Recently, I was “flashing back,” if you will, to last summer, back when I first started watching Lost and writing this crazy column. Back in June and July, I asked a lot of silly questions: Who are the Others? Can science and faith ever be reconciled? How is Lost’s season two like a game of Civilization IV?
I’m not going to answer any of those questions today. No, today, the question I want to revisit is the question I asked at the tail end of Lost’s season one: What kind of show is this, anyway?
That question still hasn’t been sufficiently answered. Back in June, I wondered if Lost was science-fiction, fantasy, or some other genre. (The answer, it turns out, was “all of the above.”) Now, in February, I’m wondering something else: Is Lost a “hero’s journey” or a Shakespearean tragedy? Or is Lost’s narrative something else, entirely—something more interesting? Something more…subversive?
Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to begin a month-long overthinking of the decade. We do this by almost ignoring pop culture, instead focusing on Latin poetry, Greek etymology, poststructuralism, and the artistic viability of remakes. We do talk about Terminator a little.
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Download Episode 75 (MP3)
Why yes, Virginia, I do plan to reuse this graphic every time I write about this show.
Glee has honestly been a little patchy, for me, since its stellar pilot and the equally stellar season opener. It’s never been less than enjoyable, but there were a couple of weeks there – episodes 3 and 4, to be precise – where I found myself wondering what I had been so excited about. I’m happy to say that with the most recent episode, the trend has reversed. And I’m even happier to say that I think I’ve figured out why, because otherwise I don’t know what I would write about this week. Episode six brought back an element of the pilot that they maintained in episode two, let slide in episodes three and four, and hopefully will never let slide again: the epic voice.
Voice in this context has nothing to do with the show’s music, which has been consistently fantastic all along. I’m using it here to describe a certain kind of writing. Basically when you sit down to tell someone a story, you have two options. Either you can try to present the story as events that are actually happening, while trying to make yourself as invisible as possible, or you can call as much attention to yourself as possible, while giving up on any attempt to convince people that story is actually taking place. The first of these techniques is dramatic. The second is epic.
William van der Bilt does something about the Buckleys.
Last night Gossip Girl fired the opening salvo in this season’s class war. Everyone seems to have converted: Jenny loves how the other half lives in the Hamptons (“…salaried servants and an account at the beach club!”). Rufus has abandoned his boho Brooklyn loft and decamped to Lily’s—was it originally Bart’s?—palatial home in Manhattan. Dan has a designer wallet (“Have you seen the stitching?”) full of Benjamins. It’s better to be rich: We’re all agreed.
Except for Vanessa: She hits this week’s high douche mark on the bunched-panties scale when she crashes a Polo match to introduce Dan to her new boyfriend, who, we’ll come to learn this year, is his half brother, a product of a youthful but apparently formative dalliance between Dan’s father and new stepmother. Oh, spoiler alert. But, I digress.
Vanessa arrives on the scene to ball Dan out. She is disappointed that her erstwhile comrade has entirely forgotten how they used to stay up nights sipping weak tea out of chipped, mismatched flea-market mugs and whispering the theory of surplus value into one another’s ears. He’s gotten all shallow and rich and shit, and this will not stand.
[This week, the Think Tank tackles a seminal work of 1980's literature: the lyrics to Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer." Stay tuned next week for music theory analysis.]
Literary Theory, Mlawski
Knowing nothing about music theory and unable to come up with anything of note to say about “Living on a Prayer” as poetry, I’ve decided to complete an assignment I once had to do when I was getting my masters in English education. It’s… the literary theory assignment! Behold!
Living on a Prayer, the New Criticism reading: The lyrics start with the claim that this story happened “once upon a time, not so long ago,” which is our cue to read the text as a modern day fairytale. What happens in the text itself, however, is not the stuff of fairytale at all. “Tommy,” our dock-worker, is no knight in shining armor, though he tries to be by putting his six-string in hock. But, like Prince Charming in the fairy stories of old, Tommy does represent Everyman, the ideal. Likewise, “Gina” is no princess, but she is indeed a damsel in distress, the Everywoman in need of protection. Thus, the “once upon a time” introduction to the song is meant to be a somewhat ironic reference that suggests that “Living on a Prayer” is at once a fairytale and something of a satire of one.
Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself — such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance.
–Jean Baudrillard
Let’s play a game: I’m going to say something ridiculous, just for the fun of it. Okay, here goes. “The Terminator franchise will come to an end with the upcoming Christian Bale movie, Terminator: Salvation. It will be the very last Terminator story ever told in any medium; the franchise will die when the credits roll.”
So why is that so absurd? Obviously a franchise is endlessly renewable as long as a corporate entity believes the property has value, and yet franchises do die. There is nothing inherently ridiculous about the claim that there will not be another Ghostbusters movie. The two that already exist present us with closed narrative forms, both individually and as a unit. If another Ghostbusters movie were to be created, it would be a resurrection of a dead property. The same is not true of the Terminator, which, as of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, exists outside of time.
Pan’s Labyrinth, the gorgeous film by Guillermo del Toro, was on TV again the other day, and just seeing certain scenes brought all the feelings I had upon my first viewing flooding back. I should say at the outset that it is easily one of the best fantasy films in recent memory. Nevertheless, I left the theater with a niggling discomfort. Where the discomfort came from I didn’t know. Until now.
Big old spoilers after the jump.
Or: Holy plaisire du texte, Barthes-Man!
The plot of The Dark Knight, like that of Batman Begins, is honestly kind of shapeless and waffle-y. And yet, as Memento proves, Nolan is capable of writing narratives that are drum-taught and mongoose-agile. Why is he churning out these behemoths? Why, despite the wafflage, are they so dang good?
To answer this, I’d like to take a minute to consider Batman as a piece of storytelling, to consider the properties of the tale as it’s told. You’re probably taking it as given that there are spoilers for The Dark Knight ahead. But I should warn you that there are also spoilers for Batman Begins, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, the Superman comic books, and The Hunt For Red October. Be warned.
In his famous – for a certain value of “fame” – book S/Z, Roland Barthes strip-mines Balzac’s Sarrasine, wringing every scrap of meaning out of the text and classifying his findings into five narrative codes: Hermeneutic, Semic, Proairetic, Symbolic, and Cultural. The wikipedia definitions of these codes are pretty solid as of this writing (I mean, they could be “Taco! Taco! Taco!” by tomorrow), but they’re easier to understand when you see them in action. Like after the jump! Convenience!