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Adventure vs. Marquee Moon

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 Compare and Contrast Television’s second album, ‘Adventure’ with its predecessor: the seminal ‘Marquee Moon’.

‘Seminal’ is such a disgustingly overused word in rock criticism, but there’s no doubting how many British and American bands were spawned out of Television’s singular songwriting, aggressive yet glowing guitar attack and non-Bonham drumming. You can also hear plenty of copies of Tom Verlaine’s strangled yelp and Romantic, Impressionistic and Surreal lyrics in many singers popping up from the early 80’s onward. I’m not saying they were on their own, or even that they were best at it – but they sure are there. For one album at least… Of course The Sex Pistols only really released one album and ‘changed everything’ too, if you are to listen to some people….. I’d like to show that Television completed at least 2 great albums in the following transmission:

OPENING CREDITS

TV = Tom Verlaine – lead vocals, guitars, organ, piano, slide guitar and guitar solos on Foxhole, Carried Away, The Fire and The Dream’s Dream.

RL = Richard Lloyd- backing vocals, guitars and guitar solos on Glory, Days, Careful and Ain’t That Nothing.

FF = Fred Frith – backing vocals and bass guitar.

BF = Billy Ficca – drums and jazz.

THEME SONG

‘Adventure’ could never live up to ‘Marquee Moon’. Like ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’, ‘Spiral Scratch’, ‘The Ramones’, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and Talking Heads’ first albums – ‘Marquee Moon’ has created its own genre within punk and new wave. It’s a shame; coz here is where the show gets really interesting! ‘Adventure’ is exactly the right second album to put out after such a game-changer. It’s a step down, but it’s also a step across… it’s not called ‘Adventure’ for nothing!

PART ONE

It starts from the album cover. It’s still the same bold and plain group portrait with a large border and clear titles, but ‘Marquee Moon’ is in midnight blues and blacks – ‘Adventure’ in fiery afternoon oranges and reds. The band photo itself shows a difference from the bleeding saturated colours of ‘Marquee Moon’ to the crisp, over-lit Adventure line-up. Words could be written about the actual band pose here: RL going from insouciant glance to a look to the floor, FF again looking like he’s just jumped into the shot and TV out front and in charge, but trying not to look it. Eyes straight ahead.
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The only tune that could have really fitted on ‘Marquee Moon’ is ‘Foxhole’ and it is the only mainstream visual account of the real Television, recorded for The Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC2 in 1978. Give Thanks to the Beeb!
 

 
GLORY opens the album like a winner. An up tempo tune like ‘See No Evil’’ RL delivers a typically brilliant solo – clean, precise and angular. In and Out. The sound is classic, yet new – after all the fuzzy, phasey, echoed excesses of the early 70’s: this is Fender guitar into Fender amp and turn it up… The approach (unlike TV’s) is one of beauty and simplicity. I read once how he preferred the first two Jimi Hendrix albums against all the rest because Chas Chandler would not allow excess. He really takes that to heart in his soloing throughout Television’s career. Try ‘Elevation’ on Marquee Moon to see what I mean: sharp corners and exotic bends – but over in seconds…
 

 
DAYS is probably the prettiest love song they could ever play and yet RL’s parts and solo takes it off into a reverie that lifts the song into a more British folk-rock level before it becomes too boring. I think it’s worth mentioning here – coz nobody else has – how much the songwriting AND the guitar approach echo Fairport Convention post ‘Liege and Lief’. Like ‘Ain’t That Nothing’ it follows classic pop lines, but played by anxiety ridden retards. TV was never a good singer and the fact that most of this song hinges on a 3 part harmony hook helps make it the most radio-friendly tune in their catalogue. It would have never been a hit…
 

 
Speaking of radio-friendly, this is the main issue with this second album for me. There are two brilliant Stones-esque songs on Adventure. This, in the hands of lesser bands would have made a career, but not in this show. ‘Ain’t That Nothing’ and ‘Glory’ are fresh-out-of-the traps rock’n’roll with enough originality to get the public interested. Either one of them would have made a decent radio hit with enough promotion. Television had already had minor chart success and MAJOR critical success by now. There’s a fair few tunes on Adventure that could have caught the public ear. But they don’t quite tell a vision…

FOXHOLE comes on like a natural successor to ‘Friction’. Grinding and stuttering and aiming just over the head, it’s probably the least ‘produced’ song on the album. The TV solo here starts with 2 or 3 harmonics bent out of shape before developing into a cross between the solo’s in ‘8 Miles High’ by The Byrds and ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ by his own band. The bass, drums and RL guitar grip as hard as on ‘Friction’ or ‘Prove It’ from Marquee Moon with added depth and grease. You can almost hear the bullets fly by your ears. By the time TV hits his last few manic run-up-the-string licks it’s time to get out of the warzone.

I DON’T CARE seems to be the album’s light-hearted moment, where once ‘Prove It’ stood. But unlike that great tune there are no dramatic flourishes of TV guitar or BF drums or even a clever lyric. A rather skip-along country feel is topped off by plainly strummed guitars and a high chorus line. A little bit too high for their voices in places. Both ‘Prove It’ and ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ show how TV can write a witty couplet when he wants to, but not here. Possibly the weakest thing the band ever committed to vinyl, but luckily followed by one of the strongest!

CARRIED AWAY appears at the end of side 1, occupying the place of Television’s signature tune. And it doesn’t disappoint there. There are acres more production features now, but it serves a beautiful song. Not known for their middle eighths or advanced song structure, Television look to break the pattern here. In fact each new part of the song, while not actually changing chord patterns or anything, seems to bring a subtle development in the playing and production. The lyric gets more Romantic, more unfocussed and more abstract as the track goes on. The overall atmosphere feels like the whole band is growing louder yet getting further away.
 

 
This time the tune is only just over 5 minutes as opposed to 10, but you really think you’ve been through the changes after it, just like with ‘Marquee Moon’. Judicious application of keyboards is what makes this tune stand out too. I assume they could afford to rent a Hammond Organ now and so they do: letting it take the main theme, like it was Dylan circa ’65. There is an insidious creep in the bass line and guitar motifs (initially) that seem to suggest we’re in for another tale of modern horror. We are not though – it’s the gentlest song the band ever made. The words talk about a quiet walk among the docklands of NYC, feeling the elements and blending with them. The Romance comes through in almost every line and sound.

Possibly the most ‘Fender’ sound of all time is employed throughout this song. A slow throbbing tremolo from the rhythm guitar, one chord a bar. Thank the lord for spring reverb and single coil pickups. They carry an atmosphere all their own! Every member of the band seems to be telling the same story, fixing to the same shadowy outcome. Like ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ it seems to be rehearsed yet free… and it’s got the perfect vocal hook line too. Should have been a classic…
 
AD BREAK

I’ve read allsorts of interviews with TV over the years and he seems like a bit of a bullshitter to be honest. There’s no doubting that he’s telling a vision, but he seems to love obscuring the efforts of others in his work. Me ME ME seems to be his preferred position. Clearly something was always wrong with his relationship with RL, but both FF and BF have played with him throughout his career and he’s never nice about either of them either!

BF, like John Densmore, uses his kit as an expressive tool, but never stops hitting them on-beats like any good rock drummer. There’s an adventurousness to his playing that was copied so much in the UK – The Banshees, The Slits, The Bunnymen all took a cue from him, but weren’t as technically innovative and inspired to do something every 4 bars. He’s jazz, no doubt… FF too is sorely underrated as a bassist. He’s more accurately called a Bass Guitarist because he’s often playing complimentary lines and contrasting rhythms with the 2 guitars. I suppose this is where the comparison with the Grateful Dead comes in: both bands are using the same 3 instruments to weave a big harmonic and rhythmic web.
 
PART Two
 
Now that Television’s new sound world has been established, it’s time to let it flourish. Flipping over the original vinyl record and you are faced with only three tunes, two of which again break the five minute mark. If this side were the last bit of sound before we switched the Television off, it would have been a great end. The second side shows where they were going: into a clearer and purer sound world. Maybe they decided to put all their weirdest and noisiest stuff on Marquee Moon coz they thought they would only get one album? And when a next one was required they dug around the back catalogue? Maybe the second side of Adventure shows what would have been? I think so. There are a few bootlegs where they feature The Dream’s Dream and The Fire at the front of the set – basking in glittering newness and then they play the arse out of the old material.

There is beautiful development there on the second side of the LP. With the most straightforward of sounds, an ample sense of space, cool lyrics and a soft touch Television made a great second episode… watch it!

THE DREAM’S DREAM opens like no other Television song before. A Theremin-like slide guitar squeals a melody over organ pads. RL is nowhere to be seen. BF and FF creep in slowly and surely. It’s a chord progression like ‘Torn Curtain’. The whole track lights up permanently once TV’s lead guitar enters before the chorus. The songwriting steps out now too, accompanied by TV’s loose and spectral licks. Again there’s an almost broken series of lyrics and guitar fills that make the show feel like it’s improvised and on the spot – but it just can’t be. There’s too much interplay between TV and the rhythm section. Too many little jerks, and the lyric only sets out to make it more confusing….
 

 
AIN’T THAT NOTHING is the strongest contender for ‘Television’s Big Hit Single’ as the guitars, bass and drums all coalesce into a controlled but flailing whole. Real punk energy pushes along a straightforward boy/girl lyric and TV manages to sing ok.
 

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THE FIRE suggests that their 3rd album would have been a killer. A four piece rock band, with minimal equipment and production, could make a purely ambient album.
 

 
The lyric and voice disappear behind a mesh of glistening guitar, gradually getting used to the space and filling it. Reverb creeps in. There are no major psychedelic effects, but the affect is definite. Television never needed too much production to create an alternate space. FF’s bass suggests things. BF stretches them out. Like ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, the whole song sounds improvised but structured. It fades and throbs between passages with TVs guitar always near. But unlike that song there is no central motif this time, it’s a jumble. Yet gripping. How do they do that?

Subtitled Love Affairs: Why Millions of Americans Prefer Korean Television

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American television doesn’t want me anymore.

I realized this a couple years ago when I downloaded the first season of “Breaking Bad” for distraction on a plane flight. Although I admired the clever structure of the pilot, I discovered I wasn’t curious about what would happen next. Even though I’ve worked as a high school teacher and I carry debt for hospital bills, I couldn’t relate to Walter White. And perhaps because I’m a female writer in my late thirties, I thought Walter’s late-thirties writer wife Skylar was an unrecognizable stock character. I lost interest without finishing the short first season, and it’s still sitting on my hard drive whispering that I must be lacking in good taste.

The idea among television critics that we’re living in a “golden age” for American television overlooks the fact that some of us find critically-acclaimed American television boring. The shows that get the most buzz are smart, it’s true. But they aren’t necessarily entertaining. This isn’t a golden age of television for all Americans. It’s a golden age for people who prefer intricate plots over empathy. Who can enjoy a show even if they don’t like the characters.

Television can still move me deeply. But in the past year, the television producers who make it with me aren’t the guys in Hollywood or New York. It’s the guys in Seoul, South Korea.

I was surprised by my out-of-the-blue interest in Korea, which began while I watched the first episode of my first subtitled show. Internet video-streaming sites (including Netflix and Hulu) offer large libraries of these “K-dramas,” as English-speaking fans call them. And several million Americans are watching with me, though it’s hard to quantify the online viewership. One of the largest sites, New York-based Drama Fever, serves about six to seven million US viewers a month, of whom roughly 80% are native English speakers. That’s roughly the number of people who watched the penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2013. (Independent research firm comScore confirms the site’s audience is growing, but estimate the audience at a somewhat lower 3.4 million. For comparison, that’s roughly the average audience size for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.) Most viewers are women, according to Drama Fever—and that’s about all we have in common. The audience includes all races and a variety of tastes.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of subtitled Asian shows this summer with a touch of horror, but there’s no reason to look down on Korean television. After years of government investment in the industry, their production values are excellent. Their aesthetic is different from ours, which can be jarring in mediocre shows, and they can be as corny as a Frank Capra film bathed in the collected tears of Steven Spielberg. But when the cream rises to the top, the best shows are suspenseful, funny and heartfelt. And even though I don’t speak Korean and I’ve never visited Asia, the cultural differences are minor next to the fact that I can relate to the characters in a way I haven’t related to anyone on American television since Dana Scully and Buffy Summers left the air.

One reason to watch Korean series is for three-dimensional female characters. K-dramas have their fair share of stock characters, Korean versions of season one Skylar, but they also have a good record of developing great roles for women. The characters popular with fans in recent years include an ambitious pastry chef, a tough cross-dressing tomboy, a scatter-brained spirit medium and a cynical defense attorney.

Another thing drawing some women may be that popular Korean series have a much lower body count than popular American shows—roughly one-eighth corpse per episode (my unofficial estimate), versus the US rate of nearly five corpses per episode (three if you omit cable). Korean characters tend to die of illness or in car crashes, while most fictional American corpses are the result of murder or zombie apocalypse. The numbers themselves are less important than the narrative style they suggest. American television producers have faith in stories about crime, politics and violence—and they do a good job with these subjects. But it’s increasingly hard to imagine an American drama that doesn’t have crime, politics or violence. In contrast, South Korea makes prime-time one-hour shows about families, growing up, romance, friendship—the good stuff in life. Some series are comedies, some are weepy melodramas, but most of them touch in some way on the human capacity for mixed emotions. Here in the U.S., shows about families and romance tend to be placed in the 22 minute format time-slot, which officially makes them “comedies” by Emmy standards, even when a show like “Nurse Jackie” challenges the drama-comedy distinction.

It’s tempting to attribute Korea’s growing appeal to the declining number of female writers in American television. After all, 75% of American television pilots are developed by writing teams made up entirely of men, while the vast majority of writers for prime-time Korean series are female. Superstar writers like the Hong Sisters even become household names à la Aaron Sorkin. The worldwide hit romantic comedy “Coffee Prince” had a female director as well as writer. But this fact doesn’t explain much on its own. After all, it was male writer Joss Whedon who created a few of my favorite female television characters.

What distinguishes K-dramas isn’t their subject matter or the gender of their writers, but their tone—and it’s hard to ascribe a gender to tone. Korean series are less cynical. The heroes are idealists underneath their flaws. The anti-heroes aren’t quite as despicable. The loners aren’t quite as alone. These are all aspects of the central fact about K-dramas: they need to entertain a wide swath of the population to make money. The successful K-drama provides pleasure to as many people as possible—like American television did twenty years ago before DVRs and Netflix.

Korean television shows aren’t “gritty,” and this makes even their action thrillers very different from ours. The big 2011 hit “City Hunter”—based in name only on Tsukasa Hojo’s 1985-91 manga—looks pretty dark on paper. It follows a mysterious vigilante looking for justice against the men who caused his father’s death. Dozens of people die in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The first episode also features a terrorist bombing, a kidnapping of a baby, a bunch of commandos slitting throats, a noisy shootout at a Thai drug plantation, and a leg severed by a land-mine. Though the following episodes contain less killing, the plot still revolves around betrayal, manipulation and corruption. There are knife-fights, gunfights and a really cool walking cane with a sword concealed inside. In episode seven, we watch the hero dig a bullet out of his own shoulder.

But despite the violence—which is presented mildly enough for Korean network television—the show interrogates violence from an idealistic point of view we haven’t seen on American television since before Sept. 11. The hero, Yoon-Sung, is the adopted son of a ruthless drug kingpin who raised and educated him to be a professional revenge-seeker. But in the first episode he’s already questioning his father’s quickness to shoot first, ask questions later. The guy’s got great moves in combat, but he prefers to tie his enemies up, put them in a refrigerator box, and drop them off at the district attorney’s office along with conclusive evidence of their crimes. Take that! The emotional and moral heart of the 20-episode series quickly becomes the conflict between Yoon-Sung and his father over whether to achieve their goals through killing or MacGyver-esque stunts. And the MacGyver-esque stunts are way more fun to watch.

The style of humor in “City Hunter” also steers away from cynicism. Instead of relying on snarky one-liners, the show finds humor in the characters’ internal contradictions. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung’s earnest middle-aged sidekick is addicted to the home shopping channel. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung preserves his secret identity by pretending to be feeble in front of his judo-chopping girlfriend. Leading man Lee Min-Ho has great comic timing—he’s starred in more than one popular romantic comedy—making him an action hero more in the mold of a young Cary Grant than Vin Diesel.

And like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie, the hero often finds himself at the mercy of the women in his life. More than once the hero’s survival depends on his crush Kim Na-Na, a fifth-level black belt who works for the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. She occasionally needs rescuing herself—she’s not quite Buffy—but she sometimes rescues the hero in turn. A second woman, a divorced veterinarian, provides crucial help (no spoilers here). And an important secondary narrative follows Yoon-Sung’s birth mother, whose life we learn about in flashbacks. These women aren’t accessories to the hero, but the people who make his success possible.

None of these elements—the idealism, the humor, the women with original personalities—are particularly “Korean” or calculated to appeal to women. We once found these things in abundance on American television. The idealism is particularly familiar. Our film and television spent the forties and fifties plumbing idealistic questions about the moral use of violence much like the ones in “City Hunter”—they’re at the heart of the classic Westerns by John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But today, these elements make for a thriller that feels unlike anything on American television right now. It’s a story about characters I want to root for.

Plenty of people enjoy America’s gritty shows. But a few million of us are bored by the joylessness on television. Before another long work week starts, we want someone to tell us a good story. If it’s a story that makes us feel like we’re living in a golden age of television, that’s even better. But first, tell us a story with characters we care for, with stakes that matter.

We didn’t leave American television. American television left us.

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Odessa Jones has a lot of degrees in a lot of subjects and she puts it all to good use in her commentary on subtitled Korean romances, including “City Hunter,” at K-Drama Today.

Why Mainstream Magazines Cover Game of Thrones

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Recently Dylan Matthews at Vox pointed out that not many people actually watch Game of Thrones, or Mad Men, or any of the most-critically-important-shows-on-television (TM). Instead, people watch NCIS, or Big Bang Theory, or, occasionally, reruns of Big Bang Theory or NCIS. One Sunday, in fact, a new Mad Men episode got fewer viewers than 8 different Law & Order SVU reruns.

So the question is, why do mainstream sites (like The Atlantic, or Salon, or Slate) cover certain shows obsessively while other, more popular shows, are ignored?

At first this may seem like a question that needs no particular answer. Critical enthusiasms and popularity are often at odds with each other. Critics loathed The Other Woman, but it did fine with the public; everybody it seems hates Justin Bieber except for all those millions of people who don’t. Critical darlings and popular favorites often don’t align; why should they here?

The thing is, though, that mainstream publications are in the business of getting clicks — and, as such, they actually do tend to often cover what is popular. The Atlantic writes about Beyoncé, and Star Wars, and Harry Potter and, Miley Cyrus. As far as films and music and YA novels go, the mainstream is right there with the unwashed, and/or washed hordes. But with television there’s a disconnect. How come?

I can’t answer that question specifically — but I think in general the choices people make about what is important in art have less to do with some sort of absolute critical/popular divide than they do with genre.

Folks usually think of genre as a convenient way to divide up art or literature, but the truth is that genre is a lot more than a categorization system. In fact, as Carl Freedman points out in his book Critical Theory and Science-Fiction, genre isn’t really a subset of art at all. Rather, art is a subset of genre. Hemingway’s novels are literature; Hemingway’s laundry lists are not. A judgment about what something is as genre precedes, and enables, the judgment of whether something is art — or, indeed, whether something is worth talking about at all.

The distinctions between NCIS and Breaking Bad may not look like a genre divide — both are dramas. But genres can actually be formed or coalesce in lots of different ways. The shows that get talked about tend to come from certain networks (HBO, Netflix) and have certain broad characteristics— as Kailyn Kent says, the Golden Age of Television could easily be called “The Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths.” The genre of television-worth-talking-about may not be specifically defined, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be used as a heuristic to decide what’s worth covering and what is a laundry list.

When you’re looking for it, you can see that genre distinctions actually affect coverage in lots of ways. It’s true that Harry Potter is extremely, awesomely popular — but Nora Roberts is extremely, awesomely popular too, selling twenty-seven books a minute according to a rare mainstream profile in The New Yorker. But you don’t see coverage of the latest Nora Roberts novels excitedly discussed at all the big websites. In part, perhaps, that’s because Nora Roberts novels don’t often get made into films — but that seems like it just begs the question, why don’t these incredibly popular novels get made into films?

There’s nothing innately wrong with using genre as a filter. In the first place, it’s unavoidable. Given the massive glut of culture sliding endlessly past our computer monitors, consumers and journalists alike need some way to sort through it. Genre’s a convenient rule-of-thumb; it tells you what might be of interest and what will make your eyes glaze over. In many cases, genre provides, not just a filter, but a community of like-minded folks, and even a self-description and an identity. To keep up with Mad Men or Orange Is the New Black is to be a particular kind of person, accepted into a certain kind of community and certain kinds of discussions. It’s a fandom. Genre shapes art, but it shapes people too.

The one danger of genre and of fandom is insularity. Again, genre sets the bounds not just of what you like, but of what you see as noteworthy or speakable. In that context, it can be easy to forget that other art, or other communities, exist. That can mean, as Vox suggests, that you start to think everyone is watching Mad Men rather than Big Bang Theory.

It can also dovetail, or reproduce other, less pleasant social divisions, though. Genres aren’t always as starkly linked to marginalized identities as the hillbilly/race records division was in the 1920s. But still, race, gender, and class, are often bound up in genre marketing and consumption, which means that ignoring certain genres in favor of others can have political and social implications. The fact that mainstream publications have so little interest in romance novels seems like it has something to do with the way that women, and femininity, are excluded from critical discussions in favor of more male-or-masculine-friendly genres, including YA novels in which the women heroes at least get to kill people. Along the same lines, it’s not exactly an accident that mainstream best music lists always seem to rate white rock (generally by guys) ahead of soul music or hip hop.

None of which is to say that folks shouldn’t like what they like, or shouldn’t pay attention to what they want to pay attention to. But it’s worth thinking about the way that what we like, and what we pay attention to, is often decided before we’ve really made a conscious choice about it. We like to think of art as opening possibilities. But it’s perhaps just as true to say that art, as genre, can often close us down, and make us narrower.
 

Game_of_thrones_cast

Rape, Murder, and Artifice in Downton Abbey

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Downton Abbey Sampler- Sean Michael Robinson

I want to keep watching Downton Abbey. I really do.

It’s a show whose virtues are immediately apparent—tremendous acting from virtually the entire cast, striking cinematography, an interesting setting, and an almost obsessive eye for detail, extending to virtually all the production crafts behind the show—costuming, set dressing, even foley, every sound of the house seemingly captured a century ago and replayed now for the viewer’s pleasure.

But it is an empty pleasure indeed. Like the great house itself, which telegraphs wealth and power with every detail of its dressing and architecture but is carried on precarious financial ground, beneath all of the show’s external grace and opulence it is an emotionally bankrupt and poor thing.

I watched all three seasons of the show with two friends over a period of a few weeks, and it’s possible that this pace of viewing exacerbated the problems. To pick one particularly charged example– in the third episode of the first season, eldest daughter Mary is raped by a visitor to the house, Kemal Pamuk, who subsequently dies in her bed.

Now, you won’t see the word “rape” in the show, which is, painfully, appropriate for the time period. Mary has spent the day flirting with this handsome visitor, and when he unexpectedly shows up in her room at night, she insists he leave, rejects him, over and over again, tells him that she’ll scream, to which her rapist replies that no one will hear her. And so ends the scene, with Mary accepting the inevitable, the horrible choice that is not in fact her choice to make at all, that this man will take what he wants of her, because he wants it.

Now, this is not treated as an insignificant event. On the contrary, the events of that night drive the plot for much of the two seasons, as Pamuk’s death and the attendant coverup cause no end of scandal and labyrinthine plotting.

But what of the emotional consequences?

What is it like to have a flirtation turn to threats of violence and unwelcome sex? What if one’s rapist were to die, possibly even in the middle of the act? What kind of behaviors might we expect from someone who has experienced such traumata?

Living as we do in a society that has a much clearer picture of the horrible consequences of rape and sexual assault, not a lot of imagination is required to tease out the potential consequences of the scene. Mary might be leery of the attentions of other men. She might have difficulty with physical contact or emotional closeness from others.

And what emotional consequences do these events have for Mary in the show?

She’s sad that he died. She refers to him as her lover in conversation with her mother, and later discusses him with her husband-to-be with no sign of any distress. The first conversation is particularly painful– her mother asks point blank. Did he force himself on you? No, she says, defiantly.

Now, it is entirely plausible that Mary could retroactively deign her rape consensual, or simply choose to discuss the event in that light with her mother. But in good fiction one has some amount of access to the inner workings of a character, not just their actions and stated feelings. How different would these events read with some kind of emotional consequences? A flash of pain, a remote sadness, a squeamishness or reluctance to be touched?

But that would involve some kind of interpretation on the part of the audience, and more often than not, Downton Abbey doesn’t trust its audience to draw its own conclusions. Julian Fellowes is in many ways a very skilled writer, and in the show he applies much of this skill to the organization necessary to juggle his army of actors and assure fitting amounts of screen time. Fellowes is the literary equivalent of a virtuoso dinner host—he knows interesting people, knows when to invite them, and remembers all of their names.

(Although occasionally their occupations slip his mind, as in the scene where Edith informs Matthew that she’s the family’s first journalist. This must have come as a surprise to fellow dinner guest and family member Tom Branson, whose fledgling career as a journalist was scorned by the family several episodes prior.)

And what of the traumas of Matthew Crawley? He fights in the trenches, drags himself through the mud among the dead and dying, is nearly killed when a shell explodes directly on his position. (He also manages to telepathically communicate his distress to his paramour—but that’s a different matter). He’s paralyzed, impotent, and recovers (!) just in time for his (untelepathic) betrothed to perish of a sudden one-episode fever. Shortly thereafter he finds solace in the arms of his paramour after a previously unmentioned deathbed letter from his barely buried betrothed beseeches him to find his comfort where he can.

Are any of these events traumatic to Matthew? Does he have nightmares—do his hands ever shake? After his experiences in the war, does he have any second thoughts about hunting with the family, any difficulty hearing gunfire? Fear of confined spaces?

This insensitivity to the interior lives of the characters might be a function of the capsule-summary nature of the show—a problem arrives at the beginning of an episode, and it is dispatched in short, concentrated movements, while the other continuing plot points swirl around it. Or it might be due to the fact that the characters spend so much time talking so baldly about their own feelings. Even the most inward of characters—O’Brien comes to mind– have someone to talk to or scowl at at any given time. Just in case, you know, we’re ever unsure how they feel about having caused spontaneous abortion through deadly soap placement.

And there, finally is the word I’ve managed to avoid for almost a thousand words. Downton Abbey is a soap opera. A well-crafted soap opera, but soap opera nonetheless, with many of the characteristics that typically attend that genre. One—events are driven by a desire to create a maximum amount of dramatic effect. Two—the status quo must be maintained. Examples of the former are available in virtually every episode, but surely season two’s Canadian amnesiac burn victim is the most extreme example. As for the second, consider what happens when a character manages to escape the trajectory of the house—Thomas, for instance, or Mister Bates. No matter what Thomas’ ambitions or desires for himself, he’s forced to return to his servitude. And it’s not solely the class issues of the time that keep him in place—it’s the machinations of the plot, which require him to remain in his familiar position. Bates’ position is the reverse—he’s pulled away not by his own ambitions, but by the unfortunate consequences of the ever-escalating tension of the plots he finds himself mired in. And when he is finally freed, it’s once again off-screen providence that is his liberator, which sets him in motion to once again return to the position he had at the start of the show.

It’s instructive to compare Downton Abbey to its predecessor, the Fellowes-penned and Robert Altman-directed feature film Gosford Park. The direction of Altman and the cool cinematography of Andrew Dunn hold the content at a distance, a tack that transforms the potentially melodramatic material into an oblique commentary on the class issues present in the film. The direction and cinematography in Downton Abbey are a striking contrast to this restraint, continually (and probably unintentionally) reinforcing through sheer visual beauty the inherent right-ness of the class positions of the characters. Lord Grantham, after all, is rarely wrong, and even in the rare instances when he is, he manages to look so goddamned noble. (Stationary or smooth-moving tracking shots with low camera angles and sumptuous light in opulent environments does tend to create that effect). The lush score is one of the biggest villains in this regard. “Thiiiiis is impoooooorrrtant!” the strings say, swelling again. “Feeeeel the nobiiiiiiiiiiiiiility.” This insistence on the part of the cinematography and the underscoring can not only seem overwrought, it can even spoil the effect of certain scenes, by telegraphing the future events minutes before they happen. All three of us watching the last episode together were aware of the impending death of Matthew Crawley from the moment we saw his car, background speeding by, with portentous strings sawing away in the soundtrack. It’s hard not to feel that a character has been killed, murdered, really, by the show itself, when the dressings of the show seem to be so aware of every upcoming disaster.

When I informed my friend James as to the content of this article, he asked me, “So, you didn’t enjoy the show?” No, I’m afraid I did enjoy the show. I enjoyed it too much, and it was packaged so handsomely and tasted so good and went down so smoothly I could hardly believe it. And so I had some more. And then I had some more.

But there are a lot of things I enjoy that I shouldn’t have every day. And in Downton Abbey‘s case, three boxes in a month were clearly too much.

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American Horror

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American Horror Story, Season 1, 2012-13

Produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk
Cast:    Dylan McDermott
Connie Britton
Jessica Lange
Evan Peters
Taissa Farmiga

“American Horror Story” begins with Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) discovering her husband, Ben (Dylan McDermott), in bed with one of his patients. To keep the family together (and move the plot forward) Ben convinces his angry wife and sullen daughter (Taissa Farmiga) to move to California and start over. They manage to purchase an old mansion at a bargain price, but soon discover that the reason the mansion was such a steal is due to its unpleasant history – most of its former residents were murdered. Even worse, “murder house” is filled with so many ghosts that they’re practically tripping over each other – a mad doctor from the Jazz Age, student nurses from the 60’s, a sexy maid from the 80’s, a psychotic teenager (Evan Peters) from the 90’s, and the gay couple who owned the house prior to the Harmons. And there are freakier residents, including a monster baby and the show’s most recognizable figure, the “Rubber Man,” who dresses in a skin-tight bondage suit complete with gimp mask. Rubber Man is the show’s main trouble-maker, and in one of the early episodes he rapes Vivien and impregnates her with a demonic baby. If that weren’t bad enough, the Harmons’ next door neighbor is Constance (Jessica Lange), a schemer who knows far more about the ghosts than she initially lets on.

The horror genre on television does not have an illustrious history. There are many people who get nostalgic for “The Twilight Zone” or “Tales from the Dark Side,” though those people have terrible memories because 90% of their episodes were crap. And those shows preferred the “anthology” approach, where every episode was a discreet narrative. Serialized television (where every episode is part of a single, larger narrative) has an even worse track record. For every hit like “The X-Files” there are ten flops like “The River.” Unfortunately, “American Horror Story” continues the long trend of shitty television horror.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its charms. Unlike “The River,” “American Horror Story” is not an complete debacle. While hardly innovative, it is a polished and professional-looking TV series. The basic premise – troubled family moves into a haunted house – is a simple but effective setup for a horror story. The series is also deliberately campy, which helps offset its tendency towards soapy melodrama (more on that below). The cast is quite impressive for basic cable, and the acting is generally good. The one weak link is Connie Britton, who responds to every situation with a look of dim-witted confusion. But Jessica Lange more than makes up for any other actor’s poor performance. Recognizing the show’s campiness and its debt to Southern Gothic horror, she plays a character that combines two archetypes: the Faded Southern Belle and the Evil Bitch Mama. Constance is by far the most entertaining character in the series, motherly one minute and crazy, narcissistic, and cruel the next. And she’s completely unafraid of the ghosts, treating most of them with barely concealed contempt.

But the series has many failings. Some of the ghosts, like the mad doctor, are entertaining in a goofy way. Others, like the the Rubber Man, are genuinely creepy (at least at first). But most of the ghosts are forgettable or annoying. Another problem is that death doesn’t seem like a big deal, which removes much of the potential tension. Sure, the ghosts are trapped in the house (except on Halloween), but otherwise they’re free to continue their un-lives however they choose. Plus, they don’t age, they can’t be permanently injured, and they can even have sex with the living or each other. The show also has a bad habit of raising interesting issues, and then addressing with them in a glib manner. For example, the psychotic teenager, Tate, killed other kids in a school shooting before he died. It’s a big, important “hot button” issue … that just kind of sits there. I might be offended if I weren’t so bored. The show also bills itself as psychosexual horror (according to the description in Netflix), but while there is sex, the psychology is absent. Rubber Man is obviously a BDSM monster, but there’s very little actual BDSM in the series. So after his initial appearance, Rubber Man becomes just another mystery villain whose identity will be revealed … during sweeps!

For all its other problems, “American Horror Story” largely fails at being horror because it has to be a TV series. This means soapy sub-plots, because TV producers believe that every show must have them. The teenage daughter must fall in love with one of the ghosts, and there must be drama and tears because Ben is an adulterer. In a soap opera, these plots might be relevant, but in a show called “American HORROR Story” they’re distracting at best, mind-numbing at worst. And the critical flaw in the series is that it both wants and needs the viewers to care about the Harmons, who are the lead characters and the emotional core of the series. The problem is that the Harmons are a typical middle class family on television, which is another way of saying they’re obnoxious assholes. In any halfway-decent horror story, the audience would get to relish the horrific punishment meted out to the Harmons. But this is prime time television in America, so we’re supposed to root for the family to overcome all odds and live happily ever after. [Spoiler alert!] To its credit, the season did not end with the family walking off into the sunset. Instead, all three Harmons died in the house and continued on as a ghost family. A surprise twist, and a clever show might have turned that into a truly horrific ending. Imagine spending the rest of eternity with the most tedious and/or annoying members of your family, with no one ever able to grow, change, or move out. But in this series, were supposed to find it bittersweet and touching that the family will be together forever. In the end, they even decorate a Christmas tree! Or maybe it’s the ghost of a Christmas tree.

Once again, a horror series has let me down.

Superman vs. the Zeitgeist

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As you may or may not know, Clark Kent apparently quit his job to become a blogger. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream media play (because the media likes to talk about the death of media, and bloggers like to talk about the rise of bloggers, natch.) Tim Hodler at TCJ is less impressed:

—Apparently Clark Kent quit his job or something? I’m not going to link to them (such behavior should not be rewarded), but newspapers are actually reporting on this comic-book plot point as if it is news. This continual urge on the part of the media to treat fictional events as newsworthy developments is the one thing comics as an art form has going for it that no other American art form seems to, but boy does it seem dumb.

Like Tim, I’m not going to read this comic. But I think most of his other comments here are kind of confused. First of all, other media get treated as newsworthy all the time. Movie releases are huge, high profile news events with no small frequency. Many media outlets (the Atlantic, for example) regularly devote space to episode recaps of television shows; the twist on Homeland was big enough news that I know there was a twist on Homeland even though I actually know just about literally nothing about Homeland. That stupid Aaron Sorkin show (the “Newsroom” right?) was reported on in much the same way the Superman-leaving-news is being reported on; that is, it was a media-enthusiastically-covering-the-media story. In fact, from the one page Andrew Sullivan is reproducing, the media reporting on entertainment is actually the reason Clark is leaving the Daily Planet — a nicely incestuous meta-twist to the nicely incestuous meta-memeness of it all.
 

 
In fact, I’d say that comics is actually far less likely to get these kinds of stories into mainstream outlets than other mass-entertainment — for the very logical reason that comics is a lot less popular than television or film or (for that matter) sports. It’s because having a story like this in the mainstream is novel that it’s noticeable.

Moreover, I’d say that getting media attention is a sign that DC is doing something right. Pulp entertainment is supposed to slavishly and shamelessly follow the zeitgeist; it’s supposed to be about whatever stupid shiny thing happens to be in the news. Mainstream comics are actually pretty bad at doing this, partly because they’re built around 40-70 year old characters, and mostly because their fanbase is incredibly hermetic and insular.

So a storyline like this — which effectively panders to a great big audience rather than to the same old tiny audience — seems like a step forward, to me. Someday, maybe, in some golden dawn, mainstream pulp comics can rise out of their subterranean level of shittiness, and attain the relatively elevated mediocre shittiness of 24 or Homeland or Breaking Bad. Dare to dream.

Update: Tim has interesting clarifications in comments, as do several other folks, so please be sure to scroll down.

Women on Pedestals: A Joke in Three Parts, You Perfectly Tanned Shitbird

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Before I begin, I’ll admit that my two favorite shows are Better off Ted and Terriers. Both were cancelled, given the run-around and are apparently only popular with critics and people who are late to everything. And no, I haven’t watched much Archer. I’ll get to it.

The idea that “women aren’t funny” has been around for a long time. Christopher Hitchens theorized that this had something to do with brain chemistry and the evolutionary value of humor. Men need to impress women and they do it through humor. Women, on the other hand, have no need to impress men since men already find women pants-droppingly funny. “Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise,” he writes. Leaving aside the obvious heteronormative bullshit embedded in that comment (as well as all evolutionary psychology), it raises an interesting dichotomy: humor at someone else’s expense and humor at one’s own expense. Popular culture and talking heads seem to agree that women’s high sex status makes them unfit for humor at other people’s expense (too mean, too cruel, coming from the Goddess on her Throne) and therefore the only funny woman is a woman that is self-deprecating to a fault. TV, by and large, reflects that popular prejudice but it is indeed changing. It mostly agrees with the premise that ladybrains are wired only to play damsels in distress, emotional melodrama queens and non-threatening straight foils. All of these archetypes are, after all, women who have lost their pedestal and are therefore capable of humor.

The women of Community, for instance, are flawed but not self-deprecating, certainly not in the way that Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, Queen of self-deprecating humor and the reigning Champion of the Thunderdome, is self-deprecating. Liz Lemon has stains on her shirt. She’s a woman. That is funny. Liz Lemon, a slob who could do better, is a clear example of the sort of TV woman who is funny because of the dissonance between her status and her reality, at least for the five people who watch NBC programming. Tina Fey’s character is made ugly in order to be funny. Our expectations of attractive women demand this. Even Tina Fey’s uproariously funny Sarah Palin impression relies on the “attractive woman being less than perfect” trope to some degree. In this case, the ugliness of Ms. Palin’s ignorance was enough but the riff still requires that trope for its power. As TV grows up, we see that it is possible for women to both be attractive and funny and self-aware. Community’s Annie, played by the consistently excellent Allison Brie, is not only given actual jokes where she isn’t just a foil but she remains attractive, even when the sexualized parts of her (her boobs) are transferred into the vessel of a monkey that lives in the vents and hoards stationery. The Monkey is literally called Annie’s Boobs. Annie’s Boobs are funny on their own, divorced from Annie, and form the basis of unrelated subplots. In this way, the show allows us to see the real Annie, boobs and all, be funny while still allowing for the kind of humor that is, apparently, only the province of adolescent males.

Only two women on TV, however, are/were playing women with power being funny without apologizing for it. It is no surprise that they are the best female comics on TV. I enjoy Sarah Silverman but she’s a little too complicated for this piece so pardon her exclusion while she bangs Jeff Goldblum in front of Nick Kroll. One, obviously, is Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, a high-strung bureaucrat/elected official managing the Parks and Recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana. Not only does she not apologize for power, she wants more of it. She risks her comfortable niche to run for elected office. And, what’s more, she’s good at her job and sincere about her intentions. Those are both things that she should not be able to do under prevailing theories of humor. A sincere, hard-working bureaucrat, of whatever gender, is a mindfuck. The other, and my favorite, is/was Better off Ted’s Veronica Palmer, played in the most insincere way by Portia DeRossi.

Veronica works for Veridian Dynamics, the archetypical evil corporation that subverts all the things people love. Can you think of something suitably evil? An octo-chicken, perhaps, with its extra drumsticks? A motion sensor that ignores black people? Weaponized pumpkins? Nicotine-flavored ice cream? Veronica is a woman whose unapologetic attractiveness is intimidating, which makes her the perfect boss for the cubicle drones she commands. She is in total charge of her sexuality, a point made clear not just by her subordinates dropping trou at a moment’s notice, but by her affair with the magician Mordor. While she worries that having people know about her double life as a magician’s assistant might harm her, ultimately when she performs, she really does perform. She doesn’t turn her sexuality into the joke in the end but instead, turns our gaze into the joke. There is not an Evolutionary Psychologist/Pseudo-scientist alive that can explain why Portia De Rossi/Veronica Palmer is fucking amazing. She is the ultimate Goddess on her Throne, out of reach and cold. And still funny. And she never does tell you where she hides the dove.

Seriously, guys, how could you cancel this?