The Miyazaki Effect: Where the Wild Things Are

We adults have two different understandings of what childhood is all about. On the one hand, there is the way children’s external behavior appears to us. We use the word “childish” to describe this: capricious, petty, sulky, selfish—it is always a bad thing. On the other hand, there is the way we imagine children’s internal experience of the world to be. For this, we have a different word, “childlike,” as in “he was filled with a childlike wonder.” Or we say, “He was like a kid in a candy shop.” This has a positive connotation. What we mean is that children feel emotions with a purity that is rare in adulthood. As adults, it is seldom that we feel positive emotions untinged by irony, doubt, or fear. Children, we imagine, must be the opposite. There is an intensity to their affect—they feel real wonder, real hope, real joy, real love.

Adults who long for the joys of childhood are drawn to books and films that capture this childlike intensity of emotion. No one is more successful at this than the Japanese anime director, Hayao Miyazaki. His films’ protagonists are almost always children, and it is through their eyes that we see the magical world Miyazaki weaves around them. It is a world, first of all, of unmitigated wonder, a world of uncompromising love, of true bravery, of absolute joy. Plot is secondary in a Miyazaki movie—what is more important is that we feel the intensity of this emotion, the joy when Kiki, in Kiki’s Delivery Service, takes to the air on a broomstick; or the wonder when Chihiro, in Spirited Away, rides a train across a watery landscape whose passengers are adult-sized shadows. These shades are not frightening apparitions but rather polite and kind silhouettes, shambling silently through their daily routines. Is this how the adult world appears to a child, with its anonymous multitudes, their faces too high above to see or hear clearly?

Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze and written by Dave Eggers, has been billed as a “children’s movie for adults.” What is meant by this, I think, is that it captures this “Miyazaki effect,” the ability to instill in its viewers a childlike intensity of emotions like wonder and joy. The movie, however, fails to live up to this billing. The protagonist is Max, a boy of about nine, who goes about mostly in a wolf costume. After a fight with his mother, culminating in his biting her on the arm, he sets sail for the land of the Wild Things, large furry creatures with even larger heads. When he gets there, there are, it is true, some moments of sheer magic, as when Max cries, “let the wild rumpus start!” and the Wild Things all take off through the forest, leaping high into the air, as if gravity were an unnecessary hindrance, an adult affair; or when Max’s closest Wild Thing friend, Carol, shows him an elaborate miniature world he has created out of sticks and rocks, hidden away in a cave. Mostly, though, the Wild Things just bicker and fight endlessly—in a word, they’re childish. In the few scenes of Max at home, before he sets sail for the land of the Wild Things, we learn that his parents are divorced—one of the things that sets him off on his rampage is seeing his mother kiss another man. The Wild Things just desperately want to stick together, but they seem always on the verge of going their separate ways—and perhaps this is Max’s biggest fear. It is easy to read the Wild Things as a projection of the child of a broken home—Max cannot trust in the permanence of relationships. That is, of course, with one exception. In the end, the movie falls back on the safe and familiar comfort of maternal love. Max realizes that this is the one thing he can never lose, and he leaves the Wild Things to return to his mother’s waiting arms.

The children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, upon which the movie is based, definitely achieves the Miyazaki effect—it captures the unmitigated joy of being wild: free, without rules, no one to boss you around! This is what Max wants and this is what he gets in the land of the Wild Things. He is the king and he can do whatever he wants. The movie, however, fails to translate this effect. At the same time, it does not give us what we expect from adult movies made for adults, either: a good story with a decent plot and interesting characters. The members of Max’s family are no more than sketches, and the Wild Things, who perhaps represent Max’s child-ish-ly exaggerated understanding of their personalities, are not really engaging. Their constant fighting and arguing could not really be said to constitute a plot.

The movie is not all bad, though—as the portrait of the psyche of a troubled child it holds some interest. It is hard, though, to figure out who it is really for. It does not seem to be for children—too many adult-themed conversations. Nor is it for adults who want to be children—there are not enough moments of magical wonder and joy. Nor, in fact, is it for adults who are just happy to be adults. It is endlessly sulky and petty, like an obstinate child, unwilling to meet us half way. It is, in short, a movie that wants to be childlike, but ends up just being childish.

Epistemology TV: FlashForward

“The truth is out there.” This is the famous motto of Special Agent Fox Mulder in the TV show, The X-Files. Mulder and his partner, Dana Scully, have become cultural icons: he the dogged believer, she the scientist skeptic. The relationship between them has been taken to represent the opposition between faith and reason. On the show, however, Mulder and Scully are not really all that far apart. She is no obstinate doubting Thomas, nor is he a mystical true believer. They are both empiricists. In fact, Mulder’s famous words, “the truth is out there,” are a sort of empiricist slogan: the answers to all of our questions can be demonstrated with hard evidence, as long as we know where and how to gather it. What separates Mulder and Scully is not the opposition between faith and reason, but what they each have faith in. Scully believes in Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest solution is usually the correct one—why assume there’s some vast alien conspiracy, when the answer could be much simpler? Mulder has faith in a very different principle, the idea that things are not always as simple as they seem (this is the faith he shares with your garden-variety conspiracy theorist).

“The truth is out there,” however, is not just Mulder’s motto, but the motto of the television show, The X-Files. The show’s promise (a promise eternally deferred) is to reveal the answers to the big questions: Why are we here? What does all this mean? And since the world of the show is essentially our world—this is not “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—these answers, we imagine, apply to our world as well. The X-Files is not alone in this—it is part of a genre that has existed for a long time. Shows like The Prisoner, in the late 60s, and more recently Lost, start out with a similar premise: there’s something going on in our world, beneath the surface, where us regular folk cannot see it—whether it be a vast political conspiracy (The Prisoner), aliens (The X-Files), or a mystical force (Lost). The heroes of these shows, whether by accident, fate, or sinister design, come face to face with this something. The problem, however, is that the shows promise something they cannot deliver. They string us along, revealing the answer to one mystery while simultaneously opening up another one, but in the end the game has to end. As we all know, however, there are really no answers to be had, at least not in our world. The shows are therefore faced with a dilemma: give us an inherently unsatisfying answer, one that can in no way be demonstrated to apply to our own world and not just the world of the show; or give us no answer at all. Or sometimes, as in the case of The X-Files, the wizard’s curtain is pulled back—the writers essentially admitted that they had no idea what the “something” was behind all the mysteries in the shows; they were just making it up as they went along.

The latest of these shows, capitalizing on the success of Lost on the same network, is ABC’s FlashForward, which has just been picked up for a whole season (it has been called Lost with the whole world as the magical, mysterious island). The first episode begins with a brilliant shot: upside down, we see pavement littered with smashed oranges; bits of glass rain down (or rather up) like hail. What has happened? Where are we? We are seeing the world through the eyes of FBI Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), who has just woken from a short blackout to find his car flipped over on the freeway. As he pulls himself from the wreckage, he sees a scene of utter chaos—it turns out he was not the only one who blacked out; the whole world has lost consciousness for 137 seconds, resulting in myriad catastrophes—cars, planes, and helicopters have crashed all over the globe. Like Lost, whose opening plane crash sequence was virtuoso television, FlashForward does these first few seconds right. Then it becomes conventional. The poetry of that first shot is replaced by a prosaic series of explosions—we get it: the results of such a seemingly minor thing, a blackout, on a global scale would be catastrophic, but do we really need to see every car and helicopter blow up in an orange ball of flame? Do we need to see a man on fire running down the street? Who do they think they are, Michael Bay? Even in the age of HD, after all, it’s not really the spectacle that moves us—far more impact has been achieved with far greater subtlety.

The show is not really about the catastrophe, though—after the first few minutes of disaster-movie CG destruction, we get another revelation: people did not just black out, they each had a vision of the future. For the span of the blackout, they all saw and felt where they would be for a couple of minutes six months in the future. Each of these visions turns out to be consistent with the others—if you were talking with someone in your vision, they were talking with you in theirs. In his vision, Agent Benford saw himself investigating the blackouts while armed masked men snuck up on him in his office. So, naturally, at the first opportunity, the FBI puts him in charge of the investigation. The mystery of the show is who or what is behind the blackouts—is it little green men, a global conspiracy, or a spiritual force? So far, the series has not tipped its hand, although it seems like they are throwing global conspiracy out there as at least a red herring. The difference between the show and Lost or the X-Files is in that six-month time frame. This raises some interesting technical questions: If people really saw what will or could happen in six months, will the show end when we get there? Since each episode seems to span a few days, this would mean it could only last a couple of seasons. Or will there be another blackout, or something else? I have some theories—and that, of course, is part of the fun of these shows, trying to guess what’s really going on, and where they’re going next (the series is based on a book, so I guess you could cheat by reading it).

So far, though, the show has been a bit of a mixed bag. The characters don’t seem as interesting as those in Lost, especially Agent Benford (could we please retire the recovering alcoholic driven cop archetype for a little while?), and the writers spend too much time trying to blow our minds with time travel paradoxes that have been old for decades—if you saw the future would you be able to prevent it, or would you just end up reinforcing it? If you saw Terminator 2 or 12 Monkeys you know the answer. (Of course, the more you think about it, the less sense this makes on a global scale—it would be almost impossible to get 6 billion people to behave exactly as they were predicted to. And what about people who work in industries based on risk and prediction? Wouldn’t stock brokers and insurance agents be able to game the system—is there such a thing as a future pre-existing condition?) The show does, at times, dip its toe into interesting psychological waters—if we believe that something is inevitable, do we behave in such a way as to bring it about? In psych circles, that’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the end, it’s the mystery that will keep us coming back, though. Without it, there’s not much drama there. It makes you long for the wit, humor, and, yes, the chemistry Mulder and Scully showed whenever they took a break from hunting down little green men. Still, I for one want to know what’s coming next. I have some theories....

Memory Objects: Summer Hours and Warehouse 13

People are interesting. They fight, they fall in love, they laugh, they cry. Objects are boring. What do they even do? Most of the time they just sit there looking pretty. Granted, in this modern age, they sometimes beep, or whir, or dance about, but even that only when we push them, prod them, or at least occasionally change their batteries. What, then, would we say about a film and a TV show that insist on putting objects at their center?

The film, Summer Hours, and the TV show, Warehouse 13, both of which arrived this summer, would seem to have little else in common. One is a sophisticated (and somewhat slow) French film with an ensemble cast of top-caliber actors. The other is a goofy, pulpy show on the Sci-fi Channel (still having difficulty calling it Syfy), by turns jokey and melodramatic, filled with worn-out genre tropes (a male-female detective pair a la Moonlighting, The X-Files, Bones, etc.). At the same time, though, it often manages to be entertaining, inventive, funny, and even touching. What connects Summer Hours and Warehouse 13, though, is that they both think hard about objects and their place in our memories, both personal and public.

Summer Hours follows three siblings whose elderly mother has recently passed away, leaving behind a house full of valuable art objects. Their great uncle was a famous artist. Some of the objects are his work, some works that he acquired. For the mother the art works had sentimental value. She grew up and lived in the house at the time that the works were still being created or purchased. She had memories attached to each of them, and the house itself was filled for her with memories from all periods of her life. For the children, the objects are not directly meaningful. In the end, they decide to sell the house and donate most of the pieces to a museum. What were once objects of personal memory thus enter the provenance of public memory, put on display for all to see in the Musee d’Orsay.

Warehouse 13 is more metaphorically about public memory. The show follows two Secret Service agents who are tasked with collecting the great artifacts of world history and bringing them back to a “safe location” in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota (the idea, I think, is borrowed from Indiana Jones; At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the military brings the Ark of the Covenant to a similar enormous, anonymous warehouse filled with stuff—this is essentially the premise of Warehouse 13: who collects all this stuff and why is it here?). In the world of the show, these objects have acquired a literal magic all their own: Lewis Carroll’s mirror can trap a person’s soul; Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod can boost the power of electrical devices; Houdini’s wallet lets you communicate with the dead—even the disco ball from Studio 54 is imbued with a malevolent energy. The magical powers with which these objects are imbued is a metaphor for the power of public memory contained in historical artifacts, the ability they have to call to mind a shared conception of our common heritage.

Why is it that both an artistic French film and a pulpy American TV show find it so poignant to consider objects at this moment? Summer Hours and Warehouse 13, I think, represent a nostalgia for a relationship to objects that is no longer current in our society. Put simply, we no longer know how to live gracefully with the objects around us. Objects need us. Without people to use and appreciate them they have no meaning. But there are some objects whose meaning is so persistent and so universal that it makes sense to talk about that meaning as inherent to the objects themselves. They contain memories, personal ones for the individuals who have had meaningful experiences through them, public ones when whole societies have had shared experiences through them. It is possible to take the reverence for the meaning inherent in these objects too far. Collectors of obscure cultural artifacts (baseball cards, action figures still in their packaging) fetishize objects with a weak power of memory. They try to coax to life dying embers, instead of tending an eternal flame.

The danger that seems to be more pressing, though, is not fetishizing objects because of their power of memory, but fetishizing objects with no power of memory. With the digitization of our world, the objects through which we experience our media become less and less important. Who will remember the i-pod on which they read Moby Dick? Your careworn physical copy of the book, however, with its beautiful design, its smell of old paper, the rustling sound of the turning pages, the slightly rough texture of those pages, will bring back memories, both positive and negative, each time you interact with it. This is not to say digitization is bad—nostalgia valorizes an old mode of experience with its specific characteristics over the characteristics of the new mode of experience. Some day the mode of reading a novel on an i-pod may be cherished in just such loving terms as reading a physical book once was, if for entirely different reasons. The problem is not that we find less meaning or sentimental value in our objects and thus no longer fetishize them, but that we fetishize them despite this. We covet i-pods and kindle readers and tablet PCs; we swaddle them in protective cases; and then, when the new object that will replace them arrives, we throw them away. We still have experiences through these objects—experiences of art, music, literature, learning, playing, and communicating—but we no longer surround ourselves with objects infused with the memories of these experiences. This is not merely a phenomenon of personal memory, either—what happens to a digital painting, created on an i-phone, uploaded to the internet, but never hung on a museum wall? There is no longer any object filled with the memory of this shared cultural experience. With the rise of these objects that we no longer love and cherish, but lust for, use up, and discard, we are losing a mode of memory. This mode of memory inherent to the lived relationship with meaningful objects has a contemplative quality that cannot be supplied by files and programs on an ever-changing assortment of screens. Its pleasure is lasting and mellow, rather than fleeting and intense. Summer Hours and Warehouse 13 make one last plea for these objects and their power of memory. Soon, it is possible that they will fall entirely to the collectors, that is, by and large, be forgotten.

Before and After: Caprica & Battlestar Galactica

The Sci-fi Channel (excuse me, Syfy) has decided to tease us by releasing the feature length pilot of their Battlestar Galactica spin-off, Caprica, on DVD fully half a year before the series airs on TV. Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, set in the halcyon days when things only occasionally blew up and the human race had not been whittled down to 40,000 desperate spaceship-bound refugees. The deeper difference, though, is in the aspect of human psychic life it takes as its subject. Battlestar Galactica is all about the death drive: are we, as individuals and as societies, destined to destroy ourselves and each other? Caprica, instead, focuses largely on the theme of mourning, both public and private. It parallels two fathers, each of whom loses a daughter in a terrorist attack on the public transportation system of a major city. One father embraces the possibility of a cybernetic recreation of his lost daughter; the other rejects this possibility in the attempt to move on with what remains of his family. One gets grief right; the other represents grieving gone awry. Battlestar Galactica is Civilization and its Discontents as space opera; Caprica is a sci-fi version of Mourning and Melancholia.

Of course, as the pilot hints, the series will be much more than this. The pilot touches on some themes that are important to Battlestar Galactica: terrorism, extremism, and technological overreach; along with themes that are less central to the original series: immigration, organized crime, and the conflict of different customs in a melting pot society. Caprica is us, although its various groups and individuals resist easy equation: the main minority group in the pilot, the Taurons (one of the fathers is a Tauron immigrant to Caprica who has become a fairly prominent lawyer) look Hispanic, speak Greek, and have Italian Godfather-style organized crime. In the end, though, it is the theme of grieving that it is at the core of the Caprica pilot, and it handles this much more subtle topic with surprising depth. In this sense, although it is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, Caprica is really its psychic sequel—it asks how we deal with our personal and public loss once the tide of destruction has ebbed? Battlestar Galactica was the perfect Bush administration series, focused relentlessly, as it was, on human self-destructivity, war, terrorism, and abuse of power. Although many of its characters died, there was very little time for grief—just some scenes of the surviving loved ones smashing things in their anger and their helplessness. Caprica is a decidedly post-Bush phenomenon—it asks the question, how do we pick up the pieces and move on?

Anti-Aristotelian Cinema-- The Hurt Locker

Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century German playwright, disliked the Aristotelian model that had dominated dramatic theory for over two-thousand years. What particularly irked him was Aristotle’s concept of “catharsis,” the idea that the play (in Aristotle’s case, Greek tragedy) was supposed to purge harmful emotions like suffering and fear, so that the spectator might leave the theater feeling relieved. For Aristotle, it was not that the plays he was watching had happy Hollywood endings that lifted you up and out of your seats, but precisely the opposite: You witness the horrible consequences of patricide, fratricide, incest, rape, etc.—tragedies don’t skimp on such nasty stuff. You have seen it all, but the thing is that in the end it has happened to somebody else. You can leave the theater unscathed, secure in the knowledge that things, after all, are not so bad for you. You’ve experienced horrors, albeit second-hand, by identifying with the characters on the stage, but you, unlike them, have come out the other side without having lost a thing (except the price of admission). This is what bothered Brecht—if art is meant to improve society, he reasoned, what’s the point of filling the spectators with a sense of satisfaction with the status quo? Instead of allowing his spectators to identify with the characters on the stage, he strove constantly to bounce them out of that identification, to remind them that they, as separate individuals, were implicated in the social, political, and ethical dilemmas depicted in the play. He wanted them in other words to be acutely aware of their own role as agents of change as they considered, intellectually rather than emotionally, the serious issues raised by the play.

There is, though, another element that Aristotle cited as crucial for drama to have its effect on the viewer. Each play, he said, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Well, duh! But is this really as obvious as it seems? The movie, The Hurt Locker, shows us that there is a different way from Brecht’s to destroy the Aristotelian effect of catharsis. You don’t have to violate the spectator’s sense of identification with the characters; all you have to do is demolish this most simple and obvious tenant of the narrative, that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The movie follows a bomb-squad in Iraq from one anxiety-laden situation to the next. The situations are tense for us, the viewers, precisely because we identify with the characters. We root for them, and against the menacing figures prepared to blow them up with simple batteries and cell-phones. The film fills us with an expectation that the over-arching story, however, will follow that basic Aristotelian structure, beginning, middle, end. Text that pops up at the beginning of each sequence tells us how many more days in the team’s rotation—if they can just make it down to zero, they will be alright! This, of course, adds to the tension—we have a sinking suspicion something awful is going to happen, any minute now. And then it keeps happening, over and over, even if the soldiers seem to come out of these situations mostly intact. The movie is like Groundhog Day with explosions— the soldiers can’t even relax when they’re relaxing—in their spare time, they get drunk and go after each other with fists and knives. Unlike the hero of Groundhog Day, however, the bomb squad never really gets out of this eternal repetition of the same. One countdown, it turns out, is followed by the next. The movie ends with the powerful impression that there is no end in sight. Its plot structure is not a line or an arc, but a spiral into the void.

Ancient tragedies can be cathartic because they have an ending. You know the story is over, even if the hero’s life goes on (a life that perhaps will be filled with more terrible stories). You have identified with the suffering and fear you have seen on stage, but you can leave it behind, now, because it is over. The awful thing about The Hurt Locker is precisely that you cannot leave it behind, because the story is not over. The fear and the suffering, and perhaps also the intellectual concern to do something about it, stick with you instead of staying behind in the theater.

The Dialectic of Romantic Comedy

An example of how the dialectic between freedom and necessity influences all the most important aspects of our psychic lives: We want to believe two contradictory things about love, that it is destiny to fall in love with the people we fall in love with, and that we have chosen them. Our love affairs have to be both the result of destiny and of a choice freely made. This is why romantic comedies always have a two-part structure. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl—that’s FATE. Boy loses girl; boy struggles to get girl back—that’s FREE WILL—there is always a moment of decision for the boy: should he mope about feeling sorry for himself for having lost the girl of his dreams, or should he run after her and through some feat of daring win her back? Of course, he gets her back in the end and she, in turn, forgives him. Thus fate and free will end up happily married.

More Large Thoughts!

When I started this blog, I told myself I would update it at least once a week. Somehow that didn't happen, but anyway, here are a couple of posts to make up for it.

Means and Ends

There is an excellent piece by Frank Rich in today's New York Times on right-wing rage and the way the conservative media enables it.

I have always thought that what lies at the heart of the ideology of modern conservatism is a confusion of ends and means. Essentially the right wing, or at least their demagogues in the media, feel that the ends always justify the means. What they fail to understand is how the means are implicated in the ends. If your end is, say, “freedom,” as our last president so often intoned, then restricting the privacy rights of your citizens through warrantless wiretapping is not the appropriate means. “Freedom,” in this case, ends up meaning very little.

This is more than mere hypocrisy. The conservative talking heads have taken this, now, to such an extreme that they are starting to devalue huge swathes of the English language (this is what George Steiner complained had happened to the German language in the wake of Nazism). What does it mean when “tyranny” and “fascism” are used to describe not restrictions of citizens’ rights, but extensions of those rights? What does it mean to decry “taxation without representation” months after taking part in a free election? Ultimately, in the mouths of the ideologues on the right, these words do not mean anything any more, except “anything we don’t like.” They continue to talk this way because they neither understand nor care what these words mean. If it hurts their enemies and helps their allies, they do not care if the words, with which they describe their ends and which are their means to those ends, mean very little in the end.

Promiscuous Genres

A recent article in the New York Times argues that the original Star Trek was not a true science-fiction show, but rather a pastiche of old b-movie genres. Each episode would find the Enterprise parked in orbit around a different planet, whose landscape consisted of old genre movie sets and props left on the studio lot, representing a different genre: the gladiator-movie planet, the detective-movie planet, the gangster-movie planet. Science fiction, however, has always been a promiscuous genre. Let me explain what I mean: All genres are friendly, but some genres are a little friendlier than others. They like to mingle, to the extent that one rarely finds them alone. This is not a new phenomenon; nor did Star Trek, as the argument goes, really represent a new height in cultural literacy. It is as old as epic. The hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, the great epic poem of the Roman empire, sails his ship from one classical genre to the next, tragedy in Carthage, a paean to athletics in Sicily, pastoral in Italy, cosmological poetry in the underworld, and finally martial epic a la the Iliad. In both cases, it is the romantic element that allows for this quick change of scenery and genre, the episodic structure of the journey from one island world to the next. Aeneas and his crew sail on the wine-dark sea; the crew of the Enterprise through the darkness of space. Star Trek has old b-movies; the Aeneid the poetry of the ancient world.

Science fiction always asks a question in the form, “what if…?” What if the machines we create to help us start thinking for themselves? What if we make contact with an alien race somewhere among the stars? A sub-genre of science fiction is the spaceship adventure, which always asks the same question: “what if we could fly not only to the other planets in our solar system but to the stars themselves?” Like the naval dramas of Joseph Conrad or more recently (and less remarkably) Patrick O’Brian, these stories are about a microcosmic hierarchical society under pressure, surrounded by a vast and dangerous void, hopping from one outpost of civilization to the next. The vastness of space, though, can be not only the vastness of the ocean, but the broad vista of an open landscape as well. Joss Whedon, in his short-lived sci-fi series Firefly, turned space into the wide-open plains of the American West. The planets in Firefly did not each represent a different genre; they were each aspects of the same genre, the western. The crew of Serenity would rustle cattle, rob trains, and get into bar fights and shootouts, while sticking primarily to what they called the “frontier-planets.” Space, though, is also, as we know, where no one can hear you scream. The closed world of the spaceship, as Alien proved, is thus also the perfect setting for a horror film. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The best you can hope for is to jettison a nasty creature out the air lock.

Perhaps the most promiscuous of genres, though, is the medical drama. As the setting of the spaceship as the bridge between different worlds is at the heart of the spaceship adventure, so the hospital (or its rough equivalent) as the segregated zone in the modern world where life and death decisions are made is at the heart of the medical drama. ER is the baseline, the medical drama as pure and simple as it gets, but there have also been medical dramedies (Gray’s Anatomy), sitcoms (Scrubs), soap operas (General Hospital), detective shows (House)—even a medical western (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, anyone?).

Maybe if these genres are so successful at getting along, it is because they are relatively low-maintenance. At the heart of every genre is a specific philosophical concern, a dilemma that the culture that produced it is working out. The medical drama gets its particular charge from the ethical questions surrounding the life and death decision. Is it right to sacrifice one life for another? How much risk is acceptable in the attempt to save a person’s life? How do we escort people out of this world and how do we usher them in? For science fiction, the question is primarily historical rather than ethical, a concern with the unpredictable effects of technological progress. Will our technology outstrip our ability to control it? Will it be a tool for peace and equality or a weapon for domination and war? Will it do more harm to our world than good? Will it lead us into dangers we can hardly imagine? To raise these issues, though, demands relatively little in terms of character and plot. The setting, a spaceship or a hospital (or a space hospital—wouldn’t that be cool?), does most of the work.

Think, by contrast, of a not-so-promiscuous genre enjoying an immense amount of popularity these days: the police procedural. All police procedurals are essentially the same. The cops may change along with the high-tech methods they employ but the story stays the same: each episode a crime is solved. This never varies and the plot very rarely ventures into the territory of other genres. If science fiction and the medical drama are consummate flirts, the procedural is the confirmed bachelor. The problem is, it demands too much: a crime scene (preferably with a body) and a bunch of detectives. These are things that can only exist in the modern city. The procedural thrives on its anonymity-- only the city serves up fresh bodies with fresh secrets on a daily basis. It cannot be penned in, say in a hospital or any other confined setting-- it needs its dark alleys and blind corners, the places where the systems of surveillance and control break down. On the other hand, it cannot survive in the vast emptiness of space (not enough bodies), nor in the wide open spaces of the western. The zone between lawlessness and civilization, between order and chaos is where the “wild” in “wild west” comes from. The crime scene investigators would get bushwhacked before they could pull out their white gloves. The big exception to this rule that procedurals do not mix might be Law & Order, which is a police procedural plus legal drama; but, even though there is always interaction between the detectives and the lawyers in the show, its two halves tend to separate out, like oil and water. It is not a mixed genre show, but a show in which two genres share a single hour uneasily.

It’s a good thing, then, that we like this genre so much. Currently there are more murders on TV in a year than there are in many major American cities. And that’s saying something.

Star Trek & Optimism

Much has been made of the supposed renewed optimism of American culture embodied by J. J. Abram’s new Star Trek reboot. The movie represents, so the argument goes, our readiness to hope again for the future of mankind, after the darkness and pessimism of recent years. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is, of course, Battlestar Galactica, which for the past four years has treated TV viewers to an unrelentingly bleak picture of our potential future, one marked by war, genocide, terrorism, and the possible self-inflicted extinction of the human race—before, that is, the series dissolved in a shower of warm platitudes in its forgettable final season. The Star Trek franchise, on the other hand, has always maintained a vision of the future marked by relative peace and tolerance. Its mission was not the desperate struggle for survival of the last remnants of the human race, but the quest for knowledge and community with other societies among the stars. There is something, though, that bothers me about the enthusiasm with which the revived optimism of Star Trek is being greeted. It seems to me somehow false. Hope cannot be manufactured. It cannot be bought and sold. It has to be earned. Science fiction’s vision of the future has to fit its culture’s present conditions. Otherwise, its optimism is just denial.

The most remarkable thing about the new Star Trek is how much it is Spock’s movie. Spock is given a rich backstory, a moral dilemma, and even a future self who comes back in time to wreak havoc and then bring the young protagonists together. Kirk’s backstory is nothing more than a doodle. Rebellious kid who grows up without a father learns to love the service as much as the service learns to love him. Essentially it is Top Gun. Every Maverick, though, needs an Ice Man who flies straight and logical as his wingman. The trick Star Trek pulls is to make its Ice Man the more interesting of the two. Spock has more to struggle with than Kirk in the film, the destruction of his home planet, the genocide of his race, and the death of his mother, and he handles it with more grace. He is not a foil for Kirk’s daring and charisma. He is not a wet blanket of logic. He is a man who has learned to temper his emotions with reason. In this sense, he is more of a man than the petulant Kirk. And once the plot gets humming we are treated to a genuine shock. The traditional Kirk and Spock roles are upended. The power dynamic that always kept logic in thrall to passion is reversed. When the first captain of the Enterprise, Captain Pike, leaves the ship, it is Spock he puts in charge and Kirk he makes his first officer (that is until Spock rudely maroons Kirk on a planet of enormous ice beasts and even larger and more absurd ice dinosaurs).

What is striking, however, is how right it feels to have Spock in command, the reasonable one, the mature one, the adult. The film is at pains to point out that Spock, in fact, makes the wrong decision, while Kirk makes the right one. Still, it is hard to escape the impression that it is, in fact, Spock who belongs in the captain’s chair. He alone befits the dignity of the office. The movie does what it can to keep Spock at its center. The famous introductory voiceover, “These are the voyages…,” is read at the end of the movie by Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock. In the end, however, it has to be Kirk, the irrational hothead guided by instinct, who takes command of the Enterprise. It is the charismatic loose cannon and not the rational sophisticate who is chosen to lead. Here we go again.

Every generation gets the spaceship it deserves. Battlestar Galactica was the interstellar drama of the Bush administration. It had it all: war, torture, extremism, abuse of power. If the new series of Star Trek movies, which this film almost certainly kicks off, really aims to earn its optimism, its vision of a future characterized by progress and harmony, and its place as the vessel of the future, it needs a new captain.

A shot across the bow for TV

Two of the greatest novels of all time were originally serialized. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in All The Year Round in 31 weekly installments in 1859. Crime and Punishment ran in The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments in 1866. The serial structure of the stories gave the reader at the time a sense of suspense and kept them coming back. It gave them something to discuss in the parlor or the pub (there were no water coolers at the time). What would happen to Charles Darnay or Raskolnikov? Tune in next time.

When we look back on these serial novels we see them backwards. We see them as great works of literature that were divided into a series of installments. In fact, they were a series of installments which together formed a great work of literature. Only after achieving success as a serial were the installments published together in one volume.

Might one not make the same case for the better TV series of our time? The Wire, Mad Men, even Battlestar Galactica? They appear first as weekly episodes and only later are published in a more permanent form, as one DVD box-set per season. The numbers are comparable. The twelve installments of Crime and Punishment is considered more or less the golden mean for a season of pay cable shows like The Wire. Dickens’ 31 installments for A Tale of Two Cities is not that far off from the 22 or so episodes that has become the standard for a season on a network or basic cable channel such as Syfy, on which Battlestar Galactica originally appeared. Shows such as these maintain the serial pleasure of suspense—they string you along from one episode to the next—but as a season, they cohere into a single, larger story with broader implications than any of their individual episodes can hold. Just like the novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, these series are more than the sum of their parts.

The TV series taken as a whole and the novel also share a similarity of scope and scale. They can include multiple well-developed and nuanced characters. They can tell stories that span all social milieus and strata. The Wire, for example, includes as two of its major characters a homeless drug addict and the mayor of Baltimore. They can transport us from one place—a planet called Caprica—to another—a planet called Earth (a little farther apart than London and Paris but equally foreign to one another). They can range over large periods of time without seeming choppy or schematic. They can, in other words, give complicated social and political phenomena their due. Dostoevsky has poverty and crime in his contemporary Russia, and Dickens has the French Revolution. The Wire shows us the dysfunction of civic institutions in the American city. Mad Men uses the ad agency as a lens to examine the culture of consumption that got humming in the ‘50s. Battlestar Galactica gives us a futuristic analogue of the political and military apparatuses of a democratic society at war with extremists.

The most successful adaptations of novels are usually mini-series, which turn them into something akin to a shortened TV season. Examples of this are the BBC’s I, Claudius, or Pride and Prejudice, which is still considered the definitive screen adaptation after numerous movie versions. The complaint that is usually launched against film adaptations of novels is that they cut out too much of the book and reduce its complexity. The exception to this rule are four-hour mega-films, like The Godfather, which strive to retain much, but not all of the original’s sub-plots and twists. Rarely does one hear that a movie is better than the novel, except in those cases where the novel is considered mostly chaff and the adaptation presents us with the wheat. The Godfather, in fact, might be an example of that, or American Psycho. What movies do significantly better is adaptation of novellas, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Of Mice and Men. Short stories have to be puffed up to become films. Novels have to be cut down. The novella, which tends to focus on one plot line and a very small number of characters, is just right for a movie.

Novellas are certainly worthwhile endeavors. The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, for example, both remain gripping, powerful, and poignant to this day. They make the reputations of their authors as much as any of their novels. If, however, we want our narrative media to do what novels do best, to explore social and political issues that demand more than a handful of characters and a couple of settings, we will have to do away with the silly assumption that underlies our cultural reception of the screen arts, that film is the high art and television the low.