Author Archives: Bob Rehak

Going with the Flow

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FlowTV’s new issue is out (or, given its online nature, up): a special edition on Battlestar Galactica, guest-edited by Lynne Joyrich and Julie Levin Russo with the help of FlowTV’s editorial liaison Jean Anne Lauer. My own contribution, Downloads, Copies, and Reboots: Battlestar Galactica and the Changing Terms of TV Genre, uses Galactica’s storied evolution — its many iterations and reinventions — as a springboard for thinking about how industrial replication structures TV as well as ways of talking about TV: in particular, the emergence of terms like reboot and showrunner, which seem to me laden with implications about how TV is being reconfigured in the popular (and industrial) imaginary.

Here’s an excerpt:

Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica is, of course, a remake or — his preferred term — “reimagining” of Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica, which ran from 1978-1979. Even in that first, Carter-era incarnation, the show occupied an undecidable space between copy and original; it was judged by many, including George Lucas and 20th Century Fox, to be a bald steal of Star Wars (1977). (Evidence of thievery was not merely textual; two of Lucas’s key behind-the-scenes talents, conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie and visual-effects guru John Dykstra, defected to the Galactica team.) And following its first cancellation by ABC, the series was followed by the much-loathed “relaunch,” Galactica 1980, which ran just ten episodes before dying on the Nielsen vine.

The irony is not just that the 1978-1980 versions of Battlestar Galactica have now come to be seen as canonical by a subset of fans who reject Moore’s version as being GINO (“Galactica In Name Only”). Popular culture, especially from the 1950s onward, is marked by an alchemical process of nostalgia by which even the most derivative texts (Star Wars being the chief example) grow a callus of originality simply through continual shoulder-bumping with the ripoffs, sequels, and series that follow. Such is the nature of the successful media franchise, doomed to plow forward under the ever-increasing inertia of its own fecund replication.

No, what’s striking about the many iterations of Galactica is how cleanly the coordinates of its fantasy lure have flipped over time, illustrating the ability of genre myths to reconfigure themselves around new cultural priorities. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica, even in its heyday, was pure cheese, a disco-hued mélange of droning chrome robots, scrappy space cowboys, a cute mechanical dog, and endless space battles (whose repetitive nature can be attributed to the exigencies of weekly production; as with the first Star Trek, pricey optical effects were recycled to amortize their cost). Back then, it was fun to fantasize planetary diaspora as effervescent escape; the prospect of being chased from our homeworld by cyclopean robots with a mirror finish seemed, by the late seventies, as giddily implausible as Ronald Reagan moving into the White House.

But nowadays, the dream embodied in Battlestar Galactica has inverted frictionlessly into nightmare. The shift in tone is reflected in a new design scheme of drably militaristic grays and browns, brutal drumbeats on the soundtrack, and jittery camerawork on both actors and spaceships — thanks to the digital-effects house Zoic, whose signature visuals lend zoomy, handheld verisimilitude to the combat scenes. It all comes inescapably together to suggest a very different mindset: hunted, paranoid, and starkly conscious of the possibility of spiritual, if not physical, annihilation.

What I do see Battlestar Galactica bringing to the table with fresh force is the useful concept of the reboot as a strategy for dealing with franchise fatigue. A liberating alternative to the depressingly commercial and linear “sequel,” the reboot signals a profound shift in how we perceive and receive serial media. We are coming to see serial dramas as generative systems, more about ground rules and conditions of possibility than events or outcomes. (And I would argue that the only sane serial aesthetic is one that allows for occasional misfires; one bad episode does not a series invalidate.) Like the terms canon and retcon, the reboot borrows from brethren like comic books and print lit. Like the term game-changer, it characterizes TV production in computational terms, as ludic algorithm. And like the term show-runner, it signals our growing comfort with the notion of series as industrial product, indeed, as series: a potentially unending churn of a diegetic engine rather than a standalone text.

Other articles include Anne Kustritz on fans and producers; Melanie E. S. Kohnen on history and technology; Sarah Toton on fan-generated databases; and a conversation with Galactica star Mary McDonnell.

The Video Game Explosion

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A quick plug for a new book edited by my friend and colleague Mark J. P. Wolf, The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to PlayStation and Beyond (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008). I’ve worked with Mark before, on a collection he edited with Bernard Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003). Mark is a remarkable historian and scholar, with an exhaustive mind for detail, who’s been in on game studies from the start (here’s an interview with him at The Brainy Gamer). His goal with this volume is nothing less than a comprehensive reference work on the history of videogames. From his introduction:

This book differs from its predecessors in several ways. It is intended both for the general reader interested in video game history as well as for students with chapters thematically organized around various topics, which are generally arranged in chronological order and tell the story of video games from their earliest inception to the present day. Other features of the book include sidebars and profiles that highlight various aspects of video game history and a glossary of terminology relating to video games and their technology. Some of the best people writing on video games today have contributed their scholarship to form this comprehensive history. While other books on video games have been written from a journalistic, sociological, psychological, or nostalgic point of view, here the video games themselves occupy a central position. Other aspects of history, such as the companies, game designers, technology, merchandising, and so forth, provide a necessary background, but games always remain in the forefront.

The Video Game Explosion is divided into five sections, “Looking at Video Games,” “The Early Days (Before 1985),” “The Industry Rebounds (1985-1994),” “Advancing to the Next Level (1995-present),” and “A Closer Look at Video Games.” There are entries on almost every imaginable subtopic within videogame history, including system profiles of the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and the PlayStation line; company profiles of Electronic Arts and Sega; genre profiles of adventure games, RPGs, and interactive movies; and a series of short essays examining videogame production in Europe, Asia, and Australia.

I particularly recommend the entries on “Rise of the Home Computer,” “Genre Profile: First-Person Shooting Games,” and the sidebar on “Retrogaming,” all written by yours truly.

Amazon link here; publisher’s page here.

Speed Indeed

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The trailer for Speed Racer has been available for a little under a week, and word of it is spreading through social channels almost as quickly as through the manifold viral vectors of information space. (The world of organic embodied communications can only stand back and shake its head in wonder at its fleet digital progeny. YouTube’s version is here; I recommend viewing it in higher quality through the official website.) I’ve watched the trailer several times myself, in increasing fascination; students and colleagues have emailed me links to it; I even overheard two students discussing it excitedly, as though it were the movie itself: It’s already out? Cool! Whatever the merits of the work-in-progress the trailer is advertising, it has certainly achieved its intended purpose, acting not so much as a preview, but rather a demo of the full-length version that will hit theaters in May 2008. It captures the movie in miniature, scales it down to an iPod-sized burst of visual attractions and narrative beats.

I admit to being suckered (or sucker-punched) by the look of Speed Racer, a hypperreal funhouse crafted from neon candy and shot in an infinitely deep focus that would make Gregg Toland or James Wong Howe weep for joy. I guess it’s not surprising that Larry and Andy Wachowski, following up the silvery-green slickness of their Matrix trilogy, have prepared another film whose brand identity depends largely upon its visual texture: an internally consistent cinematic VR — a graphic engine in the truest sense — in which cinematography, visual effects, and mise-en-sc??ne have flowed into each other like gooey fudge.

Actually, add editing to that mix, for the Speed Racer trailer is the first I can think of to offer a scene transition as a visual hook. The image at the top of this article shows the endpoint of a camera move: tracking around protagonist Speed (Emile Hirsch), the background blurs into a rainbow ribbon, and Hirsch’s shoulder “wipes” the next shot into existence. The moment features prominently in the trailer and in stills grabbed from it (like the one I found by Googling), yet it seems to be neither a turning point in the narrative, a revelation of character, nor a generic marker. Instead, it showcases a new “verb” in film grammar, signaling that Speed Racer will not simply tell a great story, but will tell it using an entirely new set of rules.

Yeah, right. We’ve all heard this before; cinema probably started making promises it couldn’t keep on December 29, 1895, the day after the first public screening of a motion picture. But unlike the Lumi??re Brothers — who called cinema “an invention without a future” — the Wachowskis have set themselves the task of forging cinema’s next epoch. Whether they can do it with Speed Racer remains to be seen. On the surface, it’s a giddy experiment in mapping anime style into live action, though I suspect the production has stretched the concept of digital animation so far that any ontological divide between it and live action has long since ceased to matter. It may end up no more successful than Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), which also toyed with a new kind of transition, in that case a pattern of orthogonal wipes based on comic-book panels. Lee’s experiment didn’t do much to pep up that dismal movie, but something tells me that Speed Racer will fare better. Here’s hoping.

Finding a Transmedia “Compass”

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My colleague Tim Burke’s pointed rebuttal to critics of the film adaptation of The Golden Compass – who charge that the movie lacks the theological critique and intellectual heft of Phillip Pullman’s source novel – caught my eye, not just because I’m a fan of the books and intend to see the movie as soon as end-of-semester chaos dies down, but because I’ve spent the last week talking about transmedia franchises with my Intro to Film class.

To recap the argument, on one side you have the complaint that, in bringing book to screen, Pullman’s central rhetorical conceit has been cruelly compromised. The adventure set forth in the three volumes of His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) unfolds against a world that is but one of millions in a set of alternate, overlapping realities. But the protagonist Lyra’s cultural home base is fearfully repressed by religious authorities whose cosmology allows for no such “magical thinking” – and whose defense of its ideology is both savagely militaristic and a thin veil over a much larger network of conspiracy and corruption. (Really, right-wing moral guardians should not be objecting to how Pullman treats the Church, but how he nails the current U.S. administration.) But, the charge goes, the movie has trimmed away the more controversial material, leaving nothing but a frantic romp through tableaux of special-effects-dependent set design and, in the case of Iorek Byrnison and the daemons, casting.

On the other side you’ve got positions like Tim’s, which welcome many of the excisions because they actually improve the story. As Pullman gets cranking, especially in the concluding Amber Spyglass, his narrative becomes both attenuated and obese, subjective time slowing to a crawl while mass increases to infinity like an space traveler moving near the speed of light. Personally, I was mesmerized by Spyglass’s long interlude in the Land of the Dead, which in its beautifully arid and disturbing tedium managed to remind me simultaneously of L’Avventura, Stalker, and Inland Empire. But it’s hard to disagree, especially when Tim reminds me how turgid and didactic C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle got, that while we all like to have our intellect and imagination stirred, very few of us like to be lectured.

Me, I’ll suspend judgment on the movie until I see it – a strategy that worked well with The Mist, which I enjoyed astronomically more than Stephen King’s original novella. But I do sense in the debate around Compass’s political pruning an opportunity to air my concern with transmedia storytelling, or rather with the discursive framework that media scholars are evolving to talk about and critique transmedia “operations.”

In a nutshell, and heavily cribbed from Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture, storytelling on a large scale in contemporary media involves telling that tale across a number of different platforms, through different media, all of which are delegated one part of the fictional universe and its characters, but none of which contains the whole. While Star Trek and Star Wars did this starting in the 1960s and 1970s respectively, current exemplars like The Matrix bring the logic of transmediation to its full, labyrinthine flower. The three installments of the 1999-2003 trilogy are but land masses in a crowded sea of other textual windows into the Matrix “system”: videogames, websites, TV spots, comics, etc. each play their part. Each text is an entry point to the franchise; ideally, each stands alone on its artistic merits while contributing something valuable to the whole; and the pleasurable labor of transmedia audiences is to explore, collect, decrypt, and discuss the fragments as an ongoing act of consumption that is also, of course, readership.

Admittedly, Pullman’s trilogy doesn’t lend itself perfectly to transmediation any more than The Lord of the Rings did. When you’ve got to contend with an “original,” pesky concepts like canonicity and (in)fidelity creep in. Fans will always measure the various incarnations of Harry Potter against Rowling’s books, just as J. R. R. Tolkien’s fans did with Peter Jackson’s movies. But The Matrix or Heroes or Halo, which don’t owe allegiance to anything except their own protocols of ongoing generation, are freed through a kind of authorless solipsism to expand indefinitely through “storyspace,” no version more legitimate than another. (I’m not saying those franchises are literally authorless, but that they lack a certain auratic core of singular, unrepeatable authorship: instead they are team enterprises, all the more appealing to those who wish to create more content.)

There are some neat felicities between the transmedia system’s sliding panels — each providing a partial slice of a larger world — and the cosmological superstructure of His Dark Materials. (One could even argue that franchises come with their own pretender-gods, the corporations that seek to brand each profitable reality and police its official and unofficial uses, thus contradicting the avowed openness of the system: New Line as Magisterium.) But to come back to the question with which I opened, does it matter that, in turning Golden Compass the book into Golden Compass the movie – surely the first and most crucial “budding” of a transmedia franchise — some of the text’s teeth have been pulled?

I suggest that one danger of transmedia thinking is that it abandons, or at least dilutes, the concept of adaptation – a key tool by which we trace genealogical relationships within a world of hungrily replicating media. If A is an adaptation of B, then B came first; A is a version, an approximation, of B. We assess A against B, and regardless of which comes out the victor (after all, there have been good movies made of bad books), we understand that between A and B there are tradeoffs. There have to be, in order to translate between media, where 400 pages or the premise of a TV series rarely fit into a feature-length film.

The contradiction is that, while we would not usually expect an adaptation to precisely replicate the ideological fabric of its source, and can even imagine some that consciously go against the grain of the original, transmedia models, which talk of extensions rather than adaptations, assume a much more transparent mapping of theme and content. We expect, that is, the various splinter worlds of Star Trek and The Matrix to agree, in general, on the same ideological message: the commonsense “talking points” of their particular worldviews. We may get different perspectives on the franchise diegesis, but the diegesis must necessarily remain unbroken as a backdrop – or else it stops being part of the whole, abjected into a wholly different and incompatible franchise. (There’s a reason why Darth Vader will never meet Voldemort, except in fan fiction, which is a whole ‘nother ball of transmedial wax.)

Golden Compass’s critical “neutering” in the process of its replication reminds us that different media do different things, and that this has political import. Jenkins writes that, in transmedia, each medium plays to its strengths: videogames let you interact with – or inhabit — the story’s characters, while novelizations give internal psychological detail or historical background. Comic books and artwork visualizes the fiction, while model kits, costumes, and collectibles solidify and operationalize its props. Precisely because of the logic of transmedia, or distributed storytelling, we don’t expect these fragments to carry the weight of the whole. But each medium promotes through its very codes, technologies, and operations a particular set of understandings and values (a point not lost on Ian Bogost and other videogame theorists who talk about “persuasive games” and “procedural rhetoric”), hence translation always involves a kind of surgery, whether to expunge or augment.

Golden Compass may fail at the box office, which would end the Dark Materials franchise then and there (or maybe not – transmedia are as full of surprise resurrections and reboots as the stories told within them). But director/screenwriter Chris Weitz has made no secret of the fact that he sanitized the book’s theological transgressions in hopes that, having found an audience, he can go on to shoot the remaining two books more as Pullman intended. Regardless of what happens to this particular franchise, it’s our responsibility as scholars and critics – hell, as people – to be sensitive to, and wary about, the ideological filters and political compromises that fall into place, like Dust, as stories travel and multiply.

Razor’s Edge

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Tonight I had the privilege of attending an advance screening of “Razor,” the Battlestar Galactica telefilm that will be broadcast on the SciFi Channel on November 24. Fresh from the experience, I want to tell you a bit about it. I’ll keep the spoilers light – that said, however, read on with caution, especially if, like me, you want to remain pure and unsullied prior to first exposure.

Along with several colleagues from Swarthmore College, I drove into Philadelphia a couple of hours before the 7 p.m. showing, fearing that more tickets had been issued than there were seats; this turned out not to be a problem, but it was fun nevertheless – a throwback to my teenage days in Ann Arbor when I stood in line for midnight premieres of Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – to kill time with a group of friends, all of us atingle with anticipation, eyeing the strangers around us with a mingled air of social fascination (are we as nerdy as they are?) and prefab amity (hail, fellow travelers, well met!).

The event itself was interesting on several levels, some of them purely visual: We knew we’d be watching a video screener blown up onto a movie-sized screen, and true to expectation, the image had the washed-out, slightly grainy quality that I’m coming to recognize now that I’m getting used to a high-def TV display. (Things overall are starting to look very good in the comfort of my living room.) There was also the odd juxtaposition of completely computer-generated science-fiction imagery in the plentiful ads for Xbox 360 titles such as Mass Effect and the new online Battlestar Galactica game (yes, more tingling at this one) with the actual show content – the space battles especially were in one sense hard to distinguish from their Xbox counterparts.

But at the same time, the entire program served as a reminder of what makes narratively-integrated visual effects sequences more compelling (in a certain sense) than their videogame equivalents. “Razor”’s battle scenes, of which there are – what’s the technical term? – puh-lenty, carry the dramatic weight of documentary footage or at least historical reenactments, by comparison to which the explosive combat of Mass Effect and the BSG game were received by audiences with the amused condescension of parents applauding politely an elementary-school play starring somebody else’s kids. Disposable entertainment, in a word, paling beside the high-stakes offering of “real” Galactica – and not just any Galactica, but the backstory of one of BSG’s most nightmarish and searing storylines, that of the “lost” Battlestar Pegasus and her ruthlessly hardline commander, Admiral Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes).

(I’ll get to the meat of the story in a moment, but one last thought on the blatantly branded evening of Microsoft-sponsored fun: does anyone really own, or use, or enjoy their Zune? The ad we watched [twice] went to great lengths to portray the Zune as better than an iPod – without ever mentioning iPods, of course – but the net effect was to remind me that a device intended to put portable personal media on a collective footing is as useless as a prehensile toe if no one around you actually owns the thing. “Welcome to the Social,” indeed.)

On to “Razor” itself. Was it any good? In my opinion, it was fantastic; it did everything I wanted it to do, including

  • Lots of space battles
  • Hard military SF action, namely a sequence highly reminiscent of the Space Marine combat staged to perfection by James Cameron in Aliens
  • A few heart-tugging moments, including several exchanges between Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos) and his son Lee (Jamie Bamber) of a type that never fail to bring tears to my eyes
  • Scary, Gigerish biomedical horror
  • Aaaaand the requisite Halloween-candy sampler of “revelations” regarding BSG’s series arc, which I won’t go into here except to note that they do advance the story, and suitably whet my appetite for season four (assuming the writer’s strike doesn’t postpone it until 2019).

A better title, then, might be “Razor: Fanservice,” for this long-awaited installment returns to the foreground many of the elements that made BSG such a potent reinvigoration of televised SF when it premiered in the U.S. at the end of 2004. Since then, Galactica has flagged in ways that I detail in an essay for an upcoming issue of Flow devoted to the series; but judging from “Razor,” showrunner Ronald D. Moore, like Heroes’s Tim Kring, has heard the fans and decided to give them what they want.

For me, the season-two Pegasus arc marked a kind of horizon of possibility for Galactica’s bold and risky game of mapping the least rendering of real-world political realities – namely government-sponsored torture questionably and conveniently justified by the “war on terror” – in SF metaphor. With the exception of the New Caprica arc that ended season two and began season three, the show has never since quite lived up to the queasy promise of the Pegasus storyline, in which a darkly militarized mirror-version of the valiant Galactica crew plunged itself with unapologetic resolve into Abu Ghraib-like sexual abuse and humiliation of prisoners.

What “Razor” does so engrossingly is revisit this primal scene of Galactica’s complex political remapping to both rationalize it – by giving us a few more glimpses of Admiral Cain’s pre- and post-apocalypse behavior and inner turmoil – and deepen its essential and inescapable repugnance. We’re given a framework, in other words, for the unforgivable misdeeds of Pegasus’s command structure and its obedient functionaries; the additional material both explains and underscores what went wrong and why it should never happen again.

Perhaps most strikingly, “Razor” provides a fantasy substitute for George W. Bush — a substitute who, despite her profoundly evil actions, is reassuring precisely because she seems aware of what she has wrought. In the film’s crucial scene, Cain instructs her chief torturer, Lieutenant Thorne (Fulvio Cecere), to make Six (Tricia Helfer)’s interrogation a humiliating, shameful experience. “Be creative,” Cain commands, and the fadeout that follows is more chilling than any clinically pornographic rendering of the subsequent violence could ever be. Precisely because I cannot imagine the cowardly powers-that-be, from Bush, Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales on down to Lynndie England and Charles Graner, to ever take responsibility in the straightforward way that Cain does, this scene strikes me as one of the most powerful and eloquent portrayals of the contemporary U.S./Iraqi tragedy that TV has generated.

Admiral Cain is the real frog in SF’s imaginary garden. Moreover, her brief return in “Razor” suggests our ongoing need – a psychic wound in need of a good antisepsis and bandage – for a real leader, one with the courage not just to do the unthinkable on our behalf, but to embrace his role in it, and ride that particular horse all the way to his inevitable destruction and damnation.

Thoughts on the Writers’ Strike

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The decision by the Writers Guild of America to go on strike this week, bringing production of scripted media content in the U.S. to a halt, triggered a couple of different reactions in me.

1. Thank god for the strike. I say this not because I believe in the essential rightness of unionized labor (though I do), or because I believe writers deserve far more monetary benefits from their work than they are currently getting (though I also do). No, I’m grateful for the strike because there is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up. The launch of the fall TV season has been stressful for me because I’m sharply aware of how many shows are vying for my attention; the good ones (Heroes, House, 30 Rock) demand a weekly commitment, but even the bad or unproven ones (Journeyman, Bionic Woman, Pushing Daisies) deserve at least a glance. And while being a media scholar has its benefits, the downside is that it casts a “work aura” over every leisure activity; it’s nearly impossible to just watch anything anymore, without some portion of my brain working busily away on ideas for essays, blog entries, or material to use in the classroom. Hooray for the stoppage, then: it means more time to catch up on the “old” content spooled up and patiently waiting on DVD, hard drive, and videotape, and more mental energy to spare on each. To live in a time of media plenitude and infinite access is great in its way. But having so much, all the time, also risks reducing the act of engaging with it to dreary automaticity — a forced march.

2. It’s fascinating to watch the differential impact of the script drought diffusing through the media ecosystem. First to go dead are the daily installments of comedy predicated on quick response to current events: nightly talk shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Next to fold will be the half-hour sitcoms and hourly dramas currently in production. Some series, like 24, may not get their seasons off the ground at all. And somewhere far down the line, if the strike continues long enough, even the mighty buffers of Hollywood will go dry. Seeing the various media zones blink out one at a time is like watching the spread of a radioactive trace throughout the body’s organs, reminding us not only of the organic, massively systematic and interconnectedly flowing nature of the mediascape, but of the way in which our media renew themselves at different rates, deriving their particular relevance and role in our lives by degree of “greenness” on the one hand, polish on the other.

Dumbledore: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

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I was all set to write about J. K. Rowling’s announcement that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, was gay, but Jason Mittell over at JustTV beat me to it. Rather than reiterating his excellent post, I’ll just point you to it with this link.

Here’s a segment of the comment I left on Jason’s blog, highlighting what I see as a particularly odd aspect of the whole event:

On a structural level, it’s interesting to note that Rowling is commenting on and characterizing an absence in her text, a profound lacuna. It’s not just that Dumbledore’s queerness is there between the lines if you know to read for it (though with one stroke, JKR has assured that future readers will do so, and probably quite convincingly!). No, his being gay is so completely offstage that it’s tantamount to not existing at all, and hence, within the terms of the text, is completely irrelevant. It’s as though she said, “By the way, during the final battle with Voldemort, Harry was wearing socks that didn’t match” or “I didn’t mention it at the time, but one of the Hogwarts restrooms has a faucet that leaked continuously throughout the events of the seven books.” Of course, the omission is far more troubling than that, because it involves the (in)visibility of a marginalized identity: it’s more as though she chose to reveal that a certain character had black skin, though she never thought to mention it before. While the move seems on the surface to validate color-blindness, or queer-blindness, with its blithe carelessness, the ultimate message is a form of “stay hidden”; “sweep it under the rug”; and of course, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

We’ve got two more movies coming out, so of course it will be interesting to see how the screenwriters, directors, production designers, etc. — not to mention Michael Gambon — choose to incorporate the news about Dumbledore into the ongoing mega-experiment in cinematic visualization. My strong sense is that it will change things not at all: the filmmakers will become, if anything, scrupulously, rabidly conscientious about adapting the written material “as is.”

But I disagree, Jason, with your contention that Rowling’s statement is not canonical. Come on, she’s the only voice on earth with the power to make and unmake the Potter reality! She could tell us that the whole story happened in the head of an autistic child, a la St. Elsewhere, and we’d have to believe it, whether we liked it or not — unless of course it could be demonstrated that JKR was herself suffering from some mental impairment, a case of one law (medical) canceling out another (literary).

For better or worse, she’s the Author — and if that concept might be unraveling in the current mediascape, all the more reason that people will cling to it, a lifejacket keeping us afloat amid a stormy sea of intepretation.

One Nation Under Stephen

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I felt a delicious chill as I read the news that Stephen Colbert is running for President. (He made his announcement on Tuesday’s edition of The Colbert Report, the half-hour news and interview program he hosts on Comedy Central.) Why a chill? For all that I enjoy and respect Colbert, he has always prompted in me a faint feeling of vertigo. Watching his comedy is like staring into a deep well or over the side of a tall building: you get the itchy feeling in your legs of wanting to jump, to give yourself up to gravity and the abyss, obliterating yourself and all that you hold dear. Colbert’s impersonation of a rabidly right-wing, plummily egotistical media pundit is so polished and impenetrable that it stops being a joke and moves into more uncannily undecidable territory: simulation, automaton, a doll that has come to life. Unlike Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Colbert’s satire doesn’t have a target, but becomes the target, triggering a collapse of categories, an implosion, a joke that eats itself and leaves its audience less thrilled than simply unsure (cf. Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, at which he mapped uneasy smiles and half-frowns across a roomful of Republican faces).

Judging from Colbert’s offstage discussion of his work, like his recent interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air, he’s a modest, sensible, reflective guy, able to view his Report persona with wit and detachment even as he delights in using it to generate ever more extreme, Dada-like interventions in popular and political culture — his Wikipedia mischief being only one instance. My half-serious worry is that with his latest move, he’s unleashed something far bigger than he knows or can control. The decision to place himself on the 2008 Presidential ballot, even if only in South Carolina, has been received by the mainstream media primarily as another ironic turn of the comedy-imitates-reality-imitates-art cycle, noting the echo of Robin Williams’s Man of the Year (2006) and comedian Pat Paulsen’s bid for the White House in 1968. But I think the more accurate and alarming comparison might be Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, the character played by Andy Griffith in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957). In that film, Rhodes goes from being a bumpkinish caricature on a television variety show to a populist demagogue, drunk on his own power and finally revealed as a hollow shell, a moral vacuum. The unsubtle message of Kazan’s film is that TV’s pervasive influence makes it a tool for our most destructive collective tendencies — a nation of viewers whose appetite for entertainment leads them to eagerly embrace fascism.

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I’d be lying — or at least being flippant — if I claimed to believe that Colbert could be another “Lonesome” Rhodes. I’m neither that cynical about our culture nor that paranoid about the power of media. But given that we live in an era when the opportunities for self-organizing social movements have multiplied profoundly through the agency of the internet, who is to say where Colbert’s campaign comedy will mutate smoothly into something more genuine? Maybe he is, at this moment in history, the perfect protest candidate, smoother and more telegenic than Nader and Perot by orders of magnitude. He just might win South Carolina. And if that happens … what next?

Movie-a-Day: August 2007

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Nineteen titles this time around, reflecting the fact that, around the third week of August, the oncoming fall semester was looming as large as the giant alien saucers that shadow the world’s capitals in Independence Day. Getting my courses up and running finally killed poor Movie-a-Day, bringing to an end the blissful ritual that structured my summer … except that Movie-a-Day isn’t dead; in fact, since September 29th, I’ve been back on the plan. Turns out I’m hooked. Hooked not simply on movies – I’ve always loved them – but on the practice of watching them daily, of unequivocally setting aside two-plus hours to lock the door, kick back in my armchair, and do nothing but watch (with occasional note-taking). With the semester underway, it’s a lot harder to find the time, and I’ve loosened the rules a bit (it’s now OK to watch movies I’ve seen before, and films screened for class count). But, like my friend and former employer Sy Safransky at The Sun Magazine, who wakes up every day at 4 a.m. to meditate and write, I’ve learned that the commitment itself – the claim one stakes on each new day – is the real treasure, and not one to be traded away lightly.

As always, I’ve starred the titles that made the greatest impression on me, positive, negative, or any other flavor. More stars than usual in August – either I meandered into some good choices, or I’m becoming easier to impress. (Not that I’m complaining: impressionability is precisely what I’m trying to cultivate.) Also a few more animated titles; recent releases; my first silent film of the summer (unless one counts Sherlock, Jr.); and films from outside the U.S.

Movie-a-Day: August 2007

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)*
Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)*
Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)*
Ninja Scroll (Yoshiaki Kawajiri, 1993)*
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Mamoru Oshii, 2004)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)*
A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)
Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973)
Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001)
The Shanghai Gesture (Josef von Sternberg, 1941)*
The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006)
Wicked City (Yoshiaki Kawajiri, 1987)
Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990)*
A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan, 1957)*
One Missed Call (Takashi Miike, 2004)
Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)*
Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973)
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)*

Better, Stronger, Faster (TM)

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Spoiler Alert!

I’ll let you in on a little secret regarding the new NBC series Bionic Woman: they’re all bionic on that show, every last one of them. Sure, the premise centers primarily on one technologically-augmented body, that of Jaime Summers (Michelle Ryan), a bartender injured so severely in a car crash that her boyfriend — an imaginative combination of your standard TV hot guy and your standard mad scientist; think McBrainy — promptly replaces both of Jaime’s legs, one arm, one eye, and one ear, with $50 million worth of bionic machinery, making her about 65% superhuman. The show, a remake or, I suppose, reboot of the 1976-1978 series that starred Lindsay Wagner in the title role, does go one step further by providing a nemesis/doppelganger in the form of Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff), a previous experiment in bionic integration who, either through bad character or having been “hacked,” has become a murderous tormenter of the nameless paragovernmental organization where Jaime now works. (Corvus is also sultry and talks like a film noir femme fatale, but it’s unclear to what degree these traits preceded her upgrade.)

But the truth, as I said before, is that everyone on the show is bionic, from Jaime’s boss Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer) to her little sister Becca (Lucy Hale) to the extras that populate the backgrounds. This greater degree of bionicization reflects the enormous strides that have occurred in the field since the late 1970s; see Eric Freedman’s excellent Flow article for a recap. Nowadays, instead of simply tacking on a robotic limb or improved sensory organ here and there, bodies can be implanted with structuring quantities of generic and intertextual material, resulting in characters whose every look, gesture, and word of dialogue issues from another source. The cast of Bionic Woman has literally been stitched together from other TV shows, movies, and comic books — reconstituted like chicken beaks and hog parts into shiny pink hot dogs, repurposed like ground-up car tires into bouncy playground equipment.

And it doesn’t stop there. Internal memoranda leaked to me from showrunner David Eick’s office reveal the deeper layers of bionicization that make up the new series. The settings, while profilmically real enough in their own right, were all first used on other shows — as were the scripts, storylines, character arcs, action setpieces, and cliffhangers. In actuality, Bionic Woman is a postmodern breakthrough, the cutting edge in mashup culture. It exists purely as a composite of borrowed and recycled material, a house mix of C-level storytelling retrofitted from the efflux of the SciFi Channel, USA, and Spike, chopped and reedited into apparently new creative “product.”

My sources inform me that, while the pilot episode was assembled under human supervision, the duties of outputting new weekly 42-minute swatches of text has now been handed over entirely to a computerized system which uses sophisticated pattern recognition to dovetail one unrelated shot or scene to another in semi-plausible continuity. (A related algorithm keeps the editing lightning-fast, ensuring that any mismatches will flash by unnoticed.) There are still a few glitches in the system, evidenced by the second episode’s kludgy splice of two fundamentally incompatible stereotypes into one character (the teenage Becca): as those of us whose organic bodies passed through adolescence know, no one who gets in trouble for smoking pot in the dressing room could simultaneously burn with the dream of performing in her high-school talent show’s number from Annie Get Your Gun. It’s not simply a logical impossibility, but a paradoxical, reality-ripping snarl in the fabric of fictive spacetime. NBC troubleshooters have traced the problem to a dunderheaded subroutine that mistakenly blended Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) from Gilmore Girls with Angela Chase (Claire Danes) from My So-Called Life. The techs say it shouldn’t happen again, but aren’t making any promises.

In the meantime, Bionic Woman will continue to unspool, following its own logic of recombination in blissful automaticity. I find the show more watchable than just about any of the other new offerings of the season, except for Kitchen Nightmares, which quaintly and cannily embeds at least one real person within its own bionic grammar — kind of an inside-out TV cyborg. Certainly Bionic Woman passes the test that Chuck didn’t or couldn’t, drawing me back for a second look. I encourage you to check out Bionic Woman, especially if you’re a fan, as I am, of the sorts of mesmerizingly random patterns that emerge from nonlinear, chaotic flow like lava lamps and screen savers.