Taylor Kitsch as John Carter

OK. I admit: it’s too early to judge. The movie isn’t even out yet, just trailers and promo photos, but on that basis alone I am regarding the imminent release of John Carter with one eye a-squint.

This does not look like the hero (and heroine) I know and love from Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ classic John Carter of Mars series, and I am perturbed.

In Which I Discover Science Fiction, Along With a Few Adult Topics

Now, please understand: Burroughs was my first introduction to science fiction. As soon as I turned 12 I became eligible for the adult library card at the Long Beach (California) Public Library, which I promptly upgraded to. And there were three pieces of adult reading I instantly checked out. One was John Carter of Mars. The entire set of Burrough’s Mars books was there on a shelf, calling my name, and I’d only been able to browse but not really lose myself in one before that summer birthday. There was something there that captivated me, that I needed a full dose of. And finally, oh joy, I could take one home and go to Mars.

The other two books I eagerly grabbed from the shelf were the Autobiography of Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known transsexual, and Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal, a comedic/satiric take on Myron’s transformation into Myra. “Transgender” was barely a word in the contemporary vocabulary, but “sex change” was getting a lot of buzz – usually in scathing tones – and I knew this was one of those secretive adult topics grownups didn’t want to talk to kids about. Critics were praising Vidal’s book, and moralists were thundering against it, and Jorgensen was in the news again as well. Why? I was burning with curiosity about this taboo-but-in-plain-sight material. Que curioso.

Of the three books, it was Breckenridge that caused the librarian to peer at me over her half-glasses a long way down her nose and ask, “Do your parents know what you’re reading?” To which I boldly replied, “They do, and they’re ok with it.”

Well. They knew I was reading books, at least, and had a new adult library card (Mom had just signed for it), and they were certainly ok with that. More details the librarian did not need. And neither did my parents.

Jorgensen’s autobiography touched me, and educated me. Myra Breckenridge – I didn’t see what the fuss was about. This was my first excursion into the realms of gender dysphoria, transgression, and sexual identity. I came away from this with the conclusion that adults should let kids read adult things before their viewpoints are tainted by grown-up biases. Kids are capable of forming open-minded opinions of their own when subjects are not framed in judgment, fear, or hatred. At least it worked for me.

So both of those books were eye-opening in a special way that summer of 1968. And then….there was Burroughs.

Burroughs is always linked for me with my first foray into Adult Reading, which is why I mention the other Adult things I was reading at the same time. I brought the same ready-for-anything open-mindedness to Burroughs’ work. But the John Carter story was a whole different kind of adventure. A near planet, exotically renamed Barsoom by the locals! Moon shot/science fair/science nerd moi loved the concept. Four-armed giant green-skinned aliens! Flying air-ships! Adventure! and let us not forget, “the incomparable Deja Thoris.” I was in heaven and read the whole series beginning to end. Then discovered anthologies, and Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and much more, and off I went down the slippery slope to aspiring science fiction novelist at high speed.

So. A little transgenderism, a little subversive literature, a whole lotta adventure on another planet – all in all, a wonderful summer. (OK, so I was one of those twelve-year-olds…)

John Carter & Deja Thoris by Frank Frazetta

Meanwhile, Back on Mars…

John Carter is an iconic figure for fans of Barsoom, on the same scale as Tarzan, Burroughs’ better-known character and series. His descriptions and background about the character are clear, and here’s where I get my first hit of terrible cognitive dissonance.

To quote Burroughs from A Princess of Mars,

He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.

His horsemanship, especially after hounds, was a marvel and delight even in that country of magnificent horsemen. I have often heard my father caution him against his wild recklessness, but he would only laugh, and say that the tumble that killed him would be from the back of a horse yet unfoaled.

Enter Taylor Kitsch cast as the lead. He stands 6′. His hair (in character) is brown. And…long. Long? Say it’s not so! He effects a scraggly could-be-savage-he-man kind of presence, or, like Tom Brady’s late unlamented locks, one could be reminded of the mythical “girly-man” of gubernatorial scorn if one wishes to bundle a lot more critical subtext into these descriptors. Why does that wording even come to mind? Because this look is so counter to steely eyed 6’2″ John Carter of the close-cropped black hair, gentlemanly manners and manly courage, with a distinctly broader shoulder-to-hip ratio than Kitsch demonstrates. The fault is not entirely in the casting – Kitsch did a fine job playing troubled teen Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights, so one would think he has potential – but what foolish makeup and costuming decisions were made to package his look in this manner? From the very get-go, this actor does not look like John Carter is supposed to look. Too short, too long-haired, and where, prey tell, is the carriage of the trained fighting man, the fire and initiative? Where is his presence? He does not seem to have the right heroic edge to him, to judge by the trailers.

This is sad. It is unfortunate. It is perhaps even a travesty – I’ll reserve judgment on that point until I see the movie, but with this start from first impressions, I am not optimistic.

But Wait! There’s More!

And this brings me, then, to Carter’s love interest and co-protagonist, Deja Thoris, Princess of Barsoom. Burroughs describes her through John Carter’s eyes:

[T]he sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.

In addition to this, Deja Thoris is much smaller than John Carter. She has a slender, girlish figure, and is “less than half the height” of the green-skinned, four-armed Barsoomian aliens; she has “little hands” that she puts on his arm or chest when speaking to him. One gets a clear picture of a woman leaning closer to average height than not, perhaps even petite, who although imperious at times is also relatively small and to be protected by large strapping warrior John.

John Carter and Deja Thoris (Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins)

Now on the big screen enters Lynn Collins – a few inches shorter than Taylor Kitsch, a fairly athletic woman in her own right – far from a ‘girlish’ figure – with straight dark brown hair (where is the mass? the waves? the black?), with attractive but not “exquisitely” beautiful features. But the princess of Mars is supposed to be a babe; she is “beautiful in the extreme.” She is drop-dead gorgeous. And Lynn Collins is…well. 5’8″ of pretty. A suitable romantic lead in X-Men: Origins. But she is not, alas, “the incomparable Deja Thoris.”

I don’t generally critique women’s appearances in media, but in this case I critique both male and female leads for one simple reason: these characters are as well established in their physical presence as anyone from Tarzan or Lord of the Rings or myriad other properties with distinctive characters made famous over time and multi-book series. That the essentials of their appearance, demeanor, and presence are blithely ignored by director Andrew Stanton, without even an effort on the part of makeup to compensate for some of these shortcomings, tells me that the screen presentation of the in-the-book characters is not important to this creative crew. This is like casting Walter Matthau as Gandalf and saying “that’s good enough.”

Ian McKellum as Gandalf, and Walter Matthau: change hat, add beard. Good enough!

And that, of course, makes me wonder what else Stanton has deemed dispensable. In his spoken intro to one movie trailer, he talks about loving these books as a child and wanting to stay true to them. If this look in the lead actors is his idea of staying true to the original…well, all I can say is, he’ll never be Peter Jackson when he grows up.

In any case, time will tell. The movie will be released in March 2012, so it’s just around the corner. I think this is one I will be catching on DVD, not the big screen. In the meanwhile, I think it’s time to reread some Burroughs and John Carter of Mars.

The real one.

Rating

This movie has not received any Stomps of Approval because a) I haven’t seen it yet and b) this is a commentary not a movie review. When I see it I’ll update this post with a link to the review proper.

 Related Post

Me, Short Stories, and Robert Heinlein

Cover art by Joe Jusko.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: John Carter: Not the Burroughs Hero After All?
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The chamber maid brings tea - Pehr Hillestrom 1775

Before our modern era of democratic equality, before school children growing up were routinely taught that “we are all equal”, quite a different calculus of social standing prevailed.¹ There was a time when class and status created strict boundaries in a person’s life, as is still the case in parts of the world today.  The strictures imposed by these forgotten frameworks had a far greater impact on historical lives than most contemporary writers are aware of.

Game designers who are ignorant of these limitations may unintentionally create worlds that mirror modern times and social equalities. Authors who give only passing attention to class and status in their fictional settings short-change the layers of interaction that can have a vital impact on characters and events. But when writers have a better understanding of these social factors, a great deal of dramatic tension and challenges for characters can be introduced to the setting, and in a way that makes cultural sense.

I don’t want to wax academic on the subject, but do want to examine some of the historical issues around class and status, and suggest some sensible ways to play up these factors in fictional settings.²

Class and Status

Class (socioeconomic standing) and status (prestige associated with one’s position, or the lack thereof) have colored human societies throughout history. For most of that history, distinctive classes with various levels of social standing were recognized to exist, with differences between them often enforced by law.  In day-to-day life people might not have paid a lot of conscious attention to class and status, but a person’s “place” in society was much more sharply defined than ours (generally) are today in the modern western world.  If someone tried to step outside their expected place, there was much harsher backlash than a person would normally experience today. This served to reinforce the expectation that everyone had a given station in society and would pretty much stick to it for most of their lives.

Today, class is associated almost exclusively with a person’s socioeconomic standing, and in our “land of opportunity” we have an underlying expectation that an enterprising individual can change that status if they work at it. It has not always been so.  In past times the implications of class went far beyond socioeconomics.  Each person was born into a social niche which itself conveyed a certain status, and this place in society determined pretty much everything about that person’s life.

French courtier exchanging finery for more sober clothes following the Edict of 1633, by Abraham Bosse

Education, employment opportunities, marital connections, voice (or lack thereof) in politics, even down to details such as what clothing one could wear and what adornments were forbidden: all these factors and more became dictated not only by custom and common usage but also by codification in law, such as the sumptuary laws that dictated permissible attire depending upon one’s class.

It was much more difficult in the past to change class and status than it is today. Marriage, inheritance, success in trade (hence gaining wealth), and elevation to a notable position were perhaps the most commonplace ways of doing so, but beyond those methods the opportunities for changing social standing were fewer than in modern times. Many who hoped to alter their standing had to defy convention and possibly even the law in order to step outside the station society had fixed for them.

When we fail to reflect these layers of nuance in our representations of the past, we risk producing generic, essentially democratic, “everyone has equal rights”-hued interactions that bear a vague resemblance to present times. Another common pitfall lies in choosing just one or two factors from the past to stand as tokens for a class-based society:  nobility are unsympathetic to the plight of the common man (unless they are our heroes); our always-literate adventurers do not stem from the lowest classes of society; we call one group lords and another group ladies and they always bow or curtsey and are very mannered.

While this shorthand representation of class factors succeeds in signalling “class plays an important role here”, this tokenism both misrepresents the reality, and gives a shallow and skewed impression of the real dynamics that existed in a more class-conscious era.

For writers who want more verisimilitude in historical settings, or who want to play with a multi-layered and rich set of social dynamics, here are some things to consider about class and status. (For convenience I may use these terms interchangeably. In doing so I am referring to the combination of both which was more restrictive historically than in modern times.)

“Learn your place in this town. Or soon enough you won’t be in it.”

Regina Mills (the Evil Queen) to Emma Swan in “Once Upon a Time”

“Know Your Place”

Throughout most of western history, most people had a sense of “place”. This awareness corresponded in part to geographical location, but even more so to where  they fit in society: in family, clan, village, in the larger community and realm of obedience to authority.

Estates of the Realm - Jacob Meydenbach, 1488. "You pray humbly, you protect, and you work."

In the Middle Ages this was exemplified with “the estates of the realm”:  a representation of the presumably heavenly ordained classes that a man could occupy during his lifetime.  An example can be seen in this Renaissance-era (1488) woodcut by Jacob Meydenbach, which shows Christ on a rainbow blessing the three estates. Those groups are clerics, nobles, and peasants. The Latin captions say to the respective groups, “You pray humbly; you protect; you work.”

Governments were structured along these lines. Throughout Europe. evolving parliaments were arranged in ways to reflect the divisions of the lords spiritual, temporal, and commoners.  Laws – or how they were administered – reflected these divisions, with multi-tiered justice systems often meting out different punishments and penalties depending upon one’s station of birth. Not everyone was considered “equal before the law” – that was a much later invention. For a long time it was considered important to support and reinforce the divinely determined differences in station of birth, and this was reflected in law and custom.

This notion of “knowing your place” lasted for centuries in Europe and the colonized Americas, and, it could be argued, continues to exist (in a diluted manner) today. For generations people were made aware that they had obligations to meet that coincided with their station in life – and even more pointedly, that to imagine themselves filling another’s place was an unacceptable flight of fancy. While a nobleman might choose (or be compelled, if a younger son) to dedicate his life to the church, it was only a minority who became churchmen, and it was highly unlikely for that process to happen in reverse (for someone to leave the church and live as lay nobility again). As to commoners and peasants, their lot in life was set: while an orphan taken in or the son of a well-off tradesman might gain entry to the clergy, by and large people born “to the land” would remain “on the land” for the rest of their lives.

In later times as economies diversified and cities grew, more opportunity opened up and economic mobility began to erode this restrictive estate structure. The habit of thinking of people as born into a place, though, continued for centuries.  The last hurrah of this outlook in broad society probably came with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.  The Great War caused social upheaval and adjustments in many regards, but domestic service provides a case in point. About 13% of women in England were in domestic service in the 19th century, and service work was the single largest employment sector for women on the eve of World War I.  To aspire to a lifetime of service to one family was an honorable goal, and completely in keeping with having a sense of place and knowing one’s place; as a result, commoners from a lower-born class routinely took service with the higher-born. It seemed like a time-tested and nearly inevitable arrangement for a large chunk of the work force.

However, the needs of war opened up clerical employment and demanded women fill industrial jobs by the tens of thousands, to take the place of men who went to the battle front. This forever changed the nature of women’s work, and also dealt a fatal blow to the centuries-long definition of appropriate endeavors for men and women born into a certain class.  The servant culture of the western world never recovered from this tectonic shift. The nobility and well-to-do had to adjust accordingly, and this all gave a huge impetus to the long slide into egalitarian relationships that dominated the 20th century. We have notable portrayals of this era and this groundswell of change in some entertainment media, most notably in the groundbreaking TV series Upstairs Downstairs, over the course of which the family and servants underwent great changes with the outbreak of WWI, and in the more recent production Downton Abbey.

Upstairs Downstairs

In part 1 of the documentary Maid in Britain (embedded below), you can see an installment of a great program about class and status and domestic service in the U.K.. It’s a very insightful production (the other installments are online at YouTube). Although focused strictly on domestic service, it delves into a microcosm that is a good example of the class consciousness and status I’ve discussed here.

In part two of this post, I look at some guidelines for class-conscious behavior, their origins, and how to use them in fictional settings.

_____

1 “We are all equal” may not be the reality, but it is certainly an ideal today, and is commonly presented as such in school and cultural indoctrination in most ostensibly democratic nations.

2 Class and status have their outworkings in every society in the world throughout history. For purposes of this post I am focusing my remarks on America and western Europe over the last 1000 years, since this geography and time span plays a dominant role in our fiction.

Related Posts

How to Use Class in Historical Settings, Part 2 (online on Wednesday 2/8)

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: How to Use Class in Historical Settings, Part 1
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Price Point

The pricing of fiction is an arcane art. There is not much science to it yet. What works? Often you won’t know until you try it and test it, keeping good records of sales so you can see how book page copy and varying prices work in combination to improve sales.  Non-fiction publishers know this, and many indie authors and small publishers are experimenting in exactly this manner to find the sweet spot in ebook pricing in their non-fiction niche.

But fiction writers? Not so much.

As a case in point, let’s consider short stories. Famously (or infamously), there are now scads of short stories being sold for .99 at Amazon, a virtual glut on the market that has both sparked hope in the rebirth of the short form story, and despair that so much cheap schlock is finding its way into print that the really good stuff is impossible to winnow out of the haystack.

This rush to the 99 cent price point has produced a ‘default’  low-ball price tag for short stories.  Is this a fair price for a short? Maybe so, especially if it is, erm, short (rather than a longer piece of short fiction)  or of only average quality.  Then again, for authors who write better quality fiction, to sell at this price point may be a real undervaluation of the work.

There is a constant tension between pricing low and selling in volume, versus pricing high, selling fewer but netting much more return on those units sold.  Will .99 guarantee your books will sell well? Or will a higher price attract a different kind of buyer, and help put more money in the writer’s pocket?

The fact is that in outlets like Amazon, the writer can set whatever price she wants to charge for a work, within certain limits. For the sake of illustration here, let’s consider an “expensive” short story priced at $2.99, as used in my friend’s number-crunching examples.

While you the author may not be willing to pay more than 99 cents for a short story, the fact is that many people are.  The reasons for this are important.

First, a higher price signals quality. People don’t always want a bargain; they are often very willing to pay a premium where they perceive value is to be had.  Second, in a market where there is a race to the bottom to undercut a competitor’s price (and I’d argue that’s been going on in ebook pricing), it is very easy to loose sight of the value factor.  But remember: people don’t buy books on price alone. They buy them for the escape and entertainment they offer. If you tell a better tale, you have made your book worth more than alternatives out there, and you can ask a higher price because you are delivering more bang for the buck.

It’s easier to do this if you have a track record or a following, of course. Even so, many buyers are surprisingly willing to simply take you at your word. For instance, in a sea of 99 cent stories, don’t you look twice at the one that charges $2.99? What’s so special about that one? Why’s it worth more?  At the very least these questions cause a buyer to look more closely at the work in question. You’d have to sell six short stories at the lower price to make the same royalty you’d clear from selling one of the more expensive stories.  Financially this should be a no-brainer.  Are you ripping off the buyer? Not at all. If they value your work, then it has higher value. It’s that simple.

In the immortal words of Don (“American Pie”) McLean, “The more you pay, the more it’s worth.”

So take the plunge and eliminate the guesswork in all this. Offer a story at a higher price point, and see how it goes. Of course, if your storytelling is poor or mediocre in quality, you are taking a big risk that scathing reviews will warn people off from your work, so I wouldn’t recommend this for people starting out or who lack professional-quality editing in their work.  But as for testing a price point? It’s that simple.  Try a higher price tag in the market. You might be surprised at the results.

Units (Quantity) Sold

So far people have been selling ebooks essentially the same way they sell paper books. Publish, offer review copies, try to get some attention for it through book reviews and blog posts, do things like virtual book tours or podcast readings,  hope word of mouth helps it catch on. Occasionally some investment in advertising to help showcase the book. Even so, things like short stories are likely to trickle, not fly, from the virtual bookshelves.

It is my belief that internet marketing tactics can be used to effectively pump up sales volume for fiction (of any sort) in the internet marketplace. I don’t mean banner ads and such; I mean targeted sales campaigns that recruit and sell to an audience that likes your work. This is a potentially complex subject, and rather beyond the scope of this particular post, but my point is simply that there may be ways to amplify sales that are not being practiced by the majority of the bookselling market right now, and which would help your work find its proper (appreciative, money-paying) audience.  I hope to be able to post more about this kind of alternative approach in the near future.

Creating a Body of Work

They may offer a low return on the dollar, but here’s one good reason to continue writing short stories: when you have more content on line, you are creating a pool of “related reading” for people who come across your work. They like one story, they browse and buy two others.  If you have a pool of work available you are creating a self-amplifying sales tool.  It’s also true that the return would be higher if these were books, not short stories, that you had a growing collection of, but short stories are quicker to write and so lend themselves to this “library building” function more readily.  One way to work shorts to your advantage is to create short stories that elaborate on aspects of your novels: telling prequel tales, side stories, back stories, tales about locations or characters or legends that you didn’t have room to properly incorporate into your novel. This way fans of the book can get another dose of your fictional world and satisfy their craving for more while you are off working on that next book.

So, there you have it.  I know this just scratches the surface, but those are my observations du jour about selling fiction in today’s ebook marketplace. Hopefully these ideas will help writers who are serious about making money off of their work. Do you have other tactics for improving sales and income in short story or novel e-publishing?  Please leave a comment below.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Improving Sales and Income in Ebook Publishing
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Yes, this curve shows averages. The point is in the comment: the more business entities screw with creative decisions, the more the distribution of the curve shifts left, toward an abundance of suck and a dearth of quality.

I love quality entertainment. Why is there so little of it on TV or in the movies? Why is it that most really good shows seem doomed to short runs and early cancellation (especially if they’re in niche genres like science fiction), and shows that hold high promise in the conception have the spark leeched from them before they ever hit prime time?  That people want superior storytelling is evident in the runaway success of shows that have flourished in the cable oases, with less (or different) corporate pressure to please advertisers and willingness to take risks. I could list a good number of those shows (The Wire and Sopranos on HBO; Mad Men on AMC; many others), but my point here is about the movie and tv productions that suck.

There are reams and reams of them. Some of this is due to the law of averages: the average production, statistically speaking, is going to be exactly that, and about half of what’s out there will be worse than average. That’s the good old bell curve at work for you. But that’s not the only reason sucky shows and movies get made.

Old Habits Die Hard

The other reason is the legacy system of Hollywood production, which sets up a dynamic that permits, even encourages, bean counters and executives to fiddle with creative decisions until they are “certain” they have a hit on their hands (pardon me while I ROFL for a while), or at least have a show that won’t scare off advertisers and create negative feedback from viewers.

Here’s a snippet I read recently that brought this home to me. This is the tiniest isolated instance touched on in this reportage, but it happens day in, day out, and in much more egregious measure than this, throughout the traditional entertainment media establishment. This anecdote is about the award-winning performance of Bryan Cranston in the phenomenally successful Breaking Bad:

[I]n typically nearsighted network fashion, AMC initially hesitated when his name came up. As the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, tells it, “There was concern originally: ‘This is the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which is night and day from Breaking Bad. Why do you think this is the guy?’?” A longtime X-Files producer and writer, Gilligan had cast Cranston as a menacing racist in a 1998 X-Files episode. “We needed a guy who could be scary and kind of loathsome but at the same time had a deep, resounding humanity. When Malcolm went on the air, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize he could be so funny!’?” To convince AMC, Gilligan distributed copies of Cranston’s X-Files appearance: “That was all it took.” (source: http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/55303/. Registration may be required to view, but is free.)

Well, yay that they saw the light eventually in this one instance, but why are they even involved in such decisions in the first place?  That’s outrageous. Why did Gilligan even have to make a case to have the actor of his choice approved for casting? Yes, I understand this is “business as usual” in Hollywood, but I don’t care: that legacy system has long outlived its usefulness.  It is designed to put entirely too much creative control in the hands of pedestrian business people who have never been enlightened by an artistic vision in their life. I don’t care if it’s their money. Sure, let them argue about what show concept they are willing to finance. Casting is a creative decision that should be strictly up to the director, series creator, or other primary creative running the show, and not be mucked with by anyone else.

Collaboration, or Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

In the “collaborative” (cough) model of movie making and tv production, anyone with a financial stake in the show or  a producer title figures they have creative input that’s just as valid as the originators of the concept. Sometimes that input is valid, but it is more often the case that constraints are dictated on the basis of an executive having been in the business for so long and fancying they know “what the market wants.” Or because he or she has a stack of (unproduced) screenplays they authored in their file drawers, and is eager to jump into someone else’s project with “input”. (Can we say “blocked artist”?) Or because unnecessary financial constraints are imposed that reduce an exceptional production to something pedestrian.

Do we have to show so many zombies? Can't we just hear them instead?

This is why so many creative shows are strangled in infancy by the production machine that dominates our entertainment industry. This is true even in the cable outlets which have ventured to tell daring tales, but which are still structured in the Hollywood studio manner.

AMC, for instance, produces some wildly talented shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead) but it seems they manage to do this in spite of themselves. They forced a parting of the ways with Frank Darabont, the creator and showrunner of The Walking Dead,  over budget disputes that would have limited his creative vision in ways he didn’t want to compromise.  Wanting to cut costs by 20%, AMC felt qualified to judge artistic elements like the need to shoot in outdoor locations, or whether it was necessary to show the zombies in this zombie-apocalypse series.  Not doing so was cheaper, so that was the kind of limitation they sought to impose, and the sort of issue that contributed to Darabont’s departure from the show.

This is not just the normal tension between budget constraints and a director’s artistic vision and ability to implement within cost.  At the time this dispute occurred, Walking Dead was “the most successful show in the history of basic cable.” They had a runaway profitable hit on their hands precisely because of Darabont’s vision, but still felt free to jump in in ways that impacted creative decisions.  “It’s not broken, but we’ll fix it anyway.”   This is par for the course in the “many cooks in the kitchen” atmosphere of Hollywood-style production.

I’m boggled that anything worthwhile ever manages to make it through the labyrinth of systems like that, which I think account for the endless hours of drek passing as mass-media entertainment in this country. (Others share my disgruntlement on this point; here’s a good rant from The Angry Black Woman on this topic).

The Tech Cure For TV Mediocrity

Rosa

But there is one silver lining here. The technology revolution we’re experiencing right now has put hugely powerful production tools into the hands of independent filmmakers. Such artists can now create shows and movies previously impossible to make without the support of a studio system and industrial-sized budgets – and do it on a single desktop computer, if one has to low-end the process. And because the lion’s share of the actual film-making takes place in a computer, and likely in a home office/studio, this allows individual artists and independent filmmakers to be answerable only to themselves and their own creative vision.

Even more importantly, this growing wealth of creative output is readily available online, and in particular at YouTube, where 48 hours of viewing material is uploaded every minute¹. Online outlets provide the distrbution, and on the production end we’ve finally reached a tipping point in the density and availability of media tools. The fruits of this magical combination are now emerging online. I’m seeing things of amazing sophistication and superior storytelling surfacing ever more frequently on the web.

This trend may be intensifying now, but it has been going on since the middle of the last decade. Some established producers have had the ability to put complete webisodes online, either to enhance existing series (Ron Moore with Battlestar Galactica webisodes), or to introduce a story concept in hopes of it getting picked up for production (Amanda Tapping’s initial Sanctuary webisodes); or an unknown artist creating originals like the very clever Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager webisodes that predated these and became a regular web-based entertainment series.

The trend I think is heating up now, though – especially via YouTube – is of many short films intended to portray an artist’s story world, their capabilities, and perhaps to lure funding for a lengthier full-blown project, as well as more and more story series like webisodes.

I predict this refreshing type of media production will only become more commonplace, and that our next big wave of good entertainment series will start to emerge from the web, not from television, cable, or movie studios.

Some samples of superior creativity of the sort I see happening:

Archetype, by Aaron Sims
Dark Resurrection, the Italian Star Wars fan movie
Dragon Age: Redemption
Portal: No Escape, by Dan Trachtenberg
Rosa, by Jesús Orellana. Embedded at end of this post.
The Gift, by Carl E. Rinsch.

Not all of these are by solo artists like Orellana, laboring alone in their garrets over a hot laptop in post-production (Dragon Age is done under license from Bioware and presumably some production funding from them as well). But the fact that the web is the premier venue of choice for such content says much about the direction this new media is flowing in. And many other samples online are simply inspired productions by people passionate about their storytelling. These little gemstones may not stay on the web – hopefully many will get picked up and turned into tv productions and major-release films, as has happened with Orellana’s Rosa, and find large audiences – but the web is becoming the incubator for this wealth of creativity.

May we see much more of this in the future.

Portal: No Escape

_____

1 There’s an astounding quantity of material being uploaded to YouTube: 3 months worth of non-stop viewing every 24 hours. YouTube now contains more hours of media than were produced by all of network television in the last 60 years. If you want to hit a large audience and get maximum exposure for your video, YouTube is the place to be.

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Mr. Gorell Barnes, Regency House Party

What was it really like to live “back then”? I think that is one of the central questions that motivates the enjoyment of historical fiction, whether one is reading, writing it, or watching in a film.  For a long time, a good historical novel was the only way a “modern” reader (of whatever era) could experience the past in great detail.  Great books of this sort bring an era alive with an immediacy that lets us forget our modern sensibilities and exist for a time in the skin of someone from the past.  It is the closest most of us ever get to visiting and living in the past.

Living in the Past

For many people, though, experiencing the past through the imagination alone is not enough. This has given rise to reenactment societies, working opportunities in living history (like the docents at Colonial Williamsburg), Renaissance Faires, the SCA and more. All of these offer folks a chance to sample a bygone way of life, but it is always in small doses, within close time constraints and within the framework of modern life. Just beyond the borders of Faire lie the interstate; the Civil War battle must be refought in time for everyone to return to work on Monday. These experiences cannot create a truly immersive sense of living in the past within these constraints.

But there is another way to go live in the past, one that is much more comprehensive than these leisure-time amusements. It is not available to everyone, but for those chosen to participate, it is arguably more immersive and for that reason potentially more enjoyable (and stressful) than the alternatives. This is the series of “historical living” experiments that PBS has aired over the last decade and a half: a series of historical “reality” documentaries where the focus is the experience of living in another time.

The 1900 House Family

The premise is simple: a carefully selected cross-section of people leave their modern lives, don the garments of the era, and move into a painstakingly recreated, historically correct setting. Intentionally isolated from all interaction with the modern world (as much as possible, considering that their experiences are being filmed), persons are assigned roles, their duties and obligations lined out for them, and they live as that person for the next several weeks or months. In conjunction with experts from historical preservation societies, academia, and other specialities, Wall to Wall/Channel 4 in the UK launched their foray into this arena with The 1900 House project in 1999.  As of this writing those producers and WNET in the US have covered groups of people living in 1940s Britain and Wales, Edwardian and Regency England,  Colonial America, the post-Civil War Texas frontier, and the Montana frontier in the late 1880s.

Transitioning Back in Time

The results of these long-term living history experiments are fascinating.  There is some indoctrination before the living experience begins, and some persons walk right into the era as if born to it. Others have a very difficult time adapting to the change and the loss of modern conveniences and social customs they are used to.  Everyone has their social niche and expected role lined out for them in detail. Some overarching goals are often assigned, and the person or group’s success will be rated accordingly. For instance, eligible young men and women in Regency House Party know they are angling for a marriage proposal by end of their summer with houseguests of varying status and incomes.  The rancher in Texas Ranch House knows he has to round up and sell enough cattle by the end of the summer to make his next mortgage payment, or he will lose his ranch. Even those without lofty goals can still have quite demanding challenges ahead of them: the maid of all work who cooks and cleans for a  household in 100-degree heat with nothing but wood stoves and elbow grease really has her work cut out for her.

In many of these shows, individuals are evaluated at the end of the residency, when their success personally and as a household are rated. If they had truly lived in that era, how would they have fared by the standards of the day? Did they establish a prosperous ranch, or go broke trying? Have sufficient food stores to survive a harsh winter? Found a husband or lost their honor in the community?  Evaluations are are conducted by area experts applying the standards of the period as much as recreation skills allow.  They are based on objective criteria, but to some extent are also necessarily subjective. What a modern person deems was a “success” may be a resounding failure in the past era, for reasons the evaluators explain in detail.

Regency House Corsetry

Almost without exception, no matter how much indoctrination they receive beforehand, modern people face peculiar challenges in stepping back into the past like this. For women a consistent stumbling block seems to be the sexism and social strictures they encounter. It is built into the mores of earlier eras and is harshly apparent to contemporary sensibilities when a modern woman has to live with it every day.  Also, for women used to comfortable clothes and freedom of movement, the often severe constraints of period fashions and the behaviors expected (be fully dressed even in a heat wave, etc) grow into a not-insignificant stress point. Many women said the heck with authenticity and took expedients like omitting their corsets, or spending the day in the equivalent of period underwear even when outside the house.

It’s a Man’s World

One thing that is striking when watching several of these shows is that men seem to have an easier time because the demands of the transition don’t hit them as hard.  Male privilege becomes if anything more explicit, and more pronounced than in our modern era. While there may be forms of etiquette they are expected to adhere to, there is no major social penalty for them if they do not (though evaluators will note if their behavior is not in keeping with the mores of the era).  For men, one is left with the impression that stepping back in time through a House project is a satisfying exercise in dressing up and playing an extended if grown-up form of let’s-pretend. Men are not asked to abandon who they are; instead they get to concentrate on one aspect of themselves and let that side “come out to play” and live the role (the Regency gentleman; the Texas ranch hand; the WWII householder on the home front).

Cooke Family, Texas Ranch House

Women, however, are suddenly surrounded with do’s and do-nots.  An Edwardian maid carrying on with a footman could be fired; Regency women are not allowed to amuse themselves outdoors in the carefree and physical manner men are. On the Texas Ranch project, all five women in the project felt discounted by the men and left out of any important decisions and opportunities.

On the ranch, this led to a contretemps that could have spelled the end of the venture had this really happened in 1867.  In this setting, the cowhands expected Mr. Cooke, the owner, to deal with them  “man to man”, on the strength of his word.  The input of Mrs. Cooke in the rancher’s dealings was universally resented as interfering at best, and emasculating at worst.  While the men’s attitudes were era-appropriate (a headspace modern men fell into quite readily), their expectations of the ranch owner challenged his 21st century practice of his wife having  equal input into decision-making. In frontier Texas, the hands come to disrespect her husband because it was thought his wife pulled his strings and he did not keep his word.  This assertive modern woman needed to put a lid on it, or she risked creating resentment and power struggles.

Unfortunately, she was not able to remain hands-off. Mrs Cooke felt she and the other women on the ranch were cut out of all business of importance and made to be inconsequential. Her antidote for this feeling of powerlessness was to assert more control in her husband’s ranch business.  Yet the more she exercised authority with her husband, the more the ranch hands resented both Mr. Cooke and her interference. Things came to a head when finally – two days before the project officially came to an end – every cowhand quit their employment and left the ranch en mass. While the rancher’s daughters were saying “I don’t understand. Dad’s so nice!”, what they were blind to is the fact that he made some harsh decisions and went back on his word to his men on several points under the influence of his wife’s input.

Cowboys, Texas Ranch House

If this had been real 1867 Texas, the rancher would have been hard pressed to find a new qualified crew of cow hands in a frontier where every such person was eagerly snapped up by competing ranchers. The desertion of his crew might have spelled out the failure of his ranch. It is an unhappy ending for the Texas Ranch project, and one brought about in no small part because of the clash of expectations between a modern woman and her more limited 19th century role.  Mr. and Mrs Cooke were startled at their failing evaluation; based on the pleasant time enjoyed by their family, the Mrs had deemed the ranch stay a success.  But according to evaluators, the more systemic elements in their scenario (poor use of food resources, muddled accounting practices, and the complete alienation of work crews) would have doomed this fledgling ranch or at least made its long-term survival very problematic.

Living Under a Microscope

Obviously, a PBS “House” project is in many ways like life in a fishbowl. Constantly under observation, cast into a strange setting with clothes that make daily functioning a challenge, often short on food or facing physical challenges in the environment, thrown in with strangers, and with many constraints built in on what one can and can’t do in the era: this set-up has many of the elements which make reality shows so popular. Unlike Survivor, however, the drama is not manufactured. People come into these projects generally expecting a good time and a pleasant adventure. There is no built-in dynamic that pits one against another, but what we do see happen is a stratification and alignment of factions based on the historical elements that were in play.

In Regency House Party, for instance, there is surprising tension between the marriageble young women and some of the older women chaperoning them.  Class tensions spring into life with the economic and labor divisions inherent between masters and servants in the Edwardian Manor House.  Likewise with the Texas Ranch, where at one juncture Mrs. Cooke thinks the hands should be appreciative of the work the family puts into feeding them, while the cowboys resent what to them feels like calculated charity at the rancher’s table.  Friction arises organically, just as do alliances, cooperation, and strong bonds forged by shared challenges. Quite often participants remark afterwards how real the period felt to them.  With the modern world absent from view and lived experience, it fades even more from mind as daily life and coping with problems demands that they “be here, now.”  In doing so these modern time travelers fall into an historical “present time” that becomes their very real life for that time.

The 1940s House

For a microcosm of human behavior, one could choose far worse to study than these people who abandon their ordinary lives to exist as fully as possible in another era. If you’ve ever wondered how you would get by if you were suddenly transported to another place and time, these historical House programs on PBS and Channel 4 (UK) are well worth checking out.  At least these documentaries permit us to see how our contemporaries fare in such settings, and if you’re like me, you can do some vicarious living through their experiences at the same time.   It is not time travel, exactly, but of all the modes of experiencing history, this seems to be the closest thing to being there.

These period living experiences  are produced by various organizations, and have been aired by PBS in the U.S.  It does not appear that they are working on any new ones at this writing, but previous shows are available now on DVD or online at  YouTube.  The episode embedded below is from the Texas Ranch House series, which illustrates some of the tensions between women, rancher and ranch hands discussed earlier in this post.  See especially Mrs Cooke’s complaints about not being part of management decisions around the 17 minute mark, and her reaction to veiled threats from a visiting Comanche around 34 minutes.

If you’ve watched these shows, which ones were your favorite and why? What period would you most like to participate in if you could be part of an immersive experience of this sort? Please leave your comments below.

Maura, Texas Ranch House

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Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Clemens)

“Kill your babies” is sage advice followed by any writer who needs to edit and polish their manuscript. It refers not only to ruthlessly cutting excess verbiage, but also to pruning subplots and even characters as needed to strengthen the story.

Mark Twain exercised this practice quite literally. One of his classics, Pudd’nhead Wilson, started life as a short story called Those Extraordinary Twins, inspired by a famous pair of conjoined twins. As he wrote, it grew in the telling and soon turned into a tangled book-length tale instead. Secondary characters like Wilson became dominant, and the story about the twins was stalled. To fix this, he  drowned characters in a well to get them off the stage, and ended by teasing apart two separate stories that had muddled into one.

I’ve been thinking lately about revising a particular book draft, and realized I will probably have to kill far more of my babies in the process than I had at first anticipated. Mark Twain’s account of his experience in this regard is entertaining and instructional, and so warrants a little closer examination.

The Tocci Brothers

The conjoined twins who inspired Twain’s original story are an interesting historical byway in their own right and well worth a novelist’s attention. The author was not alone in his fascination with them. Giacomo and Giovanni Tocci captivated the attention of the masses in Europe and

The Masters Tocci by James G. Mundie www.missioncreep.com

America in the last two decades of the 19th century. The Italian brothers were joined at the sixth rib, being two separate individuals from that point up, but sharing one torso, one set of genitalia, and one pair of legs. They could balance in place with the aid of a wheeled device, but muscular atrophy and a clubfoot prevented normal walking. One brother loved to drink beer and the other preferred only mineral water; they were were artistically talented and spoke several foreign languages. They were the subjects of intense interest and repeated medical examinations throughout their touring and performing lives; at the height of their popularity they were making as much as $1000 a week (~$25,000 in today’s money). They retired in 1897 at age 20 and bought a walled villa in Venice that afforded great privacy. They made headlines again when they married two separate sisters; the Italian press, knowing of their shared genitalia, were scandalized and considered the women ‘vulgar’. It is no surprise that the Toccis lived in seclusion for the rest of their lives, until they passed away at age 63.¹

The Deadly Well

Twain’s original story in Those Extraordinary Twins featured conjoined twins very similar to the Toccis, presenting them with farcical challenges and a problematic love affair. But minor characters soon took over the main storyline and pushed the twins offstage. He wrestled with the draft novel until he realized that, like the twins, he had two stories that had grown intertwined, one serious and one a farce. Editing required radical surgery to separate one from the other, prompting him to drown characters in a well to clear the stage of extraneous actors.

His description of this is classic Mark Twain, both a cautionary note and a hilarious commentary on the writer’s process, and so I quote at length here:

When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I had originally started out with…I found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless. It was awkward all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there was a love-match on…I didn’t know what to do with her…I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one–I must simply give her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it…

Still it had to be done. So, at the top of Chapter XVII, I put in a “Calendar” remark concerning July Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:

“Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.”

It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said “they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.” Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said “they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.” I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

Whether this manner of “killing his babies” was something he literally did in a draft of the book or was simply a Twainish metaphor remains unclear, but the end result was the same: when he had cleared out the unnecessary characters and separated farce from drama, he was left with the soon-to-be-classic Pudd’nhead Wilson. Later he finished Those Extraordinary Twins as a lighter story that concentrated on the twins as initially envisioned. Both tales benefited from the necessary triage he’d done.

Mark Twain’s account of his drowning spree is given in the introduction to Those Extraordinary Twins. I admit I found this manner of jettisoning unwanted characters to be highly amusing – but the greater trick that he accomplished was to see the difference between the light story and the serious one, and to disentangle the threads (including characters) of stories that were more appropriately separate tales. Truth be told, I am also a little gratified that a storytelling master like Sam Clemens could finish a novel and still be unhappy with it and yet struggle to put his finger on exactly what was wrong with the plot. If Clemens writing as Mark Twain had this much difficulty revising a completed novel, then us lesser mortals need not be pulling our hair out when we grapple with similar issues.

Here’s hoping I can simply drown a few bothersome folk, and that will fix my problems. I have the well ready. Now who to drop in it…?

_____

1 If you are interested in reading more about the Tocci Brothers, they are the subject of many specialized sites around the web. I recommend two that have a respectful and considered treatment not only of these twins but of many other differently abled persons who were public figures in the past. One is The Human Marvels: Presenting Peculiar People, where the proprietor J. Tithonus Pednaud takes a decidedly 19th century stylistic approach to presenting his information that feels quite appropriate to the subject matter. Another is artist James Mundie’s intriguing collected studies of “freaks of nature” called Prodigies.  Inspired by the individuals and their life stories, his site features striking hand-drawn portraiture along with a thoughtful recounting of the pertinent details of their deformities and history. He also includes references to books with more information on the persons covered. The illustration of the Tocci Brothers that appears on this page is reused with kind permission from Mr. Mundie and originally appeared here. I especially recommend his site for an artist’s sensitive take on this unusual subject matter.

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Noomi Rapace

Not long ago I watched all three of the Stieg Larsson movies, the trilogy which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I saw them in the subtitled original. Besides the powerful tale that is told, I was completely blown away by Noomi Rapace‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander. Because of this, I have no interest in watching the English-language remake of this movie or the related stories. Once you have a stellar performance engraved on your mind, others can seem only shallow imitations.  I also don’t trust American cinema to stay true to the original stories (and books) as the Swedish version did; it seems part of Hollywood’s DNA to do writing-by-committee, to toss producers’ opinions into the mix, or otherwise to allow various factors to dilute pure and powerful storytelling. Only adamant artists with creative control, like Spike Lee, or producer/directors who are completely invested in the scripting process, like James Cameron or Ridley Scott, are people I would trust with an adaptation of a foreign work in that manner.  The new version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not seem to be of that genesis, so I’ll take a pass.

The original, though, is another story entirely.  The story is quirky and unexpected, the twists unforeseen, the whole is unpredictable, like one is exploring new territory as every plot development unfolds. And Noomi Rapace! What a discovery! Her Lisbeth is street-tough but vulnerable, a near-broken child grown into a wary woman with an edge of wired-tight intensity. Her defenses are obvious; her genius as well, if she allows one to glimpse it. She is complex, prickly, and mesmerizing. She is like those women you meet sometime who are mysteries you want to solve, but who may not stand still long enough – or let you close enough – to do so.

Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

All of this brings me around to my science fiction novel Mainline. Mainline’s protagonist is Reva, a wary, streetwise woman who works as an assassin because of her rare ability to move between variant moments of Now.  She is flashy when she wants to be or can blend into the background; she is by turns abrasive or subtle, whatever she needs to do to achieve her ends. She, too, is intense, complex, prickly, and mesmerizing. When I saw Rapace’s performance in Dragon Tattoo, I knew I had found my Reva. Forget the vague cover art on that novel, an artist’s random concept based on a few book notes. Except for a difference in height (Reva is 5’8; Noomi is petite in comparison), the attitude, body language and look is virtually identical to what I have long seen as Reva. Reva is a tad less punk, more chic, but the basic vibe is the same.

Some quotes from Rapace that caught my eye:

I’m interested in people’s darker side, the ones that aren’t easy and well balanced. The cracks.

We need more extreme movies in Sweden, personal projects that aren’t necessarily made for a bigger audience. I think it creates a creative block to always have the audience as a goal.

Noomi, Lisbeth, or Reva?

When Mainline is made into a movie, Noomi Rapace gets my vote for playing the lead.  Until that happy day, you can get a hint of Reva by checking out the remarkable Dragon Tattoo movie in the original subtitled version. Rapace’s performance alone will make it worth your while, and if you like this kind of suspense/thriller tale, you’ll enjoy the ride overall. If you miss that, you might want to catch Prometheus, coming out in 2012, a dose of high-octane science fiction by Ridley Scott, who cast Rapace as lead character Elizabeth Shaw. She is also presently appearing in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

This is not a formal movie review for the original movie, but since I do go on a bit about aspects of the film and cast, I’ll give it a rating as well.

Rating

5 Stomps of Approval: This rocks!

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and My Novel MAINLINE
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The Destiny from Stargate Universe

I recently finished watching the whole two-year, 40-episode run of Stargate Universe (SGU), which aired on TV from 2009-2010. I confess I am having a strange relationship with this setting and story arc. It is haunting me. That is the only word for it.

There is a peculiar flavor to this show, one I don’t think has been captured by any other science fiction I have ever viewed. It manages to engage with its realism and drama regardless of the arguably fantastic setting. (Once you agree to the premise of ancient alien technology, all else follows from that, and that premise is well established both in SGU and in the larger Stargate franchise). It challenges one to actually contemplate the size of the universe, humanity’s inconsequential position in it, and the nature of faith, science, technology and reality.  The show dances on the edge of the un/explainable, even venturing now and then into the mystical, in the sense that an event a character cannot explain remains opaque to viewers as well. Yet this is managed in a way that comes off as luminal rather than simply mystifying. The result is not so much a sense of frustration as a realization that there are some things that are beyond our understanding and just can’t be explained. We the viewers must reconcile ourselves to that reality just as the crew must. And yet such grand questions are explored in an intensely personal manner. SGU is a close-focused microcosm of the ship-voyage crucible, successfully blending wonder, science and the nearly mystical unknown in sincerely moving drama.

Read the full review here.

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Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe

I have an ongoing interest in jet packs, ever since I first saw Commando Cody on TV when I was a kid.

Commando Cody used super-science to take on super-villains out to destroy the Earth and control the Universe (because, you know, Earth is usually the first stop in everyone’s plans for universal domination). Cody had a cool, bullet-shaped helmet, a “rocket pack” on his back, and three large buttons on his chest harness that surely did Something Important.¹ When danger threatened, he’d put on his helmet and off he’d fly to save the world. I especially loved the flying parts, but the heroics weren’t half bad either, or so thought my 3- and 4-year-old self.

Oh, how I yearned for a rocket-pack of my own! It was called a jet pack by other heroes, but they weren’t on TV in 1959, and Commando Cody was.²  One of my enduring disappointments is that jet packs have not (yet!) become a practical daily transportation device. Alas, another failed science vision.

For this reason, the jet pack as a technology qualifies for this occasional series I am doing on Future Science.^3,4 However, in this post, I have to share with you something I came across while researching jet packs for that aforementioned article. It is a device worthy of my hero, Commando Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe. It is a device every soldier wants to have on the battlefield, and it is called….The Grasshopper.

The Grasshopper

This marvel of modern engineering was powered by nitrogen gas canisters strapped to the back, which directed their force downward through nozzles on a jump belt. An early version permitted a test operator to jump four feet straight into the air, and forward for longer than normal broad-jump distances. A later, more refined model apparently allowed an upward jump of 23 feet, and assisted by the belt’s thrust, the wearer could run up to 30 mph. The intent was to permit soldiers to leap high, jump far, and clear battlefield obstacles, getting the advantage over the enemy with their increased mobility.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

It certainly seemed like a promising notion. The project was developed by Thiokol‘s Reaction Motors division. Thiokol is famous in the annals of the aerospace industry for their work in the development of solid fuel rockets. This is the same company that brought us motors and rocket propulsion stages for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the propulsion system for the Minuteman and other missiles, and the solid fuel rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle. (They also developed the Snowcat – later spun off – and in a morphed corporate form under the name of ATK they are still in existence, developing vehicles for Mars exploration programs). Their Reaction Motor division pioneered such useful things as the rocket motors in aircraft ejection seats, and some of the earliest airbags, including those that swaddled the touch-down of the Mars Pathfinder. (And for the geeks among us, I bring you a cool freebie science doc here from Thiokol, called “Rocket Basics” – everything you wanted to know about basic rocket propulsion, but didn’t know to ask.)

No wonder these masters of contained propulsive force should turn their hand to the much-longed-for jet pack. The project was introduced to the public in the pages of Popular Science, and even Life magazine got into the act. Featuring test operator Ed Kurczewski, Life tells us that he is a “durable man” – as he must have been, to be the live crash test dummy for this crude jet belt system. “Kurczewski has landed in creeks and banged into hills, leaving him a mass of bruises.”⁵ But it was all in a good cause: “Grasshopper’s makers hope to sell their device to the U.S. Army to help infantrymen jump streams, scale cliffs and surmount other obstacles.”

After an initial PR burst in 1958, though, the Grasshopper quietly faded from the news. Funding failed to materialize from the government, and the project was abandoned.

Commando Cody would not be happy with our lack of perseverance.

_____
1 They were flight controls, labeled with words like “Up” and “Down”. At the time I was too young to decipher such arcane information.

2 Commando Cody first appeared in The Radar Men of Mars, a 1952 movie serial apparently inspired by the success of the 1949 serial King of the Rocketmen. In fact, the helmet and rocket pack costume are identical, as is much of the stock footage of flying; apparently Commando Cody is one of the “Rocketmen”, although the Cody shows make no direct reference to King of the Rocketmen. No need for real plot explanations, though: these were both serials produced by Republic, and used many of the same sets, actors and stock footage throughout.

Cody returned in a dedicated series in 1953 designed for TV (although it also ran in theaters), called Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. The show abandoned the traditional serial format to create a series of stand-alone stories of a 27-minute length designed to air comfortably on television. This is the Commando Cody who introduced me to the thrill of powered flight. He also left a deep imprint on my subconscious, for in writing this I just realized I created a holovid entertainment character in my novel Splintegrate named Commander Kolo: a hero who has improbable adventures and rescues the world, and inspires children with his clever feats. Hm, I wonder where that came from…

This rocket-pack-wearing hero was cut of the same space opera cloth as Buck Rogers (created in 1928) and, as mentioned, his virtual twin, King of the Rocketmen (an inspiration for the 1991 movie The Rocketeer), For a great roundup of Commando Cody and other space opera heroes, be sure to check out Don’t Dare Miss the Next Thrilling Chapter, by Anthony L. Fletcher.

3 Alas, too occasional, but I decided I need much more Future Science here, so I promise to be more science-y in the future.

4 Here we take a look at things people once thought might be commonplace in the future. Well, the future is here, now, and what happened with these various inventions and technological byways? Things like the jet pack? Good question, and I promise that an article on the much-lamented jet pack will be coming up soon for this category.

5 Life, June 30. 1958 p34. Grasshopper photos from same page.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Grasshopper: The Army Jet Pack That Wasn’t
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The Backwards World: Woman swings scepter while man spins thread - Israhel van Meckenenem 15th c

I know an indie game designer who is working on an rpg with a surprisingly radical premise: that women are the dominant force in a fantasy society.¹ It is not that I personally found this so surprising, or even so radical; rather, I describe it this way because the very concept quickly became a lightning rod for criticism. A certain proportion of men reading about the game designer’s project simply could not get past the underlying premise of power-reversal in the fantasy setting.

The sharpness of that reaction, and indeed the vitriol in many of the remarks made, is what truly surprised me. But then again, it shouldn’t have. This designer unwittingly touched one of the third rails in game design – and for that matter, an unspoken rule in the construction of fictional settings in general, be it rpgs, books, or film. Namely, he blundered into the forbidden territory of power balance between the genders.

This designer proposed altering the power balance and some of the gendered expectations of behavior into the inverse of contemporary culture, where traditionally men hold most or all of the power. In his setting, it would be women in the power-dominant position. This concept, it turns out, was profoundly disturbing to a small but not insignificant percentage of men reading about this game. The negative reactions were varied, and when expressed, were often more harsh than not. There was curt dismissal (”I’d never play a game like that” – a declaration made on the basis of the premise alone, without knowing any other details about the game). There were rabid rapid flights of fancy down some ‘inevitable’ slippery slope to abuse of power (“Men are being forced against their will to be subservient and women will take advantage of having them in that position”; “Women would have to abuse men because men would never stay in that position willingly”). And the most red herring of dismissive attacks of all, ad hominem questioning of personal motivations and sexuality (”There’s something wrong with you if that you want to play a game like that. It could only be for personal fetishistic reasons.”)²

I thought the designer’s premise was an interesting thought experiment. As a sociologist and student of cultural anthropology, I consider gender roles largely socially constructed. The concept of challenging them, of altering power dynamics at this basic human social level, raises interesting questions and carries many intriguing possibilities. Not the least of which would be this question: what would it be like to live in (or play, in the gaming sense) in what is essentially a comprehensively matriarchal society? That is the beauty of casting this in a game-able form: it simply hasn’t been done before in the gaming genre, and is very rarely touched upon in fiction.

Yet there was a strong and argumentative outcry against this fascinating notion (“OMG, that would be terrible! Men would be treated like second-class citizens based on their gender! It would suck, and you’re a freak for even thinking it up!”) – a reaction from a small but vocal minority that went well beyond a simple “I don’t like your game concept.” From a sociological perspective, the backlash spoke to threatened identities – or the perception of threat – embedded in how people thought of themselves, and how they projected they would feel (comfortable, or not) in a game setting that challenged basic identity frameworks such as power privilege associated with gender.³

I am glad to note that the designer handled the criticisms with grace and poise. Encouraged by others who, like myself, are intrigued by the concept, he seems to be carrying on with development of that game setting. So in this case in point, perhaps a creative effort was not doomed to a stillbirth by outraged reactions before it even got off the ground.

The underlying issue, though, does not go away just because this one project is proceeding.

If some men think it would be abhorrent to live as second-class citizens in a world where the opposite gender holds all the power – well, I can only say, “welcome to the world most women live in.” By ‘most women’ I mean women all around the world. Certainly power is more equitably distributed in a place like America, relatively speaking, than it is someplace like Afghanistan. (See the movie Afghan Star for an eye-opening dose of restrictive gender roles and life-threatening backlash when they are transgressed.) And yet it was predominantly American men having the largest conniption fits about altered gender norms and the power-reversal concept in a game.

Do not misunderstand me, here: I am not saying, “Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you like it.” I am saying that in a game world, at least, we can do what we cannot do in the real world: turn these paradigms on their head, and see how they might play out if differently imagined. I think it is a great opportunity to play with and examine these all-but-invisible pieces of social encoding by challenging them in a fictional environment. For surely it is not new news that gender roles are deeply ingrained in us. Most people are relatively unaware of how gender messaging and assumptions color their thoughts on virtually every aspect of social life and personal identity. We are like fish in water, unaware of the water because it is the very air we breath. Yet threaten that environment, and the outcry sounds like an armoring-up, a stance reflexively taken to protect the core self.

As indeed, on some level, it is.

I guess I’m writing this commentary because I want to encourage people to be aware, to be mindful of the gender roles they have ascribed themselves and those around them, and how this translates into their creative works. If it feels “wrong” that women as a class run everything in a fantasy setting, the mindful person will ask him or herself why that is so. In the process of self-examination we garner more personal insights than we ever do by simply declaring that scenario anathema, and flailing at the one who dared to envision such a transgression.

The designer I mention in this post may not have been squelched by those negative reactions, but this is the kind of invisible social conformity pressure that helps keep other artists and writers in check.⁴  We don’t play much with the broad social implications of gender assumptions in most of our fiction and games, and certain approaches to this delicate terrain can obviously evoke strong backlash. Critics may not intend to “keep someone in line” with mainstream gender-think, but that is, in the end, very often the result of that process.

To anyone who thinks of creating gender-transgressive content, I can only encourage you to plug your ears to the (un)spoken mainstream expectations, and create the vision that drives you, however quirky it may be. If it is disturbing to some, then they’re obviously not the market for that work, but there are plenty of others who will be. As to the “disturbance” factor, I think the best art is the kind that unsettles and makes the person contemplating it feel moved, even if “moved” sometimes equals “downright uncomfortable.” Many of us never question our assumptions until we’re challenged in just such a manner. So go on. Challenge.

The ones who are disturbed by your work are the ones who need to be.

_____

1 rpg=”role-playing game”, in case you don’t follow the field and its shorthand.

2 These are not literal quotes from the exchanges referred to. I am summarizing and paraphrasing, rendered in a narrative form. To the best of my recollection this is the gist of what I read.

3 The text and assumptions about gender roles and power dynamics that are packed into these protests are so incredibly dense I will leave it to a women’s studies, sociology, or anthropology grad student to tease them out and offer a fuller critique on the issue. Such a level of analytical discourse is beyond what I’m prepared to get into right now for a humble blog post.

4 I’m not naming the designer because I want to keep the focus here on the underlying issue, not personal details in an internet exchange. Although, if he would like to identify himself and his project, I think it would be great to give his intriguing work more exposure, and from that viewpoint I encourage him to consider commenting on this post, since the aforementioned kerfluffle now lies somewhat distant in time.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Gender Roles and Women in Power: An Uncomfortable Fiction
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