It may at first seem strange to say that Brave is a movie with a lot to prove. After all, Pixar remains one of the few Hollywood studios whose name is a hallmark of quality, and it closed out the last decade with the one-two-three punch of Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3, a trio of films so sublime and so perfectly formed that in their wake an aura of infallibility seemed to attach itself to the studio. Even if that aura was tarnished by the misstep that was last year's Cars 2--the first Pixar film to be critically ignored and shut out of the Best Animated Film Oscar category since its creation--there's no denying that, going by the numbers, Pixar is the most consistently excellent studio in Hollywood. Of course, another way of putting it is that after Toy Story 3, there was nowhere for Pixar to go but downhill, and there are signs of trouble besides Cars 2's tepid reception--the fact that a studio that once prided itself on the originality of its stories will, by next year, have produced two sequels (Toy Story 3, Cars 2) and one prequel (Monsters University, which depicts the college years of the protagonists of Monsters Inc.) in the space of four years is deeply worrying, suggesting that Pixar is falling in line with Hollywood's other juggernaut animation studio, Dreamworks, and with the general Hollywood tendency to eschew originality in favor of multiple sequels, prequels, and reboots, of which the recent The Amazing Spider-Man, a pleasant but entirely unnecessary effort that mostly recapitulates the beats of a movie that came out only ten years ago, is but the latest example. So Brave, as Pixar's first original story in three years, had a lot riding on it. And when you add to that the fact that the film comes as a reply to the voices--raised most loudly in the wake of Up, which opened with the introduction of a magnetic, adventurous female character only to kill her off after ten minutes, but by no means silent before it--pointing out that for all Pixar's originality and flair, the stories it created were predominantly stories about men, the burden of expectations is more than doubled.
Brave opened in the US a few weeks ago, so by now you will have heard that it has not proven equal to this burden. Though by no means a bad film, it lacks the narrative and thematic complexity that have characterized previous Pixar films. It's a simple story--much simpler and more shopworn than "a robot whose job it is to clean up the polluted Earth falls in love with a more advanced robot and follows her into space" or "a grieving, elderly widower decides to honor his wife by flying their house on the adventure they never got to share"--and very simply, and obviously, told--this is the first Pixar film I can remember, for example, that opens with a voiceover in which the main character explains (unnecessarily, for the most part) her world and her situation to the audience. The worldbuilding in most Pixar films is characterized, and elevated, by its attention to idiosyncratic details--Wall-E doesn't just love Earth culture, he loves Hello, Dolly!; Carl wasn't simply inspired by film serials about adventures and derring-do, he was inspired by a particular explorer who, among other things, likes to fit his dogs with collars that allow them to talk. Brave, on the other hand, seems to run more on clichés. You've got your medieval Scottish castle, with a king, a queen, princes and princesses, visiting nobles, servants, warriors--all very well done, but in a very familiar way that the film never bothers to shade in or make its own. The wacky, imaginative detail we've grown accustomed to seems here to have been replaced by funny accents and ethnic stereotypes. (I'm quite curious to see what the reaction to Brave in the UK will be, since for all that it is a very funny film, most of the humor boils down to "look how Scottish these people are!") The result is a world that, for all the obvious effort put into bringing it into vivid, gorgeous life, feels thin, and that thinness extends to the film's plot, which proceeds in rather obvious, clomping beats that seem to squander its running time. There just isn't that much that happens here (especially in comparison with the nimble, fast-moving plots of previous Pixar films), and what happens is, again, obvious and familiar.
The real problem with this sense of familiarity, however, isn't the way it seems to indict Pixar's ability to craft original stories, but in the way it seems to indict Pixar's ability to write stories about women. Far more than its thin world or plot, or its reliance on clichés, what troubles me about Brave is that when, after fifteen years of being synonymous with originality and unbridled imagination, the folks at Pixar finally set out to write a story about a girl, what they came up with is essentially a Disney Princess Movie. Quite literally, at the most basic level--our heroine, Merida, is the first-born daughter of the high king--but also in terms of the story it chooses to tell. Like Belle and Jasmine, Merida's story kicks off because she is being pressured into marriage, but actually craves a life of adventure. And like Mulan, she rejects the feminine pursuits she's been encouraged to master in favor of martial ones--archery, horseback riding, mountain climbing, and the general joy in her physical accomplishments. The film seems to owe a particular debt to Beauty and the Beast, and its climax, in which a transformed character is restored to humanity by Merida's declaration of love, feels almost like a direct quote.
On one level, this is very disappointing. Boys, it seems, can in Pixar's conception lead any sort of story. They can be the caretakers of a small child's imagination, or the architect of a plan to protect their home from invasion, or a doting, over-protective father. They can learn how to be a chef, or go into space, or travel to South America in a flying house. But when asked to tell a story about a girl, the first thing Pixar plumped for is a princess who is told she can't do things because she's a girl. That this turns out not to be true is a heartening message, but it was already a heartening message in 1991, and the fact that we're still concentrating on climbing that hurdle more than twenty years later is dispiriting. Because the fact is that by going back to this well, by bringing up terms like princess, marriage, and the conflict between "masculine" and "feminine" pursuits, what Pixar is saying is that a boy's story can be about anything--adventure, grief, parenthood, longing for companionship, learning to be the best at what you love--but a girl's story is always and forever about being a girl. How much more encouraging would it have been, how much more positive a message would it have sent, if Pixar's first story about a girl were no different from their stories about boys except for the gender of its protagonist?
All that said, there is another way of looking at Brave, and that is that it is trying to examine, and in many ways dismantle, the conventions of the princess movie. For one thing, there's no love interest. One of the main points to be laid against Disney Princesses is that for all that their stories may revolve around self-actualization, they invariably end with romance and marriage. Belle sings about wanting more than a provincial life, but what this ends up meaning is marriage to a rich man. Jasmine isn't even the heroine of her story, and though she protests that she isn't "a prize to be won," narratively that is her role. Even Mulan ends her story not as a general but as a girl receiving a suitor. In Brave, Merida says that she doesn't want to get married, and the film takes her at her word. The three suitors who come to her father's castle to vie for her hand remain minor characters, played mostly for laughs. Instead, the central love story in Brave is between Merida and her mother, Elinor. It's Elinor who pressures Merida to be feminine and ladylike, and Elinor who arranges the contest for Merida's hand, which drives a wedge between mother and daughter. Merida's rebellion leads her to buy a potion that will change Elinor's mind about marrying her daughter off, but instead it transforms Elinor into a bear. In order to reverse the spell Merida must heal her relationship with her mother. Especially when one considers how little space mothers, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, take up in movies, and how particularly in movies about girls--be they Princess Movies, movies about Strong Female Characters, or some cross between the two--mothers are sidelined, either dead or just not very important, this emphasis is refreshing and laudable.
Even more intriguing, however, is the ambivalence with which Brave treats both Elinor's insistence on ladylike decorum, and Merida's preference for martial pursuits. The film showcases the latter, and Merida's joy in them and in her physicality, in its early scenes, and after her transformation Elinor learns to appreciate her daughter's accomplishments in this realm, and even develop a few of her own. But Brave remains skeptical of the value of these accomplishments, especially when it contrasts them with the way Elinor uses her power. Elinor draws her power from femininity--she's the sort of woman who, by behaving like lady, gets to insist that the men around her behave like gentlemen, and as the film opens she's using that power to try to make peace between fractious clans, and needs Merida to follow her lead and use her femininity in order to accomplish this by marrying one of the clans' heirs, a plan to which Merida is resistant. Merida's first attempt to avoid marriage involves showcasing her martial abilities. She chooses archery as the field in which her three suitors will compete for her hand, then beats them all at it. It's a badass moment, but Merida's (and our) triumph are soon punctured by Elinor, who points out that by humiliating her father's guests, Merida is risking war. In one of the film's climactic scenes, we see that Merida has learned this lesson. With the lords she enraged on the brink of fighting, she steps in (in a direct echo of an earlier scene in which Elinor had calmed a rambunctious mob by walking into it while female) and talks them all down, echoing her mother's words about the importance of cooperation and peace.
Brave ends with a reversal of roles--Elinor the bear saves the day through force of arms, by fighting off the demon bear Mordu (another transformed human) who has been terrorizing the kingdom, while Merida saves it through feminine skills, by sewing together the tapestry depicting her family which she had previously slashed, a condition of lifting the spell. So on the surface it seems that we've reached a sort of equilibrium, with both martial and domestic pursuits treated as equally important and potentially life-saving. But this conclusion feels less important, and less central to the film's message, than Merida's choice to adopt her mother's point of view and her methods--to the extent that she very nearly agrees to marry one of her suitors before Elinor stops her--in the earlier scene. Ultimately, Brave comes down on Elinor's side. It may buck the tradition of Disney Princess Movies by not giving Merida a love interest and by ending with her still single, but this is quite obviously a temporary state. Merida and Elinor's compromise is that Merida can choose who she wants to marry and when. She doesn't get to choose not to marry, however, nor does she get to choose to run off and live a life of adventure, or to inherit her father's throne on her own. Merida's fate--which the film and the character are so concerned with--is to become Elinor. One day she will marry a prince or chieftain, become queen, and like her mother, use her influence on her husband and his lords to bring peace and cooperation to their land.
This isn't entirely a bad message, of course. In this era of Strong Female Characters, it's worth saying that being warlike isn't a good thing just because a woman does it, and that being a peacemaker might be better (though I can't help but wish that peacemaking and femininity were not so frequently linked, as they are in Brave). Being a wife, a mother, and a force for peace and civility are all things of value, and this is a point worth making. But one does wonder whether a medieval patriarchy is the best setting in which to show off that value. The fact is, the kind of feminine power that Elinor ascribes to--the angel in the house, the font of decorum and civility, the woman who, by behaving like a lady, forces the men around her to behave like gentlemen--is a pernicious lie, one that remained ubiquitous well into the last century and still has significant power today, and which feminism has worked hard to root out. Elinor may be a diplomat and a leader, but she is those things only because of who her husband is, and she maintains her power only on the sufferance of her husband and his vassals. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful man who won't play the game--or who won't play it with her, since her power derives not simply from being a lady but from being a lady attached to a particular man--to take all her power away. For all their tendency to fall into the valorization of strength of arms, stories about women warriors gained popularity because they offered a corrective to the complementarian fantasy of this sort of feminine power, this strength through weakness, reminding women that power that is your own is better than power that is contingent on the goodwill of men--goodwill that often doesn't exist.
Brave tries to reconcile these two ideas of female power, but the only way it can do this is to posit a fantasy world in which all men are rambunctious but harmless children, who would never lift a hand against a woman and can always be whipped into gentlemanly shape by a stern word and a disappointed expression. That's a dangerous message to send to young girls (and to young boys too), especially coupled as it is with the film's deprecation of martial strength. For all the interesting things Brave tries to do with the Princess Movie template--it is, for one thing, a movie that treats being a princess as a job and castigates its heroine for shirking it--it can't get away from the inherent patriarchal assumptions at that template's core. Or rather, it won't--a lot of the film's problems could have been avoided if its setting were not so famously associated with rampant misogyny, or if its conception of princessing as a job were extended to its obvious conclusion of making Merida the heir to her father's throne, combining his strength of arms with Elinor's desire for peace. The result is a movie that, for all its best efforts to complicate this story, still assumes that a story about a girl is a story about being a girl. What we need, however, are stories about girls and women who can do or be anything, not in spite or because of their gender but regardless of it. This, it seems, is too much even for Pixar's unbridled imagination.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday, July 07, 2012
A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge
It sometimes seems that Frances Hardinge is the best kept secret in YA. People who have read her seem unanimous in the view that Hardinge ought to be a major superstar, whose books are greeted with fanfare and exhilaration. But though she's always well reviewed, Hardinge remains under the radar, particularly among the adult readership of YA fiction who should be embracing the sophistication and complexity of her worlds. Part of the problem, of course, is that Hardinge doesn't write the kind of dystopias that have been the dominant and popular flavor in YA since at least The Hunger Games (and that her novels skew a bit younger than those books, with pre-adolescent protagonists who rarely have romance on their minds). Or at least not blatantly, since nearly all of Hardinge’s novels take place in restrictive societies and focus on the lone voice (usually that of a young girl) that dares to challenge them. It's just that Hardinge’s dystopias are more detailed and a great deal more thought out than the “cheerleaders have been banned and the government controls pets” variety, to the extent that their restrictiveness is often not obvious on a first glance, and her protagonists are not thinly disguised modern teens, but products of their society, steeped in its culture and conventions, and often warped by it in ways that the reader might find alienating.
In my favorite of Hardinge's novels, Gullstruck Island, the restrictive society of the titular island is shaped by nature and history, most obviously by the island’s overactive volcanoes and the different attitudes that its native and colonizing inhabitants have towards them. Her latest novel, A Face Like Glass, takes the opposite approach—its setting, the underground city of Caverna, is manufactured and rooted in artifice, in the various mechanisms that Caverna’s citizens have devised in order to make a sealed underground cave system livable for hundreds of years, and the customs that ensure their continued survival in such an unnatural environment. I confess that I prefer the former approach. The emphasis on natural environment and on the pressures that nature brings to bear on human settlements in Gullstruck Island imposed a degree of realism on the way that Hardinge imagined and built the island’s society that to my mind only enriched the novel, whereas a sealed, artificial environment gives her the freedom to create outlandish customs and policies simply because that’s the way they do it here—as she did in her previous novel, Twilight Robbery, whose heroine visits a city in which people are categorized as good or evil according to which hour of the day they were born in. Happily, A Face Like Glass seems cognizant of this pitfall, and instead of using Caverna's artifice as a crutch it plays it up and makes it the focus of the novel. Caverna's society not only survives through artifice, but has made it the foundation of its culture, a highly stratified society whose upper echelons, the great families who curry for favor and advantage in the court of the Grand Steward, are locked in a subtle dance of manners, etiquette, and subtle insults (behind these fixed smiles and feigned politeness, of course, vicious rumor mills and assassination plots run rampant). But the most profound and dominant expression of Caverna's artificiality are its Faces.
Hardinge has threaded the needle of Neverfell's mingled innocence and knowingness, making her both an outsider to Caverna (quite literally, as her expressive face attests) and someone who is of Caverna, a little too precisely to be entirely believable. Raised in isolation, Neverfell knows virtually nothing about Caverna's running--the better for the characters she meets to explain it to her, and us--but her emotional investment in Caverna's values, and especially its class system--her awe at the Grand Steward and his court, or her thoughtless acceptance of the conditions of the drudges--seem more fitting for a character who has grown up steeped in its society, not locked outside of it, and their purpose is clearly to intensify Neverfell's anger and disillusionment when she gains a fuller understanding of how Caverna works. For a novel that works hard to tell a story about artifice without calling attention to its own artificiality, this is a rare misstep, but it is lessened by the more interesting, and more prominent, aspect of Neverfell's personality, the fact that she is emotionally damaged. It's common for YA protagonists to be unrealistically immune to trauma--consider Harry Potter's mostly sunny personality after years of abuse--but Hardinge quite refreshingly avoids this trope. A lifetime of living underground and in near-isolation has taken its toll on Neverfell, and in ways that we might consider offputting and unattractive--she's prone to sleepwalking, to the malaise that Cavernans call being "out of clock," when their natural cycle and Caverna's artificial one fall out of sync, and to panic attacks from which she recovers "shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings." And, even when judged against normal standards rather than Cavernan ones, her lack of emotional control, her tendency to say and do exactly what she's thinking as she thinks it, are jarring.
A Face Like Glass is a novel about Neverfell's emotional healing, but gratifyingly, that healing doesn't take the form of her becoming more normal or conventional. Several characters try to teach Neverfell emotional control--by which they mean, try to teach her to restrain her impulses and not to show her every emotion on her face. What they mean by this is that Neverfell should feel less--when her friends are concerned that the Grand Steward will see Neverfell's rage over the state of the drudges in her face, they take her to a Facesmith, who tries to reason those feelings away by reassuring her that drudges prefer hard work to luxuries and are incapable of feeling true pain and sadness--but Neverfell, and Hardinge, repeatedly stress the legitimacy of her anger and sadness. The control Neverfell needs to learn isn't of her feelings, but of her environment--how to best express her rage in a way that is productive and helps to alleviate that rage's cause. That control is achieved, in large part, by Neverfell learning to understand herself--to uncover the trauma of her past and the effects that that trauma has had on her--but that understanding doesn't equal complete healing. At the end of the novel, Neverfell still bears the scars of her experiences, but she's learned to live with them, and taken control of her life.
If I'm slightly less enamored of A Face Like Glass than I was of Gullstruck Island, it's because I value Hardinge's worldbuilding skills so highly, and the deliberately constructed world of Caverna--constructed both within the story and without it, as an illustrations of Hardinge's arguments about class--shows them off less impressively than Gullstruck. But Hardinge is more than just a worldbuilder, and in Neverfell and her journey she shows off her tendency towards nuance and complexity as well as in any of her worlds. That same nuance may be what's keeping Hardinge from becoming a superstar--her novels lack an obvious hook and don't lend themselves to a simple selling pitch--but hopefully the work of her ardent fans will help to spread her name, and make her a slightly less well-kept secret.
In my favorite of Hardinge's novels, Gullstruck Island, the restrictive society of the titular island is shaped by nature and history, most obviously by the island’s overactive volcanoes and the different attitudes that its native and colonizing inhabitants have towards them. Her latest novel, A Face Like Glass, takes the opposite approach—its setting, the underground city of Caverna, is manufactured and rooted in artifice, in the various mechanisms that Caverna’s citizens have devised in order to make a sealed underground cave system livable for hundreds of years, and the customs that ensure their continued survival in such an unnatural environment. I confess that I prefer the former approach. The emphasis on natural environment and on the pressures that nature brings to bear on human settlements in Gullstruck Island imposed a degree of realism on the way that Hardinge imagined and built the island’s society that to my mind only enriched the novel, whereas a sealed, artificial environment gives her the freedom to create outlandish customs and policies simply because that’s the way they do it here—as she did in her previous novel, Twilight Robbery, whose heroine visits a city in which people are categorized as good or evil according to which hour of the day they were born in. Happily, A Face Like Glass seems cognizant of this pitfall, and instead of using Caverna's artifice as a crutch it plays it up and makes it the focus of the novel. Caverna's society not only survives through artifice, but has made it the foundation of its culture, a highly stratified society whose upper echelons, the great families who curry for favor and advantage in the court of the Grand Steward, are locked in a subtle dance of manners, etiquette, and subtle insults (behind these fixed smiles and feigned politeness, of course, vicious rumor mills and assassination plots run rampant). But the most profound and dominant expression of Caverna's artificiality are its Faces.
In the overground world, babies that stared up at their mother's faces gradually started to work out that the two bright stars they could see above them were eyes like their own, and that the broad curve was a mouth like theirs. Without even thinking about it, they would curve their mouths the same way, mirroring their mothers' smiles in miniature. When they were frightened or unhappy, they would know at once how to screw up their faces and bawl. Caverna babies never did this, and nobody knew why. They looked solemnly at the face above them, and saw eyes, nose, mouth, but they did not copy its expressions. There was nothing wrong with their features, but somehow one of the tiny silver links in the chain of their souls was missing. They had to be forced to learn expressions one at a time, slowly and painfully, otherwise they remained blank as eggs.These learned expressions, numbered and named--"Face 41, the Badger in Hibernation"; "No. 29 - Uncomprehending Fawn Before Hound"--are a brilliant way of literalizing the fundamental falseness that lies at the core of the kind of royal court that runs Caverna. Caverna's aristocrats wear masks made of their own flesh, schooling their expressions to suit the prevailing mood, the political climate, the day’s fashion, or simply their personal goals. But Hardinge doesn't leave it at that. She works out the implications of a society in which facial expression is artificial in several fascinating ways, from the personal—a character who muses of her lover that "Every one of [his] small, dark smiles she had carefully designed for him at one time or another, to suit his face and his character. And now these smiles had more power over her than anything else in the world."; another who is told that "There is a feeling deep down inside you ... You don't really know what it is, or how to describe it. You do not have the Face for it. And so you scan all the Face catalogues, and ask for Faces every birthday because perhaps, just perhaps, if you had the right Face, you might understand what you are feeling"—to the political. In Caverna, Faces are a hallmark of privilege. The rich and aristocratic can afford the fine schooling in which they are taught a wide variety of Faces, and will even hire Facesmiths to create custom expressions for them, but the poor are raised in crèches where they are taught a minimal range of expression which reflects their place in society—"Erstwhile did not have any angry or annoyed expressions. Worker and drudge-class families were never taught such Faces, for it was assumed they did not need them." The limit to their expressiveness also serves as a way of keeping the poor in their place, as a character muses when she observes the crushing, oppressive conditions they live in.
How could the drudges rise up against bullies like the foreman? Rebels needed to look at each other and see their own anger reflected, and know that their feeling was part of a greater tide. But any drudge who glanced at his fellows would see only calm, tame Faces waiting for orders.The speaker here is our heroine, Neverfell, a classic outsider-insider figure who crashes into Caverna's conventions and mores and leaves them in shambles. Found wandering the caves of the cheesemaker hermit Grandible (one of Caverna’s unique qualities, and the source of its wealth, is that among its inhabitants are craftsmen who know how to make True delicacies—"wines that rewrote the subtle book of memory, cheeses that brought visions, spices that sharpened the senses, perfumes that ensnared the mind and balms that slowed ageing to a crawl"; Hardinge therefore has a lot of fun going into the details of Grandible’s arcane and often quite dangerous cheesemaking—his cheeses explode, or give off noxious gasses, when improperly treated—and the hallucinatory, mindblowing effects of his wares), a former courtier whose rejection of corrupting society is signaled by his having only one permanent expression, Neverfell is raised in isolation until the age of thirteen. When a runaway rabbit shows her a passageway out of Grandible's tunnels (a reference that Hardinge doesn't belabor but which is nevertheless obviously on her mind), the curious, impulsive, emotionally volatile Neverfell takes the opportunity to explore a world that she has been desperately aching to see, and immediately finds herself becoming a pawn in Caverna's political games. As Grandible has concealed from Neverfell, but as we could easily have guessed (even without reading the book's back cover) , Neverfell has the titular face like glass, on which her uncontrollable emotions are immediately apparent. This makes her the object of curiosity and attention. Facesmiths want to study her; the secret police believe that she is a spy from the outside; Caverna's five hundred year old Grand Steward, whose pleasures have desiccated after such a long life, wants to live vicariously through her naked emotional responses; and powerful courtier Maxim Childersin wants her for some unspecified purpose whose darkness the naïve Neverfell, won over by Childersin's kindness, won't consider.
Hardinge has threaded the needle of Neverfell's mingled innocence and knowingness, making her both an outsider to Caverna (quite literally, as her expressive face attests) and someone who is of Caverna, a little too precisely to be entirely believable. Raised in isolation, Neverfell knows virtually nothing about Caverna's running--the better for the characters she meets to explain it to her, and us--but her emotional investment in Caverna's values, and especially its class system--her awe at the Grand Steward and his court, or her thoughtless acceptance of the conditions of the drudges--seem more fitting for a character who has grown up steeped in its society, not locked outside of it, and their purpose is clearly to intensify Neverfell's anger and disillusionment when she gains a fuller understanding of how Caverna works. For a novel that works hard to tell a story about artifice without calling attention to its own artificiality, this is a rare misstep, but it is lessened by the more interesting, and more prominent, aspect of Neverfell's personality, the fact that she is emotionally damaged. It's common for YA protagonists to be unrealistically immune to trauma--consider Harry Potter's mostly sunny personality after years of abuse--but Hardinge quite refreshingly avoids this trope. A lifetime of living underground and in near-isolation has taken its toll on Neverfell, and in ways that we might consider offputting and unattractive--she's prone to sleepwalking, to the malaise that Cavernans call being "out of clock," when their natural cycle and Caverna's artificial one fall out of sync, and to panic attacks from which she recovers "shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings." And, even when judged against normal standards rather than Cavernan ones, her lack of emotional control, her tendency to say and do exactly what she's thinking as she thinks it, are jarring.
A Face Like Glass is a novel about Neverfell's emotional healing, but gratifyingly, that healing doesn't take the form of her becoming more normal or conventional. Several characters try to teach Neverfell emotional control--by which they mean, try to teach her to restrain her impulses and not to show her every emotion on her face. What they mean by this is that Neverfell should feel less--when her friends are concerned that the Grand Steward will see Neverfell's rage over the state of the drudges in her face, they take her to a Facesmith, who tries to reason those feelings away by reassuring her that drudges prefer hard work to luxuries and are incapable of feeling true pain and sadness--but Neverfell, and Hardinge, repeatedly stress the legitimacy of her anger and sadness. The control Neverfell needs to learn isn't of her feelings, but of her environment--how to best express her rage in a way that is productive and helps to alleviate that rage's cause. That control is achieved, in large part, by Neverfell learning to understand herself--to uncover the trauma of her past and the effects that that trauma has had on her--but that understanding doesn't equal complete healing. At the end of the novel, Neverfell still bears the scars of her experiences, but she's learned to live with them, and taken control of her life.
If I'm slightly less enamored of A Face Like Glass than I was of Gullstruck Island, it's because I value Hardinge's worldbuilding skills so highly, and the deliberately constructed world of Caverna--constructed both within the story and without it, as an illustrations of Hardinge's arguments about class--shows them off less impressively than Gullstruck. But Hardinge is more than just a worldbuilder, and in Neverfell and her journey she shows off her tendency towards nuance and complexity as well as in any of her worlds. That same nuance may be what's keeping Hardinge from becoming a superstar--her novels lack an obvious hook and don't lend themselves to a simple selling pitch--but hopefully the work of her ardent fans will help to spread her name, and make her a slightly less well-kept secret.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
The Legend of Korra, Season 1
When I watched the Nickolodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender a few years ago, it was, despite the recommendations of a few rabid fans whose blogs I follow, with no small amount of doubt and trepidation. When I finished the series, having become a rabid fan myself, and tried to pass on that rabid fannishness to some friends, it occurred to me what a tough sell Avatar is. If you're not a fan of animated (and specifically anime or anime-style) shows, or of children's TV, the series could very easily have flown under your radar (in fact it's likely that the title will cause associations with either James Cameron's unrelated movie, or M. Night Shyamalan's by all accounts dreadful live action film adaptation of the show's first season). It certainly doesn't help that the series take a while to get up to speed, and that its first ten episodes are broad and very consciously child-oriented--I wouldn't blame someone from my corner of fandom who watched Avatar's pilot and concluded that the show was Not For Them, not least because I very nearly did the same. Which is a shame, because once you get past the hump of the show's first half season, Avatar develops into a smart, engaging, and most of all fun series that fans of Harry Potter and Farscape will eat up with a spoon. Featuring complex, multifaceted characters and relationships, a deft handling of race and gender, and a riveting adventure plot punctuated by thrilling and stunningly animated action set pieces, it's a series that fans of smart genre fare owe it to themselves to become acquainted with--which is no help, since as we all know, "it's really good" is not a convincing sales pitch. So when Nickolodeon announced that Avatar's creators were returning with a sequel series, The Legend of Korra, I was pleased not just because of the chance to spend more time in the Avatar universe, but because of the opportunity that the show seemed to afford to introduce new fans to that universe on terms they might be more comfortable with. Shorter, better animated, and focusing on older characters than Avatar, The Legend of Korra seemed like the perfect gateway drug for the two shows' universe. I was doubly disappointed, then, by what Korra's first season has delivered--not only a lackluster story that has squandered an intriguing setting and characters, but a tone deaf handling of the show's themes that belies its alleged maturity.
Avatar takes place in a pre-industrial world whose people are divided into four nations according to the four classical elements--earth, fire, air, and water. These elements inform the culture and national character of each of the four nations, and within each nation there are certain individuals, known as "benders," who can manipulate their element--causing fire to shoot from their hands, for example, or forcing the earth to form whatever shape or structure they desire. The spiritual leader of this world, who can control all four elements, is called the Avatar, and they reincarnate into the world again and again, cycling between the four nations. As the series opens, the earth and water nations have for a century been under attack by the fire nation, a war that began with the extermination of the air nation, and with it, it is generally believed, the Avatar. When two water nation children, Katara and Sokka, find the twelve-year-old Avatar, Aang, frozen in a block of ice, they set out together to help Aang master the remaining elements and defeat the fire nation. The Legend of Korra opens 80 years after Aang's victory, and its title character is the Avatar that follows him, a water nation teenager who has already mastered the water, earth, and fire elements, and who in the series premiere sets out to learn airbending from the one remaining master of the form, Aang's son Tenzin. To do this, Korra travels to Tenzin's home of Republic City, established after the war to foster better relations between the four nations.
The Legend of Korra thus, from its outset, sets itself apart from Avatar in several significant ways. Avatar ranged all over its world, and frequently visited urban settings--the fortress of the northern water tribe, the great earth nation cities of Omashu and Ba Sing Se, the fire nation capital. In each of these settings, the color scheme, design sensibility, and functionality were informed by the nation's dominant element. In Republic City, these national boundaries have been dissolved, and the advent of an industrial revolution in the decades separating the two shows means that the bending powers that had ensured the smooth running of cities in Avatar (the public transport system in Omashu is powered by earthbenders, who move stone carriages along tracks that they have carved in the ground) have either been superseded or augmented by technology (one of the characters in Korra, a firebender, gets a job shooting bolts of lightning into the city's power grid). This results in a setting that, though still fantastical in many ways, is mostly reminiscent of a 19th century city--with the same Asian inflections that dominate the design of both series. In Avatar's story, the spirit world played a significant role--through Aang's interactions with his previous incarnations, through his lapses into "the Avatar State," in which the force that runs through the Avatar line manifests through him and performs tremendous feats, and through his forays into the spirit realm, which give the show's animators the opportunity to venture into Miyazaki-esque surrealism. Korra's world and story, on the other hand, are almost purely materialistic. Though Korra is prodigy who has mastered three of the four elements--the ones that Aang struggles with throughout his story--with ease, her skill is purely martial. Throughout most of the first season she has no connection to the spirit realm, her previous incarnations, or the Avatar State.
In other words, with Korra, the two series' creators have switched subgenres, transitioning from epic fantasy to something like steampunk. Along the way, they've also created a story that is more mundane, and less purposeful, than Avatar's. Aang and his cohort were on a quest with a very clearly defined victory condition--defeat the fire nation, end the war, save the world--and intermediate goals--master the remaining three elements (the show's three seasons are titled Water, Earth, and Fire, corresponding to the element that Aang masters in each one). When Korra arrives in Republic City, the stakes of her story are significantly lower--she's eager to learn airbending and frustrated when it doesn't come easily, but it's her own self-image, not the fate of the world, that hangs in the balance. There's so little urgency to her quest, in fact, that she has the time and inclination to join a pro-bending team--Republic City's favorite sport, in which teams of benders use their powers to score points and knock each other off the court--alongside brothers Mako and Bolin. It's only very gradually that the challenges facing her begin to manifest themselves, and only near the end of the season that these challenges take the form of a traditional action-adventure plot.
It should be said that this willingness to change their world and the type of story they tell within it so completely is something that Korra's creators should be lauded for, not least because despite the enormous differences between it and Avatar, there's never any doubt that they take place in the same world, or that the one's setting could, over the course of less than a century, become the other's (this is all the more impressive because Korra avoids leaning on the crutch of the previous series's characters and settings--though one of Avatar's main characters appears as an old woman, and several others appear as forty-year-olds in a flashback, these elements are used minimally, and for the most part it's down to the new characters to establish the show's sense of place and history). In its early episodes, Korra raises several interesting questions about the effect of modernity on the Avatar's place in society: with national identity becoming less important, or even noticeable, in Republic City's melting pot, the Avatar's role as a bridge between the nations appears to have been superseded, and with technology on the ascendant, bending may be losing its importance as well. The season's villain, Amon, adds another wrinkle to this question. The leader of a group calling themselves the Equalists, Amon argues that benders have erected a tyranny over non-benders, and seeks to overturn it through acts of terrorism carried out by an army trained in "chi-blocking"--which temporarily disables bending powers--and through his own ability to permanently remove those powers.
It's in its handling of these questions, and of the stories that emerge from them, that The Legend of Korra falls flat. In its early episodes, the show struggles to integrate the slowly building Equalist menace with the more mundane concerns of Korra's life, and the result is a season that feels alternately fitful and stalled. Though the subplot about the pro-bending tournament ends up feeding into the Equalist story in an interesting way, with a thrilling Equalist attack on the tournament final, it's hard not to feel that earlier episodes focused on Korra's pro-bending training are wasting valuable time. And the equally time-consuming parallel love triangles--between Korra, Mako, and Bolin, and between Mako, Korra, and Mako's girlfriend, the industrialist's daughter Asami--have no such justification for their existence, especially so early in the series's run, when the characters' personalities and relationships are still too faintly drawn to support so much romantic melodrama. Even when the Equalist threat becomes more prominent, however, the story doesn't snap into focus, because Korra herself is so very reactive. Aang defied many of the conventions of child protagonists in fantasy stories--having been raised to the role of Avatar, he had a deep understanding of himself and his responsibilities, but never lost his childish glee and sense of play. Korra is a more familiar, Harry Potter-ish type--affable, thoughtlessly and reflexively heroic whenever she's brought face to face with injustice or suffering, but neither very bright nor terribly inclined to think about the world around her and how she can affect it. She spends too much of the season responding to Amon's obvious taunts and following the lead of the shady Republic City councilman Tarrlok, who uses the Equalist threat to cement his political power, and later as a justification for restricting the rights and movements of non-benders, and even when she takes charge of the fight against Amon, her tactics remain shortsighted and poorly thought out--in the season finale, she decides to seek Amon out despite the fact that he's defeated her in every one of their previous encounters and she has no idea how to turn the tables--and yet rewarded by the narrative--while trying to execute this foolhardy scheme, Korra learns something about Amon that allows her to defeat him.
Korra never manages to integrate its heroine's flaws and strengths into a fully developed character. Whenever it comes close to acknowledging her failings, it falls back on highlighting her heroism, so that Korra's moments of triumph--especially when she finally breaks her spiritual block--feel less like accomplishments and more like writerly fiat. In this, unfortunately, Korra is very much in line with the rest of the series's young cast. Mako is a handsome blank, Bolin never grows beyond the role of comic relief, and only Asami--who is dealt dual blows over the course of the season in the form of the realization that her boyfriend loves someone else and the revelation that her father is in league with Amon, but is able to put her hurt feelings aside in the face of the more urgent threat of the Equalists, becoming the group's best tactician and a formidable fighter despite having no bending powers--is a genuinely interesting character. The adult characters fare somewhat better--Tenzin is a square whose fuddy-duddiness conceals a strong anti-authoritarian streak, which feels entirely right both as a response to Aang's carefree personality and as a reflection of it, and Republic City's police chief, Lin Beifong (daughter of Avatar's Toph) is a tough as nails law and order type whom Korra rubs the wrong way, and whose relationships with Aang and Tenzin are only slowly revealed. This, however, only serves to reinforce the sense that Korra is falling into the same pitfalls as the Harry Potter books, overshadowing its young protagonists with adult supporting characters whose adventures and stories come to seem a great deal more interesting.
Even worse than its problems with pacing and characterization, however, is The Legend of Korra's handling of the Equalist storyline. Simply put, Amon claims that benders are oppressing non-benders, and the show never bothers to tell us whether this is true--doesn't, in fact, seem to think that the answer is very important. When she first arrives in Republic City, Korra encounters a protester decrying bender oppression. "What are you talking about?" she impulsively calls out. "Bending is the coolest thing in the world!" This is such a clueless, privileged bit of point-missing that one can only imagine that an important component of the season will involve showing Korra how the other half lives. For a while, it seems that Mako and Bolin's role will be to do just that--when the brothers, who have been on their own since they were children and even briefly involved with criminal gangs, find themselves short of cash, Korra explains, with mock humility, that she can't help them: "I got nothing. I've never really needed money. I've always had people taking care of me." "Then I wouldn't say you have nothing," is Mako's acidic reply. Very quickly, however, Mako and Bolin's humble origins are forgotten (as is Korra's cluelessness). They become part of Korra's inner circle--which also includes, as befits the Avatar, the movers and shakers of Republic City. Within Korra's limited perspective, non-benders are almost entirely absent, and the ones she encounters are either Amon's henchmen or those who are part of her group and firmly opposed to Amon, such as Asami or Tenzin's wife Pema. In both cases, when these characters address themselves to the issue of tensions between benders and non-benders, it's only to discuss whether they support Amon's tactics--the question of whether his aims or theories are correct is never even raised. Unaffiliated non-benders from outside of Korra's privileged circle are encountered only as undifferentiated masses--the crowds who flock to Amon's rallies, or the protesters rounded up under Tarrlok's reactionary policies.
Even absent the voice of ordinary non-benders, The Legend of Korra paints a disturbing picture of their status in Republic City--a picture that is never fully acknowledged by its characters. Benders seem to hold a disproportionate amount of power and influence in Republic City's government--all of the city's police force are earthbenders, for example, and though it's not clear whether the city's ruling council is also made up solely of benders, when Tarrlok suggests that non-benders be subject to a curfew, only Tenzin objects. In an early episode, Tarrlok sends Korra on a raid on what he terms an Equalist stronghold, but what she finds when she gets there is a dojo in which non-benders are practicing chi-blocking. Given that by this point we've learned that both Mako and Bolin's parents and Asami's mother were killed by firebender criminals, and that when Korra arrives in the city she sees bender gangsters extorting protection money from a shopkeeper, it doesn't seem unreasonable for non-benders to want to learn how to protect themselves, but the possibility that chi-blocking is not an indicator of evil is never entertained by the characters--or indeed the show, which quickly reveals that the people at the dojo are indeed followers of Amon. Most damning is the simple fact that Amon amasses huge numbers of followers--he has hundreds of henchmen to do his bidding, and great crowds cheer for him in the street--a man who has terrorized their city and promised to hunt down and mutilate their fellow citizens. When Korra attacks him, they turn on her, and only reject Amon once they learn that he's lied to them and is, in fact, a bender himself. Unless we assume that the people of Republic City are credulous dupes, we have to choose between two equally unpleasant interpretations: either the city's citizens are evil, eager to turn on those whose powers they resent like a crowd of non-mutants on X-Men, or they have a genuine grievance that only Amon is addressing, and which he has inflamed into hatred and violence. Either way, defeating Amon doesn't even come close to addressing the problem, something that is ignored by the season's triumphant ending.
There's a sense that Korra's writers are aware of the corner they've painted themselves into, because a lot of the season is dedicated to shifting the goalposts of their argument. At the end of the season, Korra is told that Amon "truly believes bending is the source of all evil in the world." This echoes with the fact that, though Amon and his followers frequently use the language of oppression and tyranny when discussing bending, the examples they cite of benders' perfidy are not of prejudice or systemic inequality, but of individual cases of violence. In their final confrontation, Asami's father tells her that she is "aiding the very people who took your mother away," to which she replies "You don't feel love for Mom anymore. You're too full of hatred." In other words, we're in X-Men territory--benders are hated and feared not because of what they've done, but because of what they could do, and resentment of them is a prejudice that blames an entire group for the actions of some of its members. But while the X-Men model works when the superpowered individuals are a beleaguered minority group that has only begun to emerge into the public consciousness, it's less persuasive when they're a well-known phenomenon that has been folded into every aspect of civic and economic life, and whose members hold key positions in society. There needs to be some work explaining how benders, through their own actions or as a result of unrelated social change, have lost the public trust, and this isn't something the show does--the suggestion that technology is edging out the need for bending, for example, is something that is only faintly present in the season's early episodes, and then abandoned entirely, and though instances of bending violence are mentioned repeatedly, at no point do either the show or the characters consider that bending and criminality might have become linked in the public consciousness. Similarly, around the middle of the season the writers try to make up for the absence of any indication that non-benders are oppressed by having Tarrlok initiate his restrictive policies. "You're doing exactly what Amon says is wrong with benders," Korra tells him, implying that until those policies had been enacted, Amon had been wrong. But just as Amon couldn't have done all the damage he did on his own, without supporters and people who believed in what he was preaching, Tarrlok can't criminalize non-benders without at least the acquiescence of the city's power structures and its bender citizens--an acquiescence that, in itself, indicates a problem that the show won't face up to.
It's a sad thing to say, but it feels as if, by aiming at a more mature tone and subject matter than Avatar's, The Legend of Korra throws its inherent immaturity into sharper relief. When it comes down to it, the show isn't willing to say that terrorists are just people like you and me, whose abhorrent actions might be rooted in legitimate grievances, or that large-scale, violent persecution of minority groups can only be achieved through at least the tacit approval of most of the people, not just the ones wearing scary uniforms. You could argue that that's too heavy a moral for a children's show, but another way of looking at it is that for a story aimed at young people to stop short of this moral--to create a world in which people cry persecution merely because they resent the dominant elite, and social unrest is the work of supervillains and their armies of masked henchmen--is to send a very irresponsible message. Supervillains like Amon and Tarrlok would have worked in Avatar (in fact, like Avatar, Korra ends by humanizing both characters and explaining, if not justifying, their choices), which for all its intelligence and complexity never sought to escape the conventions of epic fantasy. Korra's ambitions are higher, but it fails to achieve them and neglects its characters and story to boot. I still recommend Avatar to just about anyone who is looking for a fun, smart, compelling fantasy story they can be sucked into, but if you're looking to get into the Avatar universe, start with the original (and give the first season at least until its midpoint), and leave Korra until you know you've been won over.
Avatar takes place in a pre-industrial world whose people are divided into four nations according to the four classical elements--earth, fire, air, and water. These elements inform the culture and national character of each of the four nations, and within each nation there are certain individuals, known as "benders," who can manipulate their element--causing fire to shoot from their hands, for example, or forcing the earth to form whatever shape or structure they desire. The spiritual leader of this world, who can control all four elements, is called the Avatar, and they reincarnate into the world again and again, cycling between the four nations. As the series opens, the earth and water nations have for a century been under attack by the fire nation, a war that began with the extermination of the air nation, and with it, it is generally believed, the Avatar. When two water nation children, Katara and Sokka, find the twelve-year-old Avatar, Aang, frozen in a block of ice, they set out together to help Aang master the remaining elements and defeat the fire nation. The Legend of Korra opens 80 years after Aang's victory, and its title character is the Avatar that follows him, a water nation teenager who has already mastered the water, earth, and fire elements, and who in the series premiere sets out to learn airbending from the one remaining master of the form, Aang's son Tenzin. To do this, Korra travels to Tenzin's home of Republic City, established after the war to foster better relations between the four nations.
The Legend of Korra thus, from its outset, sets itself apart from Avatar in several significant ways. Avatar ranged all over its world, and frequently visited urban settings--the fortress of the northern water tribe, the great earth nation cities of Omashu and Ba Sing Se, the fire nation capital. In each of these settings, the color scheme, design sensibility, and functionality were informed by the nation's dominant element. In Republic City, these national boundaries have been dissolved, and the advent of an industrial revolution in the decades separating the two shows means that the bending powers that had ensured the smooth running of cities in Avatar (the public transport system in Omashu is powered by earthbenders, who move stone carriages along tracks that they have carved in the ground) have either been superseded or augmented by technology (one of the characters in Korra, a firebender, gets a job shooting bolts of lightning into the city's power grid). This results in a setting that, though still fantastical in many ways, is mostly reminiscent of a 19th century city--with the same Asian inflections that dominate the design of both series. In Avatar's story, the spirit world played a significant role--through Aang's interactions with his previous incarnations, through his lapses into "the Avatar State," in which the force that runs through the Avatar line manifests through him and performs tremendous feats, and through his forays into the spirit realm, which give the show's animators the opportunity to venture into Miyazaki-esque surrealism. Korra's world and story, on the other hand, are almost purely materialistic. Though Korra is prodigy who has mastered three of the four elements--the ones that Aang struggles with throughout his story--with ease, her skill is purely martial. Throughout most of the first season she has no connection to the spirit realm, her previous incarnations, or the Avatar State.
In other words, with Korra, the two series' creators have switched subgenres, transitioning from epic fantasy to something like steampunk. Along the way, they've also created a story that is more mundane, and less purposeful, than Avatar's. Aang and his cohort were on a quest with a very clearly defined victory condition--defeat the fire nation, end the war, save the world--and intermediate goals--master the remaining three elements (the show's three seasons are titled Water, Earth, and Fire, corresponding to the element that Aang masters in each one). When Korra arrives in Republic City, the stakes of her story are significantly lower--she's eager to learn airbending and frustrated when it doesn't come easily, but it's her own self-image, not the fate of the world, that hangs in the balance. There's so little urgency to her quest, in fact, that she has the time and inclination to join a pro-bending team--Republic City's favorite sport, in which teams of benders use their powers to score points and knock each other off the court--alongside brothers Mako and Bolin. It's only very gradually that the challenges facing her begin to manifest themselves, and only near the end of the season that these challenges take the form of a traditional action-adventure plot.
It should be said that this willingness to change their world and the type of story they tell within it so completely is something that Korra's creators should be lauded for, not least because despite the enormous differences between it and Avatar, there's never any doubt that they take place in the same world, or that the one's setting could, over the course of less than a century, become the other's (this is all the more impressive because Korra avoids leaning on the crutch of the previous series's characters and settings--though one of Avatar's main characters appears as an old woman, and several others appear as forty-year-olds in a flashback, these elements are used minimally, and for the most part it's down to the new characters to establish the show's sense of place and history). In its early episodes, Korra raises several interesting questions about the effect of modernity on the Avatar's place in society: with national identity becoming less important, or even noticeable, in Republic City's melting pot, the Avatar's role as a bridge between the nations appears to have been superseded, and with technology on the ascendant, bending may be losing its importance as well. The season's villain, Amon, adds another wrinkle to this question. The leader of a group calling themselves the Equalists, Amon argues that benders have erected a tyranny over non-benders, and seeks to overturn it through acts of terrorism carried out by an army trained in "chi-blocking"--which temporarily disables bending powers--and through his own ability to permanently remove those powers.
It's in its handling of these questions, and of the stories that emerge from them, that The Legend of Korra falls flat. In its early episodes, the show struggles to integrate the slowly building Equalist menace with the more mundane concerns of Korra's life, and the result is a season that feels alternately fitful and stalled. Though the subplot about the pro-bending tournament ends up feeding into the Equalist story in an interesting way, with a thrilling Equalist attack on the tournament final, it's hard not to feel that earlier episodes focused on Korra's pro-bending training are wasting valuable time. And the equally time-consuming parallel love triangles--between Korra, Mako, and Bolin, and between Mako, Korra, and Mako's girlfriend, the industrialist's daughter Asami--have no such justification for their existence, especially so early in the series's run, when the characters' personalities and relationships are still too faintly drawn to support so much romantic melodrama. Even when the Equalist threat becomes more prominent, however, the story doesn't snap into focus, because Korra herself is so very reactive. Aang defied many of the conventions of child protagonists in fantasy stories--having been raised to the role of Avatar, he had a deep understanding of himself and his responsibilities, but never lost his childish glee and sense of play. Korra is a more familiar, Harry Potter-ish type--affable, thoughtlessly and reflexively heroic whenever she's brought face to face with injustice or suffering, but neither very bright nor terribly inclined to think about the world around her and how she can affect it. She spends too much of the season responding to Amon's obvious taunts and following the lead of the shady Republic City councilman Tarrlok, who uses the Equalist threat to cement his political power, and later as a justification for restricting the rights and movements of non-benders, and even when she takes charge of the fight against Amon, her tactics remain shortsighted and poorly thought out--in the season finale, she decides to seek Amon out despite the fact that he's defeated her in every one of their previous encounters and she has no idea how to turn the tables--and yet rewarded by the narrative--while trying to execute this foolhardy scheme, Korra learns something about Amon that allows her to defeat him.
Korra never manages to integrate its heroine's flaws and strengths into a fully developed character. Whenever it comes close to acknowledging her failings, it falls back on highlighting her heroism, so that Korra's moments of triumph--especially when she finally breaks her spiritual block--feel less like accomplishments and more like writerly fiat. In this, unfortunately, Korra is very much in line with the rest of the series's young cast. Mako is a handsome blank, Bolin never grows beyond the role of comic relief, and only Asami--who is dealt dual blows over the course of the season in the form of the realization that her boyfriend loves someone else and the revelation that her father is in league with Amon, but is able to put her hurt feelings aside in the face of the more urgent threat of the Equalists, becoming the group's best tactician and a formidable fighter despite having no bending powers--is a genuinely interesting character. The adult characters fare somewhat better--Tenzin is a square whose fuddy-duddiness conceals a strong anti-authoritarian streak, which feels entirely right both as a response to Aang's carefree personality and as a reflection of it, and Republic City's police chief, Lin Beifong (daughter of Avatar's Toph) is a tough as nails law and order type whom Korra rubs the wrong way, and whose relationships with Aang and Tenzin are only slowly revealed. This, however, only serves to reinforce the sense that Korra is falling into the same pitfalls as the Harry Potter books, overshadowing its young protagonists with adult supporting characters whose adventures and stories come to seem a great deal more interesting.
Even worse than its problems with pacing and characterization, however, is The Legend of Korra's handling of the Equalist storyline. Simply put, Amon claims that benders are oppressing non-benders, and the show never bothers to tell us whether this is true--doesn't, in fact, seem to think that the answer is very important. When she first arrives in Republic City, Korra encounters a protester decrying bender oppression. "What are you talking about?" she impulsively calls out. "Bending is the coolest thing in the world!" This is such a clueless, privileged bit of point-missing that one can only imagine that an important component of the season will involve showing Korra how the other half lives. For a while, it seems that Mako and Bolin's role will be to do just that--when the brothers, who have been on their own since they were children and even briefly involved with criminal gangs, find themselves short of cash, Korra explains, with mock humility, that she can't help them: "I got nothing. I've never really needed money. I've always had people taking care of me." "Then I wouldn't say you have nothing," is Mako's acidic reply. Very quickly, however, Mako and Bolin's humble origins are forgotten (as is Korra's cluelessness). They become part of Korra's inner circle--which also includes, as befits the Avatar, the movers and shakers of Republic City. Within Korra's limited perspective, non-benders are almost entirely absent, and the ones she encounters are either Amon's henchmen or those who are part of her group and firmly opposed to Amon, such as Asami or Tenzin's wife Pema. In both cases, when these characters address themselves to the issue of tensions between benders and non-benders, it's only to discuss whether they support Amon's tactics--the question of whether his aims or theories are correct is never even raised. Unaffiliated non-benders from outside of Korra's privileged circle are encountered only as undifferentiated masses--the crowds who flock to Amon's rallies, or the protesters rounded up under Tarrlok's reactionary policies.
Even absent the voice of ordinary non-benders, The Legend of Korra paints a disturbing picture of their status in Republic City--a picture that is never fully acknowledged by its characters. Benders seem to hold a disproportionate amount of power and influence in Republic City's government--all of the city's police force are earthbenders, for example, and though it's not clear whether the city's ruling council is also made up solely of benders, when Tarrlok suggests that non-benders be subject to a curfew, only Tenzin objects. In an early episode, Tarrlok sends Korra on a raid on what he terms an Equalist stronghold, but what she finds when she gets there is a dojo in which non-benders are practicing chi-blocking. Given that by this point we've learned that both Mako and Bolin's parents and Asami's mother were killed by firebender criminals, and that when Korra arrives in the city she sees bender gangsters extorting protection money from a shopkeeper, it doesn't seem unreasonable for non-benders to want to learn how to protect themselves, but the possibility that chi-blocking is not an indicator of evil is never entertained by the characters--or indeed the show, which quickly reveals that the people at the dojo are indeed followers of Amon. Most damning is the simple fact that Amon amasses huge numbers of followers--he has hundreds of henchmen to do his bidding, and great crowds cheer for him in the street--a man who has terrorized their city and promised to hunt down and mutilate their fellow citizens. When Korra attacks him, they turn on her, and only reject Amon once they learn that he's lied to them and is, in fact, a bender himself. Unless we assume that the people of Republic City are credulous dupes, we have to choose between two equally unpleasant interpretations: either the city's citizens are evil, eager to turn on those whose powers they resent like a crowd of non-mutants on X-Men, or they have a genuine grievance that only Amon is addressing, and which he has inflamed into hatred and violence. Either way, defeating Amon doesn't even come close to addressing the problem, something that is ignored by the season's triumphant ending.
There's a sense that Korra's writers are aware of the corner they've painted themselves into, because a lot of the season is dedicated to shifting the goalposts of their argument. At the end of the season, Korra is told that Amon "truly believes bending is the source of all evil in the world." This echoes with the fact that, though Amon and his followers frequently use the language of oppression and tyranny when discussing bending, the examples they cite of benders' perfidy are not of prejudice or systemic inequality, but of individual cases of violence. In their final confrontation, Asami's father tells her that she is "aiding the very people who took your mother away," to which she replies "You don't feel love for Mom anymore. You're too full of hatred." In other words, we're in X-Men territory--benders are hated and feared not because of what they've done, but because of what they could do, and resentment of them is a prejudice that blames an entire group for the actions of some of its members. But while the X-Men model works when the superpowered individuals are a beleaguered minority group that has only begun to emerge into the public consciousness, it's less persuasive when they're a well-known phenomenon that has been folded into every aspect of civic and economic life, and whose members hold key positions in society. There needs to be some work explaining how benders, through their own actions or as a result of unrelated social change, have lost the public trust, and this isn't something the show does--the suggestion that technology is edging out the need for bending, for example, is something that is only faintly present in the season's early episodes, and then abandoned entirely, and though instances of bending violence are mentioned repeatedly, at no point do either the show or the characters consider that bending and criminality might have become linked in the public consciousness. Similarly, around the middle of the season the writers try to make up for the absence of any indication that non-benders are oppressed by having Tarrlok initiate his restrictive policies. "You're doing exactly what Amon says is wrong with benders," Korra tells him, implying that until those policies had been enacted, Amon had been wrong. But just as Amon couldn't have done all the damage he did on his own, without supporters and people who believed in what he was preaching, Tarrlok can't criminalize non-benders without at least the acquiescence of the city's power structures and its bender citizens--an acquiescence that, in itself, indicates a problem that the show won't face up to.
It's a sad thing to say, but it feels as if, by aiming at a more mature tone and subject matter than Avatar's, The Legend of Korra throws its inherent immaturity into sharper relief. When it comes down to it, the show isn't willing to say that terrorists are just people like you and me, whose abhorrent actions might be rooted in legitimate grievances, or that large-scale, violent persecution of minority groups can only be achieved through at least the tacit approval of most of the people, not just the ones wearing scary uniforms. You could argue that that's too heavy a moral for a children's show, but another way of looking at it is that for a story aimed at young people to stop short of this moral--to create a world in which people cry persecution merely because they resent the dominant elite, and social unrest is the work of supervillains and their armies of masked henchmen--is to send a very irresponsible message. Supervillains like Amon and Tarrlok would have worked in Avatar (in fact, like Avatar, Korra ends by humanizing both characters and explaining, if not justifying, their choices), which for all its intelligence and complexity never sought to escape the conventions of epic fantasy. Korra's ambitions are higher, but it fails to achieve them and neglects its characters and story to boot. I still recommend Avatar to just about anyone who is looking for a fun, smart, compelling fantasy story they can be sucked into, but if you're looking to get into the Avatar universe, start with the original (and give the first season at least until its midpoint), and leave Korra until you know you've been won over.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Prometheus
There are a lot of things I like about online fandom, but one of its traits that gives me pause is the speed with which it forms an overwhelming, inescapable consensus about certain pop culture artifacts. Not to keep beating a much-too-lively horse, but this strikes me as a much bigger problem than the dreaded spoiler. It's one thing to know what's going to happen in a movie, but quite another to know how you're expected to react to those events--to know that The Avengers has been judged the greatest thing since sliced bread, or that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's prequel-but-not-really-but-actually-yes to Alien, is generally reviled. Which is not to say that I disagree with the fannish consensus about Prometheus, which is indeed a terrible, terrible film. But I am a bit troubled by the fact that when I settled into my seat at the movie theater on Saturday, a mere week after Prometheus's release and without having gone to great lengths to take the temperature of fandom regarding it, I already had no expectation of enjoying it. Instead, the question foremost in my mind was, what could possibly be so bad about this movie to justify not just disappointment or negativity, but the palpable sense of outrage that has tinged the conversation surrounding the film?
Having watched the film, I'm not sure I'm much closer to an answer. Again, I think Prometheus is a terrible, terrible film--messily plotted, peopled with unpleasant characters whose decisions one can only explain through a catastrophic combination of idiocy, lack of professionalism, and sociopathic tendencies, and littered with half a dozen themes, character arcs, and throughlines, none of which come to any sort of fruition, and most of which work at cross-purposes to one another. Plus, there are hardly any scary bits, and no action scenes to speak of. I'm just not sure that it's quite so terrible as to justify the opprobrium that has been heaped upon it, to the extent that I'm wondering if there isn't a reverse Avengers affect in play. I liked The Avengers, but couldn't quite understand why it aroused such extreme love in large portions of fandom, and by the same token I'm having trouble understanding why Prometheus, terrible as it is, is the subject of so much outrage. Were people expecting great things from Ridley Scott? The man hasn't directed a truly excellent film since Blade Runner. Are fans upset at the damage that Prometheus does to the Alien franchise? You'd think that a fandom that has managed to reason away of existence both of the Alien vs. Predator movies, Alien: Resurrection, and, in the case of certain purists, Alien3, would have no trouble doing the same to this movie. I can see how science fiction fans, in particular, would be upset at Prometheus's anti-science, anti-evolution bent--the titular ship embarks on its ill-fated journey to the alien moon LV-223 because our heroine, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), believes it to be the home of aliens whom she has dubbed The Engineers, who created the human race. When it's pointed out to her that she hasn't got a shred of scientific proof for this theory, Shaw simply replies that it's what she chooses to believe. Not a very compelling audience identification figure for science fiction fans, then, especially as in her zeal to prove her theory--which is explicitly likened, on several occasions, to religious fervor, not least in the way that several characters restate Shaw's mission as the quest to meet her makers--Shaw smugly ignores every common-sense safety precaution and research protocol, and plays a substantial part in bringing about the disaster that kills almost all of the Prometheus's crew (in fairness, Shaw is matched for recklessness and lack of professionalism by pretty much every other character in the movie, but she's the one we're meant to identify with).
On the other hand, science fiction film and TV have been moving away from scientific rationalism and towards a vague sort of deism for the better part of a decade, and Prometheus's writer, Damon Lindelof, was one of the standard bearers of that movement in his work on Lost, so it can hardly come as a surprise that Prometheus continues that trend, especially as the film's trailers all but laid out its Von Däniken-inspired plot. So while I can see how fans might be disappointed by the film's anti-science stance--which is anyway somewhat ameliorated by the revelation that though Shaw is right about the Engineers, they are far from benevolent parents, and in fact created the organism that would go on to evolve into the original films' Alien in order to unleash it on Earth and destroy their creations--I'm not sure that it on its own justifies the vehemence of the negative reaction the film has received.
But that, I think, is a clue to the answer I'm looking for. Taken on their own, none of Prometheus's flaws, serious as they are, justify the revulsion it's elicited, but taken together? Just about the only thing that works in the film are its visuals, which combine H.R. Giger's by-now iconic and still wonderfully creepy designs for the alien ship with CGI and some clever interface design, creating an environment that is both lived-in and foreign, and culminating in one of the film's two truly successful scenes, in which the android David (Michael Fassbender), activates the control room on the alien ship that Prometheus finds, and becomes the focal point of a symphony of holographic astronavigation information. If you take just about any other approach to the film, though, you'll fall flat. Want to learn where the Aliens came from? Prometheus does contain answers, some silly--the elephant-like head of the alien in the control chair in the original film turns out to have been a helmet concealing a humanoid face, which no one on the Nostromo noticed--and some interesting--after four films in which the Weyland-Yutani Corporation repeatedly tries to get its hands on the Aliens in order to use them as weapons, it's darkly funny to discover that the Engineers created them for precisely the same reason (and it's somewhat to the film's credit that we don't find out the Engineers' reason for wanting us dead is that humanity is just so awful, an infuriatingly supercilious conclusion that too many science fiction stories are happy to plump for--though it seems that Scott's original vision may have included this wrinkle, and that the film can still be read as saying this)--but there's a gap between the film's ending and Alien's beginning that seems hard to bridge, and also unnecessary. Want to find the answer to Shaw's questions about the origin of the human race? The film leaves them, and her subsequent desire to know why the Engineers decided to destroy humanity, completely unresolved. (There's a strong sense that Prometheus's ending is intended to tease a sequel, but given the film's catastrophic box office results that is now mercifully unlikely.)
The film's themes fare no better. Want to find out more about David, whose nature the film repeatedly puzzles over even as it shows him alternately saving the crew's lives and endangering them, for no reason in either case? These contradictory actions, and David's own expressions of mingled fascination and revulsion towards humanity, never cohere into a comprehensible character, and David's motivations, sanity, and personality remain opaque all the way to the credits, in no small part because after playing a major, plot-advancing role in the film's first two acts, he is unceremoniously sidelined for its denouement. Want some more development of the previous films' themes of gender and sex? For the most part, Prometheus leaves this aspect of the franchise alone. The Engineers are all male, but nothing is made of this, and though the film's mid-segment seems suddenly to remember that pregnancy, motherhood, and the appropriation of both by a masculine power structure are important themes in the franchise, its handling of them is at once over the top and perfunctory--no sooner have we learned that Shaw is infertile than she turns out to be pregnant with a proto-alien and is sedated by David (who was creepily sort-of lusting after her in the film's early scenes), then breaks free and seeks her own solution to the problem. This leads to the film's other truly successful scene, in which a naked Shaw locks herself in an auto-surgery unit and watches, fully conscious, as she is cut open and the proto-alien is removed from her body, and then must escape from the unit as it hisses, spits, and tries to capture her. As effective as this scene is, however, it's also terribly broad, taking an already not very subtle theme and intensifying it to the point that it seems almost like self-parody (the same is true of a later scene in which the last surviving Engineer is vanquished by Shaw's now fully-grown "baby"--his death is so blatantly meant to recall sex, or rape, that the power of the correlation is complete denuded). More importantly, it's an interlude that seems almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the film, to the extent that when a bloody and traumatized Shaw wanders into an inhabited part of the ship, she's met only with puzzled stares, because everyone else has been going about their business and hadn't even realized that something bad was happening to her.
In other words, pretty much everyone who watches Prometheus will find something about it that they dislike intensely, to the point that it ruins the film for them, and when those individual dislikes are fed into each other in fandom's crucible, the result is a critical mass of hate. For me, Prometheus's core flaw is the way that the film's self-conscious and over-obvious attempts to recall Alien keep running up--and even playing up--Lindelof's obvious incomprehension of what made Alien work. Prometheus opens on the image of a ship in space, and with an opening crawl that introduces that ship and its complement, and ends with the recorded message of that ship's sole survivor, an almost word-for-word recreation of Ripley's final message from Alien. It has a female lead, and a menacing android character. There is a scene in which a character refuses to let crewmembers aboard the ship because one of them is infected with an alien pathogen, and a false bottom ending in which our heroine arrives at the seeming safety of an escape pod only to find an Alien waiting there for her. But everything is backwards, reversing what was interesting and appealing about the original film. Shaw, as I've already said, is an unappealing character, absorbed with her quest to the exclusion of almost all other considerations until the awfulness of what she's discovered become inescapable (in other words, until it kills her boyfriend and impregnates her). She seems more like Aliens's Burke than a Ripley. The character who tries to stop the infected person from coming aboard is actually the one signposted throughout most of the film as a villain--Weyland Corporation's on-board representative, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron). Despite which, she is the closest the film comes to a Riply character, being the only member of the crew to reject the fool's errand that her company has embarked upon, and hoping--as Ripley does in Aliens--that the expedition will be for naught. Vickers is no heroine--she's infected with the same stupidity as the rest of the cast, and is in addition selfish and craven, lacking Ripley's compassion and moral authority (for those traits, we turn to Idris Elba's Captain Janek, who would be a shoe-in for the film's Ripley if he weren't even stupider than Shaw, massively underserved by the plot, and also a man)--but she's the only one with enough common sense to keep the infection off the ship (later, when she's off the bridge, Janek simply lets an infected--and, as he should well know, long dead--crewman on board, which dooms most of the crew) and the only one who distrusts David from the start, which makes her the easiest character in the film to sympathize with. Unfortunately, the film ends by dropping a house--or rather a spaceship--on Vickers's head, as if to make it clear which of its final girls we're meant to root for.
Perhaps what's most annoying about the way that Prometheus misapprehends Alien is the use it makes of the Weyland Corporation. In the Alien films, Weyland-Yutani was more of a villain than the Alien. As Genevieve Valentine explains in her recent, excellent essay, the franchise begins because the corporation has embedded, deep within the computers of all its ships, a directive that declares its employees expendable in the face of the opportunity to capture an Alien specimen. The fact that she is expendable is what dogs and dooms Ripley--and her crewmates, and the colonists of LV-426, and the marines who accompany Ripley there, and the prisoners on Fiorina 161--not the Alien, and even more than it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is faceless, inhuman, and ultimately unbeatable (there will always be more corporate officers, after all--you feed a Burke to the Alien, and a Bishop turns up to replace him). In Prometheus, Weyland's impersonal, coldly calculating nature is replaced with a boatload of daddy issues. The mission to LV-223 is a spiritual quest that the fiscal-minded Vickers considers a waste of time and manpower, and as we discover around the film's midpoint, its actual purpose is to bring the dying Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce under a ton of old age makeup) to beg for immortality from the Engineers. Vickers, who turns out to be Weyland's daughter, and David, who calls Weyland "father," are both desperate for his approval and for the freedom that his death will grant them, which echoes in both the film's title and the discovery that humanity's parents have turned upon it and must be murdered lest they murder us. As overheated as this theme is, what makes it even worse is how completely it defangs the franchise's most terrifying villain.
The story we've been told about Prometheus's inception is that it was originally envisioned as a prequel to Alien, then spun off into its own story, and then brought back to the franchise, but to me it feels that the truth must be the other way around--that the film was first an original story, and only then folded, rather inexpertly, into the Alien franchise, the joints and fittings still showing quite clearly. Maybe that's why, despite its too-obvious echoing of the original film, Prometheus feels less like an homage to Alien, and more like a dark retelling of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The imagery of the film's opening scene--a shot of the Earth illuminated from behind by the sun--recalls 2001 so strongly that it is almost unnecessary to go on and see an Engineer kill himself--and possibly jump-start human evolution--at some distant point in our past. David even makes more sense as HAL in android form--unlike Alien's Ash he, after all, has no directive to cause mayhem, but does so for his own inscrutable, perhaps insane reasons. And, of course, the film's preoccupation with meeting aliens who uplifted humanity and learning their purpose for us echos with 2001 and 2010. Unfortunately, reading Prometheus as a twisted retelling of 2001 is just as unsatisfying an approach as any other we might take towards the film. The revelation that our alien parents are villains is trite, and tritely handled, and despite a few exceptions like David's scene in the control room (and despite the soundtrack breaking out the classical music at the slightest provocation) Prometheus doesn't even approach 2001's immersive audio-visual majesty. Prometheus may not be the worst movie ever, and may not deserve the intensity of the scorn heaped upon it by fandom, but it is a waste--of money, talent, and not one but two iconic science fiction film franchises. That, maybe, is something worth getting worked up over.
Having watched the film, I'm not sure I'm much closer to an answer. Again, I think Prometheus is a terrible, terrible film--messily plotted, peopled with unpleasant characters whose decisions one can only explain through a catastrophic combination of idiocy, lack of professionalism, and sociopathic tendencies, and littered with half a dozen themes, character arcs, and throughlines, none of which come to any sort of fruition, and most of which work at cross-purposes to one another. Plus, there are hardly any scary bits, and no action scenes to speak of. I'm just not sure that it's quite so terrible as to justify the opprobrium that has been heaped upon it, to the extent that I'm wondering if there isn't a reverse Avengers affect in play. I liked The Avengers, but couldn't quite understand why it aroused such extreme love in large portions of fandom, and by the same token I'm having trouble understanding why Prometheus, terrible as it is, is the subject of so much outrage. Were people expecting great things from Ridley Scott? The man hasn't directed a truly excellent film since Blade Runner. Are fans upset at the damage that Prometheus does to the Alien franchise? You'd think that a fandom that has managed to reason away of existence both of the Alien vs. Predator movies, Alien: Resurrection, and, in the case of certain purists, Alien3, would have no trouble doing the same to this movie. I can see how science fiction fans, in particular, would be upset at Prometheus's anti-science, anti-evolution bent--the titular ship embarks on its ill-fated journey to the alien moon LV-223 because our heroine, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), believes it to be the home of aliens whom she has dubbed The Engineers, who created the human race. When it's pointed out to her that she hasn't got a shred of scientific proof for this theory, Shaw simply replies that it's what she chooses to believe. Not a very compelling audience identification figure for science fiction fans, then, especially as in her zeal to prove her theory--which is explicitly likened, on several occasions, to religious fervor, not least in the way that several characters restate Shaw's mission as the quest to meet her makers--Shaw smugly ignores every common-sense safety precaution and research protocol, and plays a substantial part in bringing about the disaster that kills almost all of the Prometheus's crew (in fairness, Shaw is matched for recklessness and lack of professionalism by pretty much every other character in the movie, but she's the one we're meant to identify with).
On the other hand, science fiction film and TV have been moving away from scientific rationalism and towards a vague sort of deism for the better part of a decade, and Prometheus's writer, Damon Lindelof, was one of the standard bearers of that movement in his work on Lost, so it can hardly come as a surprise that Prometheus continues that trend, especially as the film's trailers all but laid out its Von Däniken-inspired plot. So while I can see how fans might be disappointed by the film's anti-science stance--which is anyway somewhat ameliorated by the revelation that though Shaw is right about the Engineers, they are far from benevolent parents, and in fact created the organism that would go on to evolve into the original films' Alien in order to unleash it on Earth and destroy their creations--I'm not sure that it on its own justifies the vehemence of the negative reaction the film has received.
But that, I think, is a clue to the answer I'm looking for. Taken on their own, none of Prometheus's flaws, serious as they are, justify the revulsion it's elicited, but taken together? Just about the only thing that works in the film are its visuals, which combine H.R. Giger's by-now iconic and still wonderfully creepy designs for the alien ship with CGI and some clever interface design, creating an environment that is both lived-in and foreign, and culminating in one of the film's two truly successful scenes, in which the android David (Michael Fassbender), activates the control room on the alien ship that Prometheus finds, and becomes the focal point of a symphony of holographic astronavigation information. If you take just about any other approach to the film, though, you'll fall flat. Want to learn where the Aliens came from? Prometheus does contain answers, some silly--the elephant-like head of the alien in the control chair in the original film turns out to have been a helmet concealing a humanoid face, which no one on the Nostromo noticed--and some interesting--after four films in which the Weyland-Yutani Corporation repeatedly tries to get its hands on the Aliens in order to use them as weapons, it's darkly funny to discover that the Engineers created them for precisely the same reason (and it's somewhat to the film's credit that we don't find out the Engineers' reason for wanting us dead is that humanity is just so awful, an infuriatingly supercilious conclusion that too many science fiction stories are happy to plump for--though it seems that Scott's original vision may have included this wrinkle, and that the film can still be read as saying this)--but there's a gap between the film's ending and Alien's beginning that seems hard to bridge, and also unnecessary. Want to find the answer to Shaw's questions about the origin of the human race? The film leaves them, and her subsequent desire to know why the Engineers decided to destroy humanity, completely unresolved. (There's a strong sense that Prometheus's ending is intended to tease a sequel, but given the film's catastrophic box office results that is now mercifully unlikely.)
The film's themes fare no better. Want to find out more about David, whose nature the film repeatedly puzzles over even as it shows him alternately saving the crew's lives and endangering them, for no reason in either case? These contradictory actions, and David's own expressions of mingled fascination and revulsion towards humanity, never cohere into a comprehensible character, and David's motivations, sanity, and personality remain opaque all the way to the credits, in no small part because after playing a major, plot-advancing role in the film's first two acts, he is unceremoniously sidelined for its denouement. Want some more development of the previous films' themes of gender and sex? For the most part, Prometheus leaves this aspect of the franchise alone. The Engineers are all male, but nothing is made of this, and though the film's mid-segment seems suddenly to remember that pregnancy, motherhood, and the appropriation of both by a masculine power structure are important themes in the franchise, its handling of them is at once over the top and perfunctory--no sooner have we learned that Shaw is infertile than she turns out to be pregnant with a proto-alien and is sedated by David (who was creepily sort-of lusting after her in the film's early scenes), then breaks free and seeks her own solution to the problem. This leads to the film's other truly successful scene, in which a naked Shaw locks herself in an auto-surgery unit and watches, fully conscious, as she is cut open and the proto-alien is removed from her body, and then must escape from the unit as it hisses, spits, and tries to capture her. As effective as this scene is, however, it's also terribly broad, taking an already not very subtle theme and intensifying it to the point that it seems almost like self-parody (the same is true of a later scene in which the last surviving Engineer is vanquished by Shaw's now fully-grown "baby"--his death is so blatantly meant to recall sex, or rape, that the power of the correlation is complete denuded). More importantly, it's an interlude that seems almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the film, to the extent that when a bloody and traumatized Shaw wanders into an inhabited part of the ship, she's met only with puzzled stares, because everyone else has been going about their business and hadn't even realized that something bad was happening to her.
In other words, pretty much everyone who watches Prometheus will find something about it that they dislike intensely, to the point that it ruins the film for them, and when those individual dislikes are fed into each other in fandom's crucible, the result is a critical mass of hate. For me, Prometheus's core flaw is the way that the film's self-conscious and over-obvious attempts to recall Alien keep running up--and even playing up--Lindelof's obvious incomprehension of what made Alien work. Prometheus opens on the image of a ship in space, and with an opening crawl that introduces that ship and its complement, and ends with the recorded message of that ship's sole survivor, an almost word-for-word recreation of Ripley's final message from Alien. It has a female lead, and a menacing android character. There is a scene in which a character refuses to let crewmembers aboard the ship because one of them is infected with an alien pathogen, and a false bottom ending in which our heroine arrives at the seeming safety of an escape pod only to find an Alien waiting there for her. But everything is backwards, reversing what was interesting and appealing about the original film. Shaw, as I've already said, is an unappealing character, absorbed with her quest to the exclusion of almost all other considerations until the awfulness of what she's discovered become inescapable (in other words, until it kills her boyfriend and impregnates her). She seems more like Aliens's Burke than a Ripley. The character who tries to stop the infected person from coming aboard is actually the one signposted throughout most of the film as a villain--Weyland Corporation's on-board representative, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron). Despite which, she is the closest the film comes to a Riply character, being the only member of the crew to reject the fool's errand that her company has embarked upon, and hoping--as Ripley does in Aliens--that the expedition will be for naught. Vickers is no heroine--she's infected with the same stupidity as the rest of the cast, and is in addition selfish and craven, lacking Ripley's compassion and moral authority (for those traits, we turn to Idris Elba's Captain Janek, who would be a shoe-in for the film's Ripley if he weren't even stupider than Shaw, massively underserved by the plot, and also a man)--but she's the only one with enough common sense to keep the infection off the ship (later, when she's off the bridge, Janek simply lets an infected--and, as he should well know, long dead--crewman on board, which dooms most of the crew) and the only one who distrusts David from the start, which makes her the easiest character in the film to sympathize with. Unfortunately, the film ends by dropping a house--or rather a spaceship--on Vickers's head, as if to make it clear which of its final girls we're meant to root for.
Perhaps what's most annoying about the way that Prometheus misapprehends Alien is the use it makes of the Weyland Corporation. In the Alien films, Weyland-Yutani was more of a villain than the Alien. As Genevieve Valentine explains in her recent, excellent essay, the franchise begins because the corporation has embedded, deep within the computers of all its ships, a directive that declares its employees expendable in the face of the opportunity to capture an Alien specimen. The fact that she is expendable is what dogs and dooms Ripley--and her crewmates, and the colonists of LV-426, and the marines who accompany Ripley there, and the prisoners on Fiorina 161--not the Alien, and even more than it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is faceless, inhuman, and ultimately unbeatable (there will always be more corporate officers, after all--you feed a Burke to the Alien, and a Bishop turns up to replace him). In Prometheus, Weyland's impersonal, coldly calculating nature is replaced with a boatload of daddy issues. The mission to LV-223 is a spiritual quest that the fiscal-minded Vickers considers a waste of time and manpower, and as we discover around the film's midpoint, its actual purpose is to bring the dying Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce under a ton of old age makeup) to beg for immortality from the Engineers. Vickers, who turns out to be Weyland's daughter, and David, who calls Weyland "father," are both desperate for his approval and for the freedom that his death will grant them, which echoes in both the film's title and the discovery that humanity's parents have turned upon it and must be murdered lest they murder us. As overheated as this theme is, what makes it even worse is how completely it defangs the franchise's most terrifying villain.
The story we've been told about Prometheus's inception is that it was originally envisioned as a prequel to Alien, then spun off into its own story, and then brought back to the franchise, but to me it feels that the truth must be the other way around--that the film was first an original story, and only then folded, rather inexpertly, into the Alien franchise, the joints and fittings still showing quite clearly. Maybe that's why, despite its too-obvious echoing of the original film, Prometheus feels less like an homage to Alien, and more like a dark retelling of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The imagery of the film's opening scene--a shot of the Earth illuminated from behind by the sun--recalls 2001 so strongly that it is almost unnecessary to go on and see an Engineer kill himself--and possibly jump-start human evolution--at some distant point in our past. David even makes more sense as HAL in android form--unlike Alien's Ash he, after all, has no directive to cause mayhem, but does so for his own inscrutable, perhaps insane reasons. And, of course, the film's preoccupation with meeting aliens who uplifted humanity and learning their purpose for us echos with 2001 and 2010. Unfortunately, reading Prometheus as a twisted retelling of 2001 is just as unsatisfying an approach as any other we might take towards the film. The revelation that our alien parents are villains is trite, and tritely handled, and despite a few exceptions like David's scene in the control room (and despite the soundtrack breaking out the classical music at the slightest provocation) Prometheus doesn't even approach 2001's immersive audio-visual majesty. Prometheus may not be the worst movie ever, and may not deserve the intensity of the scorn heaped upon it by fandom, but it is a waste--of money, talent, and not one but two iconic science fiction film franchises. That, maybe, is something worth getting worked up over.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Review: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle
My review of Mary Gentle's The Black Opera appears today in Strange Horizons. I've liked pretty much everything else I've read by Gentle, particularly 1610: A Sundial in a Grave, which The Black Opera resembles in several ways, so it was a particular disappointment to discover that her latest effort is a baggy, unconvincing exercise. Better luck next time.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
From the Horse's Mouth
A bit surprised that this hasn't had more play: in an interview with Empire last week, Neil Marshall--who directed the penultimate episode of the second season of Game of Thrones, "Blackwater"--has this to say on the subject of the show's use of nudity:
Of course, this isn't really a surprise. No one who watches Game of Thrones can have imagined that titillation was not at least a partial motivation for its copious scenes of nudity and sex. And given the unattributed quote from a one-time director, a grain of salt might not be entirely out of order as well. But it is something to have people involved with the show saying this--that young women are being asked to strip naked and simulate sex for the benefit of perverts. If someone could explain the difference between that and soft-core porn, I would be very grateful.
The weirdest part was when you have one of the exec producers leaning over your shoulder, going, "You can go full frontal, you know. This is television, you can do whatever you want! And do it! I urge you to do it!" So I was like, "Okay, well, you're the boss."(The original quote is in a podcast. Here are two text reports, both of which seem quite cheerful about HBO courting the pervert demographic.)
This particular exec took me to one side and said, "Look, I represent the pervert side of the audience, okay? Everybody else is the serious drama side. I represent the perv side of the audience, and I'm saying I want full frontal nudity in this scene." So you go ahead and do it.
Of course, this isn't really a surprise. No one who watches Game of Thrones can have imagined that titillation was not at least a partial motivation for its copious scenes of nudity and sex. And given the unattributed quote from a one-time director, a grain of salt might not be entirely out of order as well. But it is something to have people involved with the show saying this--that young women are being asked to strip naked and simulate sex for the benefit of perverts. If someone could explain the difference between that and soft-core porn, I would be very grateful.
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
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.)
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.)
Sunday, May 27, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, May 21, 2012
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.
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