Monthly Archives: May 2012

Awake: the hyperspace of mindfuck

When you pick up a TV series you never know where it’s going to end up and if it will pay off. When you watch shows that play with mythologies and mysteries these stakes are even higher, because they rely far more on the worth of the overall arcs, than the single episode. Recently, Alcatraz revealed itself as awful with the closing of its first (and last) series. It was far, far shallower and more inconsistent (in the sense it lacked substance) than how LOST was. The writers must have been crazy thinking the public would bother going through the same patterns with even more empty baits and unexplained movers. And there’s Fringe, that grew in significance and inventiveness for the first three seasons, steadily improving, but then had a fourth season that became formulaic and proceeded by rehashing the previous three, ending in so much sloppiness and predictable cliches as to not only suck by itself, but also sucking value OUT of what preceded it.

Awake is instead the kind of show that goes as close as possible to a flawless execution. I don’t know what you could have possibly have done better with it. And if I have to explain why the public abandoned it, leading to a cancellation, then I can only find motivations for its complexity and high stakes, not making for a show that can be popular. It is true that Awake also droops into formulaic episodes through its first and middle section, and so feeling like it exhausted what it had to say (Touch also relies on the protagonist following faithfully some magical hand-waving, but that one was renewed, probably because it is a lot more hypocritical and consolatory). It can definitely feel heavy and boring depending how you approach with. Yet it didn’t ignore the hooks that are needed to reach that public, and used them in the best way possible without making them artificial and not pertinent. It wasn’t made as a “esoteric” show for a small group that could appreciate its theme, but made with the actual potential to reach out for a big public. And the execution was up to this task. SO WHY? I think because the general public prefers something (a show) that is not as much ambiguous as this one. If you’re dealing with fantasy, Sci-fi and mythology, then to be successful your show needs to be neck deep into it. Recognizable at a glance for what it is. It needs to use a “language” in the way people expect, and it needs to “surprise” while never daring to come out of the set of expectation and “communicative pact”. Awake, instead, was a show based on a tension itself based on substance you can’t pinpoint. It plays with psychology, perception and reality. It necessarily brings in the metaphysics (or meta-linguistic) aspects of the medium (who’s watching? who’s reliable?). And it is made to continuously challenge your expectations about it, making it hard to frame. Is it Sci-fi? Is it just a procedural? Is he dreaming? Is he dead? What are the stakes? And so obligatory requiring a kind of public that enjoys being put constantly off balance and challenged for real. Requiring an effort to readjust, and even accept the plausibility of its premise (since an openly Sci-fi show can dare doing a lot more without its public freaking out).

So my conclusion is that Awake “failed” (to secure at least a second season) to reach its intended public solely because it deliberately decided to stay outside of a given genre, and to dance on the edges. These days brands and genres aren’t out there in the world, they are hardwired in people’s brains. If you look at commercial successes across mediums you can see that they are always of a tribal nature. Tribes require clearly marked boundaries. Commercial success doesn’t come through authentic challenge, but through identity and beliefs reinforcement. Awake targets a public that is more heterogeneous, so potentially even bigger, but fails to trigger those mechanics that start the identity-making and tribal support. It’s more self-reflexive, personal, and fails building community. Awake was made of three parts: family drama, procedural, sci-fi/metaphysical gimmick. But it wasn’t embraced by any of these three typical audiences (way too convoluted for family drama, too magical for procedural, and didn’t flirt enough with genre to fully reach sci-fi/geek audiences).

That’s what I think about “context”, now I’ll try to say something about what happened in the show specifically. So, SPOILERS, and I assume you’ve seen it all. Structurally, and before starting with subjective guesses, the plot seems to have “folded” on itself in the last episode. First Britten abandons “red” reality (falls asleep, has a number of hallucinated transitions, ends up “merging”), then he abandons the “green” one (time freezes, he exits by walking right out of the fabric after asserting control, or doubt), to enter a third one with his family now whole. So one could say the finale not only gave closure to the story, but sequentially closed thematically and factually all the doors. The real question to tackle before speculating about an explanation, is speculating about how a second season could have worked.

I’d say we can exclude that the second season would have just this third reality. The show is still founded on a “gimmick” and so we can assume it is going to continue being present. Usually these shows restart by reestablishing an idea of normalcy. It’s plausible that the “happy end” we saw was going to be a temporary thing, and not a new status quo. While it is likely the show would reestablish the twin worlds as we currently known them (one with Britten in prison, the other with him still with his job and with a somewhat better resolution). Another assumption one can make, and evidently implicit (enjoy the apparent contradiction) in what I wrote above is that this show was going to continue staying outside genre. It wants to be a psychological drama, so you weren’t going to find strange Fringe-like machinery that somehow enabled Britten to walk between worlds. Whatever explanation needs to be sought through psychological terms.

Fortunately we don’t even have to do much guesswork since Kyle Killen (showrunner) generously answered all answerable questions. The second season was going to keep the red/green split, and the new reality that is “created” in the last minutes of the finale would have ended up like a psychological “jolly” with its workings being more symbolic than factual. They planned to have Britten in prison in “red”, with Vega trying to solve the case. Eventually (before the new season end) Britten would have been released, but in the meantime while he was in “red”, separated from his wife, he would have found a romantic interest in Rex’s tennis coach on the “green” side, where he’s not in jail and free to go on with his life. This leading to the two realities diverging more and more, and so caught in that progressive break-up and psychological fragmentation foreshadowed by Dr. Lee. How it could have proceeded from that point can’t be said, since the creators wanted to keep it open-ended and fluid.

We also know that the “mechanics” of the gimmick would have stayed ambivalent/ambiguous. Neither reality is authoritative on the other, and they are planned to “sustain” both narratives. You are supposed to find good reasons why “red” is a dream while “green” the real one, as the inverse. In fact above I said that the plot folded, red into green and green into a new one. But you can as well, and even more powerfully, plausibly, invert the order and find it being solid and convincing. Britten jailed (and these scenes gave me a sense of strong claustrophobia), destroyed and without justice, not only now separated from his son, but from his wife as well. With only a possibility for a way out: his mind.

One could even try to speculate on the “first mover”, but in this case the title of the finale is particularly explicit in its declaration of intent: “Turtles all the way down”. We know that the series creators didn’t consider this mystery as the focus of their work, and that it was simply an emotional “enabler” to tell this type of story. A what-if scenario to explore. In a post-modern world the answer is that Kyle Killen is guilty of charge (of being the first mover), but I guess this explanation wouldn’t satisfy anyone. But from there you can deduce a few thing. The reality split has been dominated by an origin: the accident. We also know that the apparent resolution of the first season wasn’t going to close it, so solving the case of the accident wouldn’t have “fixed” the split itself. Nor there was going to be a different accident causing a new split through the second season.

If I had to pick a favorite I wouldn’t say that Britten ended up in a coma and dreaming everything from that point. I’d rather ideally extend the idea of the first mover. He is imagining everything, but he isn’t passing his time unconscious in a hospital room while real reality goes on unsampled. I’d rather say he’s there, in the moment of the accident, trapped in the wreck of his car. He does not know if his wife is hurt, if his son is hurt. He has fears that he projects as speculative dreams. Like Killen himself, he begins imagining what could happen. This means that the closing scene of the finale may as well be real. Maybe no one died in the accident, or one of the three, or all three. We don’t know because the “real story” stopped before that moment. We just got a time freeze, we got to explore possibilities about what could have happened, the product of imagination. The first mover is Killen as the writer of the show, and the first mover, within the frame of the story, is Britten who fears the consequences of his accident and becomes the narrator of the story. The story itself can’t be resolved, because the show “ends” before it is written (and so truly open ended, since it’s who’s watching who gets to decide how it goes). (if you watch the movie Another Earth you’ll notice how they are built with the exact same intent, and even share the car incident as the trigger for parallel worlds)

That’s one possibility, but there aren’t that many to pick from considering the restraints the show works with (as I said: no sci-fi, no fantasy). The other possibilities is that one of the true realities is eventually revealed as “true”. This can happen at any moment and be plausible. Or maybe he is in a flux of consciousness. Less about what it is that makes his perception “weird” and more about creating doubts about our own reality. How can YOU say you’re not dreaming right now? How can YOU be sure you are not hallucinating? How can you say where is “up” and where is “down” if all your references have been removed? What if you are going through those transitions between realities constantly, but your brain self-adjust without making you perceive the “jump”?

I’ve finished reading a few days ago the first book of Thomas Covenant, and I’ll write again about this, since it deals even more directly with this specific theme.

Overall I think this was an excellent show that kept all its promises and delivered aplenty. It doesn’t even suffer much from the fact it wasn’t renewed, since the arc has a more than good closure. The mythology never became as prominent as I’d have liked, but the character drama and development through the whole arc was so convincing and well done that I didn’t mind if it played a bit conservatively. It sagged some after the first couple of episodes, and they could have done a better work describing how the subconscious was working instead of making it appear as a jedi mind-trick. But the tension in the last three episodes rose exponentially. The finale is a masterpiece from beginning to end, creative and truly inspired to the very end. That’s a perfectly crafted mind-bender, pulled off with amazing competence and so much better than more discussed mystery-based shows like Fringe, Lost, Alcatraz and so on.

Fowles’ original Magus

I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic than my pseudo-aristocratic, seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short.

Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.

It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn’t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.

The picture above (taken with the only crappy camera I could find) is of the book I received today, The Magus by John Fowles. I was able to order it for cheap from the used books on Amazon, and I was glad to find out that this copy I was able to get was indeed the one published in 1974.

I could have bought a newer edition but this one got the best cover (not as good as the original hardcover, but better than… this) and, more importantly, every review I read mentioned that the original version was superior to the revised one, and the revised one is the only one that is published these days. The revision was published in 1977, so if I could find a version prior to that date I could be certain it was the one I wanted. For the most part, what is criticized about the revision is that the writer attempted to clarify the mystery of the book, but ended up defusing and lessening that valuable and meaningful air of mystery. It was essentially made more accessible, but also less powerful. Since what interests me is the myth and mystery, I had to get the first, uncompromised version.

Not sure if the book will make my official reading queue and if I’ll continue commenting it, but for now I read the first chapter (and it’s excellent) and compared with the revised version available on Amazon. The differences are minimal, some spelling changes and unneeded grammar fixes. The biggest change I found was “we argued about essence and existence” turned into “we argued about being and nothingness”.

Bakker’s recent analysis of fiction is a meaningful one (pun intended). I’d say this book is certainly trying to “max out meaning”, but contrarily to Bakker, the romantic vision is one that, once relocated and properly understood, still carries value for me (but this becomes again another contradiction, as you might imagine).

On Deus ex Machina

I wrote a further clarification about what I intend with DEM and their use in A Clash of Kings, so I’ll repost it here. It’s an attempt to explain what I personally like and why, as well trying to describe something objectively. But it’s not some kind of absolute judgement, just a personal reaction.

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Magic isn’t always DEM. If a wizard has the fireball spell and uses it consistently, it’s not a DEM. But if a wizard suddenly has a brand new spell that is used to resolve a situation and is revealed right in that moment, that feels like a DEM. The writer is using the unpredictability of magic to come up with a convenient trick for the situation at hand. That’s why it feels sloppy, because it’s the writer giving his characters something specifically designed for that moment. It’s god coming into the world and making changes. It feels like a cheat and manipulation.

But, if the wizard has the fireball spell and the party only meets groups of goblins, then the wizard is transformed into a DEM-like character. Whenever they meet a group of goblins no one has to do anything at all because the wizard has the fireball spell that completely annihilates the goblins, again and again. The character becomes a DEM because it holds a power, within the specific frame, that is overblown and not kept in check. Like Khellus in PON (*). It disrupt what the story established up to that point. And that’s why I called Melisandre a DEM-like power. In that context she’s the ONLY one not to follow the rules, and the only one to have a kind of power that disrupts the fabric of the story.

Imho the problem in ACOK is that at high level the story is almost completely independent from the decisions of chapter PoVs (that instead drove the plot in book 1). They are powerless because the events are “steered” precisely through the use of those tricks. It happens at key points: Renly’s campaign, Stannis’ campaign, Blackwater, and Jon. That comprises the WHOLE plot frame of the book (minus Daenerys, but Daenerys is essentially idling for the whole book).

The characters who have power of choice and action (Theon, Arya, Catelyn) are essentially dealing with their own small space with relatively small impact on the outside. While others are passive bystanders or observers (Davos, Sansa, Bran). You could make an exception with Theon, who has some impact and is virtually untouched by DEM. In fact it’s the most consistent and genuine part of the book.

In book 1 magic has no influence on plot (the exception is the end of Daenerys PoV), but in book 2 magic grasps the most important threads of the plot and, through that strategic use, controls *everything*.

Since I do believe that Martin writes much better the realistic character drama than he writes magic, this sudden change of balance in book 2 makes me say that I didn’t like it as much as the first. But I also wouldn’t say it’s a bad book. It’s not. It’s really strong, gripping and entertaining to read. Just not on par with the first.

* I deliberately mention Bakker’s Prince of Nothing even if it seems to run counter to my argument. I like PON. You can write a story around or about a DEM if that’s your goal. But it’s very tricky and you need to be self-aware. Scott Bakker is. Erikson does this a lot, and he does it very well too. My point is that I personally believe that Martin writes good, realistic character drama but isn’t as good writing magic or meta-fictional types of layers. ASOIAF qualities, and Martin’s, are elsewhere (**).

** And yet I’m always more interesed to read Martin when he writes this specifically (Daenerys, Bran, a bit of Jon). I want to see if he can come up with something creative and that feels inspired. But I’m usually underwhelmed.

A Clash of Kings: some comments

I’ve finished reading A Clash of Kings even if it didn’t show on my reading queue and I’m not going to “officially” review, but I wanted to write down some scattered comments about it and put some kind of content on the blog.

Overall I think it’s not a strong as the first book. Martin did a good job with it, but I think the merit is mostly on the first book, setting up really well all the various parts. Book 2 makes it more a task of running with the ball, and that’s well done. Something that I didn’t expect is that Martin jumps some events more than the first book. The PoVs dictate the flow and the scenes that don’t strictly belong to one are avoided even if they could be significant. I fear that moving on with book 3+ this will become an exception and Martin will feel compelled to bog in unnecessary detail. In fact I remember a recent interview where he said that if he could rewrite ACOK today he would put Robb PoV back in and describe directly the campaign (hint: this wouldn’t improve the book at all and I’d rely more in Martin’s past wit than his most recent…).

Most of the merits of this second book are about sticking to those PoVs and make the characters’ drama drive the story in a way that feels plausible. Some of the best chapters tell a self-contained mini-story that ranges between 8 and 20 pages. In this book Martin begins having a more cumbersome, heavy prose that sometimes indulges into lists of names or other things that one reads only to immediately forget, but being the chapter “chunks” rather short it still makes for a good flow. Every time one of these chapter closes you have the urge to know what happens next (and I often went to read the first pages on the same PoV, sometimes almost 200 pages ahead), and I don’t think anyone else gets this compelling reading formula better than Martin.

Characters are always well written and truly “grey”. I think this is an aspect often misdescribed. It’s not about making a character morally ambiguous, but about making it somewhat plausible. There are definitely “heroes” that Martin wants the reader to root for, taking sides actively. The book is NOT neutral. Its strength is in making it work. Arya, an heroine the reader is supposed to love and recognize/sympathize with, can murder some nameless guy. This is from one side coherent with the character and the truly unforgiving world, and from the other side the reader finds it acceptable. As if this case made the murder totally acceptable. Necessary in some way.

This contrasts with murder that is not necessary, and while considering this I noticed how Martin uses this device every time he seeks for a certain response and shock the reader with some unpredictable death (and there are MANY). What defines these deaths, that are supposed to move and shock the reader, is that they are usually unnecessary (and unexpected). The result of some hate, or spite or brutal violence. But not strictly necessary, it’s an exhibition of violence. That’s how some characters (like Arya) can still be readers’ favorite even when they do something controversial. And I think this prepares the path from some characters’ arc like Jaime. The trick is the PoV, when you get into a character and learn his motivations you get to understand and sympathize.

At the micro level you can appreciate how well written everything is, but at the macro level some evident shortcomings start to show. For example the “pinch” that is made by the two extreme sides that close on the story, Ice/Jon Snow and Fire/Daenerys, is very obviously lagging behind while the center (the clash of kings) is getting bloated out of proportions. It’s not surprising that Martin started to have problem managing the thing (“the story grew in the telling”), since it’s only this central part that gets bigger in comparison with the rest. Daenerys PoV is a total of 60 pages in a book of 950, and in those few pages she’s basically idling or chasing after prophecies that are used to foreshadow how the story develops. Jon PoV is about 100 pages, but it’s mostly all preparation and flavor, used simply to move Jon to a new position. These two PoVs go together because they are disengaged from the rest of the story. They are like side-plots that wait to converge in some later book.

Another observation about the macro level is that the book is filled with Deus Ex Machina. I know people complain about this in Erikson’s books, but if you accept that kind of broad definition of DEM, then Martin have aplenty in this book, and all at crucial points of the story. To begin from the obvious: Melisandre.

In a world soaked in deceit and betrayal, she’s immune to both (the Prologue, to begin with). I guess Martin “has plans” to rule her in the later books, but within this one she’s a personified DEM for the simple reason that all the rules that apply to other characters DO NOT APPLY to her. Being a DEM personified she also leads to crucial DEMs in the plot. She can make prophecies that are NOT revealed as delusions. They really work. She has the DEATH SPELL. When I read that part I was absolutely sure that Martin was tricking me, but he wasn’t. In a world that establishes itself as “low on magic”, so that everything comes down to men and their affairs, she can simply “wish” that someone dies, and they do. At least in the Malazan world the power is in check. An action triggers a reaction, and it’s the power itself being a delusion. I don’t remember anyone dispatched as easily. But here nothing exists to keep the balance. She proceeds by killing a core character and another relevant one. Without these two deaths the WHOLE story would have spun in a totally different direction. About as much as dramatic as that certain death in book 1. And this huge plot bend is entirely a Deus ex Machina. Death spell, no saving throw. In a world with no magic and with kings being the show runners, being able to pick one and kill him in an instant is the exact equal of an I-WIN button.

It’s kind of ridiculous that when matters get serious and she can be used to easily win the war (and kill someone not made into a redshirt) she’s sent away with an excuse: “Your Grace, if the sorceress is with us, afterward men will say it was her victory, not yours. They will say you owe your crown to her spells”. The point being she’s one step away from breaking the whole story, and Martin has to rely on this artificial trick to limit the power he gave to her. Yet, she steps out and the other major DEM enters the picture: wildfire.

This is a sort of “magic” fire, whose DEM potential lies entirely in the fact that, being magic, no one anticipates it (well, Davos does, but only so much as to the lead to the powerless Big “No!” trope). It really gives this feeling of “magic entering the world” and subverting everything, a meta-device that enters the picture to make it change the natural course. On the micro level you have the character dramas that are written very well and work perfectly (in their big-picture-irrelevant stories), but on the bigger level there’s the whole war on the continent and the clash of kings. EVERYTHING on this level is artificially steered through all these Deux ex Machina. First Melisandre changing the course by killing two key characters by wishing it, and then by wildfire, whose power of subversion simply turns around the outcome of the biggest battle in the whole arc of the first two books.

A third major DEM comes with Jon, who has a magic dream (by the way, this book is filled with dream sequences, and I wonder why I don’t see them criticized as similar scenes in other books) that shows him what they are going to find, and so he’s able to save the whole company by making them turn around. Magic dream = magic rescue. A classic Deus ex Machina.

Now you can tell me that there’s very little magic in this world, but Martin has used it in the WORST way possible. By steering artificially the plot whenever something truly major was about to happen. Makes it feel the plot is on a leash. And yet it works, because the characters are so well written and relatively safe within their smaller cocoons of plot. It gives an idea of a complex world because it’s as if the main PoVs are caught in the events and not controlling them, which is the way “reality” usually feels. They try to survive while pieces more around them. Martin is the god moving the pieces from out of the picture, but at least he stays true to the characters.

The writer writing (Janny Wurts)

I’ve been away from the blog because I haven’t been reading (for the most part). I spent these past two weeks rediscovering old game classics on the Amiga and reading online scans of old magazines. Especially RPGs, adventures and simulations dating before 1994. I found a boatload of awesome stuff, including the “Realms of Arkania” trilogy that passed completely under my radar (and as you can see I didn’t stop with the Amiga). Then I spent some time looking into Roguelikes. But it’s so off-topic with the blog that I won’t go in depth about that.

Now I’m slowly returning to habit and hopefully resuming activity on the blog too. This included desperately searching on the internet where I could find a pre-1977, pre-revision copy of The Magus, by John Fowles. Hopefully I got one right.

But in the meantime I forgot to quote this bit I read just before I got sidetracked. A kind of insight into Janny Wurts inner working at the writing process. She’s currently onto her penultimate book of her epic-sized, epic-themed series, all of which I intend to read.

I think it’s cute and adorable:

Well, now – isn’t THIS interesting.

Chapter start – almost ALMOST scrapped. Even with brainstorm – refused to move.

New ideas buying the farm like paper airplanes in a hailstorm.

This morning, finger above the DELETE key – (yeah, at 12 or more pages along, s*** happens)….new whisper from the muse (Author: HEY WAIT, LADY, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL ALONG WHEN THE AUTHOR WAS KNOCKING A COLD AND SWEATING BULLETS???)

Muse: whisper whisper whisper…!!!

Ah – AUTHOR STOP! Full stop. NO delete….adjustment. Page count upped to 14 pages. Next scene that was two pages along – DEFERRED and kicked ahead to the next sub-chapter/along with the scrambled heap of ideas that were snarled into knots of refusal to move….

Sub-chapter I THOUGHT would be next (vague cloud of ideas with names tagged on) decides to flip places, morph with ANOTHER sub-chapter I had (shows what I know) already punted ahead to ‘down the story road someplace’ – haul that bit back wiggling, as a lovely, argumentative, tensioned follow up to THIS scene and voila.

Behold, this chapter passage is alive and kicking butt after all.

Day in the life of the harassed IDIOT, why not have a SANE job, um, oops, I mean, author who definitely (read that as, (let’s not be hypocritical) when the muse is WORKING) adores their job….;)

Plunge back into the story chase, again, but this time it appears to be hopping.

Page count: 201 – WAIT!!!! – 201? I’ve broken 200! OMG!!! how did I miss that milestone without a beer???

Here’s How: sometimes you get this white HEAT BLAST of inspiration. Other days you get the staggers and the crawls…:-)

(hauls off staggering and crawling toward that magical fifth chapter set, whereupon the story brew is finally shaken to fizz and the lid typically flies off the “start up plod”. I think I need a MUSE CATTLE PROD – yeah! Bring it on, take that, you flighty *sweetheart* – let’s have some steadier inspiration around here…oy.)