This reminds me of that time in 2004 when Merv Griffin and I survived the apocalypse.

Been leafing through the Left Behind books this morning. No I don't know why. The writing is of course as bad as you've heard; I'd be surprised if a red pen had come within a mile of the books at any point, not that that matters to their intended audience. And the characters - villians with names like 'Viv Ivins,' 'Suhail Akbar,' and 'Nicolae Carpathia'; proud American heroes named 'Buck Williams' and 'Rayford Steele' - are as paper-thin as you'd expect. The plot is a Tom Clancy version of a loopy literal interpretation of various Biblical end-of-the-world stories. Well you know all this, or have heard, or don't care.

Left Behind's value lies in its referentiality: it literalizes the myth of the Rapture, Tribulation, and eventual triumph of God (embodied by the warrior Jesus) at the end of the world, and the thrill of the books comes in part from the reader's knowledge of what's coming, the reminder that as a Believer you're in on the big story. The heroes are constantly in danger - indeed, Mr Steele 'dies' at the end of volume 11 - but are never really at risk of losing; the question of whether individuals will make it through the Tribulation (the rule of the Antichrist) is secondary to the certainty that Jesus will arrive at the end to wipe the slate clean. (Each volume ends with a pithy Bible quote explaining what part of the source material the series has reached; if you can't take the suspense, the plot outline is there on your nightstand.)

Which is to say that while the hook of the series is its adventure plot, and its outline is derived from an existing text, its secret drama is that of self-satisfaction: you're the enlightened reader, a believer in Christ, and you want to know who'll be around with you at the end, who'll weather the Tribulation with you. It's a vicarious experience of apocalypse, but with next to no pretense of character identification. Either LaHaye and Jenkins are the worst writers ever born, or they just don't care about typical aesthetic engagement: you'll like the books, one supposes, if you like what it refers to, what your own recognition says about you. The plot mechanics are mere formalism and no one really cares; not caring is part of the nominal aesthetic code. It's the password. The books are fanfic about the reader's fandom.

Left Behind is The Family Guy with Jesus instead of jokes.

* * *

I read the front page of Ain't It Cool News daily or semidaily; while the site's founder is an infantile self-obsessed pseudointellectual schmuck with next to no aesthetic standards and no discernible talent for prose, and its collection of commenters is strong evidence against Darwinian evolution, the TV-news listing at the site remains a useful center for geeky updates on DVDs and such. As long as you don't read the comments, skip any movie reviews not written by the one or two functioning adults on the site, and ignore the horrific design of the place, it has its value.

I bring that up to bring this up: the commenters at Ain't It Cool value, seemingly above all, the equivalent of anime's 'fanservice,' gratuitous 'upskirt' shots and flashes of nudity meant to keep developmentally-arrested male viewers interested in the nonsensical robot battles and gossipy schoolgirl antics of so much Japanese animation. (Let's just not talk about anime.) Only the AICN fanboys are gorehounds and schlock-horror lovers in addition to loving their softcore porn. At AICN, 300 is like the holy grail of filmmaking: barely-consensual sex, lingering shots of gyrating curvaceous nude women, expensive makeup effects, and endless horrific (pornographic) violence. Throw in an unsubtle glorying in the aesthetics (and even ethics) of fascism and you get the whole shebang. The entire film is fanservice for a certain kind of moviegoer, one visceral thrill after another, sex causing violence, violence deserving sex, with a li'l gay panic to boot.

And I bring that up to get back to this: as mass-media entertainments grow more targeted, television audiences smaller, filmgoers more specific in their tastes (and paradoxically less demanding), the concept of 'fanservice' grows increasingly helpful to understanding the media landscape. The schoolgirl-panty shot literalizes 'lifting the veil of desire' in the most dullwitted imaginable way; it undercuts the erotic impulse by reminding readers/viewers that the fantasy is only (but always) fantasy and that if you stick with every minute and every page of the story you'll get what you want. Which is thought necessary in serial storytelling but not in shorter-form stories like film and standalone novels (which already have hard temporal limits on their structuring of desire). Xena: Warrior Princess was overrun with fanservice; Buffy alluded to it in Season Seven (e.g. Anya's 'that was kind of sexy' moment with Willow) though it grounded its flirtations in (at least nominal) character motivations; Galactica has its menage a trois with Six, D'anna, and Baltar. Lost with its 'Kate, give me your shirt' spoof ('ironic' or not - after all, she does give him the shirt), but also the appearances of the almost meaningless Numbers. The Sopranos and the Bada Bing, in a way (OK complex example). The Lone Gunmen. And so forth.

The naked fulfillment of viewer desire essentially outside the narrative frame; an awareness of the commercial demands on the text that's far too eager to be ironic. (Can a pedophile 'ironically' hang around a school? Is it OK if that irony is lost on the kids?) Fan engagement is predicated on not getting what they want - but knowing that they might. (Everyone was so sad when Willow and Tara were separated.) Fanservice isn't about sex as such; that's just its most well-known form. It's about filling in 'holes' in the story - but not with more story. With more of the reader, the viewer, the 'fan.' And to be clear:

Fanfiction is outsourced fanservice.

[Brief clarification after the fact: I don't mean that all the concerns of fanfiction are trivial or irrelevant. I mean that fanfic is more about the reader/viewer than the source text; the latter is a pretense for the former's expression. That's fine. What's less fine is that ungenerous self-expression might as well stop at self-satisfaction. You can be self-satisfied in a group. You can be self-satisfied in a community. A community is a fixation with a webpage.]

The Left Behind books are full of fanservice as well, but of a different type: the pornography of constant reaffirmation. (Do you understand the difference between 'Good grade on the test, you're so smart' and 'Good grade on the test, you've really learned this material'? If not, ask a 'gifted and talented' kid.) The good-guy characters, members of the 'Tribulation Force,' constantly reaffirm their faith in God - which never really falters, is never 'in play' as it were. They trust that things will end up the way they're supposed to, just like the reader, which is why the beginning of The Remnant (volume 10) comes as no surprise to anyone: Rayford Steele (why not just call him 'Stronghard Godcock' and get it over with?) and a million converted Christians are saved from the Antichrist's bombs (the volume 9 cliffhanger) by God, and dance around for a while in Israel while on fire. Nothing can hurt them! The Antichrist is upset by this of course. It's not just a narrative way out (neither first nor last time God saves the good guys); it's a reward for the reader's own easy faith. I would have been saved. I just know it. Thousands of pages of this: I would have been saved. 'Fan Appreciation Day' at the Jesus ballpark - everyone gets a souvenir helmet made of plastic.

The increasing engagement with fans by writers/producers/actors - Ron Moore's blog, whedonesque.com, the Grey's Anatomy writers' blog, Jenna Fischer's hundreds of MySpace commenters, William Gibson and Neil Gaiman blogging, Russell Davies's fan identity, etc. - heightens the biographical element of fannish love. And we project our fantasy onto the creators as well, right? 'It's like he captured something about my life in that story!' 'Oh my God that episode, did you like read my diary?!' In-jokes and jokes are not the same, don't work the same way, and have different meanings and values aesthetically speaking. Left Behind is like a few thousand pages of elbow-in-the-ribs private jokes, a mash note to readers and authors alike, and the aesthetics of the stories are so horrifying that 'You are there' has to be replaced with 'You know what we're talking about.' Political theatre, religious-propaganda storytelling, schoolgirl sponge baths in cartoons, Xena and Gabrielle. 'This reminds me of that time...' The challenge of storytelling is to find the best followup to 'Look at this.' Tony Soprano saw The Family Guy and its ilk coming from a mile off: '"Remember when" is the lowest form of conversation.'

* * *

This isn't an attack on fans, it's an attack on weak storytelling, on weak communication. Up to a point, fans - let's say 'consumers' in general - no, let's say people - can't help what they like, can't help how good mere acknowledgment makes them feel. (Would you rather be blind, or deaf, or lose the sense of touch? I wondered yesterday.) What's worrisome is that the more specialized an entertainment, the closer it gets to addressing directly the mere desires of its readers, rather than creating a delaying, misdirecting narrative suspension and tension; the limit case is the novel you write for yourself, which is only a daydream on paper. Hence, by the way, one of my worries about NaNoWriMo; hence part of the disdain with which tiny religious groups are treated, as they approach the New Age-ish ideal of the 'cult of one'; hence the grotesque specificity of allusion in Left Behind; hence the tiresome baked-in datedness of The Family Guy and some of The Simpsons; hence the unwatchability of Evangelion's solipsistic fantasies, the unreadability of Harlequin romances, the unlistenability of your favourite indie rock band, less to do with 'you just don't understand the norms' than with 'it didn't occur to them to care about my (or anyone else's) understanding'; hence one danger facing 'autonomous fields' like literary scholarship, where the 'Higher Eclecticism' becomes a kind of fanfic-in-theory about readerly identity and disciplinary(!) fantasies.

The fault here is ungenerous storytelling. Fanservice costs nothing; narrative specialization costs nothing (it only feels like it; eventually you can write an encyclopedia instead of a novel and your fans will line up for it). What's hard is the effort of bringing new readers and viewers and players (we haven't even mentioned the nightmare of popular video games) into your world. My mentor Professor Thorburn taught me that great art - yes we can dare to speak of so silly a thing - teaches us how to understand it; it's animated by a generosity of spirit, a spirit of inclusiveness. (Did you notice that Ron and Hermione did most of their kissing 'offscreen' in Harry Potter volume 7? Until the grand finale, that is. 'Not what you want but what you need,' the someone infamously said.) It doesn't get more audience-specific than Finnegans Wake, does it? But there's a reward after the work, in the work. The deep structure isn't fanservice, it's its generous opposite.

We - well maybe I'm not ready to say it but I'll let it go - we might say that all great storytelling is popularization. The first picture I ever saw of a naked lady was gloriously erotic; it fed my fantasies - mainly by virtue of timing. The last one I saw was another tally mark; no fantasy, no constraint. I wasn't being let in, I was being led on. It fulfilled my desire because desire is to be fulfilled.

Porn.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Matthew 24:29-30

Comments

[Goliath's Daddy]

ARE YOU THE ONE THEY CALL BEOWULF?

[spultek]

May I remind you that the proper forum for discussions of anime is teps@tep.org???