Game of Thrones, Season 2

By a lot of conventional yardsticks, the second season of Game of Thrones is less successful than its first.  It lacks the commanding, gravitational figure of Ned Stark at its center, and the strong throughline of his investigation into the death of his predecessor as Hand of the King and the maiming of his son.  It's a more diffuse narrative, flitting between an ever-increasing number of locations and characters, and not properly a story at all.  Most of the season is spent laying the groundwork for a single battle in a war in which no side has a particularly strong claim on the audience's sympathies, and that battle turns out to be not only far from decisive, but perhaps not even very important in the grand scheme of things.  And yet it can't be denied that the second season of Game of Thrones is better and more engaging than the first, that over the course of its ten episodes the pull of its narrative, of the various clans warring for control of Westeros and the two forces massing against it in the East and the North, only grows stronger.  That as each episode, and finally the season finale, roll their credits one is increasingly consumed by the desire to know what happens next.

It's that impulse, I think, that is at the heart of Game of Thrones's success, and whose wholehearted embrace in its second season is the main reason that it outstrips its first.  I had an inkling of this already when I read the first book in George R.R. Martin's series, A Game of Thrones.  I disliked the book and was glad to see the end of it, but still when I turned the last page I felt a flicker of the desire to read the next book all the same--not because I thought Martin's prose or his characters would improve on me, but simply to know what was going to happen.  It's a soap opera impulse, a craving for pure, continuous narrative whose purpose is less to arrive at a single, fixed endpoint as it is simply to keep going.  This is not to say that Game of Thrones is a soap in the vein of Heroes, distracting viewers from the paucity of its story by delivering a constant barrage of twists and revelations.  On the contrary, the show is actually at its worst when it attempts these sorts of narrative tricks, handling them in a surprisingly ham-handed fashion--the "discovery," at the end of "The Prince of Winterfell," that the two corpses presented at the end of the previous episode, "A Man Without Honor," are not those of the two youngest Stark brothers, which the audience will surely have assumed anyway; the way that "Blackwater" ends with the question of whether Sansa Stark will accept the deserting Sandor Clegane's offer of escape from King's Landing under his protection, then resolves it in the most anticlimactic fashion in the next episode by cutting to her in the middle of a scene with a completely different topic to show that she hasn't left; worst of all, the way the season finale, "Valar Morghulis," seems to imply that the castle of Winterfell was sacked by twenty fleeing men while a liberating army of 500 stood outside and watched, but which, when one reads about the events of the books, turns out to have been intended as a cliffhanger for next season, which will resolve the mystery of who sacked Winterfell--a mystery so poorly established that most people watching the show without prior knowledge will not even be aware that it exists.

Game of Thrones's soap storylines work when they proceed logically and obviously from what came before, like a train track being laid down one tie after another.  Arguably the most stunning moment of the series, the execution of Ned Stark, is after all effective precisely because it proceeds so logically from what came before it--from Ned's naivete, from the viciousness and desperation of those arrayed against him, and from the sadism of the boy-king Joffrey, who holds Ned's life in his hands.  It's precisely the absence of a surprising, last-minute twist that makes this moment so powerful, allowing it to establish the kind of story that Game of Thrones is telling and the kind of world it is set in--one in which what happens next is interesting not so much because it is surprising, but because there are so many players and moving pieces in the system that, for all that each individual interaction usually proceeds along predictable lines, the cumulative effect is chaotic.

If you approach Game of Thrones as the story of the Starks and their travails, or the story of the war for the Iron Throne, or even the story of how Westeros was attacked by zombies, a lot of it seems baggy and beside the point.  What the first season of the show suggested, however, and the second has cemented, is that Game of Thrones is actually the story of its world, in which all of these stories, and many others, are happening.  By its nature, this is a story without purpose or end, one that can only diffuse rather than converge, which is why the second season often feels like a collection of digressions--Theon's betrayal or Robb and his conquest of Winterfell, Arya's stay at Harrenhall and encounter with the assassin Jaqen H'ghar, Catelyn's decision to send Brienne with Jamie to King's Landing and trade him for Arya and Sansa.  (This, by the way, is the reason that Jon and Daenerys's storylines this season fall so flat--because neither of these characters are suited to soap opera storytelling.  The deposed princess who has great power and the nameless orphan who might the world's last hope belong in purposeful stories with a definite endpoint--the kind that Game of Thrones can't, or at least can't yet, give them.)  When those digressions work, they are worthwhile in their own right--if Game of Thrones is a train ride, it's one best enjoyed for the scenery, not the destination--but the cumulative effect of watching the series not because one hopes to reach an ending, but simply to find out what happens next, is that the entire exercise can start to seem a little weightless.  Yes, season two was very exciting and engaging while we were watching it, but looking back, how much actually happened in it, and how much of that was actually important?

One way of counteracting this weightlessness is to use the show's many diverging and proliferating storylines to illustrate and elaborate its central themes--the corrupting influence of power, the inherent unfairness of a system that gives one group of people absolute power over another, against which the relative benevolence of one or another ruler is insignificant, and the cruel exploitation of women, in particular, in these kinds of hereditary patriarchies.  These are all themes that Game of Thrones hits repeatedly, but by the end of the second season that repetition reveals an uncomfortable truth--that the show doesn't really have much to say about any of these, actually quite self-evident, topics.  After a while, the constant barrage of examples of how it sucks to be a peasant, or a women, or a woman who is a peasant, in a feudal patriarchy, starts to seem less like driving home a point and more like misery porn (which, on this show, is often indistinguishable from regular porn).  The solution would be to focus the show's stories on its disadvantaged and disenfranchised characters, to make them people rather than receptacles for abuse and humiliation, but even when Game of Thrones gestures in this direction, it holds back.  In "The Old Gods and the New," there are two scenes in which child characters are gently rebuked for taking the loyalty of their servants, even under extreme circumstances, for granted.  When Theon takes Winterfell, Bran is shocked that the servant Osha offers Theon her service, despite the fact that Osha is a Wildling who only a few months ago was brought to Winterfell in chains by Bran's brother.  When Sansa exclaims to her handmaiden Shae that she hates Joffrey, Shae cautions her never to assume that a servant can be trusted implicitly.  But both servants do turn out to be loyal, to a self-sacrificing degree.  Osha is gaming Theon, and later prostitutes herself and risks her life in order to get Bran and his younger brother Rickon out of the captured Winterfell.  Shae not only keeps Sansa's thoughts about Joffrey to herself, but later goes to great lengths and almost compromises herself trying to keep the secret that Sansa has begun menstruating and is eligible to marry Joffrey.  For all that it keeps telling us that the game of thrones takes its heaviest toll on those who can't even play it, there is no instance of a servant or peasant character realizing this, or wondering why they should be expected to put themselves out, and even risk their lives, for the sake of the aristocratic main characters.

There's a similar schematic, dehumanizing impulse at work in the show's treatment of its female characters.  Though the second season proliferates these considerably, they eventually come to seem like markers on a spectrum, talking points in an argument that Game of Thrones is having about femininity, rather than people in their own right.  You've got women who step away from femininity entirely, like Brienne, Arya, and Yara; women who are outwardly feminine while rejecting the frivolous pursuits of those other, silly girls, like Talisa; women who, to varying degrees, take advantage of their sexuality in conjunction with other, less traditionally feminine skills, like Ygritte, Osha, Melisandre, and even Shae; and women who exist entirely in the feminine sphere, who operate and draw their power solely from their position as wives and mothers (or as potential wives and mothers).  In theory, such a broad spectrum should be an opening for a wide-ranging and interesting discussion, but as this post argues, many of these characters have suffered a considerable loss of agency in the transition from page to screen that seems aimed at denigrating the last of these groups, and with it, "girly" femininity, without ever stopping to consider how problematic such an approach is.  "Traditional" femininity's most prominent representative in the second season is the increasingly bitter and toxic Cersei, who spends the season's penultimate episode, "Blackwater," getting drunk and cracking jokes about how, if Stannis Baratheon's forces take King's Landing, the women hiding with her in the castle "will be in for a bit of a rape."  Women like Catelyn, who stands as Cersei's opposite in almost every respect, most of all in drawing her power from an almost de-sexualized, matronly demeanor, and Margaery Tyrell, who is only beginning the process of shopping for a good marriage and might have made an interesting third on a triangle whose other points are Cersei and Sansa, are sidelined almost entirely, which results in a season that ends up dividing its female characters into good and bad women, based almost entirely on how feminine and/or sexualized they are.

The only character who escapes this fate is Sansa.  It took me a while to embrace this, but Sansa has emerged as my favorite character of the season, and the only one whose story I felt interested in not because of what was happening in it but because of who it was happening to.  My reticence was rooted in the fact that for a sizable portion of the season it seemed that Sansa's purpose on the show was to suffer beautifully.  Her unattractive qualities from the first season--her childish selfishness, cowardice, and the wholehearted embrace of romantic fairy tales that leads her to ignore the grim reality of the family she's gleefully marrying into--are toned down considerably, and she's subjected to a host of abuses and humiliations--from being forced to view the severed head of her father by the boy who had it removed, to nearly being raped--which she endures with stoic equanimity.  But after a few episodes I realized that I found Sansa not just pitiable, but interesting.  One of the pitfalls of soap opera storytelling is that it flattens its character, who become compelling because of the things they do or that are done to them, not for their personalities, which remain static and obvious.  Sansa, on the other hand, is a deliberately opaque character.  Her life depends on seeming loyal and devoted to Joffrey, but for most of the season it's hard to tell where genuine devotion ends and performance begins.  Is Sansa truly naive, holding on to the princess stories she grew up with in the belief that they reflect reality, or is she playing innocent in order to seem harmless?  Is she consciously manipulating Joffrey, as when she persuades him not to kill a knight who has displeased him in the season premiere, or simply parroting ideas about courtly chivalry that happen to hit home?  Is she truly taking in Cersei's poisonous ideas about what it is to be a woman, or inwardly rejecting them?  Sansa's total commitment to the performance of docile, devoted femininity makes for a fascinating puzzle for the viewers, whose ultimate answer must be that she herself doesn't entirely know the answers.  (Sophie Turner should be commended for committing to that performance as well, only rarely allowing us to see beneath its surface.  It's a choice that makes for an unshowy--and at points almost unsympathetic--turn that might get her overlooked when the season's MVPs are tallied up, but she deserves kudos for her work.)  It also goes some way towards redeeming the season's otherwise schematic treatment of female characters, who on a meta level seem almost to be putting on a pageant for Sansa's benefit, as the only female on the show who hasn't decided what kind of woman she wants to be.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Tyrion.  Despite standing as the second season's closest equivalent to a lead character, Tyrion doesn't escape the flattening effect of soap opera storytelling.  He ostensibly has an arc over the course of the season, proving himself a canny political operator as Hand of the King, developing a taste for politics, and spearheading the defense of King's Landing against Stannis's forces--only to have all his power snatched away by his father and sister when the danger has passed.  The problem is that Game of Thrones is too in love with Tyrion, with his clever quips, sarcasm, and tendency to be the smartest guy in the room (not to mention his propensity for slapping the odious Joffrey).  There's not so much an arc or a progression to Tyrion's political acumen as there is the establishment, already in the season premiere, that he is much smarter and more capable than all the people he's dealing with.  His success feels like a forgone conclusion, which not only invalidates the idea of his having an arc, but makes the rest of the cast--particularly Tywin Lannister, who over the rest of the season is established as a shrewd person who doesn't suffer fools or incompetence--look stupid, both for discounting Tyrion before he becomes Hand, and for dismissing him after King's Landing is saved.

Of course, the reason that Tywin, Cersei, and so many others discount Tyrion is because he's a dwarf, but Game of Thrones's frustrating vagueness in depicting that prejudice undermines what should have been Tyrion's defining character arc--his discovery that all of the prejudices held against him are wrong, and that his realizing this doesn't make the people around him less likely to be prejudice against him.  In the world of Game of Thrones, Tyrion's dwarfism should class him as an un-person, someone who is only allowed to participate in society because he was fortunate enough to have been born to a rich, powerful family.  He should be subject to a constant barrage of abuse, both thoughtless and malicious, but instead almost everyone who meets Tyrion takes his condition entirely in stride.  Compare that absence of overt prejudice to the way that Brienne is casually humiliated by Stark soldiers in the season finale, even though she's a knight and they're common soldiers, just for being a woman.  Or the way that no one on the show is able to say as much as two sentences to or about Varys without making some scandalized, prurient reference to his missing genitals.  For a show whose depictions of misogyny and sexual violence are often justified on the grounds of "realism," this unrealistic absence is baffling, but even worse, it serves to neuter Tyrion's character.  Without a lifetime of overt prejudice to explain Tyrion's self-loathing and feelings of inferiority, we're left with the simple fact that the smartest, most capable character on the show (who is also played by its most charismatic actor) is treated like trash by everyone around him--including characters who are supposed to be smart themselves--and is at best half-hearted in protest of this abuse.  It's not convincing behavior, and it leaves Tyrion himself, and his slow growth towards greater self-esteem, feeling groundless.

Lacking either well-developed themes or--with the exception of Sansa--rounded characters, Game of Thrones falls into the pitfall of soap opera storytelling.  It is enormously, addictively, compulsively watchable, but also easily set aside.  Last night, when I finished watching the season finale, I wanted nothing more than for the story to continue.  Tonight I'm less eager.  Tomorrow I probably won't care.  This isn't a fatal flaw, to be certain--next year, when the third season starts, I'll surely be caught up and compelled to watch yet again.  But it's hard not to feel that Game of Thrones takes itself a little more seriously than is justified by the kind of story it's telling.  This isn't high drama, or a meaningful statement about history, fantasy, or the space between them (or if it the latter, then the statement has been made and is now simply being repeated with minor variations).  It's a story about beautiful, rich people squabbling over something that none of them deserve or could hold on to for very long, and no doubt setting themselves up for years--generations, maybe--of strife, betrayals, short-lived alliances, and strange bedfellows.  In other words, a soap opera.

The Book Migration

Setting up my new apartment is a lengthy process, involving many cycles of shopping, positioning, evaluating, and making lists of what's still missing.  But possibly the most important part--the one without which I couldn't have felt properly moved in--was moving and arranging the books.

The first part took a while to accomplish, spread out over two weeks and several stages, and mostly taking advantage of my brother's limited free time and strong back.  Slowly, The piles of books started accumulating in my new place.

I spent most of yesterday sorting, forming teetering, alphabetized piles.

With more than 30 Discworld books, the letter P is the big winner of this construction project, though M (Miéville, Mitchel, McEwan, McDonald, Morgan), and C (Crowley, Chabon, Angela Carter) weren't far behind.  I, O, and U had only one representative each (The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Morality Play by Barry Unsworth), and poor Q and X are entirely absent.

And the final result:

This is the first time in years that I've been able to see all my books properly organized, instead of shoving them on top and in front of one another.  It makes a nice change.  And yes, your eyes do not deceive you--that's empty shelf space at the bottom.  Something must be done.

(The final count, incidentally, comes to about 600--slightly less than I was expecting, actually.)

Smashed

It seems strange to think that only a few months ago, Smash was being touted as the show that would save network television.  As you'll know even if you haven't been following the show, simply from the tenor of the conversation surrounding it, this has turned out to be most emphatically not the case, but if Smash couldn't be excellent, engaging, fun TV, it has at least proved to be the next best thing--a series whose creators' arrogant certainty that they are crafting a masterpiece is matched only by their inability to grasp just how far the finished product falls from perfection.  Smash doesn't quite reach Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip levels of hubris, but it comes close enough to make one wonder whether that quality is a particular pitfall of the "let's put on a show" genre.

Smash, whose first season came to a close last week, follows the early stages of the production, from inception to previews, of Bombshell, a new Broadway musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe.  Its main characters are writer/composer team Julia Houston and Tom Levitt (Deborah Messing and Christian Borle), director Derek Wills (Jack Davenport),  producer Eileen Rand (Angelica Huston), and the two actresses vying for the role of Marilyn, newcomer Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee) and long-time chorus girl Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty).  The show's flaws have been enumerated too many times in too many places for me to need to go into them in much detail here.  Most of them stem from a crucial disconnect between writers and viewers, an inability to convince us that what we're seeing on screen is what the writers want us to see.  That Julia's marital woes are high drama rather than an insipid, soapy storyline that only distracts from the main event of the musical's production (and along the way seems to find endless ways of castigating Julia for failing as a wife and a mother).  That the character of Ellis (Jaime Cepero), a power-hungry assistant dreaming of a producer's credit, is a true Eve Harrington rather than a talentless troll whose transparent and ineffective conniving the rest of the cast inexplicably tolerates instead of booting Ellis to the curb.  Most of all, that the wan and listless Karen is the true future star while Ivy, whose performances pop off the screen, brimming not just with musical talent but with the energy and emotion that set apart a musical theater performer from just a person who can sing, is the also-ran (Hilty's credibility as a Broadway star, by the way, is well earned--she's had starring roles in several productions, including, just this year, the Marilyn role in a revival of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

Where I demur from the consensus about Smash is the oft-expressed sentiment that the one advantage it has over Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is that its show-within-a-show is convincing as a worthwhile cultural artifact that is actually as good as the characters in the show-without-the-show think it is.  The songs for Bombshell were written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, an actual Broadway songwriting team, and, taken individually, they are indeed very good.  Cleverly written and instantly hummable (I could rattle off a few bars of several right now), they are the only part of Smash that feels as if it was created by people who actually know what they're doing.  Taken as an aggregate, however, a certain obviousness begins to emerge.  The view the songs take of Marilyn is familiar and not a little shopworn.  We've got Marilyn using Hollywood as an escape from her sad life and the love of the crowds as a substitute for the love she never felt in her personal life--the opening number, "Let Me Be Your Star," bids farewell to Norma Jean Baker as Marilyn begs the audience to accept her.  We've got Marilyn as a canny user of sexuality--the brassy "I've Never Met a Wolf Who Didn't Love to Howl" explains how to make the most of your assets--and as a victim of it--singing bitterly in "On Lexington & 52nd Street," Joe DiMaggio expresses his frustration at being married to a sex symbol, as epitomized by the Manhattan street corner on which the famous skirt-billowing scene in The Seven Year Itch takes place.  And, of course, we've got Marilyn, the wounded, emotionally unstable orphan too fragile for this world--the sad ballad "Secondhand White Baby Grand" compares Marilyn to an old piano and reminds us that "something secondhand and broken/Still can make a pretty sound."

Smash tries to echo and modernize these issues in its show-without-the-show storylines--like Marilyn, Ivy has her own problems with pills but is also more aware of their dangers and less willing to be browbeaten into using them, and her relationship with Derek seems at first like a classic casting couch situation but develops into something more complex; Karen, meanwhile, is torn between beckoning stardom and her non-theater-person boyfriend who, though supportive, doesn't understand either her drive or the demands of the life she's chosen.  But, like everything else non-musical about the show, these plotlines are handled in such a trite, unconvincing fashion that it's left to the songs to shoulder the show's entire thematic burden where Marilyn is concerned.  Which leaves Bombshell feeling not only obvious, but shapeless--there's never any sense of the story that Tom and Julia are trying to tell about Marilyn, or any statement they're building up to.  As good as the individual songs are, the musical they belong to quickly comes to seem like a string of Marilyn Monroe clichés.  (For a while I thought this reaction was at least in part the result of not being very versed in Broadway musicals, but here's New York Magazine's theater critic Scott Brown, in an article asking if Broadway songwriting is in crisis, noting that Smash seems to reflect a trend of neglecting the "book"--the storyline and non-musical portions of the play--in favor of the music, and saying that Bombshell has "no discernible book.")

The paucity of Smash's ideas about Marilyn is exposed in the mid-season episode "The Coup."  Following a tepidly received workshop performance, Derek tries to wrest control of the show by suggesting his own spin on the material.  Working with Karen, he stages a number called "Touch Me," which features Karen writhing in a state of near-undress, initially inviting the audience but then menaced by faceless figures who transform the bed she's been dancing on into a cage.  Tom and Julia are appalled by this betrayal of their vision (and by how terrible "Touch Me" is--if the goal was to replicate soulless, personality-free manufactured pop, the job could scarcely have been done better).  What they should be appalled by, however, is that by stripping away their clever lyrics and arrangements, "Touch Me" reveals how many hands their take on Marilyn has already passed through.  More than anything, "Touch Me" is reminiscent--to the point of seeming derivative--of Britney Spears's "Piece of Me" (and even more than that it puts me in mind of this rather brilliant fanvid juxtaposing the song's triumphant lyrics with the not-so-triumphant reality that inspired them).  And Spears is of course a wannabe Madonna, an artist who based a substantial portion of her public image on Marilyn while updating it to reflect modern notions of sexual and economic autonomy--most notably in "Material Girl," whose video famously quotes the staging of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  In other words, Smash's ideas about Marilyn Monroe are less innovative and less original than a 25-year-old pop song.

The "Touch Me" debacle pretends to be a conflict over the soul of the musical.  "Marilyn was gorgeous and wounded," Derek sneeringly tells Tom in a shouting match they have after it, a scene that might have been one of the season's highlights were the issues it raises not so thoroughly squandered. "But she was also a drug-addicted sexual icon the likes of which the world cannot get enough.  She is an insanely provocative and timeless figure.  She is not some sweet little gay male fantasy."  For the rest of the season, Derek insists that he alone has the vision and the guts to turn Bombshell into art, but his decisions--or rather, the one decision to cast Karen, rather than Ivy, as Marilyn--move the show in the direction of safe, inoffensive, crowd-pleasing pap--a sweet little fantasy, and not so much gay as asexual.  It's obviously a mug's game to complain about the inconsistent or nonsensical behavior of Smash characters--we're talking about a series whose cast includes one attempted poisoner, one sexual harasser, and a man who calmly explains to his girlfriend that she should be fine with his infidelity because it's in the service of the show's success, and outside of campy soap opera (which Smash is sadly far too self-serious ever to be), it's never a good sign when writers have to make a substantial portion of their cast into sociopaths in order for the plot to work.  But neutering Bombshell not only destroys the one aspect of Smash that works, it completely defangs the characters' insistence that they are doing something worthwhile, and only further exposes the hollowness of their vision of Marilyn, if someone as bland and unsexy as Karen is good enough to fulfill it.

It was thus with perfect timing that The London Review of Books published, halfway into Smash's season, the text of Jacqueline Rose's lecture "A Rumbling of Things Unknown," which shows that there are still ways of talking about Marilyn Monroe that don't descend into the same familiar clichés.  Rose's piece reveals a Marilyn who is not just intelligent, well-read, and bent on self-improvement--aspects of her personality that Bombshell, at its best, ignores, and at its worst seems almost to be mocking--but politically savvy, able to connect the trap laid for her by Hollywood's attitudes towards gender and sexuality with issues of race and class, and both versed and invested in the political issues of her day.  This is all, perhaps, rather heady stuff for a musical, but it is rather depressing that when Tom and Julia are finally called upon to come up with a final statement on Marilyn, it is almost the exact opposite of Rose's lecture.  In the play's first preview, the audience is dumbfounded by its ending, in which Marilyn kills herself and the curtain falls.  Though the blame for this is placed, rather typically, squarely on Julia's shoulders ("She died!" Julia indignantly responds), this is yet another demonstration of Smash--and Bombshell's--neglect of the book.  Until this point, it had genuinely not occurred to anyone involved with the production that something more meaningful than the simple chronological recitation of the events of Marilyn's life--set to song--was necessary to make a good show.

Tom and Julia hastily cobble together a closing song, "Don't Forget Me," sung by Marilyn to the audience after her death.  It's the only Shaiman & Wittman song that I genuinely dislike, not simply because its lyrics, in contrast to the witty wordplay that characterizes Bombshell's other songs, are obvious and insipid ("But forget every man who I ever met/Because they only live to control/For a kiss they paid a thousand/Yet they paid fifty cents for my soul"), but because it serves to completely depoliticize Marilyn.  "If you see someone lost and in need of a hand/Don't forget me," Karen sings, and later "There are some born to shine who can't do it alone/So protect them and take special care," as if the only problem Marilyn had was that she was in need of a hand, and as if the Hollywood system that both made her and helped to destroy her was guilty of nothing more than not taking enough care.  If Jacqueline Rose shows us a Marilyn whose exploitation she herself can connect to the systematic exploitation of racial minorities and lower classes, Bombshell, in its final statement on her, pretends that Marilyn's own exploitation was the result of bad people, not a system designed to do just that.  (This is somewhat counteracted earlier in the musical, in two songs--"Don't Say Yes Until I've Finished Talking" and "Smash"--in which the Hollywood system's predatory approach towards young actresses is addressed, but as both of these songs are focused on the single figure of Darryl F. Zanuck, and the former even make much of his idiosyncrasies and autocratic temperament, it's hard to see them as extending past that figure, especially in light of "Don't Forget Me.")

Bombshell is not the only worthwhile thing about Smash--Angelica Huston is wonderful as Eileen, it's great that Jack Davenport has not only been given a major role but one that gives him a chance to be snide and sarcastic as often as possible, and the Broadway actors with which the show's cast has been stuffed are uniformly excellent, particularly Borle and Hilty, whose careers, on and off Broadway, will hopefully receive great boosts from the show.  But pretty much everyone on this list is working against their material, struggling to craft believable, complex people despite a writing room that has the impulse towards campy soap but produces po-faced melodrama.  Bombshell was Smash's one chance to work as intended, but it too falls prey to the show's critical disconnect between what shows up on screen and what the writers think they are producing.  "I don't want anyone else to do her," Julia tells her husband in the pilot episode, implying that she has some special insight into Marilyn, some idea of how to do her right that no one else will.  But that idea, as both the platitudes that open that exchange in the pilot ("she wanted so much to love and be loved") and the rest of the season reveal, is entirely conventional and familiar.  Which is the problem with Smash, in a nutshell.

REVIEW: The Avengers

My review of The Avengers appears today at Strange Horizons.  Short version: I enjoyed the film, but not nearly as much as so many other have done, and certainly not to a degree that makes its phenomenal box office success understandable to me.  As impressive as it is in its ability to tie together characters and plot points from five previous movies, I can't help but think that The Avengers also lays out very clearly why the Marvel movie franchise is fundamentally flawed.

Women and Horses

Earlier this spring, HBO cancelled Luck, a show set in and around a struggling Southern California horse-racing track from Deadwood creator David Milch, then several weeks into the filming of its second season, following the death of one the horses used on set.  Two other horses had already died during the filming of Luck's first season, and in the face of intense criticism following those deaths the production promised to tighten its safety protocols.  When these proved ineffective, HBO and Luck's producers jointly came to the decision to pull the plug. 

I never fell in love with Luck, which outside of its tense, riveting horse racing sequences always seemed a little too benign for its subject matter, but I did enjoy the first season and was looking forward to the second.  Nevertheless, the news of the show's cancellation came as a relief to me.  I was deeply troubled when I learned about the first two horse deaths on Luck's set, and the third one left me wondering whether I had any right to continue watching the show.  Much as I liked Luck, it seemed like the height of entitled hedonism to accept and even expect that helpless, innocent creatures would have to die for the sake of my entertainment.  At the time of the cancellation, a lot of people (myself included) assumed that HBO was using the horses' deaths as an excuse to justify cancelling a low-rated and only moderately well-received show, but information that has come to light since then (including HBO's claims about the cost of cancelling the show) suggests that the people who made that decision had qualms similar to mine, and that they truly did put an end to something they loved because it could only live at another creature's expense.

Not long after Luck's cancellation, however, I read the New York Times's profile of safety practices--or rather their absence--in real American racetracks, which result in a rate of death for horses (and of death and catastrophic injury for jockeys) besides which Luck's death count is practically insignificant.  The gap between these two entertainment industries' attitude towards the deaths of horses--a show-stopping calamity on television is just the cost of doing business in horse racing--made me realize just how situational were the ethical qualms that I--and, presumably, executives at HBO and the Luck production--had experienced.  That gap came once again to my mind last week when I read Emily Nussbaum's essay on Game of Thrones in The New Yorker.  Nussbaum, notwithstanding that she has an excellent last name, has for some time been my favorite professional TV reviewer, but the Game of Thrones piece felt a little by the numbers, a little too repetitive of ideas that have already been raised about this much-discussed show.  It was only in her final paragraph that Nussbaum made me sit up and take notice.

As with “True Blood,” the show’s most graphic elements—the cruel ones, the fantasy ones, and the cruel-fantasy ones—speak to female as well as male viewers. (One of the nuttiest quotes I’ve ever read came from Alan Ball, “True Blood” ’s showrunner, who said that a focus group had revealed that men watched his series for the sex and women for the romance. Please.) But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I.-perfect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval. It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, “Game of Thrones” is in a different class from “House of Lies,” “Californication,” and “Entourage.” But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.

The train of thought this observation started on its tracks received a boost several days later from Troy VanDerWerff's AV Club review of the most recent Game of Thrones episode, "The Old Gods and the New."  Discussing a brutal, graphic scene in which the character Sansa Stark (played by Sophie Turner) is separated from her guards by rioters who beat her, tear her clothes, and are about to rape her when she is rescued with murderous efficiency, VanDerWerff notes:

Sophie Turner was most likely 15 when that scene was filmed. 15! I know that’s old enough to know about the ugly things of the world, like sexual violence, but it still horrifies me.

Since its premiere last year, Game of Thrones has come under a lot of fire for its copious use--some might say reliance--on nudity and depictions of sex and sexual violence.  Some of these complaints have obviously been heard and applied to the show's second season--the much-derided "sexposition" has been toned down considerably (I can think of only one scene in the second season that answers the description, a somewhat sickening sequences in the second episode in which the weaselly, self-important Theon monologues to the lovestruck daughter of the captain of the ship carrying him home--whom he obviously holds in something just barely above contempt--as he thrusts into her).  In its place, however, we have copious amounts of "plot-relevant" nudity--the scene in which the priestess Melisandre gives birth to a demon leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination--and sexual violence--two episodes before Sansa's attempted rape, she is humiliated by her fiancé and captor, the psychotic boy-king Joffrey, who orders that she be publicly stripped and beaten in retaliation for her brother's military triumphs against Joffrey's grandfather; later in that same episode, Joffrey orders one of a pair of prostitutes (sent to him by his uncle and fan favorite Tyrion) to viciously beat the other on pain of her own death.

Until now, the terms in which the discussion of nudity and sex on Game of Thrones has been conducted have stressed the "necessity" of these images--were they created simply to titillate and distract the audience from a dry bit of exposition, or to cement the producers' sense that they were creating high, mature art?--and the second season seemingly addresses that concern with a shift in the way it uses sex and sexual violence to advance the plot and our understanding of the characters.  But as Nussbaum and VanDerWerff point out, there is another question that is not adequately served by the argument of "necessity."  Even if it is necessary for the story that a young girl be beaten and nearly raped, is it alright to ask a young actress to simulate that experience?  Why are we, on the one hand, outraged by the deaths of horses on the set of Luck, and on the other, casually accepting of the potential mistreatment of human women on the set of Game of Thrones?

There's a danger of reducing this question to a glib joke, similar to the one that George R.R. Martin himself made when irate fans complained about the end of the second episode of Game of Thrones's first season, in which Sansa's father Ned is forced to kill her dog.  After assuring his readers that the dog wasn't really killed, Martin drily noted that "Rhodri Hosking, the young actor who played the butcher's boy Mycah [who also dies at the end of the episode], was not actually killed either, though oddly, no one seems quite so upset about him."  The issue here isn't that people get more upset about violence when it's directed towards animals than when it is directed towards people (though this is often the case).  No one in the racing industry, after all--or at least not enough people--is getting worked up over dead horses in the same way that Game of Thrones fans became upset over the simulated death of a puppy, or that HBO and the producers of Luck became upset over the real deaths of horses.  The lack of a corresponding outrage on behalf of actresses on Game of Thrones, the fact that, on the contrary, the ubiquity of sexual and sexually violent scenes in cable drama has created a market for attractive young women--historically the most vulnerable and exploited group in show business--who are willing to be stripped and to simulate often humiliating or violent sex on camera, suggests something much more disturbing than that fans of the show don't value the well-being of women as much as they do that of a dog.  It suggests that, just as dead horses are the cost of doing business in the racing industry, traumatized and humiliated actresses are the cost of doing business in cable television.  And it suggests that we, as viewers who enjoy Game of Thrones and excuse its violent sexual content because it is necessary to the story, have accepted and even come to expect that vulnerable young women will be mistreated for the sake of our entertainment.

The two situations are not entirely the same, of course.  Women are not horses.  They will naturally have a range of opinions and reactions to acting in the nude and simulating violent sex, and the actresses who have knowingly chosen to appear in explicit or violent material on a show like Game of Thrones deserve to have their choice respected--even if we question the choices of the people who decide to film such scenes.  The damage caused by a scene like Sansa's simulated assault is ambiguous, determined by personality and circumstances--and in some cases maybe even nonexistent.  We're suffering from a dearth of information from the actresses themselves, about what it's like to actually film these scenes, and what their potentially harmful components are, without which this whole discussion has the potential to be patronizing in the worst possible way.  Still, it bothers me that hardly anyone is asking the question of whether scenes like these are harmful to the actresses performing in them, especially as those actresses are often the ones least in a position to raise the issue in a way that will get it heard and treated seriously.  The Irish actress Nussbaum mentions was free to leave a shoot that she found demeaning, but what did that cost her in terms of money, professional connections, and bad will with the agent and casting director who got her the job?  Sophie Turner may have been consulted with and counseled about her rape scene, but does that mean she didn't feel pressure to accede to it?  Not a lot of people are asking these questions, and with cable television, especially HBO, now firmly ensconced as the standard-bearer--and standard-setter--for quality and high drama on TV, it's long past time that they gained higher prominence.  The cancellation of Luck showed that the cable industry has lines in the sand, ethical boundaries it will not cross.  It's time to find out where more those boundaries lie--where women, and not just horses, are concerned.

Recent Reading Roundup 31

As I recently mentioned, one of the effects of scrambling for homeownership has been that I've had very little headspace for anything else.  It's not just writing that has fallen by the wayside but also reading, and often these days I find myself more contented with some cheesy TV at the end of the day than a good book.  Hopefully that will change in the coming weeks, and I'll soon have more substantial things to write about my reading, but here are the few books that I have managed to read this year.

1. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer - Whenever I chance upon a discussion of Heyer's Regency romances, the impression that forms is of Jane Austen methadone.  This isn't entirely an alluring description--it conjures images of an author who replicates the frothy surface of Austen's novels without dipping into the acid that lies just beneath it.  In my first foray into Heyer's writing late last year, with Cotillion, that is indeed what I found, but Cotillion was also charming, effervescent fun, and its central romance was satisfyingly human and unsentimental, so I marked Heyer as an author worth returning to.  Though it shares some superficial similarities with Cotillion--both novels involve a young woman arriving at the home of her fashionable London relatives, rearranging their lives for the better, and sweeping her dashing cousin off his feet--The Grand Sophy may not have been the ideal next step.  For one thing, the novel is just starting to gear up for its home stretch, as the title character, who has been raised by her rich, eccentric diplomat father to be his hostess and housekeeper and has been shocking her relatives with her strong will and independent habits, starts seriously meddling in her family's affairs and scheming to separate her cousin Charles from the odious, mean-spirited prig he's become engaged to, when an evil Jewish moneylender turns up.  Sophy's confrontation with, and ultimate triumph over, this character (for which read "agglomeration of ugly antisemitic stereotypes"), is one of the most viscerally unpleasant things I've ever read, but even so I might have managed to enjoy the novel around it if were not also at around this point that the novel's central romance begins to teeter.
   
   One of the things I liked about Cotillion was how firmly it established that its central lovers were made better for knowing each other, and that their relationship brought out the best in both of them.  In The Grand Sophy, however, the romance feels very one-sided.  It's pretty obvious why Charles, who in his determination to tamp down the wild tendencies that have led to his father's dissolution is hacking away at everything passionate and feeling in his personality, would fall in love with Sophy, who offers him the opportunity to express his emotions in an environment safely controlled by her iron will.  It's less obvious why Sophy falls in love with Charles, to the extent that it seems more likely that she has manipulated him into falling in love with her in order to further her aims for his family without feeling much beyond fondness towards him.  Which not only makes Sophy's decision to marry Charles at the end of the novel somewhat puzzling, but makes her seem like a rather unpleasant person.  Add to that the fact that Sophy's vaunted independence is little more than independent wealth--she can do and say as she likes because she has full access to her father's bank accounts, and the only scene in which they have no affect on her ability to carry the day is the aforementioned triumph over the evil Jewish moneylender--and the character becomes even more murky.  There is room, of course, for such characters--for an Unlawful Good figure who uses her wealth and wits to direct the lives of everyone around her, and justifies her interference with the persuasive argument that everyone is happier for her meddling--but as the heroine of a romance she makes for a rather unsatisfying fit.  There's enough in The Grand Sophy of the humor and charm that made Cotillion such a fun read that I'm sure I'll give Heyer another shot, but next time I think I'll have to be more careful about which book I choose.


2. Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge - Hardinge's Gullstruck Island was one of my most surprisingly excellent reads of 2011, so I was very pleased when the chance to read something else by her came along.  The sequel to Hardinge's 2005 debut Fly By Night (which I haven't read, but which the narrative helpfully summarizes early in the novel), Twilight Robbery (Fly Trap in the US) sees that novel's heroes, orphan Mosca Mye and con artist Eponymous Clent, trying to flee their troubles through the city of Toll, which has adopted a City and the City-esque separation of its citizens.  In the novel's universe, every hour of the day is consecrated to a certain god, and the people of Toll, including its visitors, are separated according to whether the god they were born under is deemed positive or negative.  The former are allowed to roam the city by day, the latter by night.  As that description suggests, Twilight Robbery, like Gullstruck Island, is a novel whose elaborate setting is rooted in traditions and social conventions, and the novel's plot, which sees Mosca and Eponymous sorted into different sides of the city and then embroiled in a crisis that forces the two sides to work together, examines and dismantles those conventions in a way that is both familiar from Gullstruck and that feels almost unique to Hardinge.  It is, however, a novel that skews somewhat younger than Gullstruck Island, and thus spends a little more time than I cared for establishing that it is, in fact, wrong to make moral judgments about people based on their time of birth.  And though the central villain is an interesting character, the path taken to unmasking them was longer than I would have liked.  By its final quarter, Twilight Robbery begins to flag, one too many plot twists having been piled on a message that has already been firmly established.  There's still a lot here worth reading for, mainly Hardinge's skill at worldbuilding and at crafting characters who are both observant about their world and hopelessly immersed in it, but I think that for the time being I will give the Mosca Mye books a rest, and hope that in her forthcoming Face Like Glass Hardinge will skew a little further towards the maturity that made Gullstruck Island such a revelation.


3. The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers - The thing I love best about the Clarke award is that it points me towards books, like Richard Morgan's Black Man, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, and Marcel Theroux's Far North, that I almost certainly wouldn't have read on my own, and that besides being excellent in their own right shine a light on corners of the genre that I don't tend to explore.  Even in years with an underwhelming shortlist--and though I haven't read the entire shortlist, what I have read leads me to join in the general consensus that this is one of those years--there's at least one such book on the Clarke shortlist, and this year that is The Testament of Jessie Lamb.  It's a book that's generated a lot of debate and dispute, and I'm not sure that I could expand, either in summarizing that debate or in adding my own thoughts to it, on Nic Clarke and Dan Hartland's reviews, though for myself I am inclined to side with Nic in finding Jessie Lamb satisfying and thought-provoking.  The novel takes place in an alternate present in which MDS, a bioengineered disease, has rendered pregnancy fatal.  Jessie Lamb is teenage girl already reeling from her growing awareness of the messiness and complexity of the world around her, and the emergence of MDS only further cements her belief that the world she stands to inherit is hopelessly diseased.  When she learns about the Sleeping Beauty program--young women who are impregnated and placed in comas, which allows them to bring their babies, who will be immune to MDS, to term, even as their own brains liquify--Jessie feels that the best thing she can do with her life is to volunteer for it.  When her father finds out, he locks her up, and Jessie's testament is the memoir she writes during this incarceration, explaining her decision.
   
   What emerges from this memoir--what to my mind is the book's greatest strength and accomplishment--is the twinned and seemingly irreconcilable realization that Jessie is making the decision to become a Sleeping Beauty advisedly and of her own free and unencumbered will, and that she is making it for entirely the wrong reasons.  As Nic writes, Jessie's narrative perfectly captures the self-righteousness of a certain, particularly obnoxious class of teenager, but what underpins it is fear--fear of the world into which she is about to emerge as an independent operator, and fear of the compromises it will demand from her.  Like many teenagers before her, Jessie's response to that fear is to deny the world that has aroused it in her, and the adults who are responsible for it.  MDS gives her the opportunity to take that denial to its furthest, irrevocable extreme.  At the same time, Jessie isn't deluded, insane, or suicidal.  She knows that becoming a Sleeping Beauty will kill her, and unlike many other volunteers she meets she neither wants to die nor craves the attention and adulation that volunteering will grant her and her family.  Over the course of her testament she works through the implications of her choice until all her illusions and fantasies are stripped away, and even in the face of the stark fact that she is volunteering to die her choice remains the same.  It's not an admirable decision--especially as Rogers makes it clear that the Sleeping Beauty program is at least in part a hysterical response to a problem that may soon be solved in less gruesome ways--but it is Jessie's decision.  At the end of the novel, it's impossible not to accept that, and to accept Jessie's right to make it, even as it becomes clear that in a few years' time, if the faint hope held out at the end of the novel for Jessie's survival pans out, she will most likely look back on her testament and shudder.  When I finished Jessie Lamb I felt that it stood neck and neck with Embassytown as my choice for this year's Clarke winner, but the more time has passed, the more interesting and accomplished Rogers's novel has come to seem, and I very much hope to see it take the award next week.


4. Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan - Lanagan's second novel, like her first, is a complicated retelling of a folk tale, this time the story of the selkie, the seal-woman who stays on shore with her male lover so long as he conceals her sealskin from her.  Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island in the US and UK) takes place on a small island community (which gives Lanagan plenty of opportunity for blustery, windswept, seawater-soaked description and fishing-village patois) with a history of taking "sea wives" which has now fallen into myth.  When a woman is born with enough seal heritage to call the sea wives out of their skins, she revives the practice, and the island's community is rocked for generations as its men are placed under the sea wives' spell and its women find themselves displaced.  As the story progresses, it switches between points of view--Misskaella, the witch who avenges herself on a community that mistreated her by exposing its men to the sea wives' enchantment (and growing rich on the money she charges them for her services), a girl whose mother is replaced by a sea wife, a recently engaged young man who comes to the island meaning to sell his parents' house only to fall under a sea wife's spell, and the children of these unions, who are the only ones who may be able to return the community to its rightful footing.  The shifting perspectives help to humanize the story.  Misskaella, who speaks first, is a sympathetic figure for most of her story, terrified by her power and grievously wounded by a community that mocks and discounts her for being unattractive.  Her initial explorations of her power have more to do with wanting to find her own measure of love and companionship than revenge, and the brief taste of them that she gains, only to quickly lose, wounds her deeply.  For the rest of the novel, even as she grows more bitter and as we gain a greater understanding of how her magic destroys her community, it's hard to forget the pain and loss that are at the root of her story.
   
   For all this, however, Sea Hearts doesn't quite manage to escape from the core difficulty of its underlying myth, the opposition it forces between human and seal women.  The characters who speak draw a stark comparison between the fleshy, imperfect, demanding human wives, and the endlessly yielding, accommodating, and of course eerily beautiful sea wives, and though Lanagan complicates that comparison in the sea wives' case, by showing us their sadness at being trapped on land, she can't quite get around the way the land wives seem earthy and mundane by comparison.  When Dominic Mallett, the young man who returns to the island to sell his parents' house, tells us about his fiancée, he describes her as practical, cautious, clever, and the way that she is filtered through the narrative--especially after he meets "his" sea wife, who is of course ethereal and unearthly--makes these qualities seem dull and plodding.
   
   Sea Hearts never resolves this opposition.  It's a novel that begins with Misskaella's resentment of other women--her domineering mother, her thoughtless sisters, and the pretty girls of the village who look down on her for not having a husband--and continues with the land wives' resentment of their seal replacements, but rather than an address these feelings of antagonism, the novel drops them.  There is, in fact, barely any interaction between women after the sea wives arrive--it's their male children who are able to return their mothers to the sea (girls born to human/seal pairings are transformed back into seals as infants, another way in which female relationships are done away with in this novel), and when human women return to the island it's these boys that they interact with.  The only relationship between women is Misskaela's adoption of the mainland girl Trudel, who becomes her apprentice.  But this relationship is perhaps the most underserved of the novel, developing fitfully in the background of other stories despite being quite interesting--far from recapitulating Misskaella's unhappy life, Trudel takes human lovers and has a gaggle of illegitimate children, and seems to have an affectionate if abrasive relationship with them and with her mistress.  All of this, however, is mostly unexplored.  We only find out about Trudel's children long after they're born, are not privy to her choice to take lovers or her feelings about that choice, and learn only a little about her life with Misskaella, and that after the older woman has died.  It's a sour note in a novel that otherwise feels almost perfectly formed, progressing from one narrative voice to another in a way that builds the story and its pace seemingly effortlessly.  And it is also a missed opportunity to have given Sea Hearts its missing component, the voices of women speaking to one another, not just about each other.


5. Rule 34 by Charles Stross - This is only the second Stross novel I've read, and after the tedious, Hugo-nominated Saturn's Children I wasn't exactly eager to give him another try, but some positive responses, and Rule 34's Clarke nomination, convinced me to give it a try.  While I would still qualify Rule 34 as one of the books that weigh down this year's Clarke shortlist, it is a surprisingly enjoyable and at points intriguing read.  Set in Edinburgh in the near future, it parallels the stories of Liz Kavanaugh, a detective who normally investigates internet-related sex crimes but has been attached to the investigation of a bizarre and kinky murder, Anwar Hussein, an ex con trying out get rich schemes who agrees to become the honorary consulate of a just-formed Middle Eastern country, and a nameless fixer for an organized crime cartel who finds his plans in the city constantly waylaid by a series of strange coincidences.  The murder mystery moves at a brisk clip, with the other two characters' stories feeding into it rather quickly, but it soon become clear that neither it nor the characters are Stross's main focus (which isn't porn either, as despite the novel's title internet pornography plays almost no part in the story).  That would be a window on his day after tomorrow future and the role that the internet and constant connectivity play in the smooth running of society, particularly police work.  Liz and her fellow officers use CopSpace, a system that not only records their every interaction with the public to prevent police brutality and corruption, but allows them to crowdsource their investigations and share resources and information quickly and easily.  Stross's ideas about how such a system would work are interesting, but even more so is the way that this new form of policing folds into it the old school attitudes of Liz's older colleagues, neither rejecting their John Wayne fantasies nor embracing them.  This is all very interesting and distracts for a while from the fact that Rule 34's plot is rather perfunctory, to the extent that when, about two thirds into the novel, it becomes blazingly obvious who (or rather, what) the murderer is even as Liz continues to plod towards the solution, one hardly feels annoyed, since the investigation was never the point in the first place.  It does, however, have the effect of making Rule 34 seem rather weightless--neither its character nor its plot linger long in the mind, and without them the novel's worldbuilding feels untethered.  It's a pleasant read, but not one that has stayed with me.


6. MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman - Twenty years after the publication of the first volume of his groundbreaking, seminal Holocaust comic, Art Spiegelman sits down to answer the questions that Maus continues to elicit--why the Holocaust?  Why mice?  Why comics?  MetaMaus is a book-length interview with Spiegelman about these questions, as well as many other aspects of bringing Maus into existence.  It also contains many of the steps on Maus's path to its finished form--studies for the book's art, the original, three-page Maus strip Spiegelman drew in 1972, photographs of Spiegelman's parents, Vladek and Anya, from their pre-war life in Poland and their post-war years in Sweden and the US, and examples of Spiegelman's other work.  Spiegelman emerges from his interview as a thoughtful, deliberate, detail-oriented artist (if also a bit finicky, and something of a control freak where his work is concerned), and the insight he grants us into the process of bringing Maus into being shows how considered every aspect of the book was, which only serves to enrich the final product.  Just as interesting is Spiegelman's discussion of his parents' lives, both before and after the war, and of his relationship with them (I was particularly intrigued by his observation that the choice to write about Vladek's story of survival was driven by circumstances--by the time Spiegelman sat down with his father to learn and record his story in the early 70s, Anya was dead, and had she lived Spiegelman might have preferred to tell her story rather than his father's).  The richness of the material Spiegelman was working with when creating Maus, and his own keen intelligence, make MetaMaus a window not just on a single family's story, or on a single creative process, but on the Holocaust and the way that depictions of it in popular culture have changed and increased in prominence (Spiegelman makes the sadly convincing argument that we've reached the point where Holocaust stories are hopelessly mired in kitsch, which is something I've felt myself for several years), and on the comics scene at the time of Maus's publication and in the present day.  If you've read Maus, MetaMaus is an invaluable accompaniment that only further brings home the depth of Spiegelman's accomplishment, but I think that even those who are unfamiliar with the comic will find a lot worth reading for here--and hopefully a spur to seek out Maus itself.

The Cabin in the Woods

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time you've probably noticed that I don't have much use for spoiler warnings, or for the primacy that spoilers have gained in the discourse about popular culture.  The conversations I want to have, the ones that seem interesting and worth having, are precisely the ones that don't allow for the self-censorship of spoiler mania, and the truth is that I don't believe that a truly worthwhile work is one that can be "spoiled" simply by knowing what happens next.  So when I say that Drew Goddard's horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods (written by Goddard and Joss Whedon), is the sort of film that rewards unspoiled viewing, that probably seems entirely different to viewers who know its secrets, and that may, in fact, only be worth watching if you're ignorant of its central twist, I'm not being entirely complimentary.  Cabin is a funny, clever, well-made film, extremely effective in its scary scenes and an enjoyable viewing experience all around, but it is also rather hollow.  That's a direct result of binding the film's affect so inextricably with its central twist--a choice that is disappointing not only because of what it makes of the film, but because it leaves unexplored all of that twist's more intriguing implications.

Before I get any further I should probably acknowledge that my use of the word "twist" here is somewhat questionable.  Inasmuch as The Cabin in the Woods has a twist, it is not only announced in the film's trailers, but in its opening minutes.  Before we're even introduced to our cabal of doomed young people as they blithely prepare for their fateful trip to the titular cabin--bubbly pre-med student Jules (Anna Hutchinson), her earnest boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), her best friend Dana (Kristen Connolly), Curt's friend Holden (Jesse Williams), who has been invited as a fix-up for Dana, and pothead clown Marty (Fran Kranz)--we meet the people who are planning their cliché-ridden doom, Hadley (Bradley Whitford), Sitterson (Richard Jenkins), and Lin (Amy Acker), who from a hi-tech underground facility are monitoring every centimeter of the cabin and its grounds, the better to usher the campers to their deaths.  Even the purpose of that carefully orchestrated massacre has already been made clear in the film's opening credits, which depict scenes of human sacrifice.  Ten minutes into the film's run, then, the only question that remains--the one whose answer I am calling the film's twist--is really more of a missing puzzle piece: who are these kids being sacrificed to, and why?  Nevertheless, once you know the answer to that question, The Cabin in the Woods becomes a completely different story, and to watch the film knowing that it is that story would, I think, be a supremely unsatisfying experience, because just where you'd expect that story to start is where The Cabin in the Woods chooses to stop.

The film instead puts its eggs in the metafiction basket, revealing that the tropes of American horror films (and of those from other countries, as sites in places like Sweden, Japan, or Spain, where other scenarios are being run, are mentioned) are integral components of the sacrifice ritual.  These tropes are painstakingly recreated by the behind the scenes crew, who tamper not only with the campers' circumstances but with their body chemistry.  Jules has been designated the scenario's bimbo, so Lin has introduced a substance that impairs cognitive function into the dye with which she's recently colored her hair blonde.  Like most of Cabin in the Wood's jokes, however, the film hammers this one in--"dumb blonde, huh?" Hadley says admiringly.  Other jokes, such as Marty's genre-savviness and the frustrations it causes Hadley and Sitterson, or a scene in which Mordecai, the creepy hillbilly who menaces the campers on their way to the cabin, calls the control room to deliver overheated, foreboding oratory only to complain because he's been placed on speakerphone, are initially quite funny but go on for too long, while others take forever to build up--throughout the film the bunker crew refer to Dana as The Virgin even though we know she's had an affair with one of her professors--only to deliver a faint payoff--"We work with what we're given" is Sigourney Weaver's senior director's response to Dana's wordless query at her designation.  In the aggregate, The Cabin in the Woods is a funny film, but its individual jokes are strained, trying too hard to make up for the absence of truly excellent wit.  Though a few come close (the speakerphone scene is my favorite) there isn't a single gag that truly lingers and elicits laughter on the way out of the movie theater.

Even more frustrating is the way the film points out the shallowness of horror tropes, but refuses to replace them with anything deeper.  The five campers have been designated with roles that both correspond to character types found in horror films and are, in the film's universe, components of the ritual.  The more we see of the kids, however, the less those roles seem to suit them.  Dana and Jules have been dubbed, respectively, the Virgin and the Whore, but so far as we can tell both girls are sexually active and neither is very promiscuous--they could just as easily have been given each other's parts.  By the same token, Curt is the Athlete and Holden is the Scholar, even though Curt, as well as being an athelete, is a sociology major on a full academic scholarship, and Holden, as well as being a scholar, is the new star of the football team.  This, however, is as far as the film's characterization goes--it establishes that its characters are not the reductive stereotypes to which they've been assigned, but it tells us nothing about who they are, and doesn't even attempt to make actual people out of them.  It even seems pleased to make use of those stereotypes when they suit its purposes--Marty fits his role, the Fool, to a T, both in the sense that he is a buffoon and in the sense that he sees more than the others, noticing the joints and seams in the scenario and finding his way backstage.

"She's got so much heart," Hadley says of Dana as he watches her struggle for her life against the monsters he's unleashed on her, explaining why, despite the jaded cynicism he's evinced towards his awful job since the beginning of the film, he finds himself rooting for her.  This, however, feels like the film telling us how we should feel rather than an accurate description of Dana, who though suitably appealing does little to set herself apart from the million Final Girls who have come before her.  Inasmuch as she has heart, it's because her role--her role in The Cabin in the Woods, that is, not the scenario-within-the-film--requires her to.  The film may very well be commenting on this fact--Hadley's moment of sentiment is interrupted and replaced by his typical cynicism when his colleagues arrive with alcohol to celebrate the sacrifice's success--but that still leaves us with a protagonist who can't manage to escape or transcend her type despite being in a story that is all about pointing out that that type exists.

The problem, I think, is that Dana shouldn't be the protagonist, and The Cabin in the Woods comes close to reaching this conclusion itself before shaking it off and settling into a story that, for all its quirks, runs along very familiar grooves.  In the first half of the film, we can't help but root for the campers and feel anger towards the bunker crew.  Knowing that someone within the story--someone not monstrous but ordinary and familiar--is orchestrating the kids' gruesome deaths gives those deaths an extra, fresh layer of horror that cuts through the hoariness of the story, and makes the backstage characters' jadedness, and even glee, at their actions seem terribly cruel.  Around the time that Dana and Marty find their way into the bunker, however, we get our missing puzzle piece and learn the reason that they and their friends are being sacrificed.  Which turns out to be the reason for every human sacrifice--to appease the gods and prevent the end of the world.  All over the world facilities like the one we've been watching have been reenacting rituals from their cultures, trying to stave off the Old Ones' awakening, but this year all but the American scenario have failed--the fate of the world depends on Marty and Dana dying (actually just Marty, since as the Virgin Dana may survive so long as she suffers).

Since we're constantly ahead of the campers in our understanding of their story--first knowing that they are in a horror story scenario, then realizing the reason for that scenario before they do--it's hard not to feel unreasonably angry at Marty and Dana's determination to survive, and at the things they do to achieve that end.  When Dana releases all of the nightmare creatures stored in the bunker (a component of the ritual is that each group of campers chooses, through its actions, which monster will hunt them, and there is a wide selection to choose from) and sics them on the staff, the result is one of the film's most bloody, and weirdly exhilarating, sequences, as wave after wave of increasingly bizarre monsters are unleashed to deal imaginative deaths to office workers, maintenance personnel, and HR bigwigs.  But knowing what we do, it's also an almost villainous act--Dana's actions not only lead to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unnecessary deaths, they also hasten the end of the world.

There is, yet again, a sense that The Cabin in the Woods is aware of this, and that if only the film had leaned a little bit further into this reading the result might have a much more interesting story.  After all, it's almost possible to read the film as Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin's story, a horror narrative of a different but no less compelling type.  The speakerphone scene is played for laughs, but Mordecai's dire warnings of looming disaster are aimed as much at his colleagues as they are at the campers, and they go unheeded.  The backstage plot could have been a horror story about hubris, about the arrogance of people whose power over the circumstances of other people's lives has blinded them to their own vulnerability and lack of control.  In broad strokes, this is what happens, but the final act of the film is too brisk, too preoccupied with inventive slaughter, and still too invested in Dana and Marty as protagonists while relegating Hadley, Sitterson, and Lin to comic relief (and then canon fodder) to work as their story.  Though interesting hints are raised that something more is going on behind the scenes--several near-misses before the true disaster are blamed on orders from upstairs, and someone appears to be sabotaging at least the American scenario and possibly the others as well--and though a few lines towards the end of the film, and Marty and Dana's uncaring nihilism when the purpose of the sacrifice required of them finally sinks in, suggest a theme of inter-generational strife, neither of these ideas are developed.  If The Cabin in the Woods is intended as a story in which the scenario operators are the protagonists and Marty and Dana are the villains, it is a rather shapeless one.  And more's the pity, as far as I'm concerned.

There is, quite obviously, a very large component here of blaming The Cabin in the Woods for not being the film I wanted it to be.  Goddard and Whedon set out to make a metafictional horror comedy that comments on the genre's tropes by employing them, and in this they succeeded.  (It should also be said that I might have been more appreciative of this success as its own accomplishment if I were a bigger fan of horror films.)  Much as I try to stop myself from chiding them for being short on ambition, though, I can't help but dwell on how much potential lay in their premise--a secret organization dedicated to defending the earth from ancient, evil gods with a menagerie of magical nightmare creatures at their disposal, who lure a bunch of kids to a secluded location to become part of their sacrifice ritual only for the kids to turn the tables, and the aforementioned menagerie of monsters, on them.  Once you know The Cabin in the Woods's twist it's impossible not to think of the film like this, and to have used this rich vein of story for little more than a metafictional gag seems like a criminal waste.  I wanted more time in the facility, more interactions between the campers and the bunker crew, more information about the organization running this show, more questioning of Marty and Dana's choices.  (Of course, maybe I'm only saying this because "underground facility that is also a wacky, surreal workplace and has become overrun by horrors while a menacing female voice booms on the PA" puts me in mind of Portal, which does a better job of blending humor and menace than The Cabin in the Woods and even feels like a more compelling story.)  The Cabin in the Woods is a funny, clever film, but it isn't nearly funny enough, or nearly clever enough, to make up for the loss of that story.

Homeowner

In case you were wondering what the recent dearth of posts was down to.  Of course, now that mere trivialities such as ownership and mortgages have been dealt with, it's time to scale the peaks of renovating, decorating, moving...

The Hunger Games

To get the boring stuff out of the way first: The Huger Games is a good movie.  Tense, fast-paced, and riveting, its nearly two and a half hour running time passes effortlessly and with a white-knuckle intensity that leaves one feeling almost breathless when the credits roll.  Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Katniss Everdeen, the girl forced to compete for her life in a gladiatorial contest with twenty three other children, including one who is in love with her, crafting a character who is both heroic and overwhelmed, savvy and naive.  The film's world, a future America called Panem in which a hedonistic, wealthy capitol lords over the dirt poor districts that produce its food, goods, and energy, is a perfect blend of the familiar, the futuristic, and the backwards--Katniss's home, district 12, looks and feels in many ways like a Depression-era mining town, but with enough touches or modernity to make it believable as a backwater of a futuristic empire, and the capitol is opulent in ways that are both enticing and strange.  A strong cast, with standout performances from Woody Harrelson as Katniss's alcoholic mentor Haymitch and Elizabeth Banks as the vapid but strangely affectionate capitol representative Effie, help to bring that world to life.  It is, in short, an excellent evening's entertainment.

Now to the more interesting discussion: I watched The Hunger Games with my brother, who hasn't read Suzanne Collins's book, and where I found the film excellent he was sorely disappointed.  Katniss had it too easy, he complained, the plot never forcing her to compromise herself in order to survive, and never asking her to kill anyone who hasn't been heavily signposted as evil (and even then, quite rarely).  This is, of course, exactly the complaint I made after reading the book, and the film indeed does nothing to address it.  On the contrary, it plays up the bloodlust of "Career" tribute Cato (Alexander Ludwig), who has been training for the games since childhood and volunteered for them rather than being chosen in a lottery like the other contestants, and the sweet innocence of district 11 tribute Rue (Amandla Stenberg), whom Katniss adopts as a surrogate for the beloved younger sister whose place she took in the games, and whose death justifies Katniss's first kill.  The sequence in which Katniss first bonds with Rue, then avenges and mourns her death, which concludes with her laying out Rue's body and strewing it with flowers, is one of the weakest in the film, because so blatantly--and insultingly--manipulative.  (Also, the fact that both Rue and her fellow district 11 tribute, who later saves Katniss's life in Rue's honor and is then killed by Cato, are black while Katniss is white adds an extra layer of discomfort to this subplot.)

Having read the book, however, and having learned to expect a certain slavish fidelity whenever Hollywood tries to leverage a popular book's fanbase into a new blockbuster film series, I went into The Hunger Games expecting it to repeat the book's manipulations.  Which left me more able to appreciate the ways in which the film does deviate from the book, and address--if incompletely--some of its problems.  First and foremost, the film is forced to lose Katniss's first person narrative, which some fans might view as an impediment but is, to my mind, all to the good.  First person narratives are fashionable in YA right now (I've even heard some YA authors complain that they've had trouble selling books in the third person), but in a novel as rooted in complex, painful history as The Hunger Games, the narrator is often drowned out by the infodumps they are required to deliver.  The film lets Katniss breathe, moving through her world as someone who already knows it while people around her--mainly the games' administrators and commentators--explain its rules to the audience.  An even bigger problem with Katniss's voice is that Collins presents her as a blunt, uncomplicated person who is uncomfortable with her own emotions and has trouble understanding others', then uses her as our viewpoint on a world whose inhabitants are a great deal more subtle and sophisticated.  Another author could have shown us things through Katniss's eyes that Katniss misses or misconstrues, but Collins doesn't seem to have been up to the task.  Instead, she endows Katniss with a selective knowingness that seems to have more to do with the demands of the plot than with the character's organic growth.  Katniss is oblivious one moment, and psychologically astute the next, with no discernible reason for her shifts between the two states.

By stepping out of Katniss's limited perspective, and even depicting scenes in which she is not present, the film is able to preserve Katnis's naiveté while showing us the more complex world that she is only beginning to discover.  Even better, it allows her to grow and learn from her experiences in the capitol.  When Katniss is first selected for the games, she is combative and headstrong, because those are the skills that have served her well as her family's breadwinner.  Both Haymitch and her stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) explain to her that winning the games is less a matter of martial skill and more of being able to win over an audience, and over the course of the film we see Katniss slowly learn, and then master, that skill.  She goes from hanging back from the crowd when she and fellow district 12 tribute Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) arrive in the capitol, to gingerly courting the audience by showing off her dress and talking about her sister in a pre-game interview, to gamely parroting the party line in a post-game interview, playing the role of star-crossed lover, through which she and Peeta were able to win the game jointly, to the hilt.

Another advantage that stepping away from Katniss's point of view confers on the film is that it forces the filmmakers to play up the book's most interesting aspect, its take on the games as reality TV taken to its illogical conclusion.  So much of the details of the film's plot are explained to us through the interviews and commentary that are being broadcast across Panem that we become viewers of the Hunger Games, which, through those scenes of commentary, emerge less as Katniss and Peeta's traumatic, life-changing experience and more as a longstanding sporting tradition, in which the current batch of tributes are but the latest participants.  References to previous games and victories, and comparisons of the events in the current games with those of previous years, not only have the effect of making the film's world seem more real and more layered, but reinforce the sense that the games are entertainment, and that the high stakes that the characters feel are nothing but an evening's amusement to those watching them.

It is perhaps for this reason that the one place in which moving away from Katniss's point of view hobbles the film is the love story between her and Peeta.  In the book, Katniss is thrown not only by her own confused feelings but by the fact that her life depends on being able to successfully perform infatuation, but the film doesn't bring across the complexity of her feelings.  Her romance with Peeta in the games arena feels rushed and unconvincing, and though this is at least in part a problem with the transition from page to screen--Peeta is probably the most shortchanged of the film's major characters--given the importance of performance, and especially the performance of romance, to the story, this failing can't help but reflect on The Hunger Games as a whole.  It's possible that the film intends for us to conclude that Katniss and Peeta's romance is purely a play for the audience's sympathy, though this is to simplify the book's version of the relationship quite considerably.  What I think, however, is that the film actually expects us to think the opposite, and take the romance as wholly genuine.  And therein lies the problem, as a story that emphasizes the falseness of everything that Katniss does and says expects us to accpet unquestioningly that this one behavior is genuine.

This, even more than the manipulative way in which it guides Katniss through the games without compromising her, is the core problem of The Hunger Games, book and film--and both are rooted in the same unwillingness on Collins's part to take real risks with her characters or her story.  The film presents us with a scenario whose artificiality it trumpets at every turn, and then expects us to selectively accept parts of that scenario as genuine.  Nor is this expectation of selective credulity limited to the love story between Katniss and Peeta.  In the film, as in the book, Katniss is the heavy favorite to win the games, both among the people who know her and the ones she meets in the capitol.  In the book, this feels like the natural conclusion to be drawn given Katniss's courage and skills (and, of course, the fact that she is the protagonist), but what the film emphasizes is that, as far as the characters in the story are concerned, the reason that Katniss is tipped to win is the fact that she's captured the public imagination--by volunteering to take her sister's place she's put herself at the center of a heroic narrative, and the people watching at home want that narrative to end satisfyingly.  One of the most interesting deviations the film makes from the book is Cato's final scene.  Where in the book he's triumphant all the way to the moment that Katniss vanquishes him, in the film he's despairing.  "I'm already dead," he says.  "I didn't realize it at first but now I do."  It's a puzzling line--Cato is close to winning to game--until one reads it as Cato's realization that, like so many reality contestants before him, he's been cast as the story's villain, someone the audience enjoys but doesn't want to see win.  And if Cato's villainy is, at least in part, a story imposed upon him, what does that say about Katniss's heroism?

It's a question that the film doesn't seem interested in addressing.  Much like her romance with Peeta, Katniss's heroism is something it expects us to accept as genuine, even though both are more complicated.  What's missing here, I think--what could have defused the sense that The Hunger Games is trying to have its cake and eat it too, to decry the violence and artificiality of the games, but also to revel in them as a meaningful contest of skill and courage--was some sense of the games' audience.  Not the people who manage the games, nor the ones, like Katniss's friends and family, who have a direct stake in them, but the ones who consume them as entertainment, for whom the story of Peeta and Katniss's doomed love and triumph against the odds is the best show on TV.  The equivalent, in the other words, of the bored security guards following the story in The Truman Show.  The bread and circuses reference in Panem's name almost requires that such people exist, but we never see them.  Instead, the people of the districts watch the games in solemn silence (giving way to riots in district 11 after Rue's death) while in the capitol they are a cause for celebration, which among other things feels unrealistically stark--surely there would be people in the capitol who recognize the games' barbarism, and people in the districts who enjoy rooting for their favorites and against the districts they dislike.  To show us such an audience would have been to make it clear that the games are a show, and that their artificiality infects everything that occurs in and around them--Peeta and Katniss's love story, and Katniss's heroism, included.  But this, I think, would have been a great deal more cynical than the film is willing to be, and the fans are willing to tolerate.

In the end, though it addresses many of my problems with the book, and though it is such a massively entertaining film, The Hunger Games can't--or possibly won't--escape the hollowness at the center of its original.  As Hollywood's looting of geek culture becomes ever more frenzied, I find myself repeatedly falling into the trap of thinking that a new take on an interesting but flawed work might chip away at those flaws and bring to the surface what was interesting and worthwhile.  What I keep bumping up against is the fact that in the new world of book-to-film adaptations, the ones looking to court a preexisting audience that numbers in the millions, fidelity to the source material is, for better and worse, the highest virtue.  The Hunger Games could, and should, have been a meaty, thought-provoking film, but only by stepping away from its source.  By remaining faithful to the book, the film is merely a very good piece of entertainment.  That's by no means a small accomplishment, but it's hard to watch the film, enjoyable as it is, without lamenting what might have been.