Anger is an Energy

Dancing Monkey One: Watch The Middleman, you bastards.

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

A steady trickle of blog topics rolling in response to my offer to be a Dancing Monkey this week (though most come, as most of my comments do, through the livejournal feed). Pushes my thoughts in interesting directions, it does, with enough random writerly nonsense included to keep me going for a while. Logically they should happen in order, but I’m going to start with something relatively easy (because it’ll feed into a couple of other topics folks have suggested). To whit, Adam demanded “a public rave about the awesomeness of The Middleman.”

This I can do, with bells on and a cherry on top. I can’t, apparently, do it without swearing and unleashing hate upon the world. Consider yourselves warned.

My rave starts thusly: Go and watch The Middleman in whatever form that’s available, you fuckers, because the fact that they’ve only made one season of this show makes me cry.

You should know before I go any further that I’m not a fan of most forms of Geek TV: I loathe Star Trek with a fiery passion; I see Stargate as the malignant legacy of an already stale genre tradition; I walked away from the new version of Battlestar Galactica three episodes in because I could see the clusterfuck of stupidity that was coming and it bored me unbelievably. And that last one still hurts, because I really liked the original mini-series they did to launch the revamped franchise. In fact, I was downright excited and my basic rule of thumb is that I. Don’t. Get. Excited. About. Geek. TV.

And as with most people who are unfeasibly angry at particular genres it’s because I actually love it and am therefore primed for great acts of dissapointment. Thus The Middleman makes me happy in a way that very few TV shows ever have.

Mostly, it does this by refusing to treat me like an idiot.

I realise that I’ve just insulted many of the folks who read this journal and follow the shows I bestow hate upon above, but that’s the truth of it – I turned off most of them because they do something unfailingly stupid and ask me to go along for the ride. And I’ll do that, if I have to, as my consistent viewing of the new Doctor Who series demonstrates, but you need to build up a cache of credit with some awesome up front. Stargate figured it’d earn that cache by giving me misogyny and stock characters in its opening episodes, along with dialogue so bad I actually had to leave the room in order to stop laughing. BSG gave me terminally dull episodes and overwrought melodrama with a philosophical underpinning that struck me as out-of-date. Trek? Well, Trek‘s a mixed bag, but lets just say I don’t think things such as Red Shirts help its case.

Every time I sit down to watch one of these shows I remember an interview J. Michael Strazinski did talking about the early days of Babylon 5, where he noted that Science Fiction television shows aren’t made for science fiction fans because TV executives assume that no matter how bad the program is the fans will show up and watch it because it has lasers and space ships. To a large extent I think the assembled hordes of TV fans prove them right – and while I have no real problem with people watching those shows if they’re getting something out of them, it does leave me with a large and profound feeling of hostility and alienation when it comes to TV-based SF (and, admittedly, it’s my problem; I don’t hold it against you if you love these shows, but I’m never going to be able to step up and enjoy them the same way you do). I can’t geek out over them or get drawn in unless they’re doing something I find new and interesting – B5 managed it with the stunning revelation of episode-to-episode continuity (despite its other flaws); Who manages it through some clever casting and the continued presence of Steven Moffat among the writing staff; The Middleman manages it by…

…well, lets put it this way: In its first episode The Middleman gave me snappy dialogue, a hyper-intelligent ape with a machine-gun, and more post-modern geek references than an entire season of Futurama. It had some clunky spots, sure, but the overall impression was that the people who were writing and producing the show knew the history of geek TV (and comics, and fiction, and computer games) and were happy to be a part of it. They were having fun in a very real sense, and it carried over into the program. More importantly, they weren’t labouring over the idea that this is what they were doing – they sat there and said “you know the genre as well as we do, and you know why this is funny, so lets not bother trying to explain it.” In short, it didn’t treat the fact that I was part of the Geek Tribe as an afterthought and actively tried to engage me as part of that tribe. It revelled in its geekyness, rather than trying to shrug it off and become something it wasn’t. More importantly, The Middleman remembered that part of the fun us giving you the space to “get it” on your own – it wasn’t constantly pointing at things to remind you of how smart it was.

There are other reasons to love the Middleman: the leads are engaging, the supporting cast is verging on excellent (and, dear god, how can there not be more Mouser in the world?), the entire thing is goofy and fun. The problems with the show are largely the stuff I find in most TV – dodgy computer-generated special effects and occasionally clunky acting. But it also has an episode in which the assembled horde of lucha-libre rudo’s take on a single masked martial arts master; it makes Bugbear references while naming its cars; and it teases you with zombie references for episodes at a time before the zombies make an appearance.

The other point of genius in its favour: The Middleman is funny. Very funny. And unlike most geek-oriented humour, it was funny without picking on itself. The Middleman isn’t ashamed of being geeky and, more importantly, it isn’t trying to pass that shame of being a geek onto me as the viewer in the name of being funny. Given that I come from the gamer-oriented parts of geek culture that have lorded stuff like Fear of Girls** as the stuff of great humor, and that I’ve sat through conversations where people have espoused their love for shows like Big Bang Theory***, I tend to value those forms of media that aren’t primarily interested in saying “geeks, aren’t they weird.” It even gets bonus points for having characters who are blatent, obvious geeks without coming from an IT or science background (the science/tech-only vibe given to geek characters on television tends to be one of my pet-peeves).

So yes, The Middleman is glorious and weird and one of those TV shows I will miss horribly. I’m not alone in that. And while it’s probably too late to do anything about its cancelation, you should go order it from I-Tunes and pre-order the DVD sets and ensure that there’s enough desire for it out there to make people think “hey, in retrospect, this did okay – maybe we should do something like it.”

*yes, I know, and now it’s cancelled, thereby proving this might not have been the smartest choice. Shut up, okay? Shut up, shut up, shut up.
** and a quick note for my gamer friend – stop sending me links to Fear of Girls or trying to convince me it’s funny. Just like most forms of Geek Humour that rely on poking fun at our tribe’s social disfunction, I tend to find it mildly abhorent at best. You have a greater chance of convincing me to watch Original Trek.
***which I’ve watched, yes, and enjoyed it during the episodes where they aren’t being relentlessly negative, but I still hate myself for being drawn in by the show.

Because PIL had it right

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , ,

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs.

So today I’m giving in and being frivolously ranty about two things that have annoyed me of late. I can do angry ranting; John Lydon had it right when he talked about anger and energy. Have at it:

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Frothing Rant One: I Am Not a Dear Reader

Over the last couple of days I’ve read a bunch of stuff – essays, blog posts, comments, whatever – that choose to believe that I am a dear reader. I know this, because they address me as such, just as they address every other person that stumbles across their prose. It’s right there in black and white: As you know, Dear Reader, blah blah blah. And godsfuckit, I get angry every time it happens. Most of the time I’ll stop reading right there; I’m not a dear reader. Nor am I a gentle reader, which may seem like the logical alternative to the phrase. What I am, when you get right down to it, is a bloody hostile reader full of piss, rage and vinegar. If, as a writer, you’ve made any kind of assumption that I’m on your side then I’m afraid you’re dreadfully mistaken.

Instead, big ol’ bitter meany that I am, I tend to start at the direct opposite of the spectrum from the kind of folks who use phrases like Dear Reader. I assume hostility and a willingness to put things down, a lack of sympathy on the reader’s part that says “engage me*, you bastard, or I’m walking off and reading one of the hundreds of other books/blogs on my list of things to do before I die.”

I’d like to say this has been startling revelation to me, but it basically confirms something that I’ve suspected for a long while – I’m not on the authors side, and I suspect this is so for the vast majority of readers.  This isn’t to say we don’t want to see the book succeed – heck, why start reading if that’s the case – but I have no problems walking off if it doesn’t do *something* to keep us there after the first few pages.

*engagement being, of course, very different to entertainment.

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Frothing Rant Two: Why I Hate Frame Stories  Self-Help Books

I mentioned my growing use (and anxiety about) of frame stories in current drafts last week, which prompted my old compadre villainous_mog to ask the following question on the LJ feed: “If I ask what a framing story is, will it provoke a hate-fueled rant of stabby words?” I tried to answer to question there, but as predicted there was a rant associated (albeit one devoid of hate and stabby words). Fortunately, thanks to the wikipedia entry, there is a short answer to be given on the matter: it’s basically a technique in which the opening of the narrative sets the stage for digressions into sub-narratives contained within the frame; in essence, a means of telling stories within a story. The most immediate fictive example that comes to mind is Neil Gaiman’s story October in the Chair, or collections like 1001 Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales; cinematic examples would be films like The Princess Bride or Big Fish.

The problem with all those examples is, of course, that they don’t suck*. They’re examples of frame stories done right, or at least frame-stories forgiven for being frame-stories by virtue of historical importance. I’m wracking my brain trying to think of some examples that don’t suck outright, but it’s hard to do – partially, I think, because a smart editor isn’t going to put a crappy frame-story tale out into the world and partly because a frame story that goes wrong is far easier to disregard and ignore than a simple bad story.

Actually, no, I take that back – I can think of two widely-read examples that do suck, although it’s primarily because their use of the framing technique is particularly insidious rather than ineffective. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both come from the field of self-help; the first is Who Moved My Cheese and the second is a book called The One Minute Millionaire. I’ve been subjected to both of these – the former through job-search training many years ago, which may well have marked the official point that I gave up on employment services having anything worthwhile to teach me, and the second through an ex-girlfriend who believed heavily in self-help (not that I don’t, to be honest, but I believe strongly in discriminating and being critical of what you’re taking in).

The reason these two books strike me as insidious reflects the real reason I tend to have problems with frame stories. In Who Moved My Cheese the story primarily revolves one character telling another, whose down on his luck, the story of mice and little human beings trapped in a maze. The story is, of course, a metaphoric parable and it aids the down-on-his-luck story-tellee considerably, revolutionizing his life and sending him out into the world a different man. The reason this is evil is because the narrative is basically manipulative – the frame-story sets you up to believe that the advice you’re getting in the parable is actually useful because there’s someone right there, in the story, being transformed by it.

Bad self-help books love this technique because it’s easy to be drawn in by it, and because you can manipulate the reading and interpretation of your work. Smart readers will call you on your bullshit, obviously (and if you want to see this in action, I direct you to an old post by John Scalzi, who attacks the foibles of the text with considerable more aplomb than I do). My memory of the One Minute Millionaire is considerably less detailed than the first book – primarily because it’s longer, but also because there wasn’t anyone locking me in a room for two hours with the expectation that it’d take that long to finish reading a sixty-page book** – but I took an immediate dislike to the way it used a similar technique to make an argument about getting rich that flew in the face of my even my basic understanding of economic theory and the way the world works.

This does illustrate my basic concern with frame-stories though – it’s a technique that makes it very easy to guide meaning, but also to add the illusion of depth or meaning to a story that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Part of the seductive allure of the frame is that you can make things seem important even when they’re not, or make things work by adding in a particular reaction to something. That’s why I tend to look at it like a warning sign when I find myself writing frames for my stories – like my tendency towards fractured, fragment-driven narratives it’s a familiar technique that I fall back on rather heavily when I’m not sure how to make things work. This doesn’t always mean that I’m going to look askance at every story using said techniques, but I’m going to sit down and ask myself some serious questions about why I’m using it and whether it’s the best way to go.

In sitting down to write this I started wondering what it takes for me to enjoy a frame-story, and basically I think it’s a technique that’s at its best when there is a definite and meaningful tension between the two (or more) stories being told. In the aforementioned Big Fish, for example, the stories are driving the narrative within the larger frame, making overt changes that the primary protagonist wants to resist. It works because there’s a real resistance there – the real story we’re being told is about the relationship between the protagonist and his dead father, which is constantly informed by the tall-tales his father told. Interestingly, I think October in the Chair works because it goes in the opposite direction – the complete absence of a meaningful connection between frame-story and framed-story invites the reader in, basically triggering the sensawanda that drives most Gaiman fans to seek out his work and then enjoy the possible links they come up with (that said: I think it also works because I enjoy the frame story more than the framed one, which I’ve often skipped on re-reading). In a bad frame story the frame is at the service of the inner story, enhancing it; in a good one, the inner stories are there to enhance the outer.

*actually, if I’m honest, I could live without the outer frame story in The Princess Bride movie. And I could live without the framed story in October in the Chair, since the frame is generally the place where the really fantastical stuff happens and the story that’s being told has a strange disconnection from it.
**I was sufficiently bored that I read Who Moved My Cheese a couple of times, hoping like hell that I was missing something that’d make it worth the time. There wasn’t.