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hawkwing_lbOkay, I confess.
Over the last what, year or so? Stargate has grown on me. At first I said, "What is this ridiculous stupidity?" And then I said, "Okay, the characters are interesting, if a bit clichéd and occasionally TSTL, but the whole neo-colonialism America knows best! thing, and the mythology, oh gods it hurts us." And then I said, "But there's a place for unchallenging melodrama: you can enjoy it for what it is."
And then I got to seasons nine and ten, and Ben Browder as Cam Mitchell and Claudia Black as Vala Mal Doran sold me on the package. No show that puts those two together in a scene can be bad.
I've been mulling over this since I finished season ten a couple months - three or four months? - ago. And yeah, I have to come out all in favour.
I still find this whole business of watching television kind of weirdly guilt-inducing. (Probably why I do it at every opportunity. Catholic upbringing = sucker for guilt.) I pretty much watched nothing between age twelve and age nineteen. I read, I wrote, I studied, I played sports. But tv? Why the hell would I want to watch that? There were better/more important/more interesting things to do.
But just before my Leaving Cert exams, I discovered this thing called Battlestar Galactica that everyone was raving about, and bought the DVD.
Hey, these were life-affecting examinations. I needed a distraction. An undemanding distraction.
And that was fine. DVDs watched, exams over, on with my life...
...Until, a little less than a year later, I got sick. I mean, nastily sick. Lie on the couch and not get up for a week sick, while my body ran a fever and insisted that I live on small amounts tinned pears, bread, and flat 7-Up (I still can't look at tinned pears without feeling slightly nauseaous and dizzy). I couldn't read, couldn't sit-up, so...
I went through pretty much all of Buffy in those couple of weeks, and some of Angel. And trust me, that show is truly weird when your processors aren't running at full capacity. Seriously
Since then - two years, more or less - my DVD collection has ballooned, nearly all of it serial television. And in that time I've discovered something interesting about myself.
Well, interesting to me, anyway.
Over the same period where I've noticed my taste in books become far more picky, my enjoyment of visual media has remained undiscriminating. Actually, I suspect it's grown less so.
As long as there are swordfights/gun battles/things blowing up, there's some amusing dialogue, the actors can (mostly) act, and the scenery's diverting, or at least three of the four, I'm inclined to give it a go. I'm not invested in television the same way I am in books: if a book is bad or stupid or insults my intelligence, I can get angry at it.
In television, I like poking fun at the bad/stupid whatever. It's a game: can I guess how bad or stupid or clichéd the plot is going to be? As long as I'm having fun with the melodrama or the performance or whatever, I'll stick it out.
This accounts for me having watched DVDs of such shows as Alias, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Xena the Warrior Princess, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, and the BBC's Robin Hood. Trust me, no matter how stupid you think television can get, Robin Hood is worse: turns out that despite the pretty boys and the archery and the horses and the trees, I couldn't stick it out till the end.
On the other hand, I've seen Criminal Minds and Farscape and Firefly and a good deal of Sherlock Holmes - which is a piece of sheer excellence, with incredible actors - not to mention gems of their time such as Mission: Impossible and The New Avengers.
And the other shows, the ones that fall in between: Buffy and BSG and both incarnations of Stargate before Browder and Black.
And I'm working my way round to some half-formed thoughts on storytelling and audience and making assumptions about your audience.
Criminal Minds and Farscape are a pair of shows that, while different in almost every obvious particular, are alike in a couple of ways. They both assume the audience is smart enough to keep up with the writers, and they don't bother to explain every last little thing - oh, there's exposition, but it usually does a couple of things at once. More, they assume the audience not only can keep up, but is interested in keeping up, and thus take the risk of doing - for television standards - fairly complex things with characterisation. Real growth, no reset buttons.
Not to mention, shall we say, diverse phenotypes?
Criminal Minds might have that whole, we're-the-FBI-we're-here-to-help-you thing going. But it also points up that the FBI/the police can make the wrong call. And it is not interested in telling you comforting lies. People break. People die. Other people, people with broken bits and flaws of their own, have to come along and do the best they can to stop that happening, and sometimes - regularly - they fail.
Farscape is another television show about the ways people break under stress - maybe less obviously so than CM, and perhaps less viscerally so: but the devolution of John Crichton from the slightly goofy astronaut who says, You can't go around pointing guns at people! to the man who four years later straps himself to a nuclear bomb in order to give himself something to bargain with is... some serious character development. And Farscape's other thing is distrust of authority - nearly all the organisations and governments Crichton encounters are Out To Get Him, and they're certainly in no way the good guys.
Of course, from their point of view, they're not the bad guys
Okay, both these shows also have their flaws. No one's perfect, and hell, it's television. Factual accuracy is not always a priority, and the forty-/forty-five-minute episode format has its limitations.
But I look at them, and the assumptions they make about their audiences, and I do a brief comparison to either of the CSIs or to Stargate.
In the world of CSI, the police are God. They're almost never wrong, and when they are wrong, they fix it. All murderers are caught, all crimes are solved, all survivors heal, eventually.
In Stargate, there's a very pointed dichotomy between the good guys and the bad guys, between Us and Them, so to speak. Between the US and everyone else, I might go so far as to say. The good guys - SG-1, Stargate Command - are very shinily Good. They do the Right Thing no matter what the cost.
They operate on the assumption that the right, or the better, thing is knowable. That there are no choices between two equally unpleasant evils. And that the choices made by the (shiny! good!) people in authority will work out okay in the end.
The difference between the two sets is, essentially, in the amount of ambiguity each show affords to the viewer. And how much the show is prepared to challenge the views of (parts of) the audience. Criminal Minds is all about having no good choices. Farscape is all about having very few good choices, and realising that the Other Side's moral compass may be just as valid as yours is.
And I was thinking about ambiguity and audience and storytelling, and how and why some pieces of fictions get away successfully with more subversion of the standard trope - that of the audience know who the good guys are, and the good guys are recognisable and recognisably right - than others.
(I was talking this out in chat. I was looking for the argument in melodrama or its close cousins, the angle, the dialectic. Because it's not just, or not deliberately, or at least not always or only deliberately, an argument in favour of authority and the status quo, made by people who are satisfied with how the world works for people who are satisfied, or want to be, with how the world works.)
Because if fiction reflects reality, then fiction should really have a whole hell of a lot of ambiguity. Rather than having two shows that I'm able to identify which make it a big part of the theme, most of the rest being actively engaged in an argument against ambiguity.
So a lot of popular fiction - television especially - has not realism, but verism. The shows or books that succeed in (despite!) their subversions, as Bear pointed out to me in chat, do so because they hide them.
And hello, moment of comprehension. Fictions with ambiguity - fictions which subvert, and do so successfully enough to attract parts of an audience that is not already primed to challenge their status quo - kick dirt over the subversion. They distract the attention with a bit of flash somewhere else, a little light and magic, whatever.
The point is, they're engaged in telling a story - in communicating - on more than one level. And that would be why they're harder to find and require a bit more engagement than your average melodrama.
And that might be why I find an episode of Stargate easy and fun to watch, and CSI laughable but fun, and an episode of, say, Criminal Minds (and the odd one of Farscape, when I go back to watch some of the best ones) more likely to require energy. Some episodes of CM, even seen for the fifth time, stay as engaging (and sometimes as wrenching) as they were the first time round.
I personally find the fictions with the ambiguity more rewarding than the other kind, even if they do demand more engagement. But there seem as though there are a lot more of the other kind.
So, coming to the point. Which is a question. (If anyone's read this far, that is.) What do you think about ambiguity and audience and storytelling?
(Am I off my head? Has too much television finally rotted my brain, like my grandmother used to promise?)
Over the last what, year or so? Stargate has grown on me. At first I said, "What is this ridiculous stupidity?" And then I said, "Okay, the characters are interesting, if a bit clichéd and occasionally TSTL, but the whole neo-colonialism America knows best! thing, and the mythology, oh gods it hurts us." And then I said, "But there's a place for unchallenging melodrama: you can enjoy it for what it is."
And then I got to seasons nine and ten, and Ben Browder as Cam Mitchell and Claudia Black as Vala Mal Doran sold me on the package. No show that puts those two together in a scene can be bad.
I've been mulling over this since I finished season ten a couple months - three or four months? - ago. And yeah, I have to come out all in favour.
I still find this whole business of watching television kind of weirdly guilt-inducing. (Probably why I do it at every opportunity. Catholic upbringing = sucker for guilt.) I pretty much watched nothing between age twelve and age nineteen. I read, I wrote, I studied, I played sports. But tv? Why the hell would I want to watch that? There were better/more important/more interesting things to do.
But just before my Leaving Cert exams, I discovered this thing called Battlestar Galactica that everyone was raving about, and bought the DVD.
Hey, these were life-affecting examinations. I needed a distraction. An undemanding distraction.
And that was fine. DVDs watched, exams over, on with my life...
...Until, a little less than a year later, I got sick. I mean, nastily sick. Lie on the couch and not get up for a week sick, while my body ran a fever and insisted that I live on small amounts tinned pears, bread, and flat 7-Up (I still can't look at tinned pears without feeling slightly nauseaous and dizzy). I couldn't read, couldn't sit-up, so...
I went through pretty much all of Buffy in those couple of weeks, and some of Angel. And trust me, that show is truly weird when your processors aren't running at full capacity. Seriously
Since then - two years, more or less - my DVD collection has ballooned, nearly all of it serial television. And in that time I've discovered something interesting about myself.
Well, interesting to me, anyway.
Over the same period where I've noticed my taste in books become far more picky, my enjoyment of visual media has remained undiscriminating. Actually, I suspect it's grown less so.
As long as there are swordfights/gun battles/things blowing up, there's some amusing dialogue, the actors can (mostly) act, and the scenery's diverting, or at least three of the four, I'm inclined to give it a go. I'm not invested in television the same way I am in books: if a book is bad or stupid or insults my intelligence, I can get angry at it.
In television, I like poking fun at the bad/stupid whatever. It's a game: can I guess how bad or stupid or clichéd the plot is going to be? As long as I'm having fun with the melodrama or the performance or whatever, I'll stick it out.
This accounts for me having watched DVDs of such shows as Alias, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Xena the Warrior Princess, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY, and the BBC's Robin Hood. Trust me, no matter how stupid you think television can get, Robin Hood is worse: turns out that despite the pretty boys and the archery and the horses and the trees, I couldn't stick it out till the end.
On the other hand, I've seen Criminal Minds and Farscape and Firefly and a good deal of Sherlock Holmes - which is a piece of sheer excellence, with incredible actors - not to mention gems of their time such as Mission: Impossible and The New Avengers.
And the other shows, the ones that fall in between: Buffy and BSG and both incarnations of Stargate before Browder and Black.
And I'm working my way round to some half-formed thoughts on storytelling and audience and making assumptions about your audience.
Criminal Minds and Farscape are a pair of shows that, while different in almost every obvious particular, are alike in a couple of ways. They both assume the audience is smart enough to keep up with the writers, and they don't bother to explain every last little thing - oh, there's exposition, but it usually does a couple of things at once. More, they assume the audience not only can keep up, but is interested in keeping up, and thus take the risk of doing - for television standards - fairly complex things with characterisation. Real growth, no reset buttons.
Not to mention, shall we say, diverse phenotypes?
Criminal Minds might have that whole, we're-the-FBI-we're-here-to-help-you thing going. But it also points up that the FBI/the police can make the wrong call. And it is not interested in telling you comforting lies. People break. People die. Other people, people with broken bits and flaws of their own, have to come along and do the best they can to stop that happening, and sometimes - regularly - they fail.
Farscape is another television show about the ways people break under stress - maybe less obviously so than CM, and perhaps less viscerally so: but the devolution of John Crichton from the slightly goofy astronaut who says, You can't go around pointing guns at people! to the man who four years later straps himself to a nuclear bomb in order to give himself something to bargain with is... some serious character development. And Farscape's other thing is distrust of authority - nearly all the organisations and governments Crichton encounters are Out To Get Him, and they're certainly in no way the good guys.
Of course, from their point of view, they're not the bad guys
Okay, both these shows also have their flaws. No one's perfect, and hell, it's television. Factual accuracy is not always a priority, and the forty-/forty-five-minute episode format has its limitations.
But I look at them, and the assumptions they make about their audiences, and I do a brief comparison to either of the CSIs or to Stargate.
In the world of CSI, the police are God. They're almost never wrong, and when they are wrong, they fix it. All murderers are caught, all crimes are solved, all survivors heal, eventually.
In Stargate, there's a very pointed dichotomy between the good guys and the bad guys, between Us and Them, so to speak. Between the US and everyone else, I might go so far as to say. The good guys - SG-1, Stargate Command - are very shinily Good. They do the Right Thing no matter what the cost.
They operate on the assumption that the right, or the better, thing is knowable. That there are no choices between two equally unpleasant evils. And that the choices made by the (shiny! good!) people in authority will work out okay in the end.
The difference between the two sets is, essentially, in the amount of ambiguity each show affords to the viewer. And how much the show is prepared to challenge the views of (parts of) the audience. Criminal Minds is all about having no good choices. Farscape is all about having very few good choices, and realising that the Other Side's moral compass may be just as valid as yours is.
And I was thinking about ambiguity and audience and storytelling, and how and why some pieces of fictions get away successfully with more subversion of the standard trope - that of the audience know who the good guys are, and the good guys are recognisable and recognisably right - than others.
(I was talking this out in chat. I was looking for the argument in melodrama or its close cousins, the angle, the dialectic. Because it's not just, or not deliberately, or at least not always or only deliberately, an argument in favour of authority and the status quo, made by people who are satisfied with how the world works for people who are satisfied, or want to be, with how the world works.)
Because if fiction reflects reality, then fiction should really have a whole hell of a lot of ambiguity. Rather than having two shows that I'm able to identify which make it a big part of the theme, most of the rest being actively engaged in an argument against ambiguity.
So a lot of popular fiction - television especially - has not realism, but verism. The shows or books that succeed in (despite!) their subversions, as Bear pointed out to me in chat, do so because they hide them.
And hello, moment of comprehension. Fictions with ambiguity - fictions which subvert, and do so successfully enough to attract parts of an audience that is not already primed to challenge their status quo - kick dirt over the subversion. They distract the attention with a bit of flash somewhere else, a little light and magic, whatever.
The point is, they're engaged in telling a story - in communicating - on more than one level. And that would be why they're harder to find and require a bit more engagement than your average melodrama.
And that might be why I find an episode of Stargate easy and fun to watch, and CSI laughable but fun, and an episode of, say, Criminal Minds (and the odd one of Farscape, when I go back to watch some of the best ones) more likely to require energy. Some episodes of CM, even seen for the fifth time, stay as engaging (and sometimes as wrenching) as they were the first time round.
I personally find the fictions with the ambiguity more rewarding than the other kind, even if they do demand more engagement. But there seem as though there are a lot more of the other kind.
So, coming to the point. Which is a question. (If anyone's read this far, that is.) What do you think about ambiguity and audience and storytelling?
(Am I off my head? Has too much television finally rotted my brain, like my grandmother used to promise?)
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 03:53 pm (UTC)And yeah, I know what you mean. (Even if I've only read what, four of the Aubrey and Maturin books so far.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 03:22 am (UTC)The early X-Files was about pushing past limits and discovering new things. That's why they hooked me so quickly, just like the early DS9, and ST:TOS.
Some audiences can't tolerate ambiguity, so you have to subvert the paradigm and tell them a story. Sneak the lesson through subliminally.
And, yes, television has rotted your brain. Your grandmother is All-Wise.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 03:42 pm (UTC)I find it interesting to consider the ambiguity/subversion thing, and how fiction distracts the eye to make a more subtle point, sometimes.
Or doesn't, and sometimes gives you a ham-handed moral.
I've never watched the X-Files, myself.
And my grandmother used to tell me that television would rot my brain. Until she started watching copious amounts of the daytime kind, herself. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 09:33 am (UTC)That's military authority, though; you can't trust a Stargate politician. It's the Heinlein mindset, lifted wholesale: only Those Who Serve are to be trusted.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 02:58 am (UTC)See I'd argue against that... not for every show, but quite certainly you can't trust the government, the secret services, the top brass (I think the episode where Jack see's the newpaperman run down and Hammond denies it was organised... we are reminded regularly, especially by Harry, that Jack is not a particularly good nor innocent man - that he has changed/is in the process of changing), all those nice glittery things you want (2010)... there are some wonderful ambiguities as well.
But... that doesn't really matter, because taste is taste and what suits one palate doesn't necessarily score with another. ::steps round defense of a TV show:: I think you're a lot right.
Only I don't think the ambiguity of real life is the same as the ambiguity of fiction. In real life randomish shit happens... there's no discernable story or meaning until one is chosen - that creates history. In some ways that's what shows like the new Robin Hood or CSI rely on (okay I only dragged myself through one episode so... ) -- shit happens, the hero causes or survives the events, sometimes giving the guy he doesn't like a good kicking along the way. That's mostly all there is to the show, and in many ways it's only a story the way history can look like a story... by selecting the 'right' start and end points.
Storytelling requires a layer of meaning be given to the events. Things don't just happen because it'd be cool for them to happen or they could happen, but happen to forward the purpose of the story... not just so there's movement but movement always in an intended direction. (why yes I am pushing this together from other ideas as I go along)
At the mindcandy level that tends to be the positive or negative demonstration of an accepted truth -- frex love conquers all or love doesn't conquer all - both are mindcandy although one will have a happy ending the other not, or even an uncertain ending.
The more complex story doesn't demonstrate but discusses simpler truths, and/or chooses to discuss something that's less black/white. That discussion tends to require the reader/viewer to decide for themself whether certain things in the story are or are not acceptable/workable/desirable.
What I think some writers and TV shows achieve is a level of compromise between mindcandy and more complex discussions by providing a surface level of candy, and a crunchy nutty interior -- you can bite through and enjoy the mixture of both... or just suck on the candy shell. Terry Pratchett frex, started off somewhat candy... parodying fantasy fiction, but a lot of his later works have both that same funny jokey surface, and also use the same humour to dig into the complexities of economics, the ethos etc of the postal service, and gender roles.
I like storytelling better than non-storytelling (although I tend to like my history raw rather than cooked), but I quite like both complex and mindcandy.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 06:50 pm (UTC)Of course, the great benefit of doing my thinking publically is that other people sometimes turn up and poke at the holes in my logic.
And I think I may entirely agree with you.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 01:50 am (UTC)I also find TV and film a really good way to look at/examine storytelling (I suspect that I would have a lower tolerance for reading the book equivalent of many series than I do for letting it wash over me - although there are limits even without dealing with bad grammar :D )
no subject
Date: 2008-07-28 07:20 pm (UTC)