Category Archives: DRAGONS

Hipster Douchebag Book Recommendation of the Year: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

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(Note: I will attempt to get through this post without using the words “patriarchy” or “privilege” but make no promises.)

We don’t usually write about books here on Shades of Caruso (well, okay, we did once. Where the hell is our movie, Peter Jackson? I know you have two hundred hours of The Hobbit: Parts 1 to 24, Appendices I-VIII, and the Quenta Silmarillion to get through, but come on). That’s because reading is for squares. We tend to stick to more highbrow entertainment like Michael Bay and Glee. You might think this is ironic considering one of us works in publishing and both of us are aspiring authors, and you would be right.

The sad fact is, I don’t read much fiction outside of my day job. It’s a combination of things, really – professional envy, lack of time, burnout from reading books all day, inability to turn off editing brain, addiction to Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, fuming over imagined slights on Twitter, professional jealousy, too many episodes of Friends to rewatch in case I don’t have a line or two memorized, professional bitterness, etc (including, you know, writing my own stuff occasionally). But Gone Girl broke the streak.

I’m just going to pause here to rant a little about literary fiction. Gone Girl is considered a crime novel, which makes it “genre,” which means people generally don’t take it seriously, or at least not as seriously as literary fiction (although there are happy exceptions, of course, and the book has gotten great reviews—but it is also a bestseller, so expect a backlash imminently). I’ve heard it called a beach read: a book you burn through in a day on vacation and that drops out of your head the next. This annoys me. Yes, it is a propulsive book, but just because a book is genre does not mean it lacks depth.* Folks tend to assume literary fiction is worth analysis because that’s what they were taught in school, but I’d argue this book can stand up to a close reading just as well as anything by Jonathan Franzen. (Funnily enough, one of the book’s protagonists has a rant about this very topic: “She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.”)

*And once books or authors are considered good or worthy (Tana French, Kate Atkinson, etc), they tend to get called “genre-straddling,” or something else that implies they have risen above their niche. I think it happens like this: 1. People are snobbish about genre books, because they think they are not as good (or not perceived to be as good) as literary books. 2. Authors write excellent genre books. 3. People read them and like them, and then either feel guilty because they like genre books, or feel that because they like this book, it could not be a genre book. 4. People, feeling uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance this creates, decide to classify them as something different than—better than—genre books. I could write a thesis about this.

Don’t get me wrong, I (mostly) love J-Fran’s books. But literary fiction is a genre with its own tropes just like every other (if you don’t believe me, read this. Or this). People think of it as different and better than genre fiction—more worthy—because it deals with “real life”: various domestic issues like crumbling marriages, the ennui that married people feel, and sad people trapped in loveless marriages. Intricate plots are derided as pedestrian, the province of plebs who read James Patterson and love his tales of milky bum snakes (I guess feeling compelled to continue a story means it isn’t serious enough? PS Don’t click on that link if you don’t want to go blind). It often has prose overworked to the point of parody, in which each sentence had been buffed and honed as if it were a prize jewel, not in service of the narrative but for its own sake—it glitters in a way that seems to call attention to the author rather than the story. This is what puts me off much of literary fiction—I find the construction of a series of precise, arid, perfect moments, delicate and sterile behind glass, all building up to a climax that feels like a wheezy puff of asthmatic breath, much less compelling than a well-told story full of (literal or metaphorical) blood and guts and bone. That said, a lot of genre fiction suffers from its own problems—tired plots, pedestrian prose that’s full of clichés, lackluster characters.* I have to admit, I like style too—I like verve, and sharp, imaginative language. I like a plot, yes, but not one that rattles along a well-worn path. I want the best of both worlds.

*I hasten to add, this is not because it’s genre fiction. It’s simply because there’s a lot of crap out there, in every genre, including literary fiction.

So, we arrive at Gone Girl, which I read in two days. I can’t tell you how rare this is for me; usually I limp through fifty pages of a book and eventually crawl to a stop because there’s no narrative engine that’s pushing me forward. With too many books I’m not engaged with the characters; I’m not drawn to keep reading; I can predict, depressingly, how it’s going to turn out. Sure, this is the way it is with most forms of entertainment, but they don’t require as much effort or time from the person consuming them. I tend to be harder on books than any other form of media—probably because of the jealousy, rage, bitterness, etc mentioned previously—but when I find a book I love, I love it wholeheartedly.

Gone Girl is about a crime, yes, but it’s also about a crumbling marriage (one for the lit-fic fans out there). One that goes very, very wrong indeed. But this one has a plot, as well as that most scorned of genre conventions, a twist. When Nick and Amy meet, they understand each other immediately—they think of themselves as soul mates. But by the day of their fifth anniversary, things have gone to ruin, and when Nick sees Amy that morning, cooking him crepes, he feels “bile and dread inch up [his] throat.” Later that day, Amy goes missing. It only gets worse from there.

First to the prose style. I found a terrible discussion of the book on Jezebel (I know, my first mistake) in which the leader of the debate accused it of being badly written, and I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s plain crazy. On a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing pops—just in the first chapter, we have these descriptions:

  • “sitting on the dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow”
  • “Amy would dissect the conversations for days after—‘And what did she mean by…’—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer”
  • “hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jumprope”
  • “the edges [of the floor] turned up like burnt toast”

To me those are vivid, unusual images that snap with life and imagination—they linger in your mind because Gillian Flynn captured something true in a fresh and accurate way. To blast through this book without noticing the prose is, I think, a big disservice to Flynn’s talent. Those words were chosen carefully, and her prose is better than that of most of the literary novelists I’ve read—much less affected; concerned with shading in plot and character and bringing important details to vivid life.

But onto that rollicking plot. [DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT THE ENTIRE PLOT SPOILED—IT’S REALLY GOOD SO GO AWAY AND READ IT AND THEN COME BACK AND WE’LL TALK OKAY BYE] Nick and Amy take turns narrating the novel; we hear from Nick directly, but in the first half of the book we learn about Amy through her diary. In the second half we get the “real” Amy, who is a twist darker than her constructed diary self, but recognizably on the same spectrum as the “fake” Amy. How much of Diary Amy is true and how much is false is a matter of debate, but personally I think Amy contains all of her personas—she tries them on like outfits, keeping and discarding as necessary. At first she is the Cool Girl, then the harpy wife, then the missing blonde, beautiful saint (the Gone Girl), and finally the Psycho Bitch (the woman who has terrifying power because she does not play by the rules). Ultimately none of these reductive ideas of what women are fit her. She is a full human being (and, uh, psychopath) with contradictions and weaknesses.

We learn early on that Amy grew up under the shadow of her child-psychologist parents and the books they wrote about her fictional counterpart, the long-running series Amazing Amy. Amazing Amy always does the right thing, but Diary Amy “can’t fail to notice that whenever [she] screw[s] something up, Amy does it right.” Almost from birth she was being forced into a part—the Good Girl who always made the right choice. (Nick later tells us that “Amy is always right, in every story. (Don’t think I haven’t brought this up in my arguments with my real Amy, because I have, more than once.)” This proves prophetic—the real Amy makes sure she is always right in this very story, whether by manipulating the situation, constructing it to her advantage, or outright lying.) When Amy grows up, she writes quizzes for women’s magazines—the kind that tell you whether you’re a good girlfriend or not. She always knows what the correct choice is, the kind of woman society expects you to be.

Amy’s thread runs alongside Nick’s feelings during the case that he is in a movie, playing a part—when he discovers Amy is missing, he is aware a neighbor is watching him and becomes the “Concerned Husband” who runs through their house and bellows Amy’s name in panic. We never know if that panic is real or if he’s faking it. When the police interrogate him he can’t remember if what he’s saying is what he wants to say or what he thinks he should say. Both Nick and Amy enter their marriage playing parts—they like how their spouse sees them and expect each other to keep up the lie of who they’ve pretended to be. It’s when their “true” selves begin to bleed through that their marriage starts falling apart. “I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage,” says Nick. “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?”

One of Flynn’s most brilliant inventions is the treasure hunt Amy sets out for Nick every year on their anniversary. “It was what her dad always did for her mom on their anniversary,” Nick says, “and don’t think I don’t see the gender roles here, that I don’t get the hint.” Amy gives him riddles about their life together, which he’s hardly ever able to figure out, and the hunts always end in a fight, and “a genuine tradition [is] born, one I’d never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort.” Amy sees it as a testament to how much he loves her—she hopes it will show that he has paid attention to her thoughts and feelings and remembers (what she thinks of as) important moments from their previous year together. He sees it as a test he will inevitably fail. By their fifth anniversary, it is multivalent—it is all these things, plus an ironic reminder of how Nick has failed her and also her subtle way of getting revenge. At first he thinks Amy is trying to reconcile with him by telling him how brilliant and witty and warm he is. But in fact, Amy has discovered Nick was cheating on her and the clues are designed to lead the cops to evidence that will incriminate him. The poems he thought related to him and Amy actually relate to him and his mistress, Andie. Amy has flattered him with the image of himself he wants to believe—a ruse they both fall for over and over again.

When Amy leaves, her anger at Nick takes a typically feminine form: it’s the ultimate passive-aggressive move, homicidal rage turned inward. Women are not allowed to kill, so Amy enacts psychological warfare. She will look like a saint and Nick will be branded a murderer. She cuts her own body in order to implicate Nick, and later bruises and mutilates herself to “prove” she has been raped. She even contemplates killing herself (Freud might have something to say about this) so that a body will be found. When Nick realizes he has been played, his aggression turns outward, like a man’s is allowed to—he has obsessive thoughts about getting Amy back just so he can kill her. Is this fantasy of murder more acceptable than Amy’s? Sure, he feels betrayed, but so does Amy. Do we simply find Nick’s transgressions more acceptable because we expect that men will cheat and lie?

Just as important to the story is the way we construct our identities, and the way we talk about ourselves in order to create a story about who we are. In the first half of the book we read a version of Amy that she has literally created about herself, but that doesn’t mean that Nick’s version of the truth is any less constructed and managed. He lies, and he leaves things out. Amy’s diary claims that Nick shoved her, and when we find out that the diary is false, we assume this must be too, but later, in a reverie of hatred, he says: “I saw her again at the stove, licking powdered sugar off her thumb, humming to herself, and I pictured me, walking over to her and shaking her until—” Is this a memory or a fantasy? Both Amy and Nick address the reader directly—they are very aware of their audience. They both want us on their side, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get us there.

I read a lot of reviews of the book that claimed they hated the twist—they stopped enjoying the story when it turned out Amy was a psychopath and Nick was “just” a misunderstood good guy. I think this interpretation does a great disservice to Flynn. Who ever says Nick is a good guy? He certainly wants us to think that, but is it true? It turns out that he is as skillful a manipulator as Amy—he manages to woo her back by playing the part she desperately wants him to play: the man who loves her to the exclusion of everyone else, who understands her better than anyone, who realizes how special and unique she is (for Amy, this means recognizing her fiendish brilliance). And to some extent that becomes true: “‘You were the best man you’ve ever been with me,’” Amy tells him. “‘The only time in your life you’ve ever liked yourself was pretending to be someone I might like. Without me? You’re just your dad.’” (It’s worth noting that Nick tries to kill her when she says this. And minutes later he thinks that a normal woman wouldn’t murder for him or frame him; she “could never possibly care that much.” In fact, he says, “the indulged mama’s boy in me wouldn’t be able to find peace with [a] normal woman, and pretty soon she wouldn’t just be normal, she’d be substandard, and then my father’s voice—dumb bitch—would rise up and take it from there.”)

Flynn’s stroke of genius is in making Amy a psychopath. She is already a sharp critic of mainstream femininity—she notes acidly that all the commercials on TV aimed at women are about tampons and detergent, that the constant, droning message to women is “clean and bleed. Clean and bleed.” She has contempt for ugly women because for women, sex is power, and Amy can’t stand people who don’t have any power. Amy is terrifying because she represents our deepest fears about femininity—that women really do just want to steal power from men (by using their very femininity to do it! “Crying” rape, manipulating men with their beauty, getting pregnant to trap a man into staying with them). She is blonde, beautiful, thin, and apparently saintlike—and there is nothing more terrifying than the idea that someone who represents everything our society values as “good” turns out to have traded on that power and turned it against us. She is the nightmare of what happens when female power is limited to sexuality. By the end of the book she has taken life, and in her ultimate power-move, she one-ups Nick by creating it (the only thing he can create is a book, which he deletes). Their power battle continues until the last sentence of the book—Nick damns her by saying she has to wake up every day and be her, and Amy, clearly troubled by his assessment, says, “I don’t have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that.”

Gone Girl is a satire of marriage, a gleeful black comedy. Nick and Amy are the logical extremes of masculinity and femininity—Nick just wants his wife to leave him alone, let him be free, and Amy just wants them to be close. More than anything, they both want to be understood. Who hasn’t experienced those feelings in a relationship? Who hasn’t heard jokes about the old ball and chain, about nagging wives and insensitive doofus husbands? Flynn pushes these stereotypes until they snap.

Nick, so laid-back and likable, a sensitive “new man,” becomes, when enraged, a parody of patriarchy (whoops). All he can think when he’s mad at Amy is “kill the bitch” or “I’ll murder that cunt.” He runs through lists of the women in his life, hoping he doesn’t hate them all but finding that he does. He despises feminine weakness—he was furious whenever Amy cried and can’t shed a tear himself. His Alzheimer’s-riddled father shows up at his house at random like a specter of masculinity itself, chanting how he hates the bitch, he’ll kill her. The most damning thing Amy says about Nick is that he doesn’t want a real, complicated human woman but the Cool Girl she presents herself as, a fantasy of femininity in which the woman never tests him, never complains, never has her own will or desires. This is the Amy he falls in love with—a mirage. When the mirage is challenged, he responds with fury, just as men do when their privilege (damn) is denied. (He does this again with his mistress, Andie. He thinks he loves her until she becomes a real person with her own needs and desires—then, again, he is furious.) This attitude of his was passed down from his father, just as it is passed to men from generation to generation: a historical sense of entitlement, and rage when that entitlement is taken away.

By the end of the book, though, Nick and Amy deserve each other. For a story in which they both have revelations about how little they knew their spouse, it turns out they, in fact, know each other better than anyone else possibly could. And in the end, they both get what they wanted. Nick is finally a match for Amy: he says he can “feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with.” (Let’s keep in mind, though, that it is just that—a story.) Amy gets her wish too—her deepest desire was always for Nick to pay attention to her, and because he feels he must stay to protect his baby (boy!), to “unhook, unlatch, debarb, undo everything that Amy [does],” she literally forces him to learn everything about her, to pay attention to her at all times, to never turn his back on her, because if he does, she might kill him.

Man, I’m worried about that baby. “I [will] raise my son to be a good man,” Nick says. Do you trust Nick to know what a good man is? Yeah, neither do I.

Sequel?

A Much Longer Review of Avatar

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Warning: Avatar spoilers litter this review like Ikran droppings across the rocks of the Hallelujah Mountains.

As I mentioned earlier, Avatar is a movie made almost specifically for me. It’s directed by a man whose obsessive attention to detail and fanatical devotion to technology has provided us with some of the most clearly designed and thrillingly executed movies of recent times. It’s about exploration of alien worlds and has an anti-imperialist message of clunking obviousness but surprising emotional power. It features the most startling visual effects ever committed to the big screen, and constantly pulls the rug out from under you with its dedication to outdoing itself. It’s filmed in beautifully rendered and cleverly composed 3D, and for once puts paid to criticisms that the format is a gimmick (even the sceptical Roger Ebert has been won over). It’s got a big battle between space marines and space monsters, and features a world that looks like a Yes album cover come to life (thanks to Anne Billson for the apt comparison). Basically, if it was going to make me hate it, it would have to try hard.

Luckily for me, after all of that anticipation, it didn’t piss me off — at least on first viewing, which was an overwhelming experience — but I can’t praise it without addressing some of the concerns raised by it. In the post-experience discussion I had with Daisyhellcakes, we kept coming back to the depiction of the Na’vi as a race of Native Pandorans treated so poorly by the colonial humans that they weren’t even offered beads for the rights to their sacred grounds. It’s problematic, to say the least. They are portrayed as simple, honest folk who hunt (but apologise to their prey before stabbing them in the heart, so that’s okay) and pray to a tree-god, and need to be rescued by one of the oppressors who just happens to be smarter and even more in tune with nature than they are. Scenes where the Na’vi cede control over their destiny to Jake Sully’s avatar make for queasy viewing, even if he did just land in their sacred space on the biggest, baddest, coolest multi-coloured dragon thingy you could imagine.

As Daisyhellcakes said after seeing it, she didn’t want to admit to liking the movie as much as she did because the wrongness of Cameron’s attitude to his noble alien race was so glaring. As Charlie Jane Anders points out here, this is a race that is so unfailingly noble they come across as a clumsy patronisation of the Real-World indigenous races that Cameron wants them to metaphorically represent. Apart from some douchebaggery from one guy early on, they’re all so great that they treat the imminent death of a human with the same amount of grieving and solemnity that greeted the destruction of their home and the death of their leader. Hey, I’ll bow to no man in my admiration for the eternally awesome Sigourney Weaver, but if I was an alien who had just lost the cornerstone of my culture and my civilisation, I’d be a bit more concerned about that than the death of some missionary who had been nice enough to hand out useless medicine that one time.

Still, as we talked we came to a sort of conclusion that although it made us uncomfortable, what the hell else was Cameron supposed to do? It’s tempting to think he is not up to the task of adding subtlety to any story he tells, but then he’s telling stories that fall apart when subtlety is introduced. He has his work cut out getting a lot of story and scene-setting out of the way, and at times the rush of exposition — either via voiceover or clumsy explanations by the various scientists studying the planet — means we’re really getting broad strokes already. This superb “nature documentary” about Pandora contains almost as much information about the planet and the creatures on it than is found in the movie.

As well as the Na’vi culture, some of the human relationships are sketched so lightly that their progression feels like a hint rather than an arc. Cameron was obviously ruthless in the editing room, and it stands to reason that he was already aware that portraying internecine battles within the Na’vi clan that embraces Jake would just bog the movie down further. We lose something to gain something else, and your enjoyment of the movie will likely depend on which you would rather have: sensitivity or bombast. If you think Cameron missed a trick not giving us tales of the ascerbic Na’vi arrow-maker or the cranky Na’vi mother who longs to join her lifemate on the hunt and is annoyed by his retrograde gender politics, you’re watching the wrong movie. This is good versus evil, and he’s going to make damn sure you know which is which.

Also, he might oversimplify the Na’vi, but so much thought has gone into the creation of the world and the people and their intertwined relationship that he can’t be accused of not giving a damn about the small stuff. Kudos to the production designers and astrobiologists and astrobotanists who came up with the convincing flora and fauna of Pandora. Their work is the most impressive thing about Avatar, and makes it feel like a real place. Even when doubts about the effectiveness of Cameron’s story began to itch at my brain, the secondary story — of Pandora and its ecology — was far more successful. I suspect that repeat viewings might make the problems of Cameron’s plotting seem more glaring. This morning Mr. Beaks from AICN quoted Kenneth Turan, who said Avatar would be the Jazz Singer of the 21st Century, a movie that changed everything but was widely disliked ten years after release. I expect my considerable affection for this movie will follow a similar trajectory to my opinion of Titanic, which I loved on first viewing, but disliked more and more with each revisit. Nevertheless, while the narrative clumsiness will likely annoy in time, the level of detail in this stunningly realised world will continue to hold my interest, and seeing new interconnections between them will become more interesting to me.

Of course his interest in creating a complex faux-eco-system is part-and-parcel of his environmental message, which is heavily pro-nature and anti-strip-mining. This too has come under scrutiny, especially by those who think a movie that features this much CGI has been burning through rainforests worth of energy to keep its computers humming along. The pro-tree message is rammed home with such relentlessness that the mid-movie action scene is the lengthy destruction of a single tree, though to be fair it’s a pretty goddamn awesome tree. Complaining about how Cameron paints his political pro-environment message is fair enough, but where were these complaints last year when Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E told a similarly unsubtle story? That got a free pass, but Cameron gets pilloried. Not everyone has done that, and I speak as someone who was pleased to see Stanton’s messages stated so clearly, but the double-standard still irks. I guess that’s what you get when you make an action movie instead of a Pixar movie.

Besides, Cameron’s ideas about why Pandora should be left untouched are far more interesting than mere tree-hugging. The central idea of the movie is that all lifeforms on Pandora are linked together in a way that expands even upon James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, or Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. Pandora is a kind of brain, and the creatures that live upon it can access that brain through a neural connection. The Na’vi are also able to connect to the minds of the creatures around them, and control them in much the same way the humans connect themselves to their machines, except the Na’vi also form emotional bonds with the creatures and treat them as equals. It might just be an expansion of the idea that we are connected to all other living things, but when taken literally like that it is enormously appealing and deepens what might have initially seemed like a wishy-washy justification for the Na’vi’s special nature.

It also means that the “God” they worship is actually a kind of world-mind/flesh-internet that allows them to upload and download memories. Note that their culture doesn’t seem to have a history told via words or pictures: it’s stored inside the network of life on the planet. I’ve heard the movie referred to as Luddite as it praises New-Age-style philosophy over reliance on technology, but the biotech of Pandora works as a metaphor for the connectivity we currently enjoy thanks to the Internet. Though some scenes with the Na’vi plugged into the ground and radiating outwards from the Tree of Souls look kinda dippy, they have an unexpected emotional charge. The great revelation of our age is that we work better when we’re aware of each other, and seeing this network of co-operation represented in glowing visual style is a powerful reminder of how lucky we are.

It’s an idea that makes Avatar more nuanced than a mere Dances-With-Space-Wolves and more like Dune-In-A-Forest, especially as Sully can be seen as a Space Marine/Kwisatz Haderach hybrid. That said, no matter which pop cultural artifact Cameron was influenced by most, when necessary he pulls out all the stops and tops the action work he has done in the past. With the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad guys clearly explained, he can go all out with an emotionally satisfying final act where heroes are forged, villains are killed, and revenge is taken. This is what Cameron does best, and the final half an hour is some of the most thrilling cinema I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. Any reservations we had earlier melted away in an onslaught of last minute rescues, defiant last stands, and tragic slow-motion deaths. Cameron’s facility with action serves him well, with skillfully handled set-ups paying off in a series of sub-setpieces that are layered together with a master’s touch.

Praise is also due for an earlier scene where Sully captures and tames a wild Ikran on top of the Hallelujah Mountains, and then goes on his first flight with Neytiri. It’s a stunning sequence, featuring visual effects of such complexity and clarity that I choked up. At that moment I knew I loved the movie with very nearly all my heart. It also helps that Cameron has elicited such strong work from his cast. Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi are deliriously evil but enjoyably hissable, with Lang’s Quaritch getting a couple of cool moments in the finale that drew murmurs of great pleasure from the audience. You expect Sigourney Weaver to be great — and she is — but I was surprised at how good Joel “Hottie and the Nottie” Moore and Michelle “Ana-Lucia” Rodriguez were. Even better were the heads of the Na’vi clan, played by the ever-reliable CCH Pounder and Wes Studi. Praise is also due Laz Alonso as cuckolded Tsu’tey, and Sam Worthington makes good on the promise shown in Terminator Salvation with an impassioned and charismatic turn.

Best of all is Zoe Saldana, who gives an astonishing performance as Neytiri. With the performance-capture technology now developed to the level Robert Zemeckis has always aspired to, it feels as if there is no intervening layer of CGI between us and the actor, and of the entire alien cast, it is Saldana who seizes the moment with the greatest relish. Her manifestation of this serious and tragic character was the heart of the movie. If she had failed, our suspension of belief would have fatally faltered, but thankfully she exceeds beyond our wildest dreams. About twenty minutes after her introduction, I was amazed to find that I believed with all of my heart that Neytiri was real, and it is as much a testament to her skill as to the effects chaps at WETA that this mental conversion occurred. Thanks to this — and her entertaining work as Uhura in this summer’s Star Trek — I now look forward to her future work with much enthusiasm.

It’s an unfashionable statement to say I gave myself over to Cameron’s sincerity, especially as we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is considered to be a crass populist who can only bombard audiences with glossy imagery that hide a hollow core. I’d argue that Cameron believes deeply that the message of his movie is meaningful, and will be happy to have touched the hearts of millions rather than appealed to the refined intellects of a handful of joyless twerps. If so, I reckon he’s right. As for Avatar‘s status as the most advanced display of CGI wizardry yet made, and whether this is enough to qualify it as a great movie rather than one that is just okay but pretty, my own bias intrudes. Artistic merit is attributed to movies for many reasons, many of them nebulous. Such concrete things as effects work or production design are often not included among these criteria, as it’s surely obvious that they are base and do nothing to reveal human truth (often considered the least thing that great art should do).

In my eyes, though, the technical work done on Avatar in bringing to life an entire world filled with believable creatures in a series of interlocking relationships is as close to perfection as we’re going to get at the moment. If the breathtaking design work and detailed effects work displayed here isn’t allowed into the leather-and-mahogany drawing room called Art, then no design or effects work ever will be. At its best this is a moving sculpture, a dynamic tapestry, a web of interlaced speculative concepts and exquisitely rendered visual representations that literally dazzle. Ignore the faults, and forgive it for being clumsy. You need to see Avatar so you can experience the feeling of having your point-of-view float through the most beautiful landscape painting you’ll ever see.

This Week In TV Year II (Week 2)

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During the last TV season I got myself into a right tizzy blogging about the various shows aired that week, taking on too much for little reward. So, with the new season starting in a staggered manner, I’m coming to it a bit late (or perhaps too early). I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep this up each week, but I will try, if only to see how long Fringe lasts, which is a shocking turn of events considering it was expected to be such a big hit. That said, it does featureone unmissable element…

Mad Scientist of the Week:

Dr. Walter Bishop is our new favourite character on TV after just a few minutes of screentime, but if you’ve seen Fringe you’ll probably understand. While the show underwhelms as drama and underperforms as a ratings grabber, it’s got four things going for it. 1) Lance “Intensity” Reddick in full effect. 2) Blair Brown as the cyber-arm wielding Nina Sharp, though her casting appeals to me more as a reminder of Altered States than anything else. 3) Darin Morgan is on staff as a consulting producer, hopefully getting to add his stamp to the show in the way he didn’t on the Diabolical Bionical Woman. 4) is Walter Bishop, a modern-day Frankenstein, shunned by the scientific community, mistrusted by his son, and perhaps responsible for The Pattern, a mysterious sounding arc-MacGuffin that sounds like it was put into play by Milo Rambaldi and Gerald De Groot in an Abrams-verse super-team-up.


None of which would make an impact at this early stage, if it wasn’t for John Noble’s vastly entertaining performance. After one particularly amazing line-reading, which made a tedious comment both silly, informative, and heart-wrenching all at the same time, Canyon exclaimed, “Oh my God he’s so good!”


She was right. Nailing every joke and wringing pathos out of every situation, he brought the goods. Even if the other reasons to watch don’t pan out, we’re sticking around for John Noble.

Most Pointless Character of the Week:

Though I would have loved to have given it to Chase, who continues to serve little or no purpose in House (less than Cameron, amazingly), the honor has to go to the utterly vestigial Peter Bishop, a supposed supergenius in his own right, but whose purpose on Fringe seems to be repeating dialogue back to people just I case the audience missed it the first time around. The only wrinkle Joshua Jackson adds is to deliver those lines either with reflexive, annoying sarcasm or disbelief. Once an episode would be too much, but he gets to do it about nine thousand times. The showrunners, in a fit of paranoia about their product, seem to think the audience will be sitting at home scoffing at every absurd event on screen, and so must have someone in the show echoing that eye-rolling. Though I will admit a plot involving rapidly-grown supersoldiers who have to eat pituitary glands to stop themselves ageing is ridiculous, but it’s a sci fi show about mad science. I don’t need someone on screen going, “Mad science?!?? Do you know how mad that is?” Plus, Joshua Jackson, who was just fine in that performance of A Life In The Theatre we once saw him in, is deeply annoying in this, and appears to have a weird fold in the middle of his forehead.


Did mad science put it there?!?!!?

Worst Stylistic Tic of the Week:

Canyon and I disagree on as many things as we agree on, and one of the first things we found we had a difference of opinion about was lens flares. I love them, mostly because they’re old school and looked so good in Die Hard (why can’t Jan De Bont swallow his pride and go back to excellent cinematography?), and she hates them because they distract the eye and remind you you’re watching a movie or TV show. Much to my disgust, however, while nostalgic love of photographic stylistic choices is my cross to bear, no one should have to put up with the ridiculous CGI faux-flares in Fringe.



During the deeply unpleasant opener and the suspense-free finale, every action shot opened with an identical flare, sometimes mirrored but otherwise the same.



It didn’t matter if there was no light source for it; it was just added. Why director Paul Edwards and producers JJ Abrams, Kurtzman and Orci thought this was anything other than a silly distraction is beyond me.



Real flares only! Don’t accept the CGI kind.



Still, the finale did feature one stylistic choice I could totally get behind. While Josh Jackson did his flappy defribrillator shtick, and Anna Torv ran around in the dark with her gun out in front of her like the TV cops do, it kept cutting back to Walter eating popcorn and impassively explaining how to shock a dying woman back to life. Hilarious stuff. We love you, Walter Bishop!

Reaction of the Week:

Pete Campbell’s glum expression when he realises Don Draper isn’t going to invite him to his party was the funniest sight of the week.


We love not loving this little creep.

Disappointment of the Week:

There was no way that House M.D. was going to top last year’s format shake-up, and I wasn’t going to expect it, but even taking into account the fireworks of that excellent two-part season finale, this was still a flat episode. While still providing many laughs and much character drama (plus a rare admission of sorrow from House), as well as some top-notch work from Robert Sean Leonard, there was little to distinguish it from typical mid-season filler. Except, of course, Wilson’s departure.


The final scene, with him telling House to basically go screw himself for beng a toxic asshole, was great, but I’m unable to feel good about it. Though there may be great dramatic opportunities opened up by House potentially becoming even more of a jerk without the corrective influence of Wilson around (nicely picked up by Foreman), our favourite moments of the show are the conversations between them. Without that, no matter what happens next, we’re going to miss that.

Youthified Legend of the Week:

Attempting to capture the Doctor Who lightning in a bottle once more, the BBC has revisualised Le Morte D’Arthur and The Once and Future King in much the same way that Robin Hood was turned into a topical drama about the war on terror. Having not seen Hood I can’t compare it to Merlin, but I can say that the new show is not a disaster, though any praise I’ll throw its way will be extremely faint in nature.


Early impressions hinted that by presenting Merlin: The Teenage Years we would be getting a transparently Harry Potter style grab at the attentions of Brit children, and though it’s a blatantly cynical move, it also seemed kinda logical. Why not capitalise on that? I’m almost jealous that someone else came up with the idea. What did surprise me was the similarities with Smallville and Gossip Girl, of all things. Just as Smallville starts with Clark Kent and Lex Luthor becoming friends, thus setting out the relationship arc between them, Merlin features the mirror version of that, with Merlin and Prince Arthur bickering at first sight, even though we know they will eventually become a partnership.


That snarky relationship is one of the most likeable things about it, with Colin Morgan and Bradley James keeping it pleasingly light. However, it kept reminding me of the fractious early relationship between Dan Humphrey and Nate Archibald in Gossip Girl. From that point on, I realised the show was going to spend as much time on exploring the dreary relationship combinations between Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, and Morgana at the expense of the mystical aspects of the myth, which so far include Uther Pendragon (a grumpy Anthony Head) outlawing magic, and Merlin using what amounts to a lot of telekinesis. It’s practically counting down the episdes until a saucy youngster called Lancelot turns up and complicates things even more (he will be played by Santiago Cabrera, formerly of Heroes).


Speaking of the myth, it’s interesting that The O.C. and Gossip Girl appear to be templates for this, using the class difference between Merlin and Arthur as the basis of their antagonism. Of course, in the most famous renderings of the myth, Arthur is kept out of Uther’s circle, and only becomes king when he pulls Excalibur from the stone. Here he is already a cocky young shaver, treating his servants badly and being a total dick. Luckily the change works, and I’m not about to get pissy about the alterations. It’s so far removed from any classical renderings of the legend, especially with the colloquialisms and very modern cast diversity, that it would be churlish to see it as anything other than a frivolous and mildly diverting curio. I might not bother watching further, but I’m not repelled either. Plus, it’s made me want to watch Excalibur again, even though that film is crazy nonsense.

Meltdown of the Week:

Progressing elegantly from Shaky Hands to avian genocide to the 19th nervous breakdown that probably inspired the Rolling Stones, Betty Draper went full-on Howard Beale at Don Draper, after practising on a chair.


Sadly the very entertaining crazy was handled by January Jones, an actress who still fails to convince us she can pull this kind of thing off.


It was especially frustrating as she did raise her game with her best opportunities yet, but was still blasted off the screen by show-best work from Elizabeth Moss and her life of empty “success”, and Christina Hendricks, whose hypocritical embrace of career progression contrasted with Peggy’s ennui. The scene with her dealing with the loss of that newly discovered world of responsibility and achievement should be her award clip next year.


Though it didn’t feature raggedy hair and obsessive suit-sniffing. Score one for Jones.

Pleasing Visual of the Week:

As mentioned many times in the past, we love dragons, and for all its faults, at least Merlin features a dragon.


As voiced by John Hurt, and obviouslty hamstrung by budget, it’s still better than some, but not as good as Vermithrax Pejorative. We’re still impatiently waiting to see Temeraire on the big screen for a definitive dragon, PETER JACKSON!!!

Intensity of the Week:

Lance “Intensity” Reddick!


Yes, I’m going to bang this into the ground just like I did with Ray Wise and his awesome grin. Je ne regrette rien.

Biggest Shock of the Week:

There I am trying to relax with Merlin on iPlayer, and what happens?


Eve Myles aka Gwen from the hated Torchwood!?!?! No one warned me! I was taken utterly aback. Just to make things worse, a few seconds later there were two Gwens, as an evil old crone uses magic to impersonate her. Surely this is madness!


To be honest, without her usual Gwen-style histrionics, Eve Myles gave a fair performance, merely being a bit sinister at times while presenting a friendly face the rest of the time, all to get closer to Arthur so that she can kill him. I was almost disappointed, but thankfully, at the end we get to see her badly lip-synching to some Gaelic song in front of Uther and his courtiers, as well as waggling her arms in an approximation of a dance. The tears, they flowed down my face.


She even gets to go batshit murderous with a knife. Oh how I’ve missed her expressive face!


It’s a shame she gets murderlised by Merlin using his own magic to crash something on her head, as weekly appearances by her would definitely keep me tuning in, but still, this little reminder of her peculiar talents was enough to make my day.

So, some underperforming new shows, a returning show that fails to live up to the previous episode, and some top 60s events to make up for all that. Brian Michael Bendoom, what did you think of this week in TV?


I can’t argue with that.

Temeraire and the Challenge of Ambitious Fantasy

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We here at Shades of Caruso love dragons. We love them so much that both of us independently paid money to see Dragonheart in the theater, a movie that features Dennis Quaid playing a hero with a voice reminiscent of a man in the late stages of emphysema; a dragon played by James Bond who’s saddled with lines like “I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed”; and David Thewlis honking his way through another cringing, effeminate villain role. It might be a significantly less painful experience on mute, actually. Of course, it’s bad for lots of other reasons too: terrible writing and plotting, corny “comedy” bits, lackluster CGI, muddy production values… Sure, it’s got a talking dragon in it, but let’s face it, a dragon alone can’t save a bad plot (witness Eragon. Or don’t).

The truth is that dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. Well, scratch that — I should say that good dragon-related entertainment is hard to come by. I have to admit that there are a lot of books about dragons out there that I haven’t read, so for all I know, there are plenty I’d love. It’s just that many of them sound so, well…silly.

I love the concept of fantasy, the incredible range of ideas it has access to. I read A Wrinkle in Time. I watched Game of Thrones like everyone else and I too want to slap Joffrey. I’ve even, God help me, listened to Yes. It’s just that the barrier to entry for fantasy is high, especially for books. Most of the covers could kindly be described as “niche.” The titles usually involve words like “untime” and “rayne.” The heroes’ names sometimes have apostrophes in them (note to fantasy authors: please stop doing this. I don’t want to read about someone named F’lar unless I’m supposed to hate him). The writing is often ponderous, and there are always twenty books in every series, and each one is a thousand pages long.

Perhaps the core audience doesn’t want publishers to pander to what’s considered acceptably mainstream, but I think a lot of genre books get unfairly ignored because non-fans see them and think, “That’s not for me.” Or worse, they’re intrigued, but they don’t know where to start. I edit children’s books for a large company, some of which are fantasy or sci-fi, so I realize the conundrum here: some stories might draw a larger audience, but they also have to appeal to the people they know are going to buy them, and be true to the stories within.

That’s where we come to Temeraire. The thing is, I don’t think I ever would have picked up these books based on the covers alone.

They look like standard-issue dragon fantasy novels. Actually, that’s what the US covers look like. The UK covers are better:

 

I like the dragon-and-boats thing — pretty accurate, and a bit more in the direction of “this might just be serious literature WITH DRAGONS IN IT OMFG” — but the paperback covers look a bit too much like Jane Austen-esque beast-friendly chick lit, which is schizophrenic and sexually confusing. I appreciate what a tough job the designers have, though – how do you make dragons look cool without also making them look defanged? How do you convey a blend of genres? How do you market a series like this? (I’m not going to answer those questions, by the way. Good writers know that asking questions rather proposing answers makes you sound much smarter.)

But I didn’t buy the books because of the covers – I found out about them because I read a review in Entertainment Weekly in which they were described as a kind of Patrick O’Brian with dragons, which, well, do you know me? Soon both my husband and I were both staying up until four a.m. to read them. The first three were published all at once, and at 300-400 pages each, they weren’t intimidatingly long. Neither was the world they described very different from our own. In fact, the only difference was that this alternate universe contained talking, intelligent dragons. Can you imagine anything more awesome? The only thing better would be if the dragons pooped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

Novik came up with an incredibly clever, simple idea — what if dragons existed, and were used as a line of England’s military defense during the Napoleonic Wars? She also starts us out with a protagonist as green to dragons as we are — Captain Will Laurence (note lack of apostrophes), a seaman in Her Majesty’s Navy, who accidentally ends up with a very valuable Chinese dragon egg when he captures a French ship. The egg hatches some weeks later, while Laurence and his crew are still out to sea, and though Laurence knows almost nothing about dragons except that they need to be harnessed when they hatch (so that they can bond with the person who will become their captain in England’s Aerial Corps), he ends up becoming the choice of captain for the egg who hatches — the dragon he will name Temeraire.

The first book in the series largely concerns Laurence’s gradual acceptance of his new fate — he was a respected captain in a prestigious profession, happy with his life, and he is at first reluctant and resentful of his duty to Temeraire. We follow the pair as they embark on training and learn about life in the Aerial Corps, which is very different from the life Laurence knew. Aviators are the shabby black sheep of the military, treated by the rest of English society as something of a joke, their dragons feared dangerous. In fact, dragons are as intelligent as humans — they show an incredible aptitude for math and science, and Temeraire in particular is something of a savant. At first Laurence thinks his growing bond with Temeraire is unusual and that the other aviators think of their dragons as mere tools, but he soon learns that the bond between a dragon and his captain is one of the closest relationships either of them will ever experience.

When we meet Laurence he could be fairly described as a stiff; he’s full of rigid ideas about what’s right and mannerly, and it’s only when he bonds with Temeraire that he starts to relax. But it’s to Novik’s credit that she doesn’t entirely soften him — though he grows to love Temeraire, he is still concerned utmost with what is good, with being an honorable man, and, above all, with following society’s strictures. Temeraire is his foil – an intelligent innocent who is forever questioning why things are the way they are, much to Laurence’s exasperation and bafflement. This interplay is never didactic; it comes from character and not as a lecture. The push and pull runs through the series as a constant, with each party softening to the other’s argument as they grow to love and depend on each other.

Subsequent books have Laurence and Temeraire being forced to go around the world on various missions – to China, Turkey, Germany, Africa, and back to England to fight Napolean, whose ominous presence runs through the books like a harbinger of impending destruction. It’s an ingenious idea to have the pair travel, not only because there’s only so much you can write about English battles against Napolean’s army but because it allows Novik to explore how dragons are treated in other countries.

This is perhaps Novik’s cleverest invention. By far the greatest strength of genre fiction is the way it refracts all the ordinary issues of domestic drama from unusual angles. Where a straight drama would tell us a standard teenage-daughter-hates-her-mother story, The Exorcist compares puberty to demonic possession. In Ginger Snaps, a young girl getting her period for the first time realizes she is also becoming a werewolf; we watch her coming to grips with her newfound power and sexuality. Buffy, of course, worked on a throughline of a high-school-as-hell metaphor, and Battlestar Galactica got us to sympathize with Iraqi insurgents by having our colonized heroes fight back against an oppressive regime.

Temeraire explores issues of feminism (a certain breed of dragon — Longwings — only accept female captains, to Laurence’s surprise and profound comic embarrassment), racism, slavery, the question of animal intelligence, and dragons as a metaphor for how we treat outsiders and minorities, all without being moralistic. In England, dragons are kept away from society at large, and are generally treated as if they were large, winged horses. Their captains and crews love them, but they have no autonomy. Laurence and Temeraire don’t realize there’s any other way to be, until they travel to China and find out that there, dragons are independent and have their own lives and professions (ferrying people from one place to the other, performing manual labor), eat cooked meals instead of raw cows and sheep, and live in sheltered, warm pavilions instead of making their beds on the ground. And some — like Temeraire, for he is an extremely rare and special breed known as a Celestial — are revered as thinkers and scholars, and spend their time in the life of the mind instead of being forced to defend the country as an unthinking tool of war.

With each book, Temeraire grows more and more anxious about the way dragons are treated in England and feels more and more that he must do something to change it. Laurence wants only the best for Temeraire, and for dragons as a whole, but he knows the harsh reality he’s afraid to confront his friend with; he knows how unlikely the possibility of change is, especially in a time of war. We don’t need to have the point underlined — it’s there, and it shades everything we see.

The most touching thing about the books — in which much is touching, as Novik has a deft hand with melodramatic but never mawkish storylines — is the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, but also the way Laurence is changed by his love. Temeraire is part precocious child, part confidante, part comrade and colleague — a true life partner — and he gradually opens Laurence’s tightly closed and rigid personality. For me, good drama happens when we as an audience are torn between two points of view — when both sides of an argument are presented as equally valid, and we empathize with the views of those on either side. I find nothing more riveting than this three-dimensionality of character, and good drama always has it, no matter what the genre. And in this series, Laurence and Temeraire are always fascinating, and always people we want to know.

D-War Even More Awesome Than We Thought it Would Be

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The AV Club review is in – apparently it’s called Dragon Wars in the US – and apparently it’s terrible. Ridiculously convoluted, terribly acted, pathetically written, and ineptly made on every level. I can’t wait! Someone in the comments section said that when a policeman sees a giant lizard wrapped around a building, he says something like, “I’m downtown – we’ve got a Code 3.” Code 3?!?! What the hell is Code 4?

This thing might be the awesomest movie ever made. Inept ridiculousness plus dragons? Top that, Uwe Boll! (Actually he might: the AV Club also has an interview with him, in which he talks about his latest movie, where he plays “the demented owner of an amusement park built on Nazi gold.” Well played, Uwe Boll. Better played than your boxing matches, anyway.)

The AV Club also has an interview with William Friedkin, our favorite sometimes-very-good-mostly-ridiculous cravat-wearing director (Peter Bogdanovich comes a distant second). I haven’t read either interview yet, but based on their DVD commentaries, I’m expecting very entertaining reads. More later when I’ve properly imbibed.

[ETA by AdmiralNeck: Masticator has kindly pointed out in the comments for the original D-War post that I forgot to mention Reign of Fire, and indeed he is right, I totally forgot. I know why my brain seized up, though. Of all the dragon films made over the last few years, I thought this was the one film that was going to kick my ass and sit at the top of the dragon pile, knocking off Dragonslayer and Pete's Dragon (another one I forgot). Everyone told me it was disappointing and that the film was mostly about the humans, with the dragons playing second fiddle, but as the humans were doing a Mad Max kind of thing, I figured that would be just fine. I like Mad-Max-style films. I love Waterworld for that exact reason. (Shut. Up. Everyone.)


Nothing prepared me for the tedium of it all. My God, I was heartbroken when I finally watched it (many years after the original release, oddly enough). It was wretched, horribly filmed, indifferently acted (despite the presence of McConnahunk and Batman), and almost entirely dragon-free. Dreadful stuff. Though better than Dragonheart.

I fully expect D-Wars to be a million times more entertaining.]

How did I not know this existed?

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I only just found out that this film, Shim Hyung-rae’s D-War, opened in the US this weekend. Until now I had not heard about it (even though it’s massive in South Korea). It looks like the best movie ever made.

Quick disclaimer: Canyon and I love the dragon. I love the dragon lots, Canyon loves the dragon lots and lots and lots. And yet, we are continually frustrated at the quality of dragon movies. Dragonslayer might be the best one yet, and that’s not saying much. It’s flat and humourless, though Phil Tippett’s Vermithrax Pejorative is a go-motion marvel. Dungeons and Dragons might be an excellent game, but the movie is an abomination, criminal for conducting a big finale dragon war in the background while the camera focuses on Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch throwing their careers and reputations on a bonfire. It’s so bad and yet I tried to record the straight-to-DVD sequel three weeks ago, saved only by the fact that our PVR memory was at a terrible low (as usual). Dragonheart is not quite as bad, and at least this time we get more dragon. The post-Jurassic Park effects on (::sigh::) Draco are very good, though having him voiced by Sean Connery is half-brilliant, half-lazy casting. Marks against it are the miscasting of Dennis Quaid (nothing against him, but he was not good in this) and the egregious amounts of Thewlis clogging up the action. His fey noncery is not exactly threatening, though he gets extra points for his Robert Plant hairdo. We’ve not yet seen Eragon, mostly because Irons + dragon = infinite suckage. It’s a rare thing, but I do sometimes learn a lesson from seeing bad movies.

While films get it mostly wrong, there are thankfully other media which flirt with dragonicity. Our beloved firebreathing reptiles are the only things that are going to make me break the bank to get a Playstation 3. The launch has been terribly mishandled, and there don’t seem to be any unmissable games (though Heavenly Sword looks pretty), but Lair features lots of dragon battles and might sway me, even though critical opinion is mixed. Who cares? It’s the closest I’m ever going to get to living out the events of Naomi Novik’s magnificent Temeraire series. If you’ve not yet read them, get the first three now and then get the fourth, Empire Of Ivory later this month. You will not regret it, especially if you even vaguely like either dragons or Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin series.


So you can see I will see D-War even though it has been received very badly by critics. Plus, the director’s previous film, Yongarry, was widely hated. His response to the critical dismissal and subsequent public embracing of D-War is amusing. From Wikipedia:

The positive reaction among the Korean population is widely attributed to the film’s appeal to Korean nationalism. At the end of the film in its Korean print, director Shim delivers a message, “D-War and I will succeed in the world market without fail,” accompanied by the Korean folk anthem Arirang.

It somehow makes him sound like the Korean Uwe Boll, though Uwe Boll never appeared in a movie whose English title was Slap On The Cheek Several Times (Hyung-Rae was an actor before becoming a director). I don’t care. Anyone who has seen The Host knows Korean filmmakers know how to make good monster movies. Plus, it looks too awesome to comprehend, and sounds like a cross between Lord of the Rings, Gremlins, and Transformers. That’s got to be worth something. However, knowing my luck, it’ll actually be a cross between Hawk The Slayer, Ghoulies, and Transformers – The Movie starring Orson Welles.

Even so, how can you beat the cast? Yes, it stars Jason Behr apparently imitating Milo Ventimiglia, so that’s a strike against it, but besides him there’s Chris Mulkey, Robert Forster (Alligator was obviously a dry run for this film), and OMG, Craig Robinson aka Darryl from The Office! Suck on that, Krasinski! Fighting dragons beats working with Robin Williams and Mandy Moore.