Awesome

And when I say awesome, I mean it in the traditional dictionary sense, not the more contemporary, 80′s coined Valley Girl sense. Of all the films I’ve seen in the last few months, this is the one that fulfilled my hopes for a Really Freaking Good Summer Movie. It had the action, it had the drama, it had the seriousness of universal themes while at the same time retaining a sense of “comic bookiness” in its spirit, but more than that, it managed to inspire a sense of wonder, of hope, and–at least in me–of awe.

In both the literal and metaphorical sense, Superman Returns is the Second Coming. Only instead of trying to bowl people over from the pulpit with a lot of fire and brimstone rhetoric, it actually just goes and SHOWS you the miraculous and leaves your mouth open with the only thought in your head being “I want to believe in that. I wish that were in my life.” Only because of the popcorn/pop culture underpinnings, and because of the demands of modern cinema, it does all this without beating you over the head with dogma. In essence, it brings the mystery and inexplicable feelings of faith to the screen, without attaching a formal religion to it. In that sense, Superman is like the apotheosis of the messiah/saviour, because his comic book origins disqualify him from being offensive to anyone and thus acceptable to everyone.

But let’s get back to the movie proper.

As almost everyone knows, the plot of the film is that Superman returns to Earth after a five year absence, and that is the catalyst for all the drama and action that ensues. What impresses me most about the approach that director Bryan Singer has taken is that he’s pulled off the near impossible trick of ripping something off without being accused of plaigerism, lack of imagination or unoriginality. We see Marlon Brando, we hear his words, we hear the original John Williams theme (To be fair, there can be only ONE Superman theme, and this is it. Unquestionably) we even see a newly modernized version of the classic “zooming opening credits in space” from the original. We hear characters actually re-invoking classic lines from the 70′s original, and yet, for all of this, it doesn’t feel like Singer is mining or exploiting the existing material. It doesn’t feel like he’s being lazy and recycling content to save himself the effort of coming up with his own. There’s a reverence here, a rightness. There is a sense of respect that does not make it feel like recycling, so much as giving credit where it’s due. Bryan Singer loves Superman the character and he loves Superman: The Movie by Richard Donner. And it is the Donner movie that Singer tries to stay the most true to. Particularly in the area of performance.

Brandon Routh is eerie as Kal El/Clark Kent. It’s like Christopher Reeves himself is sometimes channeling through him when he speaks his lines and it’s made all the more amazing when you consider this guy used to be a bartender out in the mid-west USA prior to this. Spacey as Luthor is… well, he’s Spacey, which is to say he’s brilliant, but there’s an edge to him that makes you keep your distance. Especially when he shows it. Bosworth does a good job of portraying Lois Lane, though I do find myself missing the “pluckiness” that has traditionally been portrayed in the character. Whether it’s Hatcher in Lois & Clark or Kidder in the original 70′s movie, that gutsy, intrepid reporter has settled down quite a bit. Of course being a mother may explain that.

But where the movie really blows the doors open is when it comes to presenting and examining the Man Of Steel himself. When you see Superman in action, you see the closest thing most of us ever will to a literal God On Earth. It helps tremendously that 21st century digital effects are bolstering the movie, because it brings Superman to life in a way that has just never been seen before. I’ve “seen” Superman lift heavy objects before–like when he actually pushed EARTH itself in his pre-reboot days, prior to the John Byrne ret-con. I’ve seen him use his heat vision, soar across the sky, all that stuff, but never until this movie have I seen it in a way that made me think, “This is what it would be like if I were actually there watching it.” Comics–as both a strength and a weakness, depending on who you ask–rely on the reader doing a lot of work between panels, forcing the imagination to make connections, constructions. Superman of the 70′s and 80′s was limited by his analog special effects, with no digital visuals, and no ability to erase wires from the frame, making medium shots unfeasible. Superman Returns has neither of these characteristics, and so when you first see him go into action, bringing all that power to bear, it is an amazing sight. It’s something you’ve never seen before. It’s the kind of thing you’ve maybe imagined, maybe even wished for, but you never thought you’d see it, and now you are.

I can only imagine what kind of reaction this engenders in American viewers. Superman’s first big debut in the film is the rescue of a crashing plane, and for Americans, who still live under the shadow of 9-11, this kind of imagery, of their great American hero preventing a disaster which is VERY relatable and identifiable to the American people… it’s almost cathartic. In a way, it’s the wish fulfillment of Americans, it’s seeing on screen what many of them may thought on that day or the days afterwards; how very different 9-11 would have been if Superman had existed, had the power to save those lives and prevent that tragedy. And when you see the bravado effects sequence put into it, then witness the reaction of the public as Superman saves the day, the cheer, the elation, the hope rekindled you experience as the crowd literarlly goes wild, is genuine. There is a hero among us. Someone who is good and pure and will do the things we cannot. Someone we can trust and put our faith in. Someone we can believe in, even if we can’t believe in ourselves.

And this is where the film begins to elevate itself for me. Because for all the godlike power that Superman has, while we all want to focus on the super aspect, he is a man. A good man, but still a man, and that means he has the same flaws, hopes and vulnerabilities of the heart that any man has. Unlike us, however he is not allowed to show it, because he is Superman, and we don’t want to see that in our savior. But Bryan Singer does, and he lifts the film by letting us see it.

The central question the film seems to be exploring is, “What do you with the body of a god and the soul of a man?” The answer, if such it could be called is, “Be conflicted as hell.” For every moment of More Human Than Human that Singer shows us, it’s counterbalanced by very real moments of loss, of longing, of sacrifice. S
uperman has always had a human face, but Singer shows us his human heart in a way not seriously explored by other films or television forays. For the first time, the mainstream audience at large gets to see that their hero has to endure a tremendous personal cost in order for us to pin our hopes and faith in him. It’s a sobering and emotional exploration, and for the first time ever, I found myself watching a guy that could toss cars around, fly faster than sound and be the object of adoration for millions everywhere, and all I could think was “You poor bastard. How I pity you.”

At the end of it, when the lights came back on, the movie had met my expectations. After almost 20 years of relentlessly nihilistic, angst-ridden, dark, cynical, gritty, jaded heroes (All almost singlehandedly borne of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns) I was ready to believe in something again. I wanted something, some one I could admire and respect, rather than fear and mistrust. We now live in a world where so many of the people that are accomplished, or acknowledged as exceptional are ugly human beings who do great things at the cost of being incredibly dangerous to themselves and others around them. Superman finally breaks that trend, and gives–in the very best sense of the words–an Old Fashioned Hero. He is noble. He is admirable. He will do the right thing. He is, unlike so, so many of the people in the public eye today, someone that you can approve of when your kid says “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

Of all the comic book heroes that have appeared in movies in the last 10 years, I can say with heartfelt, unironic sincerity that Superman is the fist Superhero that is more heroic than super.

I am SO getting this on DVD the second it’s available. So yeah, in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I freakin’ loved this movie and may even watch it again.

Once Again I Am Completely Behind The Times

In the ongoing name of one of the Wife’s jobs, there has been a sudden increase not only in the number of DVDs watched, but the fact that they are largely martial arts films. I’ve already written that we purchased Enter The Dragon a few weeks ago, but a couple of days ago we hit the local renter, known as Video-EZY, and picked up a slew of other chop socky films, so that she could look at the poses and use them as reference material. Among the old gems like Way of the Dragon (Which, amazingly, the Wife pointed out something I’d missed all these years where Bruce Lee with nunchaku and no special effects at all, knocks a knife out of mid-air as the guy is throwing is throwing it from one freakin’ hand to the other!) we picked up a few other things that we’d heard about, but until now had remained blissfully spoiler-free about, with little to no expectations about what we were in for, which is something that I am increasingly starting to become a much, much bigger believer in. Somehow when you don’t know about something and it turns out to be good, that makes the experience that much cooler. Unlike a trilogy of science fantasy movies that lived on the massive expectation its legendary previous trilogy created…

Anyway, the film in question is Stephen Chow’s Kung-Fu Hustle. It’s kind of a super-duper, steroid induced version of the kind of martial arts whackiness that Hong Kong used to pump out in the 90′s. It’s a strange, hybrid martial arts film like The Heroic Trio from that period that still had the requisite chop socky, but transformed it into something more than just historical action films or cop/gangster conflicts. Having only heard a few mentions here and there that this was a pretty good martial arts film, I was in no way prepared for just how insane and funny the actual film is. Drawing liberally both from Hong Kong cinematic history as well as Western, I was stunned into happy disbelief at references to everything from Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, to The Shining, to The Matrix.

Of course the other thing that’s really cool about the film is how it has its own consistent, internal logic at work. What you see on screen is completely crazy in our reality, but in this parallel universe a couple of photon streams down from Universe-616, Newtonian physics turns a blind eye to Kung-Fu masters, and the action here is exactly the kind of thing that geeks have seen rendered only in the low frame count world of Japanese anime, or the super swirly lines of Chinese comics and Japanese manga. It’s pretty obvious that in his own way, Stephen Chow was junkie of his particular pop culture, inhaling all the usual Hollywood influences while keeping a steady eye on what his own side of the Pacific pond was putting out. All of which results in a film that is stupefyingly, wonderfully crazy. It lacks the technical polish of Hollywood films, but I’ll put this movie and its action sequences over the last two Matrix movies any day of the week.

How In The Sam Hill

Can you possibly have a World War II aerial combat game, complete with borderline offensive racial stereotypes insulting you over the radio and NOT have Japanese pilots screaming, “BANZAAAAAI!”

I mean really, if you’re going to go with cliches anyway, you may as well go all the way…

I Have Seen The Future Of Our Species

And it has bad posture, and laughs like it’s choking on it’s own spit while being squeezed by the scrotum.

I speak of course, of the Nerd, of which I saw many when I went to Nerd-vana, better known as Biopolis for lunch today.

In recent years, one of the things Singapore has done to try and stay relevant is diversify. One of the ways the country has done this is start pushing itself as an Intelligence Based Economy, relying on brain power rather than traditional industry to make its claim in the world market. Part of that initiative has been to have an EXTREMELY friendly policy when it comes to stem cell research, and Biopolis, a science park/campus not far from the GameAxis office, is one of these centers of research. The only reason I even went there is because one of the guys at the office suggested we eat there, it being nearby and none us ever having eaten there before, so it was a “what the hell” moment that led to me quickly being overcome by an intense feeling of being overwhelmed. I was initially confused as to what invisible force was seemingly blowing against me with torrential-like speed when I realized it was the massive collective IQ of a few thousand people several orders of magnitude smarter than anyone else within a 5000 mile radius.

Whereas the rest of us sit around at lunch and say “Yeah, how ’bout them Oscars,” these guys sit around and say, “Yeah, I sneezed and it suddenly occurred to me how we could cure cancer,” or, “Screw YOU, Captain Kirk is TEN TIMES the man Picard is, and I know because I’ve figured out how to clone a person with a fingernail, a rubber band, a petri dish, calculator and 6 ounces of uranium 238 mixed with ketchup! Plus, I TOTALLY RULE MAGIC THE GATHERING!”

These people are clear and clinching proof of the success of the nerd. Some of them still carried all the hallmarks of their youth, the gangly limbs, massive adam’s apple, glasses with lenses thick enough to stop gamma rays, short sleeved shirts with collars and bad posture, and yet, whereas their jock competitors, the ones who got all the girls in high school are now car mechanics or mid-level grunts in some office, these losers of youth with no social skills whatsoever are worth millions of dollars in Basic Patents, and are the kind of guys that those same girls that scorned them in past now desperately wish they were married to, if only to take advantage of their lack of material taste to blow their huge bank accounts on.

I stood in numb amazement as two Hot Asian Chicks sandwiched a solitary nerd who was eating lunch at his table. They laughed at his jokes, they listened with shimmering engagement to his every word, they realized that he was completely hopeless when it came to relating to other human beings, but they also realized a) he was worth tons and tons of money, and b) he was wrapped around their fingers because they were attractive girls and he was a nerd who had previously only fantasized about ever being approached by such a woman. The loneliness of the nerd, plus their incredible wealth make them easy marks for the Incredible Hotness that Asian girls can cultivate when they really set their mind to it.

But behold, this is our future. Gargantuan IQs mixed with the slinky, winsome DNA of Asian hothouse flowers. The end result? Kids that look like Keanu Reeves but think like Stephen Hawking.

Fear the future, for you cannot escape it.

Jem Wasn’t That Truly Outrageous

Recently a discussion came up between the Wife and I on the merits of Jem and whether she really was that positive a role model for young girls growing up in the McFly era of 1985. For those of you that aren’t aware, Jem was the star of animated series that ran for 65 episodes during the 80′s, eponymously titled… Jem. It centered around the hi-jinks of good little rich girl Jerica Benton, who, with her little sister Kimber, experience the death of their father who does three things; leave the legacy of “Starlight House” a home for orphaned children to them, leave them one half of the controlling interest in Starlight Records, and leave them a super computer capable of projecting holograms to any point on Earth with a portable transceiver in the shape of earrings. The AI, an aerobicized purple girl named Synergy, was put to use providing a holographic cover for Jerica who became Jem, and her sister, black foster sister, Asian foster sister and eventually new Mexican friend, became the band Jem & The Holograms. And thus a series was born.

Jem herself, the animated heroine looked like this.

Britta Phillips, the girl that provided Jem’s singing voice, looks like this.

She’s still in music these days, by the way. But now she plays bass guitar.

During the 80′s, both this show and G.I. Joe, produced by a combination of Marvel/Sunbow productions, both followed a similar format in that they insisted on having a moral lesson at the end of the show, like “Don’t talk to strangers,” or, “It’s bad to lie,” or “Only use pressure sensitive landmines if you’re sure you won’t patrolling this route again.” At the end of these profound teachings on moral uprightness, they would end it with “Now you know, and knowing…” in the caseof G.I. Joe, “is half the battle,” and in the case of Jem, “makes you a superstar.”

There has been much debate on the truth of these statements with a lot of people saying that G.I. Joe knew what they were talking about and Jem was simply being the complete idiot rich girl she was. Joe, for example, could back up their argument with evidence that knowledge of terrain, the number and disposition of your enemy, and perhaps even knowledge of their own tactics, greatly enhanced your force’s chances of victory since you could now strategize accordingly. Knowledge in this case, really did contribute to the achievement of victory in military conflict. Most people would say that just knowing something does not suddenly give you the key to a recording contract and millions of dollars. However there has been a precedent established by such people as Alex Trebeck of Jeopardy fame, who regularly rewards knowledge of the trivial with large sums of cash. There’s also Who Wants To Be A Millionaire that has made several people rich–and briefly famous–for their ability to know things no one cares about.

But beyond that, what about Jem herself?

I think it’s obvious that even though the era of political correctness was slowly starting to make itself known, there were certain cultural cliches that still managed to work their way into the cartoon. Jem herself for example, is pretty, attractive, smart and most importantly, white. As a result she is rewarded for this by being the heiress of a massive fortune. Her foster sister, Shana is black and so is relegated to playing drums, because of the stereotypes of tribal Africans, while Aja, the generic Asian, plays the guitar (Koto, anyone?) knows a bit of Karate (because all Chinese people do, and yes, I know Karate is Japanese, but do the Americans?) and is the designated chauffer, much like Bruce Lee was during the Green Hornet series.

On the other side, you have the arch-nemesis, a green haired girl named Pizazz, who ran a band called the misfits. She was supposed to be a villain, but of course, because she was white, she was also rewarded for her skin color by being fabulously rich as well. One of her other band members, a white haired girl by the name of Roxy was an uneducated, lower class hick who was illiterate, thus reinforcing the notion that poor people are bad.

Over the course of the series, the Holograms clashed again and again with their rivals the Misfits, and Jem/Jerrica found herself in a the classic dual identity problem of having her clueless boyfriend Rio start to fall in love with her Jem persona, something that was never really resolved and in real life ultimately would have led to Rio either shooting heroine, or Jerrica hiring someone to burn his house down in a fit of rage.

Is this really the kind of value system we were teaching in the 80′s? Then again, looking at how those 80′s kids have turned out today, it looks like the lessons took. Thanks a lot, Jem. Now I know, and knowing makes me a super jerk…

James Frey & Superman

Two totally unrelated topics, but they’re on my mind.

I followed the story, saw that he’s now got a three page introductory note that still emphasizes the emotional core of his story and read with interest how his agent has now dropped him, and his book deal with his current publisher is now being renegotiated.

It just kind of got me to wondering, if it’s your dream to get published, just how far are you willing you to go? I mean, a lot of struggling writers will say “I’ll do whatever it takes to get my book in the store,” but Frey really went and did it. He saw an opportunity after 17 rejections and realized if he had to lie through his teeth, by God, he was gonna’ do it, and he did. I wonder how many of us would be able to resist the temptation.

I mean, for myself, it’s a non-issue since I’m firmly on the fiction side anyway. If I say “I made it up,” people will reply, “You damn well have better made it up,” so it’s moot point. But now I kind of wonder what I’d do if presented with a similarly shady opportunity. I tell myself, of course I’d just lower my head and keep on powering on the way I have the last few years, but I wonder if I really would.

And on the other hand, there’s the upcoming summer movie Superman Returns.

I don’t care how superficial or vacuous it makes me, I’m really looking forward to this movie.

Part of this is due to Frank Miller.

I think that since the mid 80′s, up until now, dark and gritty has pretty much epitomized the mood of fantastic narrative of almost every sort. In science fiction, it found a name in cyberpunk. In comics, it resulted in The Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and even stuff like Spawn. In movies, we got The Crow, Dark City, Aliens countless others. And I think it was refreshing. For the most part, it was refreshing because it was a reaction to the Pollyannaism of the early 80′s, the Regan years when people had an almost hyper-acute sense of optimism and refused to see reality for what it was, a dark and complicated mess.

However, over the years, this more merciless, unflinching look at the world has gotten to the point where its marketing, its fashionable. I hadn’t even heard the term “emo” here in Singapore until I read about it some other forum and realize it was a low grade version of Goth where kids more or less dramatize their lives to make them out to be full of angst and misery, just because… well, anger and misunderstandings and outsider-ism is cool. Dark & Gritty has stopped being a spalsh of cold water in deluded eyes and has become a compulsory badge of style. And somewhere along the way, the point of it, which was, “Don’t just look at all comforting nothings society offers, look at how dark it can get” has somehow gotten lost. Now, it’s mostly dark just for its own sake. And it seems like the reverse has now come to pass.

People are so obsessed with seeing the dark side in everything, the intense, dramatic, Goth side, that they’ve forgotten about the other stuff. The good stuff, the courageous stuff, the stuff you can admire and respect.

The HEROIC stuff.

That’s what I’m hoping Superman will be this summer. A return to that. I love Batman Begins, and I wouldn’t change a thing to it, because to be fair, that is who Batman is, and that movie understood it, the same way Frank Miller did back in the 80′s. But Superman… Superman is not someone you’re supposed to be afraid of. He’s not someone you’re supposed to think, “Oh man, he’s gonna’ slaughter them and make them sorry they were ever born.”

Superman is courage, kindness and a simple belief that you do the right thing because it IS the right thing, and not because you need recognition or accolades. I’m hoping that Bryan Singer understands that the reason Superman endures as a symbol is because he represents the positive aspects of human nature, those all too rare moments when we rise above our petty or competitive aspects and show mercy, or great inner strength. Superman should make people want to be like him, not be afraid of him. He should show people that it’s not having great power that counts, but what you do with that power.

Superman should make a person want to be a better person than they are right now.

I hope Bryan Singer gets that. And hopefully, I hope he pulls it off and makes everyone who comes out of the theater want to be a better person too.

I Think I’m Becoming A Gaming Snob

I was perusing–as I am wont to do–IGN today and happened to notice they had a story, or more accurately, a list, of the top selling PS2 games of 2005. Checking out the story, I found myself feeling a growing horror when I saw that Madden NFL 06, NCAA Football 06, MVP Baseball 2005 and a few other sports titles dominated the top 10 with God of War–quite possibly the single best title of the entire year–coming in at number 10.

My immediate gut reaction was, “My God, are these people stupid?!?” And I sat there thinking about how commercial those games were, how they were nothing but franchises and sequels with no originality and how this was squeezing out the really quality, innovative and original gaming experiences… only to realize seconds later that this is probably exactly the same kind of reaction that hoity-toity film critics have when Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith makes more money or is hailed as a cultural phenomenon over Million Dollar Baby.

I wonder if there will ever come a time when game critics have the same weight and authority as film critics.

Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of sports games. I play games for escape, so to me there’s no point in playing a video game of something I could conceivably just go by actually going outside. Granted, I’ll never play in a professional team, but sports games are entirely too bound by reality for me to ever really take to them. If I can’t shoot something, cast a magic spell, play the gee-tar, or save the world somehow, I’m not interested. First Person Shooters are a fun genre only occasionally when a truly unique experience–like Halo or Halflife–comes out, but for the most part, this genre has just turned into running and gunning a corridor and the majority of titles in the genre don’t stray very far from that formula.

But it was kind of a creepy moment to realize and not in the 12 year old l33t way, that there is pretty obviously a difference between people that are gamers–or that other people would label a gamer–and people that play games. I imagine the familiarity and “pick up and play” nature of sports games are what make them so popular. That and the USA is, to be fair, completely dedicated to their sporting events. Whereas something like Dragon Quest VIII or Kingdom Hearts, or even Shadow of the Colossus is something that requires a committment of sorts from the player, and tries to take them to an unfamiliar place with new rules.

I guess in the same way some people like “cinema” and other people like “movies.” I like interactive experiences rather than video games. Kind’a. Sort’a.

Lost Season 1 Post Mortem

First, I must get this out…

WHAT THE HELL IS IN THE HATCH?!?

The show won me over. It’s fun. A whole lotta’ fun. In the long run though… I dunno. The biggest appeal of the series seems to be that it combines the operatic arc of a melodrama (character development wise) and combines it with a ghost train mystery ride through a haunted house, in this case, the haunted house being the island. And while I was really sucked into the character development and have a lot of admiration for the sheer gutsiness of this show, I can also feel its limits. I mean, how often can you keep pulling out tragic character circumstances to make the audience cry? And how can you possibly rope together all the inexplicables and mysteries of the island into a satisfying conclusion that provides logical and emotional closure?

I’m really hoping the creators of the show can do it… But a part of me has the feeling they can’t. The FUN of this show, really, is the mystery. As an audience we like asking the questions, we love having our curiosity piqued, and we love talking with other people about it and speculating. But you can only keep pulling one mystery out after another before it begins to stretch credibility and I fear that they’ve already put out so many questions that need answering that it’ll be difficult to give any kind of closure in a acceptable way.

Or maybe I’m just too much of an SF geek. I still prefer Battlestar Galactica to this slightly more, but mostly because BSG doesn’t seem quite so dependent on the cliffhanger or the MacGuffin to drive the story. Both programs share a lot of similar qualities–small groups, in exile, struggling for survival, confronted with conflicts from large, external forces that threaten their existence, and small internal conflicts from trying to remain a society in the absence of a larger one.

However, the big difference for me–aside from setting which is a bonehead observation–is in the structure of their conflicts. There is definitely a melodramatic, almost soap operatic level to the characters and conflicts of Lost. While there is obviously a lot of character drama in BSG, it seems more “realistic” somehow, if you can apply that to a science fiction program, in that it’s not all completely dependent on high volume situations or backgrounds. For example, in Lost, I don’t think I’m giving away any spoilers by saying you have tortured doctor, a tortured former Iraqi soldier with a scarred conscience, a tortured and beautiful fugitive with complicated relationships, a tortured con artist traumatized by his childhood, a tortured rich brother and sister messed up by their wealth, a tortured Korean wife and her similarly tortured husband who does it all for her and makes things worse, a tortured former rock star who–surprise!–is strung out on drugs, a tortured mother to be who doubts her ability to be a mother, a tortured new father who also doubts his new 10 yeard old son now that his Ex is dead, and a tortured “woodsman” of sorts who needs to believe in destiny or else his world–and sanity–will fall completely to pieces. All of them have had extraordinarly terrible things happen to them in their past that make for some incredibly beautiful and moving flashbacks, but, if you don’t believe in fate or destiny, or, worse yet, simply see the mechanisms of plotting at work, it simply starts to be too much trauma to be entirely convincing.

On BSG, there is the initial trauma of… well, the end of the world. Or at least the annihilation of the Colonies and the forced exodus of the survivors to escape from the race they’d originally created as slaves who have now destroyed them utterly. And that’s a big issue. The only other really major character conflicts are the death of Commander Adama’s youngest son and how that colors his relationship with Starbuck and Apollo, and the fact that the President of the Colonies is dying of cancer. The rest of the character conflict and drama tends to evolve more “naturally” around the situations the series crafts, rather than relying on a shocking or tender revelation about someone’s past to generate an emotional attachment to the characters. Although, to be completely fair to Lost, when they do it, it WORKS, and works GREAT.

The other thing of course is the abundance of mysteries. The monster on the island, the mystery of the hatch, the numbers… All of these things keep cropping up, and once again, if you don’t believe in destiny, or are simply too aware of feeling a team of writers pulling out–some admittedly brilliantly compelling–questions to keep your curiosity fired up, that can pull you out. In BSG, the only real mystery is the Cylons, and exactly how they operate as a society and a silicon based lifeform and how that affects the human survivors. Once again, the rest of the plot related conflicts come naturally from the situation, how do you eat in space? How do you get more water? How do you refuel? How do you get enough parts to keep you fighters in the air? Does society continue as per usual in the aftermath of near total extinction, or is it time for new rules? These are natural questions that need answering as opposed to, “Wow! A polar bear! How’d that get there? GOSH! ANOTHER MYSTERY!”

Although let me once again iterate, Lost does this absolutely, bloody BRILLIANTLY.

I love what the show does. I’m just a little disappointed at my awareness they’re doing it. BSG on the other hand more or less just sucks me in and makes me completely forget my critical faculties thinking to myself “Wow…” when the show’s over, whereas Lost will occasionally make me smile in disbelief and think myself, “Clever little bastards, you are…”

I guess (Caution, blasphemous cinematic allegory coming up) it’s kind of the difference between Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both are triumphs in their own way, but Linklater made you forget entirely that a movie was happening. Spielberg on the other hand plays up all the flame and thunder and even if you’re perfectly aware you’re on a rollercoaster with precisely engineered twists and turns, you’re having so much fun, you don’t care.

I Am Almost Inspired

I admit it. I’m now officially a James Frey junkie.

I check the net every half hour or so to see if there are any new developments because for some reason, I am intensely interested in the outcome of this situation. I suppose part of its because this falls within my sphere of interest. It is news, dramatic, discussion worthy, highly debateable and yes, exciting news about a writer.

A writer who has lied.

Of course, it was Neil-O himself who once wrote, “Writers are liars, my dear. Surely you have realized that by now” in Calliope and here is that concept coming out once more. But this time, there seems to be greater consequences. Because there is so much money, and, more importantly to Oprah Winfrey, so much reputation at stake, drastic measures are being taken that are doing things that no literature professor or writer could ever do single-handedly and usually takes a few generations to really take hold.

Oprah Winfrey is redefining how we define literature.

It is kind of stunning to me now to hear phrases like “It’s a new kind of memoir,” and “The important thing, the thing that REALLY matters in a memoir, is the EMOTIONAL TRUTH, not the historical truth.”

Everyone is passing the buck here. Oprah has said that she relies on the publishers to ascertain the authenticity of the non-fiction they receive, so she’s washed her hands of the entire affair. Doubleday, the publishers have said that they accept the manuscript as is, giving responsibility to the author and assuming in good faith that it was written as recollected by the author. And James Frey himself is saying the Emotional Truth is what is the most important thing here.

It would seem that slowly, ever so slowly, the mentality of reality television where things are carefully prepared and then staged as truth is beginning to take hold in literature as well.

The thing that really knocks me on the head is that I should be agreeing with this stuff. I am, after all, an aspiring novelist. I’ve already written three very weighty books with not an ounce of historical fact to them, but plenty of what I think are emotional truths, so I definitely believe in the importance of something feeling right. Of something feeling like truth even if it didn’t actually happen.

What I find myself in violent disagreement with is the ability to create an emotional truth and then go on to incorporate that emotional truth into your own personal history, deliberately altering your own life and then positing that that this more dramatic, more emotional truth you have manufactured actually was your life, and is what people should accept, rather than what really happened.

It’s kind of like saying to all the middle class white kids who desperately want to be black, “Go on, tell people you killed someone and that you’ve been in jail for drive by shootings and drug trafficking, if that FEELS true to you, then it’s MORE true than something as boring as What Really Happened.”

I’m getting so full of thoughts about this whole situation that it is sorely tempting to me to just sit down and try to tell a story (Fiction, course, I want to be honest here) about truth, and how people twist it or reject when it proves to be inconvenient. It seems to be a side-effect of the abundance of information that rather than making it easier to find the truth, more information has hidden the truth.

Or, speaking metaphorically, truth is just one kind of plant in a forest of information, and we’re now wandering in California redwood territory, when truth just happens to be a beat up little pine tree like the Christmas tree on Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

I’m wondering why, if it’s the emotional truth that counts, Frey didn’t just stick to his original presentation of the novel as fiction. I’m wondering why, as fiction it was rejected 17 times, and I’m wondering why, when it was finally accepted it was at the suggestion of the editor that it be changed from fiction to a “memoir.”

Why, if everyone is going on and on about how it’s the emotional truth that counts, is it still being pushed as a memoir? Why can’t it simply be a beautiful lie, like great fiction? Henry Miller, who is–unsurprisingly–a huge influence on James Frey, wrote The Tropic Of Cancer by combining elements of his own life with his imaginings, his thoughts, his opinions and his wishes. It was a hodge podge of reality, idea and emotion.

And it was marketed as fiction.

If Frey admired Miller so much for his integrity, his absolute refusal to compromise on anything, including his writing, then how could he have allowed himself to do what Miller would probably find to be the literary equivalent of blasphemy? How could he have done the one thing his idol would loathe?

He finally broke after 17 rejections. I’m going to tell myself the same won’t happen to me. But I have learned one important thing. If I want to get away with writing something really, stupendously outlandish, the kind of thing that defies all common sense, I should write it for the non-fiction crowd. Apparently fiction fans have a much sharper sense of believability than they do…