Thursday, May 30, 2013

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.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

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.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

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.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

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.

Friday, March 1, 2013

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.

Monday, February 25, 2013

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.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

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.

Friday, February 15, 2013

The Politics of Dark and Gritty Storytelling

I have observed here many a time before that the words "dark and gritty" are constantly used by critics as "terms of praise, rather than descriptors, as if no other tone is even worth attempting." As I have also remarked, I find this position artistically and intellectually problematic, not only because it narrows creative possibilities in particular instances, because of what this means for our broader cultural life - and inextricable from it, our political life.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to see all "dark and gritty" writing as one and the same. In fact, where its politics are concerned, it is worth remembering that the approach can be used to different ends. The "dark and gritty" approach can be a progressive's or radical's indictment of the prevailing order of things - the ways in which it corrupts, degrades and may ultimately destroy us, and accordingly, why that order should and must be changed. Hard-boiled crime fiction largely started that way, with books like Dashiell Hammett's classic Red Harvest. Alternatively, it can be a conservative or reactionary's defense of that order, a lesson in the Fallen, dark or otherwise flawed nature of humanity, the existence of "evil," and so forth, so that attempts to ameliorate the world's injustice and suffering are futile or counterproductive, and harsh measures to keep the worst in us and of us in line far preferable to the alternative. This sensibility underlies a great deal of fiction, too, like survivalist-themed postapocalyptic tales where civilization goes down thunderously, and gives way to a Hobbesian aftermath.

Today it is the conservative version of dark and gritty that we see celebrated by critics, and endlessly enacted by those writers seeking their approval - its popularity, interestingly, extending far beyond those who identify as actual conservatives. It is easy enough to imagine why someone not necessarily subscribing to such politics may embrace it, at least from time to time, like the inclination to wallow in the morbid when one feels down, or in the case of frustrated adolescents, a sense of such a world-view as empowering (imagining a Hobbesian monster inside them letting them think of themselves as tough guys). However, for the most part it seems a reflection of the underappreciated extent to which conservative intellectual premises have become predominant, just like the prevalence of postmodernist philosophy, and the virtually unquestioned standing of neoliberal economics, beneath the superficialities of the political rhetoric of our time.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Jack Ryan Five, Jack Ryan One

The vast success of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels in print during the 1980s and after inevitably led to big-screen versions. Three films were made in quick succession in the early 1990s, between 1990 and 1994 - The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994), all of them major feature films, with the last two released as tentpole vehicles in their respective summers after the success of October. While Clear and Present Danger was a success like its predecessors, and military technothrillers continued to appear on the big screen in the 1990s (like the Harrison Ford starrer Air Force One, which one can be forgiven for mistaking for a Ryanverse-based film), it ended up being eight years before the next one, The Sum of All Fears, hit theaters in 2002.

That film's earnings were respectable, but not much more, the movie taking in a little under $200 million globally - the same money as the three earlier films, give or take, which was decent enough in the early '90s, less satisfactory in 2002, after considerable inflation of film budgets and ticket prices. And the idea of cranking out another big budget movie starring Ben Affleck must not have seemed very appealing in the years afterward, when, as always happens, the press's love affair with the actor gave way to the especially nasty post-Gigli backlash, from which he has only recently recovered fully (in large part because of his work behind the camera, with the process ironically completed by yet another spy drama, Argo).

At the same time the Jack Ryan franchise seemed increasingly moribund as a result of the novels' dating and the authors' declining cachet - the years passing without new Clancy novels (from 2003 to 2010, no Ryanverse books appeared), while thriller fashions changed (the technothriller becoming more Dan Brown than Dale Brown). Consequently it was something of a surprise when I learned that a new Ryan movie, inventively titled Jack Ryan, is now in production - helmed by Kenneth Branagh (who also plays Ryan's antagonist), while the titular character is portrayed by Chris Pine, as if the thinking went, "People accepted him in one reboot; why not another?" At last report the film is expected out by Christmas this year.

I wonder at the logic of the move. That the films have been made into blockbusters in the past can make one easily forget that the books do not readily lend themselves easily to this kind of treatment. The sprawl of the plots is lost as the scripts drop many bits and concentrate others to produce a coherent two-hour film, as they must. Also lost are the particular literary pleasures of immersion in technical detail - the plane or submarine that can seem like the star of the book reduced to a prop or a set on screen.

It is also worth remembering that the plots which the novels furnish the series, like all plots reliant on technology and geopolitics, dated quite quickly. The storyline of the Sum of All Fears, a novel situated in that brief moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, proved sufficiently the stuff of yesteryear for the cinematic adaptation to appear fairly creaky, despite quite a reasonable effort on the part of the writers.

With all this would seem to go the strongest elements of the books while it is worth remembering too that this is not the first time that Hollywood rebooted the series, this also having happened in The Sum of All Fears (which chucked Ryan's biography in favor of having the character as a young analyst starting out at the Agency rather than its Deputy Director, another stumbling block for the plot).1 Still, Hollywood abhors an unutilized IP, and we will all see how this decision turns out soon enough.

1. Ryan's prior career as Marine officer, stock broker and Annapolis professor, and the events of Patriot Games that made intelligence a career for Ryan in the first place, are simply dropped from the film.

Planning a New Dirk Pitt Movie

As of 2013 it still seems not only that no new Dirk Pitt movie is headed to the screens, but even likely to get made in the foreseeable future. The costly failures that were the two previous films, and the particularly sour aftermath of the production of Sahara, cannot but dampen enthusiasm for another Pitt film on the part of prospective producers.

There also seems to be little demand from anyone but confirmed Cussler fans--the kind of action-adventure for which the novels are known, for the most part, taking a back seat to first and foremost, fantasy and science fiction epics, particularly those featuring superheroes; and second, the more grounded action-adventure ushered in by the Jason Bourne series, and reinforced by the turn of the Bond films in this direction from Casino Royale on. The Pitt novels, which resemble the pre-reboot James Bond in many ways, fall into a middle territory which seems to have been less salable to critics and audiences (though I admittedly wonder if there is any real reason why this should be so). At the same time the fascination with mysteries of the sort that rewrite the history books also seems to have waned somewhat since 2005, when The Da Vinci Code was still setting the bestseller lists afire.

Still, what if there were real interest in a new Pitt film? The series would still face a significant stumbling block in its reliance on cutting-edge technology and ripped-from-the-headlines geopolitics for its interest. Such material tends to date very quickly, after all. The essential concept, however--a protagonist whose milieu is the sea--seems more robust. Some version of Pitt, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and the associated personalities, remain plausible as a concept. Rather than poring over the backlog of adventures looking for something to adapt, the thing to do would seem to be to take this and create an original adventure for the big screen around it which would hopefully have something of the series' swashbuckling spirit--just as the makers of the next Jack Ryan movie are apparently striving to do.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

The Trajectory of the "Post-Vietnam" Action Movie

Last year Adam Sternbergh published an article in the New York Times titled "How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey." It is an interesting and entertaining piece, but contrary to the title's promise, rather short on cause and effect--on how the American action movies of the '80s (the Rambo series, Schwarzenegger films like Commando, and the rest) took their shape, and why their pattern fell out of use. Still, it is common to view Vietnam and its aftermath as having had something to do with it, and Sternbergh is no exception.

I have to admit that for a long time I was quite skeptical of claims about such a connection, taking them as exercises in that shallow sort of instant cultural analysis that forces every pop cultural hit or miss into an ultra-conventional narrative of national tragedies and triumphs, with the most recent success or failure necessarily a loud and clear expression of popular feeling toward the most recent event.1 And yet . . . these movies about big men with big guns effortlessly mowing down hordes of faceless foreign enemies very plausibly seem the power fantasy of a deeply wounded culture.

There is also no denying the shocks of that period, of which defeat in Vietnam was only one. There was, more broadly, something analogous, if rather weaker, than what Britain went through in the twentieth century, that sense of unraveling empire--in Europe and Japan's turning from militarily occupied aid recipients into politically assertive economic rivals, the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system (still lamented by today's gold bugs), the OPEC oil embargo and the subsequent energy shocks, the end of the post-war boom (a generation which had seen 4 percent a year growth nearly flatline, full-ish employment give way to stagflation), the perceived advances of the Soviet Union in a "hostile" Third World. There was, too, mainstream, traditionalist resentment of the cultural changes that did not begin in the 1960s, but which were widely regarded as having come to a head in it, as marginalized groups (women, minorities, the young) became more assertive, and attitudes toward matters such as sex, drugs and the natural environment changed. That all this was accompanied by rising crime and urban decay did not make it any more bearable for those discomfited by the trends.

Reactions to this succession of economic and foreign policy setbacks, and the cultural changes which accompanied them, varied enormously. Some, like John Kenneth Galbraith or William Appleman Williams, hoped for, and even expected, the United States to change the way in which it dealt with other nations, and the role its government played in the economy, redressing the private sector's failings in areas from health care to the environment, and accommodating the calls of the left for a more egalitarian society.

However, the dominant reaction was conservative, and ultimately expressed in the policies and attitudes of the once improbable-seeming Reagan era. As this developed much of what had seemed threatening went into retreat, or was tamed, or was simply ignored, as bad memories faded, old failures were apparently redeemed, and big problems ameliorated or simply papered over.2 The Gulf of Sidra, Grenada, the famous and infamous PR of and for the era, weakened the memory of the last war's defeat and divisiveness. The decade's bubble economics, the constant emphasis of the media on how well the rich were doing (and the tendency to overlook how the non-rich were doing) made the stagflation of the '70s look like trouble overcome (even as the problems which became so prominent in that era--deindustrialization, financial instability, rising trade deficits, falling wages, urban decay--kept worsening).

Pop culture played its part, not least on the movie screen, replete with images of avengers "setting the world to rights." Harry Callahan cleaned up streets overrun with hoodlums and radicals and other such types, while John Rambo refought the Vietnam War--as did the legions of imitators who made the loose cannon cop and the killing machine commando clichés of '80s cinema.3 However, in the process they helped diminish their own appeal, while at the same time also using up their potentials in the way that all intensively mined genres do, fairly quickly attaining the limits of concept and scale (quite evident in the absurd finale of the third Rambo movie). The box office receipts tell the tale: the summer of 1988 saw those two biggest icons of the post-Vietnam action movie, Dirty Harry and Rambo, each snubbed by moviegoers as The Dead Pool flopped and Rambo III underperformed badly.4

In the years that followed, American triumph in the 1991 Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stagnation of Europe and Japan, the (mis)reading of the tech bubble and bull market of the '90s as signs of endless good times ahead, made all those '70s-era frustrations that much more distant by repeatedly reassuring American conservatives time and again that "the American way" was the only way. Even the September 11 terrorist attacks drew forth a new wave of triumphalism that lasted for much of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And all the while, a new generation was coming into the world for which "post-Vietnam" was as distant as post-Peloponnesian War.

Quite naturally, the cops and commandos, their old relevance lost, were succeeded by protagonists with a more "everyman" quality, evinced in such things as domestic troubles (already evident in the buddy cops of Lethal Weapon or John McClane), or outright superheroes (starting with 1989's blockbuster Batman). Instead of mean streets, Third World landscapes and villains from the nightly news, their adventures featured science fiction and fantasy elements like imaginary CGI-based creatures (which really came of age with 1993's Jurassic Park), and junkets in outer space (the mid- and late 1990s seeing more of these than any other period but the post-Star Wars rush, circa 1979-1984), and the bigger, more exotic spectacles they afforded.5

The transition certainly took its time. Much of the '80s action movie remained in the films of the '90s, from the continuation of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series' in that decade (Lethal Weapon in 1992 and 1998, Die Hard in 1990 and 1995); to later Schwarzenegger movies like the affectionate if ill-conceived parody Last Action Hero (1993), True Lies (1994) (the biggest action hit of its year) and Eraser (1996); to high-tech military thrillers like Air Force One (1997); to the special forces action of The Rock (1996) and Con Air (1997) (each prominently featuring American soldiers wronged by their governments). However, by the 2000s the transition to a different cinematic universe was virtually complete, the older style of action film persisting on lower budgets and pure nostalgia, as quaint to younger moviegoers as yesteryear's fascination with the Western.

Of course, this second decade of the twenty-first century, a time of financial crisis, frustration in overseas wars, and deep national divisions, echoes the 1970s in many ways. One may wonder if this does not imply a return to something like the movies of the '80s in a more than imitative or nostalgic way. For the time being, though, the defining action movies of recent years--superhero films like the Spiderman series or The Avengers, grand-scale fantasy epics like the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean sagas, or The Transformers movies--have tended less toward fantasies of forcing reality into line with right-wing populist images of how the world should be than a politically less contentious escape from reality altogether.6

1. An instance of this is the reading of the success of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spiderman as a matter of its analogy with post-9/11 America, which I have always found unconvincing. A country which has taken its position as the world's dominant superpower for granted for generations is hardly comparable to a nerdy orphan who has just received superpowers as a windfall, and only secretly regards himself as a hero.
2. There was, too, a measure of mainstream acceptance of the social changes that had earlier been troubling--if with caveats and modifications. As Chris Hedges put it in Death of the Liberal Class, Martin Luther King was turned "into a red-white-and-blue icon . . . [like] Most of our great social reformers . . . sanitized for mainstream public consumption."
3. Paramilitary action-adventure on TV and in print, and the military techno-thriller, also played their parts.
4. The Dead Pool was the end of the Dirty Harry series, Rambo III virtually that for the Rambo films. (Not another such movie was made until 2008, and that a comparative small, low-profile release.)
5. There was even a spurt of renewed interest in the Hong Kong action film, with directors and actors like Jackie Chan and Jet Li featuring prominently in a number of Hollywood films--Woo helming Broken Arrow and Face/Off, Jackie Chan making up half of the last really successful buddy cop duo in 1998's Rush Hour, and Jet Li's minor role in the last fourth and installment of the '80s-vintage Lethal Weapon series played up in the press to capitalize on the interest.
6. Of course, this is not to deny that some of these films have been taken as conveying political messages, including messages of the type discussed here. Christopher Nolan's Batman series has frequently been read as not merely political, but political in this manner, and one may say the same of Iron Man. Still, this seems less common, and when it does appear, more ambiguous than in many of the films of the '70s and '80s.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Leon Trotsky's Transhumanism

Back in June I commented on Dale Carrico's critique of the Singularity as a neoliberal fantasy. As I stated then, there is much to his critique of the ideas of Ray Kurzweil and company as such, but it would be a mistake to regard them as the whole of transhumanist and posthumanist thought, which has seen contributions from all across the political spectrum. Indeed, in the early part of the twentieth century leftist thinkers may actually have been more closely associated with such thought than the techno-libertarians who dominate the discussion today--Marxists like J.D. Bernal (via The World, The Flesh and the Devil) and Olaf Stapledon (who pioneered the fictional treatment of the theme in novels like Last and First Men).

Nor was such thought wholly the purview of scientists making forays into futurology, or writers of science fiction, and nor have they wholly belonged to the West. Russia's late nineteenth and early twentieth century Cosmists were perhaps the first modern school of such thought. Given that this is the case, it does not seem a very great surprise that Leon Trotsky expressed such expectations--notably in Literature and Revolution, a work which may have had as its primary focus the state of Russian letters, but in which, far more than in his works of political theory, commentary and history, he painted a portrait of what he thought socialist society might be like decades or centuries on. These speculations extended beyond the artistic to the technological, Trotsky predicting the tapping of "inexhaustible sources of super-power," "the regulation of the weather and the climate" and even the transformation of the world's surface through techniques for moving mountain and river until it has "rebuilt the Earth."1

Indeed, he held that just as humanity collectively liberated itself from the "dark," "unconscious" element in economic, political and social life with theoretical and applied science, human beings would liberate themselves individually from their own unconscious through "artificial selection" and "psycho-physical training," producing a "higher social biologic type . . . immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler," and continuously improving itself further still, this vision of transcendence in fact the book's closing words--with transhumanism another aspect of humanity's broader social and political liberation rather than an alternative to it. And indeed, it was one of the more long-term issues, too far away to be of really serious concern for the present-day artist, Trotsky criticizing "Cosmist" poets as essentially escapist, and even lazy, taking the easy way out of the difficulties of understanding, depicting, making art out of the present-day world by "jumping into another world" altogether.

One could imagine the same being said of those promoting the more facile versions of Singularitarian thought today.

1. An echo of the thought of Nikolai Fedorov? It does not seem unlikely.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

David Walsh Reviews Django Unchained

David Walsh, always one to challenge the conventional wisdom, recently took a sharply critical look at an almost universally acclaimed film nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars - Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (available here).

Walsh attacks Django for its weak plotting and shallow treatment of its ostensible themes (the story "treat[ing] slavery in an entirely false and ahistorical fashion" and "pivot[ing] on inconsequential or contrived incidents . . . nothing more than the clumsy preparation for the final bloodbath"), its similarly shallow handling of its characters (its "stereotypes . . . a decent, journeyman Hollywood studio director of another day would hardly have dared to bring to the screen"), and its sheer mean-spiritedness and sadism ("Almost everyone is filthy, even leaving aside the psychotics and racist maniacs who dominate the goings-on"). Walsh, who had previously reviewed Tarantino's work unfavorably, takes this latest film as proof that Tarantino is "a seriously unskilled artist," better thought of as "a cultural huckster, with a minor talent for pastiche, reworking genres and creating blackly comic moments" than a genuinely significant filmmaker.

At least as interesting as his criticism of the film itself is what Walsh has to say about the reason why critics have heaped so much praise on Tarantino's films for two decades now, namely that an artist
simply cannot be too bleak, sadistic, pessimistic or contemptuous of humanity for the so-called 'radical' or 'left' critic. Cynicism and misanthropy are one’s admission ticket. Anyone who believes in the betterment of mankind is automatically excluded.
Reading Walsh's comment, which rather neatly sums up not only the celebration of Tarantino's work, but that exaltation of "dark and gritty" material, I found myself thinking of that current of critical opinion holding that the deeply flawed Battlestar Galactia is a staggering work of heartbreaking genius while pre-reboot Star Trek is relentlessly bashed as a "microcosm of everything that's wrong with science fiction"; that holds that "We prefer the Cylons, who school us about humanity by screwing and killing us" to Data, The Doctor and other "clueless wankers with Aspergers who teach us what it means to be human."1

Walsh takes a similar view of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, another celebrated Oscar nominee, his examination of which is likewise well worth checking out.

1. The Doctor, of course, is the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. I was not a particular fan of that fourth incarnation of the series, which did indeed feel rather creaky and outworn, but must say that I consistently found the Doctor the most engagingly written character on that show.

David Walsh on The Life of Pi
12/20/12
My Posts on Battlestar Galactica
12/16/12
My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
My Posts on Postmodernism
11/21/12

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Thoughts on Green Lantern

While recent years have seen comic book superheroes perhaps the single biggest trend among box office hits, Hollywood's treatments of the theme have also produced their share of flops. Perhaps the biggest from a financial perspective was 2011's $200 million-plus Green Lantern.

The film certainly had its weaknesses - a miscast Ryan Reynolds in the lead (as might be expected, he proves far more convincing as snarky jackass than galactic hero), the astonishingly underwritten backstories of the characters, particularly Hector Hammond (which makes the connections of many of them to one another a surprise), the lack of freshness about the whole (too much of it seeming overly familiar, even where strictly speaking it isn't, this being the Green Lantern's first live-action film). Yet, the films' biggest liability with mainstream audiences and critics was not the execution, but the material itself, which was very much of comics' long-ago Golden Age, and E.E. Smith-vintage pulp space opera.

As those who have noted the difference between science fiction's financial successes on the big screen, and its marginality on the small, have often noted, science fiction blockbusters sell on spectacle rather than concept, which tends to be a liability. From a commercial perspective world-building is best kept to a minimum, and the dubiousness of those not ordinarily interested in this kind of subject matter avoided rather than challenged. (Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings have been the exception, not the rule.)

Relatively grounded films, relying on pseudo-science or technobabble (about which audiences can be surprisingly credulous) rather than out-and-out magic (or pseudo-science and technobabble that look too obviously like magic), and preferably not too much of any of these elements, have tended to be the easiest sell, especially with the generally Earthbound, generally contemporary superhero genre. Brian Singer's take on the X-Men and Christopher Nolan's Batman films (a far cry from where the earlier Batman series had wound up by the time of Batman and Robin) exemplify this approach. So too the Spiderman and Iron Man series', which together make up almost the entire list of the most successful superhero-based films.

By contrast, this probably worked against the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four with its rubbery Reed Richards. Thor was clearly a real hit, but more idiosyncratic, split between sword and sorcery-like spectacle in Asgard and a very grounded central hour on Earth, and the magic covered over by a patina of pseudo-science - and at any rate, a much more modest earner than the films named above.1

Green Lantern, with its rationales about the significance of the Lantern Corps' color, Hal Jordan's use of his ring to save the day (preventing a helicopter crash from taking a massive toll of human life by putting it on a race track conjured through his powers), its CGI galactic empire - even the Corps' uniform - was simply too much for skeptical viewers. (It may even have been too much for the filmmakers, who never quite seem to believe in what they're doing, which certainly didn't help.)

The result of all this is that a Green Lantern 2 seems a long shot. And while the point rarely gets acknowledged, I suspect that this same issue of concept has been a major factor in keeping the long-planned movies about the magical-mythological Wonder Woman and the deeply space operatic Silver Surfer eternally in development.

1. Catwoman (2004) and Jonah Hex (2010), of course, also rooted their heroes' abilities in magic, but the failure of those films was already overdetermined in other ways. Catwoman offered the silliness without the spectacle, while Jonah Hex had the additional liability of playing like a sharply scaled-down and much more serious version of Wild Wild West (1999).

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Coming This Year, Part I: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Star Trek: Into Darkness, the sequel to the 2009 big-screen reboot of the half century-old Star Trek franchise, is of course one of the major events of the upcoming year in genre film as far as fans are concerned.

I remember enjoying the 2009 movie as a big, loud, flashy summer blockbuster, brisk and slick and spectacular and full of grandly operatic dramatics and viscerally exciting action. And the central twist, which had this story branching off in another timeline from Star Trek as we knew it before, was clever and well-executed. However, I also remember feeling that it dispensed with almost everything that made Star Trek, Star Trek.

I have already mentioned the film's refusal to provide even a nod to the humanism and utopianism of the originals, or their intellectual aspiration - and also conceded that there may be no going back to it. The movie even destroyed significant pieces of the Star Trek universe outright, Vulcan not surviving the film's first half. One result was that the use of the characters at the core of the original series became the main link to the franchise, without which the film would have been a generic space opera with a well-known brand name slapped on.

However, this was an intrinsically problematic approach. The original cast, whatever the limitations of the material it had, or the performances it gave, occupied their roles for three decades - in Leonard Nimoy's case, from 1964's pilot "The Menagerie," to 1994's Star Trek: Generations. This means that we watched the cast assume these roles in their youth or middle age, and continue in them into old age, along with their characters, Bones becoming Admiral McCoy, Spock Ambassador Spock in their appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation's two-parter "Unification" - trajectories without any parallel in screen history. Naturally actor and character became closely identified down to their quirks, like William Shatner's theatrical delivery of his lines (so notoriously susceptible to parody), which I can't help but feel is the only way anyone playing James T. Kirk can or should speak.

Such images are not easily displaced within a mere two hours of screen time - even with ideal writing and casting, something the writing and casting of the film was not. Hiram Lee, a reviewer clearly well-acquainted with the original series, and with some apparent affection for it, wrote of the "charm and camaraderie" that the original cast managed, something in short supply here - the script at times going in the extreme opposite direction in an attempt to be "edgy" (which I suppose the shallow regard as being almost as good as "dark and gritty").

As you might guess, the rude, crude Uhura annoyed me. Her reply to a barroom pickup attempt by a young, pre-Academy Kirk with a bestiality joke (which is also a rather ugly insult to rural people) should have been beneath her - and it was unfortunate, since I suspect that with better material Zoe Saldana might have fared reasonably well. I am less convinced that the forgettable Chris Pine would have done the same, but his less than witty rejoinder didn't help matters, and on the whole he ended up being much more convincing as trouble-making idiot than galactic hero in the making.1

Of course, not every detail was so poorly thought out. I rather liked the way they worked Sulu's fencing into the action, for instance - but at the end I saw John Cho and still thought of Harold Lee rather than the senior helmsman of the Enterprise, while Simon Pegg was an implausible Scotty. Anton Yelchin's Pavel Chekov and Karl Urban's Doctor McCoy made little impression on me, though I suppose they had little chance to do so (and Urban, at least, seemed to have some potential).

Ultimately, the only one who really managed was Zachary Quinto in the role of Spock. Without denying Quinto the credit due him for that, his success was also a matter of the greater material he had to work with - the character's famous idiosyncracies (the Vulcan demeanor, Spock's divided human-Vulcan nature), the fuller use the film made of his backstory (like the alienation he experienced as the product of a mixed-marriage), and of course, the appearance by Leonard Nimoy as an older/original timeline version of that character, acknowledging Quinto's Spock as a younger/alternate timeline version of himself.

Will the second film change all that for viewers with reservations like mine? The increasing familiarity with the newer actors in these roles will have its effect, but probably not a very big one. Just as movie-watchers still remember previous James Bonds and Supermen, so will confirmed old Star Trek fans continue to remember the original incranations of Kirk, Spock and the rest, as well as the elements of the series' universe and style that have been completely tossed overboard, for a long time to come, and compare them favorably with the newer material. As the treatment of Spock's character in the first film demonstrated, the filmmakers were not unmindful of that audience, but reboots are about winning over new fans (less attached to the older version of the series, if attached to it at all) rather than pleasing old ones, while the strongly favorable response to the 2009 movie all but insures a scaled-up version of what it offered. Naturally, the current trailer promises an even bigger, louder, flashier summer blockbuster, at least as brisk and slick and spectacular and full of even more grandly operatic dramatics and action - and not necessarily anything more.

1. Like the film's product placements (remember the Nokia carphone?), the crudity is a reminder of the series' loss of its sense of the utopian (or even of the twenty-third century as a different place) - with that exchange an interesting contrast with that between Kirk and Spock on a San Francisco bus in Star Trek IV regarding the prominence of "colorful metaphors" in the speech of twentieth century Earthlings.

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