Twentysomething and post-twentysomething fans of Joss Whedon from days of yore, prepare to feel old. I have stumbled upon a fact.
Remember David Boreanaz?
Yeah, this guy, Angel. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's swoony first love, appearing in the first three seasons and sporadically thereafter in a total of 57 episodes, later the lead singer of a rotating angst band on his own eponymous show, which ran for 111 episodes
Well, this Monday, September 30th, marks the day that Angel is surpassed by this guy:
Special Agent Seeley Booth, who has appeared in every episode of the crime dramedy Bones. All 169 episodes, this coming Monday.
So while in our hearts, it may always be the case that that guy from Buffy and Angel is on a crime show now, the truth as of Monday is that that guy from Bones was in some vampire shows in the late 90s and early 00s.
No offense to Mr. Boreanaz, who is great, by the way.
While I am busily butchering The Little Mermaid for the amusement of my friends, I discover that Disney has, of course, outdone me. People. People. Have you seen this? Put in your mouthguards and stretch out your teeth-gritting muscles.
For those who don't want to watch, lemme sum up: Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to a few theaters for a limited run. The twist is that they are inviting children to bring iPads to play with a special app that will give them games to play (and sing-alongs to sing along with) synced to the movie--that is, while the movie is on.
As an aside, here, again, are words I've seen or heard too many times: "Experience the Disney
classic... like never before." Is that what people want? If the trailer
said, "Experience the Disney classic... exactly like you did in 1989," I don't know who wouldn't shell out.
(A parable, perhaps, for our time: I became aware of animated movies, more or less, in 1989. The "Disney Renaissance" was not a thing that was happening; it was simply a law of the universe that Disney made an excellent animated movie every year. Thus it had always been, for as long as I could remember anyway, and thus it would surely continue until the end of time. Thus it continued, anyway, until I was about ten, and I learned about the transience of things.)
I don't begrudge Disney the drive to innovate, in the abstract, but I think that this is one of those things, like cloning velociraptors, that science has made possible but human wisdom ought to prevent. I don't imagine that there is any shortage of rage about this. The idea of watching a good children's movie in a darkened theater filled with children who are distracted from the movie by glowing tablets is a horrific one to me.
Part of what frightens me is the thought that the folks at Disney didn't think The Little Mermaid could hold today's children's attention on its own. What frightens me more, though, is the thought that this is a test case and might catch on. The real potential of this gimmick isn't to enhance children's movies that don't need enhancement, but to pacify children during movies that couldn't otherwise hold their attention. There's a whole subset of the movie industry that serves no purpose but to temporarily hypnotize antsy kids during the summer, but don't think movie makers would pass something up that might let them get away with making even less interesting movies.
Today a children's movie has the relatively simple goal of holding a child's attention for about 90 minutes. But it still takes some work to do that. Even children demand a certain degree of novelty, coherency, and even intelligence (of a sort) from their entertainment. But what if the movie only had to play in the background while the child played a reskinned version of Bejeweled?
The app would be provided at the usual movie theater markup, of course.
That got grim. But don't mind me. All roads lead to the zombie apocalypse in my imagination lately.
At some point in the recent past I agreed with some friends to spend this month writing a short story based on a fairy tale. It's a venture we attempted once in the past but didn't follow through on as a group--although I personally came out of it with "The Long Dance," a longish short story that I am quite proud of and that would be in the mail on its way to an editor right now if not for some frustrating events at my local FedEx place grumble grumble never going back there again grumble. This time, everyone is more on board, I think.
The seed this time is "The Little Mermaid," which I initially protested was not a fairy tale in the strictest sense, but a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. (My strictest sense of "fairy tale" is a subset of "legend," so having a single, definitive author is a disqualifier.) I was outvoted, though, and there are worse things than having to temporarily swallow my personal flavor of pedantry. I had never actually read the original story anyway, so my education in things everyone except me has already read continued.
It will be fun to see how other people interpret the task. Although I complained at first, the source material is rich enough to offer different solutions to the problem of what to keep and what to throw out. And that's without getting into the rich and varied tradition of other stories about aquatic females.
After some headbanging, a partial inversion, and a transportation to a fantasy world that I was already working on, my mermaid story (ahem) grew legs. Then, as is apparently inevitable, it stalled out around the halfway point. Today I started from the beginning and realized that I've done all this before--in fact, it may even be my "process" to write half a first draft and then start over with a second draft of the first half, and continue that straight on into a first draft of the second half.
Once I can see what the story is starting to be shaped like, I know how to tear it apart and shape it like something else, I guess.
I still don't know how this story ends, which vexes me, because given the source material I have no confidence that it will end happily.
I've found a new thing to aspire to in my work. Or maybe it's an old thing. Or maybe it's what I've always wanted.
So much art happens because that sort of art is happening now. That isn't to say that it's necessarily bad--the last decade's wave of superhero movies produced a few with actual artistic merit; some of the young adult fantasy literature flooding the market right now is actually worth reading; there are even some Dutch oil paintings of historically insignificant aristocrats that are enriching to look at, in their own way--and I'm certainly not saying that I hope never to cash in on a convenient industry trend.
What I mean to say is that a lot of art that is produced seems inevitable. Ideas floating around the culture collide randomly like molecules and react in ways that are random and original, but predictable. (This happens in more practical spheres like science and politics as well.) When zombies became a "thing" they spread, zombie-like, across the culture and combined with everything. It produced some interesting combinations such as zombie romantic comedies, zombie adaptations of classic literature, and zombie Shakespeare kung fu musical theater*, but that says more about the zombie image's penetration than anything else. The question isn't whether or not something will happen, but who will do it.
On Friday night I took the time out to go see The World's End with Girlfriend, and when the credits rolled I said to her that it was nice to see a movie that, if these specific people hadn't decided to do exactly what they did, would not have happened. I don't think the stars were aligned to produce a movie about a bittersweet, nostalgic midlife pub crawl in a town that's been taken over by robots. Edgar Wright and company made that happen.
That's what I'd like to do. Maybe not exclusively, but I would like to add at least one thing to the culture that wasn't just going to happen anyway. I don't think I'm just talking about "creativity" either. Or "originality" for that matter. There is plenty of both at work in the main stream of culture. And tasting the zeitgeist and knowing what art will speak perfectly to the moment is another ability I would like to have. But it's a special thing to find a combination of ideas that works that lies outside of the main currents. Something like that may not be imitated--and perhaps shouldn't--and may only be remembered as an intriguing footnote at most.
If God had delegated the creation of life, and I had been involved, I would be proud to have created the platypus, perhaps as much as the redwood or the tyrannosaurus.
* My thesis aside, I admit that if Qui Nguyen didn't write Living Dead in Denmark it probably wouldn't have happened.
I have been watching Dollhouse at a remarkable pace. Halfway into the second season (or 3/4 through what would have been a regular season of another show) I come to a question that has been asked many times before.
Why would Fox keep cancelling Joss Whedon's series?* I have heard the theories. The suits at Fox are idiots, the common theory runs. With Firefly, and then Dollhouse, their increasingly atrophied senses of taste responded to masterful storytelling as the deepest of cave fungi respond to the light of the sun. It was terrible and incomprehensible to them, so they sought to extinguish it.
Well, that theodicy satisfies some geeks, but in my paranoid ramblings I've come to a theory of my own. And I'm going to lay it on you after the jump.
Warning: This is probably going to contain vague spoilers for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,Firefly, Serenity, and the first season of Dollhouse. But then, if I'm right, it could contain spoilers for everything.
