Wax Banks

An essential misunderstanding about story, Buffy edition.

The editor of the Buffy comics at Dark Horse, Scott Allie, recently did an interview about Angel+Faith #5. It included this exchange:

AndrewCrossett: I have a question about the "zompires" and the mechanics by which they are created. In Buffy #3, Willow says "When someone becomes a vampire, a demon possesses their dead body. But without the Seed, demons can't pass into this world. The demon has to possess the vampire's body from another dimension." I took the last sentence to be Willow clarifying that [...]

So, could you clarify the real explanation behind the zompires (at least insofar as the characters understand it at this point)?

Scott: [...] This season has also led to a lot of conversation about the metaphysics of the demon/vampire/human connection, and we have some varying theories. Joss doesn't want it nailed down in a scientific kind of way, so we try to make sure that what we do loosely works within a few differing ideas for the metaphysics of it. We think that giving the readers something to ponder in terms of the nature of these characters is more interesting than explaining it. [my emphasis --wa.]

I once referred to Allie as a 'glorified project manager' rubber-stamping Whedon's scripts and getting a shitload of free publicity for what seemed to be other people's work, and that was unfair and small-minded of me. He did write the second most incoherent arc of Buffy Season 8, so he has more to apologize for than enjoying secondhand Whedon publicity; but it was still a totally inappropriate comment which embarrasses me greatly.

But this answer is straight amateur-hour bullshit -- a writerly failing rather than a publicity-tour faux pas -- and he's made this mistake often enough that I'm starting to get embarrassed for him too.

Ambiguity is not ambivalence. (Cognate: complication is not complexity.) How many times must I and everyone else with half a brain say it? Incoherent plots are not the same as complex thematics; multiple explanations for a plot device are not the same as multiple moral frames for a story. JESUS CHRIST!

If you can't make 'there's a demon inside you and it wars with your human self for control over your actions' resonant without making a half-assed mystery out of the logistics because you can't be bothered to finish building the world your employers licensed, you're in the wrong business. Whedon handwaves his metaphysics all the time; he's infamous for it, in fact. But he never handwaves the meanings of his stories; he never misunderstands 'open to interpretation' as 'we don't have to work out super basic plot details.' Simple plots, complex stories. That's Joss's strong suit.

Y'know where the Dark Horse Buffy comics went badly off the rails last year? When the story called for one of Whedon's patented 'here's the big unbelievably-thematically-freighted plot cliché which we'll spend the rest of the story complicating' moments (Glory is a god, Buffy curses Angel, Buffy 'came back wrong,' Faith 'turns evil'), and the best the writing staff could do -- unbelievably -- was 'the universe did it; it's fate.' (I can't even bear to explain what this means; just typing out that offensive shit will lower my IQ by a good 30 points.) It felt like Whedon simply let the story get away from him for the rest of Season 8 -- indeed, in interviews he's given the impression that the offending plot-shit wasn't actually his idea, though he's justly taken the blame for the comic's incoherence.

That was an example of complication, rather than complexity, of storytelling weighing down the tale. Instead of making a clear, strong plot choice for the audience to interpret however it liked, Whedon/Allie/Meltzer made a half-assed plot choice without really committing to it, which robbed the rest of the season of almost every drop of its moral weight. As a result, what should've been one of the most tragic events in the 14-year(!) Buffy story made absolutely no sense -- and was robbed of so much of its impact -- in Allie's telling of it.

Too much plot 'cleverness,' too much business, not enough story. That ended up being the unexpected problem with Season 8. And this 'zompires' silliness sure seems to be more of the same. Joss is partly to blame, yes. But the TV series sure didn't have this problem...

* * *

As much as anything, my frustration here comes from the knowledge that -- perhaps, perhaps -- the Buffyverse is running out of steam again, because it's once again lost its prime mover. Season 4 of the original show was an enjoyable mess, a recovery period during which the writers searched for a way to write the Scooby Gang, who had been clearly written as unjustly burdened adolescents through the show's first three years, as adults. Whedon had planned to tell 'high school is hell' stories on Buffy, and the show had to shift gears, somewhat uncomfortably, before it could become a story about accepting the selflessness and entry into real community that so much constitute adulthood. (Marti Noxon's knack for depicting burgeoning eroticism and heartbreak helped the show move into its triumphant second season, and she was instrumental in guiding the series through seasons 5-7.)

The last three seasons of the show were explicitly about the deepest nature of the Slayer (mythos and character), but they were even more about the expansion and overflow of personal and group identity: Buffy joins the world, main characters drift apart and reconstitute themselves, families grow and are reimagined (remember the episode 'Family'!), destinies are grappled with and ultimately rejected, and private moralities are explored in a grey zone way way way beyond the simple 'Slayer good, demons bad' rules of the early episodes and seasons. The finale of the TV series showed Buffy simply blowing up the entire premise of the show -- the Slayer mythology itself -- and in the process giving away her birthright...so as to become a whole person, without it. ('Cookies,' in the parlance of the series finale.) The story had come to a natural ending and exhausted itself.

Then the comic began. And suddenly Buffy was...a supporting character in her own book. The mythos came back in the clumsiest way imaginable: a plot as old as the universe, by which a Slayer/supervillain teamup was preordained so as to bring into existence a magicless world and...oh fuck it, it's still too stupid; the point is, the nature of the Slayer was trivialized instead of deepened by the 'Twilight' plot. The comic was burdened, in the end, by a lot of conspiratorial gobbledygook, which wasn't enough to hide the fact that the story -- the characters, their development, the play of actual human desire -- had been lost.

I have no idea whether 'Season 9' will be any good. But it's clear from the first couple of issues that one of Whedon's key storytelling ingredients -- a dead-simple premise which ramifies and signifies in an ever-expanding assortment of (usually painful) ways -- is still missing, or deeply buried in plot mess. 'Magic has left the world' just doesn't feel personal; the 'Twilight' thing still doesn't make sense to me; Spike flying around with a spaceship full of bugs feels like a bad joke; the Xander/Dawn pairing isn't desperately necessary (it's just...limp). It's all business.

That's a sign of a faltering story: business. (For a show consisting entirely, solely of business, see Lost or the laster seasons of Galactica -- two promising shows that crawled right up their own respective assholes double quick.)

* * *

Or maybe the problem is I just don't care about comics anymore. 20 pages a month? Are you kidding me? Give me Dave Sim or BKV or even 100 Bullets, but it's just not working for Buffy. Or rather, for me. I'm the problem.

Nagging nighttime thought re: art and consciousness.

One of the main purposes (or in more neutral language, uses) of art seems to be programmed psychotropism: art permits the artist to arrange thoughts at a distance. Some art forms permit the artist only coarse-grained control over the Other's mind; a painting, for instance, might resonate with its viewer for a long time, but that resonance is highly personal and associative, even if the painting's subject matter (and the artist's aim in presenting it) is quite clear. Poetry works similarly, by evocation and association.

Not many people read poetry. Not many people spend time looking at paintings.

It's hard to share your neighbour's precise reaction to a poem or painting.

A novelist, on the other hand, can achieve very fine-grained control over the step-by-step alteration (excuse me, Prof. Austin: alternation) of the Other's consciousness. She controls the pace of presentation/encounter, the emotional context and content of each scene, and -- through sheer repetition and acculturation -- even, to some extent, the private linguistic framework within which the reader-Other will (must!) encounter the events depicted in the text.

My mentor Prof. Thorburn always said that 'Great novels teach us how to read them.' One way of understanding that not-quite-transparent claim is in the terms I'm suggesting here: by the time you reach the last page of a 500-page novel, your reading-consciousness has been subjected to a very specific series of remote-control instructions from the author, and that specificity of effect-dictation can't be matched by any other art form.

Dramatic performance comes close, long-form serial entertainment (e.g. TV shows) even closer; but our social-cognitive and emotional-processing apparatus has a lot more free reign to interpret events onstage or onscreen. They're people up there, after all.

But literary characters don't come to us as people. Not quite. Not like dramatic characters, whose medium of existence is human action, however abstract/formal. Epic poetry has some of the same quality, but its allusive/metaphorical qualities induce a certain lossiness of info-encoding.

The novel is one of the great innovations ever achieved by mankind, because it allows for an astonishingly high-fidelity transfer of enormous amounts of information, whose key function is to programmatically alter the consciousness of the reader, creating an impression not just of events-in-line but of meaning-creating-meaning. A painting can take you to an imaginary place; a poem can create a synthetic feeling; a dramatic performance can communicate a social moment. What the novel transmits, above all -- its informational payload -- is structured time: not just an explanation of how the universe works, but a fully functional example of an artificial universe.

I make no such claim regarding blog posts, though.

OK, hopefully I can sleep now.

Who suffers? The survivors. Well: and the rape and murder victims too, I suppose.

[Spoilers follow. If you haven't read Meltzer's Identity Crisis, you may as well just do that instead. That said, after the asterisks you'll find a paragraph or two on Theory of Fictional Chracterization (and Deadwood) which might - might!! - be interesting.]

I just reread Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer's controversial DC comics miniseries from a few years back. Y'know, the one with the ringing endorsement from Joss Whedon(!), who I guess was able to look past the unbearably tawdry solution to the central mystery to see the beauty of the overall design. The structure of Identity Crisis really is a thing of wonder: the sentimental family-of-superheroes material prompts a vastly more interesting examination of the working relationships between the heroes themselves. It's easy to see why it's so highly-regarded.

Easy, too, to see what some folks despise the series.

It's the women, of course. The series's treatment of women and sex is bothersome, but (for better or worse) it's just too tiring, at this point, to care about the childish sexuality of superhero comics. Still, I can't shake the sense that a cold misogynist streak runs through the whole series. The final issue's Big Reveal is an affront to the audience's intelligence and maturity, and Meltzer completely botches the characterization of the key antagonist. (Must Jean be a robotically self-assured lawyer who goes completely to pieces when she gets a shot at sleeping with her ex-husband? Why not make her a castrating dyke and round out the whole Tour de Cliché?) Moreover, the story's hidden turning point is the 'onscreen' rape of Sue Dibny, which contains the most dialogue Sue has in the whole story. For a series ostensibly about the lives of heroes' families, 'those left behind' and all that, it's shocking how shallowly those folks are characterized here.

Yet Meltzer does spend some time on the inner lives of two supporting characters - saccharine depictions of middle-aged fathers yearning for emotional intimacy with their young sons. Bad as the castrating-lawyer-who-craves-cock cliché is, at least Jean gets to show off a little bit of spine; these dads are around to make adolescent male comic book readers mushy about their own freighted paternal relationships. Period.

And of course the real betrayal in the series - the knife in the comics reader's heart - isn't Jean's killing spree. She's just the silly bitch who won't move on, and her fate is 'appropriately' cruel. Nah. The kicker is: in a story that masquerades (ahem) as a cost-of-secret-identities tale and hinges on a rape and the rapist's awful and arguably out-of-measure punishment, the only living rape victim at story's end is Batman himself, whose memories have been tampered with by the other JLA members. Ultimately it's the 'heroes' who go on bearing the cost of all those dead supporting characters (enumerated in a couple of unironic montages, where you can practically hear the violin music in the background). The deep-down limitation of nearly every superhero comic - the escapist fantasy of invincibility, of power and license and (often literal) weightlessness - can't actually be permanently undermined, not even in a much-hyped marquee miniseries.

* * *

It seems to me that one difference between complex and complicated characterization is this: complexity is all about AND, complication never goes beyond BUT. Complex characters are fully human even in their seeming contradictions, while simpler characters appear - at certain angles - to be nothing more than symbol-sets, machines for bringing contradictory features into collision. Superman is an alien god BUT he's also a patriotic American man; Night Owl is an impotent nebbish AND he's most truly alive (sexually and otherwise) when he's beating up crooks.

See the difference? If you're interested in the mere idea that contradictory impulses can exist in one human, you're hunting small game, morally/narratively speaking. The real stuff happens when you accept that of course all our impulses come from the same shared set of experiences/predilections/behaviour patterns, and then start testing not the individual traits but the whole organic mixture against circumstances. Superman is a bit of a boring character because his 'multidimensionality' manifests as unexpected shadings of a basic idea (the Man of Steel, a force of pure good from outta the prairie). Batman is more interesting but not substantially more complex - just darker. He's built on one idea (principled vengeance in a bat suit), then his audience is treated to unexpected variations on that idea. (He's sentimental about his orphaned ward! He's in love with a cat burglar!) Superhero comics have a hard time escaping that mode of characterization.

Compare those four-colour icons to, say, Al Swearengen - a character who brings his whole expansive personality to bear on everything he does. It's not that he possesses some number of discrete 'character features,' some of them flaws and some virtues; that's comic book thinking. Rather, Swearengen acts at all times out of a set of impulses that have over time unified into something like a coherent whole. When he leaps to assist Alma, we're not meant to focus on the surprising gesture itself, but rather to understand that Swearengen's hatred of Hearst and his protective (possessive) attitude toward the town all spring from a violent personal model of what family can be. His actions in that episode are touching, but he's clearly ambivalent about his role, and Milch doesn't need to give us any heroic 'resolution' of that ambivalence. The demands of dramatic storytelling (particularly the need for a big punchy ending) are kept from intruding too much on the mere humanity of the man.

He slits Jen's throat, after all, and feels bad - but feeling bad isn't enough to stop it happening. And while his actions reveal a weird possessive love for Trixie, that love isn't the 'solution' to the lingering question of whether Trixie and Sol Star would be allowed to keep on with their own weird (and cynically inaugurated) love affair.

Complex stories don't 'resolve' just to satisfy the audience. They end, because that's what 'stories' do, but they always leave us with a greater, more expansive sense of our world - they raise questions and reveal larger-than-expected structures or deeper-than-imagined relationships. That's what they're for. Identity Crisis leaves the reader with a lingering question: What will Batman do? But it's only a plot question. What remains is ambiguity rather than ambivalence. That's true of the series as a whole. Its central moral conundrum, the bit about the brain-wiping, is compelling without being particularly weighty; Meltzer's choice is to show us tough-minded superheroes who, y'know, Just Carry Around Their Angst Because They're Superheroes. The JLA erased Batman's memories? Well, we should brood about it, because - unlike Al Swearengen - the characters in the JLA aren't expansive enough to incorporate that knowledge into more complex personalities.

That's as much a limitation of mainstream comics as anything else; you can't upset the apple cart and hope to keep sales numbers up. But it's still a shame. And it's a damn shame, too, to see that lamentable situation shackling a writer who can do what Meltzer's capable of. The best moments in Identity Crisis are stunning. They serve a story that ends up a lot like every other comic book superhero story these days: 'gritty,' melodramatic, shocking without being existentially threatening. Oh, and there's some 'post-9/11 morality' in there, whatever that means.

Well then. This is what happens when I wake up at 4:30 or so and spend all morning reading comics and writing nonsense. 'Yay,' I guess?

Dreadful secrets of John Wick's manner.

My review of John Wick's essay/article collection, Play Dirty, just appeared at rpg.net. The review gets across what I thought of the book, so I'll just add one or two quick points, largely about the review itself, to this DVD-extras post.

More than most RPG books, Play Dirty invites - begs for - ad hominem reading and criticism. Half the book is taken up by Wick's war stories about his Champions, Call of Cthulhu, D&D, and Vampire games, and Wick unapologetically shares his opinion of their - and his - awesomeness. This, like much of the book's style, is a pain in the ass. When he wrote those columns roughly a decade ago, Wick was drowning in the kind of cliché-ridden nerd machismo you find at every single Rush concert, Friendly Local Game Store, and on-campus Objectivist meeting.

Alas, he wrote it all down.

It was hard not to make fun of him for it in the course of the review. Because I like things to be easy, I just went ahead and did it, even impugning his cultural heritage. Because I wanted to publish the damn review without spending too much time on it, I managed to flub the joke:

The first step to becoming a Dirty GM involves a little syndrome I call “The Die Hard Effect.” (I’ve talked about this before in other places, so I’ll keep it brief.) Essentially, all players want their characters to be John McClane. You know, the guy Bruce Willis plays in the Die Hard films. They want to be knocked down, punched out, bloody, battered and beaten.

But (and this is an important “but”, folks), every time they get knocked down, they want to be able to get back up.

That’s right. Just like the Chumbawumba song.

Being Irish, it just comes to me naturally.

In keeping with the spirit of the piece, my punchline here should be something like 'Unfortunately, so do saccharine sentimentality, world-class arrogance shot through with lovingly cultivated self-pity, impulses toward religiously-motivated murder tinged with banal fantasies about mom-fucking, and a literacy rate eclipsed only by the alcoholism rate.' But that hardly seemed appropriate for a nerd-game website. And - funny you should ask - if memory serves, the 'Holland' in 'Wally Holland' is an anglicization of great-grandad's family name (Ó hUallacháin? Houlihan? O'Halloran?), said lexical deformation occasioned by the fucking Protestants burning down the family manse (and the subsequent flight to Merry Olde England (long may she reign/moulder)). So as a citizen of nowhere, both literate and liquor-curious, with a few drops of Irish blood thinning my otherwise perfectly acceptable Spanish/French/Russian/etc. blood cocktail, I'm sentimentally inclined to find another (less purely racist) version of the joke.

Well, I snuffed it, as the final version demonstrates: '"Being Irish, it just comes to me naturally." So do sentimentality, posturing, disingenuous "self-deprecation," hand-wavy generalization, and a tendency to belabor "war stories" about good times around the beer bottle.' Huh. I guess that's what blogs are for - to fix what's wrong with 'print.' Right?

* * *

One odd thing about my review: it really only covers the first couple chapters of the book. The bits about 'Dirty PCs,' combat, and stealing plots from movies aren't terribly interesting - certainly not in comparison to the book's deeper concern, which apparently had to fight Wick's silly macho pretensions for space each month. That's why I can't help thinking the style of the book isn't some carefully-controlled literary effect. This bugs me because I'm preoccupied with literary style, not that you'd know it from this blog.

Only part of the book calls for detailed response or explication. That's not a compliment. The rest of the book is better-than-normal RPG advice, which is a compliment, but it's not exactly a high bar...

* * *

Unrelated sidebar: Y'know what disappointed me most about Avatar? That the hero's big rally-the-troops speech was framed in banally egotistical, indeed anthropocentric terms - 'This is our land' and other such rubbish. Wasn't the whole point of Avatar (storywise) that unimaginable power and freedom come not from dominance, nor ownership, but from immersion in (submission to) a shared macroconsciousness?

Why didn't he tell the truth? 'We are the land,' he might have said. 'Today we open wide canyon mouths and bare jagged mountain teeth, and welcome the invader into our world. We can not own the earth; we are the earth - today we recommit ourselves to our shared destiny.' That sort of thing. Bugs me most about the film.

* * *

I did enjoy Play Dirty, y'know. Quite liked it, the first time through. It's hard for me to accentuate the positive/eliminate the negative when the word 'Review' is in the air. Hopefully you see where I'm coming from. I'm sure you recognize how very important it is that you do so. How essential.

You don't build a world by worldbuilding. (Or: 'The best lie is the shortest.')

Bear with me a moment, and suppose:

I lie. To a boss, say.

Fearing interrogation, I work out a strong web of supporting lies.

But my boss never asks; instead he happily takes my statement at face value. Perhaps it flatters him, or comforts, or justifies. In any case my careful post hoc calculations remain my secret.

As it happens, though, he ends up believing some of these unspoken supporting (false) claims as well, which after all handily strengthen what he 'knows' to be true (my original lie). And in a private moment he prides himself on having worked things out for himself.

Two questions, then. First: Was my private expansion of the original lie necessary? By which I mean, did my calculations change the experience that my boss and I shared? If you like, alter the scenario so that I concoct my supporting lies before making my initial false claim.

Second, Does my victim believe my version of the story, or some other story, coincidentally identical? Does it matter?

* * *

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

--M. John Harrison

* * *

The difference between Harrison's reader and my imaginary boss is smaller than it might seem. Both want to be allowed to believe; even the contents of their future beliefs are shaped by private predispositions. Each entrusts part of his imagination to someone who turns out to be a fabulist. In both cases, the fabulist engages in an act of 'creation' that he misunderstands as other-directed, as generous (and generative), when its actual goal is self-satisfaction. If this misunderstanding didn't occur - if the fabulists were consciously aware that the output of their 'worldbuilding' activity was not better stories but a feeling of satisfied completism or correctness - the worldbuilding act might not even be possible. The impulse to keep spinning these lies, to 'exhaustively survey a place that isn't there,' partners with the delusion that the whole activity is 'for' something else - a fictional audience in a fictional future.

Worldbuilding is the story you tell yourself so you can tell someone else a different story. It's Nomar Garciaparra ritually tightening his gloves after every single pitch at the ballgame, or soldiers painting stupid slogans on the sides of missiles. It's the ludicrous mythology of heaven and hell - perhaps the most consequential act of fantasy worldbuilding in the history of mankind - justifying the state-building activities of priests who need to believe that they serve something other than themselves.

A means to mask intentions.

* * *

I've talked about this before in the specific context of tabletop roleplaying games. Less efficiently.

* * *

The tension, here, is between the popular idea that worldbuilding is a 'necessary part of storytelling' (e.g. that Tolkien's decades of obsessive fantasy-lexicography are important to the literary triumph of Lord of the Rings in the same way as his intuitive connection to Frodo Baggins's wartime loss of innocence) and the complicated, troubling, but ultimately much more clarifying notion that worldbuilding as commonly understood is orthogonal to storytelling. In the linked essay I suggested that good worldbuilding was a storytelling act, akin to deciding what to include in a dramatic script, and offered this text, from S. John Ross's wonderful Uresia: Grave of Heaven, as a sublime worldbuilding example:

Four gods are now known to have survived the Skyfall. There may be others, too, but there has been no sign of them in over a thousand years. The surviving gods are an odd mix of "unimportant" gods - morally ambiguous and largely unapproachable.

The Primal One: The god of animal urges - want, hunger, instinct, and lust. Some mistake her/him/it for "evil," but it's both above and beneath such things. It's the shadowy essence of the Id, and of unthinking motive impulse. It cares only for its native worshippers, the wild animals. Paradoxically, it's the secret ruler of a mortal kingdom.

The Sea Dragon: The serpentine goddess of wind and storm at sea, and the protector of the secrets of the deep. A fickle and destructive god, driven by alien motives and fond of drowning anything weak enough to require air to breathe. Villains who attempt to get on her good side end up just as drowned as anyone else. She commands a tiny secret cult of children.

The Arbiters: Their genders and personalities vary according to which culture you ask, but their area of concern is straightforward. They like any contest, as long as it is fair. They have no preference between violence and peace, or between right and wrong, so long as men are competing and striving for a judgment of victory. These cosmic referees inspire most Uresian kingdoms with an obsession for some kind of sport or contest.

The Wine God: In Helt, he is called Tom Beer, a laughing party-animal. In the Volenwood, she is Nysha, Goddess of the Vine, and the patron of the vintners' art. In Sindra, they call it Golu: The Shadow of Drunkards, a semi-sinister spectre of alcoholism, the dark image that the drunkard can only escape by plunging into darkness. Each representation of a facet of the whole truth, but that the Wine God makes more personal appearances in Helt than anywhere else tells Man something, even if it is only how he prefers to be seen.

That's the sum total of the Uresian cosmology. I love it. But note that it's almost worthless as a reference text, and is no more 'definitive' than a simple list ('surviving gods: animal urges, wind/sea, fair competition/balance, wine'). Its purpose is to illustrate the moral character and texture, not of the mythical land of Uresia, but rather of the stories the players will set there. What makes it 'worldbuilding' is the list, but what makes it wonderful is the story - the extent to which this bit of writing is contiguous with the act of storytelling in the Uresian frame.

Roleplaying gamers tend to be quite fond of complicated worked-out backstories, but these same gamers tend not to make full use of those backstories at the game table. Competent RPG play is primarily improvisatory; referring to backstory in the middle of a session is like interrupting a stage play to quote the dramaturge's note. Similarly, the same fantasy readers who praise J.R.R. Tolkien's 'extraordinary worldbuilding' will happily admit to getting five pages into the hundreds of pages of appendices to Lord of the Rings and giving up. (I'm one of these.) There's good stuff in there, but the novel itself resolves all the dilemmas it raises; the appendices start over somewhere else. They're another text, another kind of text. And while Joyce's various schemata for Ulysses are 'of interest' to Joyce fans, we're allowed to admit that noting the main body part 'associated with' each chapter of that novel - a standard Joycean academic exercise - has precious little to do with the story, the 'vivid and continuous dream' which the novel expends so much energy to maintain.

What I think of as 'good worldbuilding,' then, isn't really 'worldbuilding' in Harrison's sense of futilely exhaustive 'subcreation.' It's just one dimension of the discipline of writing, subservient to the storytelling act, and its stopping point is not a state of 'completeness' or even a particular arbitrary level of detail. The limit of worldbuilding is not the limit of the world.

* * *

If you identify your 'self' with your own high-level mental activity, your private mental reconstitution of the world from limited perception, then the last thing you want is for things to change - which would, after all, change you. Drama is change; gameplay is change. ('Play' isn't necessarily change, but then game and play are not equivalent. Far from it.) Effective dramatization requires ego-suppression. Worldbuilding gratifies the ego, which identifies the 'self' with its imaginative activity and is happy to see the imagined/constructed self augmented by 'subcreation.' (Tolkien is Middle-Earth in a way that Joyce absolutely is not Dublin.) Blah blah deductive logic, and we arrive back at: 'Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.'

The same goes for roleplaying games - like you give a damn. Media fandom too, of course, particularly among fanfic writers and 'shippers' for whom viewership is understood as a consciously editorial or oppositional act, and who zealously advocate for a particular revisionist take on (say) a TV depiction of a fictional relationship. But the same also goes, if you like, for politics: conspiracism and ideology are worldbuilding, self-gratification through the creation of ever more exhaustive imagined order. I wonder whether the same kind of argument is readily made in other domains. Huh...

At the risk of seeming unpleasantly earnest or just dippy, I'd ask you, in parting, to consider whether something like the worldbuilding impulse - which insists on logical consistency and indeed total predictability in the domain of the imagination - manifests in your own life (as it unquestionably does in mine), and under what circumstances. I'm not sure why I'm asking, frankly, but if you don't mind I'll flatter myself that the question comes out of a storytelling impulse, and wish you earnestly and even dippily well. Isn't nice nice?

From a biggish thing about (among other things) Hamlet, proof-by-induction, fanfiction, the meaning of love, and the Eiffel Tower upside-down.

Now imagine (3,3) and (4,4) on the plane. Ya dig? OK: What's the next point?

Most people, I'm guessing, speculate that the 'next point' is (5,5). Linear progression. You don't even have to think of it as function input and output; you could just have a weird way of making two lists of integers that happen to proceed at equal pace from the same starting point. 'Sliding friction' is the force that resists you when you're sliding; 'static friction' is what fights against you starting. The latter is the greater force; as wacky Wernher von Braun said, 'Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.' The world has tendencies: in motion, stay in motion; at rest, stay at rest. Reality is opinionated. So are we.

We're made to extrapolate, which is how we invented God; we need order to make sense of infinity, which is why we invented God; we tend to value and enshrine straight-line thinking, which is why God looks like a bearded white man (and there's no such thing as a 'liberal media').

Proof by induction works like this: if you can show that a proposition is true for one baseline element, and that if it's true for one element then it must be true for the next one in line, then the proposition must be true for all elements. Inductive reasoning frees you to run - once you've settled on your baseline, your (literal) starting point, then all you need is a logic of association to allow you to make a universal statement. Which feels, let me tell you, absolutely wonderful. That wind-in-your-hair feeling of encompassing all of what you see in a single expression or conception. A formula.

But.

That joy (of understanding) doesn't come from a point. Think of singular aesthetic (i.e. learning) experiences that have 'changed your life,' or just your mind: I remember for instance my first rock show, being dumped for the first time, 'losing' my virginity, realizing I was falling in love with my future wife. You go back later on and fill in relationships to what you know, or to later examples of the same general phenomenon, but in each instant what prevails is confusion, loss of center, prior understandings (a/k/a 'priorities,' right?) falling away. The word for this feeling is freedom. The feeling changes you, but you can't possibly understand or articulate each moment within itself. The limited relationship between your reptilian, emotional, and analytical minds precludes such understanding.

And from that point, where do you go?

What would Hamlet say if he were here with us right now?

Games are narcissism machines.

Games offer knowable worlds in which players can attain and (crucially) measure mastery. The idea that 'real expertise' can't be measured or compared is a commonplace; games are built to provide just such a comparative function. This illusion - power to the powerless - is their purpose. We can't actually know who the 'most athletic' person is, the 'most physically fit' (though batteries like the Ironman Triathlon and the decathlon provide compelling answers) - but games and sports reduce the scope of such evaluative problems, giving us a basis for simple comparative judgment.

The acceptance of such reduction and rationalization is a social-imaginative contract known as the 'magic circle.' Step onto the field - inside the circle - and you vow to pretend that getting the leather ball into the big fishing net (or metal rim or grassy 'end zone') is important enough to risk life and limb for. If there's no game on, it doesn't matter what you do with the ball, but for that time, in that place, illegality' constrains your behaviour. The rules, in other words, regulate desire and activity.

Games don't require what we think of as 'competition.' Individuals can 'play games with fate,' concoct dramas in miniature in which they're pitted against nature or luck, with an uncertain outcome. In middle school English class we learned that stories were built on conflict: Man vs Nature, Man vs Man, Man vs Society, etc. Solitaire and improvised games apply these imaginative contexts to seemingly irrational activity - they create provisional realities, new orders (of thought and behaviour) to stimulate or comfort or simply distract us.

As a kid in Texas I used to practice throwing tennis balls at individual bricks on the driveway side of our house. I never thought about improvement or form, didn't keep track of accuracy, but I'd narrate in the style of TV sports announcers and would feel little bursts of pride when I managed to hit a brick three or four times in a row. Pride and surprise actually. The 'game' altered what I wanted and what I did, but the rules emerged from personal habits rather than being handed down. It was a loosely-defined solitaire game of my own invention, and it had as much to do with the ongoing monologue as with throwing at a target. The purpose of the 'rules' wasn't to make me throw the ball but to make mastery possible and knowable. I was seven and could barely affect my world, but on the fantasy ballfield I was the world's bright center.

I'll come back to this, but I want to talk about the effects of increasingly detailed representation in video games, and how the difference between 'avatars' and 'character' has altered gaming culture - and specifically roleplaying culture. Which will involve talking about Japan, alas. We can come back to it.

Conspiracy arcs.

The 'conspiracy arc' (a form of 'mythology arc') in contemporary TV - cf. The X-Files, Lost, Babylon 5 (contemporary enough), 24, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, elements of Doctor Who's new incarnation, really any descendant of the Illuminatus! trilogy or the Principia Discordia mythology - stages a particularly attractive fantasy for the viewer. First off, it creates for the viewer the illusion of activity: if you just think really hard about what's going on, you're taking part in narrative creation somehow, you're not simply an impotent bystander, pace Joss Whedon's insistence on the 'holy emotion' of surprise and the relinquishing of narrative control.

Plus the conspiracy arc tells you right out that everything means something, that answers exist: The Truth Is Out There; They Have a Plan; 4 8 15 16 23 42. We can know the world fully, in other words, and this knowing - maybe there should be scare quotes around that - is mastery. Masterful. You're getting graded on this but it's a participation grade.

Centrally, TV conspiracy stories play into a particular dramatic-reception paradigm that unfortunately dominates contemporary culture. The idea is basically this: if we only knew why this happened we could beat it. In a culture where preventive medicine is eschewed in favour of diagnostic overdependence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that dramatic diagnosis - of trauma, usually - is fetishized in so many stories. (And it ain't just modern: It doesn't really matter why Iago decides to destroy Othello, as long as Iago thinks there's a reason, yet this question has preoccupied scholars for centuries. File along with: Is Hamlet really mad?) On Lost, the key to every single character's (usually nonsensical) actions is invariably some deep trauma revealed through flashback; Galactica's fourth season seems to be built around the refrain that 'This has happened before and will happen again'; the inane alien-invasion conspiracy on The X-Files had as its emotional center the abduction (by aliens!) of the protagonist's sister, and the episode in which he finally confronted The Truth of what happened to her is often hailed as one of the high points of the series. (Plus there's the foundational cultural trauma of that intensely post-traumatic show: Watergate.) This dramatic structure gives us pleasure in not knowing, then offers us mastery over pleasure (another egocentric lie) by promising that we can know everything there is to know. Storyworlds instead of stories, and they do something to us, whether or not we can admit it.

You could maybe argue that the central traumas in Western culture are imaginary variations on the theme of 'You are not alone' - the death of Jesus as its positive image, say, and the genocidal conquest of the Americas as its grand negative - and that all drama stages positively or negatively a confrontation with the fact that we can't know everything or everyone or every moment (what would Zen drama look like?). But keep it smaller: these stories take our self-absorbed characterological distraction ('If only I knew everything about this person') and generalize it to the world of the story. The fannish obsession with 'canon' - which is to say correctness - stands in for the irrational desire to make characters correspond to our desires for them. The egocentric viewer wants the world to be 'right,' having at least halfway acknowledged that she can't make the characters be right, that she can't control their destinies. Canonicity - and this is about scholars too, make no mistake - is the preoccupation of the diagnostic narcissist: I can enfold the world and it must be right. I am its caretaker and its integrity reflects my own (plus, y'know, vice versa).

Of course there are good and bad ways to work in this form; as you can guess, I think Veronica Mars and Galactica and Firefly are good texts, honest about their characters, granting access to new emotions, confronting their viewers, using the conspiracy form to structure stories about something other than story structure; while shows like Lost and The X-Files (and especially 24!) essentially comfort their viewers by sacrificing moral autonomy - their surprises are structural rather than moral (what could be more comfortable than being stranded on a paradisiacal island in the Pacific with a bunch of attractive singles? If The X-Files is serious about its paranoid storytelling, why is Fox Mulder such an unflappably cheery goof-off? How can you possibly be surprised by Jack Bauer torturing someone when that's his basic mode of communication?). The great HBO dramas - Deadwood, The Sopranos, The Wire, had no conspiracy elements at all, but it's telling that bottom-feeding Sopranos fans invariably tried to talk the show up as somehow conspiracy- or mythology-centered (the Russian in the woods! The guy in the Members Only jacket at the diner!! It's all connected!!!). We like being coddled; mythology divorced from human choice coddles us.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Emerson, of course, and I think he would've had doubts about our bullshit.

I know I got lost up in there, but if anyone asks, say we were interested in the woods, and not the path, and anyway we're back at the camp safe and sound. (Future biographers will note here a veiled reference to one of my personal foundational traumas, and let that be that for the moment. Fa!)

It was Arrested Development.

Wow, how late to the party am I on this one?

[This isn't gushing, mostly, and the third paragraph puts forward a wacky idea worth skipping to, even if you hate my TV bullshit.]

Arrested Development owed a great deal to Malcolm in the Middle; AD inherited some of Malcolm's manic tone (which drew heavily, to my eye, on The Simpsons) and its crazy-is-still-family ethics, along with the liberated feeling that single-camera sitcoms - e.g. The Simpsons! - tend to have. Maybe he best way to understand the show's weird risk-taking energy is to consider that it won the Best Comedy Emmy only once - following and preceding the insufferably bland Everybody Loves Raymond. In Season Three Mitchell Hurwitz and his crack writing staff played fast and loose with the 'documentary' conceit to great effect, particularly in the wild post-cancellation episodes when all formal bets were off; the episode "S.O.B.s" (Save Our Bluths), maybe the show's finest hour, was a wild metatextual riff on the show's tiny audience, the characters' aggressive unlikability, and AD's impending cancellation - a catalogue of the sitcom clichés and gross requirements of corporate sponsorship that the show had theretofore satirized more subtly. Yes, The Simpsons does that sort of metacommentary regularly, but then The Simpsons began life as a bilious but very spoof on the Nuclear Sitcom Family, while Arrested Development had sharp teeth from its first moment. (It was, after all, created by a Golden Girls alum, and for all that show's broad theatricality, no other sitcom had attempted to tell the merely human stories about women aging which it took on.)

I'd been warned that Season Three of AD fell off somewhat; its plots ran off the rails, believability was finally tossed aside altogether, and the hair's-breadth escapes seemed for the first time too contrived. But I don't feel that way; we just watched the entire second half of Season Three and to my eye the show's sacrifice of some emotional continuity was the cost of the enormous risks it took as it approached its end. By the time it reached escape velocity, Hurwitz's show had built up enough emotional weight that it could shift to shorthand for more of its storytelling (not that dropped plots were a Season Three innovation); in this case it worked like a charm, and the post-Charlize Theron episodes take the emotional credibility the show had earned (how moving did this satire get?) and just bolted with it. Goofy as the trip-to-Iraq episode was, it's not as if the writers didn't tease that ending from the very first batch of episodes; and the impending cancellation gave them a new, thrilling emotional context to work explore. I loved the end of the show more than its beginning.

Structurally, Arrested Development reminds me most of The Sopranos; while Hurwitz has said (in his interesting AV Club interview) that the show's dense, gnarly continuity was purely off-the-cuff, the first season was very much of a piece, springing in a very natural way from the premise and returning constantly to it. (David Chase pitched The Sopranos first as a film; its first season essentially covered that story, so that when Big Pussy ran off at the end of the Season One finale, Chase et al. didn't actually know where he'd gotten to - though they eventually made the ideal choice.) Like The Sopranos, AD returned in its second season with a larger palette and a set of storylines that related to its premise in an almost secondhand way; both shows kicked off their sophomore years (and subsequent seasons) by expanding their ensembles - remember that S2 of the gangster show kicks off with Janice and Richie reentering Tony's life - trying out unusual formal structures and stylizations, and taking chances by running with offhand notions from Season One. Each show derived much of its Season One strength from the tightness of its conception, the richness of its premise, the writers' empathetic reaction to the sparks thrown off by the actors, and each series's ability to come back constantly to its central question (the same for both: 'How do I keep this fragmenting family together?'). In years two and three, both shows seemed to gather more strength in the writing room from episode to episode. As a show's writers get to know their characters' voices, to internalize them, they can start writing with a stronger sense of how each episode will look and feel, how quickly a certain kind of scene can move a plot forward, in whose hands certain emotional beats are most effectively played. Both AD and its Jersey gangland sister-story(!) became their own sequels in their second and third seasons, and that state of affairs always holds out the promise of formal wandering; when you're talking about yourself, that's what happens.

Probably you don't need me to tell you how good this sitcom was; it was really, really, really good. Note that its first season is more fully-formed by far than the first season of Seinfeld, one of the keystone comedies of the last 30 years. AD is in some ways a demented riff on Growing Pains and Family Ties and their overwrought ilk, down to the intrusive 'aww shucks' scoring, but its episodes were built like Seinfeld stories, in ways that e.g. The Office's more linear episodes very definitely are not. Plus there's AD's cheeky kinda-Jewishness, one of the key ongoing reflexive concerns of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm (and, lest we forget, The Golden Girls). (About which perhaps more some other time.)

I'll just gush for a second, but hopefully semicritically; I wanna come back to this show some other time and here's the short version of what I'd like to say. The referentiality of AD was almost never tokenist, as with The Family Guy or (to an extent) The Simpsons; jokes that began life as one-offs or spoofs often evolved into epic running gags, often deepening and taking on weird, unexpected emotional resonance (cf. David Cross's 'Blue Man Group' foibles early on, which were a running theme into Season Three, or the saga of Lucille II, played by Liza Minelli without even a hint of irony - a reminder of how goddamn good Minelli is at this stuff). And the continuity from episode to episode was denser by far, and more meaningfully so, than on any comedy I've ever seen. On Seinfeld you'd get the loopy sagas of J. Peterman or the periodic mention of Vandelay Industries (importing/exporting), but what difference did it make that these names kept popping up? That marvelous show set out deliberately to eradicate character memories, and other than Jerry's Superman fixation I can't think of a single running gag that actually deepened a character or situation. (Of course those four were always meant as grotesques, whereas the Bluths of Arrested Development were meant to engage us as people.) While The Simpsons in my experience treats its popcult references largely as entries in a catalogue (or as objects of very specific satire), AD seemed to take its offhand gestures seriously almost in spite of itself, dressing like a satire but feeling like something more serious, never moreso than when George Michael fell hopelessly in love with his cousin. You actually felt for the guy (and for her, when things went haywire). Maybe you watch The Simpsons in a way I never managed to, but how can you feel anything consistent, or organically evolving, for essentially unchanging cartoon characters?

In other words, how can you care about characters for whom nothing is actually at risk? Remember what a big deal it was on The Simpsons when one of Marge's sisters died? [Correction: turned out to be gay. I don't watch the show, I just remember media coverage. Same thing, from a ratings standpoint, no? The point being that the specific plot points of a given episode of The Simpsons (or South Park don't tend to matter in the long run, except simply as facts to call back, like a character's birthday.] Remember how it simply didn't matter that Maggie shot Mr Burns? And so forth for two decades: the 'greatest sitcom in history' is much closer to sketch comedy - and takes far fewer emotional risks - than is generally acknowledged. Yes I'm biased, but yes I don't usually see this talked about. And yes my extra bias is that I have no great affection for sketch comedy in general; I was a sitcom kid, not a Monty Python kid, and Saturday Night Live bored the hell out of me. AD did make its fair share of up-n-backs - hell, every Gob-hates-Michael storyline was essentially the same, with the same teary resolution - but the characters did evolve over time, none more than the kids, G. Michael and Maeby, whose story was the series's secret weapon.

(Shoutout here, by the way, to Malcolm in the Middle, which when it wasn't deeply annoying was a genuinely moving piece of work. Weird that its least engaging performer, as I recall, would be in the title role.)

Alright, enough of this. I didn't mean to go on about The Simpsons but it's obviously a key reference point for American sitcoms now (and Gervais reveres it), and AD seemed to wrestle with its aesthetic inheritance and successfully dealt with the cartoonishness of some of its forefathers by sticking to ongoing stories, a choice that (for obvious reasons given e.g. my love of Buffy, c'mon people pay attention!) I tend to get excited about. Well, it's late as hell and I can barely write, sorry. But check out that Sopranos comparison, huh? That's straight-up blog crack rock right there, Babychild(ren). Rest in peace! See you.

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

What is The Office about?

The Office, UK edition, is on most days my favourite comedy in any medium (my favourite film is nominally Magnolia or [sometimes] Fight Club, but I might need to name The Singing Detective my fave screen drama award). Ricky Gervais created in David Brent a character with vast comic potential and proceeded to invest him with shocking depth and warmth; his performance in the Series Two finale ('Don't make me redundant') is gorgeous, a master class in using comic rhythms and momentum to deepen dramatic payoffs. Buffy is a 144-hour lesson in the same subject, but the abrasiveness of The Office gave it a power that the comforting Buffy sometimes sacrificed. [Update: See below.] Merchant and Gervais didn't make a single misstep doing that show; I watch the formulaic, often soporific Fawlty Towers and wonder why Gervais holds it in such high esteem. Oh well.

The American Office, run by Greg Daniels, started off very similar to its British source material in tone and attitude - the six-episode first season stands up nicely now but is a separate thing from what came after. Seasons 2 and 3 were excellent blends of serial and episodic plots, particular Season Three, with its extensive callbacks and finely paced character development and deepening relationships. As time has gone on, the characters on the US Office have almost all grown more sympathetic; the most peripheral characters (Creed, Stanley, Meredith, Angela) have gotten more outsized and ridiculous, as has Kelly, but with the exception of Ryan the Temp, everyone else is just more likable. More...sitcom-y. Michael, Jim, Pam, Roy, Dwight, Jan, the horrifying-to-goofy Andy, even the increasingly brittle Karen: you get behind them.[*]

That's not a bad thing in this case. The show's main strength, going into Season Four (two weeks or so), is its depiction of a surrogate family that is totally unpredictable in its ratio of wacky antics to sudden, painful microdrama. The marvelous Joss-directed 'Business School' episode[**] from last Spring is a case in point: Michael gives a ridiculous lecture, the officemates all act like idiots about the bat - we're supposed to believe that Dwight isn't merely a boob but actually flat-out deranged? - and yet the episode ends with pure tearjerking aww-how-sweet moments to illustrate Michael's essential goodness and good sense. Dunder-Mifflin is about people, 'and people will never go out of business.' It's not played as a moment of naivete; we're rooting for him, and for the company. For Pam he's like a surrogate father; to Ryan he's the ridiculous secret-genius uncle; he really takes care of Dwight, and for all his obliviousness he really cares about Jim's romantic wellbeing. And of course the Jan-goes-crazy plot casts an even more sympathetic light on Michael's life.

Which finally brings me to my point: The Office has very little to do with the office.

TV scholars have noted the varied cultural work performed by TV shows that depict workplaces as families - for instance, how such fantastic depictions justify/normalize the encroachment of work obligations into family life and the substitution of merely contingent, highly structured, hierarchical work relationships for negotiated organic family ones. On The Office, you increasingly get a host of reassuring sitcom tropes popping up: father really does know best, true love really does win out (and deserves it), returning to the status quo every week is OK, big guys are lovable lugs, bitches just need some old-fashioned loving. The show is at times genuinely difficult to watch - cf. 'Cocktails,' in which Michael and Pam go public with their blossoming demented relationship, or the painful-yet-heartwarming wedding episode - but it was a lot harder, for me, in Season One (and to a lesser extent the otherwise superior Season Two). Steve Carrell and the writers have created something wonderful in Michael Scott, but David Brent's sneering blithering accidentally malicious little troll of a boss has been transformed into something easier to stomach. After fifty episodes you don't believe that Michael is full of awful racist jokes like Brent; you begin to see his foibles as mental clutter or harmless accidents, because the fact remains that all around him people's lives are improving all the time, often because of him. Whatever he is, he isn't quite poisonous.

I was shocked when, in the first episode of the US episode, Pam yells directly at Michael, 'You're a jerk!' In the first season Michael Scott was a jerk, but I'd already seen a bunch of Season Three at that point, and I knew he softened considerably over time. Tonally that scene seemed to belong in the British and not the American show.

But it also seemed out of place, retrospectively, in another sense: it's very much a workplace moment. Pam is blowing up because she's going to lose her job and her flirtation with Jim; what's at stake is steeped in the show's environment. By Season Three, the best moments were job-related - Michael's business school lecture, the salary negotiations, the two branches integrating, Dwight's various office-etiquette near-breaches, Pam's growing rapport with Dwight in the finale, the magnificent sales-call sequence - but the characteristic moments were increasingly the overwrought-relationship moments, the strange-field-trip moments, Diwali, the convention. In part I suspect the show's comedy had simply outgrown its premise, but this growth seems to manifest in very specific ways in American TV comedy. Look at everything from the dumb Friends to the smart Frasier to the head-shaking Malcolm in the Middle: as the stories get bigger they get safer, because stories tend to boil down to the familiar terrain of romantic/family relationships. Even on a show like The Office, where the detailed setting is so central to the show's success, you can imagine a bunch of the later episodes being moved to different sets almost invisibly. (Odd to me: the 'Product Recall' episode was one of the season's weakest, I thought, in spite of or because of its efforts to link Dunder-Mifflin to its larger world.)

All this is to say a couple of things. First, The Office has shifted focus from the Platonic office environment to a very specific one; it's better than it's ever been, but also far less universalizable in the situations it depicts. That makes it easier to watch, I think - it implies less about our own experiences, but has the potential to inquire more deeply into the detailed experiences of (fictional) others.

Second (and the reason I wrote this post in the first place), the DVD's for Season Three are still marketed, against all sense, as being about 'cubicle hell' - and the pull quotes are all about the show's value as workplace satire. When was the last time anyone watched The Office as satire? If anything the third season of the US show has taken the tone of the original UK Office Christmas Special, which (following Series Two) shifted emphasis from The Workplace to Our Silly Workplace, bearing down harder on Brent and centralizing the romance and friendship plots. (Same for Extras, about which I had mixed but mostly good feelings at the end.) Note to NBC: The Office is not a satire. It was certainly one in Season One, and somewhat in Season Two, but try and imagine a Season Three episode matching the focused critical vibe of 'Hot Girl,' with its strongly in-character ickiness that nonetheless made strong points about workplace sexuality in a general way. You could say the show's satiric edge is a victim of the ensemble's excellence (it really is a great cast): the main characters are so finely-drawn that the right writerly choices for satire would necessitate a betrayal of the characters' particularity. You have to serve the individual actors and their characters, so you can't cop out to make broad social points.

(Yet another reason The Sopranos was hard to pin down in later seasons: Tony was so complex and his reactions so multifaceted that the show's satire was often buried fathoms deep, yet David Chase and his writers kept a broad-brush style of portraiture that sometimes left the audience wondering what kind of show they were watching. It wasn't a soap opera, but it wasn't The Wire for damn sure.)

I love the show; I root for the characters without hesitation or shame, and I cover my eyes and cry in equal measure, laughing all the while. The GF and I will be watching when the new season starts. But I think we should consider how the show has evolved in its short run, and why it's done so, and along what structure/content/intent lines; I suspect its development is indicative of certain forces present in all network TV, not just in the broad, vague 'everything gets homogenized!' way but in specific, predictable formal ways - which, I'm guessing, correlate directly to certain ideological or imaginative-sympathetic outcomes. The form of the show has altered, as has its function, and I wonder to what extent we can map the one as cause onto the other as effect. And, um, vice versa. I'm not gonna lie to you, it's nearly 2am and I'm too tired to check whether those last sentences meant anything at all.

[*] I wonder whether the writer/actor dual roles of B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling have a big effect on the way the show plays out tonally: as Kaling's performance has gotten loopier and Novak's more nakedly meanspirited (his is the character who most directly insults the whole enterprise of the show), perhaps they've pulled the other characters in slightly more meta directions. Huh.

[**] I know I'm a total Josshole, but it has to be said: 'Business School' and 'The Job' (S3 finale) are the most emotionally satisfying episodes of the show. Pam's reaction to Michael's earnest praise at the gallery, and more importantly, Steve Carrell's extraordinary reaction to Jenna Fischer's tears and hug, never fail to move me. Middle-aged men, squandered opportunities, the sad clown. It's a wonder I never got addicted to All in the Family.

[Update: I don't wanna turn this into a Joss blurt, but this bears expansion: Buffy was for most of its run a pretty comforting show, i.e. the mode of danger was knowable and understandable, the comedy never at the audience's expense. With the exception of the skin-peeling Season Seven monster-of-the-week, I never found Buffy unwatchable; Whedon's love of comedy-within-horror and shock-within-comedy and melodramatic-punctuation-to-joviality never caused him to push into violation of the audience's comfort. The most shocking moments on the show - the deaths of Jenny Calendar, Joyce, and Tara, or the de-eyeing of Xander - turned immediately to sadness (for loss) rather than prolonged discomfort. Joss's drama is about dealing with the consequences of actions; comedy almost by definition offers a structural 'out,' a return to the status quo at the end of an exploration of discomfort. (In Real Life no one would still be working at Dunder-Mifflin Scranton, least of all Michael Scott, and David Brent would have been sued out of house and home. Someone would have sued.) As such, while Whedon often presents his characters with seemingly insurmountable odds and forces them to countenance loss and unfulfilled longing, he never grants the audience the horror/comfort of looking away from the story, not even with the emotionally contiguous Monster of the Week episodes. Everything in his shows was tonally of a piece. That's one difference between, say, Buffy and the UK Office: it's not that Gervais and Merchant's show didn't have a heart (it certainly did!), it's that at times it almost represented two separate registers of experience, one the unbelievably painful missteps of Brent and his grotesque employees, one the slow walk to relationship satisfaction. That's one reason I like the second series of the UK show better than the first: its narrative highs and lows are more closely linked by way of character continuity. You could even call that...slightly more comforting. Which analysis, I may as well tell you, doesn't comfort me, since I hardly know today whether I agree with me yesterday. Well, that's blogging.]

[S&N] The Wire, TV dramatic form; attendant digressions.

[Note: The third paragraph of this post hits on a point that I've never made before, hadn't actually realized until I wrote it - and then expands from there. And this isn't really an opinion piece, though there's some evaluative stuff in the first paragraphs. This one is worth reading, I think. Also: if you comment, no Wire spoilers or I will kill you.]

The Wire is a long step forward from any of the cop shows that came before it, not only in terms of verisimilitude (to a large extent it's a show about dead ends and 'anticlimax') but in its attitude toward the police drama as a genre. Creator David Simon has been very explicit in his rejection of the good guys/bad guys schema that tends to order such shows, even in recent variations: e.g. Milch's NYPD Blue centered on the (a)morality of law enforcement but wasn't intended as a systematic critique of the laws themselves, and the viewer's job was to relate to the police as moral actors - not merely as aspects of a [failed] system as in The Wire. Simon's attitude toward drama and its social functions seems to be journalistic in origin, certainly moreso than e.g. Milch's; in The Wire, though there are main characters who serve as focal points for audience investment and identification (at first McNulty, D'Angelo, et al.), and the characters are often likable, the meaning of the show isn't the relationship of any one character to his or her world. The story comes first, always, and the enormous cast of characters enables Simon, Ed Burns, and their fellow writers to tell far-reaching stories about the American underclass and its relationship to capitalism - though these stories center around repeating characters, those characters are meant to provide entry into the wider world of the story. So when we see Frank Sobotka and his son and nephew argue about the docks, we should feel for them, but I think that in Simon's view we should mainly be thinking about the theme of Season Two (the death of labour etc.).

A number of critics stepped up in 2006 to proclaim boldly that The Wire is the greatest TV drama of all time, bar none. Now I haven't seen all four seasons of The Wire - the GF and I are 2/3 of the way through Season Two, right around the point when the noose begins to tighten on the Sobotka family - but I'm probably more moved, and certainly more awed, by Deadwood than by Baltimore's cops'n'kingpins (and in any case The Sopranos will, I'm certain, have a much greater effect on the medium of television than either of those shows - indeed I think it will have as much influence on the medium as The X-Files). David Simon would be the first to say such comparisons are a waste of time, so I'll avoid my pressing need to hierarchize for the moment. Instead let's talk more materially: what effect will The Wire have on TV, if any? Since the show to a certain extent rejects basic principles of dramatic (television) construction - starting with entirely jettisoning the notion of episodic plots or even climaxes in a way soap operas and prime-time American TV have never even attempted - does contemporary TV stand to improve by taking up some of the storytelling techniques utilized by The Wire?

The easy answer to the last question is: yes, but it makes no difference. Network TV will never be take up the dramatic form of The Wire, because the desire-economy of prime-time shows (which exist, currently, as a way of passing time between advertisements, though this is changing) is ill-suited to the kind of unremitting tension-without-release that such purely serial dramas maintain from week to week. 24 might not finish even a single storyline in the course of an hour, but there's always a bang at the end to let you know you're supposed to watch next week. When the commercial break starts with 10 minutes left in the hour, you can 'fret' for four minutes rest assured that the producers will push the appropriate buttons as soon as the ads for pickup trucks are over. British TV doesn't offer commercial breaks, nor do HBO's groundbreaking dramas; formally, the writers don't have to contend with commercial downtime, so they don't need to punctuate each act with an appropriate 'out' (whereas network hourlongs need 4-5 Big Moments on which to cut to commercials). That means new kinds of stories can be told effectively; in particular, it means that boredom can be dramatized in new, fascinating ways. You simply can't interrupt a numbing stakeout or a slow, painstaking process (e.g. restrained negotiation) with a Viagra commercial and expect the audience to remain invested - it's just too difficult for viewers to bring themselves back to the headspace of the drama.

But HBO/Showtime series are able to take on systemic action in ways network TV can't approach (notwithstanding the network-TV imperative not to criticize the status quo too harshly). The Sopranos can take its time building its indictment of Tony in part because of the shape of the individual episodes; The Wire can spread across a huge cast partly because it's 10-15 minutes longer per episode than Lost, partly because the viewer doesn't need to think in 'acts' but instead can look at an entire episode's action as cumulative. And Deadwood can luxuriate in Milch's astonishing verbal textures - seriously, the greatest dialogue yet heard on American TV, there's simply nothing like it - because the audience won't be disappointed if the story's Big Turning Point (the equivalent of the second 'act out' on a network show) hasn't arrived by the bottom of the hour.

Formally, network TV won't take up that storytelling mode until it abandons its commercial-interruption model, and that's not likely to happen soon, in part because the four-act TV drama model is incredibly accomplished at this point. Look at Homicide, NYPD Blue, Buffy, The West Wing, Galactica, 24 - even Lost, if you want. These are shows that tell complex stories within the hard constraints of four-act (or five-act) structure, stories that would have confounded or morally affronted audiences twenty years ago. This is a golden age for American TV, but that's true on the networks as well as cable (cf. the quality sitcoms currently surviving against all odds or expectations). Moreover, because of the close ties between the major networks and their corporate clients (who buy ad time), and because of the status of network TV as 'consensus narrative' form for our era - which places cultural constraints on the kind of content it can present - a show about futility and decline (The Wire) or the possibility of order without law (Deadwood) or the embarrassing, pathetic decay of a subculture (The Sopranos) aren't sufficiently uplifting for wide presentation. You come to these shows knowing they present a critique. Not so with (e.g.) 24, which it's possible to watch as a lite snuff film, and which is in any case a one-man-against-the-world melodrama of the schlockiest kind.

The Wire is a dramatization of systemic phenomena; the individual identities of its participants aren't terribly important in the long run. Stringer Bell is the Pragmatic Reformer; Freamon is the Man Too Talented For His Job; Avon is the Leader Who Overidentifies With His Past Crimes (i.e. he holds Stringer back in his reform attempt because he wants to be the Best Thug - a narcissist); Sobotka is the Well-Meaning Labour Leader Forced To Make Compromises; and so forth through the Dramatis Personae. (We might say here that every character in The Wire, even the liminal figures like Omar, is by turns morally compromised by other or morally compromising to others, by virtue of his/her place in a given set of institutional hierarchies. Which is merely true of people, but unprecedented in its television presentation.) Tony Soprano, on the other hand, is at one level a type, but because of the rich portrayal of his moral gymnastics, the question of whether he's good is a complex and compelling one - the character is bigger than his story, which is after all shrinking (cf. Season Six, part one). And part of the point of Deadwood is that, though the compromises (e.g.) Swearengen makes are emblematic of a generalized confrontation between capitalism, violent disorder, and the rule of law, the process by which Deadwood becomes a community is best understood through the moment-to-moment individual choices and communications and expansions of consciousness made by people like Swearengen (and Bullock, etc.). Swearengen's transformation is an object of interest in itself - it is one of the major moral lessons of the show. The transformation of the town is also rendered with care and seriousness, and that's part of what marks Deadwood as a great show (and close cousin to The Wire, interestingly, though Deadwood's transformation is treated more abstractly, through melodramatic confrontation and evasion, rather than journalistically chronicled as on The Wire - a lot of Baltimore history is colorfully recounted on the latter show).

Network TV offers no equivalent systemic storytelling; it can't invest so heavily in long-form storytelling, because of the constraints on its varying audience and the restrictions imposed by its advertising culture and model.

Moreover, I'm not sure that there should be that many stories like The Wire. Maybe not yet, anyhow. I love the show, and it's changed the way I look at the geography of Boston and Cambridge - no small thing. But I wonder whether it's even possible for a generation of storytellers to come up with both an interest in the minutiae of professional life, and the writing/directing chops to effectively dramatize such tiny shifts - along with the analytical skills to recognise the effects of interlocking systems of power and accumulation in the contemporary city, which Simon and Burns possess to an uncanny degree. The creators of The Wire have been around a long damn time; it's very much a summing-up of their experiences as reporter and cop and teacher and citizen, a mature work. But it's hard to make one's bones as a young writer doing such wide-ranging work. And writing for the screen is not a field for older Americans, in general (this is an observation and not a prescription or suggestion, by the way). There's a place for melodrama and a set of social functions; we're raised, to an extent, to believe that drama should elevate us (whether our spirits or our blood pressure, depending on age and mood etc.), and the aesthetic imperatives of melodrama work as a kind of natural check (not always effective) against didacticism. Burns and Simon avoid that ill quite ably on The Wire, but the lessons of concision and excision they've exercised with that series are hard-won, and complicated by the relative unfamiliarity of the commercial-free ~12-episode one-hour serial dramatic presentation among American writers and audiences.

The Sopranos is a brilliant melodrama, or in any case was for most of its run; in Season Six it shifted to a meditative mode that blended early-season melodrama with a remarkably downbeat finale, though I'm betting the story of Tony Soprano will come to a definitive close in the series's last episodes. Deadwood did end with a major confrontation at the end of each season, and if the Season Three finale seemed to go out quietly, that's only because the unbearable tension of the foregoing episodes was resolved without violence - though not without danger or finality. (And anyway Milch just didn't get around to writing Season Three's proper ending, the election outcome, which will presumably be covered in the pair of 2-hour Deadwood films. Let's hope.) The Wire does build to satisfying endings, but not conventionally climactic ones, and not by traditional narrative means; it's the show that most accurately fits HBO's marketing slogan, 'It's not TV. It's HBO.' In neither subject matter nor form are its achievements easily translatable to network or basic cable, for various reasons. It's more documentary in style and function than its sibling shows, and documentary film/TV has traditionally served a very different moral/cultural purpose than fiction, hereabouts.

At day's end, Americans respond most powerfully - whether by nature or by training, I'm not qualified to say, though I have my suspicions - to tales focused on an icon, an abstracted moral center or varying complexity (from the fluttering, irritating Lorelai Gilmore to the taciturn wish-fulfillment of Jack Bauer to Buffy Summers withdrawing from audience sympathy to the expansive, unbearable Tony Soprano and his wife Carmela, two of the most complex characters ever rendered on television). Think of Batman, or the literally abstracted Patrick Bateman, or the accumulations of trivia that were the core characters on Seinfeld, or the traumatized capital-C Characters of Lost - as Scott McCloud has pointed out, we respond to a realistic representation because it looks like someone else; we respond to icons, to cartoons, because they look like us. American TV specializes in a particular mix of those two qualities - the realistic and the iconic or abstract - in a particular proportion, modified by genre, by era, by cultural milieu, etc. And the realism of a given show can make us uncomfortable - overfamiliar, perhaps - even as its fantasy elements allow us to project ourselves into good/bad schemata (cf. Roseanne and NYPD Blue, as well as the discomfort-as-entertainment of shit like American Idol and Survivor). The Wire doggedly upends our expectations formally, structurally, but in terms of character it strikes a relatively comfortable balance between identifiable types and new, unknown quantities.

What it doesn't do is allow us the simple comfort of believing that the moral crises of the show can be 'solved' just by watching as the protagonists go through the actions of each episode. Its endings are untidy and to an extent unresolved; the show provides no answer key (in the form of external judgment/salvation - the feeling that Good has won out, or even that Evil was allowed to get away with it, this time...). The winners don't really win, after all; they just stick around to the next round. When a character dies on The Wire, all it means is that he or she won't be appearing in future episodes. Death is robbed of its traditional cops-n-robbers function as a signifier of Major Dramatic Significance Wow!, and is instead reduced to what we - generally not criminals or cops, in our own view anyhow - refuse to believe it could be for those on both sides of the drug war and its related systems: simply another measure of cost. It's a war show, you realize: only without the traditional comfort of knowing that somewhere there's a Leader who Feels Every Death. It is a story in which the idea of 'justice' is simply not admitted as moral recourse. There's retribution, and mechanisms to limit its damage (Deadwood deals with this, though it focuses moreso on the cost to individual psyches, I believe).

Indeed, of all the TV shows I've ever watched, Burns and Simon's series, maybe or maybe not the best thing on TV right now, is certainly the most doggedly committed to the proposition that no one is watching or judging, and that the question 'Was it worth it?' which is after all so central to the impact of dramas (along with 'Where do we go from here?') is something of a dramatic construction itself: words we get to utter after a scene in a story, but which always ring somewhat false in our day-to-day lives. There are no breaks, which is to say, no vantage point from which to evaluate impartially. Compromise is its essential dramatic character - and that's a hard story to tell. 'Was it worth it?' What the hell do you mean, 'was'? The Wire doesn't bother with uplift because it's already admitted a hard thing: there's nowhere else to go. And if there were, it wouldn't be up anyhow.

[S&N] TVD.

Walter at Quiet Bubble is mulling over TV-on-DVD; I left a long comment and wanted to duplicate it here, as it bears on stuff I've written about before. He's looking at the social implications of asynchronous dramatic entertainment (shows on demand, roughly), but in line with my Masters thesis here's a narrative-architectural shorty:

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Sir -

I've written about this same phenomenon but forget where/when. (And I just moved The Wire up my own Netflix queue - give me my life back!!) It seems to me that there's a tradeoff involved that's serious and has real consequences for how we perceive our chosen entertainment media. I watch a lot of TV on DVD - HBO shows in particular, but that's also how I experienced Lost's comparatively excellent first season and the complete works of Joss Whedon (save for Buffy Season Seven). Lost makes a good illustrative example: the momentum of those ~20 hours was unbelievable; I watched the final 14 in a single mind-boggling sitting. That meant revelations hit me one after the other without interruption, and the visceral impact of the final storylines (the baby's arrival, the hatch opening, the boat) was heightened.

On the other hand, what was lost was the sense of life-pervading mystery that accompanied the show for fans during its first run. The questions that were for me answered five hours after being asked might have haunted viewers for two months last year, and that meant I never followed my own thoughts down productive blind alleys - a feature of serialized shows that the creators of Lost obviously rely heavily on, since their own story consists of long dead patches and red herrings punctuated by Big Events. Watching the last season of Buffy I had to sit on my hands for months at a time wondering how the final confrontation would play out, and imagined it a hundred ways before it finally arrived. The genius of that finale was that it ably sidestepped all of the fans' expectations, and its power grew in contrast.

I've decided that the reason TV shows encourage fan-fiction in a way that films don't is that the fans have to do something to sustain the imaginative tension of their chosen narratives during the 167 hours a week that they're not watching. Whereas a film ends and our responsibilities as active viewers are done, a series of dramas regularly refreshes our old concerns and plays against our long-term memories - with their dreamlike shapes. Why is Star Wars so deeply ingrained in our psyches? Forget Joseph Campbell: it's about the fact that over six years that story was chewed over by a generation of kids (I was a little too young to be in on the frenzy, though I apparently adored RotJ in theatres as a kid). Star Wars foreclosed imaginative engagement (to a degree) by basically ending in triumph, but we think highly of Empire in part because it had a lot of time to sink in before its enormous questions were answered. (And it still does - how many people watched RotJ for the very first time immediately after screening Empire for the first time? They get separated and the gulf between them is the story.)

Watching Deadwood and NYPD Blue on DVD I've found a good compromise - a batch of episodes a week or so (sometimes slower), so that I get a sustained punch, a stretch of time with these extraordinary characters, but I still have to wait for resolution of the Big Stories. Joss Whedon calls surprise a 'holy emotion' (and has harsh words for 'spoiler whores' who want to know how everything ends without, y'know, seeing shows through to their actual ends), and patience-for-narrative might be called a holy action: as viewers we wait at a certain pace for each work of art. It's not like we fast-forward through long shots in 2001 to get to the dialogue; our unconscious mind needs time to do its work.

So on balance, I'd say that DVD is a good thing - it opens up dramatic texts to close reading, as you ably wrote in your earlier post - but that discipline can provide our imaginations with a structure (not necessarily once-a-week viewings but something analogous) that's much more germinative than what the visceral rush of a single sitting provides.

(And to close with the example of Lost: I've been disappointed with Season Two overall, in part because I didn't have to sit around all summer mulling over questions about the hatch and the Others, so I hadn't lived with the characters very long when the story took its 'introspective', static turn this year. The bloody big block of fear and energy that was the back half of Season One was a great experience that afternoon, but as the little details and allusions piled up, they began to overlap and jockey for mental space in a way very much counter to what weekly viewers had experienced. Imagine each such narrative element as an organism expanding, breeding, consuming space and mental resources: the process produced some marvelous mutant hybrids, but no one idea-creature grew in my mind to its full size. Best, I should imagine, to see things both ways. And I'm really looking forward to seeing Season Two in a day. I don't think it'll hold up. But I'll likely see movements I can't detect right now.)

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I should note: I wasn't satisfied with Buffy's final season either, at least compared to the rest of the show; I think some of this stems from what I perceived as the loss of steam that came from weekly appointment viewings rather than hours-long DVD blocks. So there's a strongly reader-response component that's left out of the above. My personal preferences obviously affect that 'analysis'. But I think we can concretize what's understood intuitively by artists like Joss Whedon about the pacing of long stories - and strengthen our understanding of Story and Character in the process.

[S&N] Ghouls.

When I was a kid, nursery rhymes formed a consistent narrative universe. Part of this is that my mom used to read to me (and I'd read myself) from a big hardbound Mother Goose collection, illustrated by a single artist; there was a look to the characters that brought them together imaginatively speaking. I would hear a rhyme and immediately link it to a shared mythology.

Similarly my mom used to make up stories for my brother and I and our friends, about the Candy Planet and our adventures there. This was always a treat, a special occasion, and is one of my most comforting childhood memories. (I remember a bunch of kids sitting/lying on the spare cot in my mom's home office at night, listening to these stories. Odd that she stuck us in there, though I suppose by that time it had been converted to a computer room for the kids primarily.)

What's odd about the Candy Planet stories is that I would invariably imagine them taking place on a bare rock, a very small moon hanging in a very large universe. In my mind it was always night on the Candy Planet, and the stars were uncountable.

Nursery rhymes were almost without exception ghoulish; though the illustrations I remember were benign, there was something ghostly or demonic about Wee Willy Winky flitting up and down the stairs; Peter Pumpkin Eater was a vicious bastard (who would no doubt eat his wife eventually, as she sat in that pumpkin); Jack Sprat and his big ol' wife were monstrous caricatures, a line and a circle; Mother Goose herself was a witch, hardly to be trusted. (The 'historical' Mother Goose is buried in Boston, and the first time I saw her grave, on Tremont St I believe, remains one of my creepiest memories of anyplace.)

Sophomore year I took a class called 'Forms of Western Narrative', which remains to this day a cornerstone of my thinking about what stories are for and how they're shaped; we read a number of the folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, and they took me back to the ghoulish nursery rhymes of my youth. Though the forms of cruelty and morality were unfamiliar to me, the overall nighttime fireside vibe of the stories - the presence of monsters in human form - was immediately recognizable.

If there's a point to this reminiscence, it's that as a child and later as an adult I desired this narrative continuity. Even if you look at the Bible as an anthology of alternate history (you might say 'sci-fi'), allegory, literary biography, adventure stories, parables, legal documents, and marvelous folktales, the desire to see them all as part of a larger tale is clear (never mind that the Bible took hundreds of years to compose and so forth). The existence of a pattern triggers a kind of receptivity, I think: or the sense of applicability or portability of knowledge. We get a thrill gaining instrumental knowledge but so many of us have no head for remember bare facts (call 'em 'trivia' to excuse yourself): stories leverage that by making facts part of patterns. The nightmares left over from our childhoods remain dear to us in a sense - or in any case, mine do - because they're part of what John Gardner calls a 'vivid and continuous dream', the creation of which is the work of the storyteller. Memories and dreams become indistinguishable by nature, but those traumatized as children are denied the luxury of reducing their experiences to only a dream or only a nightmare.

Maybe contribution to a serial narrative, to a persistent shared narrative universe, provides rare fulfillment because it gives us the feeling of creating a dream, or in any case contributing to one. The manipulation of a set of facts - I went to the store, I bought a bag of food, I fed it to my pet dog - is actuarial work; it strengthens social bonds through trust or comfort, maybe. A different kind of speech entirely. The dream - I went to the store, I bought a box of dogs, I fed them to my pet tyrannosaur - instrumentalizes the social bond in a way: we hold hands and travel together. (Nothing can happen to you if you hold hands.)

Nightmares too. Talk of 'The Greatest Generation' is a dream meant to ward off a shared nightmare. No wonder it's such a compelling story.

Wee Willy Winky is a ghost: I'm sure of it. But his smile while rapping at the window is genuine, and I think back to it as to a dream, not a nightmare.

[S&N, sort of:] Theorizing why Lost is getting so unsatisfying.

This week's Charlie flashback episode illustrates the bind the writers are in: they're rapidly running out of flashbacks that are relevant to the island narrative, so they're spending a bunch of time on supposedly thematically relevant flashbacks, with the aim of illuminating the characters in an indirect way. The idea now is seemingly to have dramatically compelling flashbacks that themselves represent interesting 'B' stories, whereas in Season One the purpose of the flashbacks was to address questions directly relevant to each episode's 'A' story (e.g. why is Locke so intense and weird in the jungle, with his 'faith' blather? Because he was in a wheelchair and miraculously recovered, so the events of 1x04 are the culmination of that part of his character arc).

The guiding principle decreasingly at work on the show is: what's interesting about each character and likely to come into play on the island? Charlie's 'have to save the baby' complex in this week's episode was a stupid premise for him having a breakdown - yet another example of the show's worsening problem, that the characters remain inarticulate because the writers don't actually have enough compelling backstory to fill every episode, and so can't put meaningful commentary into their mouths. The 'Jack and the Italian woman and Jack's wife' episode was the same way: the final flashback, where his wife left, was shown to be unconnected to the foregoing when Jack's wife said, 'I was going anyway.' And her pop-psych comment - 'You'll always need someone to fix' - was irrelevant too, even though you could surely have based an entire closely-observed episode around that insight.

The problems with the show are partly structural (expecting us to care about seven seasons of flashbacks is madness), and in a perverse way keep the show interesting. But they also partly stem from the lack of a singular guiding talent in the writers' room. Lindelof and Cuse aren't geniuses, so there's no one taking a 'genius pass' at each script, and there's no intense emotional throughline to make the show continuous characterologically speaking.

One gets the sense the Charlie/Claire/Locke tension has sprung up solely to give Charlie something to do, whether or not his motivations are incoherent and his actions flat-out stupid. I'd watch Terry O'Quinn comb his hair for an hour - he's that interesting - but one also gets the sense in the last couple of episodes that Locke's coolness in Season One was a function of the enigmatic way he was written, and that by making him nothing more (lately) than a pragmatic, wise old man, the writers are threatening to undercut what made him such a riveting feature of the first season. (Witness the matter-of-fact way he tracked Michael through the woods last week: where's the wonder at that? See also his one-off insistence on calling Sawyer by his given name, 'James'. The scene stank of a 'writerly' solution to structural problems that writerly prevention might have, y'know...prevented.

I still have an appointment every Wednesday that I intend to keep through at least the end of Season Two. (I want to know what brought down the plane, after all.) But the writers need to decide whether they're actually making a soap opera (a la Buffy's later seasons) or an adventure show that happens to say interesting things about its characters (a la Buffy Seasons Three and Four). This season started strongly but it's in a major rut right now, to my eyes.

Initial questions about, of all things, Buffy and fan culture(s). In two parts.

A fanwank is an (often convoluted) explanation of plot holes or continuity errors in a work of fiction, drama, or cinema. The term is used both as a verb and a noun; the practice is sometimes known as fanwankery.

[...]

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, "Once More, with Feeling", Xander Harris admits to having used a magical charm (and causing several deaths) for a trivial, selfish reason. Because this does not seem consistent with Xander's growth in maturity during the series, many fans believe he lied to protect Dawn Summers from the lecherous attentions of the episode's villain.

-- from the (excessive, somehow both overwritten and undercooked) Wikipedia article on 'fanwank'

This miniature article (or if you prefer, blog post of Holbonic length, though by no means worthy of the Holbonic imprimatur) poses two questions; the first is a fannish one asked many times elsewhere and variously answered by fans of the show, which I address very, very fannishly, while the second is a follow-up in a slightly more 'theoretical' mold. Were this a scholarly essay I'd talk about communities of fan-scholars and quote Matt Hills, but I think we can get over that ground without help.

1. Why do heroes and villains vary so widely in fighting ability from episode to episode on Buffy?

This is a common question and a valid complaint, of course, though ironically enough it wouldn't come up as a complaint from casual viewers, who from a single episode would almost always be able to glean the formula: 'Buffy is really strong, stronger than all her mates, and roughly on par with most of the demons she fights.' The complaint would have to come from longtime viewers, who would point out that, for instance, a single 'Ubervamp' beat Buffy to a bloody pulp midway through Season Seven and remained a major threat for some time thereafter, while by the finale every member of the Scooby Gang was facing off solo against multiple Ubervamps and with one exception surviving. They might also point out that Riley Finn, without the aid of his performance-enhancing military cocktail, dusted in five seconds the plain-vanilla vampire that stabbed Buffy in the gut and got away from her. That episode may have been about Buffy's 'death wish' (in Spike's terms), but wasn't there a way of depicting that supposed desire to end it all in less jump-cut terms? Couldn't it have been built up to more? And was Riley's cleanup routine in the vampire nest a little too easy to be believed? And was a tangible link made to that character's emotional arc...?

I'm getting away from the initial question already, but in a way that hopefully sheds light on my eventual answer to that question.

Let's be charitable and discount writers' laziness as a reason for this inconsistency. (Given the generosity of the writers toward their creation, this seems a fair tit-for-tat, though the emotional stance toward the show implied by my hoop-jumping would make an interesting fantasy/pathology to write about, I'm guessing.) Can we come up with an in-continuity explanation for this variability?

There's no denying that the monsters on Buffy are largely metaphorical anyhow, so a monstrous cosmology that bends easily to metaphoric needs makes sense. You might say that in the world of Buffy, the heroes' fighting ability is tied closely to their emotional state; the ability to kill non-human Bad Guys comes from a certain focus and awareness of one's relationship to them. So the vision of her 'demonic' nature galvanizes Buffy to fight Dracula and resist his magic ('the thrall has gone out of this relationship'), and she's unable to fight off Spike's attempted rape in 'Seeing Red' not because she's hurt but because she's sad; Faith's lightning-quick reflexes aren't quick enough to stop her from stabbing the Mayor's henchman in 'Bad Girls'; the kids at Graduation square off against a crowd of vampires and win - with losses - because of their solidarity. And the final battle against the mass of Ubervamps ends in victory because the fundamental purpose of the conflict is known and accepted by the many Slayers (in a kind of groovy 'Eastern' surrender-to-the-flow kind of way) while the vamps themselves are driven by nothing more than hunger and rage.

When you kill someone on Buffy, it opens up something inside you that won't close easily - access to all your locked-away despair and the desire to let go of your engagement with the world. So the weirdly strict problem with killing humans on Buffy (which was made a far-too-convenient plotline in the Anya flashback episode, 'Selfless') comes from this part of the mythology, which Buffy intuitively understands, because her own powers come from a place close to it, psychically speaking. (Extrapolate, if you care, to the loosely-defined concept of the 'soul' on Buffy and the coexistence of Angel and Angelus in a single body, etc.) This irritating hardline stance ('Willow's killed a human now, she's Become! a! villain!') from the Scoobies makes more sense if you accept that all action in this fictional/moral universe is enabled by essentially tangible emotional forces. ('I might be love's bitch, but at least I admit it.')

Villains on the show also draw some of their power from this clarity of purpose. Angel's been a vampire a long time, but he can whup up on everyone because he's more steely-eyed than they are: he knows his limits. Drusilla's not particularly strong, but she's got a creepy magical vibe and she embraces her batshittery, which enables her to kill Kendra (the extra Season Two Slayer) with no fuss at all, while her eventual betrayal by Spike (in 'Becoming', the finale of that season) renders her powerless. (Never mind that it suddenly enables him to suffocate her.)

This would also explain why the wily Adam, genius hybrid of demon computer and man, stands there like an idiot while magically-enhanced-Buffy gives her 'We are eternal' speech and kicks his ass all over the place. (More about him below.)

Demons on Buffy are manifestations of a general chaos or potential-for-harm or lack-of-empathy-and-love in the world, and they react according to the flow of that harm. The ones who stray closest to the Slayer behave irrationally because of some kind of Slayer-proximity field effect, whereby Buffy and her friends are magnets for evil things but their essential goodness distorts those evil things' perspectives on the world. This means that vamps like Angel and Spike can be rendered differently from other vamps, given human qualities for dramatic purposes, while the writers impart 'humanity' to lesser vampires primarily for comedic purposes. The more powerful and dangerous a Buffy villain is, the more that power seems to be linked to an essential closeness to humans and humanity (the Mayor's political wiles and care for his surrogate family, Adam's understanding of human fear, Glory's temper, Angel's love/hate relationship with Buffy, and so forth). Warren's dangerous because of his pathetic jealousy and misogyny, while the First draws its strength from (basically) people's bad thoughts and whatnot. Needless to say, these strengths generally prove the villains' undoing.

And let's add this rider - assume that the fights on the show are subjectively rendered, that the purpose of showing a fight is to show the emotional state of each character involved in it. Buffy could probably beat Angel down no problem at full strength, but emotionally she's just never at full strength around him, and their combat is a shorthand for that. And if Buffy and Angel move super fast, why don't they fight at super speed? Because the depiction of violence on Buffy is always a depiction of the character of the violence, its emotional function, not its blow-by-blow facticity. (Ooh! I took a course on Heidegger!) The final battle of 'Primeval', the Season Four climax though not its finale, is an incomplete slow-motion montage, akin to the everybody-dies sequence in 'The Wish': just a depiction of hopeless, pointless combat. The details are irrelevant.

People who watch Buffy thinking it's an action show or a Slayer-procedural are sadly mistaken.

OK, that was some work. Now on to the second question, for which I don't have a fully-formed answer, but which is by far the more important of the two.

2. What difference does all this make? Why is 'fixing' the continuity so important to fans?

I'm not alone in wondering about errors of logic and continuity on the part of the Buffy writers, though compared to the vocal online fandom I'm not at all likely to react in a strongly emotional way to such things as long as they don't upend the character logic of the show. I don't feel like these errors of logic threaten my fantasy. But many other fans obviously do - why? What motivates this 'obsessive' (a freighted word, but take it as the front half of 'obsessive-compulsive') engagement with the text?

First off. The stereotypical image or 'ideal type' of the comic book/'cult media' fan is the Trekkie who refuses to watch Enterprise not because it's a rubbish show but because the timing of its narrative creates errors in the 'canonical' chronology that greatly lessen the centrality/cohesiveness of the Original Series. (N.B. I'm not an Enterprise viewer, I don't like Star Trek at all, and I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to Trek, but you get the idea I should hope.) This image is derided as unfair and reductive by fans and scholars of fandom alike; in Henry Jenkins's outstanding early fan-culture book Textual Poachers, the depiction of fan engagement with cult-media texts is overwhelmingly positive, with emphasis sensibly placed on the creative and communitarian sides of fandom. Jenkins's book is a rich and sympathetic portrait of fans' inner lives at a certain point in cult-media history as well as an involving read, and if it seems a little hagiographic, fawning, or forgiving, it's important to remember (as Jenkins himself has repeatedly pointed out) that the work was a strategic intervention in debates about fan culture at a very particular point in the history of academic fan studies as well. Indeed, Matt Hills's scrupulous first book on fandom is entitled Fan Cultures, meant partly as a rebuke to monolithic portrayals of all fans as belonging to a single black-clad socially inept group.

Nonetheless, and this is important, these people exist. If that kind of conviction/idealization is a pathology, it's a real one. The kind of guy who'll make a point of talking about how he'll never read another Infinite Crisis book because it plays fast and loose with beloved characters is real, and his numbers are legion. Part of that is just bluster, but my sense is that while this kind of protest might be rare (certainly in absolute terms, among the entire viewership of a TV program or readership of a comic, it's very very rare), among 'fandom' these feelings are common and are responded to sympathetically and empathetically by other fans. 'Comic Book Guy' on The Simpsons is a loving/mean caricature, but he's drawn from elements very much present in, near as I can tell, all fan cultures. Up to and including and well beyond, I might add, literary and cultural critics.

(How else to describe Harold Bloom's refusal to write about The Merry Wives of Windsor, or the widespread narrowing of many scholars' focus to a small handful of texts, or for that matter the refusal of conservative radio/TV hosts to engage or even read 'liberal' cultural analyses and vice versa?)

The point is, the word 'fanwank' and its associated practices didn't arrive out of nowhere. The word is a fan coinage, of course, and we can assume that it's a partly (mostly?) affectionate one. But why? Isn't there something a little creepy, depressing, parasitic, about this kind of attention to a text? (As you read this you can probably guess my two-part answer, but let's extend the scene rhetorically for a moment before we close this out.) Is the Talmud nothing more than the Great Jewish Fanwank of all time? Would St Augustine's City of God have been at home in a collection of the Year's Best Fanfic?

Personally, I think the Buffy-related fanwank above is a reasonable activity - a particular variety of 'literary' criticism - enmeshed in a (frankly) kind of pathetic cultural framework. Does it serve a particular need in fan/geek culture? Does it speak strongly to a particular personality type? I suspect it does: those with a greater-than-normal (let's say 'abnormal' and be done with it) need for order in their fantasies, an abnormal need for approbation w/r/t their fantasy lives.

Warning: awful metaphor follows.

To open a typical lock you have to insert a key which moves a set of tumblers to a particular height relative to one another; when they're all in place, the key can turn, the lock can open. If even one tumbler is out of place, the lock won't open. Fitting the key to the lock is a procedure of great delicacy, but certain keys are shaped just right, cut just forgivingly enough, that for a certain kind of lock, when subjected to a certain brute force, they're always enough to open it. These keys will get into any lock of a certain size, and though there's nothing special about them among keys in general, from the lock's perspective they're pretty much perfect.

Yes I'll have to strain to make the metaphor work. The point is that fans point to their obsessive (yes it is, though I suppose we can bicker about the term if we must) fiddling with a text, with its structure, and happily point to their Deep Emotional Investment as both explanation and justification. But in a less charitable mood you might say that this poring over minute details looking for continuity and if need be making it up is an after-the-fact excuse for one's uncritical initial involvement with a story. In other words, talk all you want about fandom's heated debates and lengthy analyses - these come only after the escapism, the submission to the story. 'Fandom' is a pose, the ritual actions required for entrance into a particular social system or 'interpretive community' within which certain kinds of sympathy and empathy are offered and expected. In other words, it's an excuse for people to admit to one another the nature of their fantasies.

But we shouldn't necessarily accept as essential or a given the premise that we must look on all such excuses, all such groups of shared affinity, as benign or beneficial.

What I'm asking, rather undiplomatically, is: if we take 'fandom' to be evidence of a particular set of motivations or dispositions - a mix of those things unique to each individual but drawing for the most part on a shared pool of needs and so forth - should we look on the activities of fandom and their associated motivations approvingly or even dispassionately, or is the pathology-to-creativity ratio seemingly evinced by the community of fandom too high by some social measure? There isn't a concrete 'structure' to fandom, but we can speak of the social organization(s) of fans, and the nature of their involvement with their chosen texts - and is it merely wrong to criticize them?

In other words, roughly, am I wrong to be a little embarrassed by my own fanwanking up above, and should I look on it as a reasonable step in personal growth or a bad habit, like chewing my nails - even if it's one that, as I indulge it, provides me with an excuse to develop my critical faculties? Does the environment in which one carries out an 'intellectual' inquiry make it impossible to develop certain faculties?

Some people talk about how their experiences as fans have enabled them to grow as social actors, deepened their engagement with community, and so forth. But there's a part of me - uncharitable, I know - that wonders whether this is an accidental epiphenomenon of fannish getting-together, and not an essential part of it.

And I wonder whether what I take to be this central component of fan engagement with The Text - trying to make sense of the discontinuities and incompatibilities-with-the-fan's-ideal present in that Text by 'creatively' (sure!) superimposing the fan's fantasy on that of the primary work, as in a 'Mary Sue' story or fan criticism that justifies personal taste in universalizing but local terms - is too selfish an exercise for its own good.

I write this as a die-hard fan of at least one band, a couple of TV shows (and their creators), and a large armload of books and their authors; I include myself without reservation in the notion of 'fandom' outlined herein. I hope this doesn't all come off as mean-spirited; rather, it's prolegomenon to a somewhat larger set of concerns, which I'm trying to work up for a bigger piece of writing at some unknown point in the (hopefully not too distant!) future. As such, it's provisional, and I've got to get these questions working before I can settle on the right questions and the beginning of the right answers.

[Wow, I'm surprised you read this far down. That's good of you. I hope it was a good use of your time as well.]

Star Wars Episode III script (S&N, sort of).

[Warning: This is a rather geeky post, and worries over minutiae of a collection of pop culture artifacts so matter-of-fact to most people that almost everything you can say about them seems superfluous. It is also very, very mildly spoilery, particularly in the last couple paragraphs. It is unlikely that reading the following will be worth your while. And perhaps we can talk about the ramifications of labeling your work as 'geeky', and what that badge of 'honor' means, some other time.]

[Second interposition (preposition?): The new film isn't going to be great, I think, but it's going to be good in ways that the previous two weren't. If all you need is reassurance, or you just happen to be passing through wondering where all the Phish posts went, let that suffice. Why apologise so much? At this point it's funny to me, I gotta say, to carry on about my shame when the following is pretty shameless. (Oh I've already written all the other bracketed asides for this post, and am writing this one last.) (Oh a peek behind the curtain.) (Yeah you find either the Wizard of Oz or Polonius back there, I guess.)]

[One more: I've also listed this as a 'Seriality and Narrative' post, though really that's a moribund topic. Still it plays in, even retroactively. Oh look how pomo I got there! I mean you'll see what I mean.]

So I read the script to the forthcoming Revenge of the Sith between last night and this (too early!) morning. My impressions line up with everything that's being said about the film: much darker, much less funny, some interesting stuff for Ian McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor, and the finale promises to be both crowd-pleasing and horrifying. As a bridge to the original trilogy I think it will be quite effective.

Mind you, I can also already see the scenes where Hayden Christensen is going to annoy me no end as the less-petulant-but-probably-still-unbearable Anakin Skywalker. That poor guy...he's either a genuinely bad actor (which seems unlikely) or a really unlucky kid whose talent has been directed and edited right out of his biggest film role. He gets a lot of angry scenes in this film and some happy ones, and only a couple of 'Why am I such a little bitty near-omnipotent guy in a big galaxy, mommy I miss you!' moments, but it'll be enough. Christensen was unquestionably at his best playing arrogant cocky Anakin in Episode II; likely he'll get to enjoy himself a bit more on this film. At least that's the hope.

[OK I'm oscillating too rapidly between this like general thesis I haven't exactly presented yet, and niggling observations about things that excite my inner fanboy-slash-movie-dork, so if you've stuck with me up until this point hoping I'd get serious and rigorous and through-written, bail out now and read Homestar Runner.]

In any case, who cares? You'll see the movie, you'll enjoy it or won't, no matter. What I want to start saying - and flesh out later when I get serious about it - is that the popular impressions of these films, old and new trilogies alike, fail to include certain things that are of interest to me. That is to say: the new trilogy deepens and extends the original films in ways that I never expected, and the EpIII pulls together the ridiculous machinations of the first two prequels in ways that might just send you scurrying back to them for another viewing - and then to the original films, which are able to work in a fascinating new way because of the richer backstory.

The prequels tell the story of a massive galactic civil war; the original trilogy begins with 'It is a time of civil war' but that's essentially a misnomer - the Rebel Alliance amounts to a flyspeck in the face of the Empire. They're terrorists. One result of this prequel trilogy is that there's a weird retroactive narrowing of focus in the originals - after this galaxy-spanning conflict, the dust settles for a couple decades and the Empire goes on about its business of governing. (Lucas's original treatment for The Star Wars referred to the Emperor and his cronies as 'Nixonian gangsters' - about which essays beg to be written if they haven't already.)

[OK I mentioned the Nixon connection but I'm serious about y'know that's probably one aspect of the films we hardly think about. I mean the original 14-page treatment mentions 'race riots', inciting goddamn race riots, as one of the methods by which the Emperor created instability in the galaxy. The demonizing of the Jedi plays right into this. The Nazi analogies are of course deliberate, not just visually but historically as well. Hitler was allowed to happen. There is a difference in kind between Hitler and Nixon, of course, but Lucas blends both of those worlds together. See, suddenly this got all substantive!]

When Leia and Luke appeared out of nowhere in the original, it made sense that Luke looked ten years younger than she did (worldliness will do that to ya). And by the time Luke found out he had a twin sister, Mark Hamill had aged enough to make it believable. But since the prequels (necessarily!) end with the birth and separation of the Skywalker twins (and the answer to the question, 'What the hell was Ben Kenobi doing alone on the dunes all those years on Tatooine?'), Luke and Leia won't just emerge as types in the original trilogy. Instead of Farm Boy and WASP Princess, now they're heirs to something from the very beginning of the story. I watched some of A New Hope the other day, and it was shocking to see the old characters in light of what I knew they had done and failed to do in the prequels.

Which brings you right to Obi-Wan. Just a few sentences: until the prequels were made, the original trilogy told the story of a younger generation of plucky young rebels, breakin' rules and blowin' up starships (Star Wars was conceived and written right around Watergate, remember). But the prequels reconfigure EpIV's storytelling priorities in a way, by totally recontextualizing its events: now that film is as much about Obi-Wan as anything else. Vader says, 'I feel a presence I've not felt since...' and now you'll have seen the event to which he's referring (it goes badly for both of them I'm afraid). Obi-Wan's job in EpIV ends up being not just the 'crotchety old wizard' role, but of a nearly-enfeebled man trying to make up for something he did wrong a long time ago. And because of a couple revelations in EpIII, we now see his surrender to death, and the 'more powerful than you can possibly imagine' line, in a new light. Translation: 'While you were off wiping out half the galaxy, Anakin, I've been learning some new tricks.'

We now see: Vader doesn't know what Obi-Wan's talking about in that scene. You'll see what I mean.

[Oh man that's one great thing about the new script.]

The cool part for me is: In a way not foregrounded by their initial presentation but heavily underscored by the prequels, the original Star Wars films were about a younger generation paying (in blood) for the myopia, greed, and corruption of its elders. Obi-Wan and Yoda aren't just in hiding because otherwise they'll be killed, they're in hiding partly because they fail in the prequels to do their jobs. They're ronin - disgraced former samurai, now outlaws. And given the state of the Jedi reputation at the end of EpIII, you might just look on the various characters' initial reactions to Ben Kenobi (in EpIV) a bit differently. Han Solo's casualness about the Jedi, and the general hands-off vibe of the Mos Eisley cantina, is a bit shadier now; Luke's wide-eyed fascination with the Jedi reveals that he's got a few secrets of his own (Jedi posters in his room, live bootlegs of Jedi performances from the late 70's when Jerry was at his indulgent peak...OK did I just totally switch pop culture myth-systems on you there?).

[That was about the Grateful Dead if you weren't sure. I fixate, what can I tell you?]

The prequels might just be bad films in a lot of respects - the first film's climax is totally creatively bankrupt though lovely, while the 'love story' in the second film, with a single scene's dazzling exception, is handled as oafishly as the Han/Leia romance is deft and believable - but they enrich the original trilogy in remarkable ways. By allowing the preoccupations of the older George Lucas - 'How could you possibly have done this to the galaxy, dad?' becomes a different question when it's being asked by a 60-year-old filmmaker who's a dad himself - to seep into the ebullient fantasy storytelling of the much younger Lucas of the 1970's, we're granted a new gift of Star Wars, a chance to experience those classic films as both grand entertainment and considerably more serious meditations. And if you think I'm reading too much into the movies, or stretching to make my love for those original flicks more justifiable, consider this: since George Lucas first got writing on Star Wars, more than thirty years have passed. He's had a lot of time to cook up a pretty thick history. If the stuff didn't ring true for him, I don't think he'd be bothering with it now.

I don't want to say, 'We should have had more faith in ya, George,' because the old man squandered a lot of capital on Jar-Jar Binks and Baby Anakin and the half-castration of Han Solo (to be nakedly partisan: he shot first. Always will. He's a gunman, not a priest). But after reading this script, I'm willing to grant what every single person in the Empire of Dreams documentary takes pains to mention: George Lucas might not be a brilliant director, but he lives in a universe that isn't quite the same as ours. He sees in wonderful pictures and he has crafted a fictional world that is - notwithstanding its effects on Hollywood and geek culture - truly awesome. The prequels are by no means the best films possible, but against all odds they have made the original trilogy much, much better.

A moment of Star Wars geekery.

[In writing this, I realized that it was peripherally related to my 'Seriality & Narrative' posts, which I've been meaning to pick up again. So I think of it as a one-off holiday special S&N post.]

In the lamentable Episode One: The Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker's mother tells the Jedi that her son has no father - the implication being that he was miraculously born, an immaculate conception. But please bear in mind, this miracle baby, who harbours more power than pretty much all the other space-age warrior monks put together, eventually wipes out pretty much half the universe. And then his son cuts off his hand and nearly kills him, and that's how he's redeemed. But in Episode One, we get to root for this ticking time bomb because he's adorable and pathetic.

People have complained, and justifiably so, about the wooden acting, lazy and hackneyed writing, and awkward direction of the new Star Wars films. They're not particularly good as anything but spectacle, for people who think 'subtext' is too rich a word to describe what these new films have. But after watching the Star Wars documentary included with the original trilogy DVD's - which, by the way, are genuinely awe-inspiring - and watching the remarkable THX-1138, I'm inclined to give George Lucas and his Great Work a few extra brain cycles. And the more I think about it, the more impressive the saga becomes. The original trilogy (which contains at least one and possibly two of the best films ever made, in any genre) depicts the battle of a bunch of young people, with guidance from basically some aging hippies, against the evil Empire. Very 70's stuff. But the new films are a much more generation-gap saga, about the danger presented by and to the parents of those future upstarts. And instead of a clear sympathetic lead, we get the child who becomes the galaxy's greatest mass murderer, and his hapless future wife, a young girl in over her head in diplomatic affairs, whose job is basically to have kids and then die.

But the focus in the second film (Episode Two: Attack of the Clones) is, to my mind, Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's the one whose failure to control Anakin leads to all this catastrophe. And of course he's the one who sets out to help Luke in the original trilogy, and does so from beyond the grave.

Now what impresses me, only now that I think about it, is that these character dynamics - the guilt, fatigue, and sorrow animating Obi-Wan's aid to Luke - are present in the original trilogy, but are actually, improbably deepened by the new films. For all that the characters seem like cardboard cutouts in the prequels, at the very least, Obi-Wan and Anakin are deepened immeasurably in my eyes by Lucas's extended treatment.

It makes sense that now, as a much older, more jaded, wiser filmmaker (whose film-school idealism is long since gone), Lucas would want to tell a story essentially about corruption. He's said that this is much of what draws him to the universe of Star Wars: the need to explain how Anakin Skywalker set out with the best of intentions and became Darth Vader. I've been known to argue that AI: Artificial Intelligence is most profitably read as a weirdly autobiographical Steven Spielberg film, with Spielberg represented by William Hurt's scientist character; I wouldn't make the same claim about Lucas and Star Wars, but a certain autobiographical element might enhance our appreciation of the films, both new and old. The man is obviously intelligent and talented, but something more is at play.

Critics tend to scoff when, in the Empire of Dreams documentary, so many of Lucas's colleagues talk about the man's 'vision'. Why not take that talk seriously? After all, this is a guy making self-financed blockbuster pictures about an immaculately conceived child who wipes out his colleagues, friends, and all the good in the galaxy, at least in part as a way of purging some bizarre feelings of guilt about the death of his mother. It's not mere geeking-out to claim that the Star Wars films are long meditations on the will to power and the redemption that comes through community (the rebels are terrorists in the eyes of the Empire, right?). There are so many ways you can look at the Star Wars films - and all these possible interpretations feed into the movies' popularity and power. The latest movies might be wooden (Episode Two is a lot better than Episode One, you've got to admit), but there are all kinds of ideas swirling beneath the slick computer-generated surface. The Christ figure in the story, the Promethean, is the root of all evil in the universe. And this is the series we grew up on as kids.

Shit, no wonder we're such a screwed-up generation!

S&N: Phish.

[Back briefly to the old hobby-horse! A couple of them, really.]

Phish fan discourse is generally about trying to give meaning to the individual show or performance - which is radically in-the-moment, Phish being an improvisatory group and their shows spectacular rock 'n' weed blowouts - in the context of a fan-created story of the band. That's why fans have always gotten so jazzed about the setlists themselves, the schematics of the shows - they grant an order. There's an appeal to high-up views of texts. (Analogy: when I was going crazy watching every episode of Buffy in a year, I was as excited, at times, by the episode guides as I was by the episodes themselves. The guides hinted at an overarching order not visible in the day-to-day.) There's something appealing about the 'comparative' aspects of fandom, the listmaking and table-organizing aspects.

This morning I read yet another stupid response from yet another stupid poster, in response to a young poster's question about post-hiatus shows on rec.music.phish, the Phish Usenet newsgroup:

Listen to as many shows as you want. I guarantee being at them is way better. Sorry, but you have no right to judge shows that were played while you were learning the multiplication table. You are lucky you have not been booted from here. I started posting here in 94'. And if I was as a noob as you are, I would of had my ass handed to me. You are lucky that the fools here now are nice to you, you really are. How many shows have you seen? 2-3, you have no right to judge anything. Sorry.

Schematizing. I see the appeal of such a defensive posture now: it doesn't actually matter what things were like in 1994 (the newsgroup was smaller and had a much higher signal/noise ratio; I don't remember, however, the absolute number of intelligent, coherent, critical writers being any higher when I started reading in 1995-6), what matters is the ten-year gap between then and now. Simply by virtue of distance, references to that time in the band's history become something more than references to, say, 2002 shows. The hiatus (2000-2002) serves as a cultural touchstone in the community, and fans who starting listening during or after the hiatus can be ignored without guilt. There's nothing for them to do about their position.

(Compare, say, a scholarly discussion of a work of literature, in which each person brings a personal library of references, books previously read, &c., and the length of engagement with a given text is generally considered less important than one's insight into it.)

The claims that 'meh, this has happened before' or that 'the past is obviously and necessarily much better/worse than the present' are a central part of the serial-fan experience, even though those claims are, respectively, mere facts and baseless opinions. We grant them currency, unfortunately, because they provide us with our own political traction, and because they fit into our high-level fantasy, the 'inevitability' of our chosen evaluative schemata. We want to believe that our evaluation, that our interpretation, is equiprimordial with the text itself. This is easier with, say, an ongoing TV show or series than with a novel - because of the inescapability of the novel or film as artifact.

They can trump our interpretations. Of course this has to be contractually agreed-upon - the big Social Contract, knowwhatImean? OK, time to take a shower.

S&N:Difference.

[Another in a series of occasional something something somethings about seriality and narrative. Brief this time.]

The eye is good at spotting difference, as I imagine is the (more broadly) brain. We're good at detecting patterns. At seeing shapes.

Consider that, put rather coarsely, one-off narratives (films, novels to a degree, paintings, stage plays, &c.) are about grasping totality. Serial narratives (e.g. TV shows, comix, serial literature, &c.), because they are so iterative in structure, tickle the pattern-matching part of our brain. They can shade character more subtly because a characteristic is presented not as part of the whole but as a deviation therefrom, or a variation thereupon.

In order to have substantial ground from which to differ, a serial narrative must set out the groundwork for each character (archetypes if you like) firmly in the initial stages. The narrative can build on the relative wholeness of, say, the 2-hour feature film, but immediately pass into subtleties which are experienced as destinations, with the 'feature' as the character's starting point. A basis for movement.

This explains the success of the front-loaded Singing Detective, the first episode of which takes place in only two of the film's many time- and place-frames, introducing us to Marlow as a whole character before breaking him down. (The opening doesn't really work as a feature, exactly, but it grounds the fantasy of the succeeding episodes in something relatively concrete, the 'Dry Bones' hallucination notwithstanding.) This explains the difficulties faced by Joss Whedon's Firefly, the pilot of which is a generative world but the second episode of which is forced to drop us en medias res. (As a result of the Fox network's ineptitude, the pilot never aired.) This explains the tawdriness of Friends's first season as opposed to the following, and the richness of Frasier's opening year. (Frasier arrived fully-formed from his parent show, Cheers, giving the new characters something fixed against which to move; the Friends gang was only ever a sitcom family, and had to grow into something of substance. It's not clear this actually occurred.)

This explains the form of Babylon 5 - the first year of which is essentially a trailer for the story that follows. (Not a particularly interesting trailer if you ask me, but whatever.)

You can see, perhaps, why so many ongoing stories suddenly get 'discovered' when they reach a certain narrative critical mass. Nothing hits us in the gut like a total story well-told, the appearance of order in this disordered world. But nothing makes us go wandering like an ongoing tale. Serials are promises (I called them contracts before, di'n' I?). It is important to be able to trust our makers. The pilot episode, the first issue, the opening track: these are collateral.

I want to find internal formal coherence in things. Hand-waving is all right but it's unfair to default to 'this is how people work'. For whatever reason - and maybe this is a matter for a therapist? - I am more interested right now in 'this is how stories work'. How they can work, I should say. The possibilities built-into narratives that enable new kinds of action. You might say, um, new kinds of subjectivity. Hey I knew that Masters degree was good for something.

Seriality and...examples.

So Agi tells me that the reason she doesn't read the S&N posts is the lack of a relationship to the subject matter - not the theoretical stuff, but the examples. OK yes I tend to go on a bit about Buffy and such, because that's what I like. So here's the deal: I'll try and widen my horizons a bit, and for the love of Christ people you try and widen yours!! Agi that's more or less a personal attack, but it's done out of love, like everything else associated with this benighted website.

Anyhow the next section will be about Phish, so ready yourselves. Might I recommend downloading their 'concept album', Rift, a 1992 release that contains both several of their most cohesive songs and some of their most evocative lyrixxx?

Seriality and narrative: closure.

[Third in a series, though not actually written third. Some things never change.]

Let's talk about endings.

Buffy ended last year around this time (it was late May); for fans it was the end of a longish journey, which might have been seven years long and might only have lasted a few months. I had been watching the show for a year and a half, but I'd seen everything that had come before - whether in reruns, on DVD, or via (I hate myself!) Kazaa's file-sharing magic. Moreover, I didn't know what was going to happen, though I'd been 'spoiled' for Season Six (see the previous post). So it was a surprise for me, and the final episode ('Chosen') represented the capstone of a compressed, intense viewing experience: 144 episodes in a year and a half. Like a twice-a-week plan for 18 months (though of course it was periods of compression and expansion, like anything else).

How can I put this? The finale was disappointing. It's an excellent episode, actually; the structure is interesting, the events are suitably apocalyptic, the resolution is satisfying at a distance (more on that in a moment). The fact is, however, that the ending just felt deflated. I'm trying to make the argument that this had nothing to do with any lack of merit on the part of the individual episode. The problem is, that's what endings do. They deflate. They have to - God knows we hate a cliffhanger that we know won't be resolved (oh, wait until you see the Angel finale in a couple of weeks!).

Because a serial narrative is (by definition) discontinuous, discretized, its ending is set aside from the rest of the story. As a result, there is always a feeling of 'jumping forward'. [Consider the finale of Babylon 5, which literally jumps forward a million years, or the last episode of Friends, in which Ross finally (and suddenly) makes up his mind about Rachel - what a surprise! Even The Singing Detective, one of the most cohesive serial narratives I've ever seen, ends with an episode that from the beginning has a hue of finality. Potter abandons his imaginative-fiction plot (that of the Detective himself) and commits to the travails of the Michael Gambon's fictional Marlowe. That ending is earned, but discontinuous somehow with the glacial pace of the rest of the piece. Dramatic narrative is 'supposed' to accelerate - in a serial narrative it's necessary to accelerate over many episodes to maintain continuity, but that's so bloody difficult...]

If it weren't for this feeling of jumping forward, the ending wouldn't be satisfying, would it? That is, it wouldn't really be an end.

In any case: the finale of Seinfeld. It wasn't actually as funny as other episodes of the show, partially because it lacked at times a laugh track - which has a real effect on the audience - and partially because it was formally different from the other episodes in the series. The consequences of the characters' actions followed directly and simply on the heels of those actions: they failed to help the guy getting mugged, and they went to jail for it. The convolution of a typical Seinfeld episode was missing, but that's because writer Larry David didn't even attempt to follow his usual generic formula. And many viewers were disappointed - but there's a critical split on the episode. Personally, I think it's one of the show's most impressive achievements. [Disclosure: I wrote a somewhat hamfisted paper on this topic as a grad student.] Compare this to the disappointment with the final episode of Friends, which (by all accounts) simply wasn't funny or interesting.

Here's a claim. There are, in terms of narrative experience, two different kinds of disappointment (which is broadly defined as 'expectation violation', though we should specify that in order to be disappointed we have to initially prefer the undelivered expectation): formal and informal disappointment. We are 'formally' disappointed, impersonally so, when a tale does not conform to our structural expectations - when the nouns and verbs of our experience do not match those for which we've prepared. We're 'informally' disappointed when the tale attempts to match our expectations - when the structure is the same as before, as in the finale of Friends - but the quality is not what we expect. The delivery changes; the adjectives and adverbs of the experience are different. Call these categories what you will: generic and qualitative disappointment? In the former case a text 'fails' by jumping genres; in the latter, it fails to be a successful example of its chosen drama.

Buffy Season Six was a 'formal failure', which fans hate - it jumped genres on them. This is ironic, given that all the old Buffy formulae were present: intense character focus, humour, action, pathos, weird pseudo-teen-speak, sexual dysfunction...the relationships between the characters, structurally speaking, were altered. And the treasured fannish expectation-base was upset. Buffy Season Seven was at first formally jarring ('back to basics', which takes time to get used to nonetheless), then outstanding (within its new system), then unsatisfying again - because it didn't deliver the kind of apocalypse the grand Mythology seemed to merit (and when that Apocalypse came, it felt...discontinuous, radically so. Like everything else!). With Season Seven it was hard to know what to expect - with so many characters, we didn't know what kind of show we were watching. It was, for what it's worth, kind of an excellent show, but we weren't sure it was Buffy, exactly. A formal disappointment.

Suspense is a contract. The most powerful surprises, the most satisfying I think, are the ones that we kind of expect. Sure it's great to meet a friend you had no idea was even alive, just as a surprise party is wonderful to receive. But in narrative, the atmosphere of heightened expectation is necessary. We even have an entire genre of films in this vein: 'suspense film'. This is to say that the punch-in-the-but surprise of suspense films depends on a generic expectation. And we don't want to believe that our questions will never be answered. That was the mistake of The X-Files (one of many, actually): the plot questions were interesting only as long as they might be answered someday, because unanswered open questions are a license for imaginative investment, while unanswered impossible questions calcify into something to argue about (does God exist? Jesus, I don't know, let's shoot each other over it).

That's part of what fandom is good for: it's a space in which the questioning is made continuous. Fandom reopens the possibility of answering questions, by providing a new field of expectation. Texts are seen as a generic corpus. Authors enter dialogue with one another. The world of fandom continues to expand when the narrative world has already reached heat-death. You don't think fans are just playing pretend? Yeah: just like everyone else.

Serial narratives are discontinuous by nature. That's what's so fascinating about contemporary shows like The Wire and The Sopranos: they're doing what soap operas do, structurally but not thematically. They're attempts at blending the novel with the epic - hey, not bad, only 400 years after Shakespeare folded the epic into the domestic melodrama and foretold the history of the novel to come. They demand a 'new kind of viewer' - ironically enough, the new kind of viewer is a lot like the old kind of soap operagoer. But don't tell the 'angry' young boys and girls of TV Without Pity, who probably don't want their illusion punctured.

[More to come on comixxx, The Sopranos (and British TV), the Matrix movies, and Phish concerts.]

Seriality and narrative: fans.

[This is the second in a hopefully ongoing series on serial narratives and their peculiar cultural satisfactions. It is also understood to be overlaid with a gigantic sign saying both In Progress and Not for republication anywhere. But you're a good person. A loving person. So you already figured on that. And so:]

In my Masters thesis (which no you probably haven't and aren't going to read, now that I've reread the thing at a few months' remove and been embarrassed by much of it) I talk briefly about one function of Art: to make for a continuous experience, to provide a sense of order or System, to make like there's a point to everything. To pick a superficially contrary example, look at Waiting for Godot: the seeming randomness or pointlessness of the story-universe exists only within a framework of extreme verbal structure and predictability. The Contract between Author and Reader stipulates that the hairpin turns and sudden drop-offs of a narrative (like the moment when Lucky opens his mouth and apparently the Word of God pours out) are nonetheless circumscribed by a certain narrative logic. Oh let me bust out some jargon: semantic causality! The idea that some set of meanings within a story makes some other meanings necessary. Frodo has to leave Middle-Earth because his role is to be sacrificed (the proximate cause is his invitation from the Elves and Gandalf). 'Semantic causality' is just an unnecessary way of saying that things in a story are supposed to make sense. Nothing new here.

So now consider that we really like stories - we like telling and hearing them, and we like it when events in our universe fit into stories (neatly or not). We like to know why we like things as well. Maybe you see where I'm going: 'fandom' provides a totalizing logic for our aesthetic decisions. It isn't just part of being in a group - though that's certainly part of the appeal of a fan community or activity. Rather, the payoff to being in a fan group (I think) is that it provides a narrative of pleasure. Your enjoyment of a thing becomes part of a story (the community's engagement with a text); that enjoyment becomes part of your identity; there is a continuity to your relationship with the text and with the community.

And also: fans get more out of a certain literary corpus the more they know about it, the more authors they've read in a 'school' or particular area. Their esteem within the fan community rises. And what is the basic element of fan discussion? Comparison. I don't just mean bullshit like 'The Marvel heroes could kick the DC heroes' asses!' (Because everyone knows Batman and Superman would team up and school those Marvel bitches.) I mean a constant referencing within a given school of texts. Buffy fans justify their claims about Episode X with references to Episodes Y, Z, and Phi; sci-fi kidz justify their claims about the real value of Neal Stephenson with comparisons to the history of cyberpunk and alternate-history speculative fiction. The point is, for non-fans, these comparisons are worse than useless. (How does Buffy's finest hour, 'The Body', stack up to the best of All in the Family or The Sopranos or Fernwood 2-nite? That's what I'd want to know if I wasn't a fan, right?) But for fans, they put texts into dialogue with one another.

That's why densely self-referential texts are well suited to attain 'cult' status: they provide a built-in continuousness of meaning, while at the same time allowing fans to 'slip in' (it's no surprise that serial narratives encourage fan-writing and 'fannish' investment, while authors spawn fan clubs far more than books do) and stage a kind of intellectual 'intervention'. After all, most of TV-watching isn't actually TV-watching: from commercials alone, you spend 1/3 of a show's 'airtime' getting up to get food or talking to your mates during commercials. That's grokking time - the most important component of fannish involvement with a text. It's a time to situate the work in your personal story. (Hey read that last sentence thinking about games and curricular design!)

When you look at a book of the Bible as literature, you're acting like a critic. When you see the whole thing as prefiguring itself, you're reading like a fan. Between critics and fans there's not a hell of a lot of difference - but the continuity is of a different sort.

Seriality and narrative: readers.

[This is the first in a series of linked articles, 'Seriality and Narrative'. The idea is to build an essay over time. There will be overlap between parts, but the idea is to develop the crux of a more formal essay for submission to a conference or journal. I know, I know: lame!! But this is what I like.]

I think we can call 'narrative' a set of rules or shared assumptions for structuring desire - that is, for focusing interest on certain things that aren't intrinsically interesting, e.g. whether Anna and Vronsky end up together, who or what exactly Eusa is, whether the buggers win or lose the war, how Grendel feels about his inevitable death, or what Dave and Toph do at the beach. The reader signs an implicit contract: I will accept your assertion, Author, that this stuff matters. You will work within this frame to make this stuff compelling. I will get something out of my investment. (But like any investor's contract, there's the risk of low return. So what does each novel affirm? What does it assert?)

Television works no differently. We get 'swept up' in a story at least in part because we want to - we are drawn to spectacle, to be sure, and we have built-in sympathies (or tendencies toward sympathy) for certain figures/situations (I can't bear to see fathers crying for their children, for instance). When you walk by an episode of Friends and are 'compelled' to sit down - it's 'Must See TV', right? - you're being pulled in half by a biological response to attractive people, and half (I imagine) by your wish to see people who blend beauty, wit, success, and unbelievable luck. Passing by Seinfeld as you flip channels, you are drawn to the experience of people doing and saying the most astonishing things and getting away with them.

But that's not why you stay with these programs. You stay because of the Contract - you trust that the narrative will satisfy the expectations set up within it. You arrived in the first place because of expectations that you brought with you. The process by which you become a Reader (which from now on I'll use as the generic term for 'interactor with a media text') is one of acculturation.

Lemme assert something that I'll come back to in a little while: at the heart of a contemporary TV narrative (we might say: 'genre TV' or 'cult TV') is a basic (linear) story into and out of which the plot moves. One of the key elements of serial TV narrative, one of its most uniquely satisfying qualities, is the tension that comes from a blurry line between the ongoing evolution of the characters (the 'organic' story of their lives) and the forward-motoring of the plot itself (what happens to them). With a novel, you can generally assume that you're always in the plot. Same with a movie. (Even in Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses, the 'stories' such as they are are never really left behind. The saga of Byron the Bulb mirrors Slothrop's own state, enmeshed in the conspiracy, suspended between force and Counterforce...) Television moves on entirely different timescales, at the same time.

Fan culture can provide those alternate timescales. Because fan culture puts texts and culture into an explicit dialogue, essentially serializing a field of discourse. We might say the same thing for academics - who insist on placing themselves in one or another 'school', in order to give continuity to the start/stop progress of human ideation. (It's frightening to think that human history was totally unpredictable, that human thought is the same way. Maybe we built the universities for precisely that reason?)

This is the last bit for now: contemporary culture is becoming more 'fannish'. More and more, kids are able to involve themselves in 'fannish' ways with all manner of media texts. A narrative like the Matrix series exemplifies this shift: when you talk about the movies, you find yourself talking about possibilities for their world, the meaning of their characters. The basic modes of watching the Matrix movies are seeking-spectacle fodder-for-exegesis. The former is the way we traditionally think of American moviegoers. The latter is how fans work. The balance is shifting.