I've put the results of my visual narrative project up in the gallery. It's a little rough right now, I definitely could use some time to polish it up, but I probably won't have that time for a while.
I wasn't completely satisfied with how the project turned out. I had hoped to develop a very strong set of visuals and use a fairly simple narrative to connect them. But the process became so tedious that I found myself cutting corners just to get it finished. Though the game was central to the story I created, and my desire to work within a rich but unpredictable environment, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was not very hospitable to my efforts. But, I guess, that was part of my whole point. I'm riffing off machinima here, where the trend is toward greater and greater visual sophistication and character control. But so much of the charm of machinima, to me, is in the tension between what the "director" wants to do and what the gaming platform allows them to do.
Anyway, you have to admit, even if you think the end result is not brilliant, that it's pretty cool to be able to do this kind of stuff for school.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Monday, October 03, 2005
David Lynch is Happy
David Lynch was in Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre Saturday night talking to a crowd of mostly college students on the subject of "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain." One might expect from such a talk an attempt to delineate and describe these weighty concepts, and, from an artist as preeminent as Lynch, some anecdotal narratives giving insight into his creative process. Instead, the evening did little but to further mire these concepts in a web of vague abstractions.
Taking my seat in the theater, I felt an inkling of the disappointment that would follow. The very setting spoke to the lack of interactive, and hence dialectic, possibilities. I've become accustomed over the past several weeks to academic colloquia which encourage audience engagement. These have been held in utilitarian, some might say "ugly," lecture halls with limited capacity and shortened distance between speaker and listeners. The Majestic, true to its name, rises vertically hundreds of feet to provided immense capacity. From my seat in the balcony, the speakers were but fuzzy, acutely foreshortened forms. The proscenium, encrusted with gold paint and bands of sculptural fruit, framed the ensuing event as performance rather than dialog. Which is not to say that the audience wasn't ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. Though I couldn't see them from my vantage point, microphones had been deployed, and after some introductory comments Lynch accepted questions from the audience. But was it coincidence that the questions asked were slight and/or sycophantic?
I'm willing to accept that the theater setting was a necessary evil to allow as many people as possible to see a very popular but typically reclusive filmmaker. And I certainly appreciate Lynch's willingness to participate in a public forum on his life and works. However, it became clear by the end of the opening statements that this would not be a free-form discussion of art and creativity, or even a formal lecture on those topics, but a biased and scientifically specious presentation (or, as a colleague of mine correctly pegged it, an "infomercial") on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.
Supporting Lynch's impassioned but ultimately unhelpful ruminations were John Hagelin, the director of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, and Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, who put on the full-court press for legitimizing the foundations of TM. Hagelin made baldly controversial claims like (and I'm paraphrasing) "science has proven that consciousness is the unified field of Unified Field Theory," without any hint of acknowledgement to their contentiousness. And I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the audience was filled with plants, but consider these ostensibly spontaneous questions from the Q&A period:
"I'm a film teacher and filmmaker. Can you share how has Transcendental Meditation helped you be a better filmmaker?"
"What would you say to those who are skeptical about Transcendental Meditation?"
Listen, it's great that David Lynch is a happy, positive person who has found inner peace through TM. And, certainly, one who has found happiness has the right, if not the duty, to share his methodology with the rest of us. But that doesn't make it interesting.
Taking my seat in the theater, I felt an inkling of the disappointment that would follow. The very setting spoke to the lack of interactive, and hence dialectic, possibilities. I've become accustomed over the past several weeks to academic colloquia which encourage audience engagement. These have been held in utilitarian, some might say "ugly," lecture halls with limited capacity and shortened distance between speaker and listeners. The Majestic, true to its name, rises vertically hundreds of feet to provided immense capacity. From my seat in the balcony, the speakers were but fuzzy, acutely foreshortened forms. The proscenium, encrusted with gold paint and bands of sculptural fruit, framed the ensuing event as performance rather than dialog. Which is not to say that the audience wasn't ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. Though I couldn't see them from my vantage point, microphones had been deployed, and after some introductory comments Lynch accepted questions from the audience. But was it coincidence that the questions asked were slight and/or sycophantic?
I'm willing to accept that the theater setting was a necessary evil to allow as many people as possible to see a very popular but typically reclusive filmmaker. And I certainly appreciate Lynch's willingness to participate in a public forum on his life and works. However, it became clear by the end of the opening statements that this would not be a free-form discussion of art and creativity, or even a formal lecture on those topics, but a biased and scientifically specious presentation (or, as a colleague of mine correctly pegged it, an "infomercial") on the benefits of Transcendental Meditation.
Supporting Lynch's impassioned but ultimately unhelpful ruminations were John Hagelin, the director of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, and Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, who put on the full-court press for legitimizing the foundations of TM. Hagelin made baldly controversial claims like (and I'm paraphrasing) "science has proven that consciousness is the unified field of Unified Field Theory," without any hint of acknowledgement to their contentiousness. And I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the audience was filled with plants, but consider these ostensibly spontaneous questions from the Q&A period:
"I'm a film teacher and filmmaker. Can you share how has Transcendental Meditation helped you be a better filmmaker?"
"What would you say to those who are skeptical about Transcendental Meditation?"
Listen, it's great that David Lynch is a happy, positive person who has found inner peace through TM. And, certainly, one who has found happiness has the right, if not the duty, to share his methodology with the rest of us. But that doesn't make it interesting.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Noah Baumbach Update - Fantastic Mr. Fox
I'm a huge fan of the film Kicking and Screaming. No, not the film with Will Ferrell about a kids soccer team. The first K&S was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Noah Baumbach, and followed a group of recent college grads immobilized by a "quarterlife crisis" long before anyone had coined that term. I found the characters' self-doubting and malaise eerily familiar, making this one of the seminal films of my early adulthood. Baumbach followed it up with Mr. Jealousy, and underrated romantic comedy that failed to capitalize on his earlier critical success. The bizarre, ultra-low-budget Highball came next, and was, I believe, released straight to video. Sometime during all of that activity, he produced a television pilot about 20somethings starring Eric Stoltz that failed to attract a buyer.
The last few years have hosted a, for me, long overdue Baumbach resurgence. He cowrote with director Wes Anderson the brilliant Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson then produced Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which earned great accolades at Sundance. I can't wait to see that film, a 80s-era memoir of how he and his brother dealt with their parents' divorce (again, likely to prove creepily similar to my own experiences), and noticed, with excitement, the recent online dissemination of the trailer.
Already basking in the anticipation, I came across this tidbit while exploring his bio on the film's website:
"He also co-wrote THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and the upcoming FANTASTIC MR. FOX from a novel by Roald Dahl with Wes Anderson."
Fantastic Mr. Fox! Further research indicates this will be a stop-motion animated film. The last attempt at adapting Dahl to stop motion, James and the Giant Peach, yielded very mixed results. But with Anderson directing, and Revolution Studios producing (instead of Disney/Touchstone), the film has a chance of being true to my own nostalgic memories of the novel.
The last few years have hosted a, for me, long overdue Baumbach resurgence. He cowrote with director Wes Anderson the brilliant Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson then produced Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which earned great accolades at Sundance. I can't wait to see that film, a 80s-era memoir of how he and his brother dealt with their parents' divorce (again, likely to prove creepily similar to my own experiences), and noticed, with excitement, the recent online dissemination of the trailer.
Already basking in the anticipation, I came across this tidbit while exploring his bio on the film's website:
"He also co-wrote THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and the upcoming FANTASTIC MR. FOX from a novel by Roald Dahl with Wes Anderson."
Fantastic Mr. Fox! Further research indicates this will be a stop-motion animated film. The last attempt at adapting Dahl to stop motion, James and the Giant Peach, yielded very mixed results. But with Anderson directing, and Revolution Studios producing (instead of Disney/Touchstone), the film has a chance of being true to my own nostalgic memories of the novel.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Shadow of the Colossus - Video Game 'Art?'
Got my Official US Playstation Magazine this weekend, which includes full coverage of the upcoming release developed by Sony CEA: The Shadow of the Colossus. "Full Coverage" means the mag features an article about its production, a staff review, and a playable level on the included demo disk. I could probably write a comparative analysis about how each of these classes of text represent the game, the different assumptions and methodologies each bring to defining its significance, but that's for another time. I want to talk about the content - the game itself and the claims the writers make about it. As such, I will be treating the demo as truly representative of the overall game experience, though it might not be (as the magazine specifically warns).
The gaming press makes much of the work's status as the next title from the developers of the critically acclaimed Ico. Let me just say at the outset that I've never played that game and know nothing about it. The ubiquitous association of the two titles seems a bald attempt to position both as part of a canon of "artistic" games. That's fine, we do the same thing in every media. A work takes on greater depth, or, at least, greater interpretive possibility, when we can locate it within the ouvre of some author. But, I found the rhetoric of the reviewer, Joe Rybicki, rather defensive, as if we need to appeal to these conventional signifiers of high art to justify taking a video game seriously. The most egregrious example is his description of the beautiful landscapes in the game. He posits that they point to "the designers' priorities: Make it beautiful—make it art—even if it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay itself." OK, once and for all, aesthetic beauty and artistic value are not equivalent. Thomas Kincade paints some pretty landscapes (he's the painter of light. Light!), but, well, his paintings aren't quite the cutting edge of artistic expression. Call me a snob. Furthermore, in the form of video games, gameplay is a huge part of artistic content. In the reviewer's defense, we don't quite have a well-developed language for talking about the art of gameplay, and the Official US Sony Playstation Magazine is probably not the forum for development of such a language.
How about the game itself? For those unfamiliar with its basic premise, the player controls a humanoid on a quest to kill 16 giant creatures that roam a desolate landscape. The magazine's writers refers to these giants as "bosses," but that seems misapplied. "Boss" implies the end of a sequence of progressively more difficult opponents. In other words, you can't have a boss without lackeys. In Shadow, the creatures are the singular challenge, and they each require sufficiently complex manuevers to bring down that it might be more accurate to call the creatures "levels". But the subversion of these video game conventions is what makes the game interesting.
What makes it breathtaking to play, even in the short demo, is the sense of scale. The creatures tower over your little avatar. Here, I think, we see pioneers of the video game form feeding back to us a shared cultural dream: the slaying of the dragon. Actually, we're in gaming territory here, which comes out of a different cultural tradition, so I better be specific. This isn't the European St. George and the Dragon, vanquishing of the pagan by the Christian kind of thing. The associations that came most clearly to my mind while playing the game were from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Here is dragon as magnificent nature spirit, slayer as heroic and daring, yes, but also modernizing and destructive. The game creates with its story, and supports with its music and cinematographic elements, a very ambiguous moral task for the player. Of course, having only played the demo, I can't speak to how the story unfolds to its end. The review indicates, again apologetically, that the ambiguity is maintained. If so, then that's quite an achievement.
So the concept seems brilliant enough, but how about the gameplay? The review complained of complexity, but that's a pretty relative term. It's hardly flight simulator complex. In fact, I'd say it's as or less complex than most action games. I found it intuitive after a few minutes. In the demo, the camera was very annoying, pulling back to show a preferred framing rather than sticking to the player's direction. Unfortunately, that preferencing of the designer's will over that of the gamer's extends to other parts of the game. As far as I can tell, the game allows only one way to kill a Colossus. In the demo example, I replayed it several times to see if I could find my own way: climb onto the giant's hammer instead of up his leg. It confounded my every attempt, until finally some words came up on the screen to the effect of "you have to climb up the leg first." Directions. Disappointing. They designed so much scale and graphical complexity into the giants, but prescribed a single path for attacking them? I'm also curious about how the progression between Colossi is acheived. Again, despite building a world that seems to allow free roaming, I sensed that getting from one Colossus to the next was a rather linear process. Now, that's a choice by the developers. Not all games have to be open-ended sandboxes. But, from my short experience with this game, I think it would have been a better choice.
Despite those caveats, I'm sold on this title as a valuable addition to the gaming canon. But is it art? Well, duh.
The gaming press makes much of the work's status as the next title from the developers of the critically acclaimed Ico. Let me just say at the outset that I've never played that game and know nothing about it. The ubiquitous association of the two titles seems a bald attempt to position both as part of a canon of "artistic" games. That's fine, we do the same thing in every media. A work takes on greater depth, or, at least, greater interpretive possibility, when we can locate it within the ouvre of some author. But, I found the rhetoric of the reviewer, Joe Rybicki, rather defensive, as if we need to appeal to these conventional signifiers of high art to justify taking a video game seriously. The most egregrious example is his description of the beautiful landscapes in the game. He posits that they point to "the designers' priorities: Make it beautiful—make it art—even if it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay itself." OK, once and for all, aesthetic beauty and artistic value are not equivalent. Thomas Kincade paints some pretty landscapes (he's the painter of light. Light!), but, well, his paintings aren't quite the cutting edge of artistic expression. Call me a snob. Furthermore, in the form of video games, gameplay is a huge part of artistic content. In the reviewer's defense, we don't quite have a well-developed language for talking about the art of gameplay, and the Official US Sony Playstation Magazine is probably not the forum for development of such a language.
How about the game itself? For those unfamiliar with its basic premise, the player controls a humanoid on a quest to kill 16 giant creatures that roam a desolate landscape. The magazine's writers refers to these giants as "bosses," but that seems misapplied. "Boss" implies the end of a sequence of progressively more difficult opponents. In other words, you can't have a boss without lackeys. In Shadow, the creatures are the singular challenge, and they each require sufficiently complex manuevers to bring down that it might be more accurate to call the creatures "levels". But the subversion of these video game conventions is what makes the game interesting.
What makes it breathtaking to play, even in the short demo, is the sense of scale. The creatures tower over your little avatar. Here, I think, we see pioneers of the video game form feeding back to us a shared cultural dream: the slaying of the dragon. Actually, we're in gaming territory here, which comes out of a different cultural tradition, so I better be specific. This isn't the European St. George and the Dragon, vanquishing of the pagan by the Christian kind of thing. The associations that came most clearly to my mind while playing the game were from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Here is dragon as magnificent nature spirit, slayer as heroic and daring, yes, but also modernizing and destructive. The game creates with its story, and supports with its music and cinematographic elements, a very ambiguous moral task for the player. Of course, having only played the demo, I can't speak to how the story unfolds to its end. The review indicates, again apologetically, that the ambiguity is maintained. If so, then that's quite an achievement.
So the concept seems brilliant enough, but how about the gameplay? The review complained of complexity, but that's a pretty relative term. It's hardly flight simulator complex. In fact, I'd say it's as or less complex than most action games. I found it intuitive after a few minutes. In the demo, the camera was very annoying, pulling back to show a preferred framing rather than sticking to the player's direction. Unfortunately, that preferencing of the designer's will over that of the gamer's extends to other parts of the game. As far as I can tell, the game allows only one way to kill a Colossus. In the demo example, I replayed it several times to see if I could find my own way: climb onto the giant's hammer instead of up his leg. It confounded my every attempt, until finally some words came up on the screen to the effect of "you have to climb up the leg first." Directions. Disappointing. They designed so much scale and graphical complexity into the giants, but prescribed a single path for attacking them? I'm also curious about how the progression between Colossi is acheived. Again, despite building a world that seems to allow free roaming, I sensed that getting from one Colossus to the next was a rather linear process. Now, that's a choice by the developers. Not all games have to be open-ended sandboxes. But, from my short experience with this game, I think it would have been a better choice.
Despite those caveats, I'm sold on this title as a valuable addition to the gaming canon. But is it art? Well, duh.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
OK Go - Indie Boys Don't Dance
The new OK Go album, "Oh No," has been out for a few weeks now. Probably listened to the whole thing about 3 times, maybe 4. In that time, the music has burrowed in like one of those ear parasites from Star Trek II, and now has full control of my mind, though its only command to me so far has been to "put the CD back in the player!"
By now you've probably seen the infamous dance video. If not, I highly recommend it. I've heard several theories about why it's so popular. One pointed to the inherent comedy of seeing men do choreographed dance. And certainly, the routine itself mixes cheerleader flair, ballroom twirls, Michael Jackson struts, and recognizable bad dance moves in an amusing way. But I have some more theories:
1. Though created by the band itself, they have skillfully produced it to appear like a fan-made viral video. The resolution is poor, the setting casual. The dance is choreographed to a CD played off-screen (we hear the end of the previous song as they take their places), rather than overlaid with a studio mix. The "singer" in the video is not the lead singer in the band. There are no cuts away, and minor dance missteps and misalignments have been left in. All of these contribute to a perception of the video as not an abstract visual representation of the song, like most music videos, but something like an artifact. In watching the video, we feel we've discovered something. The dance feels like a discreet moment in time, it has that aura of authenticity. And because it feels more real, it triggers those voyeuristic endorphins.
2. We expect pop groups to have dance routines. All the boy bands do it. All the soloists do it, even when they're no good at it (Jessica Simpson). Indie-pop bands, however, don't. Not one (until now). Why? Because they're different. How? Because they don't dance. The video throws our musical categories back in our faces. Like most rock n' roll, it's all a semiotics of style over substance. Sullen, ironic boys make indie music. Cheery, sincere boys make pop music. The video pleases by confusing those boundaries.
By now you've probably seen the infamous dance video. If not, I highly recommend it. I've heard several theories about why it's so popular. One pointed to the inherent comedy of seeing men do choreographed dance. And certainly, the routine itself mixes cheerleader flair, ballroom twirls, Michael Jackson struts, and recognizable bad dance moves in an amusing way. But I have some more theories:
1. Though created by the band itself, they have skillfully produced it to appear like a fan-made viral video. The resolution is poor, the setting casual. The dance is choreographed to a CD played off-screen (we hear the end of the previous song as they take their places), rather than overlaid with a studio mix. The "singer" in the video is not the lead singer in the band. There are no cuts away, and minor dance missteps and misalignments have been left in. All of these contribute to a perception of the video as not an abstract visual representation of the song, like most music videos, but something like an artifact. In watching the video, we feel we've discovered something. The dance feels like a discreet moment in time, it has that aura of authenticity. And because it feels more real, it triggers those voyeuristic endorphins.
2. We expect pop groups to have dance routines. All the boy bands do it. All the soloists do it, even when they're no good at it (Jessica Simpson). Indie-pop bands, however, don't. Not one (until now). Why? Because they're different. How? Because they don't dance. The video throws our musical categories back in our faces. Like most rock n' roll, it's all a semiotics of style over substance. Sullen, ironic boys make indie music. Cheery, sincere boys make pop music. The video pleases by confusing those boundaries.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Six Feet Under - The Finale
I finally got around to watching the last three episodes of Six Feet Under. If you haven't yet seen the finale, and are planning to, please avert your eyes, as spoilers will follow.
Alan Ball provided a fitting end to a TV series that could be considered the great memento mori of the motion picture/television canon. Many viewers, critics included, have lamented this season, and it has been difficult to watch characters that I've grown to love make some really questionable choices, reveal darker sides of their personalities, and, well, die. But it's also been brilliant. Nate's death framed perfectly the concerns of the series. Many episodes owed their drama to disagreements over proper burial rights for the corpse-of-the-week. Would the family that saw other families torn apart by these arguments be able to avoid falling into the same traps? The answer, of course, was no. The Fishers were no more immune from anger and misery and spite than Nate was, as the main character, protected from death.
The finale itself hit all the emotional notes expected from a show of this depth and complexity; that is, it hit ALL of the emotional notes. It was all over the place. Series finales often have these moments of great ontological confusion, when all of the layers of a character's identity come to the surface at the same time. In this case, Claire's farewell to her family reached a level of maudlin excess that had me wondering, "is this Clair saying goodbye to her family, Lauren Ambrose saying goodbye to her character, or Alan Ball saying goodbye to his cast?" Probably all three at the same time, especially at the moment she thanked her mother for giving her life. A bit much, yes, but immediately redeemed by what followed, a musical montage closing the book on the Fisher family, showing that, though the series may end here, it's characters will not live in eternal glory forever. Remember: you, too, will die.
A note on the specifics of this montage. Like the "ghosts" of departed characters that appeared to the Fishers throughout the series, I interpreted the parade of events as completely internal to the character: possibile futures as imagined by Claire as she sped towards her future. It seemed likelier that Claire, at the moment of leaving her old life behind, would imagine meeting up with Ted 20 years later and marrying him, than that this would ever come to pass. But I guess Alan Ball intended a more literal interpretation. He prepared obituaries for the show's homepage, and in this interview, references some very specific biographical information about the characters post-show. But I like my explanation better.
Alan Ball provided a fitting end to a TV series that could be considered the great memento mori of the motion picture/television canon. Many viewers, critics included, have lamented this season, and it has been difficult to watch characters that I've grown to love make some really questionable choices, reveal darker sides of their personalities, and, well, die. But it's also been brilliant. Nate's death framed perfectly the concerns of the series. Many episodes owed their drama to disagreements over proper burial rights for the corpse-of-the-week. Would the family that saw other families torn apart by these arguments be able to avoid falling into the same traps? The answer, of course, was no. The Fishers were no more immune from anger and misery and spite than Nate was, as the main character, protected from death.
The finale itself hit all the emotional notes expected from a show of this depth and complexity; that is, it hit ALL of the emotional notes. It was all over the place. Series finales often have these moments of great ontological confusion, when all of the layers of a character's identity come to the surface at the same time. In this case, Claire's farewell to her family reached a level of maudlin excess that had me wondering, "is this Clair saying goodbye to her family, Lauren Ambrose saying goodbye to her character, or Alan Ball saying goodbye to his cast?" Probably all three at the same time, especially at the moment she thanked her mother for giving her life. A bit much, yes, but immediately redeemed by what followed, a musical montage closing the book on the Fisher family, showing that, though the series may end here, it's characters will not live in eternal glory forever. Remember: you, too, will die.
A note on the specifics of this montage. Like the "ghosts" of departed characters that appeared to the Fishers throughout the series, I interpreted the parade of events as completely internal to the character: possibile futures as imagined by Claire as she sped towards her future. It seemed likelier that Claire, at the moment of leaving her old life behind, would imagine meeting up with Ted 20 years later and marrying him, than that this would ever come to pass. But I guess Alan Ball intended a more literal interpretation. He prepared obituaries for the show's homepage, and in this interview, references some very specific biographical information about the characters post-show. But I like my explanation better.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Philip K. Dick High: Mean Girls
Tina Fey, as a first-time screenwriter working from Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction book on teenage sociology, Queen Bees and Wannabes, has accomplished something even more remarkable than the many critics who praised Mean Girls have even realized. Scanning RottenTomatoes.com, one finds accolades to Fey for bringing to the teen comedy genre a darker-than-usual tone, credible sociological underpinnings, and a generally more mature sensibility. A minority of the favorable reviews don't paint it as remarkable at all, just a reasonably enjoyable example of a fairly low-rent genre. One would assume from many of these analyses that the teen movies of note have always been cheery comedies celebrating the classless utopia of high school. But anyone who has actually paid attention to these films over the years knows them to be often-challenging examinations of social inequality. In positing that high school can be an impossibly complex social landscape rife with scheming, emotional abuse, and identity upheaval, Fey and director Mark S. Waters have only continued the tradition of smartly observed comedies of adolescence like Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. What surprised me was not the wry humor or mature themes, but the rather brilliant application of a plot design familiar to anyone who has ever read a book by the venerated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick: the danger of fully becoming the thing that you're only pretending to be.
While it might not be the most original concept in narrative history, it is an altogether different phenomenon than the one we have seen quite a few times before in teen movies. Titles such as Clueless, She's All That, and Can't Buy Me Love uncover the corrupting temptations of popularity and the quickness of teens to jettison their values for a shot in the spotlight. Mean Girls is likely to inspire a similar interpretation among less rigorous critics, but its depiction of behavior and intention is more nuanced; it's not a simple deglamorization of popularity. Protagonist Cady never consciously aspires to the ethos of power, superficiality, and meanness represented by the popular clique, the Plastics. She infiltrates their group hoping to corrupt it from within and cause its implosion. But in acting like a plastic she becomes indistinguishable from those she is self-righteously trying to destroy. And it's not a gradual process, though she certainly gets better at the game over time. She affects the mean girl behavior as soon as she is invited into the group, adding sensitive information about her friends to the Plastics' cruelty encyclopedia, the "Burn Book." She may even be better at it than any of the other girls, and indeed she eventually becomes the "Queen Bee," because she's able to suspend her values completely, believing that the ends will justify the means.
Similarities abound in Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly. The main character, Fred, is an undercover drug agent assigned to infiltrate a small community of users to find information about the pushers. For protection against dirty cops, his superiors are not allowed to know his secret identity, Bob Arctor (one of Dick's more obvious suggestive character names), or even see him. Through the course of his investigation, his handler begins to suspect that Arctor is the ringleader, and assigns Fred, unwittingly, to investigate himself. Because the drug that Fred takes to fit in with the other addicts causes brain damage, and he's forced to treat his alter-ego like a different person, he becomes so confused about where Fred ends and Bob begins that he suffers a complete psychotic break (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club). The distinction between acting like a drug addict and actually being one, existing, as it does, in the mind, ultimately can't save him from the effects of a mind-altering drug.
In the hands of a lesser artist, this kind of sci-fi twist can come off gimmicky and facile (again, think Fight Club), but Dick used his characteristic and much-imitated mind-benders only to serve the narrative and characters. The surprising reveal in A Scanner Darkly is completely germane to the story and essential to its themes because the book is not about the Big Twist, but about drug addiction; it's about how the addict literally loses control of his own life even as he believes he's making his own decisions. Cady, and, it is eventually revealed, every other girl in the school, share a similar delusion. They think that by mastering the system of gossip, back-stabbing, and deception they can subvert it, that they can act mean but stay pure of heart. But Fey shows that any participation in this system will perpetuate it. The Plastics and the girls who hate and scheme against them create mutually assured misery for the entire school.
Movies that show characters obviously degrading themselves privledge their audiences. They diagram with objective clarity a character's weaknesses and poor choices. These cautionary tales are rarely tractable beyond the confines of the artificial narrative world, their lessons difficult to apply without the benefit of ironic distance. Mean Girls pulls the audience down with its ambiguous heroine, and not just through the easy technicque of identification. Cady is as sympathetic as any protagonist, certainly, but the filmmakers also refrain from offering moralistic commentary on her actions. At first, Cady's scheming appears to subvert a corrupt social order. We only realize the magnitude of her errors when she does (or maybe a little before), which makes her subsequent reluctance to come clean all the more emotionally believable. The voice-over technique employed during the last scenes perfectly capture the pain of her self-awareness. Cady's internal monologue admits to everything but she verbally denies any wrongdoing. She's shocked to have become the villain in her own story and believes herself beyond forgiveness, but she desperately clings to the possibility of somehow mastering the situation and making everything better.
Cady's eventual solution, in contrast to the climaxes in most mainstream narratives, is not to master and subdue the other participants in the conflict, but to submit herself to fate and take responsibility for the whole mess. She admits to creating the Burn Book, even though she only wrote a few of its passages, and makes the ultimate teenage atonement by participating in the wildly uncool Math Olympiad. If the resulting social utopia seems farfetched, it could be because the social satire of late has been so reluctant to do anything but observe. Here's a film that dares to suggest solutions to the injustices it catalogues, a film unashamed of its power to persuade. I found it a refreshing salve to the viral cynicism of teen films like Heathers, not to mention the prevailing ethos of egoism.
While it might not be the most original concept in narrative history, it is an altogether different phenomenon than the one we have seen quite a few times before in teen movies. Titles such as Clueless, She's All That, and Can't Buy Me Love uncover the corrupting temptations of popularity and the quickness of teens to jettison their values for a shot in the spotlight. Mean Girls is likely to inspire a similar interpretation among less rigorous critics, but its depiction of behavior and intention is more nuanced; it's not a simple deglamorization of popularity. Protagonist Cady never consciously aspires to the ethos of power, superficiality, and meanness represented by the popular clique, the Plastics. She infiltrates their group hoping to corrupt it from within and cause its implosion. But in acting like a plastic she becomes indistinguishable from those she is self-righteously trying to destroy. And it's not a gradual process, though she certainly gets better at the game over time. She affects the mean girl behavior as soon as she is invited into the group, adding sensitive information about her friends to the Plastics' cruelty encyclopedia, the "Burn Book." She may even be better at it than any of the other girls, and indeed she eventually becomes the "Queen Bee," because she's able to suspend her values completely, believing that the ends will justify the means.
Similarities abound in Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly. The main character, Fred, is an undercover drug agent assigned to infiltrate a small community of users to find information about the pushers. For protection against dirty cops, his superiors are not allowed to know his secret identity, Bob Arctor (one of Dick's more obvious suggestive character names), or even see him. Through the course of his investigation, his handler begins to suspect that Arctor is the ringleader, and assigns Fred, unwittingly, to investigate himself. Because the drug that Fred takes to fit in with the other addicts causes brain damage, and he's forced to treat his alter-ego like a different person, he becomes so confused about where Fred ends and Bob begins that he suffers a complete psychotic break (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club). The distinction between acting like a drug addict and actually being one, existing, as it does, in the mind, ultimately can't save him from the effects of a mind-altering drug.
In the hands of a lesser artist, this kind of sci-fi twist can come off gimmicky and facile (again, think Fight Club), but Dick used his characteristic and much-imitated mind-benders only to serve the narrative and characters. The surprising reveal in A Scanner Darkly is completely germane to the story and essential to its themes because the book is not about the Big Twist, but about drug addiction; it's about how the addict literally loses control of his own life even as he believes he's making his own decisions. Cady, and, it is eventually revealed, every other girl in the school, share a similar delusion. They think that by mastering the system of gossip, back-stabbing, and deception they can subvert it, that they can act mean but stay pure of heart. But Fey shows that any participation in this system will perpetuate it. The Plastics and the girls who hate and scheme against them create mutually assured misery for the entire school.
Movies that show characters obviously degrading themselves privledge their audiences. They diagram with objective clarity a character's weaknesses and poor choices. These cautionary tales are rarely tractable beyond the confines of the artificial narrative world, their lessons difficult to apply without the benefit of ironic distance. Mean Girls pulls the audience down with its ambiguous heroine, and not just through the easy technicque of identification. Cady is as sympathetic as any protagonist, certainly, but the filmmakers also refrain from offering moralistic commentary on her actions. At first, Cady's scheming appears to subvert a corrupt social order. We only realize the magnitude of her errors when she does (or maybe a little before), which makes her subsequent reluctance to come clean all the more emotionally believable. The voice-over technique employed during the last scenes perfectly capture the pain of her self-awareness. Cady's internal monologue admits to everything but she verbally denies any wrongdoing. She's shocked to have become the villain in her own story and believes herself beyond forgiveness, but she desperately clings to the possibility of somehow mastering the situation and making everything better.
Cady's eventual solution, in contrast to the climaxes in most mainstream narratives, is not to master and subdue the other participants in the conflict, but to submit herself to fate and take responsibility for the whole mess. She admits to creating the Burn Book, even though she only wrote a few of its passages, and makes the ultimate teenage atonement by participating in the wildly uncool Math Olympiad. If the resulting social utopia seems farfetched, it could be because the social satire of late has been so reluctant to do anything but observe. Here's a film that dares to suggest solutions to the injustices it catalogues, a film unashamed of its power to persuade. I found it a refreshing salve to the viral cynicism of teen films like Heathers, not to mention the prevailing ethos of egoism.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
For Real: America's Next Top Model
More pre-blogger, unpublished musings from my personal archive:
Television reality shows typically exploit an inherent dishonesty, but perhaps not the one everyone immediately associates with the form. That's the situational lie, which we are all familiar with from countless social pundits and stand-up comedians, who complained incredulously and tiresomely about the first modern reality series: "they get to live in a huge apartment in Manhattan rent-free! That's not the 'Real World'." Since then we've become reconciled to the fact that the environment of the reality show participant is manufactured by the producers. In fact, the recent explosion of variety in reality programming was only possible through the conscious abandonment of any illusion of documentary objectivity. Starting with Survivor, rather than de-emphasizing the artificiality of the situations, reality series have made these the gimmicks of the show, and those string-pulling men behind the curtain have been brought to the front as Barnum-esque ringmasters.
The lie that these shows don't admit, then, is one more subtle and insidious: it's the suggestion that the participants in reality shows are somehow more genuine and appealing than fictional characters in a drama. They are real people, yes, but do they successfully stand in for average folks, as the genre seems to promise? Are they really more universally appealing than characters consciously scripted to represent common types? Certainly, fiction has its shortcomings. Whenever I see a film or television series that overtly panders to some idea of the "common man," I'm reminded of the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, who came to understand the insurmountable barrier between the writer and his audience. But reality does not guarantee universality. When large applicant pools of self-selected volunteers are whittled down according to a conscious or inadvertent agenda, the results are far from the random cross-section you'd hope for, and become functionally identical to the deluded efforts of poor Barton. So far, reality series have attempted to maintain the illusion of randomness by stressing the diversity of participants. But cracks in the facade show, to often comic effect, as when The Real World's formula of measured tokenism (the black one, the gay one, the virgin... but all incredibly hot) became too obvious to ignore. No, in this sense there is very little real about reality television. It just doesn't do it for me, regardless of the millions who insist that it's all in fun; that it may be trashy but it's "great television."
Imagine, then, my reluctance to watch UPN's competitive reality program America's Next Top Model. In addition to my reservations about reality TV, I found the supermodel competition element potentially very distasteful, especially following as it did the final episode of the consistently feminist Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had no desire to watch a group of ambitious Barbies held up to represent typical women everywhere. And yet, here was a series concept that begged to drop this ridiculous illusion of normality. How could you show serious contenders for the title of supermodel as anything less than the physically abnormal beings that they are? This should be a no less meritocratic contest, in its own way, than would be a series out to find America's Next Top Math Whiz, but would the show's producers and impossibly proportioned prototype/host Tyra Banks attempt to fool us into thinking that supermodels are just like regular people? Would this be a twisted Eliza Doolittle scenario out to teach us that a little practice and perseverance, some table-manner lessons and walking with books on the head, can turn any girl into a fashion icon?
The answer was a refreshing, though harsh, "no." Even before the official start of the competition, the judges hijacked the semi-democratic contestant selection process, refusing to fill the required 10 finalists from a weak slate of volunteer candidates, opting instead to bring in two traditionally scouted wildcards. The stunned faces on the passed-over women, who in any normal situation would glow like ethereal fire against the rest of us dull gray heathens, but here were rejected as not having even the remotest potential for success, spoke of shattered illusions about a unapologetically specialized industry. The betrayal seemed to say, "you may be beautiful and sexy, but we're looking for a supermodel." It laid bare the truth that the supermodel look has less to do with beauty than with a compartmentalized uniqueness. So the conventionally attractive were passed over for a group of six-foot tall aliens. Whacked? Yes. But truthful, and despite my ambivalence about reality shows and the modeling industry, I was nevertheless intrigued.
As frank as this characterization of supermodel beauty, the series has been equally brutal in demystifying what it means on a personal level to work as a model. The judges and advisors don't dance around the fact that these women are expected to turn their bodies into products. It's not reactionary fringe feminism to say models are commodified; as represented by this program it's the stated policy of the industry. So the first episode was also a lesson in sobering humiliation. Finalists stripped and were weighed in front of each other and the audience, breaking a taboo of feminine modesty. And then all rules were thrown out the window with a visit to the beauty parlor, where the women lied down on tables and endured painful bikini waxes on national television.
This was some pretty distressing shit to watch. Network censors wouldn't allow the cameras to show everything, of course, but viewers were confronted with the indelible image of a woman having her legs lifted up like a baby who needed a diaper change, then screaming in pain as the hairs were ripped from her crotch. I generally find humiliation television rather loathsome. Some may be intrigued by the question of how debased people can be made to act for money or air time, but once you realize the answer is "very debased indeed," there aren't many more reasons to watch. But while other shows present humiliation against a group of willing, dumb volunteers as the content of the show, here it's at least given context. Banks, who at 30 is a wizened old veteran of the model game, is called upon to constantly remind the contestants that, though these trials may seem cruel and embarrassing, they are perfectly consistent with an occupation that demands absolute submission to the most unrelenting public scrutiny imaginable. You want to be a model? Be careful what you wish for. It's refreshing to see an industry so dependent on the illusion of glamour taking such an unglamorous look at itself.
But for all of the show's likely inadvertent bucking of reality TV convention, it would still be unendurable were it not for some serendipitous casting. For, as much as it is, like American Idol, a talent competition, the show also observes the Real World-esque drama created by forcing its subjects to share an apartment and work together. Through information gleaned from these interviews and confessionals, it's clear that most of the would-be models' life aspirations begin and end with the rewards promised by the show. They've dreamed for years of becoming supermodels, and this is their chance. So a fundamental homogeny belies differences in personality and experience. These conditions should not encourage the most interesting interactions. But one of these women is not like the others.
For those who don't automatically sympathize with fashion industry ambition as the guiding force in life, there's the reluctant Elyse. An atheist and prospective medical school student, the waifish contestant clashed with Christian fundamentalist plus-size model Robin in the first episode (a priceless moment showed Robin confronting Elyse with a bible passage identifying Jesus as the only true God, as if she just hadn't gotten around to reading that part yet) and by the second was about ready to throw in the towel, complaining that her house-mates were too inane to tolerate. In a private, emotional tirade she relentlessly cursed out nearly everyone in the competition, including one of the show staff who had questioned her ability to succeed in medical school. It was a desperate and not entirely fair outburst, but I read into it my own frustration with all the bland reality show stars in the form's short history, and it cemented her appeal for me. And as an emotional catharsis for the conflicted contestant, it seemed to do the trick; by the end of the episode she was recommitted to the competition, as if emboldened by the challenge represented by this hegemony of superficiality.
Events have transpired since then to prove that maybe the greatest advantage a potential Top Model can possess is not, like in other competitive reality series, driving ambition and willingness to play dirty, but instead a steely detachment from the drama. There is no incentive to directly challenge the other models, to exploit weaknesses, or to stab backs. The greatest impediment to success for any of these women is themselves. Elyse and her eventual pal, the joyfully crude, Joan Jett-esque Adrianne, mock the show and the seriousness of their rivals' resolve. The various trials they are expected to perform - which have included getting skankified for a Stuff magazine spread, posing with a snake, and stripping down for a greasy "simulated" nude photo shoot - do not shock them because they have few illusions about the nature of modeling. Most of the others, in contrast, approach each new task with naive sincerity. They're shocked, shocked to learn that they must often subjugate their individuality to the whims of the photographers, make-up artists, and personal trainers. And they each wear their ambition on their shoulders, while Elyse especially has separated her hopes for happiness from the outcome of the competition.
It's this indifference bordering on antagonism to the series' challenges that sheds light on what has been missing from reality television. Though reality participants are ostensibly transparent - constantly confessing their deepest secrets to the audience - they are curiously free of self-awareness when it comes to their relationship to the show (unless, of course, the editors have systematically excised this footage). Most volunteers are either shameless exhibitionists or falsely coy crypto-exhibitionists, and none dare bite the hand that feeds them, so committed are they to remaining as long as possible in the spotlight. Fictional characters are trapped by conflict and endure three harrowing acts to find their way out, but the stars of reality shows have volunteered for the job, and attempt to draw out their suffering indefinitely. This is not drama, this is embarrassing desperation. Elyse brings to Top Model an element so lacking to this newest of TV genres that it has also seemed the most stylistically retrograde: irony.
And yet, the producers of America's Next Top Model seem hopelessly unaware of what makes their show so interesting. Not realizing that the most engaging situations and characters in reality television are discovered, not created, they've packed each episode with false dramatics and bombast. So the weekly climax is drained of all suspense by a laughable ritual ceremony. Banks is forced to give the same speech each week, and then repeat the same sentence over and over to those potentials who will remain: "Congratulations, you're one step closer to becoming America's next top model." If she said this line only once per episode, we might not mind the forced emotional reading she gives it each time. But after that first breathy intonation, it begs to be rattled off in a throwaway manner, or abandoned altogether. Instead, with an actor's resolve she attempts to make each successive reading more convincing, and succeeds only in making the whole enterprise more absurd. Why do reality shows so often treat its ostensibly adult audiences like Teletubby viewers? As if the only way to really get through to us is by bludgeoning us with repetition. I find it very difficult to believe that there is anyone alive who appreciates reality TV on the level that it seems designed to be appreciated. Who can take seriously these ceremonies and artificial rites of passage when they are so ineptly and humorlessly executed? America's Next Top Model shows that the genre itself may not be doomed, despite the best efforts of its practitioners.
Television reality shows typically exploit an inherent dishonesty, but perhaps not the one everyone immediately associates with the form. That's the situational lie, which we are all familiar with from countless social pundits and stand-up comedians, who complained incredulously and tiresomely about the first modern reality series: "they get to live in a huge apartment in Manhattan rent-free! That's not the 'Real World'." Since then we've become reconciled to the fact that the environment of the reality show participant is manufactured by the producers. In fact, the recent explosion of variety in reality programming was only possible through the conscious abandonment of any illusion of documentary objectivity. Starting with Survivor, rather than de-emphasizing the artificiality of the situations, reality series have made these the gimmicks of the show, and those string-pulling men behind the curtain have been brought to the front as Barnum-esque ringmasters.
The lie that these shows don't admit, then, is one more subtle and insidious: it's the suggestion that the participants in reality shows are somehow more genuine and appealing than fictional characters in a drama. They are real people, yes, but do they successfully stand in for average folks, as the genre seems to promise? Are they really more universally appealing than characters consciously scripted to represent common types? Certainly, fiction has its shortcomings. Whenever I see a film or television series that overtly panders to some idea of the "common man," I'm reminded of the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, who came to understand the insurmountable barrier between the writer and his audience. But reality does not guarantee universality. When large applicant pools of self-selected volunteers are whittled down according to a conscious or inadvertent agenda, the results are far from the random cross-section you'd hope for, and become functionally identical to the deluded efforts of poor Barton. So far, reality series have attempted to maintain the illusion of randomness by stressing the diversity of participants. But cracks in the facade show, to often comic effect, as when The Real World's formula of measured tokenism (the black one, the gay one, the virgin... but all incredibly hot) became too obvious to ignore. No, in this sense there is very little real about reality television. It just doesn't do it for me, regardless of the millions who insist that it's all in fun; that it may be trashy but it's "great television."
Imagine, then, my reluctance to watch UPN's competitive reality program America's Next Top Model. In addition to my reservations about reality TV, I found the supermodel competition element potentially very distasteful, especially following as it did the final episode of the consistently feminist Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I had no desire to watch a group of ambitious Barbies held up to represent typical women everywhere. And yet, here was a series concept that begged to drop this ridiculous illusion of normality. How could you show serious contenders for the title of supermodel as anything less than the physically abnormal beings that they are? This should be a no less meritocratic contest, in its own way, than would be a series out to find America's Next Top Math Whiz, but would the show's producers and impossibly proportioned prototype/host Tyra Banks attempt to fool us into thinking that supermodels are just like regular people? Would this be a twisted Eliza Doolittle scenario out to teach us that a little practice and perseverance, some table-manner lessons and walking with books on the head, can turn any girl into a fashion icon?
The answer was a refreshing, though harsh, "no." Even before the official start of the competition, the judges hijacked the semi-democratic contestant selection process, refusing to fill the required 10 finalists from a weak slate of volunteer candidates, opting instead to bring in two traditionally scouted wildcards. The stunned faces on the passed-over women, who in any normal situation would glow like ethereal fire against the rest of us dull gray heathens, but here were rejected as not having even the remotest potential for success, spoke of shattered illusions about a unapologetically specialized industry. The betrayal seemed to say, "you may be beautiful and sexy, but we're looking for a supermodel." It laid bare the truth that the supermodel look has less to do with beauty than with a compartmentalized uniqueness. So the conventionally attractive were passed over for a group of six-foot tall aliens. Whacked? Yes. But truthful, and despite my ambivalence about reality shows and the modeling industry, I was nevertheless intrigued.
As frank as this characterization of supermodel beauty, the series has been equally brutal in demystifying what it means on a personal level to work as a model. The judges and advisors don't dance around the fact that these women are expected to turn their bodies into products. It's not reactionary fringe feminism to say models are commodified; as represented by this program it's the stated policy of the industry. So the first episode was also a lesson in sobering humiliation. Finalists stripped and were weighed in front of each other and the audience, breaking a taboo of feminine modesty. And then all rules were thrown out the window with a visit to the beauty parlor, where the women lied down on tables and endured painful bikini waxes on national television.
This was some pretty distressing shit to watch. Network censors wouldn't allow the cameras to show everything, of course, but viewers were confronted with the indelible image of a woman having her legs lifted up like a baby who needed a diaper change, then screaming in pain as the hairs were ripped from her crotch. I generally find humiliation television rather loathsome. Some may be intrigued by the question of how debased people can be made to act for money or air time, but once you realize the answer is "very debased indeed," there aren't many more reasons to watch. But while other shows present humiliation against a group of willing, dumb volunteers as the content of the show, here it's at least given context. Banks, who at 30 is a wizened old veteran of the model game, is called upon to constantly remind the contestants that, though these trials may seem cruel and embarrassing, they are perfectly consistent with an occupation that demands absolute submission to the most unrelenting public scrutiny imaginable. You want to be a model? Be careful what you wish for. It's refreshing to see an industry so dependent on the illusion of glamour taking such an unglamorous look at itself.
But for all of the show's likely inadvertent bucking of reality TV convention, it would still be unendurable were it not for some serendipitous casting. For, as much as it is, like American Idol, a talent competition, the show also observes the Real World-esque drama created by forcing its subjects to share an apartment and work together. Through information gleaned from these interviews and confessionals, it's clear that most of the would-be models' life aspirations begin and end with the rewards promised by the show. They've dreamed for years of becoming supermodels, and this is their chance. So a fundamental homogeny belies differences in personality and experience. These conditions should not encourage the most interesting interactions. But one of these women is not like the others.
For those who don't automatically sympathize with fashion industry ambition as the guiding force in life, there's the reluctant Elyse. An atheist and prospective medical school student, the waifish contestant clashed with Christian fundamentalist plus-size model Robin in the first episode (a priceless moment showed Robin confronting Elyse with a bible passage identifying Jesus as the only true God, as if she just hadn't gotten around to reading that part yet) and by the second was about ready to throw in the towel, complaining that her house-mates were too inane to tolerate. In a private, emotional tirade she relentlessly cursed out nearly everyone in the competition, including one of the show staff who had questioned her ability to succeed in medical school. It was a desperate and not entirely fair outburst, but I read into it my own frustration with all the bland reality show stars in the form's short history, and it cemented her appeal for me. And as an emotional catharsis for the conflicted contestant, it seemed to do the trick; by the end of the episode she was recommitted to the competition, as if emboldened by the challenge represented by this hegemony of superficiality.
Events have transpired since then to prove that maybe the greatest advantage a potential Top Model can possess is not, like in other competitive reality series, driving ambition and willingness to play dirty, but instead a steely detachment from the drama. There is no incentive to directly challenge the other models, to exploit weaknesses, or to stab backs. The greatest impediment to success for any of these women is themselves. Elyse and her eventual pal, the joyfully crude, Joan Jett-esque Adrianne, mock the show and the seriousness of their rivals' resolve. The various trials they are expected to perform - which have included getting skankified for a Stuff magazine spread, posing with a snake, and stripping down for a greasy "simulated" nude photo shoot - do not shock them because they have few illusions about the nature of modeling. Most of the others, in contrast, approach each new task with naive sincerity. They're shocked, shocked to learn that they must often subjugate their individuality to the whims of the photographers, make-up artists, and personal trainers. And they each wear their ambition on their shoulders, while Elyse especially has separated her hopes for happiness from the outcome of the competition.
It's this indifference bordering on antagonism to the series' challenges that sheds light on what has been missing from reality television. Though reality participants are ostensibly transparent - constantly confessing their deepest secrets to the audience - they are curiously free of self-awareness when it comes to their relationship to the show (unless, of course, the editors have systematically excised this footage). Most volunteers are either shameless exhibitionists or falsely coy crypto-exhibitionists, and none dare bite the hand that feeds them, so committed are they to remaining as long as possible in the spotlight. Fictional characters are trapped by conflict and endure three harrowing acts to find their way out, but the stars of reality shows have volunteered for the job, and attempt to draw out their suffering indefinitely. This is not drama, this is embarrassing desperation. Elyse brings to Top Model an element so lacking to this newest of TV genres that it has also seemed the most stylistically retrograde: irony.
And yet, the producers of America's Next Top Model seem hopelessly unaware of what makes their show so interesting. Not realizing that the most engaging situations and characters in reality television are discovered, not created, they've packed each episode with false dramatics and bombast. So the weekly climax is drained of all suspense by a laughable ritual ceremony. Banks is forced to give the same speech each week, and then repeat the same sentence over and over to those potentials who will remain: "Congratulations, you're one step closer to becoming America's next top model." If she said this line only once per episode, we might not mind the forced emotional reading she gives it each time. But after that first breathy intonation, it begs to be rattled off in a throwaway manner, or abandoned altogether. Instead, with an actor's resolve she attempts to make each successive reading more convincing, and succeeds only in making the whole enterprise more absurd. Why do reality shows so often treat its ostensibly adult audiences like Teletubby viewers? As if the only way to really get through to us is by bludgeoning us with repetition. I find it very difficult to believe that there is anyone alive who appreciates reality TV on the level that it seems designed to be appreciated. Who can take seriously these ceremonies and artificial rites of passage when they are so ineptly and humorlessly executed? America's Next Top Model shows that the genre itself may not be doomed, despite the best efforts of its practitioners.
Saturday, June 01, 2002
24: High Tech Misogyny
OK, I wrote this several years ago, but it's the first time it's ever seen the light of day. Figure I'd use my blog as a clearinghouse for this kind of thing. Please pardon its dated quality:
Near the end of the first hour of Fox's suspense series 24, a female mercenary (Mia Kirshner) seduces a hapless political photographer on a cross-country flight for a tryst in the airliner's bathroom, stealing his security clearance card in flagrante delicto. For her grand exit, and to make sure the photographer doesn't make it to LA, she sets a bomb inside the passenger jet, blows its doors, uses the rush of air out of the cabin to eject herself as the bomb explodes, and parachutes to safety as hundreds perish. She dispatches her duties with such cool and sexy James Bondian aplomb that even post-September 11th audiences may have forgiven her utter ruthlessness and actually cheered her unscathed descent into the Mojave Desert. She immediately strips naked and builds a fire - all the better to provide a TV-friendly silhouette of her form - then buries the ID card with a homing device so her lesbian lover can later retrieve and hold the coveted item in escrow against her untrustworthy employer. This is what those in the television biz call "realism."
One may certainly imagine ways of stealing a man's identity that require less spectacle, and less nudity, but despite its claims to "real-time" verisimilitude, 24 is spy vs. spy fantasy at its most thrillingly absurd. One cannot describe the plot of the series without making it sound daffy: a federal agent becomes a puppet assassin for evil Serbian terrorists bent on revenge against a presidential candidate, himself blackmailed by a conspiracy of shadowy businessmen. It's shamelessly ridiculous, and lots of fun. For such an over-the-top, unapologetically exciting ride, one can forgive a lot of logical transgressions, and indeed one must forgive them in order to enjoy its gleeful implausibility. It is more difficult to forgive its misogyny.
While not forgetting that Mandy, our intrepid hired-gun, has shown no remorse in her slaughter of innocents for personal financial gain, she ironically emerges as one of the only winning female characters we'll see during the show's 24 hour season. By the end of the second episode, in what could be a twisted alternate ending to Thelma & Louise, Mandy chooses to murder her sister-in-crime to protect her underworld cred, and the clash of crushing heartache and steely determination in this scenario recalls the tragic grandeur of a cold-as-ice Clint Eastwood anti-hero. Unfortunately, Mandy's role in the series is through by the time the ubiquitous ticking clock hits 2 AM, leaving us for 22 uniterrupted hours with some of the flattest and most ethically questionable constructions of femininity assembled for any one TV show in years.
The last half-decade has seen the long-overdue exaltation of the female action hero. Since the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, network prime time has hosted several smart, sassy, and, above all, strong women warriors. Though the quality of some of these shows has been spotty, they've each contributed to an important neo-feminist discourse: how does the modern woman reconcile her struggle against an oppressive patriarchy with her desire to take pleasure in her femininity? Buffy must juggle her nightly demon hunting with dating and school. Sydney Bristow on Alias jets around the world subverting an evil spy syndicate while attempting to navigate the murky emotional waters of early adulthood. The secret identity thing has always complicated the lives of superheroes, but only recently have mainstream artists appropriated those themes as particularly valuable to a feminist project. Writers like Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams give tired action genre conflicts new spin by constructing the physical trials to mirror or complicate their hero's personal crises; Buffy's vampires and demons metaphorically resemble her emotional challenges, and Bristow has recently learned that the greatest enemy of all is her own mother.
The fall 2001 television season saw networks struggling to bring something new to an action landscape glutted with female protagonists, and many found the best way to do so was to bring back something old: the male action hero. So the WB brought a fresh take to the ultimate male superhero in its Superman-as-troubled-teen series, Smallville. And in 24, Fox introduced us to Counter Terrorism Unit agent and ex-special forces renegade Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). They seemed to be gambling on the possibility that the popularity of female action heroes was due to the novelty of seeing our expectations reversed, and that audiences were ready to get back to business as usual and root for men. So the genders changed, but both series did betray an influence to the girl power shows that came before. Clark Kent and Jack Bauer are family men who must not only save the planet but also keep their houses in order, and in fact the latter is seen as necessary for the former. But while Smallville seems satisfied to harmlessly riff off of teen angst themes, many already explored by Buffy, 24 takes its father-as-savior template in a far more traditional direction. Though nothing is particularly wrong with Jack Bauer himself, aside from the fact that he's something of a cipher, the world created for him is a pre-feminist anachronism.
If a character like mercenary Mandy were introduced on Buffy, she'd already have her antithesis in Buffy Summers. Buffy would embody, or come to embody, a compromise between forces that threaten to tear strong women apart. There is no such analog on 24. Any joy we take from watching Mandy must come from an appreciation of her physical skills and her stoic adherence to mercenary principles. She wields power, is confident, and survives, but there is little else for her. For the other female characters on the show, there is even less. One potential female ally after another betrays Bauer. First, we meet Jamey Farrell (Karina Arroyave), who is originally cleared as one of the few people at CTU that Jack could trust, but is later revealed to have sold classified information to the very mercenaries attempting to assassinate both Jack and the presidential candidate he is sworn to protect, Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert). When confronted with her crimes, and the threat that her son will learn of her treachery if she doesn't cooperate, she breaks down emotionally and must be violently coerced to give up information upon which lives depend.
We soon learn that emotional fragility is endemic to the show's females. When one of the Senator's aides (Kara Zediker) discovers she's being manipulated by a would-be assassin masquerading as her mysterious European lover, she's recruited to turn the tables on him by planting a transmitter in his wallet. When they next meet she plants the bug, but ultimately cannot control her anger and stabs him in a fit of rage, blowing her simple assignment and ruining Jack's chances to unravel the terrorist conspiracy once and for all. The implied lesson: Hell hath no fury blah blah blah.
Then there's Jack's wife and daughter, Teri (Leslie Hope) and Kimberly (Elisha Cuthbert). To think that its creators may actually consider these characters the strong feminine centers of the show is a disturbing notion. While the writers allow them brief flashes of intelligence and resourcefulness, they remain serially, and to a comic degree, damsels in distress. Kimberly is a lying brat who sets the wheels of the terrorist plot in motion by sneaking out of her house with her equally idiotic friend and a couple of kidnappers. We almost grow to like her by the end of the season thanks to her display of quick thinking in a couple of situations, but the only way the writers can make us regret our hating her mother is by subjecting her to constant suffering ending in death, but by then the damage has been done. Teri's reactions to the admittedly Sisyphean trials of the day run the gamut between hysteria and paralysis. Jack loves her and risks his own life, and the lives of his coworkers, to save her, so committed is he to rebuilding his family after a bitter separation. We understand his abstract matrimonial obligation, but don't quite get why he returned to this exhausting dysfunctional unit in the first place.
When 24 isn't showing us weak women it's showing us how incapable they are of intelligently wielding power. After Jack's actions in the field are misinterpreted, CTU mucky-mucks replace him with Alberta Green (Tamara Tunie), who makes it her mission to arrest Jack despite her staff's pleas. Conversations between Jack's aides make it clear that she is considered a sycophantic hack. I kept expecting her to surprise her doubters and come through for Jack in the end. Though that kind of development wouldn't have been the apex of creativity (seemingly-bitchy boss turns out to be perfectly fair, just misunderstood), it would have been less nauseating than what did happen: she gets her comeuppance upon Jack's return and is expelled from the office, and hence the show. Another career woman put in her place. Duplicitous, power-drunk women infect the parallel story as well. Senator Palmer's untrustworthy, Lady Macbeth of a wife, Sherry (Penny Johnson), is constantly scheming behind his back to undermine his moral turpitude. While his good-hearted son expresses righteous indignation about political compromises, his wife is willing to do anything illegal or immoral to further his career, which she justifies as a means of protecting her family. By the end of the season, she has recruited a clueless, starry-eyed speechwriter (Tanya Wright) to seduce her husband "for his own good," but really so the underling can serve as her spy. This relationship perfectly congeals the dual conceit of the show: the dumb weak woman deceived by the evil bitch. Of course, the senator doesn't take the bait. He refuses her advances and fires her, cementing his infallibility.
The greatest disappointment is the revelation in the penultimate episode that the mole working against CTU from the beginning is the one woman who otherwise might have escaped the show looking both strong and virtuous: Jack's right hand woman and former lover, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke). Given the show's track record by the point she is revealed, and the fact that plot twists in thrillers tend to make villains of those we least expect, I wasn't terribly surprised, but I was disappointed that the show would so completely shut out the possibility that a female character could be as trustworthy as a man. It was also discouraging to note that just as much as the show seems to hate women, it also demonizes sexuality. All of the sexual acts depicted or discussed in the series are either violent (Palmer's daughter is a rape victim, Jack's wife gives herself to a mercenary in order to protect her daughter) or part of a strategic betrayal. From Jack's dalliance with Nina to a pre-homicidal roll-in-the-hay for Kim's dumb friend, no sex act goes unpunished.
The charge of misogyny should not be levied lightly. Misapplied, it can reduce the complexity of an interpretation and reinforce an aura of stifling political correctness. It is, of course, not the responsibility of the show's producers to fill an unspoken quota of acceptable female characterizations. If we truly believe in gender equality, we must admit that women can be just as fallible as men. It's possible that the writers are just trying to buck PC convention by allowing the female characters to be just as unlikable as some of the male characters, and indeed the show has its share of unlikable men: some of Jack's superiors and fellow operatives, many of Senator Palmer's campaign staff, and the primary villains themselves. One might even praise the show for its lack of likable characters, for having the courage to present a vision of humanity usually considered too bleak for television, like a 24 hour Stanley Kubrick film. But 24 wants us to care about its characters, especially Jack and Palmer, two struggling fathers whose attempts at enforcing moral order are undermined at every turn by alternately incompetent and nefarious women. One might still argue for a less binary interpretation. Maybe they're trying to say that it takes a few great people like Jack and Palmer, who just happen to be men, to combat the exceptionally wicked and the mediocre masses. But the goodness of the good characters is so tied up in their masculinity, while the evil that women do takes the form of weaknesses traditionally attributed to femininity: emotional imbalance and hysteria, wrathful jealousy, inability to lead, lack of intelligence. The contrast between the characterizations of David and Sherry Palmer perfectly reflect this bias. While David's presidential potential is depicted as a natural extension of his sage fatherly concerns, Sherry's motherly instincts manifest themselves in a manner comparable to a threatened animal protecting her young. On 24, fatherhood is lofty and Apollonian, signifying strength, incorruptibility, and reason. Motherhood is base and animal, evoking wrath and deception. Sure, these same associations were beautifully described in some of Shakespeare's works, but even Hamlet's father warned the troubled prince not to attack his mother, and hopefully our understanding of the differences between women and men has evolved since the 16th century.
Still, it's kind of hard to get angry at a series that is so fabulously ridiculous. When I watch the show, the dearth of interesting female characters doesn't infuriate me, it just makes me frustrated, annoyed even. Annoyed that a show so potentially ground-breaking due to its form and style is fundamentally derailed by laughably ancient attitudes towards femininity. The reason why 24 fails at greatness is that despite thrilling plot twists, a novel formula, and whiz-bang techno-spectacle, it's hard to really care about the show. Even if you believe that there is no absolute political or cultural responsibility to write interesting and honest female characters, it's certainly a dramatic and aesthetic necessity, especially in light of how other shows have grown our expectations. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great show not just because its mythical structure has unfolded in a way both exciting and fairly unique to television, but also because it has proven equally engaging in its exploration of character and gender. We can't expect every action series to champion only female superheroes. There is certainly room for strong and interesting men in the televisual spectrum, but 24 is proof that philosophical progress in pop culture is extremely tenuous. If the culture speaks to itself through movies and television, as some have suggested, its discourse is in danger of regression. Some critics were frustrated that 24 was not the unambiguous hit with audiences that they almost demanded it should be, but maybe audiences just demanded more.
Near the end of the first hour of Fox's suspense series 24, a female mercenary (Mia Kirshner) seduces a hapless political photographer on a cross-country flight for a tryst in the airliner's bathroom, stealing his security clearance card in flagrante delicto. For her grand exit, and to make sure the photographer doesn't make it to LA, she sets a bomb inside the passenger jet, blows its doors, uses the rush of air out of the cabin to eject herself as the bomb explodes, and parachutes to safety as hundreds perish. She dispatches her duties with such cool and sexy James Bondian aplomb that even post-September 11th audiences may have forgiven her utter ruthlessness and actually cheered her unscathed descent into the Mojave Desert. She immediately strips naked and builds a fire - all the better to provide a TV-friendly silhouette of her form - then buries the ID card with a homing device so her lesbian lover can later retrieve and hold the coveted item in escrow against her untrustworthy employer. This is what those in the television biz call "realism."
One may certainly imagine ways of stealing a man's identity that require less spectacle, and less nudity, but despite its claims to "real-time" verisimilitude, 24 is spy vs. spy fantasy at its most thrillingly absurd. One cannot describe the plot of the series without making it sound daffy: a federal agent becomes a puppet assassin for evil Serbian terrorists bent on revenge against a presidential candidate, himself blackmailed by a conspiracy of shadowy businessmen. It's shamelessly ridiculous, and lots of fun. For such an over-the-top, unapologetically exciting ride, one can forgive a lot of logical transgressions, and indeed one must forgive them in order to enjoy its gleeful implausibility. It is more difficult to forgive its misogyny.
While not forgetting that Mandy, our intrepid hired-gun, has shown no remorse in her slaughter of innocents for personal financial gain, she ironically emerges as one of the only winning female characters we'll see during the show's 24 hour season. By the end of the second episode, in what could be a twisted alternate ending to Thelma & Louise, Mandy chooses to murder her sister-in-crime to protect her underworld cred, and the clash of crushing heartache and steely determination in this scenario recalls the tragic grandeur of a cold-as-ice Clint Eastwood anti-hero. Unfortunately, Mandy's role in the series is through by the time the ubiquitous ticking clock hits 2 AM, leaving us for 22 uniterrupted hours with some of the flattest and most ethically questionable constructions of femininity assembled for any one TV show in years.
The last half-decade has seen the long-overdue exaltation of the female action hero. Since the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, network prime time has hosted several smart, sassy, and, above all, strong women warriors. Though the quality of some of these shows has been spotty, they've each contributed to an important neo-feminist discourse: how does the modern woman reconcile her struggle against an oppressive patriarchy with her desire to take pleasure in her femininity? Buffy must juggle her nightly demon hunting with dating and school. Sydney Bristow on Alias jets around the world subverting an evil spy syndicate while attempting to navigate the murky emotional waters of early adulthood. The secret identity thing has always complicated the lives of superheroes, but only recently have mainstream artists appropriated those themes as particularly valuable to a feminist project. Writers like Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams give tired action genre conflicts new spin by constructing the physical trials to mirror or complicate their hero's personal crises; Buffy's vampires and demons metaphorically resemble her emotional challenges, and Bristow has recently learned that the greatest enemy of all is her own mother.
The fall 2001 television season saw networks struggling to bring something new to an action landscape glutted with female protagonists, and many found the best way to do so was to bring back something old: the male action hero. So the WB brought a fresh take to the ultimate male superhero in its Superman-as-troubled-teen series, Smallville. And in 24, Fox introduced us to Counter Terrorism Unit agent and ex-special forces renegade Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). They seemed to be gambling on the possibility that the popularity of female action heroes was due to the novelty of seeing our expectations reversed, and that audiences were ready to get back to business as usual and root for men. So the genders changed, but both series did betray an influence to the girl power shows that came before. Clark Kent and Jack Bauer are family men who must not only save the planet but also keep their houses in order, and in fact the latter is seen as necessary for the former. But while Smallville seems satisfied to harmlessly riff off of teen angst themes, many already explored by Buffy, 24 takes its father-as-savior template in a far more traditional direction. Though nothing is particularly wrong with Jack Bauer himself, aside from the fact that he's something of a cipher, the world created for him is a pre-feminist anachronism.
If a character like mercenary Mandy were introduced on Buffy, she'd already have her antithesis in Buffy Summers. Buffy would embody, or come to embody, a compromise between forces that threaten to tear strong women apart. There is no such analog on 24. Any joy we take from watching Mandy must come from an appreciation of her physical skills and her stoic adherence to mercenary principles. She wields power, is confident, and survives, but there is little else for her. For the other female characters on the show, there is even less. One potential female ally after another betrays Bauer. First, we meet Jamey Farrell (Karina Arroyave), who is originally cleared as one of the few people at CTU that Jack could trust, but is later revealed to have sold classified information to the very mercenaries attempting to assassinate both Jack and the presidential candidate he is sworn to protect, Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert). When confronted with her crimes, and the threat that her son will learn of her treachery if she doesn't cooperate, she breaks down emotionally and must be violently coerced to give up information upon which lives depend.
We soon learn that emotional fragility is endemic to the show's females. When one of the Senator's aides (Kara Zediker) discovers she's being manipulated by a would-be assassin masquerading as her mysterious European lover, she's recruited to turn the tables on him by planting a transmitter in his wallet. When they next meet she plants the bug, but ultimately cannot control her anger and stabs him in a fit of rage, blowing her simple assignment and ruining Jack's chances to unravel the terrorist conspiracy once and for all. The implied lesson: Hell hath no fury blah blah blah.
Then there's Jack's wife and daughter, Teri (Leslie Hope) and Kimberly (Elisha Cuthbert). To think that its creators may actually consider these characters the strong feminine centers of the show is a disturbing notion. While the writers allow them brief flashes of intelligence and resourcefulness, they remain serially, and to a comic degree, damsels in distress. Kimberly is a lying brat who sets the wheels of the terrorist plot in motion by sneaking out of her house with her equally idiotic friend and a couple of kidnappers. We almost grow to like her by the end of the season thanks to her display of quick thinking in a couple of situations, but the only way the writers can make us regret our hating her mother is by subjecting her to constant suffering ending in death, but by then the damage has been done. Teri's reactions to the admittedly Sisyphean trials of the day run the gamut between hysteria and paralysis. Jack loves her and risks his own life, and the lives of his coworkers, to save her, so committed is he to rebuilding his family after a bitter separation. We understand his abstract matrimonial obligation, but don't quite get why he returned to this exhausting dysfunctional unit in the first place.
When 24 isn't showing us weak women it's showing us how incapable they are of intelligently wielding power. After Jack's actions in the field are misinterpreted, CTU mucky-mucks replace him with Alberta Green (Tamara Tunie), who makes it her mission to arrest Jack despite her staff's pleas. Conversations between Jack's aides make it clear that she is considered a sycophantic hack. I kept expecting her to surprise her doubters and come through for Jack in the end. Though that kind of development wouldn't have been the apex of creativity (seemingly-bitchy boss turns out to be perfectly fair, just misunderstood), it would have been less nauseating than what did happen: she gets her comeuppance upon Jack's return and is expelled from the office, and hence the show. Another career woman put in her place. Duplicitous, power-drunk women infect the parallel story as well. Senator Palmer's untrustworthy, Lady Macbeth of a wife, Sherry (Penny Johnson), is constantly scheming behind his back to undermine his moral turpitude. While his good-hearted son expresses righteous indignation about political compromises, his wife is willing to do anything illegal or immoral to further his career, which she justifies as a means of protecting her family. By the end of the season, she has recruited a clueless, starry-eyed speechwriter (Tanya Wright) to seduce her husband "for his own good," but really so the underling can serve as her spy. This relationship perfectly congeals the dual conceit of the show: the dumb weak woman deceived by the evil bitch. Of course, the senator doesn't take the bait. He refuses her advances and fires her, cementing his infallibility.
The greatest disappointment is the revelation in the penultimate episode that the mole working against CTU from the beginning is the one woman who otherwise might have escaped the show looking both strong and virtuous: Jack's right hand woman and former lover, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke). Given the show's track record by the point she is revealed, and the fact that plot twists in thrillers tend to make villains of those we least expect, I wasn't terribly surprised, but I was disappointed that the show would so completely shut out the possibility that a female character could be as trustworthy as a man. It was also discouraging to note that just as much as the show seems to hate women, it also demonizes sexuality. All of the sexual acts depicted or discussed in the series are either violent (Palmer's daughter is a rape victim, Jack's wife gives herself to a mercenary in order to protect her daughter) or part of a strategic betrayal. From Jack's dalliance with Nina to a pre-homicidal roll-in-the-hay for Kim's dumb friend, no sex act goes unpunished.
The charge of misogyny should not be levied lightly. Misapplied, it can reduce the complexity of an interpretation and reinforce an aura of stifling political correctness. It is, of course, not the responsibility of the show's producers to fill an unspoken quota of acceptable female characterizations. If we truly believe in gender equality, we must admit that women can be just as fallible as men. It's possible that the writers are just trying to buck PC convention by allowing the female characters to be just as unlikable as some of the male characters, and indeed the show has its share of unlikable men: some of Jack's superiors and fellow operatives, many of Senator Palmer's campaign staff, and the primary villains themselves. One might even praise the show for its lack of likable characters, for having the courage to present a vision of humanity usually considered too bleak for television, like a 24 hour Stanley Kubrick film. But 24 wants us to care about its characters, especially Jack and Palmer, two struggling fathers whose attempts at enforcing moral order are undermined at every turn by alternately incompetent and nefarious women. One might still argue for a less binary interpretation. Maybe they're trying to say that it takes a few great people like Jack and Palmer, who just happen to be men, to combat the exceptionally wicked and the mediocre masses. But the goodness of the good characters is so tied up in their masculinity, while the evil that women do takes the form of weaknesses traditionally attributed to femininity: emotional imbalance and hysteria, wrathful jealousy, inability to lead, lack of intelligence. The contrast between the characterizations of David and Sherry Palmer perfectly reflect this bias. While David's presidential potential is depicted as a natural extension of his sage fatherly concerns, Sherry's motherly instincts manifest themselves in a manner comparable to a threatened animal protecting her young. On 24, fatherhood is lofty and Apollonian, signifying strength, incorruptibility, and reason. Motherhood is base and animal, evoking wrath and deception. Sure, these same associations were beautifully described in some of Shakespeare's works, but even Hamlet's father warned the troubled prince not to attack his mother, and hopefully our understanding of the differences between women and men has evolved since the 16th century.
Still, it's kind of hard to get angry at a series that is so fabulously ridiculous. When I watch the show, the dearth of interesting female characters doesn't infuriate me, it just makes me frustrated, annoyed even. Annoyed that a show so potentially ground-breaking due to its form and style is fundamentally derailed by laughably ancient attitudes towards femininity. The reason why 24 fails at greatness is that despite thrilling plot twists, a novel formula, and whiz-bang techno-spectacle, it's hard to really care about the show. Even if you believe that there is no absolute political or cultural responsibility to write interesting and honest female characters, it's certainly a dramatic and aesthetic necessity, especially in light of how other shows have grown our expectations. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great show not just because its mythical structure has unfolded in a way both exciting and fairly unique to television, but also because it has proven equally engaging in its exploration of character and gender. We can't expect every action series to champion only female superheroes. There is certainly room for strong and interesting men in the televisual spectrum, but 24 is proof that philosophical progress in pop culture is extremely tenuous. If the culture speaks to itself through movies and television, as some have suggested, its discourse is in danger of regression. Some critics were frustrated that 24 was not the unambiguous hit with audiences that they almost demanded it should be, but maybe audiences just demanded more.
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