Jurascible

It's not that I regret seeing Jurassic World. Wife wanted to see it and I wanted to indulge her, and after we had watched the movie we set into it with our claws, tearing it into juicy ribbons that served us as the dinner component of the evening.

Jurassic World was bad. It was baad. It was baaaaaaaaaaaad. But what's more, it seemed convinced, on every level of subtext, that it should not exist. Half a dozen conversations in the movie follow the same basic structure:

Guy 1: We wanted to do something interesting with real dinosaurs but the banal masses only want stupid things, so we mashed together a bunch of dinosaurs to build the Awesomesauce Rex.

Guy 2: That's terrible and an affront to everything I thought this franchise stood for. Why couldn't we just leave well enough alone?

Guy 1: We would but we have a directive from corporate to blindly chase profits until the whole enterprise falls down around our ears.

Guy 2: Welp.

I couldn't help but notice that Universal Pictures is now "A Comcast Company," yet one of the park folks name-drops Verizon as their corporate sponsor for the new "dinosaur." Make of that what you will.

A short post-vacation something

As I lay down for a post-church nap today, I had (what I felt at the time was) a great idea for a blog post. I assured myself that I would remember it when I woke up. I'm sure I've lost many ideas this way.

There are two reasons I didn't have a post up last Sunday. The first is that I spent last weekend at a house in another state where I had access to most of my friends but not the internet. That's only half an excuse, though, because I had meant to post this video as a filler and instead I, um, didn't.

Anyway you might have seen this already because it's not new, but Neil Gaiman (noted fantasy author who writes whatever the hell he wants, mostly) and Kazuo Ishiguro (noted literary author who also writes more or less whatever the hell he wants) got together recently on the radio and talked about the breakdown of genre boundaries. If you've got 10 minutes it's worth a listen.

My top 10 disconnected observations about Mad Max: Fury Road

First, some news: my review of the relatively new Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie movie Maggie is up at Monstrum Athanaeum, and you can expect to see some more of my writing there in the near future.

Unrelatedly, I finally watched Mad Max: Fury Road last night, but since no one is paying for my opinion of that movie, prepare for my thoughts in their unsifted form:

1. It was a late night showing, and the projectionist put on Entourage by mistake. It took us a surprisingly long time to be sure we were watching the wrong movie, because Entourage begins with some sort of yacht party and jet skis, and water everywhere and no land in sight. But knowing that Mad Max is about a parched dystopia, I guess we all thought this might be a flashback of some sort... that the party might be interrupted by a nuclear flash. Even knowing now what we were watching, I think that would have been an improvement.

2. The actual opening of Fury Road is quite effective at breaking Max down. They use a trick I feel like I've seen work elsewhere as well: physically scarring the hero as a consequence of their loss (and not in a badass way, like the fashionable cheek or over-the-eye scar). We, the audience, know that the hero can get out of any jam they get into in Act 1 of their own movie. We also know, at least subconsciously, that no matter how dejected the hero gets it is likely to be turned around by the end of the movie; no matter how bloodied up he gets we know he can heal up and clean up in time for the final battle. But mutilations, burns, scars, and tattoos stay with the character no matter how sloppy or glib the writing gets--they have to matter. And because a hero's good looks are sacred in a franchise, this tactic rarely gets used. Max's involuntary tattoo is especially painful because the mark is a matter of identity and identification, and in particular because...

3. So often apocalypse fiction is, weirdly, a fantasy of self-expression. Stripped of our monoculture and commoditized comforts, everything we carry with us or surround ourselves with becomes an expression of character. One thing Fury Road does well is this characterization-through-objects. You see it in other apocalypses: consider your favorite survivors' choices of clothing, weapons of choice, equipment, and accoutrements. But I wonder what it says about us that we have this recurring collective daydream, that if civilization collapsed, and day-to-day survival was a struggle, we would just have so much more time for self-expression, you know?

4. A few absurdities aside, I've realized that Fury Road is the best--if nothing else, the most successfully audacious--piece of movie world-building that I've seen since the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

5. Relatedly, the thing that might have surprised me the most in Fury Road's scorched-earth world is the underlying sense that humanity is starting to crawl out from the wreckage of the apocalypse. My knowledge of the Mad Max mythos is spotty, but this possibility of rejuvenation seems like a new thing. But the people of the Citadel have dug a well deep enough to bring water to the surface. They've established hydroponics and even open-air gardens. Functioning trade networks are starting to emerge (the Citadel peacefully receives goods from Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, both separate settlements apparently devoted to producing and exporting a single commodity). By setting himself as a despotic god-king, Immortan Joe is misusing these things, but they are all markers of progress.

6. At the intersection of politics, economics, self-expression and world-building, one thing someone should write a paper on is the way characters in the Mad Max universe (one of intense scarcity) project power through conspicuous consumption. For instance, the Bullet Farmer flaunts his abundance of ammunition by wearing bullets as clothes and shooting profligately into the distance. Immortan Joe showers his supplicants with water in a naked display of power. The War Boys shoot gouts of flame from the sides of their vehicles, presumably burning precious gasoline in the process.

7. You can't talk about Fury Road without commenting on the names. For some reason in a universe where characters answer to things like Corpus Colossus, Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, and The Doof Warrior, the name I have the hardest time swallowing is Max Rockatansky.

8. Nor can you talk about Fury Road without mentioning the feminist subtext. I think turning the movie into an outright allegory for women's empowerment would be a mistake, for all the reasons that Tolkien disliked allegory: namely that it reduces a rich story to a set of talking points. But short of that, I applaud what the movie did in terms of portraying well-defined and often powerful woman characters. All the more because the movie never turns to the audience and says, "I hope we're all learning something from this." It's possible that George Miller didn't create Imperator Furiosa for Culture Points. Maybe he created her because he thought the character made perfect sense in the world he had created.

9. And the people who actively object to it need to get over themselves.

10. Speaking of George Miller, some folks are surprised that this is the same director who made Babe in 1995. But go back and watch the first scene of Babe and tell me there's no trace of horrific dystopia in that movie.

Showing your work

There's a question I've been meaning to raise for a while, but I've put it off because I couldn't suggest an answer. Then in last week's post, I sort of stumbled on a partial answer, so I'll go ahead and raise the question.

With the advent of internet celebrity and, perhaps, the "maker revolution," there seems to me to be a trend toward audiences wanting to see the work that goes into art. I first noticed this when my sister introduced me to the music duo Pomplamoose. Specifically, she showed me this video:

 

Pomplamoose's videos are brilliant, but they are the opposite of "slick" (meaning, in this case, apparently effortless, hiding the mechanisms behind the finished product). In fact they go out of their way to make sure you understand what they're doing so you can appreciate it.* You can see the same idea at work in their "video song" music videos, where they scrupulously show you the origin of all the sounds they use in the song:

 

I know that music like this tended to be a sort of blur to me: whole instrumental tracks could play without me realizing I was hearing them. I imagine lots of people experience music similarly. Playing Guitar Hero 2 was a revelation for me, and after that I started being able to tease out the lead, rhythm, and bass guitar parts in songs I was listening to. By the same token, I can hear more going on in Pomplamoose's songs because they signaled for me to listen for them.

So musicians can show the components of their songs. Visual artists can record videos of their progress for fans. I had trouble figuring out how writers could take advantage of the same phenomenon. Surely no one would want to watch me write live--it would be sort of like reading a finished piece, except only a few words would appear every minute.

Neil Gaiman has at least a partial solution, I realized. Like I talked about last week, his writing lets the reader see his work of recombining familiar elements. It brings readers closer to the actual process of writing, which is more about arranging ideas than simply having them. It dispels the hazardous myth that writers just conceive their ideas in perfect completeness and then write them down (a process which I suspect many people imagine takes no more time than reading).

I shouldn't be resentful, but the art-as-magic myth doesn't do anyone any favors. As my friend Elinor Diamond pointed out recently, writing is work. The writers of yesteryear worked hard to give the impression that they weren't working hard. Some of them flat-out lied about their writing process in order to make themselves seem like some sort of word-wizards.

The dynamics are changing, and wizardry doesn't pay anymore. The process is becoming part of the product. I'm sure there's more to this puzzle than I have figured out.

* Even in their more out-there videos, they eschew a reaction of "how did they do that?" in favor of a "I can't believe they did that."