Burning Into Showbiz II

Remember a ways back when I posted to let you know that Escape Pod's Union Dues series (by Jeffrey DeRego) was being considered for translation to television? Escape Pod put out the call for fans of Union Dues, television, and superheroes to send in letters about why super hero shows generally failed and how to make one that succeeded. I never got response to my letter, though I assume that it was read (after all, I rarely get comments on these posts and I assume that they get read and you exist, perhaps even in plural).

Anyway, the important thing is that the process has moved forward somewhat. Union Dues has a new and spiffier website. The website isn't finished yet, and no products are available, but it looks like the marketing machine will soon be underway.

It's exciting to be living at a time when a series of short stories, released for free on a podcast, will be making their way to actual television. All hail the new media!

This is For the Abigail...

Who's having a hard day.

"But Mommy, I just want to see what's in there!"

"It's not safe," Jean Ponds insisted, clutching the fork to her breast. Her son had been only seconds away from inserting it into the wall socket. She wondered if her heart would ever start hammering. She knew the current wasn't enough to seriously injure Thomas, but still...

"Charlie at school says it doesn't hurt. Charlie at school says it just tickles!"

Jean put her hands on her hips. "Now, Thomas Robert Ponds, what have I told you about believing silly things your friends at school tell you? Just because some boy at school tells you it's so doesn't mean it's so, you know that!"

"I know," Thomas kicked at the floor with his shoe and wouldn't meet his mother's eyes.

After sending Thomas to his room - minus his fork - Jean made a note to make a call this evening. Mr. Hume ought to know what his son was up to.

If you're one of those silly folks who need to "context," check out my last post. Otherwise, enjoy.

Lost Lost

Since many other bloggers I read are taking some time to comment on the Lost finale, I figure I may as well jump on that boat. Lost bookended a very interesting time in my life - my post-college, pre-career struggles - and has been a very important show to me. I've enjoyed this show a lot, and the finale was striking.

Unlike Lost, my blog doesn't thrive on suspense, so I'm going to put you out of whatever misery you might be in and tell you right off the bat: I liked the Lost finale. I thought it was a fitting conclusion to a great series, and I'm happy to have watched.

Of course, that doesn't mean I have nothing to say about it.

If you haven't seen the Lost finale yet, now might be a good time to stop reading...

* * *

In my opinion, the finale of Lost had to do three things to be successful. Firstly, it had to resolve mysteries. Not all the mysteries, of course, but at least a few of them. Enough. A significant portion of Lost's following want to know the truth of the Island, of the sideways-world, of Jacob and Smoke Monster, and so on. Secondly, the Lost finale had to resolve plot threads. No story is complete without doors closing. Finally, the Lost finale had to bring character arcs to satisfying conclusions. We had to see the characters grow, change, and complete their growth as new and stronger people. For me, at least, this is the meat and potatoes of fiction.

For easier reading, I'm going to divide these three imperatives up and tackle them one at a time. Watch me go.

Resolution Mysteriis

If you get that, you're as big a nerd as I am.

With regards to this imperative, the Lost finale failed, though not spectacularly. While a great deal of important information was revealed in the closing moments of the series, most of the revelations were "content free." By that, I mean that the show failed to take a stand on what the most important things actually were, instead cloaking the truth in profound-sounding... well... bullshit. I don't want to hear that "the light" is "everything good." I want something a little more juicy. Is it God? A conduit to God? The fire brought to us by Prometheus? Some other legend the writers of Lost want to mine, mangle, or invent? Similarly, Smoke Monster's "absolute evil" was meaningless. Why is he absolutely evil? What is he? Is he an angry ghost? An angry god? A giant lizard?

Ok, probably not that last one.

On the other hand, the choice not to answer the series's many (many, many) ancillary questions is a fine one. I don't really need to know why Walt is special, why Dharma brought polar bears, or why Desmond is the radiation-proof man. Some mysteries can stay mysteries.

For me, the Lost finale failed to resolve its mysteries because it failed to resolve its most important mysteries satisfyingly, instead falling back on bland explanations that failed to add anything to the story.

All Good Plots...

Here, Lost did a reasonably good job. By the end of the series, all the doors that need to be closed are closed. The Island is saved, Smoke Monster is vanquished, and all is right with the world. There are a lot of things we don't ever find out - the legacy of the show's mid-series fuzziness - but they are all things I can live without knowing.

I'll also grant that the final episode threw me some curveballs that I loved. Hurley as the new Jacob, with Ben as his second? Brilliant! Killing the Island to render Smoke Monster mortal so that Kate could kill him, then putting the Island's butt-plug back in to revive it? Wonderful!

The only thing I wish the finale had give me more of was a sense of how the survivors' lives worked out in the end. How did Claire and Kate negotiate co-parenting Aaron (and did they, as the Abigail suggest, eventually... you know... get it on)? Did Desmond in fact die in bed as an ancient gentleman surrounded by a horde of radiation-proof grandchildren? How the hell did Richard integrate himself with the modern world? However, I respect the writers' choices. A story has to end some time, and that means somewhere, something has to go unsaid.

Ultimately, I don't have much to say about this imperative because there isn't much to say. The stories ended, most of them with panache. Moving on.

Ending with Character

My opinion on this imperative is longer, more complicated, and intensely spoilery, so read on at your own risk.

I actually liked the sideways-world-is-heaven's-antechamber angle because I enjoyed the opportunity to see the characters resolving their issues in a way that their lives had made impossible in the real world. Especially in the case of characters like Ben, where the character simultaneously resolved his issues in the real world - in Ben's case, actually becoming the kind of man for whom life as a benevolent schoolteacher is the resolution and absolution he needs - and in the alternate world. The way the two lives, so different, gradually intersected and melded was generally well-paced and compelling.

I am also a goober. I liked seeing Boone and Shannon again. I liked Hurley's reaction to Anna-Lucia. I liked Desmond as a hardened reality terrorist. I liked that the relationship that recalled Kate's memory was her friendship with Claire and love of Aaron. I was amused at the ecumenical yet compelling vision of the afterlife that Lost presented in its final moments.

Where's the bad? For some characters, the emotional resolution of the sideways world was working against some seriously poor decisions earlier in the series, and a two and a half hour finale can only do so much against more than one hundred hours of story. For those characters, the afterlife redemption angle fell flat. Jack, for example, has bored me for a long time, and in the final episode he rang only slightly truer. Sayid's emotional and narrative boat sailed long ago, and his awkward "Nadia is my unrequited love except wow Shannon is cute" plot, conflicting wildly with his content-free evil infection, failed to do anything but annoy me.

I will also concede, as some friends have pointed out, that the struggles and victories of the sideways world fell flat against the reality of... well... it's unreality. And, there's not much I can say to that. I liked the sideways world plot, but I do agree that giving it a touch of unreality rendered it a little cheap.

So Lost's emotional conclusions were part win and part fail. In the end, however, they were mostly win.

* * *

My theory to wrap up the Island plot? The Island is the axis mundi, the Eliadian pillar of creation, the place where divinity descends and man's prayers ascend. With the pillar broken, the world is in serious peril, because the relationship between the material and the divine will fall entirely out of whack.

Of course - and again, this is Eliade - the divine is perilous. It's dangerous to touch the light at the heart of the world. That's why the stations are all so dangerous, that's why only Desmond can survive in the heart of the Island, and that's why the Smoke Monster was born when someone who was unclean and unchosen came to the axis mundi with hate in his (unconscious) heart.

Better than the "bright light" at the heart of the Island, right?

In my version of Lost, Shannon didn't die until much later, completely eclipsing Nadia, and making Sayid's infection a lot more significant. Also in my version, Jack wasn't a wooden stand-in of an actor playing a boring character. And Hurley got the girl in real life. And there was more Vincent. As almost always, with anything I didn't write, there are things I'd do differently.

Clearly they should have hired the Abigail and I to write their show for them, but I'm digressing. In my mind, Lost's finale was a more than adequate conclusion to a show I have enjoyed, and will miss.

Burning Into Showbiz

I just heard a fascinating bit of news in the outro of the newest episode of Escape Pod, The Threnody of Johnny Toruko. The Union Dues series of short stories by Jeffrey DeRego, a frequent contributor to Escape Pod, has apparently been optioned for television and the big screen. This doesn't mean that Union Dues will appear in live action - as Escape Pod's alien master Stephen Eley points out, lots of things are optioned and never manifest in reality - but it does mean that it might.

What's fascinating about this piece of news is that it shows the growing influence of the new media in the old media. One of the selling points of Union Dues is that the universe already has a huge following in the 'tubes. In fact, this post is part of that effort - by writing this post, including lots of links, and writing the words "Unions Dues" in this context as many times as I can (Union Dues Union Dues Union Dues), I'm adding to that movement, in my own small way.

You can also follow Union Dues on Twitter.

Anyway, the point is twofold. First of all, if you Hollywood types are reading this (hah!), know that Union Dues is an awesome series of short stories, set in a universe that is a truly fascinating take on super heroes. It's fresh, fun, and bold.

If you aren't a pipe dream (Hollywood dudes reading my tiny little blog? Get real!), you should know this: Union Dues is a series of short stories set in a world where the superheroes got representation... and it hasn't worked out so well. The organization that runs the superheroes certainly isn't on our side, and it isn't really on theirs, either. It pretty much is it's own side, and it exists to ensure that the spotlight stays on the supers and as much money and influence as possible stays in it's collective pocket.

The other fascinating thing about this development is that Escape Pod, Jeffrey DeRego, and Jeffrey's Hollywood backers are all requesting that tin-can fantastic fiction pundits (like myself) post their thoughts on what causes superhero shoes and series generally devolve into meaningless camp. Following is the email I wrote to Steve Eley and the Escape Pod team:

Escapers,

I just finished listening to The Threnody of Johnny Taruko and I'm overjoyed to hear about the possibility of the Union Dues universe making the leap to television and movies. I'm going to make a post to my blog with a lot of the same thoughts that you'll see in this email, which I hope will help a little. My blog isn't very well followed (calling my following "modest" would be anything but modest), but it's reached the "people read it who I don't already know" stage, which might make it useful.

Anyway, my thoughts are these: what makes super hero stories fail in the long run is pacing.
Super hero stories are based on being much, much larger than life. A cop or private detective fights crime... a super hero fights crime WITH LAZERS!. A spy fights foreign terror... a super hero fights ALIENS! An action hero comes back alive from certain death... a super hero comes back from ACTUAL DEATH! Everything in a good super hero story is turned up to eleven, pumped up to the max, and otherwise large and in charge. Here's the quandary: audiences get jaded. In order to maintain the feel of over the top action, the "top" has got to keep on moving up, so that the super heroes can continue to go over it. Eventually, when a super hero has saved the world for the twelfth time, come back from death five or six times, experienced several personality, physicality, and universe shifts, the story becomes absurd. The audience can no longer empathize with what the hero has become. The narrative no longer holds together coherently, devolving into a series of unrelated explosions and associated sound effects, with the occasional flash of super-heroin cleavage.

Consider Heroes. Isn't it a good thing they didn't try to make a third season? Seriously, though: the first season focused on the heroes and their personal problems, how their personal problems interacted with their growing powers, and so on. The second season had them fighting one of their own gone bad, which was also pretty cool because it dealt with their own doubts about what they were becoming and their place in the world. Later, though, and the heroes were dealing with alternate histories and apocalypse plagues, several of them were functionally immortal or basically gods of time and space, and I lost all interest.

The trick with super hero stories is all in pacing. You've got to build the action, bring the climax over the top, then take it down to a more manageable level, deal with the emotional and narrative fallout, then bring it back up again. You've got to resist the temptation to keep on building and building and building.

Hope that was helpful.

Mark

Anyway, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on this, as well. And if you're a fan of Union Dues who hasn't somehow heard and begun to spread the news, get on it! This is our opportunity to change the face of media forever, people. Let's not waste it.

Retractions and Incriminations

The good news, I can now update my blog from school. It wasn't working before, but it is now. This means that I'm now a lot more likely to blog, since banging out a quick Burning Zeppelin post is a great way to pass a lunch break or prep period when I'm feeling solitary.

The bad news... well, read on.

The writer of the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer critique I referenced in my last post commented to let me know of my (apparently several) inaccurate statements, including...

• The article in question wasn't actually written by the guy I thought it was. Rather, it's an edited compilation of comments from a message board he was a part of.
• My attempt at describing the dude was completely off, check out his website for more accurate information.
• People who dislike the Yellow Crayon Speech aren't evil, just misguided... actually, that was meant to be a joke. As I've said before, I am dedicated to the idea that everyone deserves to be heard without being demonized. In retrospect, I possibly came on a little strong there.

I'm sorry for sending you all off in the wrong direction. All I can do is own my mistakes and redirect you to more accurate information.

Hopefully we can all expect more from the Burning Zeppelin's update schedule in the immediate future. Bye 'till next time.

The Evil Dead... Lesbian Edition

In keeping with my theme of being as outdated as humanly possible on this blog, I finally read the Willow and Tara as Evil Dead Lesbians article by Stephen Booth (a man of mystery who is either a cricket player, a Berkley English professor, a crime writer, or some dude with a website and an opinion). The Abigail has been trying to get me to read this article for a while, but I've been too busy. Actually, I'm still too busy, but I finally read it anyway.

Booth's basic premise is that Tara's death in Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a prime example of the evil/dead lesbian cliche. Apparently there's a long, shameful history of this in hollywood. Gay characters are generally introduced as weak, insane, and victims (or some combination of the three). In older works, the message was that homosexuality is bad and will lead to your destruction, while in some newer films, it's more a matter of token gay characters being introduced and then killed off because their sexuality (in the eyes of the authors) stops them from becoming major characters with wide appeal. Culminating their affections with physical sex tends to lead to the death of one or both partners. Booth cites a huge list of films which feature (or even center on) this plot device. I won't reproduce it here - read it for yourself - and suffice it to say that I am basically convinced. Booth goes on to say that Whedon's decision to kill off Tara was hurtful and unnecessary, bad for the show and for people who idealized it, and reveals secret and/or unconscious bigotry or a tendency to fall prey to the allure of the ratings stunt.

Booth also condemns my favorite scene in Buffy - the Yellow Crayon Speech - as just a man saving the world from the "crazy lesbian." That I can't forgive. The Yellow Crayon Speech will live on in my heart as a perfect literary moment. I don't cry at television shows often, but the Yellow Crayon Speech made me seriously moist.

In every other way, however, Booth is pretty much right.

I don't think Joss Whedon is a bigot, but as I've said before (and will say again) I do think he's kind of lazy. A lot of his world building is pretty suspect, from Buffy's schizophrenic attitude about what it means to have a soul to the inconsistent motifs of Firefly and Serenity. Sometimes this laziness manifests in ways that are racially charged, like how the supposedly chinese-dominated future of Firefly lacked asian main characters for no good reason or how nonwhite Actives in Dollhouse are vanishingly rare and never more than secondary characters. Or, for that matter, how Buffy's Sunnydale, supposedly a Southern California town, contained few blacks and no latinos. And at least once, as in Buffy, this laziness manifested in a abrupt descent into a deplorable homophobic cliche.

The Abigail is strident about this, and over the years I've come to agree: when you write for adolescents, you have a responsibility to help them grow. I'm not going to talk about how to help them grow. Someone who writes Christian young adult novels about the evils of sex and spiritual experimentation has as much a responsibility as someone who writes sex-positive pagan propaganda; the difference is only one of content and point of view. The only sin that I'm willing to condemn here is laziness. Kids are all our responsibility, and cash cows, rating stunts, and unwitting anything has no place in fiction created for their consumption. Sell your ideas and let adolescents decide who to follow, but don't abuse your audience.

I won't go to far in decrying Whedon's laziness, however, because when push comes to shove I still like his work. After this post is done, after all, I'm going to take a nap - because I'm a teacher and therefore the first to be infected with whatever terrible disease is sweeping through Oakland this flu-and-cold season - and then watch the latest episode of Dollhouse. I sometimes just wish the man would pay a little more attention.

Anyway, read the Booth article. It's long, but you won't regret it.

* * *

• Bitch session: what laziness have you noted in Whedon's world-building, character-developing, and word-writing?
  
• Bitch at session: where have you seen Whedon be absolutely brilliant? Let me know (and be sure to tell me I'm a bad person for forgetting it)!
• The Yellow Crayon Speech really was perfect, wasn't it? How depraved do you have to be to criticize it in the slightest?
• Remember, I'm still taking suggestions about which of my two competing ideas to pursue this NaNoWriMo. Check my last post to read (highly imperfect) synopses and comment with your opinions.

Burning the Midnight Zeppelin: What Could Have Been

I'm not a very good fanboy.

I'm usually the last person to know about anything, and what I do know, the Abigail tells me. I just don't have the patience to scour celebrity blogs and twitter the way she does - hell, I don't even read the newspaper as often as I want to. Most of the fannish facts I know are truly ancient: tidbits of Star Trek trivia and an exhaustive supply of facts about J.R.R. Tolkien and a few about C.S. Lewis.

In general, I'm content with this state of affairs. I have better things to do than hunt down facts - especially when I have the Abigail to do it for me (I love you!). However, there is one fannish thing that always turns my crank: I love to know what could have been, the processes that lead the creators of the things I love to create.

For example, I bet you didn't know that in Exalted, the Dragon-Blooded were originally going to be the heroes of the piece and all their beliefs about how the Solar and Lunar Anathema are soulless villains was going to be true. The game was meant to focus on the crumbling, decadent empire of the Chosen and its death throes, until the developers decided that the idea was too much like some of White Wolf's other games and that it might be more fun to take Exalted in a different direction. Actually, you probably did know that. It's not a big secret.

In any case, it was therefore with great joy that I sat down last night with the Abigail to watch Echo, Dollhouse's original, unaired pilot.

Echo laid a lot of the plot out there; some threads that weren't fully resolved until the end of Season 1 were finished in one episode! It was obvious to me that Whedon intended Echo to catch the studio's attention, and I'm glad it did.

That said, I'm glad of many of the changes. I like that the real series drew out the process of breaking Adele DeWitt down from the untouchable and all powerful matriarch of the dollhouse (actually, in some ways, an example of the rare, well-done ambiguously powerful matriarch) to a conflicted middle-manager with intimacy problems. I also enjoyed real-series-DeWitt's less vulnerable, more self-consciously wicked style. I like that the real series softened Topher a little by making him the origin of the "humanitarian" pro-bono assignments on which the Dolls are sometimes, rather than Doctor Saunders.

On the other hand, some things seem to have been lost. In particular, the Topher/Boyd friendship was much stronger and more compelling in the pilot. Similarly, Topher's mercenary bent and anti-humanist ideals - all morality is programming, all humanity is meat and nerve, undeserving of respect or compassion - are downplayed in the series. It may seem contradictory for me to say that I liked Topher's image being softened on the one hand and wish it were harder on the other, but I don't see it that way. I like Topher conflicted. Epitaph One - the second unaired episode - did this brilliantly... but I'll let you find out how for yourself.

From whense comes my strange fascinating with what might have been? Why does it penetrate into my otherwise current-events-impermiable skull?

I believe that it is an example of my own writerly nature emerging. I have always enjoyed glimpsing the "maker's hand" inside a finished work. I like those moments when the world is pulled over my eyes, I am caught by some invisible trap in the fiction. The words (or images, or whatever) pull on my hearstrings, and while I succumb, some part of me goes "aha! Well played, sir!"

It's kind of like that, but retroactively, when I see what a story could have been and get to compare it to what was.

* * *

• What "maker's hand" moments have you enjoyed? Does the concept make any sense to you, or am I on my own?
• Do you know of any interesting "what might have been" stories? Care to share?

Not Your Mamma's Barbies!

As of last night, I have watched all the Dollhouse there is, and I am now prepared to add my two cents to the seething pile of pennies, nickles, quarters and silver dollars that is the internet.

Let me begin by saying that I am not a huge Joss Whedon fan. Huge is too big a word. Large, or the more understated "significant," would be a better choice. I've enjoyed Whedon's work, but I think he has flaws: I think he has a hard time pacing his reveals, he can be startlingly unconscious when it comes to issues of gender and race (though I do have to give him credit for trying), and I don't like his methodology of character death at all. On the other hand, he has produced some brilliant characters, stylish and atmospheric settings, and wonderful stories, so I keep on coming back. I should also admit that I am currently wearing my Captain Hammer T-Shirt that the Abigail got me; make of it what you will.

Secondly, I am likewise not an enormous fan of Dollhouse's source material. I only ever played Shadowrun the once and it was disastrous - fun, but disastrous - and I've only read one of William Gibson's books, Pattern Recognition, his least cyberpunky by far. I've read nothing by Phillip K. Dick (though I did enjoy Blade Runner and the movie adaptations of Minority Report). In general, I prefer fantasy-flavored fantasy to science fiction flavored fantasy (I should link to a post about my personal definitions of science fiction and fantasy and where I got them, but I haven't written it yet), though there are exceptions.

All that being said: so far, I am loving the hell out of Dollhouse.

Dollhouse has everything it needs to have: guns, moral ambiguity, mystery, and sexy people. It knows the hell out of its source material, playing smoothly with themes of identity and humanity in the face of out-of-control technology in an atmosphere of glitz and grit and creeping paranoia. I can't wait for more.

From a writerly perspective, what is it about Dollhouse that has captured my attention so thoroughly?

I love the way Dollhouse lacks a clear villain. Everyone's guilty. The main character's former identity, Caroline, is clearly involved in something fishy; why else would she agree to sign away her selfhood for five years to escape? I don't think I need to explain what's morally ambiguous about the company that runs the Dollhouse and everyone who works for it. Even the FBI agent investigating the Dollhouse is a violent, bloody-minded son of a bitch; on the side of the angels, perhaps, but definitely not a good person. Even the show's bogey-man, the scalpel-wielding, gentle-doctor-carving Alpha is definitely more than he seems.

Without a clear villain, it's going to be less a matter of who's "right" than a matter of who's left when the Dollhouse-of-cards comes crashing down. Characters will have the opportunity to rise or fall by their choices, not who signs their paycheck or what color their shirts are.

I am also deeply struck by how stylish Dollhouse is. The director, writers, and cinematographers have done a very good job of setting the show in a hyper-real environment, like our world but just a little more. The highs are higher and the lights brighter, but the shadows are deeper and corruption is everywhere. The show pursues this style intensely and faithfully, producing a world that is subtly not our own, but nonetheless very real.

Dollhouse gets the Burning Zeppelin Stamp of Approval. I can't wait to see what happens next.

* * *

• No formal questions today, but feel free to comment with your thoughts and feelings on Dollhouse or the qualifications I seem to use to judge media, both of which could lead to interesting discussions.