Archive for category tv
Rooting For The Overdog
Now that Glee has been off our screens long enough to finaly banish its catchy pop earworms, I’ve realised something: it’ll take more than a slushie to the face to convince me that any of the cast are ‘underdogs’.
Glee prides itself on its underdog status. It’s constantly announcing that the members of the Glee Club are losers and outcasts. One promotional tagline was “A biting comedy for the underdog in all of us.” They’re even planning an upcoming competition to find new castmembers via Idolish auditions; one of the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, told Variety that “anybody and everybody now has a chance to be on a show about talented underdogs.”
Blame my own torturous high school years, but I wholeheartedly empathised with the pain inside every single character in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. And before Josh Schwartz’ The OC pulled off the unlikely feat of transforming Seth Cohen from a friendless nerd into a bonafide heart throb, Seth’s hatred of high school felt genuine, too.
(There’s a heartbreaking moment near the end of The OC season two where Summer – the school’s resident princess and now, amazingly, Seth’s girlfriend – is looking through their yearbook with fond nostalgia. Then she notices that Seth is friendless in every single picture, and that she’ll never understand.)
I don’t feel any actual high school angst sitting under the loser-labels that Glee loves to throw around. The show effectively mines emotion out of Kurt’s coming out to his working-class father, yes, but otherwise it relies on its powerballads as sentimental shorthand. The slushie-to-the-face is meant to be quick visual iconography for unpopularity – but it’s a mostly empty gesture.
The recent movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief pushes this desire for a token underdog even further. We’re told Percy’s a loser. He admits it. We get one short scene of him supposedly struggling in school and, uh, that’s it. Other than that maybe half-a-minute of film, he seems like a together, popular, even cocky teenager. The screenwriters might as well have just given him a t-shirt with UNDERDOG written on it, dusted off their hands, and considered Percy’s backstory complete.
Do we like the idea of rooting for the underdog, but find actual losers a little too… loserey?
Jennifer’s Body – the teen horror film penned by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox – made a massive miscalculation when it choose its victims for Jennifer’s demonic tendencies. When Carrie eviscerated her prom back in 1976, it was the bloody revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Jennifer, however, is the most popular girl in school. Where’s the joy in watching her horribly maim her unpopular classmates? That’s not fun, fantasy, or vicarious thrills. That’s just high school.
(There is, however, plenty of fun to be had in seeing Adam Brody – The OC’s Seth Cohen – all evilled and eyelinered as the film’s true villain.)
Glee is witty and good-hearted enough that I do still enjoy it, despite the hesitations above and many others, too. (Lazy writing! Haphazard plotting! Bizarre song choices with nothing to do with the scene at hand!) After all, Jane Lynch’s delivery as the surreally wicked Sue Sylvester is enough of a reason to watch.
Even if it never becomes the Heathers: The Musical like I secretly desire, I hope it lives up to its potential. Don’t stop believin’ just quite yet.
Jack Bauer Vs. Wolverine Vs. Well-Deserved Peace
Poor Jack Bauer. He managed to snatch less than ten minutes of grandfatherly bliss – in real time, no less – during the season premiere of 24 this week. Unsurprisingly, he was then dragged back into the hyper-violent patriotism that makes the show a hit.
Jack’s fate is typical of how the never-ending stories of TV series and comic books guarantee these violent heroes will never know peace for more than a few minutes or pages at a time. At the end of 24’s (admittedly terrible) season six, Jack Bauer had had enough. After all these years of torture and gunplay, he wanted his “life back”. He was told in no uncertain terms:
“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it. You know that. You’ve tried it. Sooner or later you’re gonna get back in the game…”
We’ve seen this in endless Hollywood Westerns: the hero, the only one capable of Doing What Must Be Done, has to walk away from the domestic life he dearly desires. In 1992, Clint Eastwood’s meta-mythic Unforgiven bundled up every cowboy he’d ever played into the story of William Munny, dragged inexorably away from his family and back to the gun. The coda says that he returned home, sure, but I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to believe it.
At least once the credits roll, William Munny’s story comes to an end. While ratings hold, Jack doesn’t have the same option to put down his gun. Somehow I don’t think Jack Bauer: Kindly Grandpa has the same network appeal. (Opening voiceover: “The following visit to the zoo takes place between 11am and 12pm.”)
It’s worse for violent comic book characters – and aren’t they all? Wolverine, for example, is basically immortal. His mutant healing factor keeps him in fighting shape, year after year, so he looks just the same now as he did fighting in World War II. In New X-Men #148 (2003), there’s an example of how all this death has taken its toll. “All I’m good for’s killing,” Logan thinks at the telepathic Jean Grey. “If you knew what I was, you’d hate me.”
Recently, he too had a moment of peace, albeit in a story called ‘Old Man Logan‘ set in a grim possible future. And he was older, too, finally, a grey-haired pacifist and family man. But – you guessed it – he was forced away from his spartan home for one last job. It’s an utterly shameless steal of Unforgiven, except with all Eastwood’s well-earned heartbreak replaced with pointless Marvel Comics trivia for long-term fans. I don’t think William Munny would approve.
Back in regular comic book continuity, the needs of the status quo have been crueller to Wolverine than most. After his debut in 1974, he seemed to be on a decades-long character arc to a better place. He turned from an amnesiac, animalistic killer to a more noble sort of warrior: self-controlled, samurai-influenced, and even a mentor to young X-Men like Kitty Pride. Wolverine’s readers don’t want to give up their favourite hack ‘n’ slash antihero, though, so Logan is never allowed to put his berserker rage behind him once and for all.
But Jack Bauer’s lack of a mutant healing factor is, in fact, his secret weapon. Day by day, his mortal host – Kiefer Sutherland – is getting older. At some point, suspension of disbelief will snap and he’ll be judged too decrepit to be kicking ass on 24. Only then Jack will get some well-deserved peace.
David Lynch, Mark Frost, And Lightning Strikes
What’s your favourite thing David Lynch has ever done?
Wild At Heart still makes me giddy as a schoolgirl, and after many rewatchings I think that Lost Highway is very nearly a perfect film. In fact, I don’t really understand why Mulholland Drive gets so much love when it feels like a compromised version of the same story – albeit with lesbianism and that terrifying scene behind the Winkies.
If pushed, though, I’d probably say that Twin Peaks is his best – and just writing that sentence makes me feel sorry for Mark Frost. You know, the other half of the buzzing LYNCH / FROST logo that ends each episode.
Way back in 2004, I wrote this piece for a book on cult TV called Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion. It wasn’t meant to be Lynch-specific, but it was just so much easier, analytically speaking, to give him credit for everything.
Auteur theory is so seductive that we happily pretend it’s not entirely ridiculous. How can anything as inherently collaborative as movies or TV be the equivalent to a single artist alone in a room with a canvas and a paintbrush?
Even worse: it’s obvious that Twin Peaks was never a single-author text. It never had the same sense of a single controlling force of, say, Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing or Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and I’m sure those men would never say they were wholly responsible for the identities of their respective shows, either.
It’s slightly more plausible for a movie to be one individual’s unique vision, but still basically impossible. And even if it is? There’s a good chance it’d be better if it wasn’t. There are endless stories about Hollywood films being crippled by compromise after compromise, I know, but no one talks much about the opposite.
Do you know how unlikely it is that one human is truly talented at one single thing? So what are the odds that they’ll be good at everything?
The Wrapped In Plastic fanzine with its hand-drawn cover of "Twin Peaks's Invisible Man: Mark Frost".
It’s such an improbable, one-in-a-million lightning strike, and yet everyone seems to think they’ve been struck by the same blast. M. Night Shyamalan and Richard Kelly are both filmmakers with undeniable talent, but seemingly without a sense of their own limitations. If they’d work on other peoples’ screenplays, they might really have something.
Of course, I would say this. I’m a writer with zero urge to direct. (Directing would mean… actually… you know… talking to all those people? Every day? No thanks.)
Recently, Judd Apatow’s success with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up gave him the influence to make his most personal film without artistic compromise – and sadly Funny People turned out to be misshapen, self-indulgent, and unable to hold up to his more commercial films that came before it.
Lynch’s best movies, for me, are one that’s based on Barry Gifford’s vivid characters (Wild At Heart), and another script co-written by Gifford himself (Lost Highway). Lynch works best when his creative impulses are being somehow reigned in by another’s influence. The television structure and ongoing collaborators of Twin Peaks provided the perfect balance.
When we think of Twin Peaks, sure, we think of backwards talk and non sequiturs, but it was a soap opera, first and foremost, and deeply wedded to the all the TV conventions that implies. I feel sorry for the writers on the show who – so the story goes – would spend whole episodes getting the show back on track after Lynch would come back for an episode and throw all their plans into disarray.
(And yes, these were often the most memorable episodes, no doubt – but I bet that made it more annoying for the others involved, not less.)
So, to Mark Frost, who’ll I know never read this but what the hell:
Sorry.