Ramblings about World Building

Today I can't stop thinking about world building.

Last night I watched the latest Doctor Who episode, called "The Girl Who Waited."  The girl in question, Amy Pond, is the latest in a long line of female sidekicks for the titular Doctor.  (I'm going to try to write this for an imagined reader who knows nothing about the TV show, which is A) quite difficult, and B) part of my point about world building.)  Doctor Who is a long-running British sci-fi drama in which our protagonist, a time traveller, goes on wacky and sometimes creepy adventures throughout time and space, often in the company of beautiful, young, mostly female but sometimes male sidekicks (called "companions").  The Doctor's latest companion, Ms. Pond, is often called "the girl who waited" by the Doctor in reference to their first meeting, when Amy was just a little girl.  The Doctor, having to leave, promised Amy he would return for her.  But because of his cantankerous time travel device (think Han Solo's relationship with his ship, or any use of the trope where mechanical breakdowns further plot development) while he was gone only a few minutes, many years passed for young Amy, and they met again only when she was a young adult.  Every night she waited for him to return, and every night she was disappointed.  But all's well that ends well, and now they adventure together (along with her husband Rory).

Last night's episode involved a repeat of this initial premise--Amy becomes trapped on a creepy quarantined planet, the Doctor promises to come right back for her, and though mere minutes pass for the boys, they find Amy 36 years older (in old-age makeup) and very, very bitter.  After all these years, Amy Pond has grown tired of waiting.

Which brings me to my first thought about world building.  Authors have always built worlds, of course--London is a character, perhaps the most important character, in the novels of Dickens, and Faulkner would not be a success without his evocation of the Gothic South.  But television world building is a very different beast.  Most episodes of both comedies and dramas in the early years of television were written to stand alone.  Tune in to any episode of Leave it to Beaver or Gunsmoke and you'll find the same basic plot.  Each episode contained all of the information one would need to understand what was happening and why.  The same was true of comic books--each issue of Superman was a stand-alone story, and the characters would explain in dialogue any pertinent information.  Even soap operas, the most continuity heavy of genres, made sure that characters were constantly expositing, so that one could go on vacation, miss two weeks of the show, and then return and catch up to speed almost instantly.[i]

But as time went on, all of television became more and more soap operatic.  By this I mean that TV began to tell stories that moved past individual stand-alone episodes and began telling longer stories.  Writers discovered that what audiences were interested in weren’t the plots, which after all were utterly formulaic.  No, what we wanted to see was the characters, and the plots were just excuses to watch the characters do something.[ii]  But as we watched these characters have their comedic or dramatic adventures, each the same as the last, we began to notice that these beloved characters weren’t very bright.  Why would Superman throw Lex Luthor in jail at the end of each adventure, knowing full well that he’ll just escape again in a few months?  Why would anyone ever be friends with Jessica Fletcher, knowing full well that murders follow her around like stink on shit?  In short, audience members were watching so many examples of narrative that they began to see what was previously noticed only by lit professors and other devourers of novels—they were noticing the conflict between the tropes upon which plots are constructed and the need in all realistic genres (and even comic books were being written “realistically” i.e. characters behaving in psychologically believable ways) for characters to learn from their experiences.  It used to be that characters didn’t learn anything until the adventure was almost over.  Elizabeth Bennet’s discovery of the true nature of both Darcy and Wickham means that the story will soon be moving to its close, as does Oedipus’s discovery of his true parentage.  However, in open-ended genres like soap operas and comic books, characters could not learn, because learning means the end of the story, and these stories don’t end.  So soap opera husbands are always having affairs that end badly, returning to their wives for a tearful reunion, only to begin again the cycle of adultery.  Robin will always blunder headlong into the trap from which Batman must rescue him—if he ever learnt to avoid the trap, he would cease to be Robin.  So now we are faced with a dilemma.  We want our characters to learn, but we don’t want the story to end.  This conflict between plot and character drives most of the TV I’ve seen in the past decade, including the revival of Doctor Who.   Last night’s Doctor Who episode, in fact, used perhaps the most melodramatic of tropes, the one most emblematic of the plot/character conflict—the damsel in distress.

How do we know that our protagonists are heroes?  Because they save people.  And though saving strangers is alright, we respond better when we have an emotional investment in the person being saved.  Hence the need for a love interest to save.  The rescue of the damsel tied to the train tracks is a trope that has been with us for well over a hundred years now, and dates back to a time when theatre audiences were mostly male.  The women that made up the soap opera audience didn’t seem to mind, but female audiences today are (quite rightly) tired of seeing women as nothing but love interests and passive victims.  This dilemma would seem to have an easy fix—just stop writing women as damsels in distress.  Give them the agency that men have enjoyed for a long time now.  But this isn’t happening, and it’s not because all these shows have misogynists for writers (though, boy, it feels like that sometimes.)[iii] Instead, I believe that these writers are wrestling with how to show characters changing within an open-ended story.

At the beginning of “The Girl Who Waited” we are explicitly reminded that Amy Pond is the traditional damsel in distress.  She tells her husband to save her, which he does, though he is 36 years late in doing so.  The plot is a rerun, and though tradition calls for characters to make the same mistakes over and over again, this time Amy learns.  In the rest of the episode we are shown an Amy Pond who has learned to take care of herself, and as a consequence, we know that she cannot be allowed to remain in the story.  And sure enough, the Doctor finds a way to go back in time and save the young Amy.[iv] But by saving younger Amy at a point in time before she spent 36 years learning to rely on herself, the old age make-up Amy is wiped from existence, having never lived.  The story thus, in a very postmodern way, makes its plot turn on the very problem of telling this kind of damsel in distress story.  We are made aware of the injustice of taking away Amy’s hard-won agency even as we understand that the story cannot proceed unless it happens.  Instead of not ever learning, characters now learn only to forget.[v]  At first this growth followed by reset button might seem like the perfect solution, but my unease with last night’s episode lies in part with how it seemed to deconstruct itself as it went along, as if lampshading the genre’s difficulties with character growth and female agency was the same as fixing it.[vi]

The problem of character growth within an open-ended story results in another trend that last night’s Doctor Who demonstrated—that of a generally world darkening—which will be a subject of a future post, as these ramblings have gone on long enough.

---

[i] This is one of my favorite aspects of soap operas—the expositing.  Characters telling each other things that they should be fully aware of, simply for the audience’s benefit.  In a more realistic milieu such dialogue would be bothersome, but in a world in which evil twins kidnap and impersonate their siblings, I’m OK with the idea that everyone is expositing all the time.

[ii] .  Ironically, the current demise of the soap opera on daytime television is proof of the fantastic popularity of the genre.  All TV is now soap opera, and the tropes of the genre no longer written just for stay at home moms.  Doctor Who was a trendsetter in this regard, as it has always been quite a soap opera, albeit one which uses scientific mumbo jumbo to paper over its more melodramatic leanings. 

[iii] When I say “not happening,” I don’t mean to belittle the wonderful worlds that many writers are creating, especially within the genre of science fiction novels.  I am discussing TV (and indirectly comic books) and its reliance upon long-standing tropes.

[iv] OK, that’s not quite an accurate summary of the plot, but summarizing time-travel plots is an exercise in masochism. 

[v] Superman’s “kiss of forgetfulness” at the end of Superman II being a prime example of this trope.

[vi] This post needs about a million links to tvtropes.org, but I’m too lazy to bother right now.  Look up “lampshading,” but be prepared to spend the next four hours of your life down that particular rabbit hole.

Enjoying Bad Baseball

Friday night I attended a baseball game here in Houston.  The first-place Milwaukee Brewers were in town to play the last-place Astros.

At 37-74, the Astros are the worst team in baseball.  Since I last saw the Astros, at the beginning of the summer, they traded away their SS, CF, and RF, they dumped their 2B, and they sent both their 3B and 1B back to the minors due to poor play.  That's pretty much the entire team gone.  The new folks aren't any better, mind you.  And since they have very little minor-league talent, he Astros are going to be bad for many years to come.  And yet, there I was, willingly shelling out 16 dollars to sit in the cheap seats and watch along with a half-empty stadium as the Astros lost yet again.

The final score was 8-1, but it wasn't that close.  The Astros pitcher (who was himself sent to the minors after the game) gave up three runs in the first inning, and three more in the third.  The Brewers at this point basically stopped trying very hard, and the Houston players all looked like they would rather be anywhere else but where they were.  In short, it was a pretty lackluster affair all the way around.

And yet, I had a great time.  I love going to ballgames.  Others have discussed the joy of the ball-field much more eloquently than I ever could, so let me just confirm their reports.  There is almost nowhere I would rather be than sitting with a beer in my hand watching a game.  If the game involves a team and/or players I root for or against, great.  If the game is exciting, back-and-forth, well-played baseball, fantastic.  But if the game is like Friday night--two teams I don't really care about, a game over before it really began . . . well, that's OK too.  Because there is always something in a baseball game to enjoy.

Sometimes it's not just what happens on the field, of course.  Spending time with friends at the ballpark is always more fun than just sitting in a bar. Friday night it was the quest for an Astros cap.  My friend needed a new cap, you see, and not just any old cap would do.  So we went into store after store, never settling, until finally finding the perfect cap.  Now, some people might have been annoyed by such a shopping trip, and if I had been at mall, maybe I would have been too.  But quests seem appropriate for the ballfield.

On the field, two particular events stood out at this non-eventful game.  An Astros rookie came into the game in the fifth inning, after the score was already 6-1 and everyone knew the game was over.  JB Shuck (what a great baseball name) had just been called up that day.  This was his first major league game, and I was there to cheer him on.  He singled in his first plate appearance, and I stood and applauded along with the rest of the crowd--it was as excited as the crowd had been all game.  He then stole second base, and the crowd roared even louder.  Mr. Shuck will always remember this game, as will I.  I attended a game at Shea Stadium in NYC many years ago (Sept 2 1998 to be precise) where I saw a Braves rookie named Marty Malloy play his first game and get his first hit, a home run.  It was the only home run he would ever hit in the big leagues.  He only played 35 games in all--the proverbial cup of coffee.  I doubt there are very many die-hard Braves fans, let alone baseball fans, who remember Marty Malloy. But I will never forget sharing his greatest baseball memory. Perhaps Mr. Shuck will go on to have many great baseball memories himself.  Or perhaps, like Mr. Malloy, his first game will also be his greatest.   Either way, it was a privilege to share in the moment.

There was another moment late in the game that I am happy to have seen.  In the ninth inning the Brewers sent up Craig Counsell to pinch-hit.  Mr. Counsell had been featured in many places the past few days--including a mention on the Colbert Report--for a very dubious reason.  If he were to make one more out, he would tie the record for most consecutive at-bats without a hit.  This was a record that had stood for over a century, a record that no one would want their name next to.  Mr Counsell is no Hall-of-Famer--not even close.  He never made an All-Star team, was never considered anything more than a scrappy second baseman with a very weird batting stance.  But he played important roles for two World Series teams, and was the MVP of the 2001 NLCS.  In 1997 he scored the winning run in the 7th game of the World Series.  Now in his 16th season, he is very close to the end of his playing days.  But he has had a pretty great career, with lots of happy memories.  Would it all be overshadowed by this record streak of futility?  Thankfully, we will never know.  Mr. Counsell got a hit on Friday night.  The crowd applauded, which I found touching.  Mr. Counsell had a grin that I could see from the cheap seats.

 Two important things happened at this uneventful game (three if you count the quest for the perfect cap).  One will make the records book, and one will not.  One was a beginning, one an end.  Together they represent baseball.

A Response to 21st Century Hoovernomics

Most economists are saying that now is a terrible time to be slashing spending.  With unemployment at close to 10% (and that's using the very conservative official numbers), with the housing market still reeling, austerity measures such as conservatives are advocating are little better than 21st century Hoovernomics.  But I can imagine the conservative response--so when is a good time to cut this unsustainable spending binge?  If not now, when?  And they are right, these imaginary conservative interlocutors of mine.  The answer will always be "later."

Progressives have erred in accepting so many conservative frames, and this is one of the biggies.  It has become conventional wisdom that the federal government needs to slash spending--the only question is who will be affected.  Liberals advocate soaking the rich. (Well, not really, but since I'm trying to imagine the conservative mind, let's just play along.)  Conservatives know that their base does not like--if fact hates--this notion.  Rich people, of course, don't like it, but neither do conservatives in general, and most of them are not rich.  These conservatives do not vote their economic self-interest, as many--including Thomas Frank--have pointed out.  For them, it is a moral issue.  Taking money from those that have earned it, and giving it to those who are shiftless and lazy, is the major complaint--perhaps the only complaint--that conservatives really have against government.  Progressives will never win any economic argument as long as this ideological framework is in place.

A huge majority of the country loved FDR and his big spending ways, because they saw directly how government spending affected their lives.  Government spending defeated the Nazis and saved the world.  Government spending provided electricity to the nation.  Government spending helped young couples buy their first home, and helped send them all to college.  In short, government spending created the post-war era that conservatives nostalgically pine for as the Golden Age of America.  Minorities, however, were largely shut out of the golden age of governmental spending.  Sure, they loved FDR too, for they were better off than before, but while white America was booming, their progress was slow and incremental.  The civil rights movement and LBJ's Great Society aimed to fix this inequity, to open up the power of government spending to all Americans.  And not so coincidentally, this is when more and more conservatives began to sour on government spending, when the idea began to take hold in the conservative mind that government spending doesn't help us any more.  All it does is take money from our pockets and give it to Them.  And that's not right.

Much is made of the Republican party being taken over by fundamentalist Christians, a phenomenon that began in the conservative backlash to post-war cultural changes and became manifest with Reagan's victory in 1980.  But I believe that this bit of common sense has it backwards.  Christians didn't take over the Republican Party--conservative ideology transformed Christianity.  Al Franken's Supply-Side Jesus is funny because it's no joke.  Conservative economic dogma is now central to Christian fundamentalist beliefs.  The idea that the government is taking from the wealthy to help the undeserving poor mapped almost perfectly onto the central anxiety of the post-war era--the eternal struggle between Christian America and godless Communism.  All of the ridiculous accusations of socialism, fascism, communism, and Marxism hurled against progressives (to the deep consternation of pedants like me who object not to the ideological frame being employed but to the muddling of language by using the terms interchangeably) stem from this post-war anxiety that our government is robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, which is communist, which is unchristian, and so must be opposed by good Christians.

I was born in the South in 1973, and grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household.  I went to a private Christian school, as the public school I was zoned for was largely black.  This school, of course, had not been so up until the late 60s, when desegregation finally began being enforced throughout the South.  My parents never took me to a public park--I played on the swingset in my backyard, in friends' backyards, at my private school's playground, or at my all-white church's playground.  I was never taken to a public pool--my grandparents had a pool, as did many friends.  In short, I grew up in a world where public = black.  I almost never encountered black people; not until high school did I have a black friend. For me, the South might as well have still been under Jim Crow.  And this is what progressives are getting at when they accuse conservatives (often implicitly, sometimes directly) of being racist.   These accusations are, of course, a terrible strategy.  Individual conservatives are not racist (well, some of them are, but so are some progressives).  But the current conservative economic dogma, the one that is doing so much damage to our politics right now, the one that has utterly transformed American Christianity, is built upon an ideology that took root before the vast majority of conservatives were even born.  It is an ideology that renders invisible all of the governmental services that benefit the white and the wealthy, and obsesses over those services that benefit minorities and the poor.  It is an ideology that has built a shadow world, a private world, and become more and more epistemically closed as time has passed.

This frame of government as Communist Robin Hood must be rejected if progressives ever hope to make substantial economic changes in this country.  We must return to the understanding that created FDR's popularity, the understanding that government services are a piece of the puzzle (NOT the whole puzzle--hard work and good luck will always be important, and progressives neglect this at their own peril) that is American prosperity.  The government is at its best when it curbs the excesses of capitalism (and we will always be arguing over how free the market should be--it is a good argument and should continue).  The government is at its best when it provides services, such as health care, that would be immoral to turn over to the heartlessness of pure capitalism.  But most importantly, we must return to the idea the government spending affects us all.  Providing health care to the jobless helps them, but it helps me too, by driving down the insane costs of the current health care system.  We must reject the notion that all government spending is bad, is immoral, because all government spending is redistributive.   It is most certainly not.  The federal government is certainly no utopia.  It will always be filled with self-centered individuals, always be teetering on the brink of corruption.  But unlike the private shadow system that conservatives have created, governmental corruption can be discovered, can be brought to the light and punished, and the corruptors voted out of office.  This is why governmental services are superior to private services, and why government spending should increase--it's not that the government is more pure, or more moral, than private industries, but rather that the government is more directly accountable to the American people that they serve.

A Face in the Crowd

Last night I finally got around to watching Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. The poor Netflix DVD had lain around the house all summer, ignored night after night, until it was buried under a stack of children's cartoons and bootleg episodes of Dr. Who. As has become the constant refrain of my life--I should not have waited so long.

Based on a short story by by Budd Schulberg, A Face in the Crowd tells of the rise and fall of a homespun hillbilly, played by Andy Griffith. The story was inspired by the careers of men like Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey¹, men whose genial humor masked their desire and ability to influence the nation's politics. A Face in the Crowd is one of many texts at the time which examined the growing influence of the media—The Great Man (1956) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) being two others. It was not seen at the time as a particularly good film—reviews were decidedly mixed, and box office receipts anemic. But in the mid-70s, amid the nation's reaction to Nixon and Watergate, the film began to be seen in a more positive light. The critical success of Network was seen in part as a continuation of the ideas begun in Kazan's film. Moreover, with the election of actor Ronald Reagan in 1980, the film took hold, at least for liberals, as an eerily prescient warning about the dangers of media manipulation and the public's desire for politicians that portray a faux-rural charm.

And believe you me, Griffith is charming. I had never seen Griffith act, having assiduously avoided his eponymous TV show. I've seen clips, of course, which only reinforced my impression of him as a dumbed down Atticus Finch, a soothingly bland father figure and all around nice guy who plays straight man to the wackiness of small-town life and teaches us valuable lessons. In short, I was completely unprepared for his performance in A Face in the Crowd. Griffith is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Especially in the first third of the film, I found myself laughing out loud at his antics, fully aware that he is a manipulative, completely self-centered bastard. Schickel calls Griffith's portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes the most “nakedly poised on this fine line” between attraction and repulsion of all of Kazan's protagonists, and I agree with him. Not even Brando as Stanley Kowalski is better, simply because Brando isn't able to repulse us as Griffith can.² I wasn't as enamored with Patricia Neal's character, the woman who discovers, beds, and eventually betrays Rhodes. But next to Griffith's scenery-chewing, her more restrained performance is harder to remember. Some have criticized her long-suffering character for, well, suffering so long. She does put up with quite a bit, but having seen enough Kazan work, I accept that she is just like all his other heroines—an upper-class educated woman irresistibly drawn to the animal magnetism of a sweaty working class man. Neal is superb at reaction shots; which is good, because Kazan uses a lot of them. There are plenty of moments where we see Griffith chewing some scenery while over his shoulder we see Neal's reaction—a perfect mix of attraction and repulsion. Kazan might have cast her for that look alone.

The “social menace of television” theme is well done, but at this point, nothing new. (Though there is a wonderfully surreal montage of advertising for the film's main product, a patent medicine sham that is marketed as a 50s version of Viagra, that skewers the sexism of the day.) In fact, Rhodes's quick fall from grace (fantastically if melodramatically conveyed by the close-up on the elevator buttons lighting up in succession as Rhodes descends after his TV gaffe) strikes me as a bit naïve. These days, right-wing entertainers can say just about anything and not only survive, but thrive. We do love our bad boys. And that is the aspect of the film that I found most provocative—the critique of our love of rebellion. Lonesome Rhodes is first shown to us in prison, and his rise in popularity is directly related to his bad boy behavior—he tells his radio listeners to use his boss's swimming pool, and refuses to read the advertising copy given him, mocking his sponsors instead. This mockery, of course, only increases sales. Rhodes is pure id, thinking only of himself and his pleasures, yet somehow is able to make others feel intense connections to him. Kazan had, of course, worked with both of the poster boys for Teenage Angst, Marlon Brando and James Dean, and with this film he seems to deconstruct the trope. At the beginning of the film Rhodes sings of freedom, a song that he returns to throughout the film, a song that highlights how we translate his acts of petulance and narcissism as expressions of the male American Dream, the dream of having complete control over your own life, of telling the boss to shove it, of sleeping with whomever, whenever you choose. By the end of the film this dream has become a nightmare, with Rhodes revealed as the monster he was all along. (The final time we see Rhodes, he is ranting maniacally to an empty room, as his one remaining lackey plays canned applause, reminding us of the simulacrum that he, and all Bad Boys, have always represented. Yes, he is utterly self-absorbed—as are we, for wanting his selfishness to mean something that it never can.)

If the film has a hero, it is nebbish Walter Matthau, the third spoke of the film's love triangle.³ Poor intellectual, glasses-wearing, pushover Matthau—pining away for the girl who is always attracted to the bad boy instead. Yet it is Matthau who gets to deliver the film's final denunciation of Rhodes, and he also gets the girl—though we are led to believe that she will always be pining after Andy Griffith. More importantly, Matthau's character learns from and profits from his experience—he has written a tell-all book about Rhodes, set to be released just as Rhodes spectacularly implodes. Though the film denounces the media in no uncertain terms, A Face in the Crowd is no Frankfurt School manifesto. It is not capitalism that is to blame; rather, it is us poor rubes, who fail to see through the chicanery. In such a world, the true heroes are those who pull back the curtain and reveal the Truth. And if they can profit while doing so, more power to them.

1This info is drawn from Richard Schickel's 2005 biography of Elia Kazan, which I purchased at Half-price Books for a dollar, and which has sat unread on my shelf ever since. I was aware of Will Rogers, but had never heard of Godfrey. After reading Wikipedia, I see how much of the film is based on Godfrey. I wonder if Jack Kirby modelled Glorious Godfrey on him? Red hair, power of persuasion—it must be.

2 Interestingly, the critics of the time faulted Griffith for exactly this dual quality of his performance, wanting him “to be either a snake or a charmer” in Schickel's words.

3God how I love this type of character. Screenwriters obviously overidentify with the Clark Kent type—as do I.