The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the Market for Retro-Science Fiction

In 2014 a fairly slow early summer gave way to a late summer season packed with surprising commercial successes (Guardians of the Galaxy).

2015 has proved a more typical year in that respect, with the bigger successes appearing early on, and the latter part of the season seeing the piling up of disappointment after disappointment--with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lengthening the list.

It seems safe to say that one factor was the degree to which the late spring and early summer, packed with colossal successes (Fast and Furious 7, Avengers 2, Jurassic World) sated the audience's appetite for big action.

Indeed, 2015 had already sated the appetite for as specific a taste as that for '60s-style spies, with this spring's hit Kingsman, this summer's Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5--not just a '60s-style spy adventure, but one which, just like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was spun off from a '60s TV show, and came out just two weeks earlier. And not incidentally, was yet another hit, so much so that it actually ended up making more money during The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'s opening weekend than the new movie did.

In short, the timing of the movie's release was terrible.

However, the film had two other disadvantages as compared with Mission: Impossible.

The first has to do with each show's presence within the pop cultural universe.

The original show's run had begun in 1966 and continued for seven seasons and 171 episodes, to 1973. Then there was a two season, 35 episode revival, beginning in 1988 and running to 1990--just six years before the first of the Tom Cruise films hit theaters, and exploded at the box office, after which that movie was followed up by a money-making sequel every few years.

By contrast, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had just a four year run, from 1964 to 1968, and apart from a single reunion TV movie in 1983, has not produced anything since. So basically this is a show from a whole half century ago, which incidentally does not seem to have left any trace quite so recognizable as, for example, Mission: Impossible's famous self-destructing messages or Lalo Schifrin's theme music.

The result is that not only has that property simply been less visible, but Hollywood made the mistake of waiting much, much longer to get the movie made, making it that much more obscure.

The second was the fact that Mission: Impossible got updated to the present, while Man From U.N.C.L.E. stuck with the original period setting. In short, it is an atompunk film, as the publicity made clear. That genre has been a tough sell to audiences, even when it has been attached to a successful franchise, as the underperformance of X-Men: First Class and Men in Black 3 demonstrated. I wondered for a time if this would be the movie to change that, but unsurprisingly a movie based on an obscure franchise dropped into the marketplace at the end of a season crowded not just with action, but with '60s-style spy action in particular, did not prove to be that film.

"The 25 Most Hated Sitcom Characters of All Time"

Interesting list up at Complex--not at all new, but new to me as it happens.

I haven't seen all the shows on the list, and don't remember all the shows that I did see. Some of the choices seemed questionable. The inclusion of Holly Tyler from What I Like About You may simply reflect the overblown backlash against Amanda Bynes, while Robert Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond was merely one unpleasant character on a show packed with them who, appalling as he could be, nonetheless fit in very well with the Barone family's dynamic.

Also questionable was the fact that of the only two shows to land two characters in the top twenty-five, one was Married . . . With Children, and that one of them was not an actual character, but rather a persona briefly adopted by Bud Bundy (a character the list's makers seem to rather like, dubbing him the show's second-best), which was meant to come off as being just as silly and obnoxious as it seemed. (The other character is Marcy D'Arcy, whose #12 ranking seems to me to be way too high up the list.)

However, it did not surprise me at all that where most of the featured characters from older sitcoms were supporting characters (or even just personas of supporting characters), many of the more recent characters were the leads of their own shows--with three particularly annoying characters from three particularly annoying CBS sitcoms earning well-deserved places in the top ten. Leonard Hofstadter of The Big Bang Theory made the #1 spot, Charlie Harper #5, Ted Mosby #7.

I'm taking it as evidence that I'm not the only one who thinks TV writing is getting more obnoxious by the year. Indeed, it seems astonishing that Married . . . should have got two notices, while (among others) Big Bang got only one. However, even if Sheldon Cooper and the rest went unrecognized, it is worth noting that the list contained so many characters presented as "high IQ"--Leonard (and in his more over-the-top intellectual displays, also Mosby) accompanied by Stuart Minkus of Boy Meets World, Screech Powers from Saved By the Bell, and by way of yet another persona, Steve Urkel of Family Matters.

The point bears repeating: Hollywood seems incapable of portraying intelligence without making it grate unbearably, and as the list above shows, the only thing more annoying that its presentation of "grown-up geniuses" is its handling of "child geniuses."

Is it all deliberate anti-intellectualism? Probably not. But such trite, lazy writing contributes to it all the same.

Science Fiction's Sense of Mission

It has long been unfashionable to think of fiction as having a purpose. Still, what is "fashionable" has absolutely no value for anyone trying to understand anything. (All the more so as actually trying to understand things is also unfashionable.)

Looking back over science fiction in the past year, it has seemed undeniable that from H.G. Wells to John Campbell to Horace Gold, science fiction's prime movers regarded their genre as having a special purpose, apart from other kinds of fiction--and that the genre did realize that purpose. Science fiction helped us discuss science, technology, the future. Specifically it helped accustom us to talking about these subjects, and helped develop and popularize the tools for doing so--like the thought-experiments we call "extrapolation."

Science fiction also helped bring the fantastic back into literature more generally.

Yet, having accomplished all that, science fiction also became less special, less important. Pop science has come a long way since Wells' day. So too futurology. Someone who wants to publicly speculate about what some new technology will mean, for example, does not have to write up his ideas in fictional form. He can just as easily use those old science fiction tools in a piece of nonfiction--which may be all the more effective at its job for not having to work as a story, not having to bother with plot, characters and the like (as Wells did not in Anticipations, and decreasingly did even in his novels). And those who would go beyond mundane reality in telling their stories need not dress up the fantastic in scientific jargon (the way Wells felt he had to when he began writing his scientific romances). Indeed, today fantasy seems to have trumped science fiction, with the popular market and with the critics alike.

The old mission having run its course, science fiction writers, by the 1960s, increasingly prioritized other things--things which diminished their ability to deal with science fiction's traditional concerns. The emphasis of many on Modernist and postmodernist subjectivity and irrationality in their choice of content and style were absolutely at odds with the "science" in science fiction, and edged it out over time, as science fiction increasingly abandoned its old interests to the end of becoming regular old fiction which simply happened to have science fiction's trappings.

Indeed, even getting away from the highbrow, artier end of the genre, one suspects that many of the old formulas which retain their popularity are having an effect opposite to what science fiction once did. Rather than helping us think about science, technology, and the future, the genre trades in ideas inhibiting this. The Frankenstein complex (which had even Asimov's I, Robot present us with robot rebellion). The Edisonade (epitomized by Iron Man Tony Stark). Science fiction where the "science" is really pseudoscience (as Carl Sagan complained about The X-Files). There are plenty of reasons for all this, like the ease of fitting such material into a superficially character-centered dramatic narrative, the appeal of the sensational, and so forth. But really these ideas are lingering on past their time and cluttering and confusing things.

One way of looking at this may be to think that science fiction ran its course and, over the last half century, became increasingly decadent--reaching the condition that Paul Kincaid famously criticized a few years ago, recycling old ideas, more or less nostalgically, or playing the game ironically, or even being just fantasy (or even mundane) fiction passed off as sf. Certainly I have tended to that view in many of my writings on the subject. However, one might also imagine that the stage has been set for "science fiction 2.0"--for science fiction to set aside its old tasks (and old devices), and take on some new task, using speculative science to look at the world in a new way (or perhaps even an old way we've simply forgotten). In today's cultural climate it is hard to picture anyone actually doing anything like that--writers and editors and critics too leery of such seriousness. Yet, it seems to me that that possibility does exist.