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The Drapers

There is a recent article in The Atlantic that I have neglected to read, that questions why viewers tend to dislike Betty Draper while they approve of Don, and whether there is a double standard at work. They’re both flawed characters shaped by their environment, so what could explain the different reactions?

This sort of article irritates me, so I’ve skipped it. The answer seems clear enough that I wonder why the question need be asked. Maybe for some people there is a double standard at work, but I can’t really be concerned with them. For me the it’s all about the kids. I’m not too fond of either senior Draper, but whereas Don is distant and neglectful toward everyone, his kids included, Betty is selectively violent toward them — particularly Sally.

Early on, I felt great sympathy toward Betty. Don was passively abusive and oblivious to her needs; she was increasingly unhappy but in denial about it. Then she reached a certain epiphany, where she realized how unhealthy she was in her current situation.

For a while it looked as if she was going to pull herself up and become a strong character. Yet instead of becoming an active agent in her own life, she simply began to leach hostility — particularly toward those weaker than her. At that point her children, especially her daughter, became a scapegoat for all of her anger and anxieties.

I understand the reasons why Betty is as she is; it’s too late for her. She was broken way too early, and the wound was reinforced for way too long. She doesn’t know how to be a whole person. Still, she should have the self-awareness or control to avoid actively abusing her daughter in much the way that she was abused herself. Reasons aren’t excuses, you know.

Don isn’t Dad of the Decade either (except in a historically representative sense). He seems to forget that his kids exist, even when they’re right in front of him. I’m sure if he were granted sole or major custody he would find his own pattern of bad behavior toward the kids. As it is, he’s more of a non entity. That’s its own problem, but… that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s harder to hate a lack of action than to hate clear negative action.

I suppose there may also be an element of annoyance at having invested such sympathy in a character who later flaunted it all — and who now, from her later behavior, seems worthy of very little concern.

Either way, I see no reason to root for either character. They’re not even real people in the context of the drama; they’re the biggest allegorical foils in a show that’s one big allegorical foil. The only thing to do is sit back and observe their behaviors in context, and to muse about what their actions say about the evolution of society over the past fifty years. Still, yeah. Some behaviors annoy me more than others.

(March 28th, 2012 @ 4:51pm)



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Change, my dear

I’m not sure that there’s much consequence to most classic Who stories. Ghost Light is maybe a little odd in that its events have less to do with plot than with theme. There is really no more or less carry-over than you get from Planet of Evil — except that maybe the themes will stick with the viewer more than the mechanics of who escaped from which prison in which order.

Ghost Light is about evolution in all of the ways that the concept could be applied to life, both literal and abstract.

It’s basically the same idea as Adaptation. That’s a really abstract movie about, well, adaptation. It uses the diversity of orchids and the desperation of species to propagate as a metaphor for the creative struggles of a screenwriter (indeed the very person writing the movie at hand), the tragedies and coping mechanisms of a weirdo plant poacher in the Florida Everglades, and the unfulfilled life of a posh magazine writer from Manhattan. And as with Ghost Light, the film doesn’t have much of a plot — at least, not until its shambling events reach the notion of tacking on a hackneyed Hollywood style conclusion of the sort that one of the story’s characters would have written. Instead, every element of the story exists in order to explore some aspect of its basic theme.

Ghost Light plays kind of loose with the literal mechanics of evolution, because it’s more concerned with the implications of change versus stasis. Change is embodied in Control and Ace. Anyone who fails to adapt to circumstances, like the policeman who refuses to wrap his head around what is happening, tends to perish. Nimrod is simple enough to roll with and accept whatever he is handed, so he turns out okay. Josiah’s whole interpretation of change is warped (in a very typical way, insofar as classical understanding of Darwinism), such that he views it as a narrow one-way journey to a static supremacy rather than a simple response to the needs of the environment. His reading doesn’t hold up in the end, so he also dies.

The way that I spell all of this out, I’m making it sound more complex than it is. Basically, it’s just 75 minutes of fantasy TV that dramatizes the notion of evolution in all its permutations.

(February 24th, 2012 @ 11:00pm)



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Mental graces

There’s this guy, Lawrence Miles — I think I might have mentioned him. He used to write for the Doctor Who novel range; these days he mostly grouses on the Internet and writes long, analytical books about the series. Some people love them. Others dismiss them, and Miles, out of hand because of his lack of attention to the facts. He makes the mistaken assertion that a sound effect was dubbed in after original broadcast; this means that his argument about the thematic content of a serial is invalid. Therefore his work is useless.

I don’t really see the big deal. What you get out of his writing depends on what you’re looking for — fact or insight. One is not necessary for the other. And if one has to prioritize, I’d say that for something as trivial as art and entertainment, facts are nice but not as interesting as insight.

The problem appears to be a matter of trust; if he gets a few obvious details wrong, then how can a person look to his writing as a source of viable information? What else might he have messed up?

That only strikes me as a problem if you’re looking for raw information, as opposed to an alternative thought process. I haven’t actually read his books, but I find some real value in the weirdest of Miles’ online ramblings. Even when he bases his arguments on false assumptions, or when his biases are glaring from the text, I am often amazed at the clarity of the connections he makes within those boundaries. He’s kind of brilliant in his analysis; all he needs is someone to check him on the details sometimes. As a reader it’s not too hard to do that along the way, and ignore or mentally shift some of his points to put them in line with reality. I think the perspective I gain is usually worth the ongoing translation.

I mean, you can get information anywhere — then once you have it, it’s kind of a dead end. What do you do with it? From madness comes a certain clarity, and Miles exhibits a very lucid madness. I feel it opens the mind somewhat.

There is also this idea that it can’t be insight unless it’s based on fact. If it’s not factual, then it’s fiction — or a flight of baseless fantasy.

That’s silly. Truth and fact are two very different things. Some of the greatest truth and insight comes from fiction. Likewise, facts can easily occlude the truth of a situation by shutting down thought — as if they mean something in and of themselves.

Facts come and go. The way that you process them, that’s universal.

Look, there’s a place for everything. Facts and figures are the intellectual equivalent of brushing your teeth, combing your hair, and choosing a nice shirt in the morning. They make it easier to approach you and listen to what you have to say, but they don’t substantially change what you bring to a conversation.

It is useful to have the right facts when entering a discussion, much as it is useful to wear the right tie and trousers to a function. It cuts down on the amount of parsing required of the other party.

Compare:

“Who is this guy? Does he know where he is? Who does he think he is? Who does he think we are?”

“What is he talking about? That’s not true at all. Where does he get these ideas? This is nonsense.”

So there is a social grace to being cautious with the details. What’s important in the end isn’t the facts that a person waves around; it’s what a person does with the facts.

Reason is a template that stands apart from its context. If a person is totally arbitrary and inconsistent in his argument, then his conclusions would never have a ring of truth regardless of the facts. If a person is totally arbitrary and inconsistent with his facts, there is still a reasonable conclusion to be made with the materials at hand. Straighten the facts, and if the reason is sound enough it will tend to adapt and hold.

I have no idea where Miles gets his starting notions about things. Sometimes they’re kind of bewildering. Given those assumptions, though, I often am inspired by the clarity of his vision.

Then again, it’s not hard for me to compensate for the warped lens that he uses. Maybe you don’t think it’s worth the energy. I don’t think it takes much energy at all. I guess I just lack those social graces.

(February 23rd, 2012 @ 1:24pm)



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Sherlock Holmes

A while back, I exchanged words with a long and close Internet friend on the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, featuring Robert Downey Jr. I like them well enough — or, rather, I like the first one; have yet to see the second — as I know the material, I knew ahead of time that these were silly Hollywood action movies, and as they work really well as stupid action movies based on Sherlock Holmes. Given that they are stupid Hollywood style action movies — Hollywood being more about a state of mind than a birth certificate — they are unusually faithful. My friend objected that, having read the entire body of Doyle’s work at least eight times over, the movies were actually one of the most accurate adaptations out there. There was a bit more violence, but otherwise their vision of Holmes is very close to as written.

Thing is, there’s a difference between being accurate and not being inaccurate. The Downey movies may not technically be inaccurate; that doesn’t make them truly accurate.

Prior to about 1980, nearly every adaptation of Sherlock Holmes was deathly inaccurate. Since the Granada series with Jeremy Brett, the popular image of Holmes (and, particularly, Watson) is actually pretty close to the source material.

To date that’s probably still the most accurate portrayal in terms of the character motivation and dynamics. The recent Steven Moffat series is also weirdly accurate, despite all the liberties it takes. I don’t think I’ve seen another adaptation that focuses on Holmes’s complete ignorance of facts and concepts outside of his area of study (like that the earth revolves around the sun, or who the current prime minister happens to be).

The Downey movies go with a fun interpretation, that actually hews closer to the facts and themes of the material than one might expect. The way it extrapolates the facts and themes, though, ain’t close at all.

The boxing scene is a key point of reference. Holmes is an expert pugilist, true. He is also very observational. He is not, however, a sensor. Outside of a few parlor tricks that he has mastered in order to impress potential clients, he needs time and thought and focus to make sense of his observations. Put him against an untrained ruffian, and Holmes will deftly apply his memorized technique to get the upper hand. Put him against a professional boxer, and he will have no instincts. Even if he may conclude that his opponent is from Devonshire and chews a particular brand of tobacco, his observational skills will not be of the required sort and the speed to guide his hands like an assassin. That’s not the way his brain works.

The skill of Sherlock Holmes is in identifying important information in a sea of noise. Making sense or use of that information is another skill entirely, and one that comes to him with far more difficulty. Likewise, that focus comes at a great cost elsewhere for the character.

In adaptation, the inclination is often to burden an odd and cranky but otherwise well adjusted character with superhuman powers of observation and extrapolation. You get a bunch of the super power in Moffat’s adaptation as well, and it can get tedious. You do get far more than usual of the cost, though. And it’s on that point that the show is interesting.

In the Downey movies, the super powers are bolted on top of a stock action hero. The movie goes into more than the usual detail on the nature of his observations, allowing the audience to follow his line of reasoning. The speed and application of his conclusions, however, remains mystical.

It’s that misreading, or rather deliberate misinterpretation, of Holmes’s mentality that informs the pace, structure, and thematic weight of the films. They need to work like a stupid Hollywood blockbuster, and if you squint then Doyle provides the material to bend. So if you know the material back and front, then yeah, the movies are surprisingly clever in how they use it. That doesn’t make them a faithful representation of that material. Their faith lies somewhere else entirely.

That’s fine, because they’re good natured in the way they use the material. I don’t think the movies make any secrets about what they’re up to, and nearly every beat is accompanied by a wink. It’s fun to be free with this stuff, sometimes. Break a few expectations and shine a new light in an old, dusty room. The Granada series did just that by hewing starkly to the original material for the first time ever, and breaking out of all of the material that pop culture had aggregated on top of it. For 1980, that was revolutionary. In his weird way, Steven Moffat is cutting even closer — while at the same time bending the concept (and any characters outside of Holmes and Watson) to his own whims.

It’s just — all the good will in the world doesn’t make it accurate.

(February 4th, 2012 @ 2:00pm)



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Bringing back the Who

People often criticize the last few years of Doctor Who’s original run. I get the surface complaints. The show had no budget or support from the BBC. It was produced in a rush. Nobody outside the core creative team wanted to work on it. Often the scripts overreached the talent and money available. It looked cheap. It felt neglected. Some people just don’t like Sylvester McCoy as an actor. Fair enough.

What confuses me is when people complain about Cartmel’s vision for the show. They say it’s “just not Doctor Who”, as if the show had ever been static. Well, beyond the doldrums of Tom Baker’s era and the early-mid 1980s. I’m guessing that’s what they mean, but that’s not how they explain it.

Their problem, as I often hear it, is in the portrayal of McCoy’s Doctor. Suddenly the Doctor is a puppet master; his mind is all in the future rather than the present, as he winds huge schemes around everyone and everything to achieve some goal of his own. This is overstating the case, of course; although the novels go nuts with this concept, in the show McCoy’s Doctor is more of an awkward professor. He tries to plan or anticipate situations, but he only ever sees the big picture and so spends most of his time reeling from the unexpected. The result is a strange little man who always seems to know more than he should, and who rarely steps forward to explain himself.

Thing is, that characterization has always been there to some extent. There’s a great deal of the Columbo to Troughton’s and Tom Baker’s portrayals, for instance; their Doctors allow everyone around them to underestimate them wildly, to allow them the space to explore or manipulate the situation behind the scenes.

Take Troughton’s handling of Klieg, in Tomb of the Cybermen. He allows the man to rant and assert his ego, while the Doctor scurries in the background to press buttons and work his own solutions. With his understanding of the situation, the Doctor could well have asserted authority and taken control — but that’s not his style. He would rather observe, and insert himself at key moments to change the course of events.

This is actually the trait that has always attracted me to the character; you never quite know how much the Doctor knows, and the supporting characters know even less of it. All you know is that he’s the most observant person in the room, and that his brain has already extrapolated things many steps beyond what’s in front of him.

McCoy’s portrayal just seems like a pointed example of this characterization — which may be why, for me, his Doctor feels like one of the most definitive. This is also probably why it has taken so long for me to accept more authoritative portrayals like Pertwee’s and Tennant’s; they lack that subversiveness, or at least neglect it by comparison.

This may be the first time I’ve compared Tennant to Jon Pertwee. Good grief.

Anyway. Cartmel’s era feels to me like an attempt to return the show to its 1960s roots — the subversive and ambiguous protagonist, who acts more as a supporting character to the companion; the ambitious scripts that explore broad social or theoretical concepts. I believe that Cartmel has said a few times that this was his intention, and I think it shows. Take out everything from Pertwee through Colin Baker, and I think the show progresses pretty seamlessly.

(December 8th, 2011 @ 9:45am)



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