Like a Geek God #19: Beside the Point of Origin

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, origin stories, X-Men

Like a Geek God #19 by Mark Pursell

Beside the Point of Origin

Origin stories need to die a slow, painful, fiery death.

But first, a history lesson.

The modern era of superhero cinema began in 2000 with a long-awaited celluloid re-imagining of the X-Men franchise. This should have been a portent of great things to come: Bryan Singer’s foray into comic book action brimmed with mood, tension, and a fair approximation of the franchise’s psychological complexity (Halle Berry’s tone-deaf turn as Storm notwithstanding).

It took years and millions to finally get an X-Men movie project off the ground. No, really. Imagine that for a hot second. Imagine an executive/financial landscape in good ol’ Hollywood that viewed a superhero movie not as the nominally-expensive cash grab it currently represents but instead as a black hole investment, unlikely to reap much from its sowing. That was the landscape all through the ‘80s and ‘90s, a time when not only X-Men but Spider-Man and multiple other Marvel and DC properties languished in the most fiery of development hells. The story might have been different if Tim Burton’s unparalleled 1989 Batman had launched a film franchise that was both critically and commercially viable, but Burton’s own 1992 follow-up, Batman Returns, was largely misunderstood by viewers, and the subsequent movies (1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman and Robin, both barely more than odious) did little to instill hope among Hollywood suits that comic-book adaptations would result in desired profit margins.

However, against all odds, X-Men did eventually achieve liftoff, and did so with enough panache and box office returns that it not only set the stage for sequels of its own, but also a reinvigorated cinematic landscape where suddenly, superhero projects gathering dust in the slush pile turned into diamonds-in-the-rough, potential moneymakers desperately in need of a greenlight and a quick turnaround. In rapid succession, we got X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Blade franchise, all within a period of roughly three years. By the mid-Aughties, however, this sputtering pilot light of life among superhero cinema looked in danger of going out just as quickly as it had been lit. For every Hellboy, there was a Catwoman; for every Unbreakable, a Daredevil. Then, Christopher Nolan singlehandedly reoriented the genre with his dark, archetypal take on Batman’s origination, Batman Begins.

And with it, cast the immediate future of the superhero movie into a paradoxical pit of both financial viability and critical darkness.

Batman Begins isn’t responsible for superhero cinema’s fixation on the origin story. Every noteworthy hero film that came before it in the early Aughties was also an origin story of sorts, even X-Men. And standing alone, there was nothing particularly egregious about Nolan’s decision to tackle Bruce Wayne’s complicated past. It’s only when you consider the decade of superhero movies that has passed in the interim that you see how unforgivingly Begins’s success molded the movies that came after it. The contemporary cultural juggernaut known by the innocuous-sounding title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is thoroughly and utterly marred by this. 2008’s Iron Man also chose a “hero begins” route, recasting Tony Stark as a modern, motormouthed, military-industrial apologist. Iron Man is notable as the opening salvo in Hollywood’s MCU onslaught, beginning a decade-long project to release individual hero movies for all of the classic Avengers teammates and then, finally, a climactic film where they would all work together in a team (perhaps you’ve seen it? It was written and directed by a little-known auteur named Joss Whedon). It’s also notable because it’s one of the few movies in the MCU that is actually good, but that’s an argument for another time. Iron Man’s runaway success—again, very merited, given its high quality—gave birth to Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America: origin stories, one and all. Soon even non-franchise superhero tales, like Chronicle, went the “origin story” route. The origin story became such a fixture in the forefront of pop culture preoccupation that it bled into our TV shows (Bates Motel, Hannibal, Sherlock). Somewhere along the way, the idea of the origin story became entangled with the idea of the franchise reboot; less than a decade apart, we have two very different Spider-Man movies, both origin stories.

So what’s the problem? This panoply of origin stories has been financially viable for Marvel Studios, and critics have been suspiciously kind to the entries in the MCU, even the ones that are insignificant fluff at best (here’s looking at you, Thor).

Why should we be concerned? What’s got my little geek heart all aflame?

I think, somewhere along the line—because X-Men, Batman Begins, and Iron Man told origin stories that succeeded both critically and commercially—that the origin story came to be thought of as something that has an intrinsic cinematic value to moviegoers, that the archetype itself is some sort of lodestone that, if only picked up, yields magic. The truth, as should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look beyond the immediate surface of things, is that those movies, particularly X-Men and Iron Man, are extremely well-constructed. They succeed as movies first, origin stories second. The script and the direction don’t rely on the basic components of an origin story to do their work for them. The writers and actors and directors have fleshed out the characters, spent time creating opportunities for viewer investment at all possible moments, and made sure that their story works not just as a lackadaisical illumination of how X character got from Point A to Badass, but as a narrative experience in and of itself. Take, for example, the first Mad Max movie, which wasn’t even necessarily conceived as the beginning of a franchise but whose tale of a vengeance-seeking policeman was executed with such muscular vision and cinematic poise that it unintentionally birthed a franchise.

With each passing year and each new superhero origin story, however, it’s become clear that subsequent writers and directors can ape the general look and feel of an origin story but not the substance of its best examples. There’s also the matter of not really having to do much work when writing an origin story (theoretically) because they all follow a distinct pattern: hero has problem, hero gets power, hero has to figure power out. You can knock out an origin story screenplay without moving much beyond first-thought, and, as Hollywood has discovered, people will go in droves to see the resulting movie. From a financial standpoint, origin stories have become a no-brainer investment: minimum effort resulting in maxiumum profit. What this has created is an atmosphere of origin-obsessed superhero movies that have long ago abandoned complex, fresh storytelling in favor of the rote. This problem reached its apotheosis with 2013’s Man of Steel. We’ve actually seen a LOT of Superman in the last few decades (Lois and Clark, Smallville, Superman Returns), so it’s not exactly like we needed a brand-new reboot, but reboot it they did, and with as little narrative acumen as a direct-to-video knock-off.

Archetypal stories and figures move in glacier-like cycles through the attention span of pop culture. Slasher flicks gave way to torture porn gave way to found footage, to use horror as an example. Vampires gave way to zombies gave way to whatever monster will capture the zeitgeist of the popular imagination next. The obsession with the origin story is weirdly appropriate for the Information Age and the social media generation, where everyone is the star of their own Facebook reality show and builds their own “super” origin story out of their life narrative. We powerless mortals no longer identify with the hapless humans who help the superheroes: we see ourselves as the superheroes, misunderstood and put upon but ascending to a great destiny, while pop music assures us that we were “Born This Way”, that we’re a “Firework”, that we’re never less than “Fucking Perfect.” It’s the delusional opposite of Generation X disaffection, which at least had the virtue of cynicism. Who can say whether the Men with Suits have articulated this connection, but they perceive enough about the way social psychology works to know that the contemporary moviegoing audience spits out $$$ when certain buttons are pressed, and they press them with gusto. The good news is that the origin story is quickly turning into a fallow field, in need of crop rotation. There are only so many heroes to make movies about, only so many ways to depict a brave-but-reluctant soul’s rise to power. Now that everyone from Tony Stark to Peter Parker has had the murky origins of their heroism fracked and stripped of every possible vein of crude, superhero movies will eventually be forced to turn to other types of stories, new chapters, new problems. To be honest, this will probably be the death of the superhero boom; Millennials will care little for Captain America’s middle-aged struggle with morality because it doesn’t say anything to them about the movie of their lives, and the dollars will stop flowing in a Mississippi-like torrent to the glass eyries of Los Angeles. That’s good; it’s necessary. We need to let the superhero lie dormant for a while. It’s only out of a period of dormancy that a given archetype returns to cinema with vim and vigor. Think Batman 1989. Think X-Men 2000. I’m personally looking forward to ten years without capes and noble martyrdom. Maybe by 2020, I’ll be ready for some more.

___________

Mark Pursell (Episode 75) is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Like a Geek God #18: Geeking Out on True Detective

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #18 by Mark Pursell

Geeking Out on True Detective

WARNING: contains mild spoilers through the end of Episode 7.

Here’s a facet of my geekdom that I haven’t really addressed yet on this blog: crime fiction.

Crime stories don’t usually come to mind when someone says the word “geek”, but there’s an entire subculture of crime fiction enthusiasts for whom the term “geek” is extremely apropos. It’s a more “grown up” sort of geekery, I suppose, in the sense that events are usually rooted in contemporary or historical reality, devoid of robots and/or magic. That doesn’t speak, however, to the level of investment that crime geeks sink into their favorite authors, movies, and television shows.

Of course, the crime tale is quite “done” at this point in the history of modern storytelling. Artists across the media spectrum have tackled the basic idea for well over a century, yielding results both transcendant and trite. However, over the last decade, the New Golden Age of Television—a charge of high-quality programming led by HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX—has created a safe harbor for talented writers to craft their crime tales with precision, as well as a canvas large enough to contain complexity. What is Breaking Bad if not a hyperrealist tragedy about the criminal underworld? Even shows that are more ostensibly procedural—The Fall, or Top of the Lake—elevate themselves through the quality of their writing and their characters, even though the standard “person dies, police investigate” plot engine is old hat. Cinema has fared similarly: in 2013 alone, you had movies like Prisoners, Spring Breakers, and Mud, all three of which showed that the crime story is not just alive, but thriving under the auspices of creative visionaries who have the freedom to tell stories the best way they know how.

Which makes the artistic achievement of HBO’s True Detective even more impressive. Detective hasn’t arisen in a genre vacuum, after all. But creator and sole writer Nic Pizzolato’s Shakespearean, years-spanning epic about two detectives’ hunt for an occultist ring of murderers in the deep Lousiana bayous puts one foot on the shoulder of other excellently-conceived murder mysteries and vaults over them with the ease of a gymnast.

The reasons why are multifold. The show’s limited run of eight episodes has given Pizzolato and director Cary Joji Fukunaga the space to do two very important things: let the story breathe, and end it satisfyingly before it overstays its welcome. True Detective is an anthology series, conceived to follow the pattern of American Horror Story; each new season will feature a differing cast and storyline. (The current story, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as the gridlocked detectives, will end next Sunday). This turns each season into what amounts to a miniseries or very long movie, ensuring that each new storyline will have to describe a finite arc. The big problem with serialized detective stories is that they have the potential to go on for too long, running out of gas long before the writers and the money behind the show are ready or able to let it end. The anthology format is a genius one for a crime show, and hopefully future installments of True Detective will derive as much power and focus from the format as this season has.

Because across its existing seven episodes, this flagship season of the show has not only set a bar for effective storytelling, but engaging, deeply visceral storytelling that aims to get at the uncomfortable psychological truths lurking under the veneer of civilization. Rustin Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Harrelson) can best be described as beleagured, not only by the horrific events and forces they find themselves thrown into conflict with but also by the larger problems of love, family, mortality, and “what it means to be a man/woman” that trouble us all. When their initial investigation of a ritualized murder pits them against a secret, diabolical cult, their search draws the darkness in their own lives to the surface, as if the horror they are attempting to illuminate calls, siren-like, to the unresolved and the unconscious in each of the men’s dysfunctional lives. (Cohle is a hyper-intelligent savant more than a little touched by obsession, compulsion, and the scars of undercover narcotics work; Hart paints himself into a familiar corner, drinking too hard and cheating on his wife, but the fury with which he erupts when he finds himself trapped by the consequences of his actions allow us to glimpse a person much more damaged than an adulterous cliché). The tag line of the show is “touch darkness and darkness touches you back”, and strangely enough, this serves as the most direct summation of the first season’s thematic gist.

McConaughey and Harrelson tackle these dour, hard men with a voracity. Once largely relegated to typecasting by their early famous roles and their distinct personalities, both actors have undertaken something of a career renaissance in the last few years. Serious, nuanced character work (Killer Joe and The Paperboy for McConaughey, Rampart and The Messenger for Harrelson) is apparently not beyond either of them. Far from it, in fact: both actors have increased their visibility and their reputation due to these performances, and one can’t help but see their tour de force work in True Detective as a further evolution. Or perhaps it’s the sheer delight of watching Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson scheme and think and fight together. When a friend told me that they were the two stars, I said, “Oh, I’ll watch that, I don’t even care what it’s about.” Case in point. Both men have always been charismatic on-screen, able to plumb the depths of both comedy and drama with ease, but something about their True Detective chemistry—complex and ever-shifting in the manner of all intense partnerships, comprised of respect, resentment, and shared trauma—heightens their individual and combined magnetism. Even in the early parts of the show, the detectives both look hungry, starved around the eyes, as tragically unable to extricate themselves from events as they are unable to shore themselves up under the “burdens” of love, fidelity, and human connection.

Pizzolatto has done that rare and enviable thing; he wrote all of True Detective himself, without employing a traditional writing staff. It may seem like a risky gambit for people who are invested in a traditional writing model for television, but the surety of Pizzolatto’s vision—his tight grasp on the puzzle pieces of his story and its fairly unique mythology (inspired by Robert Chambers’s seminal book The King in Yellow)—is strong evidence in favor of talented writers taking this approach more often. Maybe it’s only due to the limited number of episodes, but True Detective has a momentum and a laser-targeted focus that make it more compulsively watchable than even binge-bait like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black. One of the most compelling aspects of the writing is how Pizzolatto depicts the detectives’ case-working process. It’s refreshing to see Pizzolatto heavily emphasize two crucial aspects of actual detective work: pounding the pavement, and paperwork. The two halves of True Detective—in which Cohle and Hart investigate an initial murder in 1995 and pick back up on unresolved aspects of the case in 2012—make much out of both things. The two men spend long lonely stretches of road together, seeking out leads, often coming up empty-handed or with a piece of the puzzle they don’t know what to do with yet. They spend time and energy (on-screen!) discussing the acquisition of tax records, title transfers, and old case files; there’s a compelling scene where Hart, attempting to dig up old information, is led by a clerk to a room full of haphazard file boxes. No database, no digitization, nothing to do but roll up one’s sleeves and start sorting through the mess. Pizzolatto doesn’t linger on this part of detective work long enough to bore us, but he holds it up for us with enough obvious intent that his point becomes clear. This isn’t a flashy Hollywood thriller where profiling and a nod towards actual investigative work results in a shocking revelation and a prerequisite, climactic chase scene. It’s one of the few detective stories that don’t make the detective or his process into something romantic. Between the unglamorous stylization of detective work and the destructive personal consequences Cohle and Hart both face as a result of their involvement with the case, Pizzolatto’s point-of-view seems to be more in line with the Southern gothic noir feeling of the overall show: that detectives are cursed half-men, consigned by destiny to fight evil in the shadows and fated, by dint of that battle, to lose everything, even themselves. It’s a bleak point-of-view, but it reverberates more viscerally with an audience than a glossy, cardboard-cutout detective who breezes through a case with barely a scratch or a setback.

Above all, though, True Detective strikes a particularly American nerve. Much like the Swedish novel/film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Detective takes on an institutionalized problem within the culture and society of its setting and addresses that problem head-on through the conceit of a detective story. This is a storyteller’s trick; we all tend to wrap up a vague point or observation we wish to make inside something exciting and consumable, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Dragon Tattoo directly addressed the misogynist abuses within the Swedish government and upper echelon; True Detective does the same, but because its focus is America (and not just any America, but the Deep South), one can’t avoid the entanglement of organized religion with sex and power. It’s a bit surprising there hasn’t been a wave of attack pieces about the show, since it depicts evangelistic Louisiana politicians as secret rapists and ritual murderers. It’s a broad shot that somehow also manages to strike a bullseye. For several years now, Americans have faced the consequences of moneyed religious interests attempting to subjugate or obliterate the rights and freedoms of various subcultures and minorities, particularly women. The headscratching battle over reproductive health and the religious right’s froth-laden obsession with outlawing abortion is a thinly-veiled attempt by powerful men to exercise control over female sexuality, often by prioritizing the health of the unborn child over the health and safety of the pregnant woman. One can’t help but imagine Pizzolatto taking in the political climate about this issue in this country over the last five years—Republican politicians scheming, trying to pass clandestine and medieval legislation, publicly insulting women who speak up against them—and seeing in his story an opportunity to reflect or comment on this systemic, endemic problem. True Detective is ultimately the story of two damaged men battling the exploitative male hierarchy for the fate of every disenfranchised woman and child in the bayous. What could be more feminist, more truly American, than that?

___________

Like a Geek God #17: Agents of SHIELD Mid-Season Report Card

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #17 by Mark Pursell

Agents of SHIELD Mid-Season Report Card

The thing you need to know before we starting talking about Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD is this: I love Joss Whedon.

No, listen. I’m a hardcore Whedonite. I first fell in love with Joss Whedon’s storytelling vision because of his short-lived but iconic science fiction series Firefly and its concluding movie, Serenity. In quick order, I revisited Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a piece of pop culture zeitgeist that I had missed when it was happening, and in 2009, I followed Whedon’s new sci-fi show, Dollhouse, with weekly devotion. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so appealing about Whedon’s approach to storytelling, an approach that he instills in his writing staff. Is it the complex characters? The thorny moral and philosophical questions? The epic, labyrinthine mythology and worldbuilding? The snappy repartee that often recalls the verbal sparring of classic Hollywood films rather than the witless rhetorical slapfights of our Information Age? The answer, of course, is that it’s the synthesis of all these elements which draws in viewers and keeps them engaged. I was disappointed when FOX decided to cancel Dollhouse after only two short seasons, forestalling any chance that Whedon and his team had to capitalize on the various ideas the show set in motion. But then, a glimmer of exciting news: in the wake of Whedon’s success writing and directing The Avengers—which has the distinction of being hands-down the best movie in the cinematic Marvel canon, second only to the first Iron Man—he would be developing a TV series for ABC that focused on fan-favorite character Agent Coulson and his team of SHIELD operatives, i.e. mortal but highly-trained specialists working for an American shadow agency whose ostensible purpose is to protect the unprepared human race from exposure to alien and otherwise otherworldly phenomena. It’s essentially Men in Black with an NSA twist (more on that later). Whedon brought his brother Jed and Jed’s wife, Maurissa Tancharoen—both of whom wrote for Dollhouse and acted as showrunners—to take the lead on SHIELD. I admit that while I was excited for the show, I also had my doubts. One, it was going to be on ABC, and history has shown us that network TV is hardly the place for Joss Whedon and his writers to stretch their wings and accomplish great storytelling without interference (just Google the production histories of Firefly and Dollhouse over at FOX). Second, Whedon himself wasn’t going to be writing any of the episodes or acting as showrunner. Still, I was interested to see what they could accomplish.

We are now just past the halfway point of SHIELD’s first season run. Time to take stock, see where we are, and just how things are going. SPOILERS AHOY!

The Characters

It wouldn’t be a Joss Whedon show without a loveable, idiosyncratic cast. The SHIELD ensemble, operating as a self-contained special unit from their airplane base, is a large part of the show’s charm. Ming Na and Brett Dalton started out a bit stolid as the team’s resident ass-kicking jarheads, but subsequent episodes have revealed more facets of their characters, particularly the mysterious Agent May (Na).

And, in a genius bit of plotting, these two warrior types—who often find themselves at odds with the tech-and-science team members as well as their enigmatic leader, Agent Coulson—bond over their bloody pasts and martial natures and form a sexual connection that the show handles with remarkable subtlety for a network. A mawkish romantic storyline would have dealt a major blow to the show’s machinery, but somebody in the writing room rightly adhered to a higher instinct.

Another engaging pair is the science team of Fitz and Simmons, played with chatterboxy verve by British actors Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge, respectively.

The dynamic between these two characters form part of the show’s comic relief. It’s a traditional Whedonesque gambit to have the show’s most hyperintelligent character(s) fill the role of the jester (see Fran Kranz’s portrayal of programmer Topher in Dollhouse), and it works to great effect here, mostly because of the actors’ presence and chemistry.

Chloe Bennet’s Skye is the everyman, an off-the-grid outsider and self-reliant hacker who becomes entangled in SHIELD’s business and eventually becomes part of the team despite her lack of training or vetting by the agency, a controversial decision that the show continues to mill for plot grist. Bennet is a doe-eyed Hollywood type in the vein of a would-be “it girl” and visually doesn’t quite fit the profile of a 99%, anti-Big Brother hacker living out of her van (in fact, all the actors are too pretty for realism, but hey, it’s ABC), but the young actress makes up for that with admirable comic timing and a believable streak of impulsive, street-smart rebelliousness.

Then of course, there’s Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson himself. This show largely came about because of Coulson’s popularity as a character and the fan outcry when he was brutally killed in The Avengers (Joss Whedon is like George R.R. Martin; he’s not afraid to kill your favorite characters to drive home the peril of a given situation), and Gregg is a force to be reckoned with as the show’s anchor and leader. He is wry, kind, and empathetic, but also frightening, with a sense of barely contained lethality lurking under his self-effacement, and his moral inflexibility regarding SHIELD (he believes in what they do and reacts angrily to Skye’s criticisms of government overreach) seems destined to take his character down emotional roads that are going to be unpleasant at best. In fact, in one of SHIELD’s most recent episodes to date, and its strongest so far in its run, Agent Coulson is metaphorically brought to his knees by this very question.

The Plot

Because SHIELD is doing a 22-episode run on a major network, the writers seem to have adapted an episodic model rather than a serial model, meaning that for the most part, each episode has a “problem of the week” that is largely dealt with and resolved by the end of the episode. I personally find this kind of television boring and pointless; I’m a big story arc, serial kind of guy. Fortunately, SHIELD does have an intriguing mythology and story arc at work; they just tend to develop it periodically rather than episode to episode (though seemingly unrelated one-off plots have, as the show progresses, come back to factor into the larger picture). It’s when the show takes on its central storyline that it really shines, mostly epitomized (to return to character for a second) by the excellent performance of Ruth Negga as Raina, the “girl in the flower dress” who essentially serves as the series’ main/most visible villainess. Raina is a manipulative, shadowy figure; her big-eyed, soft-spoken nature conceals a cruel and unforgiving intelligence. Throughout the first season, she is seen working towards the development of workable, biologically-stable super solders on the orders of an unknown, unseen figure referred to only as the Clairvoyant. The Clairvoyant’s attempt to create his/her own supersoldiers, and SHIELD’s efforts to forestall him/her, are the main plot thrust of the season. Raina and the Clairvoyant are chilling, fascinating antagonists, and the show works best when our SHIELD heroes are thrown into conflict with them. There’s also a slow-burning subplot regarding the actual identity of Skye, who we learned at the season’s halfway point was discovered as the sole, infant survivor of a massacre in which multiple SHIELD agents died, ostensibly trying to protect her. Every effort was then made to reinsert the child into society (the foster system) with no trace or clue to her actual heritage or origins; ostensibly, these revelations will play out in dramatic fashion, possibly with the Clairvoyant revealing the truth (or the partial truth) to Skye in an attempt to pull her away from SHIELD and join forces with him/her.

The Theme

At the heart of the show, there is a debate, embodied by Agent Coulson (the establishment) and Skye (the anti-establishment) about the nature of surveillance and the power of government force. Coulson insists repeatedly that the vast human population is unprepared to deal with the truth about alien artifacts and the highly-advanced science that comes with it, that what SHIELD does keeps people safe, out of danger. Skye argues that the concealment of life-and-world-changing information harms humanity more than it helps it, and that SHIELD’s sweeping, shadowy authority is dangerous and highly problematic (even as she becomes more and more invested in helping them against their enemies). It’s a conversation that is extremely relevant in the Information Age, in the age of Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, NSA overreach, phone tapping, and the like. The question of “what are we being protected from? And who are you to protect us from it?” has never been more in the forefront of American minds, and the show smartly capitalizes on that. Actually, I wish they would capitalize on it more—it can best be described as a “background” element—but I imagine that it’s also hard to tackle those conversation directly without becoming preachy.

SHIELD has been on a bit of a winter hiatus, but it returns with a string of new episodes this Tuesday. Is it a great show? At the moment, no. Is it a show with great potential that it sometimes realizes? Absolutely. My hope, as the writers push towards the May finale, is that the filler episodes fall by the wayside and they devote more time to the main story arc and the mythology of the show, and that they don’t shy away from storylines that ask hard questions about technology, government, surveillance, information, and the price of evolutionary advancement. In a fictional universe populated by aliens, monsters, and supermen, these are very human, very relevant concerns.

___________

Like a Geek God #11: Finding Our Footage

03 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Cannibal Holocaust, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project

Like a Geek God #11 by Mark Pursell

Finding Our Footage

Part of what makes movies so delightful, so transporting, is the fantasy of it all. Even darkly-realistic, psychologically-complex movies are constructed, and no matter how engaged we are by them, there is always, at some level, the slight, smiling recognition that everything playing out before us is mummery: love and violence and awe and despair contained safely in the celluloid. However, there are some types of movies that play fast and loose with this basic compact of visual fiction. Documentaries lay claim to the “nonfiction” side of moviemaking (though some are more journalistic, and have more integrity, than others); mockumentaries use a cinéma vérité format for very much un-verite material, an approach that works wonders for satire and comedy. However, there is another subgenre at work, too, a subgenre which has been around for decades but which has risen to a new prominence (for good or ill) in the last fifteen years: the found footage movie.

For the most part, found footage movies swim in the horror school. There is something about the concept—here is mysterious footage, presented without editing, of something that really happened—that lends itself to horror. One of the earliest examples is the infamous 1980 gorefest Cannibal Holocaust, which revolves around horrific footage recovered from a team of researchers who vanish while studying the indigenous tribes of the Amazon.

Like Nicholas Cage vehicle 8mm or Mark Danielewski’s found-footage novel House of Leaves, the footage in Cannibal Holocaust is itself framed by an outer story of characters who endeavor to verify the footage’s authenticity or suppress its release.

As a subset of horror filmmaking, though, found footage truly came into its own with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

Blair_Witch_Project

Witch dispensed with any narrative layering or framing devices, other than a title card which briefly, disturbingly states that what you are about to see is footage recovered from the Maryland woods, footage belonging to three young filmmakers who disappeared in said woods while filming a documentary about a malevolent local legend. The movie then plays out in what feels like unedited form–the camera angles sweep sickeningly up and down, shadows become pregnant with threat, and the forest’s eerie silence is punctuated only by strange, hair-raising crunches and cackles in the dark. As the beleagured trio’s desperation grows, their cries of terror become more resigned, their breathing labored and shallow as a fox driven before hounds. Indeed, a found footage approach stripped away much of what usually dilutes the power of an effective horror movie, such as overweening or manipulative background music and a sense of visual style over substance. It worked like gangbusters; The Blair Witch Project was wildly successful and, to this writer’s mind, deserving of recognition as one of the most deeply terrifying movies ever made.

Not that a movie must adopt a found footage approach to be scary, but the forced minimalism of it was a lesson that many took to heart, with the result that other found footage horrors soon began to appear, some more effective than others. The most notable successor to Blair Witch’s level of quality is 2007’s Paranormal Activity, which traded the Maryland woods for a suburban home and a folkloric witch for an (equally unseen) demonic interloper. The merits of the format, mostly evinced by these two movies almost a decade apart, helped create an atmosphere where found footage or elements of it could be used effectively in other genres besides horror, such as science fiction (Cloverfield in 2008, parts of 2011’s Super 8) and superhero action (2012’s Chronicle).

Found footage has its limits, of course. No matter how hard you try or how you creative you get, it is still a “gimmick” format at its core, and the thorny problem of creating narrative justification for “why is someone filming this right now? why would they still be holding a camera?” does not have infinite solutions. It’s important, though, to recognize how found footage has come into its own as a genre and a narrative method, because I think it points to positive developments on the horizon regarding how movies are made. We live in an age where exponentially-advancing technology has given us the ability to create art in our homes. We can make records in our bedroom, we can film YouTube shorts in our kitchen. For filmmakers, the ability to make actual full-length movies of quality—on a shoestring budget, with limited resources—increases with each passing month, each passing day. To this writer, what this (potentially) signals is the advent of a new DIY ethos, a hands-on, no-frills approach to emotionally-direct filmmaking that recalls the gritty genius of the ’70s. In a cinematic environment bloated with mediocre superhero flicks and inane, unfunny comedies, a filmmaker who can cut to the heart of what thrills people, or moves them, or makes them laugh, a filmmaker who can do this independent of big budgets and pointlessly overpaid stars and fatigue-inducing digital mayhem, is a filmmaker whose star will be hung undoubtedly high in the sky of the coming creative decades.

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Mark Pursell is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Like a Geek God #10: A Dreadful Double Feature Triple Threat

27 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Alien, Alred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Donnie Darko, John Carpenter, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Mulholland Drive, Ridley Scott, The Birds, The Thing

Like a Geek God #10 by Mark Pursell

A Dreadful Double Feature Triple Threat

Halloween in the Information Age always sees a glut of “favorite scary movie” lists clogging up your feeds and repeating the same recommendations over and over again. The thing is, if you’re a horror geek or a fan of scary movies in any way, you already know and love classic, foundational horror flicks like The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween, The Exorcist, Carrie, and more. You’ll also see plenty of lists from self-righteous horror geeks, directing you to their favorite under-the-radar splatterfest gems (many of which are meritorious only because of a certain flair for cringeworthy gore and not because of strong storytelling or atmospherics). The truth is that, somewhere in the divide between the standards and the schlock, any number of deeply frightening films often get lost or overlooked as horror movies, even if they are famous or have followings for other reasons.

I wrote last time about the nature of fear, and how truly successful horror movies foster an unbearable sense of dread as opposed to jump scares and shock tactics. So, in that spirit, I present six must-see, truly scary movies for your Halloween viewing pleasure. These are all movies that only occasionally pop up on Halloween-themed “scariest movie” lists; they also do not self identify as horror (with the possible exception of The Thing) but are more truly terrifying than most movies that do. The movies in this list not only craft strong, complex stories with memorable characters, but also and most importantly create an atmosphere of tangible dread. Danger imbues every frame of these fine films. And, just for extra fun, they are paired together in ready-to-view double headers. You’re welcome.

Jaws and The Birds

Nature is rife with terrific and unstoppable forces that threaten our existence at every turn, but there is something so specifically disturbing about our fellow living creatures turning against us that bone-chilling tales about marauding animals are a media staple in genres ranging from adventure and drama to straight horror. Maybe our fascination with these stories stems from a sense of Biblical betrayal: Judeo-Christian philosophy describes “the dominion of man” over the earth and its other inhabitants, and as a race, we certainly seem to take that to heart. No wonder, then, that stories about our supposedly subservient and non-sentient cousins in the evolutionary chain rising up like avenging spirits make us clutch the blankets closer, look askance at the neighbor’s cat, refuse to go swimming. Of course, straightforward stories about wounded, unhinged, or otherwise marred animals acting out against humans because of exploitation or mistreatment inspire pathos instead of fear, but the movies where our bestial intelopers seem to embody a force much more terrible and destructive than simple animal behavior hint at something insatiable and apocalyptic that lurks just beneath the surface of the natural order.

Jaws and The Birds both embody this idea, and make use of surprisingly similar contexts—beleagured seaside towns, with one threat coming from the waves and the other from the wide blue. However, they elevate themselves beyond your typical “creature feature” by building complex human characters whose welfare we are made to care about long before the trouble really gets going. Jaws in particular folds its air of panic into a small-town human drama that accentuates the movie’s anxiety, pushing the plot and the characters into ever more reactionary places until, with a sense of inevitability that is the beating heart of all true horror, the three heroes—grim, resolved—put out to sea to face their nemesis. They carry with them the burden of not only having to find and defeat the great white threat, but also the knowledge that doing so will save their livelihoods and the existence of Amity.

The Birds is, of course, closer in tone to classic Hollywood with its chilly, Hitchcockian beauty, but what makes the avian threat equally as terrifying as the maw of a shark is its unexpectedness and uncertainty. A man-eating shark is not necessarily anomalous in the real world, but hundreds of birds inexplicably turning on us mammals creates fear because it is such a disruption of the “natural order”, a feeling which is only enhanced by Hitchcock’s (wise) decision not to address the reason behind this event. With a slyness that has only become apparent to me on repeated viewings, Hitchcock and the script imply a mix of factors which might, at least thematically or metaphorically, be the cause—the unwed Tippi Hedren’s sexual independence, perhaps, or the mysterious pair of lovebirds she takes to Bodega Bay as a flirtatious sally fired at Rod Taylor, and which the survivors (probably unwisely) take with them when making their final escape. The uncanny nature of the birds’ aggression mixed with this teasing lack of explanation create an atmosphere in which, like Jaws, the laws of nature seem to no longer apply, and the invisible structures we cling to to make sense of the world fall away from us, leaving us exposed and with no place to hide.

Alien and The Thing

Aggressive organisms from our own planet are one thing, but aggressive organisms from the uncharted bournes of outer space are another matter entirely. The universe beyond our fragile atmosphere is a Rorschach sort of canvas on which humanity has projected its capacity for wonder and terror since our infancy as a race. Small wonder, then, that some of our most hair-raising tales concern themselves with the nigh incomprehensible horrors that might one day come slithering out of the void.

Much has been made over the decades about Ridley Scott’s Alien—it is a seminal science fiction work—but I rarely see it described as a horror movie, or lauded as one. Which is odd, because that is essentially what it is. It’s not even really a creature feature—it has less in common with something like Jaws than it does with slasher flicks, the methodical slaying, one by one, of an isolated and fearful cast of characters. Much like Jaws, though, Alien builds its feeling of dread by keeping the titular aggressor out of sight as long as possible, allowing our imagintions—always more powerful than the most dazzling special effect—to work overtime and juice up our adrenaline and anxiety as the fiend’s nature is slowly, sickeningly revealed. (It’s worth noting that both Jaws and Alien employed this type of restraint not because of the initial intent of their respective directors, but because the special effects for both creatures were not as effective as desired, forcing both Spielberg and Scott to keep their monsters out of sight as long as possible). The DNA of Alien’s particular flavor of dread—the run-down blue-collar spaceship, evoking a grim lower-class future; the oral rape and violation metaphors, mixed with the sexual aspects of the xenomorph’s life cycle and design; the overwhelming hopelessness of pitting oneself against the whims of a powerful corporation, a particularly relevant thematic strand for today’s America—all of these things have been written about and analyzed. But perhaps the most chilling aspect of the movie is the xenomorph’s bloodthirsty aggression itself. Possible to explain away the behavior of a rogue shark; possible, even, to form thematic explanations for unnatural avian aggression (the encroachment of man, perhaps). The xenomorph’s predations, though, are as unfounded as they are nearly unstoppable. It seems to exist for no other reason, and to want nothing, other than to destroy life, and the movie leaves us dangling in desperation at that unexplainable fact. Faced with such unreasoning destruction, what is there to do but run?

The Thing, for its part, is not set in outer space but in an equally desolate, isolated setting: Antarctica (a nod, perhaps, to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”). It exchanges Alien’s mixed-gender cast of interstellar truckers for a gruff assortment of male scientists, headed up by a scruffy Kurt Russell, but much like Alien, the titular organism infiltrates the group by subterfuge—in the case of The Thing, the creature takes on the likeness of a dog, and by the time the scientists realize all is not well with Rover, it is practically too late. The Thing is largely the same “type” of movie as Alien, a series of suspenseful encounters that gradually escalate into pitched battle, but one element that distinguishes the Thing and makes it terrifying in its own right, and not just by default of its alienness, is its protean nature. It can shapeshift, yes, but it’s also the intermediate forms it takes in transition (which show off some amazing special effects and makeup work that, though dated, still dazzles almost twenty-five years later) that inspire in us human beings—fixed as we are in our forms—a deep and queasy unease. The idea of a living organism that seems to have no “true” shape, jumping from copy to copy like a macabre chameleon, is so anthithetical to our view of the world that we reject it outright, shrinking away from it with revulsion at its unnaturalness.

Donnie Darko and Mulholland Drive

Space, as a frontier, overwhelms with its vast and unknowable reaches. The frontier of our own minds, though—and the way that we build our relationships with time, with dream, and with memory—is no less mysterious and no less full of potential danger.

Donnie Darko presents at first as the simple tale of a troubled teen. But as the movie winds on and becomes more complicated, bringing in subtle flavors of science fiction and true horror, it turns out that Jake Gyllenhaal (a breakout performance in the title role) is right to push with adolescent rage and frustration at the boundaries of his cozened suburban life; his feeling that all is not quite right with the world, that there is a flaw in reality hovering just beyond his ability to define or grasp, turns out to be the only thing that can avert tragedy and bring him to his ultimate fate.

There is a similar sense of ultimate inevitability laced through David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, as Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring struggle to piece together an unsettling mystery, racing towards a revelation and an outcome that, we realize as the credits roll, was actually racing towards them all along with the inexorability of a freight train. In Mulholland Drive, though, it is not our heroines who sense the “wrongness” of their world, even as they struggle to piece together an unsettling mystery; it is the audience who senses this wrongness, a feeling that this version of reality is alternate, somehow, and when the final revelation plays out and our worst suspicions are confirmed, it makes our ability to understand time, dreams, and memory seem not only suspect but traitorous, that attempting to get a fix on ourselves in relation to the ever-flowing forces of time and the limitations of our own perception is a battle that can’t be won and, if pushed too far, can boomerang on us in strange, frightening, and ultimately fatal ways.

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Like a Geek God #9: Geeks, Ghouls, and Gore

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Horror, Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell

Like a Geek God #9 by Mark Pursell

Geeks, Ghouls, and Gore

Fear—being brought face to face with your own mortality and the possibility that you will be somehow damaged or erased in mind, spirit, and/or body—has always been replicated in our cultural objects, from scary stories told ‘round a bonfire in the prehistoric dark to the horror movies playing on TV screens and laptops across the world as Halloween approaches. We build society to eliminate, by ever more miniscule degrees, the possibility of personal peril and the situations that would cause us to feel true, deep fear. But approximated in the form of art, it becomes a cathartic drug, a vicarious high that shakes you up in the safety of a theater or your living room and sends you to bed recalibrated, and grateful for the peace of your relatively fearless real life. Horror as an entertainment media genre isn’t for everyone, but geek culture has always embraced it. There’s an entire “horror geek” sub-subculture, men and women who obsessively collect and categorize the endless movies and books and games and shows designed to keep you up long after bedtime, staring paranoid into a corner of your room where the shadows seem a little thicker than they should be. This is, perhaps, because geek culture thrives on the frontier. Whether penetrating the farthest reaches of outer space or pondering the insoluble mysteries of our own brains, geek culture properties tend to be powered by an exploratory spirit, a willingness to boldly go where no man, etc. And what greater frontier is there—what territory more treacherous and titillating—than fear?

Of course, I’m talking about pop culture objects that inspire true fear, which is not the predominant model being followed by many people in the business of crafting chilling stories. Cheap thrills—jump scares, blaring music, torture porn—are lucrative and easy to manufacture. Moviegoers line up for the next Saw or Paranormal Activity (a franchise with a genuinely terrifying first entry that quickly devolved into lackluster contrivance), and the money continues to flow. These movies aren’t really scary, though. They are shocking, but the shock is hollow. You are “scared” not because there is a true atmosphere of dread, but because a banging door or a manipulative quick cut makes you jump. And that’s fine for the milling masses who want merely to be startled, two nervous hours in the dark that they can brush off on the drive back home, hours which sink in and leave an impression as permanent as a bootprint in snow. But geek culture craves more than that. True dread is difficult to bring to life in a pop culture object, but not impossible. Our history as a creative race is littered with stories that electrify our nerve endings, tales humming with an unease that grows, slow but implacable as molasses, into dread. So this Halloween, celebrate like a geek. Pick up the novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King. Watch Rosemary’s Baby. Play the original Resident Evil video game. Spend some time vicariously besieged by the forces of darkness. Leave the jump scares to the plebeians.

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Like a Geek God #8: The Destiny of Ellen Ripley

29 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Aliens 3: Assembly Cut, David Fincher, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell

Like a Geek God #8 by Mark Pursell

The Destiny of Ellen Ripley

No franchise escapes the law of decay. With the exception, perhaps, of the Harry Potter novels, franchises—whether in books, movies, television, or video games—tend to flame out rather than finish strong. You can attribute this phenomenon to different factors—an exhaustion of ideas, conflicts between team members, executive interference, or just plain bad storytelling—but generally it’s enough to chalk it up to a kind of half life, an atomic law of attrition, as if the higher a franchise soars in both popularity and artistic achievement, the more likely it is to crash and burn in exponentially spectacular fashion. This is evident across all pop culture strata but geek culture properties are particularly prone to it. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, the basis for HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones, has stalled out creatively; the two most recent books are panoply of longwinded and insubstantial ramblings that possess none of the earlier books’ verve. Lost and Battlestar Galactica, two hugely popular television franchises with rabid geek fan bases and massive crossover appeal, sank under the weight of their respective mythologies and devolved into metaphysical gobbledygook. And let us not forget that geek truism: the last entry in a trilogy is usually the worst one.

Which has to make you wonder why they even tried to make a third movie in the Alien franchise. The laws of creativity and pop culture were working against them before they even set down a treatment.

The Alien movies weren’t even supposed to be a franchise. The original film’s runaway success in 1979 didn’t, as is common today, get an immediate sequel-prep machine chugging the day after its strong opening weekend. Also unlike today, the idea to do a sequel didn’t even come from the studio as part of a way to maximize their profits; James Cameron himself proposed the idea in 1983 while gearing up to film The Terminator, four years after the original movie’s success. 20th Century Fox largely left Cameron to it, and by all accounts were stunned when Aliens replicated—even surpassed—its landmark predecessor. You can almost picture it: nearsighted executives waking up on a Monday morning, bleary-eyed, to the news that Aliens is a hit. Suddenly, this wasn’t just about an individual movie. This was that holiest of holy grails in the world of the entertainment executive: the franchise.

This eleventh-hour epiphany on the part of Fox is probably directly responsible for the unrelenting shitshow that was the production of Alien 3. Salivating over potential box office returns for a new Alien movie but anxious about expending huge amounts of capital on the project, the studio kept a tight rein on the project rather than releasing it to the auspices of a visionary. As a result, the studio’s behavior during the process can best be compared to that of an indecisive teenager, pulling multiple outfits from the closet and then throwing them on the floor in a fit of pique, crying, “I never have anything to wear!” Directors were hired and fired; screenplays were commissioned and then abandoned, or spliced together with elements from other and completely different drafts until on paper the movie resembled nothing so much as Frankenstein’s monster, with all the same elegance. (You can read more about Alien 3’s chaotic development and production history, and about director/writer Vincent Ward’s lost vision for the film, here.)

Alien 3’s theatrical release—which celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year—was postponed a full two years from 1990 to 1992 due to its production troubles, and was met with a lukewarm response. And rightfully so: the theatrical cut of Alien 3, which I saw for the first time years ago when I was first buzzsawing through the franchise, can only be politely described as a hot mess. The movie—which tells the tale of Ellen Ripley’s crash landing on a penal colony planet after the events of Aliens, and how she and the prisoners have to confront a final alien that stowed away on her ship—is difficult to follow and at times nonsensical. Characters do and say things for little or no reason (that we are shown); throughlines are disrupted or deserted; and the grim, dark atmosphere, already a trademark of then-novice director David Fincher, who created the final product and is the only credited director, evoked murkiness of plot rather than of mood. I’ve watched the theatrical cut a few times in the intervening years, and my opinion is always the same: an ambitious but incomprehensible mess that cheapens the material. Which pains me to say, as it should pain anyone to say about the concluding chapter of a favorite series or trilogy or franchise (we don’t talk about Alien: Resurrection). We want the things that we love to end well, to bow out with glory and panache. Lackluster conclusions feel like betrayals to the devoted, and geeks tend to react that kind of betrayal with a mixture of fury and depression. For a long time, I tried to forget Alien 3 even existed, coming up with my own scenarios for the final adventure of Ellen Ripley that would live up to the first two stories.

Fast forward to 2012, the actual twentieth anniversary of the film’s release. I knew about the existence of the Alien Quadrilogy boxset, but hadn’t watched any of the special editions contained therein. I wasn’t even aware, until a friend pointed it out to me, that the set contained an alternate version of Alien 3. This “Assembly Cut” is not a true director’s cut—David Fincher has publicly disowned the movie and refused to participate in the Quadrilogy boxset’s production—but rather is described as Fincher’s “workprint”, a 145-minute rough cut that he turned in to the studio. The 115-minute theatrical cut of the film is derived from this workprint but 20th Century Fox created it without consulting Fincher, essentially editing the movie themselves (which is probably why it’s an inscrutable mess). I was curious about watching what would have essentially been Fincher’s unaltered “vision” of the movie; I wondered if a cut free of executive meddling would capitalize on the central concept’s strengths.

Lo and behold, the Assembly Cut of Alien 3 is masterful in its own right. Everything about the theatrical cut’s pacing and editing is altered; the Assembly Cut is a slow, thoughtful movie, approximating the creeping dread and eerie silences of the first film, allowing the gravity of Ripley’s situation and the personalities of the prisoner characters to slowly build and grow. It makes the most out of the controversial decision to kill off Hicks and Newt, Ripley’s fellow survivors from Aliens, in the sense that once again, Ripley is alone, isolated, a stranger among other dark, violent strangers and increasingly fearful that her nemesis has followed her, even to this place, at the end of the galaxy. The religious elements (the prisoners practice a fire-and-brimstone version of a nameless Judeo-Christian faith), which seem alternately cheesy and bizarre in the theatrical cut, take on frightening import in the longer and more deliberate Assembly Cut, folding in themes of punishment, suffering, and salvation that, unexpectedly, dovetail in thematic harmony with the implacable depredations of the xenomorph, metaphorically casting the creature as a horror unleashed by the gods to cleanse gangrenous humanity (an implication taken in another direction in the franchise’s latest entry, Prometheus). Also unexpectedly—especially for yours truly, a hard-line atheist—it is the prisoners’ faith-based saber rattling and their monk-like dynamic, cast in the different and more effective light of the Assembly Cut, which bring a gravitas to Ellen Ripley’s character and situation that feels worthy of being a conclusion to this story. There is a running thread in Alien 3 where, confronted by the prisoners’ faith, Ripley questions why it’s always her, why she seems to be the only one who can stand in the xenomorph’s way, the only barrier between their ravening destruction and the rest of life in the universe. The characters don’t have much to offer in the way of answer, but the movie itself carries fascinating implications—and they are just implications, no heavy-handed savior-complex here—that this, that all of it, is Ellen Ripley’s destiny. Whatever forces are at work in the universe beyond our understanding have chosen her, events have chosen her, to be the last line of defense against an apocalyptic nightmare race. This thematic strand, which builds slowly throughout the movie, makes the movie’s infamous ending (where Ripley, impregnated by a new alien queen, kills herself and the creature by jumping into a pit of molten metal) seem not only fitting but inevitable, whereas in the theatrical cut it just felt stupid, a contrived ploy to add a sense of grand tragedy to the proceedings.

There are many lessons to be taken from this rexamination of Alien 3—the perils of studio interference, most of all—but as a geek, the most important thing I walked away from watching the Assembly Cut with was a deep sense of satisfaction. We want our franchises and our series to end satisfyingly—not necessarily happily, but rightly. When this happens—Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, even non-geek properties like Six Feet Under—it creates a feeling of completeness, of unity, whereas disappointing conclusions leave us with a sense of frustration and unfinished business, a phantom limb we can’t ignore. For years I have had that frustrated feeling about the Alien franchise, but the Assembly Cut of Alien 3 did what I didn’t think it was possible to do: take the basic DNA of the movie and present it in such a way that it not only made for a better movie, but also made Ellen Ripley’s fatal last outing a deeply heroic and moving story of one woman sacrificing everything, including herself, to defeat the forces of evil. If that’s not an ending worthy of the franchise’s high highs, I don’t know what it is.

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Like a Geek God #7: An Unlikely, Unlikeable Heroine

22 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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anime, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Sailor Moon, writing

Like a Geek God #7 by Mark Pursell

An Unlikely, Unlikeable Heroine

Of all the anime properties to make their way to Western shores over the decades, Sailor Moon is undoutedly one of the most beloved and most recognizable even to non-fans. 2012 marked the show’s twentieth anniversary, and this winter we will see a brand-new series in the franchise from the original creator and writer, Naoko Takeuchi.

It is hard to say exactly what is so compelling about Sailor Moon. There are many factors that pinpoint the show’s success on both sides of the world, but not all of these would indicate why the show continues to be revisited at regular intervals by devotees long after its original run concluded. It’s an interesting question to ask of any beloved show, really, from MASH to Buffy. Quality writing, quality performances, yes, these are reasons why we watch a show in the first place. But what pulls us back to some shows, and not others, even ones we liked perfectly well? There is something extra about these shows (and these books, these movies, etc.) that get a hook in you for whatever reason, binding itself to you for the rest of your life. And you may never recognize the hook for what it is, or the why and the how of it.

I did recognize mine, though, lately, as it relates to Sailor Moon. I was rewatching several of the show’s older episodes in belated tribute to the twentieth anniversary, and also because something had been pushing me lately to revisit them. I wasn’t sure what; maybe it was just the curiosity of nostalgia, wondering if there was something in the show that merited a fourteen-year-old boy’s obsession with it, and why I still think about it to this day. A sense of retroactive validation, if you wish, of what happened to catch my fancy at the time.

What I found, sneaking the show into my day—an episode at breakfast, one or two before bed, quick sneaky bites—was both expected and surprising. The show’s mythos is byzantine and contradictory like many shows of its ilk, but it did marry the “magical girl” genre to a superhero ethos, by way of reincarnation (Sailor Moon and her companions are reincarnations of a cosmic royal court, sent a thousand years into the future on Earth, our present, to escape a past catastrophe and, perhaps, to combat a future evil). The characters are vivid, the conflicts standard but always tinged with the zany, manic comedy so endemic to the original manga, and which in the show serves to intensify the more serious or melodramatic elements rather than drown them out. But I realized, several episodes in, that the hook under my ribs that kept drawing me back to Sailor Moon was Sailor Moon herself.

Sailor Moon—whose day-by-day identity is Serena (Usagi in the Japanese original), a teenage schoolgirl—is quite the reluctant heroine. She is ambivalent about her cosmic superhero destiny and avoids taking it seriously at almost every opportunity. As a personality, Serena is lazy, ditzy, gluttonous, and selfish, addicted to video games and sweets and thinking about boys. She shows little interest in school, or anything else besides comic books and sleeping, and her grades show it. She is also largely a wimp, crumpling at the first sign of adversity. But she is very funny, both intentionally and not, and as a character she never lies about what kind of person she is or makes much apology for it, except in instances where she hurt or angered a friend. Serena is elemental; she reacts to everything at a high volume, at the slightest provocation. Anger her and she erupts, hysterical; injure or insult her slightly and she collapses into anguished sobs. This kind of person in real life might be too intense, too annoying, but there is something about this aspect of her character that I think we can identify with. We all have those elemental reactions, but long training has taught us to subsume and rationalize them, in order to minimize embarassment of self and others. But inside, at some level, we’re all Serena, blazing up at every spark or tug of wind. And though she is a lot to take, Serena does have a few points in her favor. She is a loyal and staunch friend, and if her reactionary personality settles into determination mode, watch as her animation slightly changes and you see the echo of some lost lunar princess, squaring herself against the dark. She isn’t most courageous leader, but she never backs down from a fight.

Unlikeable heroes and heroines fascinate me, and Sailor Moon, it turns out, was an early formative example of that concept for me. Serena is a problematic young girl clinging to the soporifics of her middle-class suburban comforts; she is overzealous and annoying to her friends (and to some viewers), and there is little about her that a viewer might wish to emulate. But she’s an enduring and popular character, the head of an attendant franchise which, when you come right down to it, centers on her. We are drawn to the idea of a person who embodies some of the worst things we can think about ourselves or others also being capable of greatness, of heroism. Because if they are capable of it, then maybe we are, too.

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Like a Geek God #6: These Childish Things

15 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Disney, Like a Geek God

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Beauty and the Beast, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, The Wizard of Oz

Like a Geek God #6 by Mark Pursell

These Childish Things

Geeks have it over Muggles in one very important area: we are highly susceptible to wonder.

Wonder is something I think we all, geek or not, can remember from moments in our childhood, particularly as they pertain to the pop culture we were being exposed to. For example, my generation is permanently marked by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Many pop culture artifacts of our childhood didn’t leave a long-lasting impression on us; memories of them now are characterized by a tinge of nostalgia mixed with shame. But many of my peers can recall the first time they saw Beauty and the Beast with breathless clarity: the music, the characters, the beautiful animation. Beast—along with a score of other movies, books, and even video games—stood out from the rest; they seemed to open us up and inhabit us. On leaving the theater, the world looked different. You were left with the indefinable but undeniable feeling that something magical had happened to you.

Many people lose that capacity for wonder as they grow older; the ability to be thrilled by something, to be not only entertained but transported by it, falls by the wayside on the long road to adulthood, independence, and a cohesive sense of self, knocked out of us by disillusionment or exhaustion or resentment or a host of other devils. Geeks, though, retain it. Riding psychic shotgun to a panoply of knights, aliens, outlaws, wizards, and gods, we take flight to realms and eras that exist as distant (but instructive) echoes of our own. This is looked on, in some ways, as being immature. Childlike. Childish, even. Outsiders look at geek culture with its spaceships and dragons and time-traveling doctors and see a population of people stuck at an emotional age of ten, substituting a love of Batman and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars for more “grown up” preoccupations. By this measure, we geeks have never “put away [our] childish things.”

There are many arguments to refute this, not the least of which is that so much of the content in geek culture is as complex, rigorous, and investigative of our humanity as pop culture for adults. (Whatever that means; pop culture for adults these days seems to be comprised of reality housewives and boring “literary” novels about emotionally-stunted people who spend hundreds of pages wringing their hands about their emotional stuntedness). The most compelling argument, however, has to do with that sense of wonder itself. Since when is that ability, so common in childhood—to lose yourself in something, to be, indeed, transported by it, whisked out of yourself to another place entirely, and to be awed (and terrified) by what you find there—a bad thing? Wonder isn’t just desirable for the feeling itself, either; that kind of immersion opens up your imagination and, thereby, your empathy. When the experience is over and that out-of-body feeling jars you—walking out of a dark theater and, blinking, back into sunlight—and, in many ways, recalibrates you. Is this not the goal of all art?

The Wizard of Oz opens with a title card that reads: “For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion.” That quote is always hovering somewhere in my consciousness; not because of the movie, necessarily (though the movie is another example of a formative childhood memory of wonder), but because it genuflects towards us, the geeks. We are the young-in-heart, the receivers of wonder. And maybe being vulnerable to wonder is childlike, a vestigial mode that really is meant to be cast off as we take up the mantle of adulthood and begin our long slide to the grave. But the fact that so many of us don’t cast it off—that the wonder we experience in our chosen corner of pop culture enables a perspective and a frame of mind that is more connected and more attuned to the moment, to mindfulness, to compassion, and to self—makes me think that, once again, it’s the grown ups who’ve got it wrong.

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Like a Geek God #5: Geek is the New Cool

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell

Like a Geek God #5 by Mark Pursell

Geek is the New Cool

My husband is an elementary school teacher. You can imagine the sort of anecdotes he brings home after spending every day teaching a formative generation born with smartphones in their hands. One thing that particularly struck me, however, happened last year. A constant complaint of my husband’s is that the kids at school, especially the fifth graders—teetering on the edge of a hyper-advanced puberty that mainstream pop culture has been trying to shove them into their entire lives—act like they don’t “care” about anything. The social norm that he observed being adopted and, indeed, self enforced, was that it was “uncool” to seem like you cared too much about something, to show too much enthusiasm. He told me that one time, a little girl let her excitement shine through her veneer of above-it-all boredom when a particular lesson (abstract expressionist art) caught her attention; but as soon as she realized what she was allowing herself to express, she carefully withdrew into her “so what?” shell.

This isn’t a new story, or even a particularly interesting one at this point in American culture. The twin paradigms of “geek” and “cool” have orbited each other like binary stars—locked in opposition but never touching—since the 1950s and possibly before. To be “cool” is be unaffected, imperturbable—“not bothered”, as comedienne Catherine Tate puts it in one of her schoolgirl sketches. Yes, you seem jaded and uncaring, but you also seem strong, walled in your own armor of dispassion. If you don’t care about anything, you’re not vulnerable. You can’t be hurt. By comparison, geeks—and by “geek” I mean “a person who displays deep knowledge of and great or even excessive enthusiasm for a particular thing or subject”—are walking, talking targets. Our unfettered enthusiasm is a weakness.

When our fearless leader here at The Drunken Odyssey, John King, first approached me about being a contributor to his daily/weekly cultural blog project, it didn’t take us long to arrive at the perfect area for my column: geek culture. (It is possible that, after being Facebook friends with me for a while and being subjected to an endless onslaught of 3:00am rants about superhero movies and lazy worldbuilding in MMORPGS, this is entirely what John had in mind in the first place). But after we had decided on this and I began brainstorming about possible column ideas, I found myself thinking less about the specific subjects I was going to write about and more about being a geek in and of itself: what it means to be a geek, and what it entails. Is geek even the right word for us? We, the lovers of Star Wars and Star Trek, the cosplayers and the con-langers, fanboys and fangirls with our fingers on the pulse of everything from Bioshock Infinite to Sailor Moon—what are we? Mainstream culture has always tossed a plethora of pejoratives our way, in an attempt to minimize and disenfranchise our pop culture power and capital. “Nerd”, “dork”, “dweeb”: those of us who dare to violate the Code of Cool in some way are appropriately labeled and pushed to the fringes. (While it is helpful to lump us, the Great Uncool, into a single subcultural bracket, there are distinctions to be drawn. “Nerd” connotes academic and scholarly excess; “dork” and “dweeb” evoke social anxiety, interpersonal clumsiness).

In the last decade or so, however, geek culture has become less ghettoized, more standard than ever before. You have only to use America’s most cherished yardstick—the financial one—to see that this is true. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games: geek culture is culture these days, and those are only three franchises in a teeming subculture of science fiction and fantasy properties that is less “sub” with each passing year.

Does this have to do with geek pop culture properties in and of themselves? I don’t think so. There have always been (and always will be) people who love wizards and aliens and every permutation thereof, in all their otherworldly, operatic glory. And being a geek isn’t just about science fiction and fantasy; you can be a geek about geology, or presentation design, or antique furniture. Being a geek isn’t about the object; it’s about the state of mind, about having the self confidence and the security in yourself and who you are to not only care deeply about a given thing but to be zealous and unabashed about it, to display that enthusiam without worrying about who is going to cut you down for it.

And who knows: maybe the affected apathy my husband sees in his students, in the up-and-coming generation, is nothing more than a by-product of adolescence and navigating the strangeness of school—here today, gone tomorrow. Or maybe the new generation will see all our hype-blogging, button-clicking, multiple-tabs-opening frenzy as a waste of energy and recalibrate accordingly, greeting the psychic bombardment of the Information Age with chilly disdain. But as a first-wave Millennial with one toe on the Gen X line, I look around and see my peer group (twentysomethings and thirtysomethings) repudiating apathy—on every level, from pop culture to politics—with the fervor of proselytizers. In this sense, being a geek has become—at least for a little while—the New Cool.

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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

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