Watching Doctor Who at Fifty

I will start off by saying that this post is not a retrospective about the series. I simply lack the context to provide that, having as I do virtually no familiarity with Doctor Who during its first twenty-six years. Instead it is a consideration of the show in its current form, which is frankly all I really know firsthand.

My first encounter with Dr. Who, after all, was in the American-made TV movie that aired on FOX in 1996. I remember little of it except what seemed to be the titular character's wandering a hospital without his memory for most of its running time. Needless to say, it left little impression on me, and I'd thought, on anyone else, and was later surprised to find that it was regarded as canon, with Paul McGann officially counted as the Eighth Doctor. Recently reading a summary of that movie it struck me that this may have been because I came to the film totally unfamiliar with the character's history (I'd never so much as heard of The Master), and that I might have had a more favorable impression if I came to it as a longtime fan - but in any event, I did not encounter the franchise again until Syfy Channel aired series one of the revival in early 2006.1

Once again, I didn't know what to make of the franchise.2 For one thing it seemed rather light on concept, lacking the density of world-building or intellectual play I found in shows like Babylon 5 or Lexx. Much of what the show did present seemed to me very old-fashioned (the Daleks something out of a '50s B movie), while other ideas appeared just plain silly (like the Autons the Doctor confronted in the first episode of the revival, "Rose"). For another, the Doctor's four-dimensional tourism seemed aimless and casual next to the more purposeful sagas I was used to - and surprisingly Earthbound, the hero of this space opera doing much of anything off-world for just four of season one's thirteen episodes. Instead he spent a lot of time in contemporary Britain, and when traveling to other times, tended to stick with British drama's most conventional choices (e.g. the Victorian era, World War II), which seemed rather limiting.3 Even on a visual level the production left me underwhelmed, neither lavish enough nor exotic enough to stand out from the then rather thick crowd of TV space operas.4

Still, I was a fan by the end of the first season. I suppose it just took a while for me to catch its wavelength: its penchant for Douglas Adams-like zaniness and whimsy, its faithfulness to its inheritance, its Britain-centricness.5 (I'd watched a lot of British television before, but little of it genre television, and while I suppose I'm rather more up on British history than most on this side of the Atlantic, once in a while there was a reference to something I didn't fully get, or wasn't familiar with from before.6) It took a while, too, to get to know the protagonist (who would be intolerably Mary Sue-like if he were not a nine hundred year old alien of exceptional charm and generosity), and the dynamic between Doctor and Companion, and the rhythms of the story arcs. The stories got bigger, the visuals better. And while still regarding it as intellectually and dramatically lighter stuff than many past favorites, and packed with implausibilities and dissonances best not examined too closely, every so often it offered a clever idea (as in "Blink"), or a genuinely moving moment (as in "Vincent and the Doctor"), while presenting its humanism with rather more conviction than the later Trek series' managed, and maintaining a cheerfulness that is downright refreshing in this age of dark-and-gritty-everything-with-a-side-of-still-more-dark-and-gritty. It has all made for an appealing enough combination that I find myself looking forward to season eight in a way I would not be to the announcement of an anemic new small screen Trek, or yet another clone of the Galactica reboot.

1. As indicated by the lengthy article devoted to it on Wikipedia, and its 5.9 score over at the Internet Movie Data Base, others responded rather more favorably.
2. It is worth remembering that I had long since read a large portion of the genre's print classics (a fair amount of newer stuff included), and taken in such shows as the famously idiosyncratic Lexx, so that this was not simply a case of a viewer being confused about what to make of a show simply because it "was not Star Trek."
3. Of course, series four of Lexx was set on contemporary Earth - but that followed three seasons of outer-space adventure.
4. For nearly two decades, from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, there was always at least one first-run North American space opera in production, and around the turn of the century, often a half dozen. However, no such show has been on the air since the cancellation of Stargate: Universe.
5. Interestingly, Adams was to be a direct influence on the show's course in a number of ways, not least his writing a number of episodes.
6. Case in point: in the second series episode "The Idiot's Lantern," the plot hinges on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth being a milestone in the history of television, something of which I had not previously been aware. Prior to that, in "The Doctor Dances," when the Doctor followed up "beat the Germans, save the world" with "don't forget the welfare state!" I had been less than certain of the connection implied between the former and the latter - not having yet read Angus Calder's outstanding history of the era, The People's War.

Of Right and Left Transhumanism

The way we think about the possibility of transcending "the human condition" strongly reflects the way in which we think about humanity and society in general. Transhumanist thought has been no exception, evident across the political spectrum--while anything but the fundamental premise varies in line with the thinker's other political attitudes. In fact, it seems possible to speak of a transhumanism of the political right, and a transhumanism of the political left, the key difference between which is the context in which we would see technology utilized to effect fundamental changes in human beings. Rightist transhumanism seeks to achieve it within the existing social order (e.g. capitalism), and where the alleviation of problems like poverty or pollution are concerned, to anticipate that the new technologies associated with it will obviate the need for social and political change. Leftist transhumanism regards it as part of a broader project of human liberation, likely to follow the achievement of a more equitable society.

Ray Kurzweil's Singularitarianism is a clear case of the former, positing as it does our experiencing twenty thousand years' worth of change within the space of a century--and still finding ourselves living with a capitalist economy, while the solution of our environmental problems depends on the improvement of technology in response to market imperatives, rather than social and political innovation (like changes in values or the emergence of new institutions). By contrast, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, or W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future, present the leftist version, in which the modification of the species follows the achievement of a "good society" which has moved past the inequities of our own.

Just as elsewhere in our intellectual life these past several decades, the ideas of the right have prevailed in this discussion, reducing the left to offering little but criticism of the visions of Kurzweil and company. Nonetheless, Ken MacLeod's recent piece in Aeon Magazine contending that socialism, or something like it, is all the more necessary in an age in which our already contentious identity politics have been made much more so by the addition of substantial biological diversity hints at the possibility of movement in this direction.

Sex on Screen: "The Joylessness of Sex" on Television

I previously noted the decline of sex as a theme of blockbusters at the American box office, and the disappearance of gratuitous nudity as an element in major hits.

Of course, this has had partially to do with the unprecedented abundance of sex on television. Still, as Gina Bellafante notes over at T Magazine,

what's striking about the current depiction is how much of it just isn't sexy — how much of it is divorced from any real sense of eroticism or desire. The audience, at home in bed in need of diversion, is betrayed. What they get instead is sex that is transactional, utilitarian — the end product of a kind of twisted careerism.

This is less surprising than it may seem. Even as some applaud a new age of openness, and others decry the sexualization of culture, society remains at bottom deeply sex-negative. In those quarters where religious-traditionalist hostility to sexual imagery has weakened (or at least, sunk beneath the surface of everyday life), postmodernism and identity politics have filled its niche. Terms like "objectification," when tortured far past any useful meaning in that way that has become routine, can virtually outlaw such concepts as physical attraction, sexual fantasy and even sexuality itself.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, proponents of such ideas have had their effect, one which has naturally been manifested in our cultural production. Sex as a set-up for degradation or self-destruction, sex as a temptation to be resisted or a display of weakness, even sex as banality and disappointment, whether treated comically or tragically or tragic-comically, is broadly accepted. Sex as an occasion for embarrassment or frustration or gross-out gags (as in "raunchy" comedies), sex scenes which make the viewer's skin crawl (Ms. Bellafonte describes several), are what we can expect. The idea of sex and sexuality as a source of pleasure (for the characters, or the viewer) is regarded with much more apprehension, and within the mainstream, is rather more elusive, even as depictions of sex have become more frequent and graphic and accessible.

Once again I remember Roger Vadim's remark that "Hollywood is sometimes licentious, but always puritanical."1 And that hasn't changed. If anything, that characterization seems truer of the place than ever.

1. Also consistent with this sensibility: sex as a prelude to the monster or killer striking like some cosmic punisher (as in horror movies), or sex as indiscretion or transgression for which someone will soon pay dearly (the basis of the erotic thriller and much other drama).

The Politics of Continuum, Part I

In the science fiction series Continuum North America in 2077 is under the direct rule of business corporations, which operate a police state to protect their domination of society.

In discussing the show's premise many casually label the show's "North American Union" fascist. It is indisputably anti-democratic and right-wing, but fascism is a specific form of such rule. Defining fascism in such a way that it encompasses anything wider than the Fascist party of Mussolini has always been problematic, but some analysts have made useful attempts to at least identify characteristics distinguishing it from other political forms.

To take one example, Chip Berlet and Matthew Nemiroff Lyons characterize it as a political ideology which "glorifies national, racial or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to to purge imagined enemies, and attacks both revolutionary socialism and liberal pluralism in favor of militarized, totalitarian mass politics."1 Such characteristics seem pointedly absent from the world of Continuum. The political culture of the North American Union appears cosmopolitan, and neither celebrates a golden past, nor promises a golden future. Nor does it seem to display much concern with the mobilization of masses, or militarism as such. Additionally fascism tends to be at least formally critical of capitalism, and offer a vision of class reconciliation through a corporatist economics in which business, labor and a strong state ostensibly cooperate at an institutional level to achieve national economic goals. By contrast, the dominance of corporate power is naked and matter-of-fact in the show's milieu.

This makes the label "fascist" a misnomer. The NAU is, rather, a "corporatocracy," a polity directly ruled by corporations (not unlike India under the East India Company, prior to the Raj). This regime may serve similar ends to fascism (typically viewed from the left as capitalism's defensive reaction against socialism), but as shown by what is absent from the NAU's order, there are significant differences in the rhetorical and practical means they use to achieve those ends.

1. This description, which appears in their book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), seems consistent with compelling but less clinical analyses offered by other observers. Wilhelm Reich's description of fascism as the "mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas"; and Walter Benjamin's characterization of fascism as a politics which organizes "the masses" around their self-expression rather than the self-interest it seeks to deny them, and "the introduction of aesthetics into political life"; both fit quite well with Berlet and Lyons' usage of the term.

Game of Thrones: Toward the End of the Game

Over at Tor.com Chris Lough considers the possibility that HBO's Game of Thrones may come to an end before the series of novels on which it is based gets its concluding volume into print. Might, then, the TV series (projected to run about seven seasons, and thus wind things up circa 2017) offer the ending of the saga before the books do?

It certainly does seem plausible that we will not get both of the last two volumes to George R.R. Martin's series within the next four years, given how slowly volumes four and five came out (A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons taking some eleven years to appear after A Storm of Swords). Still, as Lough points out, the series' creators have many alternatives to actually presenting that conclusion, including the series giving only some of the ending; leaving the real conclusion to a film to come out later; or putting off the conclusion for a bit longer by going on hiatus for another season.

All of these strategies have been used before (though given the norms of American TV, that first option, giving only some of the ending, seems most likely). Yet the challenge for the series' writers begins well before the conclusion. A Storm of Swords offered material sufficient for two seasons--but the fourth and fifth books were rather less satisfactory for many readers, because so much of what they contain seems to be of marginal importance to the whole.

Arya and Sansa do continue their journeys--but these are much further removed from the core of the conflict in Westeros than in the first three volumes. The same goes for Tyrion's adventure after his escape from Westeros, while this seems even more the case with Daenerys' time attempting to establish a new order in Mereen in the fifth book. The attention these books devote to established characters now being used as viewpoint figures (Brienne, Samwell), and new characters in new places which had received little direct attention prior to these volumes (the events in the Iron Islands and Dorne) only deepens the impression of this part of the story as looser and lacking in significant events.

Only Cersei's misrule in King's Landing, Stannis' struggle against her and Jon Snow's tenure as Lord-Commander of the Night's Watch remain at the heart of the drama, and even these portions of the books lacked the tightness of their earlier treatments. The fact that Feast and Dance mostly depict events that happened simultaneously (with Crows dealing with only some plot threads, and Dragons picking up others where Storm left off) adds yet another complication.

Next to what came before, it can seem diffuse and anemic, and it ought not to be assumed that viewers of the show will be more forgiving than readers of the books, confronting the writers with a significant challenge if they mean to hold their interest for another three seasons, and making some alterations seem all but inevitable. One is that they will synchronize the events of Feast and Dance (so that, for instance, we will see Cersei's and Tyrion's plots unfolding in the same episodes). Another is that they will compress these events, perhaps by turning them into a single season by dropping anything not absolutely essential to the story's trajectory. (I certainly expect that we will see much less of the Iron Islands and Dorne.) I also think we are likely to see rather more revision of the material that is retained than we have seen in the series to date (throwing in as many surprises as the story can stand to spice things up).

Of course, even after all that, I doubt the results will match the vigor and pace of the first four seasons, but they might be sufficiently strong to hold on to the viewers' loyalty until the revelations of the (hopefully) more eventful The Winds of Winter.

New This Week: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Much has been made of the fact that Star Trek: Into Darkness fell well short of Paramount's $100 million-plus projection for the opening weekend. It made $70 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period and $84 million in the Thursday-to-Sunday period - which, given 3-D and IMAX surcharges, higher ticket prices all around, added up to a weaker opening than the first film had - despite the tendency of audiences to come out up front for the sequel of a well-liked film also enjoying positive buzz (and a larger budget). TrekMovie.com offers a round-up of the analysis, including a number of explanations for the disappointing numbers, including the lateness of the shift of the opening to Thursday (which ended up just stretching a three-day gross over four days), the four year gap between this film and its predecessor, and the intensity of the competition in a box office which saw the release of Iron Man 3 and The Great Gatsby in the two preceding weeks.

I do think these were all factors, but that they had their effect because of a larger problem: the last film was well-liked, but simply did not win over the big base of loyal new fans that enthusiasts of the reboot expected. Certainly the demographics of the audience point to this, with, as Trekmovie.com noting,

Deadline reports exit polling shows that 64% of the audience was male and only 27% was under the age 25. For the 2009 Star Trek movie, 35% were under 25. And in comparison Iron Man 3 had 45% under 25. So with all the talk of this not being your father’s Star Trek, there may be too many fathers in the audience.

This reminds me of something many a Trek fan, myself included, said about the reboot back in 2009 - that it was a fun summer blockbuster, but not much more. Putting it bluntly, it went the same route as the Jason Bourne series, dispensing with older elements while not adding enough new ones to elevate it above the level of the generic - and that seems to me to be how the audience has taken it. That being the case, is it really any wonder that those who came out were disproportionately longtime franchise fans rather than eager new converts?

Still, many observers are seeing a silver lining in the film's overseas earnings, which seem likely not just to outdo those of the first movie, but to more than offset any shortfall in the movie's North American earnings, which are themselves far from marking it as a flop. The upshot is that a Star Trek 3 a few summers from now still seems close to a sure thing.

The Decline of Sex in American Film: The Mysterious Disappearance of Gratuitous Nudity

A quick search of the Internet for the words "gratuitous nudity" turns up innumerable expressions of nostalgia for the '70s and '80s as a golden age for this kind of content, which devotees of a common line of argument hold virtually disappeared from film by the end of the 1990s.

Political correctness, of course, keeps reputable mainstream writers from expressing such laments, so those thoughts turns up mainly in dialogues between anonymous users of a web forum, or quirky independent blogs, or lists made by the users of sites like the Internet Movie DataBase. Still, there are exceptions, Roger Ebert notably expressing what many more were thinking in his review of '70s blaxploitation movie spoof Black Dynamite when he wrote that he was

happy to say it brings back an element sadly missing in recent movies, gratuitous nudity. Sexy women would "happen" to be topless in the 1970s movies for no better reason than that everyone agreed, including themselves, that their breasts were a genuine pleasure to regard . . . Now we see breasts only in serious films, for expressing reasons. There's been such a comeback for the strategically positioned bed sheet, you'd think we were back in the 1950s.

To my knowledge there has been no really serious attempt to statistically quantify movie nudity over the years, let alone do so in the methodically more rigorous way that tracking the incidence of gratuitous nudity requires, but there seems to be something to the perception nonetheless. The "desk clerks at resorts who just happened to be naked [and] coeds strolling the halls of dorms all day wearing nothing but incompetently tied towels" on which Steve Penhollow remarked in The Journal Gazette are clearly gone from our movie screens, while the propensity of characters to just happen to hold their meetings in strip joints has similarly gone into decline. So has the way that action sequences tended to crash through the doors of rooms where people just happened to be having sex (like in 1985's Commando, or 1988's Die Hard). Where nudity does occur not only is it usually more plausible within the plot, but it also tends to be briefer, angled and positioned and lit so as to conspicuously limit what is shown, and in general suggest rather than display. (This was even the case with the threesome in Wild Things that put Denise Richards on the pop cultural map.)

What caused all these changes? Certainly the explosion of alternative options for accessing sexual content, generally cheaper and more convenient than going to the theater (as is the case with flipping a channel, visiting a web site or ordering a disc), greatly diminished the effectiveness of cinematic nudity as a way of selling tickets, which after all is the point of the enterprise. The dampening effect of identity politics on sex in film has also been a factor, with any female nudity that might be branded gratuitous especially vulnerable to such pressures.1

There was also the explosion of film budgets. In the 1980s would-be summer blockbusters (like the aforementioned Commando) were still being made for $10-20 million--or $20-40 million in today's terms. Now comparably positioned movies cost $150 million as a matter of course, requiring filmmakers to shoot for a gross of $400 million or more, a financial territory where the R rating to which film nudity easily leads is a major liability2--so much so that the Terminator and Die Hard franchises went PG-13 for their fourth installments in the late '00s3.

Unsurprisingly, nudity is probably less present in such productions than in any other kind of film today, the PG-13-rated nudity of X-Men's Mystique as far as the megabudgeted superhero films go. Much the same can be said for the other, upper-tier action films, from family-friendly fantasy epics to the movies of Michael Bay, who out of exactly those considerations famously had Scarlett Johansson keep her bra on (despite her wanting to go without it) during a love scene in The Island.

While less susceptible to such changes given their lower (if also burgeoning) budgets, and readier embrace of the R-rating, the "raunchy" comedies which seem like such "naturals" for this kind of content have nonetheless been subject to the same climate, and have similarly become more inhibited about nudity of this type (such nudity as does appear in them of quite other sorts, for quite other purposes).

On the whole it seems that the less commercially ambitious the fare, the more leeway it possesses in this area, a situation which would suggest exactly the opposite of the familiar claim that "sex sells." Or at the very least, its qualification by another adage, that less has become more, a subtler use of this particular spice (like casting an action movie heroine who can enticingly fill out a jumpsuit, or the presentation of a teasing, strategically concealed glimpse of what's under the jumpsuit) the more profitable approach.

Still, it all leaves many a movie fan dismayed at the thought that they will never get a really good look, while a good many men of a certain generation look back longingly on movies like Porky's or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, both the films, and what they represented. In these quarters, they seem as much objects of nostalgia as the paramilitary action movies of the same era, that long, strange period between the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, and the millennium bug.

1. Take premium cable television, where gratuitous nudity is comparatively alive and well, helped by lower financial stakes, and the flexibility television's serial nature affords, while the small screen also has fewer alternatives where the sensational is concerned. HBO's Game of Thrones can go only so far in presenting epic battles or historical pageantry, but it can afford plenty of what Steve Penhollow terms the "cheapest special effect." Nonetheless, TV is certainly not immune to the aforementioned cultural politics, the threshold for giving offense at times surprisingly low here (witness the intensity of the criticism of a few seconds of an episode of Stargate: Universe in which Julia Benson wore a perfectly intact and completely dry T-shirt).
2. This might be reinforced by the likelihood that while those who bestow film ratings may have become more forgiving of some sorts of content (like profane language), they have become less forgiving of nudity--the PG ratings bestowed on Airplane! (1980) or Sheena (1984) seeming rather less plausible today.
3. The trend did not continue in the case of the Die Hard series, of course, the recent fifth film appearing with an R rating--but not because of any nude scenes.

Smiley, Ace of Spies: Reading John le Carré

I have to admit that I didn't care for John le Carré's novels when I first tried reading them back in high school (in the main, earlier books of the '60s and early '70s, like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).

After all, back then the spy tale was to me synonymous with James Bond (detached as I knew its image of spying to be from the reality). I knew from the start that le Carré was working toward quite different ends, and in fact reacting against the Bondian image, but felt that he failed to make this interesting.1 His world appeared to consist wholly of sad middle-aged toffs out of the pre-war era (and out of time in the post-war) eternally trudging through eternally gray, eternally shabby, eternally sodden North European cityscapes – epitomized, of course, by eternal cuckold George Smiley (whose wife Ann, not incidentally, came far closer to jet-setting glamour than George or any of his mostly indistinguishable colleagues).

Making the books even more off-putting was the way in which they were written, specifically the particular combination of show and tell le Carré employed.2 It seemed that he directly, profusely, even tediously "showed" things that seemed (to me) to be of marginal interest, and then when coming to things such as key plot points, "told" them much too briefly, or off-handedly, or even simply hinted at them, with the very slowness of the pace, the long stretches in which nothing seemed to be happening (and the slackening of my concentration as a result), making it all the easier to miss them. Or he "showed" those things in the most oblique manner possible, again obscuring through the very act of presentation. (Scenes involving violence or subterfuge were especially prone to such treatment, typically described through a succession of fragmentary images.)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for instance, is very much of this pattern in such respects as its opening with a long chapter devoted to the post-service life of Jim Prideaux; simply dropping on us (or so it felt to me) George Smiley's conclusion that the key to the identity of the mole he is supposed to find lies in the details of Operation Testify rather than presenting the thought process that led to that conclusion; and at the end giving us just glimpses of Bill Haydon's explanation of his betrayal of the Circus to the Soviets (in part an "aesthetic" judgment, he tells us), before he is killed in circumstances that leave us wondering as to who and how. The flashback-laden nonlinearity of that particular book compounded matters, making one scene seem to lead to the next without transition or explanation just as much as if the author had excised crucial parts from the text (which, in a sense, he had).

Authorial games such as these seemed bad enough in even the most straightforward of stories, but quite intolerable in a complex tale of intrigue in which the characters are already trying quite hard to fool one another, and it all seemed to me yet more evidence that the Arbiters of Literary Taste who labeled le Carré the greatest of spy novelists were simply hostile to the things I enjoyed in my fiction. So after starting several of his books I ended up not finishing any of them and for a long time only really knew his work secondhand, from what others said about him, and from films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) and The Tailor of Panama (2001) – which I rather admired, but which did not tempt me back to the books.

I only returned to them when I took a renewed interest in the spy genre many years later and decided to read my way through all of the classics I'd missed before, even those that struck me as difficult or dull or otherwise not worth my time – and where le Carré's books are concerned, found the experience rewarding rather than trying.3 This was not because my understanding of what le Carré actually did changed. In fact the assessment of Tinker, Tailor given above is based on my rereading of the book as much as my first impression, and after much reflection, still seems valid to me on a descriptive level. If anything, I remain as convinced as ever that le Carré is an author whose works not only ask for but require close reading and considerable patience, while being exceedingly unforgiving of small slips in attention, and that even the most experienced, able readers can find themselves confused or frustrated by them at times. And I still think there is room to argue that the books are more difficult and less accessible than they really need to be.

However, the second time around I did feel that the esteem of so many critics for this author was not just a display of literary snobbery, but rather that these books were genuinely worth the while, and the measure of effort they demanded. If one goes to fiction for a sense of "felt life," well, here it is in abundance. The substance and style of the typical le Carré novel may not wholly satisfy as a thrill ride of either the action-adventure or mystery-suspense varieties, but their author does succeed admirably in telling the kinds of tales that he clearly does mean to tell.4 The social and political blinkers of his privileged, cloistered, backward-looking protagonists; the practical and ethical ambiguities of their work; the relentless bureaucratic venality and stupidity that are such a large part of their collective existence; the frailty of human life, so often destroyed by the games they play – all these things came through artfully and powerfully, while my greater willingness to make the effort enabled me to appreciate the intricacy of his plotting, and his sense of humor (which actually took me by surprise when I first watched the film version of Panama).

Ultimately, where my estimation of many of the writers I earlier enjoyed had declined over the years in line with my growing awareness of their technical and imaginative limitations, and my broadening sense of what literature could do, my estimation of le Carré's work grew enormously, so that I came around to the view of him widely held by the critics. But the same experiences have also been another powerful reminder of the insufficiently acknowledged distance between highbrow critic and the general readership, some members of which uncritically go along with the commonplaces handed to them, while others, responding to the undeniable difference between the promises of the advertising and the actual thing, protest that The Emperor Has No Clothes.5 As anyone who has compared the commercial descriptions of these books in circulation with their actual content can appreciate, it has also been a reminder of the tendency of book jacket blurb and critic alike to raise unreasonable hopes by presenting books like these as if they were no more and no less than well-executed entertainments.

1. The James Bond image, as opposed to the James Bond novels, which bear a closer resemblance to le Carré's work than is usually appreciated.
2. It seems that professional commentators on this author's work rarely mention his style, in part, I suppose, because discussing the style of a work of fiction in a substantive way is much more challenging than discussing its content, and perhaps because those who do have the ability to do so seem reluctant to characterize le Carré as a difficult writer – as if to say this about any author less idiosyncratic than a Thomas Pynchon would be an admission of weakness on their part.
3. The only work on my list I almost failed to finish out of sheer frustration proved to be Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, not because of stylistic issues, but rather more conventional literary failings – the book seeming to me overlong, much too slow and at points made nearly impenetrable by the thickness of the nautical detail.
4. I do, however, think that the more conventional and accessible Call for the Dead (1961), and the celebrated The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), are at the least partial exceptions in this regard.
5. In circumstances like these I commonly suspect that many readers applaud the books without actually understanding them, even on the level of plot, and think that the scarcity of encyclopedic fan sites or wikis devoted to the Smiley series (such as exist for many another such series) is telling; there may simply not be enough readers with a sufficiently firm grasp of the books to form the kind of base that would produce them.

On The 85th Academy Awards

The 85th annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was last night.

This year there was no clear-cut front-runner, and unsurprisingly, the awards ended up being quite widely distributed.

Ang Li's Life of Pi won four awards, including Best Director, Original Score, Cinematography, and Visual Effects. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln won Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in the title role (an unprecedented third Oscar for Day-Lewis), and Best Production Design, while Silver Lining's Playbook won Best Actress for the performance of Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. Django Unchained won Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Waltz) and Best Original Screenplay for director Tarantino (groan), while Les Miserables picked up Best Supporting Actress for Anne Hathaway's performance as Fantine (as well as prizes for Makeup and Hairstyling, and Sound Mixing).

Despite not winning in the acting and directing categories (helmer Ben Affleck not even nominated in that category, a reminder perhaps of the slowness of his post-Gigli rehabilitation), Argo won, along with Best Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing, Best Picture. Astonishingly, the prize was presented by First Lady Michelle Obama - making for a tableau which, given Argo's storyline and the U.S.'s present confrontation with Iran, had unintended but unfortunate political implications seized on by the Iranian state media. Of course, it could not have been assumed that Argo would be the winner, but the possibility that her role in the ceremony could be taken for government endorsement of the film should have given the responsible PR hack pause. Besides, Ms. Obama's bestowing the award on, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty, or Django Unchained, might have been even more problematic in this regard.

A Note on The "Cool Stuff" Theory of Literature

Several years ago fantasy writer Steven Brust presented "The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature" to the world. When asked about it in an interview with Chris Olson for Strange Horizons he described it as holding that

all literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool, and the reader will enjoy the work to the degree that the reader and writer agree about what's cool--and this functions all the way from the external trappings to deepest level of theme and to the way the writer uses words.

Brust has also remarked (apparently elsewhere, though I have not found the original source) that the novel can be "understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff."

As a Grand Unified Theory of Literature, of course, this leaves something to be desired, but as a more limited theory it certainly has its attractions, Brust's position being virtually irrefutable (of course people write as much of what they like as possible!) while still offering something of substance for our understanding of literature. When I look at the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, what I find at bottom is a profound difference in the idea about what constitutes cool stuff, and the manner in which they advertise their particular sort of cool stuff to the would-be reader. Genre fiction presents sorts of cool stuff for which there are large, clearly established markets, reflected in the very name of the genre or subgenre of which they are examples, from Regency romance to forensic police procedural to young adult urban fantasy. The cool stuff in confirmed, highbrow literary fiction is apt to be of a less easily labeled or marketed kind, because it does not lend itself to formulaic use in cases, or perhaps because it simply lacks wide appeal. (Try, for instance, to picture large numbers of people seeking out the "Unreliable Narrator" fiction section of a bookshop.)

In either case, it is commonly a cause for complaint when the promised cool stuff was not presented in the quantities expected. "Not enough big weapons and battles," a fan may give as their reason for disappointment with a particular military techno-thriller. "But that book was all about plot and action! What about good writing?" a reader of literature may say in dismissing that very same book.

Of course, this is not to say that I take the position that it is all relative, that there are no grounds for suggesting standards - quite the contrary. But Brust's idea is a worthwhile reminder of something too often forgotten in the study of literature, the idea of literature as a source of pleasure to reader and author, reports of whose death have been greatly exaggerated. It is a reminder, too, of the limits to efforts to read literary works entirely and exclusively as a cultural code to be cracked in search of hidden meanings--as much of their content will invariably have other reasons for being there.