(number one million and nine in a continuing series)
(1) I just overheard a young woman on her mobile phone saying It was a brilliant film, really really good, it ticked all the boxes, whatever emotion you wanted, it had it. This is depressing because a lecturer in TV studies told me recently that the reason TV drama is rubbish these days is because of reality TV changing the way that we make and understand narratives - because you can't plot reality TV round events, you have to structure the episodes solely around the emotional ups and downs. And now fictional drama has begun to privilege emotion as the primary narrative drive, too. Which hypothesis is, by the way, borne out by every episode of New Who that Russell T Davies has ever written.
So this explains a lot about why so many of my students find it so difficult to talk about the words on the page in front of them, rather than going straight into generalities about the meaning of the text or how it made them feel. Because pop-culture these days is often not rewarding the kinds of reading that follow structure and plot and respond to well-crafted, intricate, sense-making narratives. Films? They might as well be mood organs!
(2) Andrew O'Hagan wrote an essay on the decline of the English working-classes in the Guardian review recently, which I did not read, and then Tim Lott wrote a very long letter to the Guardian in response basically saying that the Scottish working-classes were much worse so there. But what was incredibly revealing about this letter - gah, I don't seem to be able to link to it, if anyone can find it please let me know, or otherwise I'll just have to copy bits out when I get home and find it - was twofold; Lott says
(a) that the English are 'naturally dominant' in Britain because they comprise 84% of the population in the British Isles, and that this isolates them; and
(b) that it is harder to be a member of the dominant culture because you are not cushioned by oppression.
Cushioned by oppression! It's brilliant! By which I mean it's one of the neatest expressions of one of the stupidest ways of thinking I've seen in a long time. The idea that dominant groups are not 'cushioned' by constant reflections and reminders of their own rightness, their own normality, their own obviousness, their own naturalness. Instead members of oppressed groups, living in cultures which constantly remind them (us) that they (we) are wrong, abnormal, surprising or unusual or unnatural or in need of explanation and justification, are 'cushioned', by... I'm not sure. The sense of specialness that this gives us? The way we are protected from isolation by sheer lack of numbers? Hmm.
Anyway, thank you, Tim Lott. I have been trying to put my finger on a particular strand of dominant-culture apologia for a long time now, and this crystallizes it for me.
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5 comments:
(1) I wonder how this relates to what you were saying about the differences between writing theory and writing fiction that you were discussing the other day-- you talked about the words themselves being the stuff of theory, while suggesting that fiction springs from daydreams/images/character, etc (always acknowledging, of course, that thought and language are inseperable). Do you see this privileging of emotion as a futile attempt to divorce the (trancendental) signified from chains of signification? Do you think that texts that use emotion as a narrative vehicle play on a cultural ideal that associates emotion with interiority and truth?
Of course, I'm not sure that we can lay the blame solely at the feet of reality TV. Plenty of movies had taglines to the tune of "You'll laugh, you'll cry, in this tale of rediscovered friendship, blah blah" long before reality TV was around.
And finally, I must confess that, while I have never particularly enjoyed tear-jerkers-- films that seems to exist for a cheap catharsis-- I do very much enjoy RTD's episodes of Doctor Who-- yes, he enjoys playing on our emotions in order to make an impact, but I think he's a writer who is very well aware of the role that language plays in evoking that emotional response, something that becomes very clear in the episode "Midnight".
(2) The notion of dominant groups being isolated is strangely intriguing, although not in Lott's sense-- because dominant groups do have privilege that allows them (us) to ignore the other, to render the other invisible, and as such, they isolate themselves from plurality. It reminds me of tales of Americans who can't locate Iraq on a map-- even if these are just urban legends, they have power because there is a sense that (white) America, as a dominant and xenophobic group, has isolated itself from the world.
Poor Tim Lott, how awful to only get to publish about your lack of cushions in The Guardian. But the real reason I am here is to point you to an mp3 of Le Guin reading from Lavinia: download from this page.
Eee thanks Una!!
Beppie, this has been intriguing me for ages, sorry it's taken me so long to respond.
Do you see this privileging of emotion as a futile attempt to divorce the (trancendental) signified from chains of signification? Do you think that texts that use emotion as a narrative vehicle play on a cultural ideal that associates emotion with interiority and truth?
No, I don't - which is interesting, because I hadn't realized how different I think reading and writing are. I mean, I think about the pleasure of writing fanfic as being about the pleasure of converting emotion and (imagined) physical sensation into language, but I haven't thought about the pleasures of watching as being about the conversion the other way round (from language into emotion). That's intriguing, and it might help me reconcile myself to this new thing...
And yes, emotion (you'll laugh! you'll cry!) has been around forever (you'll feel pity! you'll feel terror! you'll achieve catharsis and be a better Athenian citizen!), and I am a big fan of emotion as such, or at least I recognize that it's hugely problematic to kick it out in favour of the intellect or other such gendered-and-raced binaries. But the thing with RTD is that his plots don't make any sense - I mean, Finding Nemo, which is one of my favourite films, makes me cry copiously (we actually had to stop the DVD ten minutes in the first time we watched it because I started a half-hour crying jag), but it doesn't just rely on the emotions in the audience to fake some sort of narrative closure: there's never a point at which you go 'But there is no reason for that character to do that thing' or 'But they could have solved that problem by doing x/y/z'. Emotion probably drives the narrative as much as everything else, but the writers don't use randomly-generated emotions in the author to fake a solution to plot points which have, in fact, been left unresolved. And that's what I think RTD very often does (although when he gets it right, my God he gets it right, and he is absolutely one of my heroes). I mean his plots often just have logical holes in that you could drive a bus through, and that makes the motivations of the characters deeply suspect and the whole thing falls apart for me. (Also, his valuations of the characters, on which the emotional closure/effects depend often doesn't work on its own terms - we watched 'The Voyage of the Damned' last night and srsly, the way he milked the death of Kylie robs the deaths of Poon and Bannakaffalata and the others of their impact - and therefore, for me, robs the death of Kylie of its impact, too. I spend the whole last ten minutes of that episode just throwing myself about on the sofa in rage.)
I hated Midnight, too, interestingly - I think it's my least favourite RTD episode by quite some way, because it sets up a number of social and narrative problems and then fails to resolve them at all, instead switching to, basically, shouting shallow truisms about how bad it is when people TURN ON OTHER PEOPLE because they're DIFFERENT until we all just switch our brains off in self-defence.
Ahem. I mean, I suppose the thing for me is that I need a fit between emotion and narrative - when I talked at the London Literary Festival about slash (hem-hem), I was talking about the difference between slash and gay porn being that when I read gay porn I spend so much time going But what is he feeling? What does this specific sex act mean to him in terms of his earlier experience? What will the emotional consequences be? Has he got bus fare home? Aren't his knees getting sore? that I actually drop out of the fantasy, because without that (emotional) information it just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe what I mean is that I think of emotions as being on the same level of reality as other narrative things... But that's the characters' emotions, not the audience's, so I'm not talking about the same thing any more, anyway.
(2) I love the idea of being (or feeling) isolated from plurality - I can feel a switch going on in my brain at the thought! It explains a lot, I think.
but I haven't thought about the pleasures of watching as being about the conversion the other way round (from language into emotion).
And this becomes even more tangled when we're talking about Doctor Who, given that so many of the people involved in the production of the show now were fans as children, and people like RTD and Moffat started out writing fan fiction, etc. So you have writers who are trying to translate their emotions from childhood into something for a modern audience, who is then supposed to translate that into a new set of emotions.
Can you provide me an example of where you think RTD does get it right? Admittedly, my familiarity with his work extends only to Who and Casanova (I mean to watch Queer as Folk sometime soon, but the shops near me seem to only stock the American version), but I'm interested to know what you see as his best work.
About "Voyage of the Damned" and "Midnight"-- RTD himself has said (in The Writer's Tale) that he saw the latter as a response to the former-- in VotD they get through because so many people are willing to sacrifice themselves (and I agree that the way that Astrid's sacrifice is valorised above Bannakafalata's or Foon's is highly problematic), while in "Midnight" the complete opposite happens.
[Midnight] sets up a number of social and narrative problems and then fails to resolve them at all, instead switching to, basically, shouting shallow truisms about how bad it is when people TURN ON OTHER PEOPLE because they're DIFFERENT until we all just switch our brains off in self-defence.
But this happens in the context of the Doctor's speech being stolen from him, pre-empted by the unnamed entity possessing Skye, which emphasises the impossibility of an individual ever owning a language, and therefore the impossibility owning their own thoughts, sense of selfhood, etc. RTD undermines the notion of the Doctor as an authority-- when possessed!Skye steals his words before he speaks them, she represents the threat that the language of authority is merely a simulacrum without any connection to the real or a transcendental signified-- and in that context, every truism does become shallow and empty.
Of course, one can argue that Rusty ultimately reasserts the Doctor's authority and selfhood, insofar as the unnamed attendant recognises the term "Allonsy" as "belonging" to the Doctor, but I don't think that this actually resolves the problems raised by the pre-emptive mimicry. We're still left with the uneasiness that if the Doctor can be undermined in such a way, then we're all vulnerable.
Back to the issue of emotion being used to resolve narrative rather than plot, the obvious example is Donna's ending, where RTD has said openly that he wanted to create the maximum emotional impact so that people would remember it. But while this ending was deeply problematic in so many ways (please Rusty, why can't you let a woman KEEP her super-powers for once?), I don't think it could have had the emotional impact that it did if it hadn't been backed up by the entire S4 story arc.
I'm probably going to have to step back here and analyse my own responses a bit, because I admit that I greatly enjoyed "The Stolen Earth" and "Journeys End" (which is NOT to say that I think they should be watched uncritically), and the plot holes really didn't bother me (I suppose the entire plot really boiled down to Davros wanting to evoke an emotional response in the Doctor, and Dalek Caan wanting to do the same to Davros), simply because it was a case of, "I really love these characters, and they're all going to be together at the same time, squee!" While I can see, objectively, that the plot of these episodes was rather colander-like, I found them satisfying.
What you say about randomly generated emotions seems to describe to me what happened in Torchwood (which usually makes Doctor Who plots look rock solid, of course!), particularly with the whole death-and-ressurection-of-Owen thing-- because we were supposed to believe that Jack would resurrect Owen for emotionally driven reasons, even though he's been he's allowed people he's loved go to their deaths plenty of times in the past-- it was like we were supposed to understand why Jack was emotionally driven to do this thing with NOTHING to back it up.
And now I think I'm rambling-- and much as I'd love to go back over this comment and get rid of all the typos that I'm sure I've made, I really have to get on with my thesis-writing now. :)
when possessed!Skye steals his words before he speaks them, she represents the threat that the language of authority is merely a simulacrum without any connection to the real or a transcendental signified-
Oh, now this I like!
in VotD they get through because so many people are willing to sacrifice themselves (and I agree that the way that Astrid's sacrifice is valorised above Bannakafalata's or Foon's is highly problematic), while in "Midnight" the complete opposite happens.
Oh, Rusty is a very strange person - he thinks 'the complete opposite' of 'so many people sacrificing themselves' is 'just the black woman sacrificing herself'? Rusty!
RTD episodes I love: Rose (God, that's a bloody marvellous episode); The End of the World; Tooth and Claw; Love and Monsters; the Cybermen/Dalek two-parter at the end of Tennant's first season; Gridlock; Turn Left. I think he does 'high concept', visual spectacle, and family drama absolutely brilliantly, but when he tries to do a Stephen Moffat episode (eg in Midnight - a mixture of psychology and science-fiction) he buggers it up.
Am just back from a con where EVERYONE IN THE WORLD was in love with Midnight, by the way - I think J and I might be the only people I know who don't like it. It is often the way.
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