Raritania

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:34:00 +0000

Listed below are my posts on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and the television series based on it, Game of Thrones.

New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, Game of Thrones' Sansa, The Horror Genre, Charles Stross)
5/21/13
Review: A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
9/22/12
Game of Thrones: Season One
3/30/12
New and Noteworthy (Michael Bay and the Sublime, Game of Thrones, Gary Shteyngart and Default, Alan Moore)
7/26/11
New and Noteworthy (Stross and the Singularity Debate, Game of Thrones)
6/23/11
New and Noteworthy (The End of Big Publishing, Dinklage on Game of Thrones)
4/21/11

New This Week: Star Trek: Into Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Much has been made of the fact that Star Trek: Into Darkness fell well short of Paramount's $100 million-plus projection for the opening weekend. It made $70 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period and $84 million in the Thursday-to-Sunday period - which, given 3-D and IMAX surcharges, higher ticket prices all around, added up to a weaker opening than the first film had - despite the tendency of audiences to come out up front for the sequel of a well-liked film also enjoying positive buzz (and a larger budget). TrekMovie.com offers a round-up of the analysis, including a number of explanations for the disappointing numbers, including the lateness of the shift of the opening to Thursday (which ended up just stretching a three-day gross over four days), the four year gap between this film and its predecessor, and the intensity of the competition in a box office which saw the release of Iron Man 3 and The Great Gatsby in the two preceding weeks.

I do think these were all factors, but that they had their effect because of a larger problem: the last film was well-liked, but simply did not win over the big base of loyal new fans that enthusiasts of the reboot expected. Certainly the demographics of the audience point to this, with, as Trekmovie.com noting,

Deadline reports exit polling shows that 64% of the audience was male and only 27% was under the age 25. For the 2009 Star Trek movie, 35% were under 25. And in comparison Iron Man 3 had 45% under 25. So with all the talk of this not being your father’s Star Trek, there may be too many fathers in the audience.

This reminds me of something many a Trek fan, myself included, said about the reboot back in 2009 - that it was a fun summer blockbuster, but not much more. Putting it bluntly, it went the same route as the Jason Bourne series, dispensing with older elements while not adding enough new ones to elevate it above the level of the generic - and that seems to me to be how the audience has taken it. That being the case, is it really any wonder that those who came out were disproportionately longtime franchise fans rather than eager new converts?

Still, many observers are seeing a silver lining in the film's overseas earnings, which seem likely not just to outdo those of the first movie, but to more than offset any shortfall in the movie's North American earnings, which are themselves far from marking it as a flop. The upshot is that a Star Trek 3 a few summers from now still seems close to a sure thing.

My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11

New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, The Horror Genre, Game of Thrones' Sansa, Charles Stross)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:16:00 +0000

In this edition, still more pieces that caught my eye during the hiatus (which is hopefully really over this time).

* In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alec Ash's interview with writer Fei Dao about science fiction in China touching on the genre's history and influences in China (interestingly he identifies Soviet science fiction as one of the "big three" influences, alongside Western and Japanese science fiction), its current concerns (reflecting the country's modernization), as well as the audience for this type of work and the prejudices it is up against (which are not all that dissimilar from what it has seen in the West).

* Ian Sales on taking Amazon's bestseller lists as a guide to larger trends in book publishing.

* At Fanpop, a well-constructed response to the enmity so many apparently feel toward Game of Thrones' Sansa Stark. (I would have to number myself among those who see her character as one of the series' more sympathetic - and a reminder that much as we complain about the prevalence of Mary Sue/Gary Stu characters, a large segment of the audience all but demands them, and becomes quite unreasonable when their demand is not met.)

* A provocative piece from Airlock Alpha's Amber Hollingsworth which takes on the issue of "Why Horror Isn't Scary, But Thrillers Are."

* And last but not least, a number of Charles Stross's posts, including his response to Margaret Thatcher's passing, and its aftermath; his "Public Service Announcement" about why it is best to ignore the news; his announcement of the release of The Traders' War (an omnibus edition of the first three Trade of Queens novels, "revised and reassembled as the single book it was meant to be"); and his piece on British nuclear disarmament, which offers a succinct critical history of the country's strategic deterrent.

Incidentally, you can find my review of the Trade of Queens in its previously published six-volume form here.

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire
1/2/13
Of Mary Sue and Gary Stu
7/9/11

At My Other Blog: Reassessing The Limits to Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:38:00 +0000

Over at my other blog I take a look at the original The Limits to Growth four decades on.

Taking a fresh look at the classic study is a reminder of a great many things - not the least of them the abysmally low level of public debate (public understanding of this very short, simple book being incredibly distorted), and how timid our political imaginations have become (the era of Big Solutions long behind us, even with the Big Problems endlessly getting bigger).

New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Paulo Coelho, SF Novels 1985-2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:15:00 +0000

A few items that caught my eye over this blog's quite unplanned late March/April hiatus:

* John Winters on being a (self-described) self-publishing failure, a much needed corrective to the kinds of success stories our rags-to-riches-quick-fantasy-obsessed culture trumpets.

* By way of the Ukiah Blog, a piece by Victoria Beale in the New Republic which offers a critical take on Paul Coelho, as both artist and thinker, with her assessment of the author's Message tidily summed up in its last sentences:

[U]nder the platitudes Coelho’s philosophy has always been a harsh worldview: unhappiness or lack of fulfilment is only for the weak and unfocused. And increasingly in his books, success can only be measured against the author and the obstacles he has overcome. The gospel of self-reliance has never been so trite or unforgiving.

Make what you will of Coelho's star status at Davos.

* Finally, over at Strange Horizons Martin Lewis reviewed Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo's Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. To go by Lewis' review the book has its limitations (he's actually a lot harsher than that, eventually resorting to a four-letter word to express his disgust) but given the scarcity of critical efforts even attempting a comprehensive overview of science fiction "after the New Wave" (a fact which prompted me to put together the book by that very title), it seems worth at least a glance from anyone interested in a big picture view of the life of the genre in these years.

New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Stross on the Presidential Election, The Hydrogen Sonata)
10/23/12
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11

May 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:10:00 +0000

New This Week: Star Trek: Into Darkness
5/21/13
New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, Game of Thrones' Sansa, The Horror Genre, Charles Stross)
5/21/13
At My Other Blog: Reassessing The Limits to Growth
5/21/13
New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Paulo Coelho, SF Novels 1985-2010)
5/2/13

April 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:29:00 +0000

NO POSTS THIS MONTH.

The Decline of Sex in American Film: The Mysterious Disappearance of Gratuitous Nudity

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:26:00 +0000

A quick search of the Internet for the words "gratuitous nudity" turns up innumerable expressions of nostalgia for the '70s and '80s as a golden age for this kind of content, which devotees of a common line of argument hold virtually disappeared from film by the end of the 1990s.

Political correctness, of course, keeps reputable mainstream writers from expressing such laments, so those thoughts turns up mainly in dialogues between anonymous users of a web forum, or quirky independent blogs, or lists made by the users of sites like the Internet Movie DataBase. Still, there are exceptions, Roger Ebert notably expressing what many more were thinking in his review of '70s blaxploitation movie spoof Black Dynamite when he wrote that he was

happy to say it brings back an element sadly missing in recent movies, gratuitous nudity. Sexy women would "happen" to be topless in the 1970s movies for no better reason than that everyone agreed, including themselves, that their breasts were a genuine pleasure to regard . . . Now we see breasts only in serious films, for expressing reasons. There's been such a comeback for the strategically positioned bed sheet, you'd think we were back in the 1950s.

To my knowledge there has been no really serious attempt to statistically quantify movie nudity over the years, let alone do so in the methodically more rigorous way that quantifying gratuitous nudity requires, but there seems to be something to the perception nonetheless. The "desk clerks at resorts who just happened to be naked [and] coeds strolling the halls of dorms all day wearing nothing but incompetently tied towels" on which Steve Penhollow remarked in The Journal Gazette are clearly gone from our movie screens, while the propensity of characters to just happen to hold their meetings in strip joints has similarly gone into decline. So has the way that action sequences tended to crash through the doors of rooms where people just happened to be having sex (like in 1985's Commando, or 1988's Die Hard). Where nudity does occur not only is it usually more plausible within the plot, but it also tends to be briefer, angled and positioned and lit so as to conspicuously limit what is shown, and in general suggest rather than display. (This was even the case with the threesome in Wild Things that put Denise Richards on the pop cultural map.)

What happened to explain all these changes? The dampening effect of identity politics on sex in film has surely been a factor, with any female nudity that might be branded gratuitous especially vulnerable to such pressures. So has the explosion of alternative options for accessing sexual content, generally cheaper, easier and more convenient than going to the theater (as is the case with flipping a channel, visiting a web site or getting a disc), making nudity less effective as a draw to feature film.1 However, one ought not to overlook other changes in the economics of filmmaking, particularly big-budget filmmaking. In the 1980s would-be summer blockbusters (like the aforementioned Commando) were still being made for $10-20 million - or $20-40 million in today's terms. Sharply rising costs have meant a decreasing willingness to take risks of any sort. Now comparably positioned movies cost $150 million as a matter of course, requiring filmmakers to shoot for a gross of $400 million or more, a financial territory where any extra ticket sales nudity might bring are much more than offset by the liability of an R rating - something studios have been much more prone to avoid, with even the Terminator and Die Hard franchises going PG-13 for their fourth installments in the late '00s.2

Unsurprisingly, nudity is probably less present in such productions than in any other kind of film today. Where the megabudgeted movies about comic book superheroes are concerned, the PG-13-rated nudity of X-Men's Mystique was as far as it went. Much the same can be said for the other, upper-tier action films, from family-friendly fantasy epics to the movies of Michael Bay, who out of exactly those considerations famously had Scarlett Johansson keep her bra on (despite her wanting to go without it) during a love scene in The Island. While less thoroughly impacted given their lower (if also burgeoning) budgets and embrace of the R-rating, the "raunchy" comedies which seem like such "naturals" for this kind of content have been subject to the same climate, and are in practice prone to pack in nudity of quite other sorts, for quite other purposes, have similarly become more inhibited about nudity of this type.

On the whole it seems that the less commercially ambitious the fare, the more leeway it possesses, a situation which would suggest exactly the opposite of the familiar claim that "sex sells." Or at the very least, its qualification by another adage, that less has become more, a subtler use of this particular spice like casting an action movie heroine who can enticingly fill out a jumpsuit, or the presentation of a teasing, strategically concealed glimpse of what's under the jumpsuit – the more practical approach. Still, it all leaves many a movie fan dismayed at the thought that they will never get a really good look, while a good many men of a certain generation look back longingly movies like Porky's or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the films, and what they represented. In these quarters, they seem as much objects of nostalgia as the paramilitary action movies of the same era, that long, strange period between the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, and the age of the millennium bug.

1. Take premium cable television, where gratuitous nudity is comparatively alive and well, helped by lower financial stakes, and the flexibility television's serial nature affords, while the small screen also has fewer alternatives where the sensational is concerned. HBO's Game of Thrones can go only so far in presenting epic battles or historical pageantry, but they can afford plenty of what Steve Penhollow terms the "cheapest special effect." Nonetheless, TV is certainly not immune to the aforementioned cultural politics, the threshold for giving offense at times surprisingly low here (witness the intensity of the criticism of a few seconds of an episode of Stargate: Universe in which Julia Benson wore a perfectly intact and completely dry T-shirt).
2. The trend did not continue in the case of the Die Hard series, of course, the recent fifth film appearing with an R rating.

Seven Days Until A Good Day to Die Hard
2/7/13
The Return(?) of the '80s Action Movie
2/7/13
The Decline of the Sex-Themed Blockbuster
1/9/13

New and Noteworthy (Cheapening "Innovation," $70 Video Games, Stross on the EU)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:46:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Kent Anderson on the cheapening of the word "innovation." That the post is itself a comment on an earlier post by Scott Berkun from more than five years ago only highlights how thoroughly this term has been abused by a certain kind of technology and business-hyping nit-wit, ruining it for everyone else, so that we are all far, far, far past the point at which we should, if not totally cease and desist using the term, at least use it only very, very carefully.

We can think of it this way: if you're saying it, you probably aren't doing it.

* Tor.com on the prospect of a rise in the cost of video games with the next generation of consoles (Playstation 4, XBox 720 and the rest) now on the horizon.

I should say, though, that the $70 video game does not seem all that new to me. I remember such retail prices for 8-bit games way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Admittedly, such prices were a rarity, but given the inflation we have since then, which has almost halved the purchasing power of a dollar ($1 today is like 53 cents in 1989, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), a $70 game today is about equal to $37 then, a bit below what was average at the time - which suggests a slight drop in prices.

How many things can one say that about? Certainly not food. Or energy. Or education. Or health care. Or any of the other things that really do put pressure on people's budgets. And in contrast with all these other areas, it does seem pretty clearly the case that gamers are getting more product for their money.

* Charles Stross, considering the possible implications of a British exit from the EU (which he thinks will not be pretty for the British economy).

New and Noteworthy (Babylon 5, Nebulas, The Memory of Light)
2/26/13
New and Noteworthy (Oscar Edition)
2/26/13

Why the Wonder Woman Movie Hasn't Happened

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:46:00 +0000

After the more than decade-long boom of comic book superhero-based films, during which the release of several such movies a year has been routine; most of the best known superheroes have reached the big screen in one form or another (Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, etc.); some of these have already been rebooted (like the Hulk and Spiderman); and many much less recognized characters have received similar treatment (like the Ghost Rider and Jonah Hex); it has become commonplace to wonder why those still as-yet unfilmed household names remain that way. And it seems that Wonder Woman is the subject of more of this kind of talk than any of the others.

On the face of it, the fact that not only has a Wonder Woman movie not been made, but that a green light for one remains a distant prospect, seems quite surprising. Nonetheless, a little consideration of the issue quickly brings to mind four not insignificant obstacles in the way of such a film.

DC Comics' Big Screen Track Record
It is a common observation that where film is concerned, Marvel's properties have gone from strength to strength, culminating in the recent success of The Avengers, while DC has typically disappointed. In fairness, Marvel too has had its letdowns (like 2003's Hulk), and DC its successes (Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy arguably the biggest all-around success story of the past decade among superhero films). However, there is no disputing that overall Marvel has done far better, most of its best-known characters reaching the big screen and attaining some measure of success, while the handful of efforts to make movies about DC's equivalents (Superman Returns, Green Lantern) have been discouraging enough to inhibit other attempts - so that along with Wonder Woman, Justice League members like the Flash and Aquaman have yet to be featured in films of their own.

The Artistic Challenges the Material Poses for Adaptation: Plausibility, Relatability, Quality
The superhero films that have done best in recent years have tended to be relatively grounded efforts rather than over-the-top in tone, let alone broad and jokey - Nolan's Batman films rather than Green Lantern or The Fantastic Four, for instance.1 A related aspect of this is that superheroes with a basis in even the most dubious of pseudo-science have had an easier time at the box office than their magic- and myth-based counterparts. All of this works to the disadvantage of a character like Wonder Woman, with her Themysciran roots and the involvement of Olympian deities and other figures out of Classical myth in the stories; her invisible plane and bracelets of victory and truth-extracting rope; and of course, her famous costume.2

The difficulty of "selling" a Wonder Woman movie, big enough given the aforementioned basics of the concept, may be compounded by the fact that the character is "above us and different from us" and so difficult to make relatable to audiences. Of course, the comic dates back to the 1940s, when heroes "above us and different from us" were the norm. However, the difficulty may be greater in her case: even if Superman is from Krypton, he was raised in Smallville, Kansas, and has made a home for himself in the quasi-New York of Metropolis, connecting him to the everyday world in a way which has no counterpart in Wonder Woman's backstory.

On top of all this, many a critic of the franchise notes that the material is simply weak in crucial respects, a post at Topless Robot, for instance, pointing to such things as its cast of its supporting characters. The series has no iconic villains, which have typically been a key ingredient in successful superhero franchises. (Superman has Lex Luthor, Batman the Joker, and Wonder Woman - the Cheetah?)3 Wonder Woman's allies have similarly failed to capture the public's imagination. (Superman has Lois Lane - while Wonder Woman has Steve Tyler, who seems to have about as many fans as the Cheetah does.)

All of this leaves would-be screenwriters that much more torn between using the material furnished by the comics (as those actually looking forward to a Wonder Woman film would wish), and being forced to create new material from scratch to make the concept more credible to a general audience, enlarging the distance between page and screen and rendering the project that much more risky. (And we all know how corporate executives feel about risk.)

Bad PR From Previous Adaptations
There may be room for argument over the strengths and weaknesses of the Wonder Woman comics, in themselves and in relation to the trends in superhero movie-making today, but it seems beyond question that the legacy of previous efforts at adaptation has been discouraging to many would-be moviemakers. It is not clear to me to just what extent the '70s-era television series remains in the popular consciousness (I have no idea how many sixteen year olds, for instance, have actually seen it), but its "campy" image has likely been an inhibiting factor for those operating in today's marketplace, with its expectation of a more serious tone in its superhero films. The bad buzz surrounding the unaired David E. Kelley pilot for a new Wonder Woman TV series has not been helpful.

Gender Politics - and Economics
Substantial as the aforementioned obstacles are, the aspect of such a project that has drawn the most attention has, all too predictably, been gender politics, and it seems pointless to deny that this is an issue here (even if it is equally erroneous to discuss it to the exclusion of all else, as many in the blogosphere seem prone to do). During the last decade Hollywood put an unprecedented number of female action heroes on screen, but it is worth remembering that after the failure of the sequels to Lara Croft and Charlie's Angels in the summer of 2003, studios have been much more inhibited about centering first-string blockbusters on female protagonists.4 When not part of a larger ensemble of characters, they more typically play the lead in somewhat lower-budgeted, less commercially ambitious films (like those of the Resident Evil or Underworld series', or even The Hunger Games).5 The tendency has naturally been reflected in the films of the especially costly superhero genre. The last big summer release centered on a major female comic book character was 2004's Catwoman, a notorious flop which cast a pall over other such attempts, with Elektra (2005) and Sucker Punch (2011) not much more encouraging.

The barest overview of the debate over why this is the case (the demographics of the audience for this type of film, the conflicts between the stuff of popular entertainment and political correctness, etc.) would require a piece much longer than the format of this post can accommodate, but that this is the case seems nearly indisputable, and that does make the prospect of a $150 million-plus movie about a comic book superheroine a longshot. The problem is in this case compounded by the heroine's iconic status among quite different groups for quite different reasons, and the character's well-known idiosyncracies (the famous outfit, the implications of an Amazon culture, the questions about her sexuality), all of which may seem to guarantee that (just as happened with producer Kelley's pilot) the results of any plausible effort will alienate groups the studio cares about, and perhaps please no one who does matter to it.

Any one of these factors might have been problematic in themselves, but the combination of them - confronting a would-be producer with the decision to actually shoot a really big-budget film about the over-the-top adventures of a DC Comics-based superheroine carrying such heavy artistic and political baggage - actually makes it seem little wonder that Wonder Woman has yet to grace the big screen. Indeed, it occurs to me that a Wonder Woman film may not actually be the best way to launch such a franchise, but rather that long-beleaguered Justice League film, which would naturally include Wonder Woman (who, being one member of the group, would not make or break the film herself). If the portrayal ends up being well-received, it would be a logical springboard for a Wonder Woman film (and for that matter, films about other neglected members of DC's pantheon). This is, of course, the opposite of the approach Marvel took with The Avengers, to which it built by establishing multiple franchises first, but given the way these efforts have gone for DC so far this approach looks to me a lot safer and more plausible - at least, assuming that we have not all had our fill of superhero-based films by then.

1. The Avengers may seem an exception, but it remains to be seen that this will actually mean a new trend in superhero-themed films. Indeed, director Joss Whedon already seems intent on going in a different direction with this very franchise.
2. Megan Fox, as usual too frank for the health of her career, dismissed the character as "lame" when the rumors of her being considered for this role came up in an interview. Much as her remarks have been criticized, this does seem rather a common sentiment.
3. Of course, the first two Iron Man films were resounding successes despite their lack of such villains, but again this seems an exception.
4. Those failures were, for instance, a factor in the decision to terminate the project to spin off a Jinx film series from the Bond film Die Another Day.
5. The Hunger Games did go on to become a $400 million hit at the U.S. box office, but as an $80 million budgeted March release it did represent a comparatively limited investment.

Smiley, Ace of Spies: Reading John Le Carrè

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:51:00 +0000

I have to admit that I didn't care for John Le Carrè's novels when I first tried reading them back in high school (in the main, earlier books of the '60s and early '70s).

I knew from the start that Le Carrè was working toward quite different ends, in fact reacting against the Bondian image of espionage which attracted my interest to the genre in the first place - and for me that was part of the problem.1 His world appeared to consist wholly of sad middle-aged toffs out of the pre-war era (and out of time in the post-war) eternally trudging through eternally gray, eternally shabby, eternally sodden North European cityscapes - epitomized, of course, by eternal cuckold George Smiley (whose wife Ann, not incidentally, came far closer to jet-setting glamour than George or any of his mostly indistinguishable colleagues).

Making the books even more off-putting was the way in which they were written, specifically the particular combination of show and tell Le Carrè employed.2 It seemed that he directly, profusely, even tediously "showed" things that seemed (to me) to be of marginal interest, and then when coming to things such as key plot points, "told" them much too briefly, or off-handedly, or even simply hinted at them, with the very slowness of the pace, the long stretches in which nothing seemed to be happening (and the slackening of my concentration as a result), lending those already scarce and easily missed clues considerable cover. Or he "showed" us what was going on, but did so in the most oblique manner possible, again obscuring through the very act of presentation. (Scenes involving violence or subterfuge were especially prone to such treatment, typically described through a succession of fragmentary images.)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for instance, is very much written in this manner, in such respects as its opening with a long chapter devoted to the post-service life of Jim Prideaux; simply dropping on us (or so it felt to me) George Smiley's conclusion that the key to the identity of the mole he is supposed to find lies in the details of Operation Testify; and at the end giving us just glimpses of Bill Haydon's decision to betray the Circus to the Soviets (in part an "aesthetic" judgment, he tells us), before he is killed in circumstances that leave us wondering as to who and how. The flashback-laden nonlinearity of that particular book compounded matters, making one scene seem to lead to the next without transition or explanation just as much as if the author had excised crucial parts from the text (which, in a sense, he had).

Authorial games such as these seemed bad enough in even the most straightforward of stories, but quite intolerable in a complex tale of intrigue in which the characters are already trying quite hard to fool one another, and it all seemed to me yet more evidence that the Arbiters of Literary Taste who labeled Le Carrè the greatest of spy novelists were simply hostile to the things I enjoyed in my fiction. So after starting several of his books I ended up not finishing any of them and for a long time only really knew his work secondhand, from what others said about him, and from films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) and The Tailor of Panama (2001) - which I rather admired, but which did not tempt me back to the books.

I only returned to them when I took a renewed interest in the spy genre and decided to read my way through all of the classics I'd missed before, even those that struck me as difficult or dull or otherwise not worth my time - and where Le Carrè's books are concerned, found the experience rewarding rather than trying.3 This was not because my understanding of what Le Carrè actually did changed. In fact the assessment of Tinker, Tailor given above is based on my rereading of the book as much as my first impression, and after much reflection, still seems valid to me on a descriptive level. There is no denying that Le Carrè is an author whose works not only ask for but require close reading and considerable patience, while being exceedingly unforgiving of small slips in attention, and that even the most experienced, able readers can find themselves confused or frustrated by them at times. And I still think there is plenty of room to argue that the books are more difficult and less accessible than they really need to be.

But the second time around I did feel that the esteem of so many critics for this author was not just an exercise in literary snobbery, but that these books were genuinely worth the while, and the measure of effort they demanded. If one goes to fiction for a sense of "felt life," well, here it was in abundance. The substance and style of the typical Le Carrè novel may not wholly satisfy as a thrill ride of either the action-adventure or mystery-suspense varieties, but he does succeed admirably in telling the kinds of tales that he clearly does mean to tell.4 The social and political blinkers of his privileged, cloistered, backward-looking protagonists; the practical and ethical ambiguities of their work; the relentless bureaucratic venality and stupidity that are such a large part of their collective existence; the frailty of human life, so often destroyed by the games they play - such things came through artfully and powerfully (while my greater willingness to make the effort enabled me to appreciate the intricacy of his plotting, and his sense of humor, which I completely missed the first time around). Books like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Looking Glass War - and of course, Tinker, Tailor - left me underwhelmed on first contact, but thoroughly impressed me that time around.

Ultimately, where my estimation of many of the writers I earlier enjoyed had declined over the years in line with my growing awareness of their technical and imaginative limitations, and my broadening sense of what literature can do, my estimation of Le Carrè's work grew enormously, so that I did come around to the view of him widely held by the critics. But the same experiences have also been another powerful reminder of the distance between highbrow critic and the general readership, some members of which uncritically go along with the commonplaces handed to them, while others, responding to the undeniable difference between the promises of the advertising and the actual thing, protest that The Emperor Has No Clothes (both of which propensities are quite evident in the Customer Reviews of these books on Amazon).5 As anyone who has compared the commercial descriptions of these books in circulation with their actual content can appreciate, it has also been a reminder of the tendency of book jacket blurb and critic alike to raise unreasonable hopes by presenting books like these as if they were merely high-quality examples of conventional genre fare.

1. The James Bond image, as opposed to the James Bond novels, which bear a closer resemblance to Le Carrès work than is usually appreciated.
2. It seems that professional commentators on this author's work rarely mention his style, in part, I suppose, because discussing the style of a work of fiction in a substantive way is much more challenging than discussing its content, and perhaps because those who do have the ability to do so seem reluctant to characterize Le Carrè as a difficult writer - as if to say this about any author less idiosyncratic than a Thomas Pynchon would be an admission of weakness on their part.
3. The only work on my list I almost failed to finish out of sheer frustration proved to be Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, not because of stylistic issues, but rather more conventional literary failings - the book seeming to me overlong, much too slow and at points so thick with nautical detail as to seem written in another language.
4. I do, however, think that the more conventional and accessible Call for the Dead (1961), and the celebrated The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), are at the least partial exceptions in this regard.
5. In circumstances like these I commonly suspect that many readers applaud the books without actually understanding them, even on the level of plot, and think that the scarcity of encyclopedic fan sites or wikis devoted to the series (such as exist for many another author or series) is telling; there may simply not be enough readers with a firm enough grasp of the books to form the kind of base that would produce them.

My Posts on Literature
12/1/12
My Posts on Spy Fiction
11/30/12

March 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:51:00 +0000

New and Noteworthy (Cheapening "Innovation," $70 Video Games, Stross on the EU)
3/16/13
Why the Wonder Woman Movie Hasn't Happened
3/16/13
Smiley, Ace of Spies: Reading John Le Carrè
3/1/13

New and Noteworthy (Babylon 5, Nebulas, The Memory of Light)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:05:00 +0000

In today's regular, non-Oscar-themed edition:

* io9 considers the 20th anniversary of the airing of Babylon 5's pilot film, The Gathering, offering a nice round-up of the thinking behind the series, ranging from the larger conception, to the nuts and bolts of making it work within the parameters of series television.

* The Science Fiction Writers' of America announce the nominees for 2012's Nebula Awards.

* And in case you missed the news, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga has come to its long-awaited (and for many, long, long overdue) close with volume fourteen, The Memory of Light, penned by Brandon Sanderson. You can read io9's review of the book here.

A Note on The "Cool Stuff" Theory of Literature
2/17/13
The Politics of Dark and Gritty Storytelling
2/14/13
New and Noteworthy (Charles Stross, Tobias Buckell, George R.R. Martin)
2/9/13
Barbarella: The TV Series?
2/9/13
Thoughts on Green Lantern
2/2/13
The 2012 BSFA Awards
1/24/13
My Posts on Babylon 5
12/16/12

New and Noteworthy (Oscar Edition)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:50:00 +0000

In today's special Oscar-themed edition, the comments about this year's awards that struck me as being of greatest interest (in all likelihood, wrapping up this blog's discussion of the event):

* Total Film offers a list of fifteen "shameful" snubs. The most interesting of the cases they present: those for Best Picture nominations for The Dark Knight Rises and The Raid: Redemption, a Best Actor nomination for Karl Urban's performance in the titular role in Dredd, and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for The Avengers.

* Tom Shone of the Guardians' film blog on the end of what he called the "Oscar film," described here as "mid-range, mid-budget humanitarian epics like Dances With Wolves, Gandhi and Driving Missy Daisy, about the moral efficacy of the individual – one person making a difference, in costume" - and of course, how that led to Argo (a controversial win in quite a few quarters) beating Lincoln.

* And finally, David Walsh with quite another perspective on how the ceremony played out. As one might expect given his particularly pointed criticism of some of the year's nominees (like Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, but also Argo), he criticizes the product on the grounds of politics as well as art, which he sees as broadly representative of problematic tendencies within the film industry, like the superficiality of its "liberalism" (limited to culture and lifestyle, while thoroughly conservative in its attitudes toward economics and international politics), and its refusal to "mention . . . a single problem of contemporary life" (one had the distinct sense that some powerful anti-reality filtration system was at work in the hall"), with the implications of Michelle Obama's presenting the Best Picture award, and Syriana producer and star George Clooney's being among the recipients, naturally remarked upon.

Skyfall and the Oscars, Part II
2/25/13
On The 85th Academy Awards
2/25/13
New and Noteworthy (Oscar Night, TMNT Movie)
2/22/13
David Walsh on the Oscar Contenders
2/22/13
David Walsh Reviews Django Unchained
2/7/13
Skyfall and the Oscars
1/12/13
The Irrelevance of Oscar Night?
3/5/12

A Note on The 33rd Razzies

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:19:00 +0000

The Oscars, of course, were not the only movie awards ceremony held this past weekend. So were the Golden Raspberry Awards, "celebrating" the worst in filmmaking this past year. Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 swept this ceremony, taking the "prizes" for Worst Actress (Kristen Stewart, also recognized here for her performance in Snow White and the Huntsman), Worst Supporting Actor (Taylor Lautner), Worst Screen Ensemble, Worst Director (Bill Condon), Worst Prequel, Rip-Off or Sequel and Worst Picture. Also prominent: Adam Sandler's That's My Boy, which got Worst Actor and Worst Screenplay, while Battleship was also recognized with a Worst Supporting Actress prize for Rihanna.

It may seem at first glance that the Oscars and Razzies, with their different purposes and differing lists of nominees and winners, have little in common. Nonetheless, they are both indexes of much besides attitudes about cinematic quality, or the lack of it, with the politics of the Razzies at least as influential as the better-known politics of the Oscars. Razzies are awarded to films which are not merely bad, but notorious for being bad, and so often a function of poor pre-release buzz, of media backlashes against particular artists, of irritation with the ubiquity of particular cultural phenomena. The last of these was probably decisive in the beating the last installment of the Twilight saga took, while the prize handed That's My Boy likely reflects an annoyance with the way he manages to keep cranking out (admittedly awful) films despite the opprobrium to which they have long been subject.

The chance to laugh at a famous singer trying her hand at acting - and the feeling that Battleship deserved some recognition as a bad movie, likely decided Rihanna's win in that category. There is no pretending her performance was something to celebrate, but my impression was that much more fault lay with the thin, trite script than with any of the actors - and that just as Supporting Actor Oscars are often consolation prizes for movies that fail to get other, more prestigious awards, so did this Razzie perform that function here.

On The 85th Academy Awards
2/25/13
And The Worst Movie of All Time Is . . .
12/22/12
The Irrelevance of Oscar Night?
3/5/12

Skyfall and the Oscars, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:13:00 +0000

While not in the running for the "major" prizes at the 85th Academy Awards, the James Bond film Skyfall, nominated for five awards, did win in the Original Song category and tied for Best Sound Editing with Zero Dark Thirty, and it did receive its tribute - though the rumor that the six non-1967 Casino Royale Bonds would all be there in an unprecedented gathering proved unfounded. As Morgan Little of Hero Complex reports, there were "No past Bonds, no villains sneaking behind the curtains — just music and a montage" (though the music did include Shirley Bassey performing Goldfinger). It may not have been the recognition Bond fans hoped for from Oscar - but like the film's box office earnings, this represents a series high in this sphere as well.

On The 85th Academy Awards
2/25/13
My Posts on James Bond
11/9/12

On The 85th Academy Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:08:00 +0000

The 85th annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was last night.

This year there was no clear-cut front-runner, and unsurprisingly, the awards ended up being quite widely distributed.

Ang Li's Life of Pi won four awards, including Best Director, Original Score, Cinematography, and Visual Effects. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln won Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in the title role (an unprecedented third Oscar for Day-Lewis), and Best Production Design, while Silver Lining's Playbook won Best Actress for the performance of Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. Django Unchained won Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Waltz) and Best Original Screenplay for director Tarantino (groan), while Les Miserables picked up Best Supporting Actress for Anne Hathaway's performance as Fantine (as well as prizes for Makeup and Hairstyling, and Sound Mixing).

Despite not winning in the acting and directing categories (helmer Ben Affleck not even nominated in that category, a reminder perhaps of the slowness of his post-Gigli rehabilitation), Argo won, along with Best Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing, Best Picture, a prize astonishingly presented by First Lady Michelle Obama - making for a tableau which, given Argo's storyline and the U.S.'s present confrontation with Iran, had unintended but unfortunate political implications seized on by the Iranian state media. Of course, it could not have been assumed that Argo would be the winner, but the possibility that her role in the ceremony could be taken for government endorsement should have given the responsible PR hack pause. Besides, Ms. Obama's bestowing the award on, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty, or Django Unchained, might have been even more problematic in this regard.

New and Noteworthy (Oscar Night, TMNT Movie)
2/22/13
David Walsh on the Oscar Contenders
2/22/13
David Walsh Reviews Django Unchained
2/7/13
My Posts on Postmodernism
11/21/12
The Irrelevance of Oscar Night?
3/5/12

New and Noteworthy (Oscar Night, TMNT Movie)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:39:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Blastr offers "seven sci-fi ways to spend Sunday night instead of watching the Oscars." (At this point in life I hardly need advice on how to avoid the ceremony - something I will be doing again this year - but the thought is appreciated.)

* Hero Complex on the plans for the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. For the time being the major revelation seems to be the casting of Megan Fox, which seems to suggest that the insanely disproportionate hostility to which the actress has been subject for the last four years (which has been part predictable-but-still-unfair backlash after her period of entertainment press-beloved superstar status between the first and second Transformers films, and part sheer vindictiveness over her breaking the Hollywood commandment that Thou Shalt Confine One's Remarks About Colleagues to Ass-Kissing Drivel) has finally run its course. I'd say that its end is long overdue, but the fact is that I regard all this sort of thing as something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

David Walsh on the Oscar Contenders
2/22/13
Skyfall and the Oscars
1/12/13
My Posts on Toby Young
12/20/12
New and Noteworthy (Planet of the Turtles, Facebook, YA Saves the Economy)
3/26/12

David Walsh on the Oscar Contenders

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:17:00 +0000

Earlier this month I mentioned David Walsh's review of Django Unchained, and his remarks on Zero Dark Thirty. Interestingly, just two days before the Academy Awards ceremony, he has produced a follow-up to these reviews in which he extends his analysis of the weaknesses of those films, and also why they have attracted such enthusiasm among the "psuedo-left" (in comparison with, for instance, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln), noting that this

well-heeled social layer, conditioned by decades of academic anti-Marxism, identity politics and self-absorption, rejects the notion of progress, the appeal of reason, the ability to learn anything from history, the impact of ideas on the population, mass mobilizations and centralized force. It responds strongly to irrationality, mythologizing, the "carnivalesque," petty bourgeois individualism, racialism, gender politics, vulgarity and social backwardness.

This is as succinct and forceful a description of the politics of postmodernism, and the way in which it manifests itself in the taste for a certain kind of "dark and gritty" storytelling, as I have seen in some time.

You can read Walsh's full remarks here.

Also of interest to those interested in this line of cultural criticism: David Walsh's review of the recent film Not Fade Away, in which he debunks the romanticizing of the 1960s as a "golden age in which everything seemed possible and revolution was in the air."

The Politics of Dark and Gritty Storytelling
2/14/13
David Walsh Reviews Django Unchained
2/7/13
Skyfall and the Oscars
1/12/13
David Walsh on The Life of Pi
12/20/12
My Posts on Postmodernism
11/21/12

A Note on The "Cool Stuff" Theory of Literature

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:29:00 +0000

Several years ago fantasy writer Steven Brust presented "The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature" to the world. When asked about it in an interview with Chris Olson for Strange Horizons he described it as holding that

all literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool, and the reader will enjoy the work to the degree that the reader and writer agree about what's cool - and this functions all the way from the external trappings to deepest level of theme and to the way the writer uses words.

Brust has also remarked (apparently elsewhere, though I have not found the original source) that the novel can be "understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff."

As a Grand Unified Theory of Literature, of course, this leaves something to be desired, but as a more limited theory it certainly has its attractions, Brust's position being virtually irrefutable while still offering something of substance for our understanding of literature. When I look at the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, what I find at bottom is a profound difference in the idea about what constitutes cool stuff, and the manner in which they advertise their particular sort of cool stuff to the would-be reader. Genre fiction presents sorts of cool stuff for which there are large, clearly established markets, reflected in the very name of the genre or subgenre of which they are examples, from Regency romance to forensic police procedural to young adult urban fantasy. The cool stuff in confirmed, highbrow literary fiction is apt to be of a less easily labeled or marketed kind, because it does not lend itself to formulaic use in cases, or perhaps because it simply lacks wide appeal. (Try, for instance, to picture large numbers of people seeking out the "Unreliable Narrator" fiction section of a bookshop.)

In either case, it is commonly a cause for complaint when the promised cool stuff was not presented in the quantities expected. "Not enough big weapons and battles," a fan may give as their reason for disappointment with a particular military techno-thriller. "But that book was all about plot and action! What about good writing?" a reader of literature may say in dismissing that very same book.

Of course, this is not to say that I take the position that it is all relative, that there are no grounds for suggesting standards - quite the contrary. But Brust's idea is a worthwhile reminder of something too often forgotten in the study of literature, the idea of literature as a source of pleasure to reader and author, reports of whose death have been greatly exaggerated. It is a reminder, too, of the limits to efforts to read literary works entirely and exclusively as a cultural code to be cracked in search of hidden meanings - as much of their content will invariably have other reasons for being there.

My Posts on Literature
12/1/12

The Politics of Dark and Gritty Storytelling

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:34:00 +0000

I have observed here many a time before that the words "dark and gritty" are constantly used by critics as "terms of praise, rather than descriptors, as if no other tone is even worth attempting." As I have also remarked, I find this position artistically and intellectually problematic, not only because it narrows creative possibilities in particular instances, because of what this means for our broader cultural life - and inextricable from it, our political life.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to see all "dark and gritty" writing as one and the same. In fact, where its politics are concerned, it is worth remembering that the approach can be used to different ends. The "dark and gritty" approach can be a progressive's or radical's indictment of the prevailing order of things - the ways in which it corrupts, degrades and may ultimately destroy us, and accordingly, why that order should and must be changed. Hard-boiled crime fiction largely started that way, with books like Dashiell Hammett's classic Red Harvest. Alternatively, it can be a conservative or reactionary's defense of that order, a lesson in the Fallen, dark or otherwise flawed nature of humanity, the existence of "evil," and so forth, so that attempts to ameliorate the world's injustice and suffering are futile or counterproductive, and harsh measures to keep the worst in us and of us in line far preferable to the alternative. This sensibility underlies a great deal of fiction, too, like survivalist-themed postapocalyptic tales where civilization goes down thunderously, and gives way to a Hobbesian aftermath.

Today it is the conservative version of dark and gritty that we see celebrated by critics, and endlessly enacted by those writers seeking their approval - its popularity, interestingly, extending far beyond those who identify as actual conservatives. It is easy enough to imagine why someone not necessarily subscribing to such politics may embrace it, at least from time to time, like the inclination to wallow in the morbid when one feels down, or in the case of frustrated adolescents, a sense of such a world-view as empowering (imagining a Hobbesian monster inside them letting them think of themselves as tough guys). However, for the most part it seems a reflection of the underappreciated extent to which conservative intellectual premises have become predominant, just like the prevalence of postmodernist philosophy, and the virtually unquestioned standing of neoliberal economics, beneath the superficialities of the political rhetoric of our time.

David Walsh Reviews Django Unchained
2/7/13
My Posts on Battlestar Galactica
12/16/12
My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
My Posts on Postmodernism
11/21/12
My Posts on James Bond
11/9/12

Planning a New Dirk Pitt Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:56:00 +0000

As of 2013 it still seems not only that no new Dirk Pitt movie is headed to the screens, but even likely to get made in the foreseeable future. The costly failures that were the two previous films, and the particularly sour aftermath of the production of Sahara, cannot but dampen enthusiasm for another Pitt film on the part of prospective producers.

There also seems to be little demand from anyone but confirmed Cussler fans - the kind of action-adventure for which the novels are known, for the most part, taking a back seat to first and foremost, fantasy and science fiction epics, particularly those featuring superheroes; and second, the more grounded action-adventure ushered in by the Jason Bourne series, and reinforced by the turn of the Bond films in this direction from Casino Royale on. The Pitt novels, which resemble the pre-reboot James Bond in many ways, fall into a middle territory which seems to have been less salable to critics and audiences (though I admittedly wonder if there is any real reason why this should be so). At the same time the fascination with mysteries of the sort that rewrite the history books also seems to have waned somewhat since 2005, when The Da Vinci Code was still setting the bestseller lists afire.

Still, what if there were real interest in a new Pitt film? The series would still face a significant stumbling block in its reliance on cutting-edge technology and ripped-from-the-headlines geopolitics for its interest. Such material tends to date very quickly, after all. The essential concept, however - a protagonist whose milieu is the sea - seems more robust. Some version of Pitt, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and the associated personalities, remain plausible as a concept. Rather than poring over the backlog of adventures looking for something to adapt, the thing to do would seem to be to take this and create an original adventure for the big screen around it which would hopefully have something of the series' print - just as the makers of the next Jack Ryan movie are apparently striving to do.

My Posts on the Dirk Pitt Series
12/2/12

Jack Ryan Five, Jack Ryan One

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:56:00 +0000

The vast success of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels in print during the 1980s and after inevitably led to big-screen versions. Three films were made in quick succession in the early 1990s, between 1990 and 1994 - The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), and Clear and Present Danger (1994), all of them major feature films, with the last two released as tentpole vehicles in their respective summers after the success of October. While Clear and Present Danger was a success like its predecessors, and military technothrillers continued to appear on the big screen in the 1990s (like the Harrison Ford starrer Air Force One, which one can be forgiven for mistaking for a Ryanverse-based film), it ended up being eight years before the next one, The Sum of All Fears, hit theaters in 2002.

That film's earnings were respectable, but not much more, the movie taking in a little under $200 million globally - the same money as the three earlier films, give or take, which was decent enough in the early '90s, less satisfactory in 2002, after considerable inflation of film budgets and ticket prices. And the idea of cranking out another big budget movie starring Ben Affleck must not have seemed very appealing in the years afterward, when, as always happens, the press's love affair with the actor gave way to the especially nasty post-Gigli backlash, from which he has only recently recovered fully (in large part because of his work behind the camera, with the process ironically completed by yet another spy drama, Argo).

At the same time the Jack Ryan franchise seemed increasingly moribund as a result of the novels' dating and the authors' declining cachet - the years passing without new Clancy novels (from 2003 to 2010, no Ryanverse books appeared), while thriller fashions changed (the technothriller becoming more Dan Brown than Dale Brown). Consequently it was something of a surprise when I learned that a new Ryan movie, inventively titled Jack Ryan, is now in production - helmed by Kenneth Branagh (who also plays Ryan's antagonist), while the titular character is portrayed by Chris Pine, as if the thinking went, "People accepted him in one reboot; why not another?" At last report the film is expected out by Christmas this year.

I wonder at the logic of the move. That the films have been made into blockbusters in the past can make one easily forget that the books do not readily lend themselves easily to this kind of treatment. The sprawl of the plots is lost as the scripts drop many bits and concentrate others to produce a coherent two-hour film, as they must. Also lost are the particular literary pleasures of immersion in technical detail - the plane or submarine that can seem like the star of the book reduced to a prop or a set on screen.

It is also worth remembering that the plots which the novels furnish the series, like all plots reliant on technology and geopolitics, dated quite quickly. The storyline of the Sum of All Fears, a novel situated in that brief moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union, proved sufficiently the stuff of yesteryear for the cinematic adaptation to appear fairly creaky, despite quite a reasonable effort on the part of the writers.

With all this would seem to go the strongest elements of the books while it is worth remembering too that this is not the first time that Hollywood rebooted the series, this also having happened in The Sum of All Fears (which chucked Ryan's biography in favor of having the character as a young analyst starting out at the Agency rather than its Deputy Director, another stumbling block for the plot).1 Still, Hollywood abhors an unutilized IP, and we will all see how this decision turns out soon enough.

1. Ryan's prior career as Marine officer, stock broker and Annapolis professor, and the events of Patriot Games that made intelligence a career for Ryan in the first place, are simply dropped from the film.

Reading the Jack Ryan Novels
12/12/12
My Posts on Spy Fiction
11/30/12

The Trajectory of the "Post-Vietnam" Action Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:51:00 +0000

Last year Adam Sternbergh published an article in the New York Times titled "How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey." It is an interesting and entertaining piece, but contrary to the title's promise, rather short on cause and effect - on how the American action movies of the '80s (the Rambo series, Schwarzenegger films like Commando, and the rest) took their shape, and why their pattern fell out of use. Still, it is common to view Vietnam and its aftermath as having had something to do with it, and Sternbergh is no exception.

I have to admit that for a long time I was quite skeptical of claims about such a connection, taking them as exercises in that shallow sort of instant cultural analysis that forces every pop cultural hit or miss into an ultra-conventional narrative of national tragedies and triumphs, with the most recent success or failure necessarily a reflection of popular feeling toward the most recent event.1 And yet . . . these movies about big men with big guns easily mowing down hordes of faceless foreign enemies very plausibly seem the power fantasy of a deeply wounded culture.

There is also no denying the shocks of that period, of which defeat in Vietnam was only one. There was, more broadly, something analogous, if rather weaker, than what Britain went through in the twentieth century, that sense of unraveling empire - in Europe and Japan's turning from militarily occupied aid recipients into politically assertive economic rivals, the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system (still lamented by today's gold bugs), the OPEC oil embargo and the subsequent energy shocks, the end of the post-war boom (a generation which had seen 4 percent a year growth nearly flatline, full-ish employment give way to stagflation), the perceived advances of the Soviet Union in what was seen as a hostile Third World. There was, too, resentment of the cultural changes that did not begin in the 1960s, but which were widely regarded as having come to a head in it, as marginalized groups (women, minorities, the young) became more assertive, and attitudes toward matters such as sex, drugs and the natural environment changed. That all this was accompanied by rising crime and urban decay did not make it any more bearable.

Reactions to this succession of economic and foreign policy setbacks, and the cultural changes which accompanied them, varied enormously. Some, like John Kenneth Galbraith or William Appleman Williams, hoped for, and even expected, the United States to change the way in which it dealt with other nations, and the role its government played in the economy, redressing the private sector's failings in areas from health care to the environment, and accommodating the calls of the left for a more egalitarian society.

However, the dominant reaction was conservative, and ultimately expressed in the policies and attitudes of the once improbable-seeming Reagan era. As this developed much of what had seemed threatening went into retreat, or was tamed, or was simply ignored, as bad memories faded, old failures were apparently redeemed, and big problems ameliorated or simply papered over.2 The Gulf of Sidra, Grenada, the famous and infamous PR of and for the era, weakened the memory of the last war's defeat and divisiveness. The decade's bubble economics, the constant emphasis of the media on how well the rich were doing (and the tendency to overlook how the non-rich were doing) made the stagflation of the '70s look like trouble overcome (even as the problems which became so prominent in that era - deindustrialization, financial instability, rising trade deficits, falling wages, urban decay - kept on worsening).

Pop culture played its part, not least on the movie screen, replete with images of avengers "setting the world to rights." Harry Callahan cleaned up streets overrun with hoodlums and radicals and other such types, while John Rambo refought the Vietnam War (and in the 1985 sequel to First Blood, sort of won it) - as did the legions of imitators who made the loose cannon cop and the killing machine commando clichès of '80s cinema.3 But this did not go on forever, of course, this therapy (if that is what one calls it), like all therapy, eventually relieving the pains that called it forth.4 At the same time these films used up their potentials in the way that all intensively mined genres do, fairly quickly attaining the limits of concept and scale (quite evident in the absurd finale of the third Rambo movie). The box office receipts tell the tale: the summer of 1988 saw those two biggest icons of the post-Vietnam action movie, Dirty Harry and Rambo, each snubbed by moviegoers as The Dead Pool flopped and Rambo III underperformed badly.5

The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stagnation of Europe and Japan, the (mis)reading of the tech bubble and bull market of the '90s as signs of endless good times ahead, made all those '70s-era frustrations that much more distant by repeatedly reassuring American conservatives time and again that "the American way" was the only way. Even the September 11 terrorist attacks drew forth a new wave of triumphalism that lasted for much of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And all the while, a new generation was coming into the world for which "post-Vietnam" was as distant as the Peloponnesian War.

Quite naturally, the cops and commandos, the bases of their initial attraction diminished, and quite shopworn to boot, were eclipsed by protagonists with an "everyman" quality, evinced in such things as domestic troubles (like the buddy cops of Lethal Weapon, John McClane or Jack Ryan), and in many a case, superheroes (starting with 1989's blockbuster Batman). Instead of mean streets, Third World landscapes, villains from the nightly news, their adventures featured CGI creatures (which really came of age with 1993's Jurassic Park), and junkets in outer-space (the mid- and late 1990s seeing more of these than any other period but the post-Star Wars rush, circa 1979-1984), and the bigger, more exotic spectacles they afforded. There was even a spurt of renewed interest in the Hong Kong action film (again, to an extent not seen since the 1970s, which Hong Kong stars and performers come to Hollywood, like John Woo, who helmed Broken Arrow and Face/Off, and Jackie Chan who made up half of the last really successful buddy cop duo in 1998's Rush Hour, and Jet Li, whose minor role in the last installment of the '80s-vintage Lethal Weapon series that same year was played up in the press to capitalize on such interest).6 By the 2000s the transition to a different cinematic universe was virtually complete, the older style of action film persisting on lower budgets and pure nostalgia, as quaint to younger moviegoers as yesteryear's fascination with the Western.

Of course, this second decade of the twenty-first century, a time of financial crisis, frustration in overseas wars, and deep national divisions, echoes the 1970s in many ways. One may wonder if this does not augur a return to something like the movies of the '80s in a more than imitative way. For the time being, though, the defining action movies of recent years - superhero films like the Spiderman series or The Avengers, grand-scale fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean, or The Transformers - have tended less toward fantasies of forcing reality into line with right-wing populist images of how the world should be than a politically less contentious escape from reality altogether.7

1. An instance of this is the reading of the success of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spiderman as a matter of its analogy with post-9/11 America, which I have always found unconvincing. A country which has taken its position as the world's dominant superpower for granted for generations is hardly comparable to a nerdy orphan who has just received superpowers as a windfall, and only secretly regards himself as a hero.
2. As Chris Hedges put it in Death of the Liberal Class, Martin Luther King was turned "into a red-white-and-blue icon . . . [like] Most of our great social reformers . . . sanitized for mainstream public consumption."
3. Paramilitary action-adventure on TV and in print, and the military techno-thriller, also played their parts.
4. Of course, another way of looking at the issue is to say that it sustained a false view of the world.
5. The Dead Pool was the end of the Dirty Harry series, Rambo III virtually that for the Rambo films. (Not another such movie was made until 2008, and that a comparative small, low-profile release.)
6. Much of the '80s action movie remained in the films of the '90s, from the continuation of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series' in that decade (Lethal Weapon in 1992 and 1998, Die Hard in 1990 and 1995); to later Schwarzenegger movies like the affectionate if ill-conceived parody Last Action Hero (1993), True Lies (1994) (the biggest action hit of its year) and Eraser (1996); to the wave of high-tech military thrillers that culminated in Air Force One (1997); to films like The Rock (1996) and Con Air (1997) (each prominently featuring American soldiers wronged by their governments).
7. Of course, this is not to deny that some of these films have been taken as conveying political messages, including messages of the type discussed here. Christopher Nolan's Batman series has frequently been read as not merely political, but political in this manner, and one may say the same of Iron Man. Still, this seems less common, and when it does appear, more ambiguous than in many of the films of the '70s and '80s.

Seven Days Until A Good Day to Die Hard
2/7/13
The Return(?) of the '80s Action Movie
2/7/13
On the Graying of the Action Hero
10/30/12

Leon Trotsky's Transhumanism

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:34:00 +0000

Back in June I commented on Dale Carrico's critique of the Singularity as a neoliberal fantasy. As I stated then, there is much to his critique of the ideas of Ray Kurzweil and company as such, but it would be a mistake to regard them as the whole of transhumanist and posthumanist thought, which has seen contributions from all across the political spectrum. Indeed, in the early part of the twentieth century leftist thinkers may actually have been more closely associated with such thought than the techno-libertarians who dominate the discussion today - Marxists like J.D. Bernal (via The World, The Flesh and the Devil) and Olaf Stapledon (who pioneered the fictional treatment of the theme in novels like Last and First Men).

Nor was this such thought wholly the purview of scientists making forays into futurology, or writers of science fiction, and nor have they wholly belonged to the West. Russia's late nineteenth and early twentieth century Cosmists were perhaps the first modern school of such thought. Given that this is the case, it does not seem a very great surprise that Leon Trotsky expressed such expectations - notably in Literature and Revolution, a work which may have had as its primary focus the state of Russian letters, but in which, far more than in his works of political theory, commentary and history, he painted a portrait of what he thought socialist society might be like decades or centuries on. These speculations extended beyond the artistic to the technological, Trotsky imagining the tapping of "inexhaustible sources of super-power" and "the regulation of the weather and the climate" (in that particular idea, perhaps an echo of the thought of Nikolai Fedorov). Humanity, he was sure, would remake the Earth, moving "mountains and rivers," and "repeatedly mak[ing] improvements in nature" until it has "rebuilt the Earth."

However, he wrote, "More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest" via "the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training." Just as humanity liberated itself from the "dark," "unconscious" element in "industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science"; in "politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship"; and in economic life, "by means of . . . Socialist organization [which] makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life"; it would liberate itself from those limitations of its nature

hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil . . . The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!

"Emancipated man," Trotsky imagines, "will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger." Man will

master his own feelings . . . raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness . . . make them transparent . . . extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

Moreover, he saw no end to this process, positing that it

is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler . . . The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

No doubt to be surmounted in their own turn.

Those words, in fact, are the ones with which the book closes, this vision of transcendence the note on which the work ends. Nonetheless, as the sequence he presented suggestion, this was to be a cap to be part of the process of social and political change - liberation from "God, kings and capital" - rather than an alternative to it - as with the mainstream of Singularitarian thought today. ("Social construction and psycho-physical self-education," he wrote, "will become two aspects of one and the same process.") He also regarded it as a very, very long-term issue. Indeed, he seems to have thought such developments too far away to be of real concern for the arts, criticizing "Cosmist" poets as essentially escapist. Poets, he wrote,

are becoming Cosmists, not because the population of the Milky Way is knocking at their doors and demanding an answer, but because the problems of earth are lending themselves to artistic expression with so much difficulty that it makes them feel like jumping into another world . . . Astronomy and cosmogony are good things! But first of all, one has to know the history of mankind and the laws, the concrete facts, the picturesqueness and the personalities of contemporary life.

It is exactly in "the history of mankind and the laws, the concrete facts, the picturesqueness and the personalities of contemporary life" that the more facile versions of Singularitarian thought are lacking.

The Neoliberal Singularity
6/7/12