing the stolid, unromantic, less attractive corner of the love triangle).  Where Anna's descent into drug-addled neurosis feels inaccessible--it's impossible to sympathize with her all-consuming infatuation with such a callow crumpet as Vronsky--Karenin goes from cold, ineffectual correctness, to injured seething, to transcendent forgiveness, and finally to incomprehension at his wife's determination to destroy herself, and comes away from the film seeming--almost impossibly given that he represents the very patriarchy that has sold Anna like chattel and now expects her to abide by its rules--like its most decent character (in the Anna plotline, anyway; a secondary plot involves Anna's sister-in-law and the man who is in love with her, both of whom are quite positive figures, but which though well done feels, in Wright's version of the story, disconnected from the main plot).  By the film's last quarter, Anna becomes the epitome of a tragic heroine, so reduced as a character that even if I hadn't known about her fast-approaching date with a train, I feel certain I would have expected it, since there's nothing left for her to do but die.
  
  What does work about Anna Karenina is Wright's choice for the film's visuals.  He shoots the film in an old theater, with major scenes taking place framed by the proscenium arch and the footlights, and characters moving from one scene to another by cutting through the backstage and catwalks.  And if Wright's Anna Karenina is a play, it often feels like a musical, with musicians appearing to set the mood (in addition to the omnipresent musical score, which as is typical in Wright films is lush to the point of being overpowering) and characters all-but dancing into and out of their roles--the clerks at Anna's brother Oblonsky's (Matthew Macfayden) place of work, or the servants dressing Anna and other women--like cogs in a well-oiled machine.  Wright's point is no doubt to stress the artificiality of the society in which Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky move, and the theatricality of the film is never so obvious as in those scenes in which the characters attend balls and dance with one another, stressing the carefully laid out steps that proscribe their lives.  But to me the film's overt theatricality also does more than a little to counteract the staleness that tends to afflict period novel adaptations.  It feels like a wink to the audience, an acknowledgment that all this--the costumes, the mannerisms, the social mores--is an affectation not only of its own time period, but one that has been put on to entertain us, the 21st century audience eager for stories about forbidden love and tragic heroines.  Much like Anna's character, however, the theater device loses steam about halfway into the film--after a scene in which Wright manages, quite impressively, to simulate a horse-race on his stage, the film stops stressing the theater set.  Perhaps the idea was to allow that device to recede in order to leave space for the story's grand, tragic ending, but if so this represents Wright putting too much faith in his script and actors' ability to make us care about a rather melodramatic story.  I do plan to read Anna Karenina at some point, and I expect to find it a great deal more subtle and interesting than what Wright has made of it.  I only wish he had had the courage to stick with, and even intensify, his visual device all the way to the film's end--if he wasn't able to make a genuinely worthy adaptation, at least he could have made a truly interesting comment on the kinds of adaptations he's made a career out of.  As it stands, he's done neither.