Salon Pokes the Movies: Is Movie Culture Dead?/The Movies are Finished

09 Tuesday Oct 2012

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Late last month, Andrew O’Hehir measured the decline in movie culture as a lack of buzz, or at least as a lack of buzz compared with TV in the last decade.

Today, Salon featured Scott Timberg’s interview with The New Yorker‘s David Denby. His new book is titled Do the Movies have a Future? The general tag for Timberg’s piece is that movies aren’t for adults anymore and their aesthetic value is lost in a sea of genre excitement based on tits, prosthetic penises, and other fantastical effects.

Both these ideas are generally correct. The culture is moving on to longer, more involved mediums of storytelling. TV serials give us more exposure to interesting performers and premises. As an example, look at the fascination with Homeland, an unlikely genre premise that was done to death on 24 and countless thrillers but has been reanimated with emphasis on the psychology of the characters and the performance of Danes and Lewis. Premises have also been enhanced to novelistic complexity in shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad.

What O’Hehir and Denby miss is that the movies have always been, fundamentally, the most limited version of cinema, destined to end up at the back of the bus of cinematic adulthood. When television came along, the assumption in the film industry was that it would be downmarket, less cerebral and more slappy. And for a few decades the prophecy was self-fulfilled: television became “TV” and was limited to amnesiac episodes of generally immature crap while the auteurs went to the movies to work out their ideas over two and three hours rather than fifteen-minute TV acts.

The variable that has changed for some TV shows—not for the amnesiac shit like Jersey Shore and Honey Boo Boo that promises a payoff only in the inevitable perp-walks—is that they are now long form. Almost infinitely long. So long that when a series ends the production team is completely unable to do a proper long-form ending. I feel sorry for the showrunners of Lost and Battlestar Galactica. They got stuck in the transition and then were dumped on by their ungrateful fans. Those fans had signed on for Gilligan’s Isle of Horror and Robots with Vaginas and they loved what they got. But after their expectations were exceeded, they matured and decided they wanted more than just Gilligan’s Isle of Horror and Robots with Vaginas. They wanted Gilligan and Robots to make sense. Not knowing that they were going to be doing quality work for a long time, the genre-breaking quality was doomed from the beginning.

The ultimate restraint on adult complexity, all talent being equal, is length. Many long works can be low quality crap (best-seller lists are full of them) and many short works can be obscure masterpieces of quality. But the median of artistic possibility is governed most directly by the length available.

Length in Cinema

Amnesiac television remains the shortest cinematic medium. In the 1950s shows were ten to fifteen minutes between commercial breaks. Then TV shows expanded into daily collections of acts separated by commercial breaks. Now in their shortest form TV shows have  been cut back down in the form of music videos and the commercials themselves.

Public broadcasting and original programming on cable were able to dispense with commercial breaks in the 70s but were unwilling to get away from the general limit of one hour. This allowed the development of coherent serials which didn’t rely on the amnesia enforced on each daily dose of a show’s formula.

In the 90s DVDs changed our perception of TV into cinematic novels constructed in tightly-formatted regular chapters. Even after the DVD market died this is how many people still watch their shows. Web-based non-TV-channel distribution will allow the length of “chapters” to vary until we see a full duplication of the possibilities of novels in cinematic form.

-ish.

The Poetical-Lyrical Divide

Some key differences remain between novels and cinema: cost of production and what I think of as the poetical-lyrical divide. On the surface, written poetry and sung lyrics are similar mediums, but if you turn a poem into a song there isn’t much for the music to do and lyrics without music seem childish.

So, novels with actors (HBO’s Game of Thrones) will do best when they lose the nerdy details of the novels in favor of the celebrity and pathos of the actors and production. If you consider an acclaimed cinematic series (Homeland, True Blood, Dexter) outside the context of the production and performance you’ll be left with an image of nakedly implausible schlockiness. Cinematic series that attempt to defy this divide will increasingly fail to become popular: Mad Men, Treme. Novels that go the other way, substituting schlock for complexity, will do the same as they’ve always done*** except that now they’ll be competing more directly with Here Comes Snooki Choo-Choo!.

Compared with cinema, books will still win on cost. The future of movies is pretty set: a short form for schlock or lyrical vignettes, but the future of books relies on containing the smartest option… without falling too far behind the accessibilty of tits-n-splosion cinema.

***(See volume #84002 of the ongoing series, My Bosoms are on Fire with Passion for my Billionaire, or #65470 of the series Chappy McKeel Builds Leverage in the Paramilitary Explosion Center)

Moist and Fragrant Fruit of Villainy / Cloud Atlas 2 of 3

24 Monday Sep 2012

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I’ve been thinking about this post for nearly two weeks now, bad for my status as a blogger I know, which is funny in itself. This post began as a glib and valueless bit of snark about Mitt Romney’s inability to simply buy the election. Then as September 11th evolved, Mitt-ish events climbed up a tree and began throwing poo at everyone. As a result, this post has had to evolve in my subconscious before I could address it properly. To take my mind off it I’ve consumed Scinemax’s Strike Back, loading up my forebrain with soft-core sex and explosions.

I also read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as part of another blogligation. There are parallels in what I have to say about both things—Mitt Romney and Cloud Atlas, not my speculation about whether we’ll be treated to Rhona Mitra in the the buff.

Cloud Atlas and Conventions of Literary Futurism

Cloud Atlas is a fine book with some flaws. Its structure is its most distinctive feature and it is David Mitchell himself that makes the best non-spoiler comment about it, in the voice of Robert Frobisher:

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds.

The structure is not a flaw except in the shameless way it requires the reader to complete the book to figure out if it’s any good, or at least not too annoying. The book is, in fact, not too annoying, but that’s because only three-elevenths of the story is set in the future. Like so many works of literary futurism, Mitchell’s take on the future is a tragically sad bit of angsty, tearjerking humbuggery.

Margaret Atwood and seemingly every other future vision that gains acclaim in the literary world presents technology as magically self-defeating when it is mixed with human agency. Our moral flaws will lead us to a techno-doom where the best we can hope for is to sink into an illiterate, unremembering de-evolutionary twilight. Because of… slavery, plague, and cannibalism? These are sins and afflictions that have only been undercut in a lasting way by technology, libraries, and human communication, but in the future they get worse?

Mitchell follows in these footsteps. Sigh.

Democracy’s Denouement Deemed Robotic and Out-of-Touch

Carefully limited communication and controlled presentation of information have been the foundation element of another, less literary trope. On Fox News, the bravest face they’ve been able to put on their latest losing endeavor is to embrace the world of Mitt Romney’s “gaffes.” “Own it!” they cry. Regarding the very latest, they declare that the 47% is indeed lazy and doesn’t pay taxes—directly in the face of evidence to the contrary and confusion about which 47% is being referred to at any one moment. For example, the 47% that (in theory) don’t pay income tax are not the same 47% that are committed to Obama. White working poor are overrepresented in the first group but underrepresented in the second. If the number “47” is really a thing, it is a coincidence. Conflating these various populations is similar to the idea of not having to worry about the thirty thousand people killed by guns every year because the same thirty thousand people have already been killed in traffic accidents. *

*Note, I’m not claiming that 30k people are being killed every year by either cause. If they were, however, they would be separate populations. And yes, I realize that the mutual exclusivity of these populations is the exact opposite fallacy. Think of it this way: if it were possible to be both killed by gunfire and a traffic accident in one year, being killed by gunfire would not necessarily mean you’d have to be killed in a traffic accident. My point is that there are many wrong ways of looking at a number.

Going back to the most recent September 11th exercise which spawned my extended spasm of paralyzed amusement, Fox and Romney both pushed the meme “Obama apologized for the 1st amendment!” in the middle of an ongoing, tragic international crisis. This was a hastily designed fantasy for insertion into our moral consciousness. Instead of taking hold in the larger world, the idea paused during its consumption in other channels. The charge became news in itself: contemplated, considered and ridiculed, becoming a complete reversal of the intended propaganda. Typical for this campaign cycle, Romney and his fellow travelers have not been able to convert their corporate power and wealth directly into corporeal power. The attempt to do so is becoming more nakedly transparent.

I’ll leave aside the possibility of a conspiracy by the librul media to distort everything Romney does into a caricature of badly-calculated and cockeyed flailings. I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that Romney is what he appears to be: a well-connected finance operator who has swum far away from his native audience of like-minded investor douchebags, political operatives and doting but blinded fellow Mormons.

 Malthus Takes a Holiday

From the point of view of a writer of science-fiction, the hilarious failure of the Corporate CEO-King in the real world poses a dilemma: how do we take seriously the ever-raining cyberpunk twilight of franchise municipalities and walking organ farms?  Why instead is the Romney Future turning out to be the finely-combed tip of a cold and putrescently melting berg of incompetent LaRouchiite zombies who rant about mud people and the fall of Gold from Holy Grace? Why is Papa Song sucking so badly at his job?

One issue is the fact that a common trope of the future, the inevitability of Malthusian collapse, is being found wanting in the real world. It was found wanting in the 19th century in England; it was found wanting in the mid-20th century in Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States; it was found wanting in China, Korea, Turkey and Iran in the late 20th, and the Malthusian Apocalypse is found wanting everywhere else which has educated the other half of its population and given it the right not to be baby-slaves.

So Malthus and his collapse isn’t looking so inevitable as he did twenty or thirty or two hundred years ago. Yet in Cloud Atlas he appears in the corporate future as a revered prophet in statue form. It’s appropriate that the evil corporate state put it there but the statue should be a forgotten target of ridicule—or just target practice—and not a warning.

I Blame George Lucas

Because why not? Yes, his dystopias seemed hip and edgy in the 70s but it turns out that like every other evidence-averse, reactionary democracy-hater working in fantasy and science fiction, he’s a frightened amoral zombie making up cockeyed bullshit to warn us of an even worse horde of frightened amoral zombies hot on his heels. Or robots with magic underwear.

Since then, to guarantee an audience the future has to be crappy with acid-spewing aliens popping out of every cavity and neutral, atmospheric endings turned ludicrously happy or “properly” edgy and depressing.

And somewhere in there vampires became killable. Was that Lucas? Or was it Ann Rice gone wild with world-building? Vampires (the past) should be known, respected, and feared while people (the future) should be imagined to continue existing, being born, living, and dying, regardless of the plastic-to-ichor ratio of their flesh.

I Don’t Blame David Mitchell

Whaddaya gonna do? The book needed eyeballs and it was published eight years ago when corporate idiots seemed destined to be in charge forever, so if less than a third of the book makes me feel manipulated and grumpy, I can live with that given its redeeming features.

Cloud Atlas is a cleverly crafted work with engaging structure and images and several interesting characters. That may be the reverse of the typically successful formula but it works here. Hopefully in the Wachowski Siblings’ movie it will be the structure, images, and characters that shine through and not the gloomy stereotype of a future.

Cloud Atlas, Part One of a Trilogy

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

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In the New Yorker this week, Aleksandar Hemon looks at the Wachowskis’ latest project, a film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The project includes historical, contemporary and future storylines weaved together. How they’re weaved interests me as a writer. There’s also talk of souls and redemption in future lives, so it’s likely that this is another film in the long decades of movie history which take sci-fi themes and substitute in religion and miracles for the meat of the speculative fiction in the plot. However, it sounds like that’s the point of the book they are adapting, so in a sense the story is pre-ruined. That makes the film potentially more appetizing to me.

So with my atheistic eye-rolling out of the way I will now put the novel in my queue. When I’ve read it, I’ll review it. Then when the movie comes out, I’ll finish my own little trilogy.

Leaving aside the potential of this story, I just want to note that even though the Matrix trilogy was a sales success and I seemed to enjoy the second and third films more than most people, the Wachowkis have not released anything that could be called a masterpiece. Everything they’ve done has had major asterisks and viewers carping on unsatisfactory elements. For a few of their projects, these points of conflict have been extremely geeky but not too damning (wait, the machines need human body heat, not our brains’ processing capacity to create their world? seriously? whatever executive handed down that note should have his legs broken. too dramatic? what would anyone know about drama in a film industry that would let that happen?). For others (the entirety of Speed Racer) the wailing has consumed the entire discussion. I hope that the Wachowskis finally put something together that’s watchable and tidy and right.

So, yes, the next thing I’ll write about this subject will be a review of David Mitchell’s novel.

Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (without spoilers)

10 Monday Sep 2012

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I love seeing Terry Pratchett’s name on a new book. I know much less about Stephen Baxter. I’ve only read a few short stories by Baxter and most of what I remember of them is that they were concept-heavy and a bit dry elsewhere. I doubt that my sample was representative of his work. What I remember of Baxter’s work I’m okay with, but it didn’t have the playfulness that I seem to require to become hooked.

I’m a sucker for anything with Pratchett’s name on it, even if I might expect less of his usual playfulness in a work that shares another name. It isn’t just a way to salve my profound sadness over his slow exit from his working life. We are all slowly exiting our lives, so I’ll celebrate anything Terry Pratchett does until his final trip to Switzerland

The Science and the Really-Realness

Stephen Baxter is known as a hard sci-fi writer. Hard sci-fi doesn’t necessarily mean realistic. Hard sci-fi has a long history of unrealistic premises involving faster-than-light travel, time travel, travel between realities and extra-sensory remote perception of other locations and other minds.

Travel and cultural exploration is the major part of the appeal of hard science fiction. They are travelogues of the mind, reports from many varying experiments in society which we cannot duplicate in the really-real world. All of the Grand Old Men of sci-fi did it. I’m sure that somewhere in the more speculative realm of fantasy fiction, bees and educated fleas are doing it, composing their own fantasies that pit their worlds against each other in what-if scenarios of honeycomb-versus-hair or honeycomb-from-roses versus honeycomb-from-slightly-different-roses.

That said, I have some trouble getting through most books without mulling over the really-realness (or lack thereof) in a story’s mechanics and psychology. For me, only the most carefully realistic literary writers (Woolf or Ian McEwan) or the most heavily lamp-shaded speculative writers (Terry Pratchett) seem to escape this. With neither extreme do I stop occasionally and go for agitated walks around the block, chattering to myself about how “the fake world I’m reading about wouldn’t work like that at all,” and craving a cigarette.

Terry’s participation in The Long Earth is clear in the gag-like mechanics of the least really-real aspects of the premise. For me this silliness succeeds in taking the burr off the rough edges of Baxter’s really-realness. Importantly, Pratchett seems to have had a strong influence in enhancing the really-real psychology of the characters as they respond to the slightly cockeyed economics and improbably stable celestial dynamics of the Long Earth. I could go off on a tangent detailing my quibbles, but that would just be a list of spoilers. If anyone actually reads this and comments, I’ll be happy to discuss it there.

Suffice it to say that Terry Pratchett’s name is NOT just along for a ride on the cover. While he doesn’t seem to have written a large portion of the text, he’s made significant contributions to the premise and making the premise work. Also some of the jokes. Perhaps all the jokes.

The Characters

Even the throwaway characters have the kind of touches that Pratchett is known for. Entire lives are hinted at and remembered in the style of the Discworld vagrant who went to sea and had a number of adventures before dying of “stepping on a tiger”. It is Pratchett’s concern for these characters that bring much of his work to life and it works to good effect here as well.

Unfortunately, Terry’s limited contribution to the writing has left the latter part of the book with significant action of the major characters which is listed more than conveyed. In particular, the female characters have an important role but their action, conflicts, and motivations seem to parallel the story without ever becoming integrated. This is not Witches Abroad.

I know Stephen Baxter has been in this game, successfully, for a few decades, while I’m just an infrequent blogger that no one reads, but let’s just say that he has some great opportunities for improvement. Or he needs to push harder for more time to blend things together or a bit more word count to flesh things out. As it stands, the characterizations are a little bit of a letdown. It takes away the possibility of an enthusiastic Pratchett-fan-gives-it-five-stars-! and puts it down into an-entertaining-three-stars-and-a-bit.

The Potential for a Series

Given that Sir Terry’s involvement is probably only going to wane, the only strong hope I have for this series is if the strength of Baxter’s characterizations wax considerably. A more robustly human touch is needed.

It’s Not At All Bad

It’s a very entertaining read that will get you thinking about exactly the kinds of things sci-fi is supposed to. It’s also amusing, quirky, and has all the touches you might ask for from a story from these experienced authors.

 

See also Josh Roseman’s review on escapepod.org.

From Confusion to Completion

24 Sunday Jun 2012

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I lost a thing two Sundays ago. I had already been unable to find a starting point for the day and then I couldn’t find the thing. I was going to write my first blog post, but I had lost the feeling for the idea that inspired me to create this blog in the first place. I lost that idea a week before. Two weeks later, three weeks after buying the domain, I’m still writing this post as I occasionally swirl past the draft on random currents in my daily sea of electric media.

The thing I lost that Sunday was part of the liquid electric fuzz that manages my ears along with the thing’s over-jiggly silicone rubber earphones. I couldn’t even be sure the thing was even possible to find. The thing could have slipped forever under the surface and become a figment, so I lacked optimism and my search wasn’t well-designed for success.

Finally, I checked to see if my fleet of electric fluff could find the thing floating out on the fluffosphere. It could. With confidence in the thing’s nearby existence, it took only a moment to find.

For an hour I had been caught in a cycle of looking in the same places over and over. Only after the thing’s name appeared on a list in my phone could my search lose its hopeless churn: hey, at the other end of my bed under the window… how did it get there?

–

Ray Bradbury died at the beginning of this month. One of his stories I never got around to reading was “The Toynbee Convector,” published in Playboy when I was 13. This story has been mentioned elsewhere and this is a good time to be introduced to it. I worry about climate change, ocean deterioration, and the effects of the continuing economic depression. These things sometimes overpower my optimism just as certain other people are demented by fears of the final battle with the Beast (or creeping socialism, sexually ambiguous hipsters, lizard people, whatever).

In “The Toynbee Convector,” a man builds a time machine and visits Earth 100 years in the future. He comes back with evidence of great improvements in technology, a peaceful civilization, and environmental restoration. Bradbury’s time traveler declares:

“We made it!” he said. “We did it! The future is ours. We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri. We cured cancer and stopped death. We did it—Oh Lord, much thanks—we did it. Oh, future’s bright and beauteous spires, arise!”

After his return the time machine is locked away by the government and the film and recordings are published by the time traveler, sparking a cultural orgasm of optimism. One hundred years after the time traveler’s journey, the world described by the time traveler has come to pass. The time traveler, however, reveals in an interview that he had lied all along: his journey to the future had been a hoax. The civilized world of the 1980s had been sinking into cynical dreams of dystopian futures, so Bradbury’s time traveler decided to do a bit of prophylactic and purple-prosed culture-jamming.

The “Toynbee” of the title refers to the real-world historian, Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee was a famous pop-intellectual among historians. For a long time in the 20th century he was considered “Mr. History” in the same way Marshall McLuhan was later considered “Mr. Media.” A central idea of Toynbee’s was that civilizations survive only by facing continual challenges that are difficult but possible. Otherwise, they are annihilated by adversity or fall into weak, decadent elitism.

While Ray Bradbury himself referred to the ideas of Arnold Toynbee as the inspiration for the story’s premise, I’m not sure Bradbury understood that his character’s gift to the world had nothing to do with Toynbee’s idea of measured challenges and continual renewal. Bradbury was reacting against the apocalyptic mania of science fiction in the 1980s and his time traveler simply gave society the confidence of knowing that civilization would have an almost miraculously optimistic endpoint. The time traveler’s “history machine” took away the perception of risk from the task of engineering sci-fi optimism in the real world.

Today we see misinformation about economic risk being used in the real world to turn the public against investments in science, infrastructure, education, health care, and environmentally sustainable technology. In Bradbury’s world, the time traveler laid down a brave and clear image of a future target. That future target, though, is a brave challenge only because he was lucky enough to present challenges that were possible. In our world, experts duel about the possibilities. Some wish to work toward a more egalitarian and sustainable future, others view that possibility with skepticism or disgust. Many more swim in confusion between the two visions.

–

My goal with this blog is to complete writings, complete them to my satisfaction, and fix them publicly in time to allow me move on. With two weeks spent getting here and still being unable to get fully around my point, my hair is too short to hold firmly and tear out. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this done. My mind plans, but the rest of me doesn’t really believe in the future. As in Bradbury’s scheme of hoaxing the world, I have to tease myself past my bodily skepticism with visions of accomplishment. Still, it seems so self-indulgent and the contemplated accomplishments are either unrealistic (somehow I’ll eventually be paid to… blog?) or shamefully lame (I blogged! I are now a blogger! Now for a warm bath and a utility knife!). These are optimistic lies, but they are possible lies and I might turn them into entries on a list.

The cynical and hopeless mutterings that always follow my hopeful lies stir more hopeful rebellion. It is the reason I’m taking this exercise. There’s always a larger message for the future of society and science fiction, but for right now I’m just trying to get to the end of this thought, which is: I must write and finish in order to know, finally, that I can, and then reach farther.