Why Can't I Be You?

TELEVISION: Dollhouse
Created by Joss Whedon
Fox Television 2009-2010
IMDB


Dollhouse is sort of the unloved child in the Whedon family of entertainments.  Which is not to say that Whedon himself didn't love it, but amongst Whedon's fans, it seems to be the most unappreciated.  Joss Whedon, for those fingers not quite so on the pulse of modern media culture, is the writer and director behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and a little arthouse number called The Avengers.  The first four tend to be referred to in proximity to the term "cult favorites" while the latter often comes paired with "blockbuster."  Dollhouse carries neither of these descriptors, though it shares "ill-fated" with Firefly.  Unlike Firefly, however, it actually gets where it's going.  This isn't a dig at Firefly (although it might be a dig at Firefly's overly abbreviated cinematic follow-up, Serenity) but a credit to Whedon for having open eyes when dealing with Fox again. 

The concept of Dollhouse can be a little complicated to explain, but once you've had it explained then witness it in action, it all makes sense.  You can tell someone what it's about, but like Wheedon's other shows, the greatness is in the execution ("It's about a high school girl that fights vampires!"  "It's a western in space!"  "Uh, those sound dumb, dude."  "No, you have to SEE it!")

The Dollhouse is a super secret company for ultra-rich clients.  They take the young and beautiful and wipe their minds clean, so that they can be imprinted with any identity their clients desire.  A "doll" or "active" may be a dream lover one day, a super spy the next, and a dead spouse the day after that.  While they're in the Dollhouse, however, they are essentially blank slates; docile children.  Part of the fun of the show is seeing how they come up with ways to use the dolls that don't amount to an endless stream of prostitution gigs.  That's the premise, but that's not what the show is about.  The pattern is established right off the bat, but that pattern begins to change.  Things don't always work the way they're supposed to, but there's also a lot more going on under the surface, both of the characters and the plot.

The central character is Echo, a doll played by Eliza Dushku (Buffy's Faith).  She does a more than serviceable job in the role, although her characters tend to end up being versions of herself, so we get all-business Boston girls, super-excited Boston girls, quiet or scared Boston girls, brash and sassy Boston girls -- you get the picture.  For me, the real scene stealer of the show is another doll, Victor, played by Enver Gjokaj.  The fact that he has no other star credits for me to explain to you where you've seen him is a dead shame.  He plays each personality as a whole new character -- Russian mobster, suave British ladykiller, US Marine, other cast members -- each with absolute conviction, so much so that I was left with no idea who the actor really was.  He perfectly embodied the premise of the dolls.  I can only assume that the reason casting directors aren't calling him more is that they don't know how to say his name.

Victor eventually begins to develop feelings for another doll, Sierra; something they are not supposed to be able to do.  Therein lies much of the fabric later in the series.  The show isn't about the Dollhouse, but about being human in the environment of the Dollhouse.  Beyond the dolls, which don't (or aren't supposed to) have personalities of their own, there is the supporting staff.  Another strong performance comes from Olivia Williams as Adele DeWitt, the director of the house.  She, in her very professional way, has completely skipped over moral compromise to convince herself that the Dollhouse does good things.  She delivers some real pressure-cooker moments.  The scientist in charge of the lab that programs and deprograms the dolls is an unsurprisingly spazzed-out young geek who comes to develop more dimensions through the course of events he considers himself removed from -- literally above it all in his glass-fronted lab above the house's living environment.

We are introduced to much of the Dollhouse's operations through the eyes of Echo's new "handler" who is responsible for her well-being when she's away from the house.  Rounding out the core staff is the ruthless head of security, Mr. Dominic.  The fly in the ointment is FBI agent Paul Ballard.  After a divorce and the loss of a partner, Ballard has become obsessed with a dead-end, probably-just-an-urban-myth case; the Dollhouse.  Mysterious information has sent him in pursuit of a missing college student named Caroline, whom he believes to be trapped there.  This character, while deeply important to developing the plot, is one of the weakest.  His obsession doesn't seem to be as well explained or supported as it should be for such a pivotal character.  I'm not altogether sure whether this is due to poor development on the writing end, or if he's just not that interestingly played by Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Galactica).  The character seems like a trainwreck, and not the appealing kind.  I have to assume it's intentional, since characters in the show actually comment on the weirdness of it.  Nevertheless, a lot of the most interesting story beats depend on him.

As an informant tells Ballard, "That's what the Dollhouse does, but that is not its purpose," and indeed, what the show is ultimately about is what happens, not what it is.  Developing its plot in similar territory as X-Files and Lost, Dollhouse is a big birthday cake of conspiracy and double-cross.  Unlike those other shows, however, Dollhouse knows what its conspiracy is from the very beginning and sees it through to the end.  Upon rewatching, there were elements in the very first episode that would only make sense in the context of the finished product.  Lasting only 2 half seasons, there was no need to overstuff the series with meaningless sidetracks and dead-ends (yes I mean YOU, Lost).

Virtually every character surprises us at one point and/or another.  There are double and triple-crosses and distinct arcs of personal growth for everyone in what becomes a very, very screwed up sort of family.  All of Whedon's series deal with themes of family, but Dollhouse is probably the most mature and dysfunctional of the lot.  Characters start at-odds but grow together out of respect or understanding, expedience or love.  They discover not simply who each other are, but who they are themselves, and what that means.  Among all the changing directions in character, the last and most surprising is also the hardest to swallow.  This seems to have been the biggest single concession to fitting everything in before time runs out, or simply an afterthought, because a repeated viewing yields no signs that [character in question] has been anything other than [character in question] had appeared to be, even in [character in question]'s private moments.  Ironically, [character in question] is the first one who really sees their group as a family.

The critic Roger Ebert, in reviews of Wings of Desire and the "Up" documentaries, discusses, as the "central meaning of life" the questions "Why am I me and not you?"  Amid all the action and melodrama, Dollhouse considers this question as well.  Not merely "Why am I me and not you?" but "Am I still me when I'm not longer me?" and "Who am I when I'm you?"

Speaking of Ebert, in the Ebert & Roeper review of one of the Hellboy films, he raised the question of what would really happen if the bad guys won, if the great threat came to be.  Time and again in films there's the moment where characters discuss the unimaginable consequences should the good guys fail.  Joss Whedon must have been paying attention too.  There are two episodes set years after the main body of the series that show the aftermath of the conspiracy come to fruition (yes, I'm being deliberately vague).  As is Whedon's way, there is penance and redemption to go around, as well as love hard-earned.

Border Crossing

COMIC: Safe Area Gorazde
Joe Sacco
Fantagraphics Books -- 2000

Joe Sacco has carved out a niche in comics, which, if not necessary wholly unique, is one he's most certainly made his own. Sacco is the foremost practitioner of the unlikely genre of comics journalism, and in his hands, you'll start to wish that more journalism was presented this way.

Safe Area Gorazde is the central piece in a series of books and stories Sacco produced from time spent in Bosnia during the war. Sacco spent months going between the cities of Sarajevo and Gorazde, the latter of which is the primary concern of this book. Gorazde was a U.N. designated "safe area," one of six enclaves supposedly protected by U.N. forces, and the only one in eastern Bosnia not ultimately overrun by the Serbs (though not for a lack of effort).

Whereas most journalists would ride in with the morning convoy, get their soundbites, and ride out with the afternoon convoy, Sacco spent time living with the people of Gorazde, seeing how they survived, hearing their stories, getting a sense of the personalities involved. As a result, Sacco's writing has a breadth and depth conveyed by no other reportage of the Bosnian war that I've ever encountered.

The chapters in Gorazde fall into three loose categories (which often crossover effortlessly); Sacco's first-hand experiences with the people of Gorazde, the stories of war and survival that they share with him, and some pretty straight, uncomplicated history of the region and conflict.

 To the vast majority of Americans, the "war" in Bosnia was just more backward people killing each other in places with hard-to-say names. Granted, neither the mainstream press, nor the U.S. government, nor even the U.N. did a consistent or accurate job in conveying the facts of the situation. Sacco remedies that. By telling the stories of the people who lived through it, and showing them, at home in their battered environment, he gives not only a face and voice to the people, but a context and framework for understanding. Safe Area Gorazde is potent journalism for anyone who ever wondered what "the whole Bosnia thing" was all about, as well as anyone who followed the situation closely and wants to add some meat to the bare bones of mainstream journalism.

Sacco's illustration isn't the kind of polished technique-fest that readers primarily accustomed to mainstream comics will be used to, but his talent for observation, texture and character give Gorazde a palpable sense of place and feeling. The passion and detail that he puts into Gorazde's shell-pocked streets, burned and blasted homes, scarred and wounded refugees and their desperate, weary faces lend his storytelling authenticity and credibility.

Joe Sacco is one of comics' truly unique and visionary talents, and Safe Area Gorazde is a masterful achievement in an already admirable career.


Crosspost Classic!  8.10.2007

Gaiman Knows Fairies

COMIC: Stardust
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
Vertigo/DC Comics - 1998

Stardust may or may not be an actual "comic" depending on your definition. It's a storybook, in prose, punctuated with paintings an illustrations, which many people wouldn't consider or recognize to be comics, but according to Scott McCloud's definition in Understanding Comics (see Sequential Smarts) it qualifies. Furthermore, both Gaiman and Vess made their reputations in comics, and it's published by a comics publisher, so there you have it.

Gaiman and Vess previously collaborated on one of the standout stories from the Gaiman-penned Sandman comic series, in which William Shakespeare encountered the denizens of the realm of Faerie who would inspire A Midsummer Night's Dream. Gaiman presented these characters as Shakespeare did (albeit in a somewhat intensified form), as petty and meddling creatures who were bound to the strict letter of their agreements, but who were more often motivated by cruelty and self-interest. Stardust, while being an unrelated project, feels like a return to, and expansion on that same interpretation of "the lands beyond the fields we know."

Foremost, and quite literally, Stardust is a fairy tale in the most traditional sense. It maintains the sense of danger and the macabre that the sanitized and Disneyfied fare we've become used to throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. It's an adventure and a romance which gives Gaiman another chance to explore these worlds through the eyes of his characters, and leaves the reader wishing he would have explored it even more.

Gaiman's strength has always been creating fascinating worlds and telling stories within them, and he does that here in satisfying fashion. What Gaiman, for my money, doesn't do as well, is create interesting characters with sympathetic motivations. Every one is an archetype who behaves accordingly, providing no surprises and very little insight. In a book like this, that isn't a fatal flaw, but the slim bit of development we do get from the principals just left me hungry for a larger helping. But that wasn't the thing that bothered me...

I've been reading Gaiman's comics for almost as long as he's been writing them. I was one of the people who told all the other people that they needed to be reading Sandman during its original publication. More recently, however, he's been made a name for himself as a writer of straight prose fiction. I've had more than a couple friends ask if I've read his novels, and subsequently question why not. Rereading Stardust, nearly 10 years after its original publication, I'm reminded why I've avoided his other work. While I enjoy his storytelling; free of the strictures of traditional comics, I find his narrative voice to be overly affected. While I have been assured that this is not the case with his other writing, it took me a good quarter of the series (Stardust was initially serialized as a 4 book series, and later collected into a single volume) to get past it. Now I'm perfectly aware that this affectation was deliberate, with the book intending to emulate the classic age of Victorian fantasy writing, but it struck me as excessively self-conscious.

Charles Vess' art has always been something of a mixed bag for me. He is a masterful stylist and a skilled craftsman, but I've always found his anatomy to be somewhat hit-or-miss. The faces of his characters are often flat, with their eyes appearing too high, or the domes of their skulls too shallow. With his more fanciful creatures, this is rarely a problem, especially since many of them have grotesque, gnarled faces with beakish noses that counter this effect, but for his barefaced human (or nearly human) characters, I'm occasionally left with the echoes of a high school crafts fair.

There are also places in Stardust where Vess seems not to have been given -- or not to have read -- Gaiman's text; where the textual descriptions (which frankly are a little more specific than I found necessary in an illustrated book) don't match the illustrations. More than once, the hair color described in the text doesn't match the one shown. While this could be a result of palette choices for a given scene, there's one in particular that isn't. In Chapter 3, the text describes the dying Lord of Stormhold with his sons gathered about him, the living on the right, and the dead on the left, while the accompanying painting clearly shows the opposite arrangement. Of course, most people aren't going to catch this, but it just seemed to me to be symptomatic of the way that a stronger editorial hand could have guided this to a stronger package.

All petty complaints aside, however, Stardust is an enjoyable entertainment, and I would have liked more of what both creators do well; more rollicking exploration of the Realm of Faerie from Gaiman, and more big, beautiful paintings (allowing for fewer of the less thrilling spot illustrations) of it from Vess. It's for these reasons that I'm looking forward to the film version, which will naturally be more visual, and less reliant on the narrative voice.


Crosspost Classic!  08.14.2007

Cruse in Control

COMIC: Stuck Rubber Baby
Howard Cruse
Paradox Press
1995

Howard Cruse's graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby is not an autobiography, but it doesn't feel far off. The book's central character, like Cruse, grew up amidst the tumultuous civil rights era of the 1960s in the American South, and, like Cruse, had to learn to accept and process the reality of his own homosexuality. I suspect Cruse's main purpose in writing a piece of fiction similar and yet separated from his own life was the freedom to tweak characters and relations for dramatic effect, and to place his character in more pivotal and volatile situations than most people would have ordinarily found themselves in.

These are just my own suspicions, however. As a piece of fiction, Stuck Rubber Baby feels a little bit like made-for-TV fare, albeit fairly good made-for-TV fare with an honesty more apt to appear on PBS or cable than the networks. As a work of comic art, however, this is fairly new ground to cover, and Cruse gives the reader a sense of being enriched with a sense of a particular time and place, as well as a timeless sense of what it is to be a young adult at odds with oneself and one's place in the world.

Cruse's art (which, to be honest, I really was not familiar with before this book) has previously been somewhat-to-very cartoonish. Here, his characters still have a certain rubbery quality, and to almost a one, feature Leno-esque oversized chins, but Cruse covers every page with such fine, almost pointillistic crosshatching that gives his art a lush weight that anchors his places, characters and things in a believable world.

It's clear that this was a labor of love for Cruse. Evidently it took him 4 years to create, and it shows.


Crosspost Classic!  08.14.2007

Sequential Smarts

COMIC: Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud
Kitchen Sink Press (later editions; DC Comics and HarperPerennial) 1993


It's no exaggeration to declare that Scott McCloud's groundbreaking book, Understanding Comics is very probably the most important book ever written about comics, whether comic or prose. It's certainly debatable, but it's no exaggeration. During the 3 years that I taught comics classes at an art college in Portland, Understanding Comics was the required text for my classes, and although I never lectured from it, I frequently referenced it, and felt no guilt about about making it a compulsory purchase for a class that most students took just for fun. If they didn't "get it" then, at least they'd have it and be able to come back to it, because it's the kind of book that reveals new insight with every re-read; not just about comics specifically, but ways of looking at the world and human thought in general. It belongs in the collection of every person who has moved on to the question of "Why are comics cool?" whether they're coming from the direction of fanboy or skeptic.

I want to choose the right words here, to explain what Understanding Comics is to the uninitiated. I'm tempted to use words like "documentary" and "lecture series" but I'm afraid that the eyes of more skeptical or anti-intellectual readers will instantly glaze over and they'll fail to grasp how entertaining the material is in McCloud's hands. Firstly, Understanding Comics is a comic. It's a 215 page meditation on what comics are and what they can be. McCloud attempts to define what "comics" is, or are -- well, both really. He explores the language, time-bending nature, psychology, mechanics and approaches to comics, art in general, what comics mean, how they work, and the vast potential to which they can be used. He deftly sidesteps the question of whether comics can be "Art" with little more than a "Duh!" and goes on to treat them seriously as such, without bothering to validate such an ignorant question.

[Note to video game fans who are still surly with Roger Ebert for claiming that games can't be art: Rather than worrying about arguing with Ebert about whether or not they CAN be, the onus is upon us to demand more from our creators so the question becomes a moot one due to overwhelming evidence that they simply ARE. But this is a discussion for another day.]

McCloud walks us through the process of arriving at his definition of "comics." What he comes up with is a pretty broadly embracing definition, "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence." I'm still personally a little iffy on his definition. It excluded things like single panel cartoons, which, as I have argued directly with McCloud, create their own sequence owing to the placement of words relative to the image (example: a Family Circus panel with the text placed on the left of the panel by newspaper editors trying to cram more comics onto a page will not "work" the way it was intended when Bill Keane wrote it with the text appearing beneath the image).



McCloud's definition may also includes things like magazine articles which arrange photos throughout. The images may not tell a story, but they're definitely in deliberate sequence to "convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" [from McCloud's expanded definition]. Now maybe he intends the definition to be that embracing, although part of me starts to believe that it's so broad that it doesn't really define ("to fix or mark the limits of") anything. His functional definition, however, is "Sequential Art," and that's as useful a handle as anything. With this definition, he's able to explore the impact that the form has had on culture throughout human history, far beyond the commonly accepted late 19th century origins of comics.



It becomes difficult to describe much of what McCloud talks about without turning into a second-rate parroting of all the material he manages so well. It's clear that he spent a lot of time thinking about these subjects, and clarifying his thoughts before he decided to tackle it all in a book. Much like describing the book in total, trying to explain the individual chapters would betray the ease and expertise with which McCloud handles (at first) seemingly esoteric and academic topics. He never speaks down to readers who would ordinarily never touch such a theoretical work as this. He explains things clearly, and makes understand why you suddenly care about things you probably never gave that much thought to in the first place.

By presenting this information in comics form, McCloud not only makes the theoretical more palatable, but he validates many of his points by demonstrating the largely untapped potential of the medium to communicate and enrich. When I taught my comics classes, and in conversations with fanboys online, every once in a while I'll come across someone who'll tell me "I already understand comics." Of course, what they really mean is that they understand what they want comics to be -- specifically, masturbatory nostalgia and/or juvenile reinforcement of male identity imagery -- and they don't want someone coming along and telling them that there's more to the medium that they love (and want to keep trapped in a frozen infancy, like a child who wants their dog to always remain a dependent and controllable puppy) than what they've believed it was since they first huddled under the covers with a flashlight and a stack of hand-me-down issues of Spider-Man. Understanding Comics doesn't make value judgments on content. In fact, it barely discusses content at all. What it does is deepen and broaden the reader's concept of what comics are, and what they can be. That expands the view of the reader (or the non-reader, for that matter) and opens them up to greater experiences, and in so doing, fills them with a hunger for a more refined and adventurous menu of a wider world -- and isn't that what art is supposed to do, after all?

Crosspost Classic!  08.21.2007

State of Rapid Change

MOVIE:
Cedar Rapids - 2011
Written by Phil Johnson
Directed by Miguel Arteta









In a sentence never uttered before in human history; Cedar Rapids is fast becoming my new "happy place."  Not the city, mind you, but the film.  It has joined the ranks of Wonder Boys and Almost Famous as one of my comfort comedies.  Like those films, Cedar Rapids is filled with beautifully flawed human characters crashing into each others' lives and coming out something new.

This is Ed Helms' movie.  The "aw shucks" naivete of his characters from The Daily Show, The Office and The Hangover reach their purest (least obnoxious) and most endearing form here in his character, Tim Lippe.  Tim, an insurance agent from small town Wisconsin, is the far-more-dependent partner in a relationship with his former 7th grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver).  Called upon at the last minute to defend his agency's award-winning status at the regional convention of insurers, Tim is forced to leave the familiar comfort of his town for the eye-opening and corrupting influences of the "big city."

At the convention, he makes a new collection of friends, albeit with varying levels of hesitation.  The first is hotel prostitute Bree (Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development), whose come-on Tim completely fails to recognize, offering her a butterscotch candy instead of a cigarette.  The next is convention roommate Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.).  They're joined by obnoxious fellow agent Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), who Tim's boss has specifically warned him to avoid.  And finally there's Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) whose brashness intrigues and befuddles Tim, and who is herself intrigued and befuddled by his earnestness.

Throughout the weekend, each of the characters gets an opportunity to defy expectations.  Well, maybe not Bree (who, one must admit, exists primarily as a plot device), although she does bail on a potentially profitable convention night to take Tim to house party, but the four insurance agents each get at least one scene to play against character.

 What struck me most on my recent viewing was that four main characters (Tim, Ronald, Deanzie and Joan) each represent our own anxieties about ourselves.  Tim isn't just earnest; he's the clueless naif we each fear ourselves to be when we make ourselves vulnerable to something new, to the world that is bigger than our own back yard.  Ronald is the boring person we fear we are in small talk.  Dean is the overbearing doofus that we worry others will see us as when we speak with confidence, whether real or feigned.  Joan was a little harder to figure out, but I think she's how lost we can feel in our own lives -- overwhelmed but incomplete by living up to expectations and unconvinced by our own self-assurance.  Together, the four of them create a kind of balance, and their acceptance of each other creates a kind of balance between them.

And mayhem.  Don't get me wrong, it's not all cuddles.  The way they rub against each other leads to all kinds of internal and external conflict, but through it, they learn to accept and rely on each other thus becoming something new, something whole.

The movie is packed with rock-solid character actors.  Beyond Helms, Reilly, Heche, Whitlock, Shawkat and Weaver, Stephen Root (News Radio) and Kurtwood Smith (Robocop, That 70s Show) represent Tim's rock-and-a-hard-place.  Tom Lennon and Rob Corddry both appear in almost cameo roles, but Lennon's character -- and the seamy circumstances of his death early in the film -- thread through much of what happens later.

Cedar Rapids never resorts to the squirmy Comedy of Discomfort that has become the trend in "edgy" and "indy" comedy.  There's shame and embarrassment aplenty, but it's the result of Tim's earnestness coming into conflict with the big nasty world.  He doesn't always do the right things, but he does the wrong things for the right reasons.  His pains are growing pains, and his weekend of confronting his own fears and misconceptions about the world and the wild ride that ensues turn out to be one of those life-changing experiences that strike from out of the blue when we venture beyond the fields we know.

You Can't Be Nine Again

TELEVISION: Star Wars Holiday Special
Directed by Steve Binder (1978)
IMDB


When I was nine years old, I cared about one thing, only one thing, and (as far as I knew) I cared about it more than any other nine year old in the world did. To save you the math, I'll just tell you... that thing was Star Wars.

Unless you were there, and the right age, you really can't appreciate what it was like. Star Wars was an effing epidemic for us. We walked around thinking Star Wars for years, talking about it, fantasizing about being anything from Luke Skywalker to John Dykstra (special effects wizard on the film), collecting the cards, coveting the toys, resenting the kids we'd heard about who'd seen the movie 96 times. In ways that I'm not going to bother explaining right now, it very probably changed the course of my life -- no exaggeration.

So I was eight when the movie came out, but on November 17, 1978, I was nine years old. That was when CBS aired the Star Wars Holiday Special on TV. This was like a container car full of cocaine derailing in Robert Downey Jr.'s back yard, for us. I couldn't wait. Yet somehow, when the evening came, my parents wouldn't let me watch it. I don't remember the exact reason. It was something like I had to finish my homework first, or I was being punished. No amount of begging, pleading, bargaining or cajoling would get them to back down. I specifically remember my mom telling me "It will be on again."

Of course, if you're a geek, you know that, notoriously, the Star Wars Holiday Special was never aired again, which is why, if you're NOT a geek, you're saying "Star Wars Holiday Special???" Whatever it was I was doing in the dining room (I do think it was homework), I couldn't sit still, I HAD to see the show, I could hear some of it in the other room, and managed to see little bits of it (like the first appearance of Boba Fett) on my trips back to the living room to beg for mercy, but in the end, I pretty much missed it.

Over the years following, I kind of forgot about it. I knew there had been an early appearance of Boba Fett, but the memory was woven of loose threads, like a long-ago dream that gets stitched into real memories, except in reverse. Then one day, thinking about the Boba Fett action figure that you could only get from a mail-in offer (which I could have got, but didn't -- something I'll eventually quit kicking myself for), it triggered the memory, and I asked whoever it was I was with -- John, I think -- "Was there a Star Wars Holiday Special?" Yes, there was, and it was horrible, he told me. He was older than me, though, and he couldn't know the unresolved nine year old within me.

So, more years pass, and then there's the internet. I managed to get a hold of a truly terrible copy of the video, but I had it, and I could finally watch it, even if it was 28 years later.

From this date forth, the yardstick by which I measure terribleness has been changed forever.

How terrible? The central story is built around Chewbacca's family -- that's right, Wookies, who don't speak English -- and their preparations for "Life Day" while they wait and worry about Chewbacca and Han Solo, who have run afoul of some local Imperials on their way home. This central narrative with Chewie's hapless wife Malla, scampish son Lumpy, and face-gumming old father (all of which is just wrong, wrong, WRONG), serves as the framing device for:

* Token cameos from Mark Hammill, Carrie Fisher (who sings the Life Day song in the end), Harrison Ford, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels and R2D2. There's also a brief bit of James Earl Jones' voice over some stock footage from the film.

* Some extremely nelly acrobats in a proto-Cirque de Soliel holographic performance.

* Art Carney as a daffy trader, who evidently got an incredible offer on his comedic timing, because he's entirely out-of-stock of that particular commodity.

* Harvey Korman in THREE agonizing character sketches -- as a four-armed TV chef (female), a malfunctioning android in an instructional video, and as a lovestruck chump who drinks through a hole in the top of his head, pining for Bea Arthur (more on this later).

* Diahann Caroll as the featured act in some kind of psychedelic soft-core erotic music video, drooled over by Chewbacca's father (or is it stepfather?), Itchy. Very creepy.

* Jefferson Starship as a holographic rock band. Very creepy.

* A kind-of-cool cartoon about Han, Luke and Chewie, which is where Boba Fett appears.

* A "Life on Tatooine" documentary that starts with cantina footage from the film, evidently via the cutting room floor, and culminates in a performance by Bea Arthur as the cantina owner, singing a kind of Brechtian dirge called "Goodnight But Not Goodbye" as she kicks all her patrons out, under Imperial curfew.

At times the special is sugar-coated kiddy (or "family") fare, such as you would expect from a holiday special stacked with second tier "stars" of the '70s. At other times, it's like a school play about fascism performed by students who were forced to perform but haven't rehearsed. And there are still other times when I don't know WHAT the hell that was. There's only so much shrugging and going "Eh, it was the '70's..." you can do.

Looking back, I think the nine year old me would have been too jacked up to sleep after watching that. It was MORE Star Wars, which was all I cared about -- nevermind GOOD Star Wars. But watching it now, it was mostly painful, and then funny, and then back to painful. I want to forgive it, but other than the cartoon, there's so little to redeem it.

I no longer have any questions about why George Lucas did his best to keep it from ever seeing the light of day again.


Crosspost Classic!  5.25.2006

Purity Is An Agenda

I was a number of years back that my friend Mike was talking about some narrow-minded twit from the anime message boards he frequented who complained that manga & anime (show-off words for comics and animation produced in Japan) should not intermix with comics & animation styles from the West. Now, of course, this is pure foolishness. The origins of Japanese comics and animation are tied very closely to direct American influences. Comics took off in Japan after World War II as a result of Japanese children being exposed to American comics by servicemen stationed there. The so-called "God of Comics" in Japan, Osamu Tezuka, was primarily influenced by Disney and Fleisher studio cartoons, and one would be hard pressed to find an artist in Japan who wasn't influenced by Tezuka, or at least someone who was. Anyway, long rant made short, the idea that American and Japanese comics and animation should not influence each other is so asinine that I'm kind of embarrassed to have validated it this much by even addressing it seriously.

What I'm actually writing about is the kind of though behind such wrong-minded assertions. Like I said, this originally came up a couple years ago, and it's been on my mind intermittently ever since then, and the conclusion I've come to is...


Purity is an agenda.

More specifically, attempts -- almost ANY attempt -- to keep something "pure" denotes the presence of an agenda -- almost always -- to impose control. It is my further contention that reference to purity should be met with caution and/or mistrust, and that purity itself is, in fact, a wrong thing.

Let us take the anime example. Now there are few people on planet Earth more xenophobic than the Japanese (but hang on, because I'll get around to the ones who are), but without the external cultural influence of American comics and cartoons, there very well might not even BE such a thriving and ubiquitous manga and anime industry in Japan, or, at the very least, not one we would recognize.

The flipside of that coin is that, after the comics crash of the mid-90s (following the glut of trash in the early-90s) both Japanese-influenced American artists, and Japanese comics translated into English, were a large part of keeping the floundering industry afloat. In the case of manga, comics gained a strong female following, which had long eluded "pure" (i.e. superhero) American approaches to comics.

So what does it profit the aficionado to rail against the inevitable winds of change, hoping to keep his beloved artform "pure" and self-replicating? Well, for one, it allows the most fannish of fans to keep the bounds of their chosen medium finite. If new works can only be created following strict limitations, then the fan can enjoy the certainty that he knows the precise limits and definition of the medium. He knows exactly where it begins and ends, and in so doing, can feel empowered by the knowledge, in control of it, utterly possessing the object of his affection. Furthermore, he wants this art to remain exactly as he has known it to be when he first encountered it. By attempting to hold this item in the past, in the place he once loved it, he is trying to hold himself in the past, denying himself the opportunity to grow and evolve alongside the particular medium in question. If he allows himself to grow as the medium grows and takes on new influences and discovers new things to say, his own view might be opened up, and he might grow away from this comforting relationship, in time. This is Life, and the purist fears its uncertainty.

The loss of purity spawns the seeds of Progress.

If that sounds vaguely sexual, then perhaps I'm being too vague. The intermingling of energies is the stuff of Life. Much as we humans wouldn't exist if our biological parents hadn't lost their "purity," cultures wouldn't grow and thrive without soiling the sheets of the creative norms.

We wouldn't have rock and roll if someone hadn't muddied the purity of blues and country music. We wouldn't have had country music in the first place, if someone hadn't violated the virtue of pure Irish fiddle music at some point. I'm no musical historian, but I know that we wouldn't have most (if not all) of what we have today, and what we'll have tomorrow, if someone hadn't mucked up the moons-old tradition of banging two rocks together by introducing the hollow log to the mix. Take your favorite medium and apply this principle as appropriate.

So far, I've mostly talked about art, but I believe that it applies to purity in virtually all areas of life. Purity sounds like a good and respectable thing, but it still means somebody is trying to maintain control. Of course, one of the most obvious and notorious "purity" agendas is racial/cultural/religious. Many of the same control motives apply here. By keeping races/cultures/religions anchored in the simple form that the individual first digested it as a child, the individual doesn't have to grow or confront challenging and uncomfortable questions. Further, it allows those who hold the reigns of that institution to continue to exert their primacy over those who would allow themselves to consider questions of the finer points. This would be the George W. Bush approach; the facts don't matter, as long as you commit to an unwavering decision. Ironically, we know scientifically that the merging of genetic strains provides an opportunity to make the species stronger.

And finally, of course, there's the sexual purity agenda, which is enforced by the religious agenda, although it actually cuts across cultural lines. The heightened value placed on virginity -- and of course this means female virginity in particular -- is part and parcel of male domination of women. Whether it's maintaining the "precious maidenhead" until marriage, to know that no one else has been breeding your prize heifer, or the premium paid for virgins in brothels, demonstrated in its most ritualized form in the mizuage ceremony for the auctioning off of an oiran's (the courtesan precursors to the geisha) virginity to the highest (and hopefully most socially advantageous) bidder. Transculturally, there is no premium placed on male virginity (BELIEVE ME -- am I RIGHT, fellas?), and male status is improved by planting his seed in any field that hasn't been guarded against him. Women, however, aren't expected to enjoy sex or have any basis for comparison beyond the man she "loves, honors and obeys." This topic has been considered more thoroughly by finer minds than mine, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

Life is impure. I know we'd all like it to be a little more simple, but that doesn't mean we should be simple-minded and unwilling to grow in ourselves and our appreciation for the wondrous variety in the universe.


Crosspost Classic! 8.22.2007

Ain't No Party Like a Lemmon Party

FILM:

The Apartment - 1960

Written by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond

Directed by Billy Wilder

If you're anything like me (and God help you if you are), then you grew up familiar with Jack Lemmon as a primarily dramatic actor who slummed it in the "Grumpy Old" movies, and only occasionally remembered that he was Felix Ungar before Tony Randall. If you've made some effort, you'll also know Some Like It Hot. So it's been with no small amount of wonder and delight that I've been "discovering" more of his comedy work from the 60s recently. How To Murder Your Wife and Irma La Douce were among my favorite films viewed last year, and sometime down the road I'll tell you more of the why to that, but Lemmon was a key ingredient in both those pies. In the early-to-mid 60s, he could have walked away with the title "The Next Jerry Lewis." As Lewis' work was becoming more bitter and unkind (see: Hook, Line & Sinker -- or rather don't), Lemmon embodied a similar nebbishy, loosey-goosey enthusiasm and sweetness that Lewis had choked with sour grapes and pickled in scotch. Lemmon seems to have made a conscious effort to keep betting big on himself and his chops, to great success. The Apartment gives him plenty of opportunities to play with a range of emotions, writ both large and small.

Lemmon plays C.C.Baxter, a corporate cog with dreams of ambition. There are two significant locales in the film, and the one that's not the titular apartment is Consolidated Life of New York; an insurance corporation as soulless and impersonal as its acres of cold, sterile office spaces. Baxter is a minnow trying to swim with the sharks, but it's not his head for numbers that has made him popular with various department heads, but his callow willingness to let them use his apartment for liaisons their mistresses. Their casual disregard for him often keeps him waiting in the cold just to go home to his own place, which they have ransacked of booze and cheese crackers. Meanwhile, his landlady and her husband believe him to be an impossible lothario, owing to the ruckuses made by his self-serving bosses.

As shiny, austere and angular as the office is, his apartment is textural, cluttered and curvilinear -- a womb against an uncaring world which he allows to be violated by the same men who make the outside world so uncaring in the first place. Ralph Waldo Emerson said "I find that Americans have no passions, they have appetites." These are those Americans.

Baxter is interested in Miss Kubelik, an elevator operator at Consolidated Life of New York (an interesting name, given the closed atmosphere in which all aspects of one's life are pursued, and upon which all aspects appear dependent). Shirley MacLaine endows her with that jaded hope that no one else could do quite the same. She knows better, but she keeps following her heart into danger. The danger in this case is Mr. Sheldrake, one of the top corporate brass with whom she's had and off-and-on affair. It being "on" again, Sheldrake (played by Fred MacMurray with Romneyesque white-washed sleaze) takes an interest in Baxter, or more specifically, his apartment. The quid pro quo is that Baxter gets his own office while Sheldrake gets a key to the apartment. Baxter, unaware of the identity of the young lady in question, is filled with the confidence of a rising corporate raider, while his flirtations with Miss Kubelik seem to stall-out on the runway, owing to her renewed relations with their mutual employer.

After Sheldrake's secretary (and formerly featured flavor-of-the-year) Miss Olsen boozily sheds some light on his modus operandi during the company Christmas party, Miss Kubelik heads to the apartment to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. Meanwhile, Baxter, finally giving up on Kubelik, is about to "get lucky" with the floozy-ish wife of a jockey currently detained by Castro in Cuba. She fits the mold of all the corporately approved mistresses -- blonde, blowsy, and unburdened with an overabundance of brains. They all seemed to speak in that "yeah-yeah, sure-sure" Harley Quinn-y Brooklyn movie accent.

That's where things start happening very quickly. The get to his apartment. He discovers Miss Kubelik unconscious in his bed. He has to get rid of his date, roust the landlady's husband, Dr. Dreyfus to pump Miss Kubelik's stomach (later echoed in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous), keep Miss Kubelik awake long enough to be sure she won't die and chase off an amorous executive who did well at the Christmas party. All of these things are themselves made up of smaller comedy bits. It's kind of an atom smasher for "bits," all swirling together -- all the while never denying that it's still an attempted suicide scene. Though the scene is roughly in the middle of the film, it could easily be considered the climax in the story arc, with all previous scenes leading up to it and all following scenes being an untangling and categorization of the messes they've all made.

I'd like to avoid giving away endings as much as possible, so I'm going to leave off there, plot-wise. The Apartment is an unexpectedly adult comedy. I was going to say "for its time," but thinking about it, it's more mature than comedies in our time -- not just in its dealings with suicide, infidelity, and class warfare (well, we don't call it that when it's just the rich waging it), but in the emotional complexity of two people finding the nerve to really love honestly. There is a lot more going on here than the words they say. So much of the complexity is never spoken of, but shared via a continuum of emotional subtexts. Lemmon is harried and hopeful. He's aware of his struggle to become UNaware of the ways that he debases himself to climb, and finds the top to be the lowest place of all. MacLaine's eyes twinkle from within her dense canopy of eyelashes, that pursed smirk that says "Show me something, bud -- no, really, SHOW me something, please."

At Long Last Love

FILM:
Woman of the Year - 1942
Written by Ring Lardner Jr. & Michael Kanin
Directed by George Stevens


Now, me, I never had much use for prissy, unimaginative women. I've always been more of a Lois Lane/Princess Leia/Veronica Mars kind of man. Naturally that put Katharine Hepburn on my radar, but this is the one where she sinks my battleship. Hepburn's character, Tess Harding may well be the ultimate refinement of that archetype. She's a smart, classy, fast-talkin', wise-crackin', tough-as-nails yet warm-hearted newspaper reporter -- because aren't all the best ones? I had assumed that Tess was the proto-Lois, but a little background research sounds like they both owe a debt to the Torchy Blane series from the 30s, and the entire river seems to flow back to Nellie Bly (who, herself, is legitimately fascinating). Regardless, it wasn't long before I was completely in love with Tess. Which works out well, because Spencer Tracy's character, Sam falls just as hard.

As writers for the same newspaper, on very different beats, they begin at loggerheads. Sam is something of an uncomplicated hump, a sports reporter who is completely at home in his world, with very little interest in shaking anything up -- the everyman. Tess is dynamic, almost a caricature of an FDR Liberal but not derisively so. She falls somewhere on the activity scale between "activist" and "activities freak" with a finger on the pulse of every issue of the era. A flip remark in an interview leads to a war of words in the press as the two debate the merits of baseball. This culminates in an educational field trip to a Yankee game (and an hilarious bit of schtick with a large hat). Naturally, Tess falls in love with baseball, and Sam falls in love with Tess.

Their romance is problematic. Though they both recognize early on that they are headed for Big Love, Sam is often frustrated. He just wants to be with Tess, but Tess lives at the center of a tornado of activities, demands, causes and hangers-on (later abbreviated into her disapproving personal secretary played by Reginald Owen). After a few confusing and/or disappointing get-togethers, Sam (with the encouragement of her uncle) decides to cut-out the time-wasting period of acquaintance and cut straight to the matrimony.

It's not long, however, before the go-go lifestyle of the modern woman gets in the way of wedded bliss. Their honeymoon is crashed by a political refugee and his supporters -- a fire upon which Sam throws more fuel by inviting his buddies from the bar, after having just told them not to expect him. Once Sam explains to an old girlfriend that they JUST got married, word of mouth spreads and both groups excuse themselves with wide-eyed knowing looks. This highlights one of Tess' main flaws; she's just a girl that cain't say no, even if "no" would be a perfectly acceptable answer.

The demands on Tess continue to ratchet up. She's more and more engaged in the cause of Italian refugees, and Sam feels more and more sidelined. This highlights Sam's main flaw; he's a bit of a baby. This part of the story feels very much like The Love Parade (Lubitsch; Chevalier/MacDonald, 1929), with the mas masculino male feeling/acting like a pouty little boy because his strong wife is gettin' it done. I appreciate that this is a very realistic reaction for a lot of men in their times (and sadly, ours), but I have little-to-no respect for that. Fortunately, Sam manages it a little better than Count Renard. Tess, less fortunately, handles it fairly poorly.

What Sam takes to be a discussion of having children turns out to be the very sudden introduction of their new son, an Italian refugee Tess could not refuse. She tells Sam and herself that she believes the child is what their marriage needs to hold them together, but it has far more to do with her own weakness. She can't say no. She tends to want to solve every problem on her own rather than engage Sam on a vulnerable level. Tess herself seems to have come from a fairly WASP-y, Ivy League family where children were often left to the care of household staff, thus assumes that she will be able to do the same after no consultation with her spouse. Granted, the little boy is also one adorable bambino.

Farm-raised Sam has a problem with this, and it will eventually be the element that drives them apart. It was one thing to neglect him -- he's a man, and though hurt, he can take it -- but to throw a child into that world just isn't fair or right. This was my least favorite wrinkle in the movie, because even while scolding Tess, the filmmakers themselves were fairly callous about the way they used the child as a plot device to come and go as needed.

I suppose most of the things that I find somewhat bothersome (mostly in retrospect) can be explained by historical context. In the end, Tess tries -- and fails disastrously -- to become the "perfect wife" that she thinks Sam wants. Of course, if that's what he'd wanted, he never would have married Tess, and finally says so.

Then he immediately treats her as an invalid, because how else is an already-married couple going to round out a 40s romantic comedy other than "expecting?"

The thing I loved about the film -- indeed the predominant thing TO love -- is Hepburn's embodiment of Tess. Tracy stands back and lets her light up every scene with her fire. There's lots of great verbal, physical and situational humor here, but it would all matter far less without her seductive energy.

AFTERWORD: I must admit that, while familiar, George Stevens wasn't a household name for me. It is now. Stevens, if you're equally as unaware as I was, directed Gunga Din, Swing Time, Shane, Giant and The Greatest Story Ever Told (you know, because he was humble) among others in his 30+ year career in feature films. Ring Lardner Jr. was one of the Hollywood Ten; writers and directors who defied the HUAC on the basis of the First Amendment, and thus he was jailed and blacklisted. Much of his work remains officially uncredited, including Laura and episodes of the 50s Robin Hood TV series, but his greatest triumph (and vindication) would have to be the screenplay for M*A*S*H as well as uncredited contributions to the TV series. He won Oscars for both Woman of the Year and M*A*S*H, and is rumored to have won another one using a borrowed name.