A short note today. This isn't anything new for those who know me, but it's an important foundation of what I believe, so I figured it should be up here, especially for some pieces I want to write in the future.

Major Premise: All rational/logical structures/systems can be fundamentally represented mathematically.

Minor Premise: Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which collectively demonstrate that a mathematical system cannot be both consistent and complete (i.e., contain irreconcilable contradictions and/or errors).

Conclusion: All rational/logical structures/systems contain irreconcilable contradictions and/or errors.

Facile, perhaps. But the point is this: never forget that rationality, logic, structures, systems, order, et. al., are not ends to themselves. They are useful but dishonest; they are an attempt to bound, limit, define what is fundamentally unboundable, limitless, indefinable: physical reality and the human experience of it.

I really should have seen this the first time. (Spoilers for Quantum of Solace below.)

The Palio di Siena (source)
Having watched Quantum of Solace for the second time today, it seems so obvious to me. Hindsight, of course. The first big action sequence--Bond's chase after traitorous MI6 agent Mitchell--is intercut against shots of a horse race. I noticed this the first time I watched the movie, and was amused by it: juxtaposing the exciting chase against an obviously artificial game expressly set up for the entertainment of the masses (and repeatedly showing us those masses as well as the actual racers). One way to read it is a contrast, life-and-death against a game, but of course it's the opposite: it's a reminder that we, too, are watching something constructed purely for our entertainment. Right from the start, Quantum of Solace seems to be saying: remember that this is a movie meant for your entertainment.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. (Robert A. Heinlein)

Who are the pinnacle of modern Western society? Our political leaders, variously despised and mistrusted? Our philosophers, who don't exist in the minds of a majority? Our artists, ignored if they don't produce carefully constructed entertainment to numb the pain of living our lives of quiet desperation? I think a strong argument could be made that the pinnacle of modern Western society, from the view of modern Western society itself, in terms of those paid the most and getting the most media coverage (easily argued, I think, to be the two primary definitions of status for modern Western society), are professional sports players. ("Most of them don't make that much and aren't known", yeah, yeah. Same goes for all the other aforementioned categories, and everything in general.)

I hate being home. It's not my family--though they are little more than familiar strangers to me, people whom I lived with for so long but have never really known, or allowed myself to know, or allowed to know me. I suppose it is, then, at least a corollary of that. It's that, when I'm home, I feel--alone. Overwhelmed. This is the place in which I destroyed myself, over and over. This is the place in which I wallowed, decadent, lay for hours on end, night after night, devoured by my own depression. This is the place which I left so desperately hoping to start anew, and I did, sort-of, maybe.

But every time I come home I am devoured anew, trapped by the prison I created and continue to create, because I can't let go and say, it is just a building. I should leave, walk about this town that used to be mine, and sometimes I do, but I have nowhere to go. I used to go the park and admire--the people, nature, whatever; but it's too cold now. I used to walk two hours one way to the nearest movie theater, and then come back, six hours gone, because it was better than being here.

The worst part is that I see myself. I never look in mirrors except at home, and here, they are everywhere. I get up in the morning and look into a mirror and I think--not, I wish I was someone else; not even, that is not me; but simply, who is that? Because I do not know. It is a foreign face, a foreign body--gaunt and pale and scarred and so very, very tired.

I used to tell people that I didn't care about my appearance because I didn't have to look at it. It wasn't true, of course--while certainly there is less care involved, I do consider what clothes I'm wearing on what day and why. I would be impressed by someone who has endured modern American society's conditioning and can avoid that. But it was true, somehow, that I dissociated myself from my own image, not from the clothes but from my physical body itself; somehow I mentally divorced myself from my own embodiment, became a floating brain, always fascinated but ultimately confused and distanced by the way my hands move, tendons twisting on bones beneath the skin, the way my leg steps forward with such instinctual confidence, the way my eyes glisten and contract and stare without comprehension.

So, the bailout. ZOMG, the House rejected it soundly--before they didn't. A lot was made of that brief blip, calls that at last the government was being held accountable by the American people, etc., but of course it wasn't to last, of course all they had to do was make a few superficial changes, wait until everyone was properly pleased that they had succeeded in stopping a 700 billion dollar check to a bunch of unrepentant morons, then send the check anyway.

But those guys who called this a major development weren't wrong, or at least as wrong as they look now. Because the first rejection of the bailout was entirely against the corporate politics (whatever the fuck that word even means) that control the American government, and entirely because the American people for one very brief moment said No. Yes, it was a hop and a skip of political maneuvering to get over that hurdle, but if things had been going as they should be for the corporatists/elites/special interests/whatever, that hurdle shouldn't have existed at all. Hoi polloi are sheep to be slaughtered, not a voice to be dealt with.

It's interesting to compare this oh-so-brief moment of popular action with the sustained grass-roots support of Obama and other mainstream candidates before him. The difference being, of course, nobody cares about Obama. Why? Because the people behind him--that frothing mass of do-gooding young idealists, absolutely convinced that they are changing the fucking world for the fucking better at long last after all those fuckers before them continually screwed it up--are doing nothing. They are putting all their energy towards getting more people to check a ballot box, which is exactly what hoi polloi are supposed to do, and nothing more.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a fascinating show. It's a show on a major network (and one notorious for canning potentially brilliant but niche shows befor giving them any real chance to establish an audience) that manages to get away with many things you wouldn't expect possible on a major network (and especially on FOX). It's a confused show, one that often seems to be at odds with itself, threatening to be torn apart by these two impulses: the desire for mainstream, traditional, escapist entertainment and the desire for a genuinely new, creative, and interesting work of science fiction. To this already dangerous balancing act is a third pillar, the nostalgic love for the first two Terminator films that presumably keeps much of the audience (and thus the show) coming back while at the same time fighting with both of the show's other main directions. If you're at all interested in the troubles of maintaining a clear vision on a network television series, this is enough reason to watch Sarah Connor Chronicles, just trying to decipher each week how the people behind the show have managed to corral all these competing impulses into a coherent series.

That's not most people, of course, and that's fine. But the reason I point all this out up front is that while I want to focus on one aspect of the show--the aspect of it that is a genuinely new work of science fiction--I don't want to pretend that that's all it is, or that the show is a particularly great one. This is not Battlestar Galactica. At times SCC devolves into a conventional if entertaining action series, or into a love song for The Terminator and Terminator 2. The series is often clumsy and unsubtle, the acting by leads Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker is uneven (though Summer Glau and Brian Austin Green are reliably excellent), and some of the first season's plot threads were too drawn-out and complicated to really work on television. Despite these flaws in execution and its confused heart, however, SCC is a show with a very strong heart, a show with something to say which, even if it's not quite sure how to say it (or perhaps even what it is that it wants to say), deserves to be heard.

I want to tear it down.

I don't really have much to say about this, but it struck me when I finally saw Wall-E (which is brilliant and deserves every accolade it can get):

Wall-E, the masculine protagonist, is a robot whose job is to literally clean up the mess left behind by humans. More figuratively, it is a care-taker, protector, preserver, nurturer (e.g. the cockroach, the plant), a lover, etc: the roles of a house-wife and mother. Throughout the film, Wall-E's only goal is to win over Eve (excepting a brief period before the finale when Wall-E gives up and acquiesces to Eve's insistence on "directive")--what characters are bemoaned for often the entirety of their character being their desire for a romantic interest?

Eve, the feminine protagonist, is a robot whose job is a literal Campbellian hero's journey (the archetypal masculine plot): venture into a strange otherworld, retrieve a boon, and return with the boon to the old world. It is a transgresser, a destroyer (it repeatedly demonstrates its heedless willingness to use its ridiculously over-powered weapons), an interloper, a plan-maker, a fighter: the roles of a hero, a man. While amused by Wall-E's attention, it is (at first) readily willing and even eager to abandon Wall-E to pursue the completion of its "directive".

These are not strict frameworks, of course, because Wall-E is not a movie of cliches and stereotypes. Wall-E's journey can be organized as a more fully-realized Campbellian arc; Eve spends much effort trying to preserve the plant; etc. There's also an interesting play, related to this, with the power and age of Wall-E and Eve: Eve is nearly invincible, can destroy anything, operates in an impossible fashion (e.g. its "fingers" floating unconnected to its "hands", its unaided movement, etc.), yet can be completely disabled at the push of a button (a killswitch?); Wall-E is fragile (to the point where it survives only by constantly replacing its parts with new ones scavenged from other disabled Wall-Es), has no weapons, operates in a very mechanical, physical, understandable manner, yet through sheer perseverence proves just as enduring as Eve. (In this way Wall-E very much resembles the typical American hero, exemplified by Indiana Jones and John McClane, who win through sheer stubborn refusal to lose, no matter how much damage they take, while Eve compares more to the traditional American villain, gleefully strident from the power of high-tech toys but completely destroyed once said high-tech toys have been disabled by some secret, simple weakness.)

I don't think any of this is really relevant to the heart or meaning of Wall-E, but I find it interesting nonetheless, and anything that gives me reason to remember the movie makes me happy. It is so joyful.

I'm a storyteller. I see the world in stories. That's not saying much, because this is true of everyone. What is a story, after all? It's an organization of reality, an illusionary order imposed by our brains to make sense of the fundamentally nonsensical universe. So why say I'm a storyteller? Because it means something else to most people, and the difference between that meaning and my meaning is what I want to talk about. For those with some knowledge of narrative theory this won't be anything new or interesting, except maybe the stuff about video games and D&D later.

When most people think "story", they think a book, or a movie, or whatever. Words, images, a sequence of events experienced by and actions taken by characters, fictional or non. For most people, a story is a distinct entity, separate from them, that they may borrow for a time but that remains outside of them. If a story is in a forest and no one's around to read it, is it still a story? Most people say yes. The answer is no.

Well, not necessarily, because "story" is just a word and it means whatever you want it to mean, whatever meaning you endow it with, but there are other words for that sort of thing. "Text", usually: if a text is in a forest and no one's around to read it, is it still a text? Yes. (Well, actually, I would say no, because I think that all that really exists is the relationships between things and that the idea of "things" is just another false order constructed by our brains to make sense of nonsense, and so something without any relation to anything else doesn't exist, but that's for another time.) Unless you mean something else. But using a different word isn't the problem; the problem is that people don't accept that anything exists besides text. That, whatever you want to call it, there is something more than text.

This post is something of a sequel to this one.

I'm halfway through season two of The Wire (just finished "All Prologue") and I've got some more thoughts on it and David Simon's other HBO production, Generation Kill (thoughts which of course apply to television and to some extent narratives in general as well).

What strikes me now, especially after getting into Generation Kill, is that the problem I attempted to describe previously already has a perfect title, albeit one not widely used: the "tragedy of verisimilitude". Coined, as far as I know, by Battlestar Galactica's James Callis in a "roundtable" podcast of several of the show's actors and crew (a fascinating, albeit very long, discussion, you can get download it from SciFi's Battlestar site, which unfortunately prevents more direct linking), he lamented that Battlestar's oft-praised dedication to realism (or more accurately verisimilitude) was occasionally a burden, when the principles of physical reality (or the expectations of the audience) made simple stories needlessly complex (or worse, made them impossible to convey believably).

While the problem occasionally rises on Battlestar, it's much more prevalent on the much more grounded Wire and, in a twisted, more acceptable fashion due to its semi-nonfictional nature, Generation Kill. The second season of The Wire begins with the main characters of the first season, who were pulled from various disparate police units to serve on a special detail, scattered into the wind. McNulty is working the boat; Freamon is in Homicide; Kima has a desk job; Daniels is in the basement; etc. The first episode juggles the ongoing fates of these characters while continuing the story of Avon Barksdale's similarly scattered drug crew and introducing an entirely new set of characters at the Baltimore docks (not to mention beginning a plot, although that's clearly, as always on The Wire, a secondary priority). It's a clusterfuck of too many characters, too much to carry, and yet it works in a twisted way, because this is what happens. People move on, with their jobs and with their lives, and the attempt to follow that, rather than unrealistically but more simply keep them together, or bring them back together on another detail for a new case.

You fight like a dairy-farmer.

I always used to get into trouble with people because I say a lot of things I don't mean. Or, rather, I mean them, but other people don't understand what I mean and think I mean something else, which amounts to the same thing from their frame of reference. It doesn't help that much of what I used to say that they didn't understand sounded like insults. Sometimes they weren't--sometimes they were true statements that I actually meant as compliments but due to disparities in ethical philosophies were considered insults by them--but that's not what I want to talk about, because those are easy to explain. I think this a is right, they think a is wrong, I tell them they're a and they flip out. Mathematics.

While I'm using the past tense throughout, of course, none of this is really gone, though it doesn't happen as often as it used to.

Anyway. The other cases, when they were insults, or sort-of, or whatever, are more interesting, because they're more complicated. I learned early on that words were words and that's all they were; that is, an insult was a sound out of someone's mouth and nothing more unless you made it more. ("Sticks and stones can break my bones / but words will never hurt me" was my motto back in the day. Not that I was a particularly bullied child, because I was actually a fairly sociable child in my younger years and anyway most would-be bullies learned quickly that I was quite willing to apply that mantra to the offensive as well as the defensive.) Since then I've always had a strange relationship with language: a fascination, to be sure (I'm an English major, after all), but also a detachment, an awareness of how fragile language is, how easily it can be broken and tossed aside, all its illusory control and power dispersed in a flash, like a flame consuming a cloud of gas.

This is a strange post.

First, a disclaimer: I don't like grand statements about "our times", how they're different or more important than what came before. I think history mostly repeats itself, with minor variations, because despite all our percieved advances humanity hasn't actually changed much since history first became history. Please keep this in mind, for while I try to avoid hyperbole, I'll doubtless engage in some of it anyway.

The current state of the United States is--and here's probably a moment of hyperbole--precarious. I won't be so presumptious as to argue this is a recent change; the United States has never been a great country (except in the sense of important), and that recognition, too, is nothing new. In fact, that's what concerns me the most about recent years. During the Bush administration the executive branch has become a bloated, corrupt arm that has seized as much power as it can, the legislature, even with a supposedly majority opposition, has laid over and played dead, and the judicial branch has publicly become a joke. The Constitution has been shredded, torture has become common-place, and prejudice, manipulation, smearing, and outright lying have become the order of the day.

Having finished the first season of The Wire (and the first episode of season two), I think I've figured out what my problem with it is: I'm not engaged by the characters. I don't mean to say that I don't like The Wire; I think it is brilliant, and great, and powerful, but so far it isn't the best show on television to me, because I don't love it. That sounds cheesy and it's about to get worse. There's no beauty in The Wire (for me). I am cognizant of the quality of what I'm watching, but I don't care.

As a writer I'm a character guy. My first priority in a story is always making the characters true and real; while of course I think about themes and motifs and structure and mechanics and what have you, if it undercuts the characters, it goes. On The Wire, I can't help but feel that the characters are working for the story and not the other way around. A part of it is likely simply that the characters are for the most part quite pedestrian--McNulty, setting aside the quality of the series and simply looking at the substance of his character, is a character I've seen a thousand times before in nearly every cop show ever: self-righteous, arrogant, intelligent, divorced, battling with his wife for custody, fucking another woman. This is more-or-less the sum total of his character at the end of season one. There's nothing interesting here. And the same goes for almost all of the characters. (I find Stringer Bell fascinating, but that may just be me.)

If you somehow weren't aware, season two of Mad Men premiered last night. The episode was everything I expected and hoped for and more, with a couple of surprises along with the general thoughtful evolution of characters that have aged more than a year since we last saw them. (Season two begins in February 1962; I believe season one ended Thanksgiving 1960, although I'm not as sure as I'd like to be.) What struck me--what has always struck me about Mad Men, since I watched the first episode, even as I have grown accustomed to it--was the pacing. Mad Men is a brilliant show, and while these are of necessity rare, it is by no means alone. I do believe, however, that Mad Men is unique, or nearly so, among television shows in its pacing. At the very least, I have never seen another show like it in this regard.

When searching for a way to describe Mad Men to friends who have never seen it, the word that almost always comes to mind is "pensive". So much of the show it seems is not in the dialogue or the actions but in the inaction, the moments of quite solitude when characters simply stare off in the distance, lost in thought. Of course, describing the show like this usually makes it seem boring and dull, but because of the acting and the writing it's not. Because Mad Men is a show about characters, more, a show about characters who are trapped in lives they do not want, in a structure and society they do not like but nonetheless uphold like some kind of nation-spanning Abilene paradox, we understand why they must take a moment, or many moments, to contemplate how fucked up their existences really are (and drink a hell of a lot of alcohol).

John Slattery as Roger Sterling in Mad Men (2007).
And it couldn't be done any other way. If Mad Men were a fast-paced show about action and snappy banter, full of people walking down hallways, issuing quick orders, and exchanging rapid barbs, the characters would never get anywhere, because without those moments of reflection they would never come to the piercing self-awareness whose tragic juxtaposition with the flashy, glamorous action of the ad agency is the heart of the show.

I don't mean to say that such a fast-paced show can't have strong characters--Battlestar Galactica has proven that many times over. Although now I can't help but wonder, considering other things as well, if Battlestar's characters really came across as well as Mad Men's do in its first season. I suspect the answer is no, but I think that's more because Battlestar, as much as I like to think of it as a character drama (and the people behind it, according to press, do, too), in many ways it's not, or at least it's trying to do a lot more than just character drama, and it loses some of the character development in order to further those other goals in the limited time that it has. However, I think this, too, ties into pacing, because could a show really focus on its characters without a slower pace that allows them moments of reflection? A character study or portrait, perhaps, but not any show in which the characters were expected to change and grow, I think.

Pacing doesn't just apply to the style and structure of individual episodes, of course. The pacing of seasons--or even an entire series (here's looking at you, Babylon 5)--also deserve consideration. Episodic series, obviously, don't have any real seasonal or serial pacing, but shows with long-term arcs (sometimes referred to as "novelistic" series) do. Several years ago, following the unlikely runaway success of Lost, "arc-based" shows briefly became a fad on the major networks, with shows like Threshold and Invasion trying to repeat Lost's success by replicating its long-term story (with almost no success). On cable and premium television, of course, there was nothing new about arc-based shows, and arcs have been a fixture even of network television for decades. And the existence of arcs themselves doesn't necessarily constitute a sense of pacing, although it does force those behind a show to at least consider it (I hope).

One of the best examples, or at least one of the most extreme, of such seasonal pacing is The Wire. In the past couple of days I've watched the first ten episodes of season one. The Wire's creator and show-runner, David Simon, has famously compared each season of The Wire to a novel, with each season telling a single long, over-arcing plot and (somewhat infamously) early episodes being devoted (as in the early chapters of a novel, the analogy goes) to character development and exposition rather than direct plot development. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the "novelistic" moniker: yes, it's closer to a novel than anything else I've seen on television, but nonetheless it's not a novel, and the comparison tends to be used more to implicitly reference the supposed superiority of literature to television rather than any real commentary for the structure of the show.

At left: The Wire (2008). At right: a book (photo by Lars Aronsson).
Setting that aside, however, The Wire does demonstrate a very deliberate and slow seasonal pacing that marks it from other shows. After watching as much as I have, I'm honestly quite glad that I never tried to watch this show as it premiered, because the individual episodes are so obviously simply a part of a larger whole that I'm not sure how satisfying it would have been to watch only one a week. It's not uncommon in The Wire for details mentioned in one scene of one episode to come to bear relevance on the plot three, four, or much more episodes later. Several times, such details are startling "cliffhanger" revelations in the final scene of an episode, which are then never mentioned and have no obvious impact on the next episode. Watching it as I am, in close procession, this isn't particularly bothersome, but it does at times feel like sloppy television. The Wire is supposed to be the best show on television, and I'm not denying its brilliance, but even the best have flaws, and to me this seems one of them.

I don't mean to degrade arc-based plotting in general; in fact, quite the opposite: I love arc-based shows and strongly prefer them over episodic series, which tend towards popcorn entertainment. (This is intrinsic to the nature of episodic television, I think: in order for a show to be episodic, to begin with the same premise every episode, it must end with the same premise every episode. Nothing can change, leading usually to the frequent usage of a "reset button" that fixes whatever changes might have occurred as a result of the episode's events and prevents any real development of the plot or characters.) But the episodic nature of television cannot be ignored or denied.

A television season is not a thirteen-hour movie (and even a thirteen-hour movie would have its own special pacing requirements rather than simply being a feature length film extended so many hours); it is a progression of thirteen, or twenty, or however many episodes, each of which are a contained unit. While nowadays sales of television DVDs are strong and growing, and many people are encountering critically acclaimed but popularly ignored series for the first time in this format that obviates some of these pacing concerns, this is still true. (Watching a season on DVD could be directly compared to watching a thirteen-hour movie--but again, that's not the same as a regular movie.)

Mad Men knows this, as does Battlestar. I honestly think the best example of such episodic yet arc-based television may be the first season of Veronica Mars, a critical darling that skirted cancellation for three years before finally (and tragically) losing the battle. While the following seasons were questionable as to their greatness, the first season is to me among the best ever on television, and it perfectly balances a season-long mystery plot, with a slow progression of clues, red herrings, and true revelations, with cleverly done individual mysteries in each episode, along with seasonal character development and well-developed guest characters in individual episodes. While I watched the first (and second) seasons on DVD, I never felt that the series would have been difficult to watch weekly (and I did watch the third season weekly, which handled the structure about as well, if the actual plots and characters were not as well-done).

Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars (2007).
Ironically, the first season of Veronica Mars was developed from an unpublished novel by creator Rob Thomas; supposedly most of the progression of the seasonal mystery was taken more-or-less directly from this novel. (This also to some degree explains the quality of the first season's big mystery in comparison to the next two, which were developed on the time of the series.) But Veronica Mars is not a novel, and doesn't try to be, and that is its strength. I have never seen anything pointing one way or the other, but I assume that the vast majority of the individual episodic mysteries were written specifically for the series and the general pace of the novel greatly slowed in order to accommodate the new format of the story. It is because Veronica Mars recognized its format and didn't try to pretend to be something else--regardless of its origins--that it succeeds so well (in addition to brilliant writing and acting, of course).

Recently I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in theaters for the second time. I'm a true Indiana Jones fanatic--hung above my desk, right next to my computer, are all four movie posters, framed--so when I saw the film for the first time, most of my response to it was as from the view of a fan who had read over ten years' worth of rumors and reports (basically, from when I first got internet access) about a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Even so, my analytical brain went into action when I saw it the first time, and there were a number of things that intrigued me about the film. I don't consider it a particularly good movie: I think it's certainly the weakest of the four, and what I have to say here is not meant to elevate the quality of the movie in any way. But there were things that seemed to deserve further thought than usual with the simple popcorn entertainment that I consider Indiana Jones, and so on my second viewing I went in with an eye for something more. Spoilers from here on, for all four Indiana Jones films.

What I realized, or decided, or constructed, was that The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not just a new movie about Indiana Jones; it is a movie about the death of Indiana Jones--the idea of Indiana Jones, the persona separate from the person of Henry Jones, Jr. Upon thinking about it, this is really strikingly obvious. After all, the film ends with Indiana Jones getting married, something that could not even be contemplated with regards to the Indy of the original trilogy, and an almost literal passing-of-the-hat to Indy's son (although "Mutt Jones and the whatever" doesn't seem to me as something that would play well on a movie poster). But it's not simply the death of one man's adventuring career, it's the death of the entire idea of adventuring for "fortune and glory" (as Indy famously quips in The Temple of Doom), of death-defying stunts against insidious villains, of mysterious artifacts of ancient and unknown power. More than that, it's the death of the unrepentant American optimism of the thirties and forties, when Americans believed in an American dream despite the Great Depression and later believed in their absolute righteousness in the fight against the Nazis, so gloriously demonstrated in the adventure serials that the original Indiana Jones trilogy were inspired by. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is about the end of an era.

For years there have been (at least to my perhaps biased perceptions) two shows that have dominated television critics' articles as the "best shows on TV": Battlestar Galactica and The Wire. I've watched Battlestar since the beginning (and fallen completely in love with it, and become known as something of an evangelist for it), but I was never able to watch The Wire because it's an HBO show. Recently I've finally been able to start watching it--so far, only the first episode--and I've been trying to put my reaction into words. It's a very weird thing, to read about the greatness of something for five-odd years before finally getting to experience it; it's a recipe for overhyped expectations, disillusionment, disappointment. I'm not disappointed, so far; but disillusionment would be a fair assessment. I don't mean that in a bad way--the first episode was great--and to be honest it doesn't so much have to do with the critical praise as it does with the show it's paired with.

Battlestar is a show about the nuclear annihilation of humanity by killer robots and the human survivors' attempts to find a new life and a new way to live. It's a character drama of the highest caliber, yes, but it's also a show with space battles and nuclear showdowns and sex (surprising amounts of sex, really) and all a manner of infantile geek fun. Watching Battlestar, I get to indulge both the intellectual, artistic, philosophical brain and the instinctual, visceral, kiddie brain. And that's not just a great package, it also allows the show to occasionally transform visceral fantasies into their horrifying realities in a moment, twisting the infantile pleasure of watching spaceships blow up into a shocking moment of self-awareness. Which is great and lovely and awesome.

That's not what The Wire is. This should be obvious, of course. The Wire is, after all, a cop show. It's not about nuclear showdowns and killer robots. But somehow, in the years I spent hearing about the other best show on television, I connected the two in my brain, or at least got used to the idea of great television being both entertaining and intelligent. I don't mean to say that The Wire isn't entertaining (even though that's what I just said), but that--well, it's not visceral. There's nothing "awesome" (in the popular sense of explosions and sex) about The Wire, or at least not the first episode. It's very well-written and touches on a lot of important themes and says a lot of important things, but I didn't get a spectacularly wide grin on my face when I watched it like I do with Battlestar or even (to reference a previous post) The Dark Knight.

At left: "The Target", The Wire (2002). At right: "Exodus, Part II", Battlestar Galactica (2006).
That's not a bad thing, necessarily, of course. Or maybe it is. One of my other favorite shows is/was Firefly, the infamously short-changed sci-fi/western from Joss Whedon. Firefly and Battlestar have often been paired as the vanguards of a new type of science fiction. In the sense of "actually really good", that's true, but beyond that there's not a lot to compare them, I think. The striking thing about Firefly (although it's not really striking to anyone familiar with Whedon's work) is its method of combining moments of seriousness and comedy, transitioning between the two smoothly and elegantly, and using the combination of the two to elevate both of them to higher levels. (Whedon talks about this in the director's commentary to Serenity, the Firefly feature film.) Watching Firefly, the drama is more dramatic because of the comedy, and vice versa, much in the same way as the viscerality and intellectualism of Battlestar complement and elevate each other.

I used to just say Battlestar and Firefly were different shows and that's that. I still agree with the first part, but after watching a recent episode, "The Hub", penned by regular Whedon writer Jane Espenson I came to think there's more to say on the subject. (Espenson maintains a blog on writing that has discussed this subject in more detail and with her own expertise weighing in. I whole-heartedly recommend it for any aspiring writer.) While Espenson wrote several Battlestar episodes prior to "The Hub" (she's now a co-executive producer, I believe), this was the first in which a substantial amount of comedy is present. And it made the episode one of the most memorable of the series, as well as making some of the dramatic moments (particularly between the characters of Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar, around whom most of the earlier comedy is based) strikingly poignant.

Battlestar attempted comedy once before, in a season one episode called "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down". It's one of my favorites from the first season, and I think it's hilarious, but it's a very odd episode, very obviously different from the rest of the series, very obviously intended to be a comedy (albeit, in Battlestar fashion, a very, very dark one). "The Hub" is not like this: the humor doesn't stand out, and the episode contains some of the most serious and important scenes in the series.


At left: Edward James Olmos in "Pegasus", Battlestar Galactica (2005). At right: Adam Baldwin in "The Message", Firefly (2003).
I like Battlestar more than Firefly, but I'm the first to admit that a large part of that may be the fact that I have four seasons of Battlestar to love and not even one complete season of Firefly. I have often wondered if I would have liked Firefly more had it survived--a pointless question, taken superficially, but what I really want to know: is Firefly's style of blending comedy and drama (and not in the asinine "dramedy" that usually manages to accomplish neither, but in a more natural sense) better than the hardcore bleak blackness of Battlestar and (even moreso, it would seem) The Wire? Is the blending of the visceral and the intellectual on Battlestar better than the so-far almost purely intellectual of The Wire?

Since I'm posing the question, of course, I lean towards yes. I won't pretend that I'm sure of that. (And since I'm rather terrible at writing comedy, there's a part of me that would really prefer the answer be no.) But I think what the essence here is not so much comedy and drama, or the intellectual and visceral, but just the idea of combining, blending, mixing. I think that truth, what's right, is in general terms a matter of openness, acceptance, reconciliation. I won't explain fully here--because doing so would be an entirely other, very long essay--but I tend to see things in terms of apophasis (defining things through negatives, or just defining things, putting limits on them, categorizing, and so on) and entanglement (embracing differences, undefinability, the vagueness of existence, and so on). Society, structure, systems (not to mention "the plan") are apophatic, while life and reality is entangled.

Fiction, or art, or any construction (including what is generally termed "non-fiction") lies at an interesting point along this spectrum. As a construction there's an inherent amount of apophasis to a work--there is only what the creator created, right?--but in the end, like everything else, it always becomes entangled. Works come to mean much more than their creators ever intended. And to embrace that, to embrace the undefinability and not try to limit a work to one specific frame, is what's right.

That's a far cry from the difference between comedy and drama or between viscerality and intellectualism, of course. I don't mean to suggest that they're equivalent--or maybe I do. To be honest I'm not sure what I think about all of this. I'm basically just talking out of my ass and hoping to find a solution as I write. It hasn't worked--it rarely does--but I have, I think, managed to organize my thoughts on the subject better. And that will have to do for now.

This isn't a review; so if that's what you're looking for, go somewhere else. (Preferably to a theater, where you can buy a ticket to see The Dark Knight.) Nor is this a critical analysis, although that's closer. I think the best term for it would be a "response" to The Dark Knight--if only because that's a very general, almost meaningless term. This is my attempt to engage the film on level beyond "holy fuck, that was awesome" (although that is a perfectly legitimate response, and one I agree with completely). In case you haven't gotten the hint yet, there be spoilers ahead.

I'm going to delineate three phases I went through with The Dark Knight. I didn't actually go through three distinct phases--as with everything, these categories and definitions and limitations are mere approximations of the true, gradual, undefinable, limitless experience--but they're useful for what I want to do here, so bear with me.

The first phase, beginning shortly after the film started and continuing for several hours after walking out the theater, was the "holy fuck, that was awesome" phase. I sat in my car with a huge grin on my face, incapable of being distracted or annoyed by anything, completely overcome with joy at the experience of the film. I went straight from the movie to a party with many people who had seen just seen it that day or the night before (this was the Friday it was released) and spent a lot of time discussing the general awesomeness of the film as well as specific moments. (The scene where the Joker makes the pencil disappear seemed to be a favorite. I agree.)

Life is change; stasis is death. I say it again and again and again because people--perhaps myself most of all--need to hear it again and again and again. But how do we change? Or, more precisely and importantly, how do we choose to change? Because externally-induced change is omnipresent, unavoidable, and while not exactly irrelevant, at least not particularly useful as a measure of life success.

I ask this because the directive for change--real, personal, individual change--seems to exist in direct conflict with my other personal primary directive: honesty. I value honesty above all else; I think that without honesty, we cannot reach understanding (and thus faith, mercy, and the ideal/divinity that that trinity represents to me). Normally I come down unequivocally on the side of honesty in all questions of morality--I think "little white lies" are always harmful and malicious despite intentions because they represent an attempt to control another person, which no one has a right to do. But what about when you're trying to control yourself? To change yourself, you have to lie to yourself--you have to keep repeating a lie to yourself, over and over and over, until you believe it. I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people, I don't want to hurt people... We have to accept what we are, face our deepest, repressed desires and fuck-ups and reconcile with them in order to begin to fix ourselves, but what then? It seems like the only answer is this kind of fucked-up doublethink, lying to yourself and knowing that you're lying but doing it enough that eventually it's true because you believe it is.

An old page from one of my notebooks, circa September of last year.