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.