Prog horror

Normal service is officially on hold today. So, instead of the usual platitudes, here’s some groovy prog-comedy from the ever magnificent Matt Berry - some prog joy that sounds oddly like the gig I went to last night.

Horror followers will of course know MB as ‘Sanch’ from cult horror visionary Garth Marenghi’s deathless ‘Darkplace’ TV series - just as a reminder, I’ve dropped in the titles from that too. Who can forget the deathless tragi-horror of Skipper the Eye Child? Or the bleak curse of the Highlands? Or the searing romantic trauma of the broccoli from beyond time?

Enjoy, pilgrims…

X Factories

I used to quite enjoy the X-Factor (UK’s Pop Idol equivalent) audition round; the combination of the deluded, the talentless, the clearly taking-the-piss and the odd gem was just wonderful.

I think the first time I saw it was about when I was running a cabaret night down in Brixton – as a rule, I’d have booked the acts that the judges rejected most directly, because they tended to be the most eccentrically individual ones.

I didn’t have too much of a problem with judge harshness. They seemed to be pretty selective with their responses, and there always seemed to be an effective good cop / bad cop balance going on. So, when I turned on this year’s X Factor the other day, I thought I’d get half an hour or so of enjoyable mayhem.

Instead, I got bullying. Pre-selected acts were marched through to be shredded, directly and brutally. There was a coarseness and absolute lack of empathy I hadn’t seen before, combined with a lack of any sort of balance on the judging panel itself. I watched about five minutes, then turned over.

I’m sure I’m not the first blogger to rant about judge brutality on the X-Factor, and I certainly won’t be the last. But I suspect I’ll be one of the few to link it to the ethical problems implicit in 3 act narrative structure.

Let me explain. As I’m sure you know, three act narrative structure is the dominant modern model for building narratives. If you follow the classic Hollywood version of it, you use Act 1 to establish motivation (‘Luke wants to rescue Princess Leia’), Act 2 to frustrate achievement of that motivation (‘Luke can’t rescue her because of Darth Vader, the Death Star, etc’) and Act 3 to show what happens when that motivation is achieved (‘Luke blows up the Death Star, defeats Darth Vader, and rescues PL’).

Implicit in that structure is a very basic binary opposition – good vs evil. At the start of the story, somebody is shown to have a ‘good’ motivation. The action of the story is generated as the ‘good’ motivation is frustrated by ‘evil’ people or events. The protagonist’s triumph comes when he finally and absolutely overcomes ‘evil’, and his / her little moral universe is thus purged and rendered exclusively ‘good’.

What’s that got to do with the X-Factor? Well, within that structure only the good succeed and only the evil fail. Success itself becomes a basis on which to reach a full and final moral judgement on any given character. If you fail, you fail because you’re evil – you’re worth less than the protagonist, in a very real sense.

And that’s the morality that’s infected the X-Factor. Successful people judge failed people – and, because success gives automatic moral justification, they’re free to inflict any kind of humiliation on those in front of them. The failed X-Factor singers aren’t just bad singers; they’re flawed people, evil, representing the kind of weakness and failure that any true hero can and must leave behind.

And of course, in the X-Factor narrative, the true heroes do leave this perceived mire behind, rising up into another world of one-on-one engagement with Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh and the rest.

Subsequent episodes become a drama of detection; individual contestants are found out as impostors, not potential winners, but rather people who stand in the way of the final winner’s ascension. Deemed impure, they’re booted out until only unfrustrated goodness remains.

But that’s utter bollocks. The show isn’t a ritual of purification; rather, it’s a ritual of commodification, as the contestants are ruthlessly stripped back to reveal the most commercial performers. And ‘commercial’ as a category is very limited, aiming ruthlessly for that which is closest to the already successful. It demands repetition, not originality; homogeneity, not personality.

And that reflects back on three act narrative structure, too. Far from achieving ‘good’, its most simple (and therefore most common - for we live in a world that privileges the simple) variants achieve ‘smoothed over’, ‘polished’. Anything awkward is banished; anything complex is broken down into neat categories, until we’re left in a landscape that’s both a moral and an emotional pablum.

It’s a key problem of our modern culture that that pablum is taken to represent absolute moral truths, rather than a passing entertainment. Much as I didn’t enjoy the X-Factor, I have to admit that it shows us back to ourselves very effectively; bullying the weak from a position of absolute righteousness, and using the extent of that bullying as a measure of our virtue.

Made from clay

And also, courtesy of Jeff Vandermeer’s blog, some heavy dark weirdness, as the Demiurge enters children’s TV through the Claymation window. Apparently - and unsurprisingly - this was banned for being too disturbing…

<EDIT> It’s from a film called ‘The Adventures of Mark Twain’, which according to IMDB is marvellous… another scene apparently features Twain playing the organ at his own funeral! I shall be looking out for it.

Big things exploding, forever

I was reading about the militarization of space, and ended up pondering the militarization of science fiction TV. Take the Star Trek franchise, for example – a set of shows whose heroes are almost without exception members of the military, working compliantly within military structures to achieve the goals it sets for them.

Building on that, I went through the other military based / related SF shows I’ve seen. Immediate ones that sprung to mind were Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Timecop, The X-Files and Space: Above and Beyond.

These are some of the key US SF shows, and all of them support a view of society in which the military – or related civil institutions – represent the finest exemplars of that society, and are battling to preserve its coherence from one kind of threat or another.

There’s an implied worldview there that’s both fascinating and rather worrying. These are very popular shows. Their viewers (myself included) are clearly happy to buy uncritically into the concept of military or militarised action as the final solution to any problems in dealing with any external, ‘other’ threat.

That’s worrying, for obvious reasons – and it’s also one more symptom of our more general obsession with violence as entertainment. If TV has its way, we’ll all come to see the future as big things blowing each other up, out of a deep rooted and unchallengeable sense of personal righteousness; or, at a more intimate scale, agents of governance stepping in to solve problems before which civilians can only ever be passive.

The butcher’s apprentice

I’m at home, watching trailers for upcoming movies on Five. Guns, fisticuffs – combat as a fundamental dramatic component. It’s so all-pervasive, you don’t notice it any more.

And I’m sick of it. Sick of the reduction of the subtle emotional conflicts inherent in drama to meatheaded literal battles; sick of the constant presentation of violence as a positive response to problematic situations; sick of the idiot miscalled-morality that can only respond to opposition with absolute destruction.

Encoded in violence-as-entertainment is a whole broken world view, over-brought in to a narrative structure that demands a frangible antagonist for every protagonist, and makes every hero an innocent victim of evil, a by-definition justified responder to a situation that’s been forced onto him or her, thus absolving them of any real moral responsibility for their actions.

This sickened externalisation of such a limited view of evil, this self-indulgent definition of the other as both dispensable and perpetually unjustified, is at the root of so much of the damage we do in the world, complaining about our own hurt while butchering by the thousand to re-confirm our brutally narrow, boneheaded definitions of what heroism is.

You want to hold up a mirror to up to the worst parts of what we are? Turn on the television, and watch endless butchery presented as narrative positivity, casual massacres as a constant solution to opposition. We are our obsessions – and, in the modern world, our obsessions are so brutally, perpetually present and exposed.

Matrices old and new

I’ve been pondering The Matrix movies lately. Key pieces of plot and character information were offered in animes, computer games, and so on. Back in the day, I thought this was lazy and exploitative. Now, I think I was wrong.

Narrative is getting old school. For thousands of years, the great public stories were built on mythology. Mythologies are inchoate tale masses, springing to life when the simply defined character traits of their protagonists encounter the rich complexities of life.

That narrative breadth was reflected in the variety of media employed to communicate those mythologies. Over the years, their stories were told orally, enacted ritually, depicted through sculpture, painting, illumination, even sung.

Narrative units were excerpted for use in churches or temples, in the house or workplace, or even just on personal amulets or altarpieces, giving a particular devotional emphasis as necessary.

By presenting a single story through multiple different media, that could be engaged with individually or taken together to form a whole, the Wachowskis were tapping into this very ancient set of narrative techniques.

They’re not the only people to do it. Throughout genre writing, this kind of multiplicity is being actively engaged with.

Take the Hellboy franchise, for example – now including comic books, novels, cartoons and feature films. Or the richly populated Star Trek universe, which can be explored through everything from the original episodes to fan fiction, boardgames to a (rather strange) small museum in Las Vegas.

What’s interesting is why it’s genre writing that’s working like this; and why (for a couple of centuries at least) fiction pulled away from this kind of multiple narrative.

Genre fiction’s always been at home with the episodic, the multiple; rooted in short stories, television series, radio serials and even comic books as much as in novels, it comes ready tooled for these kinds of story telling methodologies.

Over and above this, it’s enjoyed by a highly active – and very creative – fan base that’s very comfortable with reworking favoured narratives according to personal need.

And why did we step away from multiple narratives in the first place? For me, it’s linked to the rise of the literary novel as a discrete art form. Such novels are understood to present unique narrative universes, created by and under the control of single, named writers.

Only Dickens can write like Dickens; only Cervantes can write Don Quixote (tho’others tried and failed, as Cervantes successfully managed to defend his own turf against them). This kind of emphasis on individual, highly personal world creation militates against the kind of shared narratives I’ve been talking about.

So what’s going on? How to conclude? Really, by pointing out that genre writing is helping maintain a very ancient narrative tradition; and that literary writers are not the sole arbiters of what fiction is, and how it works.

Norming, performing

Thomas More notes of the Utopians that ‘they believe that the dead mix freely with the living… the sense of their ancestors’ presence discourages any bad behaviour in private.’ Observation is control; bad behaviour here is deviance from social norms, rather than anything more fundamentally immoral - and the observing dead ensure that those social norms are adhered to, everywhere.

Which made me realise how a sense of being observed is key to social control; and why, in certain kinds of religion, it’s very important that the deity is known to be omniscient. And that leads to ‘1984’, and Orwell’s treatment of Big Brother. Can ‘1984’ be read as religious as much as political satire? Really, it’s taking on any kind of oppressive social structure, however it’s dressed - political, religious, cultural, etc.

And that leads on to a very different kind of ‘Big Brother’. On reality TV, ‘bad behaviour in private’ is actively encouraged – conflict is drama, after all. The purpose of observation here isn’t to enforce a set of pre-existing norms; it’s to encourage the extreme, for our viewing pleasure.

So we’ve inverted Utopia, Airstrip One, and arrived at a place where observation is for the creation of extreme entertainment. Or are these the new norms that we’re meant to embrace? Over-reaction, exhibitionism and a slow process of knock-out until only one of us wins…

Ghostworld

Watching hokey supernatural programme ‘Supernatural’ the other night, I was wondering why I watch hokey supernatural programmes like ‘Supernatural’. I even have an occasional ‘Most Haunted’ habit – the Blair Witch aesthetic transferred to seriously trashy reality TV. In memory, ‘Ironside’ is starting to look like ‘King Lear’. Oh, the tragic authority of Raymond Burr…

What grabs me about them is not so much plot or excitement; more, every so often a fantastic image or moment. In last night’s ‘Most Haunted’, for example, a beer barrel spookily rolling down an empty corridor, on its own, while the (apparently very freaked out) presenter mutters ‘Fuck me, I’m handling this well’ to himself.

But I always get a bit wound up with these programmes too; there’s always a need to set the weird stuff into a broader, rational framework. ‘Supernatural’ relies on narrative detective work – the two brother detectives discover the story of the ghost / demon / trickster / etc, which gives them the tools to defeat it. They’ve also introduced some loopy exorcism rules, whereby you can only get rid of ghosts by digging up the relevant corpses and burning them. Right…

In MH, chief medium Derek Acorah or similar usually pops up with some berserk back story or other (always entertainingly surreal) which gives the whole thing a basic narrative setting (I nearly said coherent, but that would be too charitable). ‘Of course it’s haunted… in the 11^th Century, someone had a pagan altar here, so devil worship and human sacrifice continued even when this place was a Regency manor!’ – Ta, Derek, thanks for sorting that one out.

But I’ve run into ghosts; watched things that weren’t there walk across dark rooms; listened to nobody banging on doors in empty houses. What’s always stood out for me is the way that these phenomena absolutely resist narrative logic or coherence. Something happens; there’s no rational explanation for it; it can’t be fitted into any sort of resolved story; and that’s it. In memory, ghosts are odd little bumps and wrinkles, always sitting outside the structures we use to rationalise our lives for ourselves.

They’re impossible, yet they happened… a reminder of how partial and inadequate our explanations of the world are. That’s a good thing to be reminded of – and that’s why I watch these programmes, because every so often an image pops up that has an equivalent oddness to it – or someone acknowledges how helpless they are before the weird. ‘Fuck me, I’m handling this well…’ isn’t just about ghosts; it’s more than that, a baffled, wonderful response to the strangeness and unpredictability of life in general.

Oh, and what’s my favourite ‘Supernatural’ image? A classic Roswell style ‘grey’ alien torturing a fratboy by forcing him to slow dance to cheesy 70s disco, underneath a shimmering glitterball. Now that’s what I call supernatural…