In the Star Trek universe, starship captains tend to be Renaissance Men.
Jean-Luc Picard is an obvious example. Not only does his job require him to be a good many different things (explorer, diplomat, soldier), at all of which he manages to excel; but in his own private life he also displays a wide variety of talents and interests (in literature, mathematics, archaeology, music).
The show manages this without making it all seem silly, or over-the-top, or grating, and this is much rarer than one might think. The truth is that it is very difficult to make overachievers believable and human, let alone likeable, with television usually failing at this. Far too often, we get not a depiction of intelligence or talent, but a crude caricature of it--because the writer doesn't understand what it is they are presenting to us (they write geniuses without being geniuses themselves, and so can't get into their heads; they write scientists without having ever cracked open a science book); because intelligence and talent are not the sorts of things a good writer, let alone a hack, can readily dramatize in five seconds of screen time. (Listening to a performance on a musical instrument, for example, how many of us can actually assess the technical skill that went into it?)
Besides, there is the way in which such characters are often used. Very often the overachiever is a wish-fulfillment figure, either the author's outsized fantasy of themselves, or their attempt to give some targeted audience such a fantasy; or they are an expression of an elitism as raging and mean-spirited as it is simplistic; or it is simply a writer's lame way of freeing themselves to stick their character in a multitude of different situations and somehow have them always come out on top, always have the solution, always be the hero.
The results tends to grate in all these cases.
With Picard, the show happily escaped that trap, and much as the writing on Star Trek gets a lot of flak, one ought not to underestimate that achievement.
Just how did they manage it?
Part of the secret would seem to lie in the writers' giving Picard limitations. While very capable in a great many areas, the writers never went over the top with it. We may see him working on a proof of Fermat's Theorem, for example--but not casually coming up with the proof in the middle of his conversation about this. He does not do everything by himself, and cannot, actually relying on his crew, rather than being the man who saves the day every time while everyone else is just along for the ride. (Sometimes it's Data who does it. Sometimes it's Wesley--for which the audience never forgives him. More likely it's a team effort.)
The other part of the secret would seem to be Picard's attitude toward his strengths and weaknesses. No one has yet called him bully or braggart. Respected and justifiably confident as he is, he never rubs his achievements in other people's faces. His talents and accomplishments are never cause for callousness, or for looking down on others--while his moral center and sense of honor seem virtually unshakable.
How many TV characters can you say that about today?
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
The End of Mad Men
Mad Men came to an end this year, and once again I found myself again thinking about how the show came to enjoy its high standing. I ended up checking out some of the comments critics offered after I lost interest in the whole thing.
Daniel Mendlesohn offered an incisive piece at the New York Review of Books, in which he found both its appeal to its audience, and its weakness as art, in its extreme superficiality. As he noted, while the show aspired to serious treatment of "social and historical “issues," it generally failed to explore "by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation," the "sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture" that it presumes to take up as themes. Instead what prevailed was implausible "melodrama."
Meanwhile, over at New Republic, Marc Tracy's later article extends the criticism with a discussion of the show's propensity for "Show, don't tell"--"Sally Draper scowling" simply not up to "the heavy work of Saying Something." Indeed, Tracy judges all this as the best "contemporary example . . . of what Dwight Macdonald called 'midcult,'" which Tracy, with a concision which compares favorably with Macdonald's writing, that by this he means "unexceptional art whose highbrow trappings convince consumers they are putting real cultural work into consuming it," all of which is "really empty calories that leave you feeling full," and so worse in its way than the frankly trifling.
Personally I don't care much for Macdonald, or for the labeling of things "midcult" or middlebrow. Historically it has not been a really meaningful concept, this problematic territory only opened up in the twentieth century by the Modernists putting a large part of culture out of reach of even the well-educated by equating "art" with material requiring the reader, viewer, listener to do a very great deal of "cultural work"--an idea that has, by fostering a worship of obscurity and obscurantism as the criterion of artistic accomplishment, and the idea that anything else must be just mass-marketed trash, deeply warped our cultural life.
Still, this is one case where the idea fits. The accent on surface, the evocation of serious subject matter without seriously doing anything with it, the stress on Show-don't-tell technique over content (lots of subtext, which is not really saying anything at all), is all tediously postmodernist--and its easy, nearly unquestioning embrace has been absolutely what Tracy describes. And while Mad Men may have come to an end, there is for the time being little sign of this attitude giving way to a greater appreciation of greater substance.
Daniel Mendlesohn offered an incisive piece at the New York Review of Books, in which he found both its appeal to its audience, and its weakness as art, in its extreme superficiality. As he noted, while the show aspired to serious treatment of "social and historical “issues," it generally failed to explore "by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation," the "sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture" that it presumes to take up as themes. Instead what prevailed was implausible "melodrama."
Meanwhile, over at New Republic, Marc Tracy's later article extends the criticism with a discussion of the show's propensity for "Show, don't tell"--"Sally Draper scowling" simply not up to "the heavy work of Saying Something." Indeed, Tracy judges all this as the best "contemporary example . . . of what Dwight Macdonald called 'midcult,'" which Tracy, with a concision which compares favorably with Macdonald's writing, that by this he means "unexceptional art whose highbrow trappings convince consumers they are putting real cultural work into consuming it," all of which is "really empty calories that leave you feeling full," and so worse in its way than the frankly trifling.
Personally I don't care much for Macdonald, or for the labeling of things "midcult" or middlebrow. Historically it has not been a really meaningful concept, this problematic territory only opened up in the twentieth century by the Modernists putting a large part of culture out of reach of even the well-educated by equating "art" with material requiring the reader, viewer, listener to do a very great deal of "cultural work"--an idea that has, by fostering a worship of obscurity and obscurantism as the criterion of artistic accomplishment, and the idea that anything else must be just mass-marketed trash, deeply warped our cultural life.
Still, this is one case where the idea fits. The accent on surface, the evocation of serious subject matter without seriously doing anything with it, the stress on Show-don't-tell technique over content (lots of subtext, which is not really saying anything at all), is all tediously postmodernist--and its easy, nearly unquestioning embrace has been absolutely what Tracy describes. And while Mad Men may have come to an end, there is for the time being little sign of this attitude giving way to a greater appreciation of greater substance.
Review: Vixen 03, by Clive Cussler
New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 364.
The real point of transition in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series from the small-scale novels of the early years (like The Mediterranean Caper and Raise the Titanic!) to the large-scale plots of his later books (like Sahara) was Deep Six, but the much earlier Vixen 03 still represents a tentative step in that direction. It is much more compact, but has something of the later book's divided plot structure, starting with two different threads that eventually tie together - Pitt's happening upon mysterious aircraft wreckage while on vacation in Colorado's Sawatch mountains with his girlfriend Loren Smith (introduced here for the first time); and the battle of the South African government against African-American expatriate Hiram Lusana's anti-apartheid guerrilla group African Army of the Revolution, in which each seeks the support of the United States.
The story has its share of implausibilities, particularly at the levels of geopolitics and technology. The D.C. hijinks, a frequent weak point of technothriller writing, have members of the House of Representatives making American foreign policy in a simplified, sanitized near-vacuum. (The soap operatic sleaze of the blackmail attempt against Loren merely underlines the absence of the real sleaze of practical politics from Cussler's portrait of the Beltway.1) The prospect of the U.S.'s supporting Communist-backed South African guerrillas against their government in the midst of the Cold War seems more like a rightist fear of radical (or radical chic) influence over American foreign policy than a plausible extrapolation. (We see Hiram Lusana lobbying in D.C. - with the help of Hollywood starlet Felicia Collins - but no Jack Abramoff-type making Pretoria's case, with the help of the Hollywood connections that brought us Red Scorpion.2) The Quick Death virus that ends up playing a key role in the plot is a rather convenient and casual creation, as its very name indicates. (It kills exposed humans in minutes, and renders infected areas uninhabitable for centuries - but while being unkillable by anything else, is totally and instantly neutralized by immersion in water.)
In fairness, though, authorial rigor in these areas (let alone insight into the great affairs of the day) is rarely the attraction of the Dirk Pitt novel. Rather what compels is the adventure Cussler spins out of them, and this book certainly provides its fair share of undersea exploration, nautical mystery and over-the-top action. It is the South African plot line which initially supplies the last, but the relatively tight writing and fast pace soon enough bring on the convergence. And this culminates in a climax that may have lost something of the retro appeal it had at the time of the book's publication, but which is sufficiently intricate, inventive and spectacular to remain one of Cussler's more memorable thirty-five prolific years on.3
1. One can also see the blackmail plot, like the heavier accent on sex in Cussler's '70s-era work, as a concession to the fashions of the period (and perhaps, the influence of a certain British predecessor), preceding our era of celibate action heroes.
2. It is worth remembering that Vixen 03 appeared the very same year as Graham Greene's classic spy novel The Human Factor, which offered a very different, and much more realistic, take on the situation.
3. This would be a matter of certain Defense Department procurement decisions which will be immediately apparent to any reader familiar with the 600-Ship Navy program initiated in the 1980s.
The real point of transition in Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series from the small-scale novels of the early years (like The Mediterranean Caper and Raise the Titanic!) to the large-scale plots of his later books (like Sahara) was Deep Six, but the much earlier Vixen 03 still represents a tentative step in that direction. It is much more compact, but has something of the later book's divided plot structure, starting with two different threads that eventually tie together - Pitt's happening upon mysterious aircraft wreckage while on vacation in Colorado's Sawatch mountains with his girlfriend Loren Smith (introduced here for the first time); and the battle of the South African government against African-American expatriate Hiram Lusana's anti-apartheid guerrilla group African Army of the Revolution, in which each seeks the support of the United States.
The story has its share of implausibilities, particularly at the levels of geopolitics and technology. The D.C. hijinks, a frequent weak point of technothriller writing, have members of the House of Representatives making American foreign policy in a simplified, sanitized near-vacuum. (The soap operatic sleaze of the blackmail attempt against Loren merely underlines the absence of the real sleaze of practical politics from Cussler's portrait of the Beltway.1) The prospect of the U.S.'s supporting Communist-backed South African guerrillas against their government in the midst of the Cold War seems more like a rightist fear of radical (or radical chic) influence over American foreign policy than a plausible extrapolation. (We see Hiram Lusana lobbying in D.C. - with the help of Hollywood starlet Felicia Collins - but no Jack Abramoff-type making Pretoria's case, with the help of the Hollywood connections that brought us Red Scorpion.2) The Quick Death virus that ends up playing a key role in the plot is a rather convenient and casual creation, as its very name indicates. (It kills exposed humans in minutes, and renders infected areas uninhabitable for centuries - but while being unkillable by anything else, is totally and instantly neutralized by immersion in water.)
In fairness, though, authorial rigor in these areas (let alone insight into the great affairs of the day) is rarely the attraction of the Dirk Pitt novel. Rather what compels is the adventure Cussler spins out of them, and this book certainly provides its fair share of undersea exploration, nautical mystery and over-the-top action. It is the South African plot line which initially supplies the last, but the relatively tight writing and fast pace soon enough bring on the convergence. And this culminates in a climax that may have lost something of the retro appeal it had at the time of the book's publication, but which is sufficiently intricate, inventive and spectacular to remain one of Cussler's more memorable thirty-five prolific years on.3
1. One can also see the blackmail plot, like the heavier accent on sex in Cussler's '70s-era work, as a concession to the fashions of the period (and perhaps, the influence of a certain British predecessor), preceding our era of celibate action heroes.
2. It is worth remembering that Vixen 03 appeared the very same year as Graham Greene's classic spy novel The Human Factor, which offered a very different, and much more realistic, take on the situation.
3. This would be a matter of certain Defense Department procurement decisions which will be immediately apparent to any reader familiar with the 600-Ship Navy program initiated in the 1980s.
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