Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!
By Edward Copeland
Without a doubt, one song stands heads and shoulders above all others written by Stephen Sondheim for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and "Comedy Tonight" holds that perch. Even people unaware of the movie or the stage show of Forum probably know that infectious number that opens and closes both versions. No more proof need be delivered to back this claim than the sheer number of performances, spoofs and use of the song as background music for clips and slideshows that I stumbled upon on the World Wide Web. Who knows how many more are out there? One used the song to back scenes from The West Wing, but the quality of the video was so poor, I wasn't going to use it until I stumbled upon a better version. Another person did three separate Bewitched montages, two of which employed identical moments only one used Zero Mostel's 1962 original cast recording version while the other took Nathan Lane's 1996 revival recording. I chose not to toss those in this collection because each montage only lasts 42 seconds, cutting off the song early. Never fear though, that still left me with plenty of options. Before I "open up the curtain," I thought I'd start with a clip of "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience" from The Frogs, a 1974 musical staged and "freely adapted" by Burt Shevelove (co-author of Forum) from the play by Aristophanes (written in 405 B.C.) and staged in the Yale University Swimming Pool with a cast of Ivy League students whose ranks included one Meryl Streep. Sondheim originally composed "Invocation" as the opening number for Forum when his first attempt ("Love Is in the Air") wasn't working during out-of-town tryouts. The show's legendary director George Abbott, according to Sondheim's Finishing the Hat, didn't find "Invocation" "hummable enough" — no doubt inspiring the producer's complaint in Merrily We Roll Along. Thankfully, that led to the blessing of "Comedy Tonight" and "Invocation" returned with the addition of the hysterical "Instructions to the Audience" when Sondheim and Shevelove collaborated on The Frogs. The clip below comes from the BBC Proms program given July 31, 2010, to celebrate Sondheim's 80th birthday. With the backing of The BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell, Daniel Evans, a Tony nominee for best actor in the 2008 revival of Sunday in the Park with George, and Simon Russell Beale, a Tony nominee for best actor in the 2004 revival of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, perform the number.
As I mentioned, people love to use "Comedy Tonight" as a backdrop to scenes from their favorite television shows or, in one instance, a series' cast actually performed the song themselves. I thought I'd start with TV and go chronologically from the oldest to the newest. First, this variety show's ensemble performed the number in the show's third episode ever on Oct. 18, 1976. Honestly, it's pure coincidence that I led into this with the number from The Frogs.
Anyone recall the last time they saw a rerun of this hit 1980s detective series with romantic banter between the leads? No, not Moonlighting. I refer to Remington Steele, the series that made Pierce Brosnan a star during its run from 1982-1987. What did happen to Stephanie Zimbalist?
The English certainly aren't immune to the charms of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Five major productions of the musical have played London since 1963 (with its original Pseudolus, Frankie Howerd, reprising the role in a 1986 revival) and a company that toured throughout the United Kingdom. Some enterprising fan of the musical combined the song with the long-running British spy series MI-5 (originally titled Spooks) that ran 10 seasons beginning in 2002.
This West Wing fan not only sets scenes to a version of "Comedy Tonight" but tosses in some of "Love Is in the Air," the first opening song that Sondheim wrote for Forum as well.
Finally, since in some ways the farcical elements of Forum almost make it a cartoon, its final television salute should, most appropriately, pair it with an animated work, namely Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran from 2005-2008.
The song brings out the fun in everyday folk as well as we see here where "Comedy Tonight" underscores a year-end slideshow presentation for players, coaches and fans of the Long Beach State track and field team.
What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas if you post it on YouTube as with this parody of "Comedy Tonight" performed by the master of ceremonies (officially named MC Vegas) for an annual Edwardian Ball.
Now, I haven't heard much of them lately but the concept of flash mobs shouldn't be an unfamiliar one to most reading this. Apparently, at University of Western Ontario, you might be able to get course credits for participating in them since they appear to do them so often. The campus' improv broke out once into Handel's "Messiah." They interrupted this lecture with — you guessed it — "Comedy Tonight" Impressively, they choreographed some moves as well as learning the words.
I'm not sure what's funnier: That this boy named Ben (I believe his last name is Lerner) would perform this spoof of "Comedy Tonight" at his bar mitzvah (interrupted by his younger sister Nina) or that the explanatory note by his father informs us that when dad posted it years ago, the video and audio had problems, so we're watching a corrected version that he has labeled Take 2. I didn't try to track down the promised one that Nina later sang at her bat mitzvah.
Also on YouTube sits, as you'd expect, the song playing against photos of various Republican presidential contenders. I almost included it, but that's really like shooting water in a barrel, isn't it? Why waste the space? They make the point so much more brilliantly when they open their mouths than when we just look at them, even if we do see Rick Santorum chowing down on a very phallic-looking food item. Instead, we'll skip to the movies. As with television, I'm going to do this chronologically, starting with the oldest and we're going way back to 1928 and one of the last gasps of silent German Expressionism, Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs starring Conrad Veidt as the creepy villain Gwynplaine, 14 years before Veidt became best known as Major Strasser in Casablanca.
For pure ambition, you have to give it to the students at The College of New Jersey Musical Theatre staged at the Ewing, N.J., campus a full-fledged musical based on the original Star Wars trilogy spoofing songs from a wide variety of musicals. The show opens with "Trilogy Tonight."
The title for the single best-edited video that I found involving a single subject probably deserves to go to the true identity of puddleglum128 for mating Zero Mostel's version to scenes from Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs. I'd call it perfect if it didn't contain the strange audio splice in the middle, but the right moments of Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and the rest get used.
Christopher Nolan's second take on Batman, The Dark Knight, earns two takes of "Comedy Tonight!" The first, staged by The Pauper Players of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the group's annual Broadway Melodies in 2009 where they parody different works. (The other two that year were Lost and Super Mario Bros.) The second video features photos from Nolan's film set to Nathan Lane singing the finale version of the song and also includes stills of Gerard Way.
For the last montage, which must have required a tremendous amount of time and effort by CRAIGSWORLD1427, he asked people about what movies throughout film history tickled their funny bones the most and then assembled various bits and pieces (including dialogue) with the song for this nearly 10-minute long package. It's worth it though. Chuck Workman, be damned.
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Labels: Animation, Books, Christopher Nolan, Demme, Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Lost, Music, Musicals, Sondheim, Star Wars, Stoppard, Streep, Television, Theater
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Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Mirror, mirror in the sky
By Edward Copeland
With Another Earth, you're never quite certain what direction the screenplay by director Mike Cahill and lead actress Brit Marling plans to take you. Given the title and the opening moments that detail the approach of a planet which seems to be Earth's twin, you might suspect that a low-budget sci-fi tale is warming up — then Another Earth takes a sudden twist and you realize that it has a much more human story to tell about guilt and redemption and the new planet exists merely as a subplot and metaphor.
When we initially meet Rhoda Williams (Marling), she's a successful high school student celebrating her acceptance to M.I.T. when news comes over the radio about the sudden approach of a planet that resembles Earth in every way. As the inebriated teen takes her eyes off the road momentarily to gaze into the cosmos, she misses a stoplight and slams into another vehicle, killing a mother and her young son and placing her husband (William Mapother) in a coma.
Flash foward four years and Rhoda finishes her prison sentence (though her identity remained secret since she was a juvenile at the time). Rhoda works as a janitor at a school (Wes Anderson regular Kumar Pallana plays one of her co-workers) while she follows the news on what has been named Earth 2, including a contest offered by a superrich entrepreneur for a free trip to the planet. She begins researching what happened to the surviving husband, who eventually came out of his coma. She discovers his name is John Burroughs, once a successful composer and musician who also taught music at Yale.
Rhoda summons enough courage to go to his door with the intention of apologizing for what she did, but she chickens out at the last moment and claims to be from a cleaning service offering a trial of their service which Burroughs accepts. Her cleaning becomes a regular gig, though she rips up the checks he gives her. A warm relationship develops between the two, making it even more difficult for Rhoda to share her horrible secret.
More research on Earth 2 reveals that the planet doesn't just look like Earth, it appears to be an exact duplicate, containing the same people, places and things present on the original and the doppelgangers behave exactly the same until they become aware of their twin's existence. The revelation point for Rhoda's secret comes when the essay that she wrote for the contest wins. She shares the news with John, who insists on a celebration — though during the triumphant dinner, Burroughs pleads with Rhoda not to go to space and Rhoda decides to come clean.
Another Earth doesn't break any ground and the film's trajectory isn't hard to predict, but Marling and Mapother give good enough performances to make this quiet film work. It doesn't have anything new to say about guilt or redemption and Earth 2 plays as if it's an excuse to make its simple story seem fresher than it is, but Another Earth doesn't commit any sins that make you roll your eyes or feel as if you've wasted your time.
Marling's solid turn as Rhoda proves all the more impressive given that she co-wrote and co-produced the film as well. Mapother also does nicely in a role unlike anything I've seen him in before. I remember him best as Marisa Tomei's abusive jerk of a husband in In the Bedroom. Checking his credits, it seems he's spent most his time in episodic television, including a recurring role on Lost.
Another Earth isn't a great film, but it does have its moments and I've certainly seen worse.
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Labels: 10s, Lost, Tomei, Wes Anderson
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Friday, June 17, 2011
14 Questions for Kim Dickens
By Edward Copeland
As frustrating and annoying as it can be at times, in the end, you have to love the development of social media. If it didn't exist, I'd never have been able to have a virtual friendship with actress Kim Dickens that developed over a couple of years and she would never have agreed to do an email interview with me that I could post as the second season of HBO's Treme, where she portrays chef Janette Desautel, winds down. (This season's final three episodes debut the next three Sundays at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central.) The series already has been renewed for a third season, so Treme and Janette shall be returning. That's good news for both fans of the series and the talented actress. It's also worth noting that these questions were written and submitted after the fifth episode, when Janette had walked out on her job at the fictional New York restaurant Brulard but had yet to start work at the real restaurant Le Bernardin.
Dickens hails from the South, Huntsville, Ala., to be exact. (Her birthday happens to be Saturday.) She first came to my attention on another great HBO series, Deadwood, and I "friended" her based on that, before Treme had even aired. I didn't know she was in it until I saw the first episode. All I really knew about Treme was that it was co-created by David Simon who had co-created HBO's The Wire, one of my all-time favorite dramas (arguably the best that's ever been). However, Dickens been working in a lot of other places, recently and further back, that I didn't catch her in. Having not watched either show, I didn't realize she had parts on Lost and Friday Night Lights. I did catch her in the surprise box office hit that won Sandra Bullock her Oscar, The Blind Side, but I didn't realize her other films included the 1998 Great Expectations (Dickens does Dickens), Hollow Man, House of Sand and Fog and Thank You for Smoking. Soon she'll be seen in the Footloose remake.
When Dickens played Joanie Stubbs on David Milch's late, great, poetically profane and prematurely buried Deadwood. Joanie began as the handler of the whores for Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) at his gambling palace The Bella Luna before she eventually talked him into backing her own brothel where she served as madam. Unfortunately, being a manager had its drawbacks, especially when one of your customers turns out to be a well-connected psycho who works for George Hearst and tends to slaughter your employees. Even more tragically, arguments between HBO, Milch and the production company over financing and other issues ended Deadwood after a mere three seasons, instead of Milch's projected five-season run. For awhile, there was talk that HBO would back the filming of two, two-hour Deadwood movies to give the series something resembling a proper sendoff, but that never happened.
EDWARD COPELAND: Do you still wish those two two-hour Deadwood movies could be made to wrap it up since the show ended so unnecessarily and prematurely?
KIM DICKENS: Yes, I do. I'm pretty sure all of us would be happy to do those movies, even now. It was such a disservice to the beautiful art of Deadwood to not let that story finish. It still hurts.
Of course, more than just centuries separate Joanie Stubbs and Janette Desautel but as much as all the characters on Deadwood let the curse words fly, Joanie's mouth seemed slightly cleaner than the other denizens in that western town. In fact, I theorized in one of my recaps of Treme this year, that Janette might actually swear more than Joanie did.
EC: I raised the idea that Janette might actually cuss more often than Joanie Stubbs. We don’t have an equal amount of episodes yet to compare but since you read the lines, what do you think?
KD: That's what I said to David Simon and (co-creator) Eric Overmyer…I thought I just may curse more in Treme than I did in Deadwood. Hard to imagine, but it may be true!
While Dickens no longer lives in Huntsville, she still has relatives who do. Fortunately, the destructive tornado that struck the city earlier this year didn't affect them, but Huntsville has a long history of tragic tornadic activity, including when Dickens was growing up there.
EC: Your relatives in your native Huntsville, Ala., were thankfully unscathed by the recent tornadoes, but Huntsville did see some big ones while you were growing up. While none came close to the scale of Katrina’s aftermath, did any of those storms give you personal insight going into Treme?
KD: No, not other than being familiar with weather becoming an annual threat during particular seasons. Growing up in tornado country, I definitely experienced some frightening weather conditions and close calls but was spared any real destruction. I no longer live there, but my family does and my heart has been broken for all of the lost lives and for all of the destruction in so many Southern and Midwestern towns.
EC: Before taking the role of Janette, did you have much interest in serious cooking? Have you learned a lot, especially this year with Anthony Bourdain on staff?
KD: I have definitely learned a lot during all of the kitchen and cooking training that i have done for Treme. My cooking has definitely improved, and I'll be honest and say I was a just the basics kind of a cook. And now, I may have a little more confidence. Unfortunately I haven't worked one on one with Mr. Bourdain. I have however been trained at two of Tom Colicchio 's Craft restaurants, Susan Spicer's Bayona, and one afternoon at Providence in L.A. Also, on set during the scenes we have our own consulting chef, Chris Lynch, on hand at all times. The training is ongoing and will remain so. It's not easy making something like shucking oysters look like you've been doing it for 10 years or so!
EC: What do you think Janette is searching for in life? This year, we’ve seen her engage in one-night stands with strangers and possibly drinking a bit more than she should.
KD: Well, I'm not sure what Janette is searching for in life, but I know she loves to cook. She's driven to do it, against all odds. And cooking and being a chef, I've come to understand is a very noble profession. Chefs and kitchen staffs work long, hard hours. AND, I've heard that sometimes the hard road of being a cook can lead to lots of drinking and a sometimes pathetic love life. I think Janette was having one of those moments this season.
EC: As flighty as he is, do you think Janette harbors deeper feelings for Davis than she’d admit? That seemed to be a particularly wistful grin she had when she read his note with the box of booze.
KD: I think they had a nice understanding those two, a real friends with benefits kind of a situation. And I think as annoyed as Janette could get with Davis, she could also be very charmed and humored by him. I think it's clear those characters are fond of each other with no resentments left over.
EC: Wendell Pierce mentioned how so many stories are separate that he really doesn’t know what everyone’s doing until he sees a completed episode and feels as if he doesn’t know some in the cast. Janette seems to be the character who has interacted with more of the ensemble than any other person. In two episodes in a row this season, you shared scenes with both Lambreaux men, Albert and Delmond (Clarke Peters and Rob Brown). Are there any characters Janette hasn’t met yet, other than Jon Seda’s new one, or ones you’d like to work with either for the first time or in a larger way?
KD: I want to work with Khandi Alexander (LaDonna) this year! i love her character and she's just a fabulous person. Oh and also Elizabeth Ashley (Aunt Mimi). She's the original Maggie the Cat…I love her (from Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). I'm so glad I get to cross paths with some of our other main characters, I really love it. I especially love that scene with Clarke this year. I don't know why, it just felt so "by chance," these strangers who were in sync. But I hope I cross with Khandi soon. And by the way, not only is Rob Brown handsome, he's hilarious.
EC: How odd did it feel to be on the set in Louisiana pretending to be in New York when everyone else’s scenes were set in New Orleans?
KD: Not strange at all, I've been doing that kind of stuff for years. Just part of the job. one set is a NY apartment and the next set is a New Orleans radio station. That's filmmaking. It probably felt more odd to be a character on the show and actually shooting a lot of scenes IN New York away from the rest of the cast.
EC: Victor Slezak created such a great, frightening character in Enrico Brulard, was his role one of those where it’s difficult to just be yourselves when the cameras were off for fear somehow that would lessen the tension when the cameras came on again?
KD: Victor was so wonderful and so prepared and is such a terrific actor. Everyone works differently, but he was easy and able to just relax and talk in between takes and scenes. We had a couple of moments where we broke up laughing during some takes, but that happens…and it's always a nice jolt of energy and a challenge to your focus.
EC: Acting is such an uncertain profession in terms of employment, how did you react when you got the word that Treme had been renewed for a third season?
KD: I was just overjoyed. It's a relief to know you have a job to come back to and it's so exciting to know I get to come back and be a part of such a meaningful show.
EC: How long do you stay in New Orleans when Treme is shooting? Where is home when you aren’t shooting the show?
KD: We shoot the show for about seven months in New Orleans. And my home is in Los Angeles.
EC: While Treme has shown what a diverse selection of music exists in New Orleans, do you have particular musical tastes or are you more eclectic?
KD: I'm a country girl, so I like a lot of country music. But I recently did an interview for The Onion where you put your iPod on shuffle and discuss the 10 songs that randomly come up. Turns out my musical taste is pretty diverse.
Treme almost wasn't Dickens' second HBO series to air following Deadwood. She'd been cast in a comedy called 12 Miles of Bad Road starring Lily Tomlin, Mary Kay Place, Gary Cole and even her Deadwood co-star Sean Bridgers (he was Al's dimwitted worker Johnny). Its executive producers were Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason of Designing Women fame. Bloodworth-Thomason co-wrote the series, six episodes were filmed and HBO even aired promos touting its eventual premiere, but it never aired.
EC: What happened with 12 Miles of Bad Road? It had such a notable cast and producers. I’ve never heard of a series that filmed six episodes before a decision was made not to air it.
KD: I think it boils down to bad timing. The show was brilliant and really, really funny and subversive. We shot six and then the writer's strike happened, which lasted about three-four months I think. During that time, they decided to let us go. Our show had begun under the previous head of HBO, so sometimes shows get tossed aside for the new boss's ideas and shows. It happens a lot. Another artistic disservice! Here's the old trailer:
EC: Do you have anything planned during the hiatus that you’d like to mention?
KD: Right now, I'm taking a little vacation. Nothing is scheduled at the moment. But, if the right thing comes along, I'll jump on.
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Labels: Clarke Peters, David Simon, Deadwood, E. Ashley, HBO, Interview, Kim Dickens, Lily Tomlin, Lost, Milch, Overmyer, Remakes, Television, Tennessee Williams, The Wire, Treme, Wendell Pierce
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Monday, March 14, 2011
Catching up with The Walking Dead
By Edward Copeland
As I've grown older, it's a rare occurrence when I start watching a new television series from the moment it premieres. There are exceptions, HBO series such as Boardwalk Empire or Treme and TNT's Men of a Certain Age to name some recent instances, but by and large I wait, usually catching up after a season or two hits DVD and then deciding if that's something I want to follow when it airs regularly. That being said, I just finished watching AMC's first season of The Walking Dead.
When I first heard about The Walking Dead, I have to admit I was skeptical despite AMC being on a roll with two of my favorite dramas Mad Men and the best drama currently on television, Breaking Bad. While I even mentioned in my review of the movie Zombieland, that those creatures seem to be the most versatile monsters around with a seemingly infinite number of ways to play them, I thought that really could apply mainly to movies or a miniseries at best, not to a continuing series.
Having now seen the six-episode first season of The Walking Dead, I must admit that I still wonder how long this series can keep going (and the double meaning of the show's title seems a bit on the nose for my taste). Admittedly, I'm going to be sketchy on plot details for others such as myself out there who haven't watched the first season yet. I never watched Lost, but I imagine they can stumble upon more groups of human survivors to prolong the battle for survival with the building of a new community and get chances for solid guest turns such as Noah Emmerich's in the first season finale, but I fear at some point it will get monotonous, especially when the credits sort of give away who might be zombie food by listing them as guest stars or outside the main credits.
Those questions about its longevity aside, the first six episodes were pretty damn good with enough turns in the story that it took you places that you didn't expect. While most of the cast is serviceable, it could use a lot more in the way of character development. When in the season finale one character decides to end their life rather than go on facing battles with the undead, it would have had a lot more resonance if the character had been developed more over the previous five episodes.
Old hand Michael Rooker's brief appearances as a racist human survivor who apparently severed his own hand to escape and still lurks out there somewhere sort of put the rest of the cast to shame. It's not that the acting is bad, it's just that the majority of the cast aren't given much of a chance so far to show how talented they are or they aren't. Lead Andrew Lincoln plays the noble former lawman, but a rather colorless one, and we get lots of types: the redneck, the wifebeater, the abused wife, the jealous brother, the overprotective sister, the resourceful young guy etc. I know we could get more juice from the talents of Jeffrey DeMunn as the pseudo-patriarch Dale and Laurie Holden as Angela if we just knew more about them.
Even with that weakness, those six episodes were compulsively watchable. Whenever AMC would rerun the series, I hated that they would do it all in one evening because I didn't want to devote six hours to it. However, when I received the two DVDs arrived in the mail, I ended up watching five of the episodes in one night, so that has to say something.
It's interesting that the series, though based on a series of graphic novels, was developed by Frank Darabont who made two of his three feature films (the great Shawshank Redemption and the cloying bore The Green Mile) from works by Stephen King since much of the time The Walking Dead reminded me of King's novel The Stand.
Until season two, I'm gonna reserve judgment. Six episodes really isn't enough for a final verdict. It usually takes about four episodes for a new series to hit its stride (and the fourth episode happened to be the first really good one, I thought). The Walking Dead needs to beef up its character development and avoid the trap of overstaying its welcome, but I can't escape the feeling that this would work much better as a miniseries than a multi-season one.
UPDATE: Since I've finished the first half of season two, most of my predictions have come to pass. They stumble on a new group of survivors. No surprise there. The resolution of the missing Sophia (Madison Lintz) did get handled well, though I suspected that was her fate. The Walking Dead continues to have the problem I complained about after season one. Except for DeMunn's Dale and, I would add Norman Reedus' Daryl, character development has been sparse, to the point that I wonder if it's not so much a lack of development as it is just bad acting. Shane certainly has changed but Jon Bernthal plays him so over-the-top, you have to think that more than Dale would have noticed.
In fact, Dale seems to be the only character allowed to notice when anyone acts screwy or might be pregnant. Is he a Jedi? Andrew Lincoln's Rick is almost literally a block of wood. The survivors they ran into led by Scott Wilson were instantly developed better by virtue of the higher level of their acting ability. Too bad Pruitt Taylor Vince had such a short run. Then again — they never found the body.
Overall, The Walking Dead has grown old on me and fast. I find myself turning it on, but being easily distracted to do something else so I always record it on the off chance I might miss something when my mind wanders. At some point, so will my channel tuner.
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Labels: Boardwalk Empire, Books, Breaking Bad, HBO, Lost, Mad Men, Television, Treme
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Monday, June 28, 2010
The Golden Age of TV drama?
By Edward Copeland
When The West Wing premiered, my mother expressed how glad she was that there finally was a show that wasn't about cops, lawyers or doctors. (She watched that show until the end, I gave up after the first two seasons once I started to realize you could put any character's lines into another's mouth and it wouldn't make a difference: They all sounded exactly the same.) Still, I understood her complaint and in the years since, it truly has been a bountiful time, thanks to the expansion of the cable universe, for TV dramas to explore new and different type of subjects. Most of the network fare still sticks to the docs and crime procedurals, but what glorious ideas have been springing forth elsewhere on the dial.
Even though I don't watch all the series that have driven the drama into new and exciting directions (or in some cases, I've started them and then gave up), it really is an exciting time for television. Though I've been a
movie lover far and above anything else for all my life, I've had to acknowledge that in recent years, it's television that's been far more willing to take chances than the film industry, which seems obsessed with sequels and remakes of movies that aren't that old to begin with. While great movies still turn up, I really can't recall the last time a new film excited me the same way a series such as AMC's Breaking Bad does. There really isn't a television antecedent for the story of a man who is dying of cancer who becomes a meth-making master to leave a nest egg for his family. The story has the makings for a great movie, but it's even better on television because there's more room for layering and character development over time. Also, it builds anticipation week to week, season to season as to what happens next. It's difficult to remember back to when films could do that for me on a regular basis.Now the interesting programs are spread across the dial but though it's their slogan (and by now a cliche), for a lengthy time it really did seem like it was true when an announcer would say, "It's not TV. It's HBO." The pay cable behemoth seems as if it single-handedly sparked this new take on what makes a quality drama series. Of
course, the whiny commercial networks said they could be that good if they had the freedom of language, violence and nudity, but we all know the truth is that would just mean more lawyers would cuss, murders would be bloodier and doctors would take more clothes off when they have sex. Look at NYPD Blue, where the language was marginally more daring but the nudity was nothing but gimmicky shots of butts and the series itself was just an excuse to see how many friends and relatives of Andy Sipowicz they could kill off. It really never expanded to any other network programming and at its base, it was still a cop show with a gimmick. It wasn't the freedom of how things could be presented, but the ideas for series HBO was willing to pursue. Granted, not every drama HBO touched turned to gold (see Carnivale and John From Cincinnati) or were too short lived (like Rome), but they were willing to take chances others wouldn't including one little show you might have heard of that all the commercial networks took a pass on called The Sopranos. It was one of the worst moves in the history of the networks and the greatest for fans of quality television. That's what started the network bellyaching as they rushed to imitate it, but without David Chase and that brilliant cast, there hardly was a point. Not everyone remembers this but The Sopranos debuted in the season before The West Wing did. I can almost justify the first season of West Wing beating The Sopranos second season for the Emmy, but The Practice beating The Sopranos' first season and Nancy Marchand's loss still sticks in my craw. Then again, Emmy voters lack the same imagination that network executives do.HBO just completed the run of its latest hard-to-describe drama, Treme, a type of series you would never find on a commercial network. Some of HBO's other successful dramas, past and present, might have had unusual
settings such as Six Feet Under which revolved around a family that ran a funeral home and Big Love with its polygamists but at their base, both shows are really glorified soap operas. Other cable networks have joined the unusual drama game. In addition to AMC's Breaking Bad, the network scored first with Mad Men (ironically rejected by HBO) about ad men in the 1960s incorporating real products, events and characters almost like an E.L. Doctorow novel. What's really encouraging is that there are so many new and interesting dramas out there, you can't possibly watch them all. I've never seen Showtime's The Tudors or HBO's In Treatment, and have only seen the first two seasons of Showtime's Dexter. Would the commercial networks have dared try to make a continuing series with a sympathetic serial killer as its lead? I've also missed FX's Sons of Anarchy and Justified. While most of TNT's offerings fall into pretty predictable lines, they are marking new territory with Men of a Certain Age, but I'll follow Andre Braugher just about anywhere since his days on one of the rare network quality dramas, Homicide: Life on the Street, until that show got ruined by network meddling and pointless cast additions and subtractions that marred what was a marvelous show for three seasons or show. (Of course, Homicide was based on a book by the brilliant writer David Simon who created The Wire and co-created Treme.)
What's interesting is when networks put new spins on old genres. There have been plenty of Westerns on television, though you can never look at any the same way after the three marvelous seasons of HBO's Deadwood, though it was deprived of the two more seasons both it and its fans rightly deserved. The Wire might have been mistaken as just another cop show when it debuted, but it developed into so much more than that, presenting a portrait of a city and keeping more plates spinning in the air with each passing season while looking at the drug trade, port workers, the school system, politics and journalism as well as police work. With its approach that was more novel-like than TV-like, there is a reason that it is routinely hailed as the greatest TV drama ever. FX also shook up the deck of the police drama with The Shield by making its lead a corrupt cop who killed another officer to cover his tracks.
The networks have been sticking their toes in with shows like Lost, which I never watched, but it never could have shown up without the ground work laid by Twin Peaks back when ABC didn't have patience for that sort of adventure. Back when the networks did have their quality phase (and by networks I mean NBC) they gave life to Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere because their ratings were so awful, they could afford to take the chance and they stuck by them to let audiences develop. Of course, it's not as if the Emmys can save shows as they did with Hill Street. Look how they ignored the brilliant fusion of teen drama and horror on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. At least Fox (and WB) stood by it for seven seasons, but again they were still up-starts that could afford to ride out the ratings in return for buzz and demographics. The commercial networks need to realize the days of their monopoly is over and they might as well take chances. What do they have to lose?
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Labels: Awards, Braugher, Breaking Bad, David Chase, David Simon, Deadwood, HBO, Homicide, Lost, Mad Men, Television, The Sopranos, The Wire, Treme, Twin Peaks
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Monday, May 31, 2010
It's Real and It's Spectacular
By Jonathan Pacheco"The greatest show ever" or "overrated"? "Cynical" or "postmodern"? Whatever you choose to label Seinfeld, there's no denying its well-documented impact on television and popular culture, and 20 years after its inaugural season, the brainchild of comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David remains relevant thanks to its unconventionally simple approach to the sitcom genre, its cleverness and catchiness, and its memorable fleet of characters, from the core to the fringe. Seinfeld is instantly recognizable, incessantly memorable, and downright iconic; not bad for "a show about nothing."
The project actually dates back to 1989 when its pilot, The Seinfeld Chronicles, debuted on NBC in a slightly different incarnation, with the three male leads (Jerry as himself, Jason Alexander as George, and Michael Richards as Kramer), but missing its token female, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Feared to be "too New York," "too Jewish," and "too male," the show was passed on, but in a gutsy show of faith, network exec Rick Ludwin used part of his late-night and special events budget to fund four more episodes of the show, and almost a year after its pilot premiered, Seinfeld had its brief first season.
It began as a meek, leisurely, conversational show, feeling its way through the darkness with Seinfeld and David leading the way on all fronts (they're often referred to as "Lennon and McCartney"). Dead-set on showcasing things once thought too mundane to put on TV, scenes took their time as we watched Jerry in his apartment alone, untucking his shirt, grabbing a bowl of cereal, sitting down to watch a baseball game.... Because the show was in its infancy, it hadn't quite found its identity, so it borrowed heavily from the observational tone of Seinfeld's standup and the dialogue-heavy strategy of fellow Jewish New Yorker Woody Allen. Characters spoke "natural" dialogue in thick New York accents and Jerry always stood on deck, ready with pre-planned sarcastic one-liners. These early episodes are almost adorable in their earnestness to literally be "a show about nothing" and to stand out as quirky and unique. What thin plots they did have were simple and low-key: did Jerry misinterpret "signals" from a woman? Should Jerry move into a new apartment? How does Jerry tell Elaine he doesn't want her to move into his building? How does Jerry "break up" with a male friend? These episodes often ended with very cute punch-lines to tie things together, sometimes more cringe-worthy than endearing.
By the 3rd season, episodes began to speed up as Larry and Jerry started to get the hang of this television thing, leading to Seinfeld's watershed 4th season when the show, characters, and writers really found their voices. They discovered the perfect level of self-hatred and neurosis for George, learned Kramer could be much more than simply the clichéd hipster doofus next door, realized Elaine offered more than just her history as Jerry's ex-girlfriend, and found that Jerry's jokes worked best as clever, rapidly conjured zingers as opposed to slow, quaint observations. Possibly most importantly, Jerry, Larry, and all involved realized that a show about nothing doesn't need to be a show where characters do nothing. Celebrated episodes from this time period like "The Contest" (a bold turning point for the show, launching it into the stratosphere, and responsible for the euphemism "master of your domain"), "The Outing" (you know, the "not that there's anything wrong with it" show), "The Switch" (one of the strongest episodes of the show's entire run, paying homage to classic noir and heist films), and "The Soup Nazi" (possibly Seinfeld's most recognizable and memorable episode) gave these characters more to do at a quicker pace, developing them through their reactions to the ridiculous problems surrounding them. It's also no coincidence that Seinfeld's two strongest seasons — the 4th and the 7th — were the two seasons that featured prominent season-long plots (with the 4th season revolving around Jerry and George pitching, writing, and filming their TV show pilot, and the 7th centering on George's proposal and engagement to Susan).
When Larry David left Seinfeld as co-showrunner after Season 7 (the equivalent of Carlton Cuse or Damon Lindelof stepping down from Lost after its 4th season), Seinfeld shifted into its 3rd distinct era. While seasons 4 through 7 featured exceptionally notable writing and a fun but jaded view of the world typical of Larry David, the final two seasons truly felt more like Jerry: exceedingly silly and absurd, but meticulously planned out. Interestingly, the earlier seasons always felt like Jerry and Larry's babies, but seasons 8 and 9 felt more like Seinfeld's babies, with the show bringing on board many talented writers from other TV shows — people who knew and loved Seinfeld — and let them do their own thing, essentially creating episodes out of their collective fan fiction. (Seinfeld featured other writers for many years, but the final scripts would always make a stop at Larry and Jerry's office for final revisions. Not so in the final seasons with Larry stepping down and Jerry overloading with other responsibilities.) The show shifted from belonging to the two creators to belonging to the world of the show, a world created over seven or eight years, accumulating its own set of rules and traits. Anyone who'd been a fan of the show could tell you what a sort of Seinfeld Bible might look like: this is who the characters are, this is how they react, this is how we tie stories together, and this is what we never, ever, do. Anything else, you can pretty much get away with — and the writers did. The show became more self-aware as the new writers brought fresh perspectives to the team, and that's we ended up with episodes such as "The Betrayal" (the backward episode), "The Bizarro Jerry" (perhaps the most meta episode out of all nine seasons), and "The Chicken Roaster" (for years my favorite Seinfeld episode, full of goofiness, great lines, and fun plot connections and resolutions).
Moving along the same line of the show's style, the core characters evolved from quirky and quaint to lovable and relatable to iconic, and they grew as a group. Scene-stealing supporting characters like Newman, the Soup Nazi, and J. Peterman are remembered for their individual performances, and Kramer truly transcends the show entirely (more on that later), but it's very difficult to look at Jerry, Elaine, George, and Cosmo without identifying them as one entity. Dating back to the pilot episode, several of the weaker episodes suffered from missing a character or two, the lone exception being "The Chinese Restaurant", a classic despite not having Kramer in it at all. But generally speaking, remove any leg from this table, and it comes crashing down.
As a tangent to that, one of the reasons Jerry's apartment and Monk's, the coffee shop, became so iconic was because they were places of convergence and came to represent the show's nucleus. These were settings where all four would meet, complain, scheme, banter, bicker, muse, reflect, and bond. The masturbation contest was conceived at Monk's, and in that same booth we got George's classic marine biologist monologue to the group, while Jerry's apartment was a hub for pontificating social guidelines like breakup etiquette. ("To the victor belong the spoils.") These locations were the group.
But admittedly, Kramer lives on as the most recognized, beloved, and memorable character of the bunch, typical of the "buffoon" in comedies. (Who was more memorable in Shakespeare's As You Like It: Orlando, the romantic lead, or the court fool Touchstone?) With his trademark hair and vintage clothing, the jobless cigar-smoking ladies' man elicits a strong and immediate reaction on-sight because of his countless legendary moments, from his patented entrance to his butter shaving to his scenes as a supposed pimp. The layperson may not know much about Seinfeld but he definitely knows Cosmo Kramer, who's become a sort of archetype for the modern clown. (In a production of You Can't Take It With You, I was instructed to incorporate many elements of the K-Man into my role of Mr. DePinna. Years later, a friend of mine was directed to play Verges as Kramer in Much Ado About Nothing. I've yet to hear a director say, "Play him more like Joey Tribbiani.")
The success of the character comes from so many different factors, but one musn't underplay the impact of the professionalism of Michael Richards. Despite his silly role, he was the one on set taking his job most seriously, sometimes to a fault, and his dedication elevated his performance. He drew inspiration for his physical antics from classic and silent comedies, with so much of that style hinging on harnessing and communicating true weight — bouncing off objects that strike you, using your weight to create harder falls, conveying the heaviness of everything you carry. Richards was fearless in this respect, sacrificing himself like a workhorse running back, punishing his body just to get that extra yard. To watch him tumble across a couch, lug a real air conditioner around a parking garage, or slide down a baggage chute is to marvel at his commitment to bringing as much weight to Kramer as possible.
Larry and Jerry have said that they always had a rule of "no hugging, no learning," and I think that was a big part of Seinfeld's appeal during and after its run, ensuring that viewers would avoid the vomit-inducing "serious moments" that other sitcoms feel obligated to provide. Think of an episode of Friends; do any of us really have such blatant and sweet lesson-learning moments like they do every week on that show? Seinfeld works for the audience that cringes during these moments, recognizing that maybe some people don't want to be "learning lessons" from their sitcoms. Maybe they just want to laugh. It's not that Costanza, Seinfeld, Benes, and Kramer don't love each other, because their affection is beautifully obvious; it's that real people don't conveniently and explicitly express their feelings at the 19-minute mark. Sometimes it's enough to let your loyalty, rapport, and insults do the loving.
Keeping the "no hugging, no learning" credo in mind also helps make the show's finale highly appropriate. We can quibble about how the last episode was acted and executed, but it's hard to deny that having all four characters end up in jail, still not hugging, still no lessons learned, but still together, is nothing if not a logical and somewhat poetic ending to what we saw for nine years. (Not convinced? Go back and watch Season 4's "The Handicap Spot.") Nevertheless, many people take issue with it because the episode had that blatant finale feel, but not the patented TV series happy ending. Moreover, many elements such as the "final group vacation" and throwback to ancient jokes just felt out of place; it was almost as if every character was aware that he was in a finale. The episode was written by Larry David, who hadn't done a Seinfeld script since the Season 7 finale, and consequently this one proved to be a bit out of place with the flow and comedic groove of the ninth season. Instead of feeling like a true Seinfeld episode, it felt like someone trying to write a Seinfeld episode.
The finale did feature a few final masterstrokes, namely its ending mirroring the show's beginning, all the way back to the beginning of The Seinfeld Chronicles. As the four characters sit in a jail cell, Jerry and George repeat the first conversation we ever hear them have, bringing the show full circle (you're not the only one who can do that, Lost), and as a nice little coda, we get to see Jerry do stand-up for the show one last time, this time with an audience of prison-mates.
But in what could be the most brilliant move of all, Larry David made up for the shortcomings of the Seinfeld finale by writing a season-long plot for Curb Your Enthusiasm last year revolving around the Seinfeld cast getting back together for one more episode. David managed to make a reunion show without actually making a reunion show, instead letting it exist as merely a fictional storyline. Slyly winking at itself and even poking fun at the much-maligned finale (a running joke has characters claiming the reunion episode would make up for "screwing up" the Seinfeld ending while Larry vehemently defends it), this move ultimately gave audiences what they wanted without the awkwardness and lameness of a typical reunion show.
Seinfeld continues to live on via DVD and TBS reruns, and has aged remarkably well since it ended its run in 1998. Though the latter seasons, with lots of newer, younger writers, featured a few pop culture references that seem a little dated today (jabs at Titanic, the impending new millennium, and tentative talk of the Internet), many of the show's jokes, especially in the middle seasons, have a timeless quality because they don't focus so much on up-to-date references, but rather on lasting historical allusions, such as the most unattractive world leaders of all time, favorite explorers, the Kennedy family, and Bud Abbott. In retrospect, Seinfeld feels like it gave more to modern pop culture than it took from it. I mean, do I have to get into how many catchphrases the show has contributed or popularized? (Answer: Yes, I do. "Yadda yadda yadda," "spongeworthy," "double-dip," "shrinkage," "these pretzels are making me thirsty," "no soup for you," "the [blank] Nazi," "man-hands," "mimbo," the aforementioned "master of your domain" and "not that there's anything wrong with it" — just to name a few.)
Seinfeld's legacy with me personally, as I've written before, is about much more than its entertainment value. The show is a litmus test, something to bond over, and a way for me to relate to people. (You'll know that you and I have gotten close when I stop prefacing my jokes and references with, "There's this one Seinfeld episode".) The show helped me socialize in high school, and taped reruns and DVDs have helped put me to sleep every night for nearly 10 years. My brother and I even express moments of pride when our significant others deliver flawless Seinfeld references all on their own. Yes, I know, "no hugging, no learning," but I'm making an exception; the show is a dear, dear friend to me.
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Labels: 90s, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, Lost, Seinfeld, Shakespeare, TV Tribute, Woody
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010
A Tale of Two Losts
By Alex Ricciuti
"They all die and go to heaven? Seriously?"
That was one of the first comments I read online after the finale was over.
Yes, and apparently some people can take a cab there, but still, don't forget to tip the driver with American money. And remember, heaven's official language is English. I was half-expecting to see Betty White make an appearance as Jack's grandmother, chiding him for never calling while she was still alive.
But at least the sentimentality wasn't half as annoying as those peaceful, knowing looks the characters were going around with in the afterlife universe like they had just been inducted into some kind of cult. Lost usually kept its distance from the excessively saccharine for most of its run only to make its final episode a 100-minute tearjerker experiment (out of a 2 and 1/2 hour run-time. Did all those commercial breaks ruin it for you?) with a juvenile ecumenical message. Honestly, the acting was good, but only because it was obvious that it was the actors themselves saying goodbye to each other after six years of being castmates.
Maybe that's a little too harsh. The execution was far better than I've just implied, but this Six Feet Under-miming ending begs the question — What kind of show was Lost?
There were really two Losts. One was a mystery/fantasy/sci-fi show meant to keep you watching week after week, and the other was, as the show's producers never failed to tell us, all about character. Well, they wrapped up the character arcs pretty neatly, with horse-pill doses of redemption and resolution.
I would have liked to believe that it was always about the characters but Lost painted its characters in the typical broad strokes of a classical (read: mythological) storytelling style; their actions were always bent more toward plot pivots than anything related to realistic character development. Just think about all the episodes spent moving characters around the island just to get them into place for an action set-piece or to have a surprising character-popping-out-of-the-jungle moment. There were literally dozens of these contrivances — I'm going off into the jungle and won't be back for a few episodes so don't wait up for me — which, I assume, most Lost fans were perfectly willing to forgive in exchange for a thematically solid storyline payoff. This never happened. This was a mystery show that turned itself into an office farewell party in its last 100 minutes.
And what about the theme of the episode itself (titled "The End")?
Redemption, yes, transcendence, OK, I get that part — they all die and have to “move on.” But the island, the light, the monster, what were these things metaphors for? That isn't terribly clear or perhaps it's too simplistic (monster = evil, light source = gate to hell — You mean like the hell-mouth on Buffy?). The island story is an allegory for what, exactly? Please, someone fill me in because it wasn't Purgatory — that was the sideways universe. As Christian Shepherd told Jack, everything that happened on the island happened. It was real. The island is a place that characters come to and find redemption. Is that it? That's a little too high school-level drama for me.
If Lost was going to be a mystical, spiritual experience I would have gladly been on board. I like crazy stuff that doesn't make sense. I love David Lynch. I even listen to experimental jazz. But the idiom of the show was always literal and real. There were few Lynchian moments on the show (one being a Locke dream sequence
from season 3 when he built a sweat-lodge to summon an answer from the island regarding the whereabouts of Mr. Eko). The cinematography, the dialogue, the entire style of the show was never dream-like or lyrical. It was always firmly grounded in a certain realism and the mysteries were laid out in the foreground and meant to be taken literally and as central to the show. So when Kate flies off the island again in the finale it is a legitimate question to ask — since we saw scenes of the very public nature of the return of the Oceanic 6 to civilization back in Season 4 — what the hell is the lady going to tell people? She has a penchant for boarding airliners that disappear over the Pacific? And what is Richard Alpert going to say — Hi, my name is Richard and I'm 175 years old. Oh, look at that, I never imagined my native Teneriffe would turn into a haven for drunken German tourists. Thinking of it this way makes the whole thing look really ridiculous. But the show has put it in those terms. So the fact that there were no — let's not even use the word 'answers' — let's say resolution to many of the main mysteries of the show is a huge bone of contention.
Why couldn't women bear children? How were Hugo, Jack, Kate and Sayid sucked out of a plane and landed on the island in 1977? Did the bomb change the future? If it didn't why did we spent the entirety of season 5 traveling into the past?
And what about the philosophical question upon which the whole of season 5 was based — a brilliantly set-up narrative device on the debate between free will and destiny. Can the past be changed or is it fixed? And if you travel back there and cannot change it, then doesn't that mean that destiny trumps free will?
But that question, very beautifully put by the writers, was never resolved along with almost every other mystery on Lost. The sideways world was not a construct of the split-timeline caused by the bomb going off. According to Christian, the castaways themselves created the sideways universe after they died.
The finale was all about the triumph of faith and love over reason and science. That is one question they did indeed answer and perhaps the writers feel that that negates the need for any further explanations.
One has to understand the demands of the medium. Episodes on broadcast television have to be broken into six mini-acts in order to fit the commercials in. Each of those acts has to end in a mini cliffhanger to make sure the viewer returns after the break. Each episode, every season has to end the same way -— leaving viewers wanting more and wondering about what happens next. Don't ever forget, networks are for-profit corporations and want to milk a show for as many seasons as possible.
And that left the writers in a Catch-22 predicament: Answer the mysteries too early and the audience leaves you (Twin Peaks). String them out too much and the viewers will give up and abandon the show as you go off the rails (X-Files). Replace old mysteries with new ones and they will keep watching for a while (new Lost formula). But after six seasons of doing this you will never be able to untangle the mess that is your story...so you simply don't. You do a back-flip and say it's all about the characters.
This isn't art. It's commercial television.
Now, go forth, children of the tube, and start anticipating the next season of Mad Men.
But maybe you should do yourself a favor and avail yourself of technology. Watch without the commercials — exercise your free will.
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Labels: Lost, Lynch, Mad Men, TV Recap, Twin Peaks
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Sunday, May 23, 2010
I Am Jack's Raging Madness
By Jonathan Pacheco
It's well known that Stephen King was, shall we say, less than pleased with Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of his novel The Shining. Much to the author's dismay, Kubrick removed many of the elements that made the story "patent Stephen King" — particularly King's clear, definitive vision of the supernatural — and stripped the protagonist of nearly all his backstory and characterization, instead using ambiguity and a deceptively "bare-bones" approach to the story as a way to engage his audience in a timeless manner. As King put it, "Kubrick didn't really do the book, he did a Stanley Kubrick film." Precisely, Mr. King, and that's why even 30 years later, Kubrick's film still works so well.
Stay anywhere long enough, and you'll get claustrophobic, even at the expansive Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) accepts a winter-long gig as caretaker, with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) acting as the only other inhabitants of the building during this time. Danny exhibits psychic abilities — or as the hotel chef (also psychic) puts it, he "shines" — and he picks up on some bad vibes coming from the hotel itself, catching visions of brutal murders and elevator bloodbaths. These same evil spiritual forces slowly possess his father Jack with a mean case of cabin fever as the man just tries his darnedest to write his novel, and soon enough, all work and no play makes Jack one of the most memorable film villains of all time.
Kubrick's refusal to explicitly explain the supernatural events in the film contributes to its lasting appeal, intrigue, and debatability, even after three decades. Sure, at first glance, The Shining is downright simple: a guy goes nuts in an isolated hotel and tries to butcher his family. Yet any superficial musing immediately calls into question what we think we believe. Did Jack go mad or was he possessed? Are the ghosts real or merely cabin fever hallucinations? Did the spirits have a purpose for possessing Jack, or was it just one man's descent into madness? Was Jack absorbed by the spirits of the hotel, or does the final shot imply reincarnation? And we haven't even gotten into the two Gradys or the more interesting details of The Photograph (taken in 1921, the year that the relevantly titled The Phantom Carriage was released, a film featuring the source material for the legendary "Here's Johnny!" sequence). Despite what the time-travel-weary fans of Lost might claim, people are much more interested in questions than in answers because questions don't lock you into one person's vision. With The Shining, Kubrick wants to drive you mad with possibilities.
In Jack, King had intended to give his audience an everyman, burdening him with very human problems (heavy alcoholism and a family life rich in abuse and dysfunction), but Kubrick chose again to leave more to the imagination by downplaying and eliminating those histories, changing Jack from an autobiographical personification of Stephen King to simply a frustrated guy with anger issues and an annoying wife. Jack's not quite an empty vessel of a character, but because we are allowed to fill in the blanks with our own experiences, Kubrick in many ways still accomplishes the goal of making Jack an everyman.
For this reason, many attribute much of the disturbing effectiveness of The Shining to Jack's "resemblance" of people we know, particularly our own fathers (I have a friend whose apartment features a framed photo of Jack Torrance, but no pictures of her own dad), though personally, I see Jack most in myself. Struggling to finish his very vague "writing project" (the genericness there working in favor of the film's universal appeal), he finds himself killing time tossing a tennis ball against the wall instead of grinding away at the typewriter, growing more and more frustrated until he begins snapping at his wife, blaming her for his inability to realize his goals. It made me sit up straighter; that's me on the screen, doing those same things and making those same excuses, almost verbatim:
"I'm not being grouchy, I just wanna finish my work. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're distracting me, and it will then take me time to get back to where I was. Understand? Whenever I'm in here, and you hear me typing, or whether you don't hear me typing — whatever the fuck you hear me doing in here, when I'm in here, that means that I am working. That means don't come in."
The man punctuates his sentences by tearing his paper and smacking his head, benign behavior when compared to his later actions, but nevertheless all too familiar. Is The Shining still scary? Absolutely (the first time I tried watching it seven years ago, I hurriedly cut it off during the Room 237 sequence and refused to revisit it for years. I still struggle to get through that scene without looking away). But for me, its lasting appeal isn't based in its still-functioning ability to make me watch it with the lights on, but in its archetypal portrait of a frustrated, possessed man, frighteningly accurate and endlessly intriguing.
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Labels: 80s, Kubrick, Lost, Movie Tributes, Nicholson
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Friday, May 21, 2010
When the son bested the father
— Horace, "Odes," III, 6, l. 1.
— George Lucas, talking about his father, 2008
They may not mean to, but they do."
— Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse
By Ali Arikan
The interwebs was abuzz last week with the news of a letter George Lucas sent to the producers of TV’s Lost. In it, Lucas apparently stated that he had made up the whole story of the Star Wars saga as he went along — a nonadmission, really, but one on which the fanboys pounced anyway, as if a meticulously detailed trope from the start were automatically greater than a naturally evolving one in service of its characters (it isn’t). Since Lucas is the great pariah when it comes to genre fiction, the backlash — such as it was — was hardly unexpected, but most definitely unfair.
The unjustly despised prequel trilogy has had such a retroactive fallout on the original three and their reputation that Lucas’ involvement in the Star Wars saga (and, to an extent, the Indiana Jones films) can be boiled down, by many, to ultimate responsibility for all the saga’s missteps, and none whatsoever for its triumphs. Spectacularly unfair, this claim, nonetheless, has become a shibboleth amongst the most ardent fans of the saga, as well as its saner aficionados. One doesn’t need to be well versed in Star Wars lore or Lucas’ biography, however, to see how major an influence the latter had on the former (and, naturally, vice versa) — even in the two films that he did not direct. In fact, it is in the beloved first sequel that the saga reached its philosophical apex, and it was because of Lucas’ direct involvement. The Empire Strikes Back is not just the finest chapter of the Star Wars saga, it is also the most personal.
On this day in 1980, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was unleashed on movie screens in the United States to almost universal acclaim (for the sake of brevity, and sanity, from this point on I shall abbreviate the film’s full title to the colloquial ESB). Coming on the heels of the previous film’s unprecedented — and unexpected — success, the second chapter of the saga (retconned to serve as the fifth within the in-movie chronology) had a completely different feel from its predecessor, and this narrative contrast was hammered home during the film’s first few minutes.
Whereas 1977’s Star Wars (re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1978) opens on the desert planet of Tattooine (after the initial space age shenanigans, natch), ESB sets the action on the ice planet of Hoth. Even though both environments are extreme wastelands, the direness of the situation is made more explicit by the expository opening crawl (“It’s a dark time for the rebellion”) as well as the dialogue: there is almost no life on this planet, and what there is of it, is hostile. On the run from the Empire following the destruction of the Death Star at the end of the first film, the Rebel Alliance has taken refuge here, but they are soon discovered by Darth Vader (body by David Prowse, voice by James Earl Jones) and the Empire, and have to flee for their lives. The heroes are separated: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) goes to the swamp planet of Dagobah to train under the tutelage of the impish Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz), while Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) end up going to Cloud City, where the betrayal of Han’s old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams – Billy Dee! Billy Dee! Billy Dee! Billy Dee Klump!) will have dire consequences for everyone involved.
The first Star Wars was admittedly more a cacophonous, albeit endearing, hodgepodge of boys’ own and pulp stories of yesteryear than a holistic tale. Auteurist touches were sprinkled like fairy dust, haphazardly, and not
coherently. It was in ESB that this earlier promise was fulfilled: multifaceted and rich, George Lucas’ sequel, directed by his film school mentor Irvin Kershner, implied to the world just how personal an affair these films would end up being, from a philosophical as well as psychological standpoint. I recently struggled through the film while suffering from a particularly bad spell of food poisoning (not that there are good spells of this messiest of ailments), and was struck by the fiendishly systematic way themes and motifs are built up to culminate in one of the most depressing, yet hopeful, finales in the history of genre storytelling. One fully comprehends the gravity, and sheer precision, of both those notes only after seeing ESB’s 1983 sequel, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi; but to contextualise it, appreciation — or, at least, experience — of the Prequel Trilogy is also equally crucial.Of all the movie brats, George Lucas is commercially the most successful one and also the most maligned; and I doubt the two are completely unrelated. Even though people with short memory spans tend to make a direct connection to the auteur’s general deprecation with the prequels, they are wrong: as far back as 1977, people were upset with Lucas for daring to opt for levity rather than portent. Recently, the inimitable Girish Shambu published on his Facebook feed a quote he discovered of Lucas, which originally appeared in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Sight and Sound review of the first film:
“Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film, I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps — that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures.”
Then came a number of comments that chastised Lucas, some going as far as pitching him as some sort of a modern Pied Piper, leading an unsuspecting audience to piffle (because, obviously, if it weren’t for Lucas, we’d all be lining around the block for the new Kiarostami); until Glenn Kenny The Wise sagely offered these words of observation:
“Let us remember, however, that 'angry' and 'socially relevant' do not automatically equal 'good.' In fact, more often than not, in art they tend to equal 'strident,' 'obvious,' 'condescending,' etc.”
This conversation was nothing new. Lucas was ostracized by a bunch of his contemporaries, and a fair few of the critical establishment, in 1977, for breaking from the pact, and having the audacity to discover edge, and profundity, through subtext rather than text. Art is subjective, and if any work of art, be it a film, or a book, or a piece of music, doesn’t work for one, it just doesn’t work for one, but secondguessing the reasons why is silly, and is a direct road to mind-numbing vacuity and conformism. It wasn’t the Ewoks wot killed Lucas’ reputation, and it wasn’t Jar Jar. It was because he did not make THX-1138: he made Star Wars.
Even though disapprobation of Lucas is relatively old news, a recent trend, which could be dated back to the lukewarm (boom, boom) reception of 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, is the attribution of the saga’s failures to Lucas, while crediting its triumphs to his collaborators. Since ESB is generally regarded as the finest chapter, it’s no wonder this oversimplification applies to it the most.
A period of De-Lucasisation began around 1999, the gist of which was, “Irvin Kershner and Lawrence Kasdan (ESB’s writer) did all the hard work, and made the film what it is while Lucas crunched numbers in Marin County.” It is unfair to downplay the importance of Kershner and Kasdan, but to completely write Lucas off is egregious. However, blame, in this case, also rests with Lucas.
According to Laurent Bouzerau’s 1997 book Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, work began on a sequel to the first film almost right away. Lucas put together a number of story conferences with friends, and then hired Leigh Brackett to write the first draft of the script (which was recently leaked on the interwebs).
These initial conferences show some major diversions from the final film. First of all, Darth Vader and Luke’s father, by the later drafts that bear at least a modicum of resemblance to ESB, are two very separate people. In fact, records show that Lucas came up with the idea of their being one and the same well into the development of Empire. From the first transcript of the story conferences between Lucas and Leigh Brackett, entitled Chapter II: The Empire Strikes Back, through to the two subsequent treatments written by Lucas, to the imaginatively titled first draft, Star Wars Sequel, Vader is most definitely not Luke’s father (in fact, even the concept of Ben Kenobi’s (Alec Guinness) Force-ghost only appears in the first draft — in all the previous treatments, Luke uses a talisman that used to belong to Ben to find out about Yoda).
The notion of Vader’s being Luke’s father appears in the second draft. Lucas nowadays argues that that was the idea all-along, and that he kept it quiet. Through five separate treatments and a full first draft of the script? OK, from Leigh Brackett maybe, but from himself? Eh? That’s either bullshit, or batshit insane. Besides, it makes no sense whatsoever as, in the earlier treatments and the first draft, Luke contacts Ben during his training, and the latter brings along with him Luke’s father from the netherworld for an interplenary father and son tête-à-tête.
Hell, the possibility of romance between Luke and Leia, already pretty icky, is full-on in the earlier drafts. And even though Yoda says, in ESB, that “there is another,” Irvin Kershner explains in the DVD commentary that it was a later addition to unsettle the audience with regards to Luke’s apparent invulnerability. It’s clear that Lucas never thought ahead to the third film, and this, too, attests to Lucas’ aversion to coming up with an overall storyline (even though Star Wars lore argues otherwise).
Fans have used this to wag their fingers at Lucas, for not having figured out the plot to the saga when he first sat down to write it in 1972. I’d like to invoke a favorite quote here from Stephen King: “Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story that results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.” Plot, obviously, is different from story — and while Lucas worked out the plot as he went along, he must have known the story, subconsciously, from the start. And that’s because the films have all been so deeply personal to him. And, albeit directed by Kershner, in retrospect, ESB is the most personal film in the saga, and betrays a true auteurist touch.
First of all, certain motifs are delicately worked in to the narrative like subtle melodies in a symphony. Take, for example, the cave motif, one that figures out in all drafts going as far back as the first story conferences. Earlier in the film, Luke gets attacked by a Wampa, and is dragged into its cave. When he comes to, he is suspended, head down, from the ceiling: it is in this cave that his world is turned upside down for the first time. Luke’s lightsabre has fallen off his belt, resting gently on the snow a few feet away. Luke can’t reach it. Finally, he closes his eyes; and as the “Force Theme” — the true leitmotif of John Williams’ Star Wars scores — begins, Luke starts to concentrate, uses the Force, and, for the first time, wills an object to his hand. The transformation to his true self has begun.
Later, Luke confronts the image of Darth Vader in a cave in Dagobah, and, after a brief clash, decapitates the mirage, as the exploding mask reveals Luke’s own face underneath. Similarly, Han and Leia first kiss while hiding from the Imperials in a cave (which turns out, literally, to be the belly of the beast), and what is the Carbonite Chamber in Bespin but a metallic cave: one where both Luke and Han pay the heaviest price. Cave allegories go all the way back to Plato, and Lucas, having immersed himself in the Campbellian idea of the monomyth, employs it to splendid thematic use in this film.
Further, Lucas (and Kershner) play around with masks, scars and revelations: when we first see Luke, he has his face covered to protect him from the blizzard: he looks like an outlaw. After the attack, as he heals in the Bacta tank, an iron lung of sorts is attached to his face, and, in hindsight, gives Luke a sort of proto-Vaderesque look. On a practical level, masks not only act as a way of hiding one’s identity, but also as protection against damage. Or, once that damage is done, to conceal its effects. The way Darth Vader’s helmet is lowered over his scarred, corpse-like head, and the way Luke gets pulled out of the bacta tank, work as mirror images: in the former the helmet hides Vader’s scars, and, as we know from the next film, his true identity. The latter learns from his scarring experience, and has an epiphany to set off on his journey. The Wampa attack leads Luke on his way to Damascus.
Of course, there is a more obvious reason why Lucas went to all that trouble to underline the contrast: in one of the most memorable scenes in the history of cinema, Darth Vader reveals to Luke that he is, in fact, his father. The revelation comes after Vader bests Luke in a lightsabre fight (“The Force is with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet”), and chops off his right hand. For all intents and purposes, this is emasculation at the hands of the father. Lucas’ uneasy relationship with his own father, especially as he was growing up, rears its head.
Lucas said in an interview in 2008 that, “(My father) wanted me to go into his business. I said, 'I'm absolutely not going to do it. He sold office equipment in a store. I said, 'I will never go to work every day doing the same thing day in and day out.'” As Anthony Breznican of USA Today noted at the time, “It sort of gives a new perspective to all Darth Vader's talk of, "Join me and together we can rule the galaxy!" Lucas’ father hated his love of fast cars, and chastised him when he got into an almost-fatal accident. Later, he was less than enthusiastic when his son decided to become a filmmaker, and not a businessman (though he ended up being both, which is also interesting).
Unable to receive support from his father, Lucas sought other paternal figures, fathers, if you like, by proxy. Francis Coppola was one of them, and their master-apprentice relationship is analogous to that of both the Jedi and the Sith. Kershner was another paternal influence: Lucas’ hiring of his old mentor to make a film about rising up against the legacy, the sins, of the father was no coincidence.
Nonetheless, ESB never offers a true black-and-white view of Luke and Vader’s relationship — the dichotomy of good father vs. bad father is not clear in any of the films, especially with regard to Luke. For one, Luke’s proxy parents all lie to him, from his aunt and uncle in the first film, to Obi Wan and Yoda in this one. They, too, want to use him for their own ends: to destroy Vader and to destroy the Empire. The latter is also Vader’s ultimate objective. Both parties want power, and they want Luke to help them get it. But, Luke is not the only one to suffer from the sins of his father. In Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Darth Vader becomes a slave to the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid), his “bad father,” but only after being betrayed — according to him — Obi Wan and the Jedi Order (his “good father”). And Obi Wan is forsaken by his “father,” Qui Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), who, in The Phantom Menace, takes on the responsibility to train Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) when the Jedi Council refuses to do so. It is only after the murder of Qui Gon that Obi Wan is handed the burden to train Anakin, something he’d initially protested. “Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Indeed.
ESB shows that the old guard, good or bad, are intrinsically manipulative: that the children live with their parents’ sins, and end up having to atone for them. By the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke becomes a tragic figure; as Robin Cross put it in his 1985 book Science Fiction Films, “Like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956), he has saved those around him, but can find no peace for himself.” Since Lucas identifies so much with Luke (Luke-Lucas, etc), is this how he sees himself? I wonder. Even when taking a stand against his father, and redeeming himself through his actions, does he, nonetheless, become a slave to his past? The answer is ambiguous.
Note: Some parts of this essay were appropriated from the author’s previous writings on Star Wars.
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Labels: 80s, Coppola, Criticism, Guinness, Harrison Ford, J.E. Jones, John Williams, L. Kasdan, Liam Neeson, Lost, Lucas, Movie Tributes, Sequels, Star Wars, Television, Wayne
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