mrissa | Entries tagged with small screen

Today with my workout I watched Eight Men Out, which I have seen before but not for years, probably decades. If you've only seen one movie by John Sayles, it's probably that one. I have seen most of the movies by John Sayles and also read two novels. I love John Sayles. He is one of my favorite directors and filmwriters, and incidentally or perhaps not I also love his two more recent novels. I always feel weird knowing that Eight Men Out is the one people have seen, though, and watching it again showed me why. I feel like a brilliant mosaicist has just handed me one really beautiful pebble.

Mosaicists are quite good at picking pebbles! It's their job. This one is green. And under another circumstance, he is very well aware that he could make it someone's eye, or a tree, or a flower. But this one is just one pebble, very smooth, self-contained.

It's the self-contained part that gets me, because...nothing else Sayles does is like that. Nothing. And I can see the places where he doesn't go off the map. Arnold Rothstein, Ring Lardner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis--I can almost hear him whispering to himself: not now, John. Reel it in, John. He doesn't tell you about Joe Jackson's hometown. About Fred McMullin's connection to Bill Burns. Not a whisper, even, of the influenza pandemic that directly affected the game, and that's the thing that made me sit upright and say--aloud to myself, because I am a terrible television companion, I talk to the screen--this is a John Sayles movie? This?

Because he knows all this stuff, and more to the point, he cares about all this stuff. He cares about all the connections, the way that it all fits together. He cares about whether any of the Black Sox were ever on record favoring votes for women. What their various attitudes were to the actually Black people around the stadium. 1988 John Sayles is still John Sayles--he still makes sure there's a Black person having a line about how it's the best white team he's ever seen. But he manages, in this one movie, in 1988, just this, not to go into that man's story. Not to go into the wives' stories. To keep the neighborhood kids' stories only in their emotions about baseball, not their home lives, not their ambitions. Just this.

He makes a baseball movie that is substantially--almost uniquely, among baseball movies--about baseball. He could have passed the Bechdel test in it, if the Bechdel test had existed and if he'd wanted to, by having Helen Weaver and Rose Cicotte talk earnestly about the new tighter-wound baseballs they were talking of using next year--because all of these characters, all of them, eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. I would absolutely have believed it.

I can't recommend it if you don't like baseball. Because it's about class, and it's about how power structures like these corrupt. It's about the end of a gilded age, and labor, and who gets left holding the bag, sure. It's still a John Sayles movie. If you watched it at a John Sayles film fest--oh, what a beautiful thought that is--the kind of people who would show up for that, the kind of people like me, would be stifling full on horror queen shrieks when Kennesaw Mountain Landis came on screen. "He cleared out the Reds during the War"--oh run, children, run, this is not going to be good. Do people who are watching this as their only John Sayles movie know that? I think the message comes through, but...not in the same way without the rest of the body of work. The implication, the denouement, are so feather-light. It feels so strange to take it in isolation like this. To know that for so many people this speck of green is not going on to Matewan, it's not going on to A Moment in the Sun, it's not touching Lone Star or Brother or any of that, the mosaic that is class and corruption and America is not part of a leaf, it's just its own flash and then gone.

And then there's this: this man's pebble is a full two-hour feature film. This is what he does for flash fiction.

I wish there was such a thing as a John Sayles film fest. I do. Because it makes me understand a little, though I try to fight it, why people invest personal identity in their fandoms. Because the sort of person who would show up for a whole weekend of John Saylesiana...well, I won't say I'd like all of those people, but I think they'd inevitably have to have some substantial interests and personality traits overlapping with some of mine. And it would be interesting to talk to other people who have gone all in on all the other much messier works about this one much tidier one.

I believe reining himself in made this more accessible. More popular. I don't think it's an accident that the one where he told this story and just this story is the one people know. And it's a good film, I'm not saying it's not. But I am left wanting all the rest of the mosaics. I'm left so relieved, so incredibly relieved, that he made all the other films, that he wrote those big messy books, that are full of connection and depth and...a little bit of chaos. Even if it means that I am left flailing trying to get anyone who doesn't already live here to talk about A Moment in the Sun with me. ("Wanna read a thousand pages of fiction about America in 1905? Hey, where are you going?") I'm willing to indulge this one cleanly told story. But you can get a cleanly told story almost anywhere. With Sayles I want the whole thing. I know it's a lot. I'm a lot too, John. I can take more than just the pebble.

It's a really nice green, though, I'll give you that.

Last week I finished watching Season 2 of The Good Fight on CBS Some Access (that's not what they call it, but...welp). I really loved the show from which it's a spin-off, The Good Wife, and they kept some of my favorite characters and added a few new characters I like a lot. All the things that frustrated me most about the original show were gone, plus they had kept the rich and extensive universe of characters going. Yet I found watching this season a slog--I was going downstairs to watch it with my workout with a little distaste rather than a lot of excitement--so I had to think about why.

The Good Wife had fictional court cases inspired by real ones in recent headlines, starting from the first season. That wasn't new. But The Good Fight doubled down on the contemporary references. It is a show that is entirely about American politics in 2018. There's a lot that's directly about Donald Trump and his effects on local and state level politics. There are also plotlines that are less inspired by and more copies of current events in other areas. Even plotlines that are supposedly about the characters' love lives are often also about the fate of protesters or how candidates are presented in modern elections.

I sympathize. I do. There's a lot out there, and sometimes just screaming into your pillow is not enough. Sometimes you really want to scream something in words, that someone else can hear. Words like, "What is even going on," and, "I am not okay with any of this." I get it. But I think that there's a paradoxical effect where the closer you get to an actual nonfiction commentary without being one, the harder it is to take.

I think the people who wrote M*A*S*H are a great counterexample here. M*A*S*H is set during the Korean War, but even a cursory glance tells you it wasn't about the Korean War. It was about the Vietnam War. Not only does the quagmire timeline not make sense for the US's presence in Korea, none of the characters' backstories do either. Anyone over the age of 22--so all of the main characters except Radar and maybe Klinger--but probably just Radar--should have WWII experience if they're regular Army. If they're not, they should still have the perspective that came of having their country in an all-out world war within the last decade. But they don't seem to. What they do have, eventually, is Colonel Potter, the old-timer with world war experience that he's always hearkening back to--but not recent experience, of course. This makes no literal sense, but it makes complete emotional sense when you consider that the show is really about the US troops in Vietnam instead.

Why bother? Why use one war to comment on another? Why remove your characters that far? If they wanted to talk about current events, why didn't they? For me, one of the answers is: it can get overwhelming. Dealing with news stories and then having your fictional entertainment copy those same news stories exactly: it's too much of one thing. Which is bad enough when that one thing is chocolate peanut butter ice cream, far worse when it's a specific corruption charge.

Another answer is broader thinking. One particular policy discussion can start to fall into "denounce this one thing, this one thing is bad." In real life, that can be necessary! But art gives us the chance to look for patterns. To ask, what kind of thing is this, where have I seen it before, where might I see it again, would it still be bad in those contexts too or is there something specific to this one. What are my actual principles here, when removed from the immediacy of people I already know I trust or distrust? How would I react to a situation like this one if there were a few things different? and what does that tell me about this situation?

Of course my bias is toward indirect comment because I'm a science fiction writer. M*A*S*H may have been the first Vietnam War commentary I encountered, in reruns my parents watched while they were making supper, but The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is also pretty influential in my line of work. Haldeman is a Vietnam vet who had things to say--and he used the depth of hundreds of years to say them. Haldeman also wrote War Year and 1968, both of which are non-genre novels inspired by his experiences--both of which are very different from The Forever War. Indirection and shift of perspective give you different art, even when it's coming from the same person.

I'm not giving up on The Good Fight. I hope that it manages to find its footing and a place to stand where it can create commentary that stretches beyond the current moment, that gives us a lens that allows us to look into that moment without damaging our eyes with the intensity. But my preference as a reader and as a writer is going to continue to be work that tries to find a different angle for perspective and illumination.

A few months ago, we had to explain to my goddaughter the old trope where the hero takes off the heroine's glasses and says, "Why, Miss A! You're beautiful without your glasses!" Because...she has never known a world where she can't get cute glasses in flattering styles and a wide variety of colors. That's just how glasses are--and not because her parents are wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, either. Some of my friends who are struggling a lot for money still browse dozens and hundreds of glasses styles on the internet, able to choose from more on their tight budget than the richest could have dreamed of on theirs 50 years ago--especially the richest children.

My parents tell stories of having one choice of glasses, sometimes one gendered choice--here you go, here are your glasses. Doesn't flatter your face? Too bad, this is what you get. Glasses. Now you can see. The fashion for girls right now is cat's eyes. Boys get square blocky ones. For me, it was a little better than that, but not much--and they were not well-fitted to my child's head, on the assumption that kids were growing, and as a result they were always slipping down my nose, and--in a fairly low-parental-conflict childhood--my mother was always nagging me to push my glasses back up.

Meg Murry's glasses did that too. In A Wrinkle in Time. It was one of the reasons I bonded with her instantly when I first read the book in grade school: ugh, the glasses thing.

My goddaughter doesn't have that. Meg's glasses slipping down her nose are an individual character trait for her, not a bonding moment for every kid with glasses. There is no presumption that obviously everyone would look better without theirs, because, hey, there are so many flattering pairs of glasses, she knows so many people who look great in them. She looks great in hers. And if some jerk ever tries to take her glasses off to tell her she's beautiful without them, she hasn't been prepared that that's the only way this can ever work. The idea of finding someone who thinks she's pretty great with them is not a massive shock. It's...life, it's reasonable, it's how things are.

The entire meaning of that description has shifted.

So you can't just put Meg Murry in a pair of glasses and film it that way, assume the modern viewer will get it--in fact, you can assume they won't. Translation is like that. The past, we say over and over again, is a foreign country. Sometimes the recent past even more so, because we don't think of what we're not seeing. We don't have to explain chamber pots and carriages in the Murry home. Glasses are known technology, aren't they? We understand glasses, don't we? Oh.

And then there's the hair.

This article on Meg's natural hair in the movie is really good, really interesting. It quotes from the book, and I'm going to repeat the quote: "Meg’s hair had been passable as long as she wore it tidily in plaits. When she went into high school it was cut, and now she and her mother struggled with putting it up, but one side would come out curly and the other straight."

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well.

A Wrinkle in Time has a 1962 publication date. Before the hippie era. So...I think younger readers mostly don't understand the implications of women's hair here. The passive voice is not accidental: when she went into high school it was cut. This is basically a force of nature, in social terms of the time. Wearing her hair in the braids that actually worked for (book) Meg is no longer an option because that is little kid hair. If you find a high school yearbook from the early 1960s, especially in a small town, you are not seeing the option of long hair worn straight or in braids yet. That came later. So what has happened here is that there are requirements of existing in the teen social world, between the kid world and the adult world, and Meg's hair is failing her at them. Imagine one of the bouffants from a 1962 yearbook, but done poorly. That is what they mean by "up." It is "done," it is done with a fair amount of AquaNet or equivalent, it is one of the miserable child faces underneath a failed elaborate coiffure, because an extremely simple hairstyle of whatever length was not one of the options at the time.

Some of this is universal. Hair texture changes at puberty--sometimes daily--and it can feel impossible to work with whatever you got. And figuring out what on earth other people think is stylish and why on earth they think that is even more difficult when "people" means "whoever I am randomly assigned by geography" rather than "someone I have any interests in common with." But...I think that people who post-date the hippie era--myself included, on some emotional levels--have difficulty conceiving just how many more options there are for What People Can Look Like, what we can do our hair like, what we can do our clothes like, what we can reject or choose for makeup or nails or any other grooming options.

And so...if you showed a modern audience. Especially a modern child audience. The vision of Meg that was in Madeleine L'Engle's head for Meg. The hair that had "been cut" and "put up," the failed bouffant. It would be fundamentally not understood. Even if she was surrounded by other '62 teenagers in a '62 high school. The reaction, I think, would be, "What happened to her hair? Why did she do that?" Because as modern viewers, we just don't have the context of the range of bad hair in the past. We know what present teen struggles with hair look like. We have no reason to keep the data set for 1962.

Similarly, if you filmed the fancy dress occasions of the 1920s, exactly as imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald--the brilliantine on the gentlemen's hair would overwhelm us as modern viewers. And so on through history. It just...gets adjusted for the modern viewer. Inherently. Because the world is large, history is large, we cannot keep it all in our head. Every movie made from a book is a translation. No matter how faithful to the text it tries to be. It's still a translation. The more so for a movie that's more than a year or two from its source text.

So--read the article in the link about how Ava DuVernay decided to translate Meg's struggles with her hair. It is a translation, a visual translation, or a transformation, but it's a necessary one even if the movie had decided to do other things than what it did with race (of which I thoroughly approve), because the world has gone on. I haven't seen this movie yet. I don't know if I'll ever be able to--I hear that it's one of the most vertigo-inducing movies made in a very vertigo-inducing recent crop of movies. But I think that this particular choice of visual translation of Meg's struggles with her hair is a brilliant one. It's one that has some chance of making sense to a modern audience in a way that a literal rendering of the original just couldn't. And the minute I hear people talk about filming what's on the page, I know that they're missing how books and film work differently as media--much less books and film across time.

Know when to walk away. Know when to run.

I am a big fan of the TV show The Good Wife, and by “a big fan” I mean “a person who is behind by a full season at this point,” but that doesn’t make my enthusiasm less strong, it just means that I am physically incapable of watching broadcast and, eh, life. But I really do love this show. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. I’m looking forward to watching every episode, and when Alec visits, I am now watching every episode a second time so that I can enjoy them with him.

The network confirmed a few weeks ago what those of us who pay attention to title structure* already know: that this season, season seven, is the last season of The Good Wife. And I am glad. Because I used to be a fan of Criminal Minds, and I’m currently watching S10 of it with my workout. And uff da. Uff da. It is the shambling corpse of the show I used to love.

One of the episodes I watched yesterday tied up a plot thread that had been left from season two. And it did so in the most inane and simplistic way possible, taking all emotional complexity out of the equation, just: yep, this thing happened. We were sad. There was another person sad too. We tried to comfort him. People knew each other in the past. The end.

So it’s clearly not that people run out of plot, because there was some plot, just sitting around right there unused, and they used it. It’s something else that happens. The momentum runs out. The elastic wears out, the story needs a belt and suspenders to keep going. A lot of shows that get to be a train wreck as time goes on, it’s clear that there was plot yet to happen, they just…couldn’t wrangle it all as they tried to go and go and go.

So get in. Tell your story. And for the love of little green turtles get out again. And when a story you love ends–not when it’s cut off, but when it comes to an actual ending–be glad that it had the grace to do so, instead of becoming its own self-parody.

(I refer to the fourth Brunette Agent on Criminal Minds as O. If you name the first two Elle and Em, you cannot blame me for calling the next two N and O. Brunette women: not interchangeable! Come on, show! I hear tell that O is not long for this show. I do not look forward to P. Why am I still watching this show about how you are not safe in your home, or also if you leave your home you are not safe, and especially on the internet you are not safe? Because for as terrible as it is now, it’s still the right pace for my workouts. Sigh.)

What if people don’t like the next thing you do as well as this thing? Well. Then they don’t. That’s a risk. They also might not like this thing as well as this thing.

What if you can’t think of a next thing? Eat some strawberries (or an orange if you are allergic to strawberries; whatever). Take a walk where there are trees. Breathe.

What if people nag you and nag you and they spend the rest of your life nagging you about the thing you did that they liked so much? Remember that it is great when people like things you make, but it does not make them the boss of you, and it does not excuse them from polite behavior. And it is far better to be begged for more of your art than to be begged to stop.

Now go on. Know when to hold ’em, but err on the side of folding ’em.

*Season one of The Good Wife had one-word episode titles. Season two, two-word episode titles. And so on until season five, which had three-word episode title again, and Tim and I turned to each other and said, “Well, guess it’s a seven-season show, then. Cool.”

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

I have talked in this space before about how I watch a bunch of cop shows, largely because I watch them while working out. This has advantages (pacing! hurrah pacing!). It also has disadvantages, because dang, are some of the things paced the way I need them to be…kind of obvious, honestly. It’s like you can see the places where they said, “[Find motivation for character here],” and then never did a search on brackets. Except that I’m not convinced that they did. I’m not convinced that in every case there was someone saying, “Uh…that motivation makes no sense.”

Here’s the thing. It’s not that smart people don’t make stupid mistakes. For whatever axis of “smart” you have decided is important in this consideration, you can come up with obvious, boneheaded mistakes that people with lots of that kind of “smarts” will make.

BUT THEY’RE NOT RANDOM MISTAKES.

If you’ve established that a character is both street-smart and good at math, having them decide to go into debt to a loan shark with no known plan of repayment is so far out of character that you have to seriously jump through hoops to justify it. (Yes, actual example.)

That same character might underestimate an opponent’s competence in a number of areas. They might rely on contacts who didn’t come through this time. They might do any of a number of “dumb” things. But for heaven’s sake, make them dumb things that fit. You only get so many foolish choices without it looking like you’re making things too convenient for yourself, or without losing sympathy for the character, or without undermining their characterization as smart. There are all sorts of failure modes here, and you don’t have to give your character perfect decision-making skills to dodge them.

Something that is helpful here: if you have an idea of what a small characteristic error looks like for your character, you can seed that to ramify into the larger ones later, so that a reader doesn’t say, “They’d never make that mistake!” But it does have to ramify throughout, or it doesn’t work.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Further in my watching of ten gajillion cop shows with my workouts, I have noticed an alarming tendency to try to add suspense in all the wrong places. Not every season has to end with a cliffhanger. If people like your show, they will keep watching your show.

I repeat: NOT EVER SEASON HAS TO END WITH A CLIFFHANGER.

But if you do choose to end your season (chapter, whatever piece of your narrative arc) with a cliffhanger, for the love of Pete can you make it one that actually…cliffhangs? Competently?

For example: “Will this be the end for the group of people this story focuses on?” No. No it will not. Everyone knows it will not. Exactly zero cop shows ever have completely disbanded their unit after that kind of cliffhanger, and the ones that have sort of disbanded it (The Wire S1 into S2) did not make it a cliffhanger. They just said: yup, now we are shifting these characters around to do something different. “Will [only female character] perish in a watery grave?” I’m just going to guess no there. “Will [main protagonist] spend his life in jail for a murder he didn’t commit?” Also going with no.

And okay, yes, if you’re doing it right, the suspense is not whether they will get out of something but how–but in the cases above, the “how” looks pretty obvious. How will [only female character] not perish in a watery grave? Well, by swimming or by having one of the others pick her up in a boat, I’m guessing. Haven’t seen that one yet, so we’ll see. And how will [main protag] get out of jail for a murder he didn’t commit? In a cop show–except for The Wire pretty much universally invested in the system working–I’m going to guess exonerating evidence. Wheee. So could you please stop pretending that we don’t know these things?

Putting a secondary character in peril is more effective than putting a protag in peril if you have established a reason for us to be interested in the secondary character–and if we actually believe you’d carry through with it. By the time you’ve watched a season of a show (read several chapters of the book, etc.), you have some idea whether it’s the sort of show that would let a bad guy murder a 4-year-old. That kind of show has to signal its turns pretty early on, or they will put off the people who are watching it to unwind of an evening with a little light mystery. We live in a narrative-savvy age. You have to roll with it.

Also more effective: putting a protag in non-mortal peril of a kind you’d carry through with. Fiction does horrible things to series protags as long as it lets them keep protagging. “Maybe their spouse will leave them or die!” Yep, unless the spouse is seriously major in the show (El in White Collar, for example), that can happen. “Maybe they will be demoted but still able to do the stuff we thought was interesting about them!” Yep. “Maybe they will have an injury they will have to work through in implausible PT episodes!” Wait, that’s a different gripe. (LEGEND OF KORRA PT FAIL ARGH.) You can make them sad. You can make them lonely. You can make them injured. We know these things happen to protags, so we can actually worry that they will happen this time.

Tim and I had a beautiful alternate universe Criminal Minds for the season in which there was an SUV explosion and it was strongly implied one of the team members was in the SUV at the time. In the time between seasons, we lovingly detailed the adventures of Aaron Hotchner after he had recovered from his massive burns and was dealing with trying to run the BAU from a wheelchair while doing actual rehab so the scar tissue wouldn’t cripple his fine motor control and still raise his son. But we knew they would never, ever do it. The question for the beginning of that season was “how will they cheat,” not “who will be killed or maimed.” And really, “how will they cheat” is pretty much always less satisfying suspense. It’s got the viewer/reader thinking about the creator, not the characters. Not what we want.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

1. If someone close to you is brutally murdered and you feel the urge to ask the police, “Do I need a lawyer?”, YOU NEED A LAWYER. Possibly even if they are gently murdered.

2. All people in the British Isles get their exercise by running very close to the edge of cliffs. Nobody in the UK or Ireland goes to the gym or runs on pavement or in a forest or something. Always a cliff, usually with no guard rail.

3. It is totally normal for a very recent widow or widower to make sexual advances to a police officer or other investigating detective. No one finds this suspicious. They should, of course, because it nearly always turns out to be relevant to the case. But apparently there are tons of cases we don’t see in which, “My spouse died this morning, helloooooo Officer Friendly!” is one of the stages of grief that Kubler-Ross missed, because no one ever goes, “hmm, that’s weird, possibly I should consider why this is happening other than my incredible personal magnetism.”

4. When people say that poker is a game that relies on skill and the better player will win in the long-term, they mean that ten to twenty hands should do it. It’s best if you form an elaborate plan for catching murderers (or other criminals!) that relies on someone on your investigative team winning one particular hand at one particular moment, with no way to cheat with the deck or dealer. That should be fine.

5. Boxing, on the other hand, is something that boxers don’t spend years training to do well. You can throw a random tough person at boxing and have them win at a crucial moment to catch a bad guy. Tracking down evidence is usually secondary to this.

6. If you worry enough about doing the right thing, no one will care that you never actually do it.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Last week I was watching yet another murder mystery on television with my workout–really, on any given day, it’s a good bet that I will be watching at least one murder mystery on television with my workout, sometimes two depending on how long they are–and this time it featured a character who had been seriously injured and could not walk. And whenever I see that, I wince, because I know that they’re more than 50% likely to do dodgy PT/OT on screen, and in fact they did.

See, on TV, PT and OT are the same thing. Here is what they both consist of: there are the two parallel bars at armpit height, and the person who cannot walk is supposed to walk between them, and the PT/OT/random relative of the person who cannot walk yells at them to walk. And mostly they eventually do. Isn’t that easy? Isn’t that great? Why can’t everybody walk unassisted by now! How straightforward it all is! And why do people bother to go to school to learn to do PT or OT when anyone–the janitor, the hospital administrator, in fact the random relative of the person who cannot walk–could quite easily do this task?

SIGH.

And I know that the actors who play these characters who cannot walk are usually themselves able-bodied. But the PT/OT characters never do anything like, for example, making sure the characters they are supposed to be helping are stepping down on the correct part of their foot, by which I mean the bottom. I know that gait problems are one of the things the able-bodied can see when they watch someone with assistive devices walking, but they’re also one of the things that therapy will be working to correct, and they don’t show up out of nowhere. “I was in a car accident, and now I walk on the sides of my feet for no reason!” No, and also no. There’s a reason you don’t see people with visible gait problems walking around without assistive devices very often: incurable gait problems make it very hard to walk without them. So if you’re aiming for unassisted walking, you’re going to try to correct the gait if at all possible. A therapist worth their salt will notice that you are setting your feet down sideways and will stop you and work to correct it. They may remove you from the Parallel Bars of Doom and set you to doing different exercises somewhere else.

But that can’t be right, because being shouted at to walk is the only therapy anyone who cannot walk needs, right?

Another thing that never happens: nobody on TV ever needs to be told to slow down and take a rest, because we always need to be yelled at to do more and try harder. So no physical therapist ever says, “You’re not doing yourself any more good here, you’re just wearing yourself out.” Even though in people close to me alone, I can think of four physical therapy examples where the therapist said, “Now for heaven’s sake don’t do more than X amount, because it won’t help and might hurt you.” But on TV, no. Never.

(Yes, I know that sometimes you do PT and are told to just do it for as much as you can stand, until you drop, etc. It’s just that this is the only mode I see represented on TV.)

This is just sloppy, and I’m very tired of it. Physical therapy and occupational therapy are not the same thing, and between them they cover all kinds of activities to rehabilitate all kinds of body systems. If you’re someone who writes fiction, please think about portraying something different for your PT or OT. If you don’t know what that might include, do some research. There are physical therapists and occupational therapists and lots and lots of people who have been through one or both, and I bet you can easily find boatloads of us who are willing to talk about our experiences and the details that do not involve walking on the sides of your feet between two bars and being yelled at.

Oh, wait. I’m being unfair. Sometimes people who can’t walk also get to go swimming for their PT/OT. Nothing much happens there except they go swimming. Well. I take it all back, then. I was very, very wrong.

Seriously, if you have some examples of PT/OT on TV done better than this, please recommend them to me in the comments.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

I watch a bunch of TV to get me through my workouts, and right now I don’t have a default thing of the right length that I’ve got momentum on, so I thought I would take the opportunity to ask for recommendations. I’ll list a bunch of things I’m in some sense “currently in the middle of,” and you can either suggest other stuff you think I might like or else ask what I like about the things I’ve listed. I am not current on anything: I watch DVDs or Netflix, so “current season” stuff will be spoilers for me.

Oh, and: I am a tough sell for sexual violence. It’s not a hard, fast line for me–for example, I watch Criminal Minds–but it’s pretty easy to hit my “this is no fun any more and I’m taking my marbles and going home” threshold on things like a certain popular soapy historical drama this season.

Shows I’m watching: Arrow, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, The Bletchley Circle, Elementary, The Good Wife, House of Cards, Inspector Lewis, The Killing, The Mentalist, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, Ripper Street, Scandal, Sherlock, White Collar.

I am not at all limited to English language stuff, but the pacing of 22-minute episodes has to hit me right–some anime does and some doesn’t. Almost no live-action English-language stuff does. 55-minute shows can work, but they frustrate me because they’re pretty much exactly the wrong length for what I need for workouts. 40-to-44 are great, as are the 80-to-90 blocks.

Thoughts?

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

I have had a long string of days with no specific time commitments earlier than late afternoon (because things are quite frankly pretty really difficult right now with the vertigo and the meds). As a result, I have the flexibility to try out movies that are in my Netflix queue on an “oh why not, let’s see how it goes” basis, because if they run over the amount of time I need for my workout, or if I have to stop one because it’s no good and move on to another, it won’t screw up the rest of the schedule. I have this theory that if I never run into bad movies (or TV or books or music or restaurants or or or or), I am not casting the net wide enough and am probably missing things I would like that don’t look like things I would definitely totally like.

Lordy there are a lot of bad movies out there. It is hard work to make a movie, and the sheer quantity of terrible ones out there–just the ones on Netflix–just the ones on Netflix that do not immediately trigger the “no, that one will be terrible, do not watch” buttons–is staggering.

One of the things that’s come up a lot about movies that have talented actors in them and come out terrible anyway is that a lot of them start out only trying to do one thing at once. They are doing setting. Not even setting plus gorgeous camerawork, which I could forgive. But look! Here is a solid seven minutes of setting! We are in this particular location! It has buildings! Sometimes a tree or two! (If there are lots of trees I am also more forgiving. Me and trees, you know. Also water. But no, mostly buildings.) Here are some people who are not shot in such a way that you could possibly get to know them, so: still setting! Yep! Setting! No theme here! No characters! Just setting! Seeeeeeettinnnnnng!

Don’t do this.

Or character: here is this guy doing stuff! Boy, is he doing stuff! He is folding his laundry! Hee, what a quirky guy, with the way he folds his laundry! It is what we call stage business, the laundry folding! And this can be great. This can be really good, the stage business, the introducing us to the character. But you can’t let it drag. Because if your actor is talented enough to show us who he is with the folding of his laundry, he’s talented enough to show us who he is with the folding of his laundry in a few minutes. And then more of it…is not actually giving us more backstory of who he is and who his Uncle Carlo is and what his Uncle Carlo did in the war and all that. Not just with the laundry. You have to give us another character, you have to give us more setting, you have to give us something more than just the one thing.

I’m not saying everything has to be fast-paced. I’m saying that even in leisurely pacing, even in a loving slow and gentle buildup like you often get with the hour and a half BBC mysteries, you’re generally doing more than one thing at once…and if you’re not, you lose audience attention, because you have to earn it, you don’t get to just call names when it slips away.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Spoilers for the first season of House of Cards in UK and US versions. I don’t know how to do a cut-tag on my wordpress journal if in fact such a thing is possible. So seriously. Spoilers. If you care, back away from the post.

Francis Urquhart and Frank Underwood have some key things in common, due to the one series being based on the other. The main thing is that they are both consummate backroom politicians–wheeler-dealers, hip-deep in machinations, people who use the secrets and foibles and relationships of others to achieve their own ends. This is sometimes horrible and generally fun to watch, in no small part because they are so good at it. It’s a form of competence porn: it’s very satisfying to watch people do difficult things they’re good at.

And then. And then partway through each version’s first season, the main character FU kills someone who is being inconvenient.

And gets away with it.

When I was talking about this with Timprov, the metaphor he came up with was that it was as though you had set up Sherlock Holmes and suddenly had him torture a confession out of a suspect. It’s not what makes Sherlock Holmes interesting–in fact, it’s the opposite of it. In some fundamental sense it’s not what Sherlock Holmes is for. It’s a crude solution from someone whose entire point is subtlety, and as such it’s terribly unsatisfying. If you want me to watch someone kill people, and wince and marvel, give me Omar, give me Brother Mouzone, but do not give me Sherlock Holmes with a baseball bat, and do not give me Francis Urquhart or Frank Underwood. The early episodes of each show us that FU is someone who exploits other people’s weaknesses, and the victims in question each have plenty of weaknesses. So having FU just decide to kill them is an annoying waste of the character’s skills, which are what I like to watch in the first place, in favor of a skillset neither FU has ever demonstrated in the first place.

I’ve started watching the second series (what we would call the second season) of the British version, and it has some lovely moments, but generally the killing thing is totally unsatisfactory to me, and the handling of it has not improved. Timprov pointed out that the show may not have been made as competence porn at all, it may have been made mostly as a poke at the Tories, and I can see that–it’s visible from space–but it’s a great deal less interesting to me, and I think would be even if it was poking at politicians in my own country and my own timeline. Schemers are fascinating. Unsubtle digs and implausible deaths less so.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

timprov and I are almost done watching S2 of Boardwalk Empire, and one of the ways I viewed S1 has...not exactly shifted, but I have been reminded to be careful in how I talk about this sort of thing, especially with a multi-author work.

In S1 of BE, I feel like I notice an interesting triad of post-WWI New Women: Margaret the Suffragist, Angela the Bohemian/Artist, and Lucy the Flapper. I didn't love all these characters--okay, mostly I didn't love Lucy. But the things I didn't love about her, I still kind of loved, because they were totally period-appropriate. She's a pouty jazz baby--the way she addresses men fairly indiscriminately as "daddy" and whines for what she wants and doesn't care who she stomps on her way to a good time--or whether that good time will last more than five seconds--that's all very period-appropriate. And that's all stuff that's not liking the character rather than thinking the character is done badly. In a cast this size, I can totally live with one Lucy in exchange for an Angela and a Richard and a Chalky.

But ( spoilers for S2 of Boardwalk Empire )

Does that mean that the triad I was seeing isn't there in the show? No. It's there in S1. You can poke it with a stick. But talking about it as the thing that I see is very different from talking about it as the thing that they were doing, and the experience of watching S2 reminds me to be careful in making that distinction. I can appreciate it as something cool in S1 of the show without insisting that it's all a cunning plan--and especially without getting angry with the writers when the cunning plan that was not necessarily theirs in the first place falls apart.

For workout fodder, I have been watching Leverage S4. It's not very good, although it has compensating factors for me (the compensating factors are named Hardison, Eliot, and Parker), and one of the things I like least is the stuff they consider running gag or arc plot. The one I'm thinking of at the moment is a question that falls flat for me in most of its incarnations, and that is: what is Sophie's real name?

I can tell you. Sophie's real name is Sophie.

See, I don't care what it says on her birth certificate. I don't care what it says on the most legal of her legal documents. The four people she works with most, the four people she appears to care about most, call her Sophie. And therefore her name is Sophie. She may also have another real name. But Sophie is her real name.

I have a friend named Ctein, and from conversations with him I understand he has gone through the legal process to make sure that all documents reflect this. That is his name. But guess what? If the US government thought his name was John Smith or Susan Goldstein or Bobatundae Chen, his real name would still be Ctein. Because when I see him, I say, "Hey, Ctein!", and he says, "Hi!" and gives me a hug. If instead he sighed and said, "I told you not to call me that. Please call me Larry," and he wasn't joking, then his real name would be Larry. But it's not, it's Ctein.

One of my friends posted a list on Facebook about being polite to transgendered people, and as far as I could tell, the rule of thumb was, "Assume transgendered people are people; proceed." Because I could not think of any other circumstance in which someone would say, "Hello, my name is Jennifer," and it would be polite to respond with, "But what is it REALLY? What is your REAL name?" If someone says, "Hello, my name is Jennifer," the polite response is, "Pleased to meet you, Jennifer." Or possibly, "Duck, Jennifer, there are ninjas coming at your head!" But mostly the former. The latter circumstance rarely arises but is still more commonly polite than quizzing Jennifer on her REAL name.

The stories where finding out who somebody used to be turns out to be the most important thing--I can connect to those sometimes. I can connect to those when who that person used to be was forcibly taken from them. So, like, slave narratives. Or some Native American/First Nations stories. Times when someone had to hide. Times when they've forgotten who they used to be, although those are iffy for me because they're so often done badly. But when someone has had a good degree of free choice, I feel pretty strongly about respecting that free choice. If they've left a parent of origin who was pretty crappy, sometimes they have kept the name that parent gave them, and sometimes they've picked a new one, and I don't feel that insisting that the real true them is not the interesting person they've built, but rather the childhood they left, is a good idea. I feel that that's disrespectful of the person they've built and the choices they've made. And even when it's not a matter of crappy parenting--yes, the past is important. It contains our roots. But I think we can get way too caught up in that. In the case of "what is Sophie's real name?", it's a very superficial rooting. We have no ongoing character Sophie could turn out to secretly be, no history that could turn out to suddenly be hers. We already met her family of origin. We could just now discover that they originally named her Madeleine or Mehitabel or Claudia or Claire. Which...would not make her not-Sophie in any way that I can see.

So I tend to bounce off of secret name magic in fantasy, and I'm bouncing off it even more in Leverage, where it has no built-up use. The kennings and cognomens that we have--they are knowable. They are reachable. The way we have them is by being ourselves. You cannot keep them secret, because you walk through the world making a hole that is shaped like Sophie, or like Ctein, or like Mrissahainen mighty-sinewed chemist's daughter, or like you. And the parts of yourself that are secret to you can only stay really completely secret for so long before they reach out and shape bits of glass into tiny worlds--and even when they do, the people who have been around you will nod and say, well, that's the sort of thing, you know. I didn't know it would be that world in specific. But I suspected she might. There will be someone who is not in the least surprised, because you have been going around being you, and even when it's an unpredictable kind of you, there will at the very least be people who are smart enough not to try to predict, after awhile.

Maybe that's just in my life. Maybe this Sophie's-name thing is working for people because they have lives full of people who persist in trying to predict in detail and being surprised when it comes out funny. Or maybe there are some of you for whom the secret name thing works better, and you'll be able to tell me why in comments.

Hey, yesterday was my birthday, good deal. That's not actually what I want to talk about, though. I had a great example of structurally obvious choices making something far less interesting than it could have been, and thinking past the obvious choice. So! Spoilers ahoy! If you care about being spoilered for a single episode of a show you might not even watch, avert your pristine eyes.

( Spoilers for Leverage 3.11: The Rashomon Job )

Not every writer needs to write down the most obvious idea and then deliberately toss it out or subvert it. But I've run into several stories and episodes lately where I really felt that the practice might improve the situation, and this sort of thing is why.

During his visit,

alecaustin and I watched the Doctor Who "specials" discs, and

markgritter watched the last two with us. (

timprov apparently has a self-preservation instinct.) And it triggered a theory or perhaps a reminder for the writerly types:

If you feel that you have to have sympathetic supporting characters reminding the reader/viewer at every turn of how Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful your central character is, this is a warning sign that your central character has not been acting Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful enough in plain sight of the reader/viewer.

In the seventh grade we were solemnly taught a list of things you can know about characters, and they included things other people say about them and things they believe about themselves. But these things cannot trump actions. If you have somebody being a megalomaniac onscreen--if you have them being self-indulgent or self-involved or a whiner or whatever else that is not sympathetic and amazing and gosh-darn wonderful--after a certain point, the sympathetic character saying, "Jinkies, you're swell," does not give us information about the non-swell person. It gives us information that the sympathetic person is willing to self-delude and/or ignore evidence. Which is also important information! Just not in the same way. So beware the protag who suddenly seems to have people declaring, "You're dreamy," in herds and droves. This is telling you something, and the thing it's telling is often pretty sketchy.

So the title of this post is an obscure sort of series of jokes: my friend

elisem has a friend she sometimes refers to on lj as Nel Gurgle because of a journal entry he once made, and I think of him that way because it helps for me to have a way to separate out the Exceedingly Public Famous Person and the person who is friends with some of my friends, even though I don't actually know either of them personally. So the name Nel Gurgle is sort of in my head for when I am feeling silly anyway.

Anyway. I have been watching Sandbaggers as part of the Ongoing Mrissa Spy Fiction Experience. It was kindly lent me by carbonel, and I am finding it quite useful for reminding me of spy things I do and do not want to be doing.

But oh lordy. What I am not doing is emotionally engaging with it.

( spoilers through mid-S2 )

When people advise you to steal from the best, they do not mean to lift your scene nearly verbatim from The Remains of the Day.

They particularly do not mean to do so if you are also working in filmed 20th-century-setting historical fiction so that most of your audience will have also seen The Remains of the Day good grief monkeys what are you thinking yarrrrrg.

Ahem. As you were.

It turns out that the line between "well enough to get propped up on the couch and watch Daria and A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and "not well enough to get propped up on the couch and watch Daria and A Bit of Fry and Laurie" is an important one.

We just watched

markgritter's new DVD of X-Men: First Class, and I totally have ideas for the new mutants for their next movie, X-Men: Coach! Okay, so First Class featured such stellar mutants as Nightcrawler But Red And Evil, Screams Like A Littull Girrull, and Guy Who Remembers What Decade We're Supposed To Be In And Dresses Accordingly. So for Coach, I figure they should have Leprechaun! Who will be like Nightcrawler but green and evil! And also Animal! Who will be like Beast but red! And a drummer!

Actually this title is totally misleading; I don't know why they don't call me about these things.

You know, if you'd asked me before tonight, I would probably have said that my X-men-related affections could be bought for the price of one pretty good Beast. And it turns out no, I am not that cheap. Good to know.

When

moiread said she was enjoying The Good Wife, I raised an eyebrow. The Good Wife? Really? What is it, a Louisa May Alcott miniseries? (No. That is Good Wives.) It was not a title to inspire confidence. And then later when I said I was enjoying it, I got the same eyebrow from

alecaustin: it's called The Good Wife? And you like it?

I do. And I figured it was worth saying here, because others of you may be liking this thing, but I'm not really hearing about it.

Here is what The Good Wife does better than any other show I've ever seen except maybe The Wire: rather than having Good Guys and Bad Guys, it has good and bad actions flowing from--and follow me here, this is going to get difficult to comprehend--the characters themselves. I know! How radical! But seriously, Will and Kalinda and Cary and Diane and Peter and Alicia herself--and Eli, oh, Eli--pretty much all of them. They don't do bad things because they Are Bad People, and they don't do good things because they Are Good People. They do good and bad things because they are very particular people, and those are not only their very particular mistakes but also--and I feel this is actually more often missing--their very particular moments of conscience and nobility. But on a meta level, I love watching the show keeping the balance: is X a sympathetic character or an unsympathetic one? The answer to that is almost never easy or straightforward, because just when you hate or love someone, they will do something perfectly in character and opposing in direction of sympathy from where they were before. And I love this. I also love that the writers want me to acknowledge that I am cheering for Eli (or whoever else) because I like Eli, not because he is an upstanding person. I love that they understand the difference. I love that bad behavior is allowed to remain bad behavior when it is performed by people we like--that "this is good because we're the good guys" is never, ever what they're doing.

On a more basic level, this is a legal procedural set in Chicago and interwoven with Chicago politics. And the writers, they get what reputation Chicago politics has. Sometimes things are very dirty indeed. And sometimes things are dirty in service of a good cause, and sometimes they're just plain dirty, and sometimes things come back to bite people. Consequences! You know how we love shows about consequences around here.

And yes, the titular character does in fact start the series with her husband going through a sex scandal, but the title starts with irony and goes into complexity within a few minutes, then never leaves. Is Alicia a good wife? Is she a good person? The show refuses to answer. She is herself, she is a person, she has goals, and sometimes those goals shift with time and additional information.

I've seen two seasons of this, and I can't wait for season three. It prompts me to sigh, "Oh, show," so frequently that

timprov (who wandered in halfway through S1 and got hooked) is probably sick of it. I love this show. It is so much fun. It is frothy fun and chewy fun, sometimes both at once. Unless you hate legal procedurals, you should probably give it a try.

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Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

The stories are made up, but the problems are real.

Entries tagged with small screen

A mosaicist's pebble

Indirection and the Horrors of the Moment

Why, Miss A! You're Beautiful Without Your Shift In Meaning!

Listen to Kenny Rogers, storytellers.

The stupid mistakes of smart people (are not the same)

Excitement! Suspense! Cliffhangers! Or…not.

Things I Learned From Watching Cop Shows

PT/OT, TV

Small screen suggestions?

Bad movies: doing just one thing at a time

Competence porn, character expectations, and the Houses of Cards

Boardwalk Empire and critical attibution pitfalls

Real true names.

Structure and obvious choices: Leverage as an example

Very special episodes.

The Angst of Nel Gurgle

A word to the wise

The two halves of my day

Why They Don't Call Me

Titles are important, but sometimes you should ignore them.

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