A Plea for Proportionality in Fiction

Since I was writing about fiction and stories in my last post, and since I have something to add on the subject, I may as well continue on the same theme. Obviously my mind is running that way.

For most of my adult life, and indeed well back into my teens, I have harboured a certain assumption about stories which nobody else seems to share, but that which seems reasonable enough to me. The assumption is that there should be some sort of proportionality involved in the choice of subjects and motifs for stories. The world of stories-- of all the stories being told at one time-- should, in some manner, be a reflection of the real world.

This is an example of what I mean. I find myself irritated at the amount of thrillers and fantastic tales in which the literal end of the world is at stake. Imminent apocalypse is a very rare thing. As far as we know, and apart from all the possible close encounters with asteroids which we may have survived over the last few billion years, it has only really happened twice; in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the incident in 1983 where one Stanislav Petrov refused to panic when a Soviet radar malfunction made it look as though an American nuclear missile had been fired at Russia. The end of the world as we know it doesn't really come along very often, and it seems a device grossly overused in books and movies and comics.

Now, you may say that such a reaction is ridiculously literal-minded, that humanity has always been haunted by apocalyptic visions and that it is inevitable our stories would draw on them. And I acknowledge this. I do accept that having only two End-of-the-World stories, to correspond with the couple of times the thing actually happened, would be ridiculously restrictive. I don't object to twenty. I don't object to two hundred. I don't even object to two thousand. But when the thing becomes as common as the common cold, I can't help feeling that Armageddon has been rather devalued.

Besides-- it's such a cheap source of drama, when you think about it. Why do we always have to ramp everything up to the max? I remember the late and great film critic Roger Ebert, in a review of the French film The Chorus, complaining that the mysterious music teacher turns out to be The World's Greatest Conductor. "I would have been better pleased if he had merely been a Really Great Conductor", he wrote. I agree. There is nothing really imaginative about superlatives. I think they rather show a lack of imagination than an abundance of it.

Similarly, it bothers me that the same scenarios and settings and social circles are so remorselessly overused by story-tellers, rather than drawing on the vast reservoir of actual human experience. Now, I realize that some themes are simply more dramatic than others, and will therefore tend to appear more often. Murder is a very dramatic situation and it is inevitable that it will be over-represented in fiction. But do we really need a whole industry of murder mystery novels, and of crime novels in general? Why should directors and authors flatter themselves on finding a new "twist" for the crime genre? Why not just "twist" out of the tiresome genre and onto the vast tracts of human experience that don't involve Detective Inspectors or DNA tests?

What about the fantastic, you say? If our stories are going to reflect reality more closely, should we simply leave out the fantastic?

I don't think so. First of all, many people (myself included) do believe in ghosts and other supernatural occurences, and the world is full of claims of actual ghosts, doppelgangers, poltergeists, and so forth. To this extent, having a myriad of supernatural tales does not contradict my principle of proportionality in fiction.

Besides, the fantastic element in fantastic tales is accepted as fantastic. The question of probability does not come into it because it is accepted that it is, not only improbable, but not necessarily possible at all. I simply wish that the non-fantastic element in fantastic tales would not show an excessive concentration upon the superlative, the global, the exclusive. Why does every science-fiction story have to be about a world conflict, and feature Presidents and billionaire business-men and Nobel-winning scientists? Can't we have a swords-and-sorcery tale entirely confined to one obscure village, far from palaces and castles?

Viewed from this perspective, I think the disdain that is so often heaped upon "chick-lit" is unfair. I am not a reader of chick-lit, but, to my mind, it is has this advantage over more "manly" fiction such as thriller novels and spy novels (which usually enjoy more critical cachet)-- that it draws upon universal experience. Chick-lit is mostly about romance and family and working life, and those are experiences common to most people. In the same way, "TV movie" is a term of disparagement, but why should it be? Why is a housewife battling with alcoholism or the life of a wheelchair-bound college student a less worthy theme than scientists battling to stop a pandemic from bringing about the one millionth End of the World?

Oh, for Goodness Sake, Grow Up. Grow Up! Grow Up!!

For the last few mornings, I have been gritting my teeth while my bus passes a billboard which advertises a film by the charming title Kick-Ass 2. As I am an avid cinema-goer, I saw the trailer for the first masterpiece in this series. That made me grit my teeth too. There won't be much left of my teeth at this stage.

Can there be any greater indictment of our culture than superhero movies? (Yes, there can-- superhero comics. But forget that for the moment.) It isn't just the sheer volume of these infantile productions that offends. It isn't the fact that they are increasingly taken oh-so-seriously, often treated as profound dramas in their own right.

It isn't even just that every superhero movie is exactly the same. It's exactly the same themes, over and over again-- the conflict between the private individual and the public persona, between personal hopes and dreams and the stern Call of Duty. But even the monotony of the genre is beside the point. The point is that the whole thing is so agonizingly, maddeningly puerile. Men and women dressed up in bright colours and skin-tight outfits, going by ridiculous names like Batman and Daredevil and Cyclops? Fighting villains who are also dressed in bright colours and have ridiculous names like Dr. Octopus and the Penguin? Doesn't anyone see how ludicrous all this is? Doesn't anyone see how debasing it is? Doesn't anyone find something jarring about it?

More than anything else, what nauseates me about the superhero genre is how it is such a pathetic power fantasy. It is as though our culture has no greater aspiration than to have perfect abs and to beat the living daylights out of other people. I'm well aware that the superhero genre tries to balance the power fantasy with a moral about responsibility and duty and the dark underside of having such phenomenal powers. Big deal. A little bit of pseudo-intellectual or pseudo-artistic seasoning hardly takes away from the sheer, inescapable childishness of the basic premise.

It's not just the superhero genre that exasperates me, though. Increasingly, it's popular culture as a whole. I'm sick of it, and I'm especially sick of it when it tries to be serious and thoughtful-- only then is its sheer superficiality most obvious. The Sopranos (which I've never seen) is a wonderfully complex and human drama, you say? Well, why is it about the Mafia? Why not make a drama about an ordinary family? Why do we need guns and violence and fast cars and vast wealth to sugar the pill of serious artistic intent?

More than anything, though, I resent all the popular culture that I've swallowed myself, usually with the sauce of nostalgia. I have a post on this blog analysing Star Trek in depth. Star Trek is trash. The Transformers comic that I read in childhood was trash. So was the Eagle comic. So were the Indiana Jones films that I went to see in the cinema, despite the golden glow of those childhood memories. Sherlock Holmes is trash-- I don't just mean any of the films or the TV series, but the stories themselves, which provided the template for so much detective drivel. Conan Doyle was quite right to disdain them. All the horror films I watched and analysed so avidly for so many years were and are trash. It's all trash. It's all stylized, caricatured, episodic, babyish, day-glo, puerile, developmentally arrested, vulgar, glib trash.

(I make an exception for Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is a great work of serious art.)

I am hereby checking out of the popular culture theme park. Henceforth I plan to read only grown-up books-- mostly poetry, especially long poetry. Nobody reads long poetry anymore, so that is a good sign. Anything that is ignored by our trash culture has to be good. Currently I am reading The Faerie Queene, which I'm finding tough going. But of course I'd find it tough going. I find it tough going because I've been infantalised by thirty-five years of trash culture. Finding it tough going is a very, very good sign.

(Note: There is some interesting discussion in the comments section, below).

The World's End, and the Flies of a Summer's Day

I'm just back from seeing The World's End, the third and final part of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "Blood and Ice-Cream" trilogy. I enjoyed it, though I didn't think it was nearly as good as the previous film, Hot Fuzz, which is one of my all-time favourites.

The theme of The World's End was a fairly common cinematic theme-- men entering middle age seeking to reconnect with their youth. (Oh, and some stuff about a town's population being replaced by robots.) I find this theme-- recapturing lost youth, not robots posing as humans-- a little too poignant, since I am now half-way through my thirties (midway through life's journey, according to Dante). Sometimes I feel grateful that my childhood and adolescence was pretty uneventful and I don't have very much to get maudlin about-- although nostalgia will always find something.

But I also found myself (after the film) thinking about popular culture, social amnesia, and the sad condition of people who have been uprooted from their heritage, when they hit middle age. The film (like most films and works of entertainment these days, but even more so than most) is chock-full of pop culture references-- mostly marking the way the world has changed since the central characters were young.

It strikes me that ageing is particularly sad, particulaly lonely and desolate, when you have nothing but popular culture to draw on. It's like trying to cling onto a clump of grass. When you mark the passage of historic time by pop songs and TV shows and movies and technology, how can you help feeling ancient by the age of thirty?

Whereas somebody who is rooted in a tradition-- be that a national tradition, a cultural tradition, or (best of all, I think) a religious tradition-- doesn't feel so terribly antiquated, since traditions tend to extend across many generations. A man who is absorbed in some political cause-- trade unionism, for instance-- feels himself to be part of a story that began long before his birth and will continue (he hopes) well after his death. His own biography is only a moment in that story. He is part of something bigger and more enduring. Similarly, a man who feels himself to be part of a cultural tradition-- a man who reads old books, who feels a living connection with previous generations-- need not feel so unmoored when all the rock heroes of his youth start dying off.

I make no apologies for repeatedly quoting Edmund Burke's marvellous phase, "the flies of a summer's day", to describe people cut off from history and tradition. I think one of the worst things that a reliance on pop culture does to us is to make us flies of a summer's day-- but flies who are conscious of their own tragically short moment in the sun.

Papist Popcorn: Dark Shadows (4/5)

I'm just back from seeing Dark Shadows, in my beloved Santry Omniplex. (I've seen two hundred and seventy one films in that cinema to date, not including multiple viewings of the same film. I know that because I record all the films I see on an Excel spreadsheet. How nerdy is that?)

I had never even heard of the American TV series on which it was based. (Which pleased me-- I'm always happy when I find myself untouched by pop culture in some way.) The posters and bus advertisements didn't look very promising, especially since I've heard that films are only advertised on the sides of buses as a desperate measure, when they are expected to tank.

But I went anyway, because I was so intrigued to find out about the TV series. A Gothic horror soap? Whoever heard of that? So, despite the fact that I think the undead are becoming tedious beyond words and that there should be a moratorium on vampire movies for the next ten years (and a moratorium on superhero movies for the next twenty), I decided to go. After all, I wasn't going to swell the coffers of Avengers Assemble or American Pie.

My curiosity was rewarded. Dark Shadows is one of the oddest and most interesting films I've seen in a long time. And, funnily enough, it is odd not because it is quirky but precisely because it is not all that quirky. Considering the battiness of the premise, it's remarkable how straight this movie is played, how tightly the comedic elements are reined in. Remarkable, and refreshing.

The plot is something of a mix between Interview with the Vampire and Crocodile Dundee. Barnabas Collins is the scion of wealthy eighteenth-century Maine family, owners of a lucrative fishing business. Something of a playboy, he makes the mistake of jilting a domestic servant who also happens to be a witch. She enchants his true love into wandering over a cliff, turns Barnabas into a vampire, and then for good measure has him buried alive. When he is finally released from his internment, it is 1972 and the Collins family has hit on hard times, while the witch who beat up on Barnabas has pretty much taken over the area's fishing trade. And she is still harbouring a lust-hate relationship for Barnabas.

Of course, the film provides plenty of scope for fish-out-of-water humour, and it's genuinely funny, as fish-out-of-water humour usually is. Barnabas wonders aloud why one of his female relatives is still unmarried at fifteen, and recommends her to put her good "birthing hips" to use. He reads Love Story by Eric Segal and hangs out with a bunch of hippies. He even invites Alice Cooper to perform at his mansion, (and reflects that she is the ugliest woman he's ever seen).

Inevitably, too, the seventies is mined for its soundtrack and its fashions, and the groovy atmosphere does add an extra relish to the movie. Hey, I like the seventies. I come from there.

There is an awful lot happening in this film. It seems like it has about ten central characters and half a dozen plots, in almost as many genres. Which sounds like a recipe for chaos, but-- quite surprisingly-- Dark Shadows gets away with it.

Visually it is as lip-smacking as you would hope, with atmospheric Gothic sets, exciting camera angles, and magical special effects.

Mixing comedy and horror is a tricky business. The comedy tends to negate the horror. Most of the time it doesn't work and it's a horrible mess. But now and again, a film like Scream or Creepshow will come along and pull off this bravura feat. Dark Shadows doesn't rank with either of those, but it still enters the far-from-crowded ranks of decent comedy-horrors.

The worst fault of the film is that it pushes things just a little too far, trying our patience in the last fifteen minutes or so, as the spectacle becomes more and more spectacular. But I suppose it does have soap opera DNA, and could hardly avoid excess.

As usual, these days, the film was awarded a completely inappropriate certificate. Rated for twelve years or above, it contained very racy humour, and some extremely erotic imagery. Suicide is presented in a morally neutral manner.

But on the whole, a very pleasant surprise, and very much recommended if you are at all a horror aficionado.