In the Candy Shoppe

I had meant to write this post when I became distracted by Avatar and perceived disconnects. The jump, as it were, was bad writing. I was prepared to compare the script writers for Doctor Who with Anne Rice, who is famous for her disdain of editors and their publishing industry, as discussed here. That site led me to the pseudo-contests mocking individuals Storm and I very much admire and - dare I say - hero worship, such as the 1998 "Bad Writing" award winner and runner up, Judith Butler and Homi Bhaba, and I couldn't resist commenting.

If the drunken revelation I underwent in Avatar regarded the disconnect between various parts of my life, the end of David Tennant's run as the eponymous Doctor, The End of Time,* suffered from the exact opposite - from too many allusions to Tennant's, Davies's, and others' exit too strongly affecting the plot.

When I go book shopping, I go around and around the store, and pick up all the items that catch my attention. When I want to go, I find a quiet spot with the ten to fifteen titles in hand, choose a maximum of three, and put the rest back. I thus know I really want the books I've chosen; I economize; I am happy.

Someone needed to sit Russell T. Davies down and say: "You need to look through the fifteen plots you are doing poorly in this rough draft, choose three, and then edit and revise them."

-Drunk
* 2009, BBC One. Directed by Euros Lyn. Written by Russell T. Davies.

Through the Looking-Glass

Heath Ledger's swan song, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,* explores a possible union of a shadowy Eastern philosophy (closer to Buddhism than anything else) with the Western Devil-as-Great-Tempter. The titular imaginarium is a gateway Parnassus creates, through which audience members can travel into their own imaginations.

Within their world-construct, the e'er-smoking and smooth-talking Devil offers the temptation of the audience member's most-desired material possession {alcohol, sex, normalcy} while Parnassus offers a transcendental Nirvana. The path to Parnassus's option is often hard {in the distance, up a ziggurat, in the clouds} but the Devil's choice immediately implodes, taking the soul with it.

Heath Ledger smooth talks the souls into taking Parnassus's option, which results in their renunciation of material possessions - which they then give to the troupe. The Order of the Imaginarium thus show the paradox of their position: while attempting to save people from the illusion of samsara, they are themselves trapped on the outskirts of society by their rickety show, by their appearance as stereotypical carnies/gypies, by their carnal desires.

What's more, the film emphasizes the modern vanity - the supreme importance of a singular choice that will forever trap the soul in samsara, or release it to nirvana, when human experience is never so clean, never so easy to encapsulate in the run-time of 120 minutes. Even if the soul chooses the "arduous" journey, it receives instant gratification, and we are meant not to ask just what happens to the individuals who have given up all of their credit cards and furs and riches. They presumably have wrought themselves into a state of poverty and suffering, but we should rejoice because they have reached, in the "A-B-C-s" of enlightenment, "z"?

* 2009, Sony Pictures (et al). Written and directed by Terry Gilliam.

Oh ord-Lay ive-us-Gay our essings-Blay

(Why do I keep writing about films? The world will never know.)

The movie Avatar* takes us on an intergalactic colonial quest to the forest moon, Pandora, of a distant planet (which, although it resembles Uranus or a blue-tinged Yavin IV [of Star Wars fame], is in fact named "Polyphemus." This goes unmentioned in the film). The audience-surrogate and main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic who infiltrates the alien society in the form of one of the titular Avatars - an alien-human hybrid without a consciousness or soul of its own, which he controls via a mental bridging device.

In one of Jake's first interactions with a native (Neytiri, Zoe Saldana), he watches as she stabs a knife through the chest of a wounded jackal-analogue and says words over the corpse. He - and we, through his eyes - assume that Neytiri has said a prayer for the animal's soul (which we later discover to be for good cause; all of Pandora is, literally, wired together - and the natives' god is a manifestation of the sum totality of the planet's electromagnetic and metaphysical energy).

Here I come at odds with myself. Everything I've learned and know about studying history, cultures, humans (or fictional aliens) is screaming that I-Jake-we can't take Neytiri's physical actions (stabbing with a knife, saying words) as immediate evidence that she is praying for the animal's soul. We don't know that! And we can't seek better understanding of one another unless we accept that cultural subjectivity (this is Sociology 101, and basic, I know - but the point stands).

As a movie-goer, however, I accept the action as such, and am later rewarded for doing so (because that assumption, in Cameron's universe, is correct). This is little different from the basic adage for writers: "show, don't tell." (And all of its variations: Twain's "...bring on the fat lady and make her sing," Woolf's "It is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part..." Lukeman's "A guy shouldn't have to say, 'Ow, I'm bleeding,'" etc. etc.)

I think this internal conflict is the same as that which we can chart between "academia" and "the real world." For example:

-An attack on the "useless" jargon and opaque prose of academics, which later becomes
-A mocking contest on "Bad Writing", meriting
-A belated response from one of the upper windows among the parapets of the cliched Ivory Tower.

At my entry level position, in the guest lodgings among the servants' quarters in the basement of the Tower, I can see that we must bridge this disconnect. I'm just not sure how yet.

-Drunk

*2009, 20th Century Fox. Directed and written by James Cameron.

500 Days of Summer

I watched the movie 500 Days of Summer* on a recent plane ride. Despite the treatment it received in the Moscow-based entertainment magazine, Afisha, as an art film, 500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy or, in common parlance, a "chick flick." The tag line for the movie is: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't."

In this non-linear production, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a drone making greeting cards, dreaming of someday returning to his true ambition, architecture, and of finding L'Amour Parfait™. He is infatuated with the very idea of being in love with a temp at the greeting card company, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who doesn't understand why men become puppies in her presence, and who doesn't believe in Les Amours Parfaits™ that Tom espouses. Throughout the film, we see Tom as a manic-depressive, perhaps clinically neurotic individual whose stress-management skills include mechanically throwing dishes onto the ground and writing huge to-do lists in chalk on a wall of his apartment. Summer, conversely, is dead-pan and more-or-less serene even in the most emotional moments of their break-up.

The process at work here seems to be the following. The filmmakers have acknowledged gender stereotypes in a romantic comedy - they should make the man tall, dark, and handsome (or, to put it in the words of a British television actress: "Gorgeous, and he doesn't speak a word! My kind of man.") and ought to imbue the woman with emotional and stereotypic obsessions. They then attempt to reject the stereotypes by crafting characters who are the polar opposites.

But this thought process still hinges upon

1) the concept of a binary of gender
2) the definitional stereotypes of each gender in that binary.

Rather than refuting anything, the filmmakers have solidified the pre-existing stereotypes. A creative individual cannot play with forms if the initial shape of those forms changes. Without the stereotypes, their creation of polar-opposites makes no sense. The polar opposite of a Thing, then, eventually returns back to the very Thing itself.

-Drunk

*2009, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Directed by Mark Webb. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber.