Enterprise came on with a clear objective to both do something distinctly new, and get back to the basics of Trek. After the lacklustre final years of Deep Space Nine and the (with all due respect to friends and family who enjoy it) horrifically pointles Voyager, Paramount needed to revive the Star Trek 'franchise' (as they so lovingly call it), and for a little while, it seemed to work.
The first season was genuinely interesting. It didn't look and feel like standard Trek. The show was just called Enterprise, without the Star Trek part. The theme wasn't a stirring bit of orchestral music, and though the theme they did choose sucks so bad I want to gauge my ears out when I hear it, I do respect that they were just trying to do something new. The show itself tried to get away from the lazy-writer-syndrome of earlier Trek shows. There were no transporters, no shields, no universal translator, and Star Fleet was not the big boy on the block when it came to military might. In one of the first-season episodes, a small team ends up experiencing paranoid visions because of a hullicinagenic plant that's on the surface of the planet. They were constantly stymied by the (for Trek) mundane dangers of space travel. Season 2 trundled along without much fanfare or, to be honest, originality, and the flag-waving circle-jerk that was Season 3 was just offensive.
Then, we were told the show was going to be cancelled, and there was much rejoicing. I was still watching, still nominally enjoying it, but the dissappointed fans were already in full attack mode, much as they have been for both Star Wars and The Martrix since their prequels and sequels (repsectively).
The fourth season has been, ironically, one of their best. They've found a middle-ground between the season-long plot threads that have become the norm in even sit coms, and the more traditional isolated episodes. Somewhat like old Dr. Who storylines, a single narrative went on for four shows, so you got the sense of serialised fiction, complete with Sunday matinée-style cliffhangers, without having to keep watching for the whole damn year. They also started making contact with the touch-stones of Trek's backstory. Some of their efforts were less well-recieved than others, but for long-time fans, linking the Eugenics Wars to Khan's 'augments' to an ancestor of Dr. Nunian Sung, the guy who built Data, was really cool. It showed how the whole Trek history is intermingled, instead of just being a series of isolated incidents... hey, just like the format of the season itself! Nifty that, no?
The most recent four-episode 'arc' is all about that wacky Mirror universe that we saw way back in the original series and in Deep Space Nine. That was all a long preamble to get to my point. In this version of the Mirror universe, the Terran Empire having defeated and enslaved the Vulcans (and stolen their technology!) is on its rise to power. We encounter the evil version of the Enterprise crew and, hey look!, all the women are wearing cleavage- and belly-revealing uniforms.
Now, far be it for me to complain about seeing Linda Park and Jolene Blalock with less clothing on. In fact, I'm quite distinctly not complaining, but the representation is really interesting. Not only are the characters wearing less clothes, but Hoshi (Park's character) basically sleeps her way to a position of power on the ship, and this perfectly parallels the fact that the Mirror versions of the women of DS9 were not only hyper-sexualised versions of their 'real' selves, but seemed to be universally bisexual.
Kira Nurese encounters her dark double, and it's very clear, in a particularly good two-shot, that the double is more turned on by the idea of doing herself than she has ever been in her life. The point of the moment is that Dark Kira is a total narcisist, of course, but we can't deny the 'fan service' of the moment. Trek fans are notoriously undersexed, and often develop crushes on the characters.
My point, and I do have one, is that I find fascinating the fact that the 'evil' versions of these women seem to have, as a matter of course, hyped-up sex drives. The obvious representation is that only evil, decadent, imperial, tyrannical women actually like sex, the whores. American media has always had a love-hate relationship with sex. It sells movies, but we're not supposed to show it, but we can show it if we represent it as sinful. That's why the old dime-store novels from the 50s always involve sex-hungry men and women who inevitably get killed in car crashes or end up begging on the street. It's fine to display whatever kind of sexual depravity you want, as long as those who take part in it are punished in the end. The exact same thing was true of mobster movies back in the 30s and 40s (check out the original Scarface if you don't believe me).
Although I have a deep, almost genetic, love of Star Trek in general, one of the things I love about it is how sappily rebelious it tries to be. Sure, it screws up a lot, but the original show and TNG had some (ridiculous, blindingly-obvious, over-the-top) moments of social commentary, and they usually pointed to something that was greviously wrong with the present day that the people in the Trek universe had solved, and even found laughable and bizarre that we still struggled with it. To have Enterprise, which I also quite like, revert to exactly what Gene Roddenberry didn't want it to be, a flag-waving, status quo-supporting, bit of mindless sex and violence, actually really hurts. I feel betrayed. Ironically, I'm just as happy that it's cancelled and that there will be no new Trek for a while. It's time a take a break, regroup, and remember what the point of this whole thing was: one lovable old drunk's vision of a better future.
Preacher is an incredible series. The premise of the story, God shirks his job and the world is on its own, perfectly parallels the emotional states of the characters (big surprise): people who all feel lost or abandoned, without a rudder to guide them. Sounds like a pretty classic "God is dead" dillemna, to me.
The full roster of characters starts to get very long, but Jesse and Cassaday are really the core. Through the story, both them find the things that they didn't have that left them without direction. Jesse is between worlds. In one, a real man is guided by the same values as John Wayne, and in the other, a real man reads Feminist theory. Only by accepting some of his own (ellegedly) feminine emotions (i.e., by learning to cry) does he find his own direction.
Cassaday is bereft of humanity, a psychological state symbolically represented by the fact that he's a vampire. He has the odd ability to screw up the lives of everyone around him. It's always someone else's responsibility to pull him out of the pile of shit he builds more himself, but it's always his fault for burrying himself in that pile of shit to begin with. Deep down, he doesn't think much of himself and covers it with an equal measure of sarcasm and bravado. Only when he honestly asks for forgiveness, instead of just grovelling to fulfill his own vision of his lack of self-worth, does he finally break out of his emotionally destructive behaviour. He begs that his friend, a 'preacher' not less, forgive him his sins and help him to over come them.
There are some real thematic problems with the story, but they mostly reflect the rudderlessness of the story itself, so they're oddly appropriate. A major theme of the series is the question "what does it mean to be a 'man'?" The narrative answers that question in many different, often conflicting, ways. Often, the answer is "Fart jokes and violence," the stereotypical masculinity we see in the West. Just as often, though, the answer is "maturity and sophistication," which includes a healthy dose of what I'd label Feminist thinking.
Preacher is a complex book that presents extremely difficult questions and then takes a stab at answering them. The answers aren't always right on the money, but I have to give Ennis credit for even asking them, especially in a medium with a very specific readership (guys in their 20s, for the most part) that is also linked to a genre that is typically extremely narrow in its gendered and political content (superheroes). Preacher's flaws make it more interesting than if it presented a simple, universal answer to the questions it asks.
This is what the next Superman will look like, courtesy of Brian Singer's upcoming film Superman Returns.
I looked at this picture for a bit, wrote some fan-boy entries on a discussion forum about comics, came back to the picture, wrote some more, couldn't figure out why I really, really don't like it, but then I finally figured it out. See, body types go in and out of style. We can see that really clearly with women's bodies. One decade, we want big boobs and hips, the next we want waifs, the next we want muscled warrior-babes. The trend in men's bodies' right this second is the gymnast-going-on-ballet-dancer look. It's muscled, fit, and totally without body fat, but it's also boyish. Thin neck, not too-wide shoulders, and definatley not the barrel chest of yesteryear.
Too bad that's not what Superman looks like and has neer looked like. Too bad Singer has decided to go with an actor who has the (let's face it) almost androgynous look that oh-so stylish right now. 'Cause, you see, the Superman costume is designed, consciously or not, for the "big, strappin' lad" body. Without the thick neck and the huge chest and shoulders, he's just some skinny kid in tights. The reason that the iconic S-sheild look so dinky in that shot is that it's sitting on a chest that's too small. Routh isn't just too young for the role (especially so considering that the plot is that Superman returns to Earth after several years absence and finds that the whole planet has moved on); he's just too damn little.
I find most of the wierd moments in The Matrix can be explained by one simple idea: Neo is kinda dumb. Seriously. He just ain't too swift. He's the One, and he's got the knack for hacking the code of the matrix itself, but when it comes right down to it, he's sorta slow. He has to have things eplained to him a couple of times. He doesn't tend to act all on his own; he needs someone to direct him. I realise this is probably a result of Keanu's lack of acting ability, more than anything else, but it fits the movies, for me.
Neo represents a certain kind of person, a passive person who doesn't think for himself unless absolutely necessary. He's a decent enough guy, and his brain functions just as well as anyone else's, but because of a lifetime of living in a world where all his decisions are effectively made for him (once again, the matrix stands in for American society as we know it) have made him prone to gormlessly ignoring the world around him. He doesn't expend energy on thinking things through or analysing his surroundings. He just does what he's told.
That's why the ideological climax of the movie is Smith asking him "Why? Why!? Why do you persist?!?!" and Neo responding "Because I choose to." It's a banal answer. It means nothing, but it signifies Neo fully realising that he can make choices, he can choose to fight or not to fight, to take the red pill or the blue pill, to save Morpheus or save himself, to rescue Trinity or accept the domination of the machines, etc, etc. Those movies are all about choice, not just the existence of free will, but the actual excercising of that freedom and that will.
The return of the Doctor to his rightful home at the BBC is cause for celebration amongst nerds and geeks of a great variety of nations and cultures. His seventeen-year absence has been felt by us all. I wasn't a huge fan of Dr. Who. It was just before my time, I think, but like many others I have fond memories of the the buck-toothed Tom Baker years (much of it written by Douglas Adams, by the way), and the mere sound of the TARDIS grinding its way through the space-time continuum does get my blood going. And, of course, I can vividly remember the first time I heard a Dalek scream "Ex-ter-mi-nate!" and how much the very appearance of one of those knobbly things made me want to hide behind the couch.
I find the The Doctor interesting for a lot of the same reasons I find someone like Superman or Spider-man interesting. He's been around for several generations now (the show started in 1964, if memory serves), and not only has show been through dozens of writers and the character been through (depending on how you count) nine different actors, but the continuity of the show itself takes those shifting actors into account. For those who don't know (and if you don't, how in the world did you stumble on this blog?), Time Lords get thirteen 'regenerations,' which means that they spontaneously regenerate into a new body every so often, possibly as a result of great physical trauma (I haven't figured that part out).
The upshot is that every couple of years there's a whole new actor with a whole new personality and a whole new character, but who is, never the less, the Doctor. Tom Baker, the guy with the dearstalker and the long scarf, is probably the best known, but some of the other actors have become pretty iconic, too.
What's interesting, and what it all has to do with superheroes, is the fact that the show has a built-in capacity to change with the time, update itself every few years, and conveniently avoid charges of being inconsistent. It maintains the slippery 'neverwhen' of comics, except relocated to England. There are bits of the mythology that can't change. For example, the TARDIS must be a mid-50s, British emergy police phone box, but that blue box is, by now, far more associated with the show than with 50s Bobby's.
After seventeen years, the new Doctor is a very different figure than the ones I knew. He's at more engaging, more energetic, and less aloof, but also far more apt to point out how alien he is, and how narrow human perception is. By the same token, his human companion, Rose (the ultimate British 'girl next door'), gets a lot more attention paid to her circumstances, the reality and difficulty of picking up and going on a time jaunt. By the fourth episode of this series, we already see the after effects of her dissapearance: a heart-broken mother, and an ex-boyfriend who's hassled by the police for a year because he's the prime suspect in her 'murder.'
These two things are related. On the one hand, we have a clear effort to put (for lack of a better word) domestic morality in a larger perspective. In sci-fi, references to 'human' morality almost always mean the morality of whatever culture produced the story. For American shows, it's American morality. For a British show, it's British morality. We can follow this trend down the line. Given that national/cultural perspective, the Doctor's almost constant call for understanding the alien 'Other,' for compassion where humans usually show violence, for reason and kindness where humans how fear is a metaphorical call for the viewer, British or otherwise, to extend that same compassion to the hum 'Others' among us. The Doctor's cosmic perspective is an example of the kind of global perspective we ought to adopt. It's not a measured, calculated plan. It doesn't call for a new British foreign policy. It's actually quite simplistic, but it's never the less quite a positive message.
On the other hand, we have great value placed on 'the local,' on Rose's life and her concerns. While it's all great fun to travel to the year 5,000,000 and witness the destruction of the Earth, her mum's putting up posters that say "Have you seen my daughter?" In conversation on the internet (hello, fellow goons), someone recently said that the perspective on this show has changed. Whereas, previously we always followed the Doctor through the various companions and adventures that he had, this show, if Billie Piper stays on the cast after Eccleston leaves, will actually follow the human girl, Rose, as the Doctor fades in and out of view. She's not quite the star, but she is our view into the Doctor's bizarre and frightening world.
One way or the other, cosmic/global or mundane local, this incarnation of Dr. Who focuses on, ironically, human experience in the context of events of galactic proportion. The tendancy in most big, flashy, science-fiction stories is to only do the latter. The good ones manage to do both, the mediocre ones do one well at the expense of the other, and the bad ones do neither.
Not a review or a thought on pop culture, but I just had to share this. Go to the drop-down window and look for "Thor Norse God."
I do, and will always, have a soft spot for science geeks with an eye for art.
I'm not a huge fan of Frank Miller. Dark Knight Returns pretty much bored the crap out of me, and Sin City was basically more of the same: gargantuan, hypermasculine men whose identity seems to be based solely on how and how many ways they can commit grevious bodily harm to other people. Sin City's innovation is that it also includes hyperfeminine women, mostly prostitutes, who wear little to nothing most of the time and exist pretty much for the purposes of titilating the (male) reader.
Now, I want to make something clear, here. I like looking at women with little to nothing on. It's a thrill. I am, in fact, titilated by it. That doesn't change the fact that, as someone who knows a thing or two about storytelling, I think it's a cheap trick employed by lazy storytellers. The women of Sin City have almost as little personality as they do clothing, and the lack of the latter doesn't make up for the lack of the former. Every time I see those costumes I am pulled out of the story. My belief is no longer suspended because I know for a fact that those women are only present for the oggling pleasure of the audience. Nudity, eroticism, that's actually located within a plot is fantastic; nudity that is there to cover for a lack of plot just insults my intelligence.
I don't want to sound like I hated the books, or the movie, for that matter. What a good friend of mine calls "the lizard brain" was highly entertained by Marv beating the living shit out of people or by watching Miho wield twin katanas. I absolutely enjoyed the movie. There's no question of that. But I didn't respect it.
What is remarkable about Sin City is how slavishly faithful Robert Rodriguez is to Frank Miller's original material. The framing of shots is almost identical to the framing of panels in the books. The dialogue is almost directly from the book, with very little alteration, although there is a great deal removed for the sake of time. This is the second most direct translation from comics to film I've ever seen (the first is The Maxx, an animated series that actually used the original art and reproduced every issue of the comic series, word for word, shot for shot).
However, there are certain very real logistical differences between cinema and sequential art. The pacing of the film constantly ruins suspension of disbelief. A comic panel captures a single moment of time, in its visuals, but can span minutes in terms of text. A fleating thought that requires hundreds of words to express can happen in a fraction of a second of internal narrative time. In a film, time always flows. Unless the director uses slow motion or stills, we can't always sit and listen to "hard boiled" voice overs that explain every nuance of a situation.
Rodriguez and Miller utterly failed to pace this movie like a movie. Instead, what we have is a live-action comicbook, an adaptation so direct that it adds almost nothing to our experience of the original, except for the fact that we get to oggle "real" breasts (the reality of cinematic reproduction is a tricky proposition, so I'm not sure how "real" we can actually say those breasts are, and that doesn't even enter into the question of whether or not they were actually "real" at all, even if you're in the room with them).
The same problem comes through in the dialogue. There are words that are meant for the page, and there are words meant for the stage, and they're distinctly different. Using Miller's textual dialogue in a performative medium was a bad choice. I'd have no problem with the hard-boiled tradition of using 40s slang in an-almost-but-not-quite parodic way, but that's different than bad dialogue. I actually laughed out loud and some of the lines, and I'm not sure I was supposed to. I suspect that Rodriguez told his actors to be a little stiff, and little stilted, a little contrived in their performances. The opening scene feels like Bruce Willis is making fun of 40s detective films, but as the movie continues, the parody just becomes annoying.
The one performance that really works is Mickey Rourke as Marv, the man-mountain who gets hit by a car four times in less than a minute and gets up again. With his face covered in several layers of rubber-cement, Rourke manages to look cartoony enough that we don't mind his character being flat and parodic. The Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) has the same release from good acting due to a full-body suit that makes him look like a hobbit that fell in a vat of toxic waste (which is ironic with Elijah Wood in the cast!). If only the whole cast were a little less than human, they might be more believable. Or, if only it were a comic book, in which the cast was actually drawings, then we wouldn't have the problem of suspension of disbelief at all.
Sin City, the movie, doesn't need to exist. There's already a series of comics that do the job better. There seems to be a wierd cultural assumption that any time we read a good book that the natural progression is for it to be made into a movie, as if movies are our highest form of expression. Why isn't the book enough? Why can't we just enjoy it for what it is, instead of insisting that it turn into something else that can't possibly capture that experience?
PS: is it really necessary that the Sin City logo on the screen had a little (R) next to it? Fuck. Ruined that cool-ass title sequence, for me.