Shakespeare with Tits: Oliver Parker's Othello

First impressions:

1. I must have as specific an idea of Iago as I do of Hamlet, because this is the second one who’s seemed shockingly wrong to me.

2. This production’s not embalmed, like the Olivier, but suffers from the opposite flaw, which characterizes modern Shakespeare films: it’s manically busy. From the first shots of a gondola at night and Desdemona running secretly to be married, veil over her face, we know we’ve been downgraded to a cheap melodrama, and it affects the interpretations: the minor characters (Roderigo, Desdemona’s father) are just cartoon villains. It makes me appreciate the well-rounded, sympathetic characterizations of even the simplest characters in the Olivier version - a benefit of traditional Shakespeare.

3. Fishburne is elegant, restrained, and great to look at, but he doesn’t have a whit of Olivier’s authority.

4. You’d think the “realism” of having them settle the skirmish over Othello’s marriage as a courtroom scene would be more dramatic than characters standing around delivering speeches, but in fact it slows things down - all those tedious cuts back and forth. The director, Oliver Parker, is doing a hack-job, cutting away from speeches for literal-minded, cliched flashbacks. Oh, he did the 2002 Importance of Being Earnest? Yeah, that was terrible. Somebody (the director, I imagine) forgot to tell Judi Dench that Lady Bracknell is a comic role.

4. Branagh’s having fun, he can speak the language a hundred miles a minute (thumbs up from me), and in this crowd you can see what a skilled, clever actor he is. Fishburne’s his only competition, and most of Fishburne’s speeches are getting cut so he and Desdemona can suck face some more or strip their clothes off while the camera lingers. (The camera’s at least as fascinated by Fishburne’s body as by Desdemona’s.)

5. Rough sex as the explanation for why Emilia puts up with her husband and steals the handkerchief for him is better than any academic explanation I’ve ever heard. Although these days, for all I know that is an academic theory, which the movie stole.

6. The actor playing Cassio isn’t exactly bad, but he’s absolutely forgettable and the part’s been heavily cut so that a) a sub-plot that might add an extra layer to the play if we sympathized with him is sacrificed and b) the whole build-up of how Iago manipulates him into accidentally compromising Desdemona is completely lost. But who cares about plot when all these tits are around?

Final impressions:

1. Branagh’s smart, charming, and knows how to give a performance (and now I recall that he was a good Benedict), but he’s no Iago. Iago is Shakespeare’s most cynical character, incessantly suspecting the worst of everyone, a thorough pragmatist, materialist, and egotist - and paranoid. The puckish, puffy-faced Branagh’s just not… earthy enough. He’s great in the first temptation scene, though, playing expertly on Othello’s jealousy. But after that the acting gets overpowered by busy, busy, busyness. They can’t possibly just be talking, we might lose interest, you know. They have to clean guns or walk along the ocean or become blood brothers on a roof - how’s it possible to either give or watch a performance like this? In normal, non-Shakespeare movies, people are allowed to just talk in a room sometimes.

2. Fishburne’s a good, solid actor, but he’s making me see (for the first time in my life) why people think Olivier’s a genius. For all the mannerism and scenery-chewing of Olivier’s performance, it was far more powerful than this - a portrait of a man going mad from jealousy. Not that Fishburne’s able to construct a portrait anyway; the growth of his jealousy is a construction of editing and fantasy sequences. Saves the actors the acting, I guess.

3. My God, this is SO SLOW. Stage scenes have got to happen blindingly fast, one after another - this bit, that bit, bit’s over, next bit. But in a movie there’s all this realistic… “space.” Like dead air.

4. By the time you get to the scene where Iago’s prompting Othello to kill Desdemona, there’s been so much busy editing that you’ve forgotten why Iago wanted this. In the play there’s a gathering momentum that leaves you no room for questioning either Iago or Othello as jealousy tips over into murder: there’s a straight progression from the hatching of Iago’s plan to its execution and results. In the movie something else has taken the place of the momentum - the sense that Iago is “evil,” as a static character trait. I would have thought that was there in Shakespeare play, but it’s not in the same way. In the play we identify with Iago because he believes he’s injured, and it’s a (strange) given of drama that we’ll identify with any character who believes they’re injured - slighted, shamed, rendered impotent - and takes revenge for it, just as long as we meet them first. In the play Iago’s not a static character who’s at the same level of evil throughout. He’s a man full of such a sense of injury that nothing will satisfy it short of destroying Othello. I think Parker realizes that he needs to throw in a motivation for Iago once things go over the edge… so he has Branagh cry after he seals a blood pact with Othello over Desdemona’s death and Othello finally declares him his lieutenant. Parker’s clearly aware of the academic queer interpretation of the play (is that why Iago takes his wife from behind?), but having Iago cry at this moment out of nowhere is just weird. 

5. Since the Cassio sub-plot has been shoved aside, Desdemona’s missing for the whole middle of the movie, and comes back just to be prepared for the sacrifice - so literally that Emilia’s actually giving her a bath during their girl-talk scene after Othello struck her in public. (We need a bit of creepy female homoeroticism to go with the creepy male homoeroticism, right?) Desdemona’s none too bright in Shakespeare’s play, but here she doesn’t even have the sense to be scared. She’s just the dewy nubile girl in the horror movie (shades of Psycho) for us to gaze upon erotically while we anticipate what she doesn’t know is coming. The ironic thing is that the Shakespeare’s so close to this - all you have to do is miss seven or eight layers and it’s a cheap sex-horror melodrama. But then, that’s the movie Parker wants.

Verdict: Oliver Parker is a genuine moron, an incompetent director who should never be let near classics of theatre. Unlike Baz Lurhmann, he doesn’t have the skill, intelligence, or inventiveness to make Shakespeare modern and “exciting” while being faithful to its spirit and offering new ways to think about it. Then again, Lurhmann was smart enough not to take on one of the great tragedies.

I have to high-five myself for calling Parker an idiot just based on the one scene we watched in class, even though Fishburne’s performance made me cry - because Parker cut away from the murder scene, which anyone with the most elementary knowledge of theatre would tell you was a moron move: it breaks the tension that’s the material a playwright works with.

Compared to this trash, the elegance of the structure of the Olivier version - both the staging and even Stuart Burge’s (who?) film direction - makes it look brilliant. Branagh’s performance is flashy and technically skilled at the same time, but he’s defeated by a director and format that won’t let him give his character a sound psychological basis, and so it’s not very resonant (besides his wrongness for the part). Seeing this right after the Olivier version makes me wonder if it’s possible at all to make films out of Shakespeare’s great tragedies as opposed to filming stage versions. The minor tragedies and the comedies do fine because they don’t depend on actors having to construct and sustain difficult characterizations.

After watching the Olivier and then this I find myself baffled at how movie actors can create a character at all. I know they can, but you definitely cannot perform a theatre role if conventional movie techniques are used with total disregard of the original medium. It’s not the same character.

--Tagged under: othello--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

--Tagged under: theatre vs. film--

--Tagged under: oliver parker--

--Tagged under: kenneth branagh--

Olivier's Othello

I’ve launched my project of watching every famous filmed version of Shakespeare I can find on the internet or at the library with Olivier’s Othello (1965).

First impressions:

1. Frank Finlay’s naturalistic Iago is such a bore I’m falling asleep. At first I thought this might be a good thing, since Iago tends to steal the play when you’re reading it, quite against your will, even though it’s Othello and Desdemona we feel for. Unfortunately, Iago is the star of the play - he’s on so much and talks so much, while Othello is mostly absent for the first half, that if he’s no fun, the play sinks like a stone. There’s no sense of evil anticipation in Finlay’s portrayal, which kills the suspense and excitement dead, let alone any attempt to explore Iago’s psychology.

2. As usual, the small parts, the ones that make you fall asleep when you’re reading, are expertly rendered. Derek Jacobi’s Cassio (despite a little-girl wig and a tendency to play drunk like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow) is played just as Shakespeare wrote him (a nice fellow with a weakness for drink and women who would never consider seducing his general’s wife) and lots of bouncy fun, and now I do want to see his Hamlet. Robert Lang is also excellent in the much smaller part of Roderigo, a slimey, naive little half-wit who’s mentally overpowered by Iago at every turn.

3. Why are the good Shakespeare plays so exciting to read and such a bore to watch in production? I realize this is a filming of the stage version, not a proper film version, but can we at least all pretend that we’ve just survived a tempest, to give some stakes to Othello and Desdemona’s reunion? Why is everyone acting embalmed?

4. Olivier’s Othello. According to accounts on Wiki, it’s high camp consisting of a made-up accent and special walk. Throw in a lot of minstrel-type grimaces, and you’ve got a pastiche of every kind of politically incorrect representation of blackness up to 1965. I went in with an open mind, but it’s a truly bizarre, tic-filled performance. No more bizarre than anything Marlon Brando went on to do after Streetcar, though - it seems to be what befalls great actors who’re given their way too much. On the other hand - what’s he supposed to do? It’s not like the Shakespeare was being historically accurate to blacks (and which blacks?) of his day, or of his source’s day. Othello’s such a pastiche of Otherness that he seems to be a conflation of African and Arab.

5. Once Othello and Iago start getting scenes together, things pick up - the characters do play off each other well. The first tempting scene is a thing of beauty - sudden stakes appearing with the great bit of business of Othello putting his arm around Iago, and then the other shoe dropping with the cry of “O beware of jealousy my lord!” Nicely done all around.

6. Othello’s costumes are great, and the weird-looking Olivier has never looked better (or - oddly enough - more masculine). It’s Olivier’s own exoticism and peacockery that he’s letting loose in this performance, after all.

Final impressions:

1. The Othello and Iago scenes are terrific. They’re written for maximum dramatic tension, even sensationalism and horror, and neither actor overpowers the other. Despite the slow start, once these scenes start, the production takes off.

2. The bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia is brilliant. I can see that (like Olivier’s very physical performance) it would have worked even better onstage - real chills. The anticipation-of-murder scene is always a good place for the playwright to go to town, and Shakespeare makes the most of the opportunity. It’s too bad they cut Emilia’s feminist speech in defense of adulterous women, although the feminism of the play is still written all over it - as in the scene prior to this one where Othello strikes Desdemona in public, to the vocal horror of the visiting statesmen.

3. Othello is a well-made play, perhaps more than the other major tragedies. A woman being suspected of adultery because she’s generously advancing a man’s suit; the device of the lost handkerchief; the way that Iago peaks in his power and then slowly gets caught in his own trap - it’s all the stuff of Ibsen.

4. The murder itself wasn’t that powerful. We watched the same scene from the Branagh Othello in class and Laurence Fishburne was much more effective than Olivier, although the focus on Othello threw the scene to him, and Desdemona was very weakly portrayed. Maggie Smith does a good job of playing the docile interpretation of Desdemona, wracked with shock and anger and eroticized passivity, but the final debate on the bed is still too calm.

5. I started sobbing anyway when Emilia came on the scene, and didn’t stop for the rest of the play. Emilia’s such a great role that all you need is a competent actress. If you want to know why Shakespeare’s a great dramatist, it’s there in the way he uses her repetition of “My husband?” (two simple words) to bring about the recognition of the tragedy. As a lower-class woman Emilia gets to speak up for the grievances acted upon women in the play, and as the voice of righteousness, condemning her husband, she’s powerfully moving. It’s also the most ironic exposure scene I know of in drama, topping even Hedda Gabler’s entrapment by the slimey doctor. The woman-hating Iago is undone by his wife, who turns out to be the only person he can’t control - because of her loyalty to her own persecuted sex. Jacobean theatre is of two minds about women: on the one hand, it luxuriates in the erotic horror of their persecution and torture; on the other hand, it uses the opportunity to speak out against the real abuses suffered by women. The upper-class heroines in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia) tend to be far more docile than in, say, Ford’s or Webster’s (Shakespeare likes his female Christ figures), but he makes up for it by letting loose his lower-class women. He’ll return to this ploy in The Winter’s Tale, where Paulina is a cross between Emilia and the Fool in Lear.

6. What to make of Olivier’s flailing-and-shouting performance? I have a distinct feeling this is how it would have been done in Jacobean theatre, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only choice for a modern actor. Olivier loves to physically contort himself, too, which is probably why he’s still most remembered for Richard III. The discomfort with the performance comes from all the un-p.c. implications. For example, his monkey-like, “primitive” reaction right after he’s killed Desdemona, sticking his tongue out and manipulating her head. It’s a defensible bit of grotesque stylization, not unsuitable for Jacobean tragedy, but I don’t know if it will ever be acceptable again post-p.c. (How did he even get away with this in 1965?) For all his contortions and grimaces, it’s an often moving and certainly charismatic performance, and I like how the speed with which everything happens is emphasized - in the space of a day Othello’s transformed from a noble man and loving husband to a murderous madman. Fittingly for tragedy, everyone’s hysterical and there’s no time to think.

7. The play really is full of homoerotic touches (literally), and it’s nice to see that they’re all here even though the queer intepretation isn’t foregrounded.

8. I’ve thought this before, but more than any other Shakespeare protagonist, Othello is seen from the outside. That seems to be the only effect handling a protagonist of another race has on Shakespeare - he certainly loves and pities Othello and considers him a great man. But it’s one reason Iago shares the lead role with Othello, who can only be known to Shakespeare through dialogue.

--Tagged under: olivier--

--Tagged under: othello--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

Hamlet on YouTube

After a lifetime spent resisting the idea of ever watching an actor perform Hamlet, the upcoming David Tennant DVD release has suddenly made me want to plunge into that world and compare and choose. I saw the Olivier Hamlet, which made me never want to watch another (all I remember is him clinging to Gertrude’s skirts the whole time; I guess this was in the era of Freud redux), but I had to watch the Almereyda Hamlet for a class and I thought Ethan Hawke was okay but no more. The only praised Hamlet of the DVD era I’m unlikely to check out any time soon is Kenneth “pudding-faced” Branagh’s. I’m sure he made a great Henry V. Olivier’s greatest film Shakespearean turn is probably Richard III - it’s an early play and a hammy role, and Olivier served it up so well that John Lydon apparently based his Johnny Rotten character on the performance. Even the most admired Shakespearean actors seem to do better, at least on film, in the one-note roles.

Jude Law is the latest high-profile actor to assume the Hamlet role, and I think he’d be passable. He was easily the best thing, the only alive thing, in Stephen Fry’s vanity project Wilde. (I have the greatest admiration for the young Fry of Fry and Laurie, but he shouldn’t have applied himself to Wilde, who was self-pitying enough without Fry’s help.) What I admired about Law’s Bosie Douglas was the actor’s total lack of vanity. To understand that you are supposed to be playing an insufferable prick requires actorly intelligence, and Law also brought to the part, and to his role in The Talented Mr. Ripley, a mercurial charm rarely seen onscreen these days.

The mercuriality is right for Hamlet, but the amoral opportunism he’s brought to his best screen roles would be better suited for Prince Hal - in fact he’d make a fantastic one… although he already pretty much did the part in Wilde. A fellow female Shakespeare fan agreed with me that other than Hamlet, Hal is the sexiest Shakespeare character, but although there’s a strange connection between the roles, Hal is Hamlet one-note. There’s a sense that both characters ultimately don’t really give a damn about anyone but themselves, and they both like play-acting, but Hal is a cold-blooded opportunist, while Hamlet’s contempt is intellectually and morally based. Hamlet’s charisma is intellectually based, too, and having a too-handsome Hamlet might throw the play, which is already enormously weighted in Hamlet’s favour, out of balance.

Derek Jacobi’s delivery of the “To be or not to be” speech, found on YouTube, is interesting: the production values and eyebrows give me the sniggers, and Jacobi’s jaw-droppingly effete, but he demarcates the changing thought processes in the soliloquy instead of just reading it off, and when he starts playing with the arm of the chair, he’s magnetic. Now if only he’d read it fifty times faster. Perhaps the idea at the time was to read Shakespeare incredibly slowly so the audience could follow. My own theory is that Shakespeare produced so many words with such ease that he couldn’t have cared less if the audience didn’t hear half of them, and Hamlet in particular should speak his lines with great speed and as if he’s just having the thoughts for the first time and making it up on the spot - as in fact the writer was doing. The fertility and spontaneity of Hamlet’s intelligence and inventiveness is key to the character.  

(This to be or not to be mashup is pretty great, by the way - I especially like the lego men.)

Jacobi’s Hamlet, from the early 80s, starts off the Hamlets on The Guardian’s list of best modern interpretations (post-50s) that I could find on YouTube. Here’s Michael Pennington, also early 80s. The gravedigger’s terrific (it’s hard to go wrong with the low comedy parts), too bad Pennington has such a grating voice (seems to be one of the standard modern Shakespeare accents, and it’s unbearable), and his interpretation is far too earnest for my tastes. I’m never a fan of acting-by-panting either. But things pick up during the graveyard fight, like I was saying in my Hamlet review, even though they don’t grapple in the grave. (The effect of hearing the lines coming out of the grave would be silly, to be sure, but if I’m not mistaken that’s the point.)

Here’s Richard Burton (not on the list), who will live forever in my heart for his performance in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, doing my favourite scene in literature (“Get thee to a nunnery”)… and it’s pure junk. All the angsty shouting (both of them)! And what a big head he has. His portrayal of Albee’s George was closer to Hamlet than this. Early Romantic Burton: do not want. (Or if he must needs play Shakespeare, Antony’s his role, alright, or else one of the villains.)

Same scene from Olivier’s film version. The way he tosses the book over his shoulder at the beginning of the clip nearly made me LOL, it’s so ripe for parody. Olivier’s going for the big obvious interpretation here (that Hamlet suspects the ploy partway through and only pretends to be cruel to Ophelia - not that it helps her!). It smooth out the problem of Hamlet’s undermotivated cruelty here, but unfortunately it doesn’t really work with the text, where Hamlet’s manic, jittery, and nasty from the moment he lays eyes on her. (Personally I read “Where’s thy father?” not as a sudden suspicion but as his tip-off to Polonius - if Polonius were smart enough to get it - that he’s on to him.)

My quick survey of YouTube Hamlets would seem to confirm that I have such a fixed notion of how it should be played that no Hamlet will make me happy (unless I played/directed it!). But doubtless every great Hamlet brings at least some of the right qualities to the part, that it would be interesting to search out. Not so sure about Olivier, though. Being the greatest actor of your generation doesn’t mean you have the right qualities for Hamlet. That’s why I’m still holding out hope for Tennant, especially because his Shakespearean background is in comedy rather than tragedy. After the centuries of hype, if there’s one thing you can say for and about Hamlet, he’s still making me laugh-out-loud throughout now that I’m past my dozenth reading.

--Tagged under: hamlet--

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

Morality, tragedy, religion, drama, and sci-fi

Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, intended to justify the ways of God to man - and famously failed according to most readers despite some pretty compelling, if confusing, arguments (“sufficient to stand but free to fall”). Thinking about The Orestia in the wake of Children of Earth, it occurs to me that Aeschyles’ tragic cycle was an attempt to justify a fact of legend that was morally incomprehensible: the sacrifice of an innocent in order to make possible a fantastically stupid war. The act that precipitates the tragedy of The Iliad, Achilles’ denial of his war trophy, a captured girl, echoes the cause of the legendary war in the first place: Helen being stolen from her husband (which is a breach of etiquette). Later on Shakespeare’s going to pick up this trick of absurdly insufficient causes for his most painful tragedies: Iago or Edmund being slighted (like Achilles, whose sulking is motivated by both sex and politics), Lear being differently slighted, in a manner that’s emotionally devestating… but also no more than a breach of decorum by Cordelia. And we can even see a similar motif in fairy tales: the witch who’s not allowed to come to the party and therefore comes back when the princess is grown to take her revenge. A daemonic power has not been honoured, throwing everything into an imbalance that must be “rectified” at horrible cost. (In drama this is depicted in its purest form in Euripides’ Bacchae.)

There’s no way that Clytemnestra wasn’t as sympathetic to Aeschyles (or anyone familiar with the legend) in her revenge as Satan was to Milton in his rebellion. But to admit to that sympathy would be to say that a woman might be justified in murdering her husband - as unacceptable to a patriarchal society as admitting sympathy for the devil in a Christian one (just a different kind of patriarchy). And so each dramatist goes about trying to morally justify the morally unjustifiable legend. That may in fact be what the motive for drama originally was: attempting to make the archaic, pre-moral religious texts of a culture morally intelligible to a rational, part-secular society. Which incidentally shows how closely tied drama and morality are.

The crux of tragedy itself (which is amoral), as distinguished from tragic drama (which is moral), is imagining the most excruciating situations that could be forced upon you: the horror of killing your child or the worse horror (because children are property, while parents are authority) of killing your parent. This is what would be gripping the Athenian audience, and if anything the gruesome opening section of the death of Agamemnon is unsettling (in a Hitchcock way) because the audience will identify with Clytemnestra even though she’s presented as thoroughly evil. In order to try to make the tragic crux justifiable, Aeschyles is forced into the argument that women can’t go around killing their husbands or all anarchy would break loose. That is, he’s forced to argue this way because unlike the killings of Iphigenia or Clytemnestra, the killing of Agamemnon doesn’t deeply trouble anyone. Killing your husband, who is not blood, in revenge for killing your child, your most immediate blood, is no more tragic than having to kill your uncle in revenge for killing your father. (Children of Earth hints at these ancient debates of blood, with a gender reversal, in the sub-plot of Gwen contemplating abortion but then telling her husband that she would never do that to him.) By arguing that Agamemnon’s death was of greater consequence than the others, Aeschyles implies that the most troubling deaths aren’t troubling after all. While this misogynous solution would have played better to an ancient Athenian audience than it would today, I’m going to give them the credit of recognizing on some level that it was still incredibly lame, even lamer than the philosophically rather inspiring “sufficient to stand but free to fall.” But that’s what happens when you try to justify the ways of God to man.

It’s amazing how well all of this translates into a modern sci-fi/fantasy context. The most gripping parts of Children of Earth for me were the long, talky sections of debate as the British government tries to figure out how to “spin” the insoluble dilemma of sacrificing 10% of its children to stave off the murder of the human race through alien viral warfare. Their decision to make it look like it’s the aliens’ fault, that is, that they were gullible victims who weren’t just coerced but duped into what they did, repeats the uneasy idea lurking in the shadows of Paradise Lost that by fobbing off the introduction of evil into the world on Satan, God’s just doing the same thing that Adam is castigated for doing. And that is exactly the old theological problem of evil: if God is all-powerful, then he should have kept evil out of the world; if evil’s not his fault, then he must be Satan’s chump. Entire heresies developed out of this dilemma. Not to mention a lot of atheism, because without the problem of evil, the idea of an all-powerful benevolent God would look so good I’m not sure even Darwin could have put a sizeable dent in it. Then again without the problem of evil (i.e., suffering) we wouldn’t need the idea of God.

--Tagged under: shakespeare--

--Tagged under: greek tragedy--

--Tagged under: tragedy--

--Tagged under: torchwood--

--Tagged under: aeschyles--

--Tagged under: religion--

--Tagged under: television--

--Tagged under: drama--

--Tagged under: milton--

--Tagged under: paradise lost--

Is it ever a good idea to go biblical with your stakes?

Iphigenia is the genesis of a lot of the plotlines of Greek tragedy. She’s the maiden daughter of Agamemnon who was sacrificed so that his men could get to the Trojan War. When he comes home from the (pretty useless) war, the shits really hits the fan, since his wife is - sympathetically enough - waiting to repay him in kind (with the boyfriend she acquired while he was away). Such is the plot of Aeschyles’ Orestia, the foundational work of Western drama. Clytemnestra’s son Orestes has to revenge himself upon his mother for his father’s death, but since it’s his mother he’s polluted and pursued by The Furies until an impromptu trial is held by the gods, where it’s decided that the old blood revenge code of which The Furies are advocates needs to be transcended by a legal system based on justice… in which killing your mother is a lesser crime than killing your husband. And so Western drama begins, with a gesture towards a mythological foundation of Western civilization.

Euripides, meanwhile, treated the story of Iphigenia, and in his version she finds out what’s in store for her and ultimately offers herself as a heroic sacrifice, which turns out to be only creepy in a different way than the legend, where she believes she’s going to be married. I thought about this difference at the end of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which I finished watching today. I kept wishing someone would clue in the children and let them step up to the plate, or in one case, let the child know what his death meant. But that really doesn’t do much more than slightly let the audience morally off the hook.

Russell T. Davies doesn’t stint on the overt references to Greek mythology (the monster who demands a sacrifice of innocents at regular intervals) or parallel Biblical themes (Passover, Abraham and Isaac). I’ve heard Series 3 (really a mini-series, being in five parts) accused of “emotionally manipulative writing” by both fans and detractors. This isn’t emotional manipulation though - it’s emotional rape. The moral and emotional stakes are as high as it’s possible to get, and in getting to the classical tragedy roots of sci-fi/fantasy, Davies is, once again, following in the footsteps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Only now he’s not just copying (after Messiahfying Doctor Who, like “death is my gift” Buffy), he’s moving into other territory - foundational myths of Western culture. It’s been a truism in drama for ages that you never rape an audience by presenting a child’s death as a consequence in an action picture. Even Hitchcock, who went far, once refused the opportunity. Deaths in drama have to be earned, and no drama earns that. But drama was founded on death of that kind.

One of the main things I loved about Buffy was Whedon’s discovery of a context where the stakes of classical tragedy could be used and made perfect sense in an era when “serious drama” hasn’t been able to use the stakes even of European tragedy for a couple of centuries. Davies’ imitations show that this discovery can be used by other TV fantasy writers. After finding the two Torchwood series painfully derivative, uneven, and marred by the inescapable presense of John Barrowman, I thought the mini-series was excellent (if long scenes of brutal moral debate in which you’re forced to actively engage - plus stuff and people blowing up - is your idea of good drama, it’s for you), and if what I’ve heard about the show getting no fourth series is true, it’s a shame, because it finally came into its own - and rendered Captain Jack Harkness, whether portrayed by John Barrowman or not, the darkest - the most tragic - superhero ever conceived. Fans of the series were understandably bummed out, but not being one in particular (or of the X-Files, from which the idea of children-stealing alien-government liasons was apparently stolen?), I was enthralled.

It’s really too bad that they did that terribly-acted storyline about Jack’s brother coming back to kill him, because this time Jack’s done something that really deserves a theme of eternal familial vengeance - and this time, for all the too-little-too-late cramming in of character background, Davies not only got Whedon but Euripides right.

--Tagged under: torchwood--

--Tagged under: science fiction--

--Tagged under: buffy the vampire slayer--

--Tagged under: russell t. davies--

--Tagged under: joss whedon--

--Tagged under: greek tragedy--

--Tagged under: euripides--

--Tagged under: aeschyles--

--Tagged under: television--

Death of the auteur

Gore Vidal’s comments on his stint as a studio-era Hollywood screenwriter have prompted me to reconsider auteur theory, which has only ever been a convenience of film criticism. It strikes me that the only reason “authorship” of a film, that inherently collaborative enterprise, has been assigned to the director is that unlike a play, a screenplay does not have a further life. The filmic interpretation is the only interpretation, and so whereas in theatre our interest is in the play, not the director (even if we can’t tell writing and production apart unless we’re familiar with either the text or other productions), in film the situation reverses: because what we’ve got before us is the interpretation, authorship goes to the interpreter.

This has created an ironic situation where we (both journalistic and academic critics) treat film as a branch of literature but fail to credit the writer(s), or even the writing itself, which we treat as sub-literary even when we regard the film as a masterpiece, because “as we all know” expectations for filmic writing, especially Hollywood films, is low, and film isn’t a literary medium anyway. (Wait… so then why are we studying it like it is one?)

In any case, “director” by itself isn’t an artistic function - not a creative one, anyway. The auteurists knew this, and so they singled out directors who were also producers and who usually had a hand in the writing. As auteur theory was adopted and developed by academic and non-academic film criticism alike it was decided that producers with a literary bent like Selznick and Val Lewton could also be auteurs. But what this means is that a director-producer, a producer-writer, a director-writer, or a writer-producer-director can be an auteur.

Auterism was a founding fiction of the serious consideration of studio-era Hollywood film, since for film to be an art (not part of the entertainment business) you had to locate an artist (not a bunch of craftsmen), and in order to interpret a film you needed to attribute intention. Ironically (again) auteur theory was being developed at around the same time other French intellectuals were calling for the death of the author in literary studies. Most devestatingly for auteur theory, Vidal points out that the presence of preoccupations in a director’s oeuvre doesn’t prove that he’s an artist. A stage director with enough power to choose what he wanted to direct would also be drawn to certain plays rather than others, obviously.

Later still it was admitted that a screenwriter could be co-auteur with a director if they had sufficient independent clout. But this hasn’t led to a different kind of analysis. Thorton Wilder’s given a perfunctory nod for his Shadow of a Doubt screenplay, then we’re back to talking about “Hitchcock this” and “Hitchcock that” in reference to the story and characters. This seems to hold true even of criticism of European films, to which established authors (Giradoux, Cocteau, Prevost) often contributed full screenplays (and not, as in the American system, drafts). As for Hollywood screenwriters who had enough of a personal style to gain their own reputation, they were usually comic writers (Sturges, Wilder) and usually went on to direct.

If we were to start paying more attention to the writing of classic Hollywood films, it would call for some radical reassessment of the director’s role. Case in point: Douglas Sirk. Sirk did not produce his films, and from what I’ve read had little or no hand in the writing, yet he’s been accepted as an auteur. He came to Hollywood from a background as a director in the German theatre, and as such he seems to have understood that his role was interpretive. But that role doesn’t have to be passive (as it seems to have been for William Wyler). Handed soap opera trash to direct, Sirk subjected the screenplays to subversive interpretations that brought out their Euripidean madness and the proximity of melodrama to tragedy. Forget his ironic signature shots showing a character “trapped” in a circle of their own doing. It was by heightening the luridness of the scripts almost to the point of surrealism, with a further surrealistic contrast with Ross Hunter’s vulgar, kitschy production design, that Sirk achieved his goal.

Just because the interpretation transcended the material, though, doesn’t mean that all of the writing in those screenplays was bad. Imitation of Life has some campy howlers (surely deliberate), but it also has two or three scenes (all involving the tormented Sarah Jane character) that any writer would be proud of. And the bookend design of the film, with the opening and closing scenes as mirror reversals, is a stroke of genius - whoever thought of it, Sirk or the screenwriters.  

What do you mean “impossible”?

But I like All That Heaven Allows almost as much, and that film doesn’t particularly benefit from the Sirkean treatment. The screenplay is kitsch, the acting is kitsch, the set design is kitsch, and the direction is kitsch. But the part of the movie that survives the kitsch is the screenplay - feminist and scathing towards suburban WASP conformity, with a fabulous ironic twist. According to Wiki, Sirk found the screenplay “rather impossible” and restructured the story - so I guess I’ll have to read Sirk on Sirk before I say too much about what kind of hand Sirk had in his films’ writing and how much creative control he was given at the height of his career despite not being the producer. It’s also possible that Sirk was no judge of the screenplay’s merits, being a European intellectual with no taste for soap opera that he couldn’t twist into lurid madness.

This screen’s gonna become REAL important…

The screenplay for All That Heaven Allows belongs to the same tradition as the 40s Bette Davis women’s picture Now, Voyager, where a woman trapped in WASP conformity goes on a path to self-discovery aided in equal parts by steamy romance and American transcendentalism. Now, Voyager was based on the bestselling novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, and while I believe all that’s been said about Prouty’s near-illiteracy, with the bad prose stripped away the continuity of her themes with those of Jane Austen and Henry James is revealed; and it’s in women’s pictures like ATHA and Now, Voyager that such continuity must be found, since such themes have dropped out of “serious literature” post-Modernism.

In the study of the Hollywood classics, the writing - often kitschy, never demanding or Modernist - has often been overlooked as an embarrassment, instead of which we hide behind the “auteur” notion and the magical transformative powers of the medium and the director. So from Now, Voyager to Bringing Up Baby to Gilda (and hundreds of others), the glories of classic Hollywood screenplays when they weren’t trying to be anything more than entertainments hasn’t been nearly celebrated (or analyzed) enough. To focus more on the writing would also force critics to consider more particularly what the director is bringing to the table - but that would require a theory of interpretation (and more knowledge of the technical side of film than most critics have). That may be the theory we need right now - not auteur theory.

--Tagged under: film--

--Tagged under: auteurism--

--Tagged under: film vs. literature--

--Tagged under: douglas sirk--

Wherein I continue to be a killjoy

Exhibit A: Where the Wild Things Are, the movie. I haven’t seen it, though I intend to take my five-year-old nephew to it if I get around to it. I half-heartedly echoed the general consensus that it would be “so cool,” mainly because I recalled from elementary school that the adherents of that book are fearsomely cultish (in a way Pride and Prejudice fans apparently aren’t allowed to be without being accused of lacking a sense of humour). I wasn’t read the book at home and came to it as an older child, and my reaction was, “So?” (Something I probably shouldn’t admit for fear of being accused of lacking taste even as a child, or something.) The ads put The Fear in me, the shots oozing a particular kind of shaggy-monster-following sense of wonder (incidentally not in the book, which thankfully avoids senses of wonder) that I knew would make my skin crawl, just a bit. When I heard that Eggars and Jonze were responsible for the movie, The Fear grew. Just the title of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius made me queasy, not for the personal but for the generational self-congratulation. But then, I was the kid who hated Catcher in the Rye - I thought Holden was a whiny little bastard. As for Jonze, I was shocked and appalled by the critical reception of Being John Malkovitch. There’s nothing inherently applaudable about narrative experimentation. With or without it, the narrative was boring, mainly due to the characters’ unpleasantness, and, above all, it was poorly resolved (Kaufman did create an impossible task for himself). Clever schmever, I thought it was an insult to my intelligence, and so I did not watch Adaptation, which I had a feeling I’d dislike even more. I am that most dangerous of things, the anti-hipster hipster, sharing the tastes of my generation in principle but seldom in fact. In fact it has created an agonizing dilemma whereby the more I like someone’s hair, glasses, and scarf the more I am apt to disagree with them on all other matters of importance. Not even I can deny the appeal of McSweeney’s design, as well. If only superficial aesthetics were enough. ARGH!

Exhibit B: Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the movie on Salon.com. I used to find Zacharek’s contrarian reviews interesting if seldom an indication of a movie’s value, but as she’s become more cantankerous she’s also become lazier, her ideas blurrier. This review is nothing but a series of not-at-all-veiled snarling potshots at my generation (hipsters, Gen Xers, emos, whatever you want to call it, although that’s to blur together a couple of generations - which is fair enough, I do recognize, with a shudder, that us Smiths-listeners birthed emo while ourselves moving on to the MOR whining of Coldplay or its arty version, Arcade Fire), and while I am a conflicted hipster, Zacharek makes her points with a sledgehammer. My God - could it be that a kid’s movie betraying a spirit of not wanting to grow up is reflective of the E(l)mo Generation, which in turn shows there’s something Terribly Wrong With the World Today? Well, you tell me: was Peter Pan reflective of something terribly wrong with J.M. Barrie’s generation - or the several subsequent generations for whom it was a stage standard? If so, you know, the world recovered from it and went on to give us Zacharek’s apparently mature and mentally-balanced generation… NOT. (Actually, to judge from the photo that’s on the web, Zacharek looks about the same age as me. So why are you hatin’ on the emos, Steph? We, and not their parents, made them.)

Exhibit C:

From the letter pages on the article:

Stunning Film & Shockingly Bad Review

This review stinks. In a mean-spirited way, it beats down all the remarkable inspiration and effort on the part of Jonze and Eggers to create a film that spans the imaginative worlds of both children and adults. When I saw the film, I was overwhelmed with its honesty about the nature of childhood frustration, how children reach into the deepest part of themselves when they are marginalized through the inevitable course of life. It especially speaks to how children’s imaginations can save them and bring them back to their “safe place,” into the arms of their parents and those who love them.

As Jonze and Eggers show us, life is a continuum of emotions and events that take us back and forth between the richness of childhood vs. the sterile world of adulthood. It’s not just two compartments (childhood OR adulthood) where the door slams, and one never again has access into the volatile frustrations or creative imagination of a child. We always have the capacity for both, they say. Jonze and Eggers are not indulging in their own stultified growth; they show very convincingly that the alienation that children feel during these years is normal. Venting, as Max has takes several forms. His first response is to act out, and this causes pain to everyone. Then, as Max reaches deeper into himself and the world of his monsters, he finds his own strengths to express the honesty of his longing to belong at home. The film is an honest rendering of Sendak’s story that speaks the language of the heart. A pox on this reviewer.

This is actually slightly more thoughtful and better-written than Zacharek’s review, but it’s still devoting a whole lot of pretentious wind to a kid’s movie. Don’t get me wrong, I think the classics of children’s movies and (especially) literature deserve analysis. But this reader review sounds like it was written by a child psychologist (I hope it actually was, and not by a parent who’s read too many books on child psychology!), which is the whole queasy-making problem, because the movie, too, seems like it was written by one. Incidentally, Zacharek’s description of the beginning of the movie makes it sound a lot like the set-up of E.T. - which I appreciated as a kid for its realistic (and, as I recall, not at all mushy - and this was Spielberg!) depiction of a post-divorce house in chaos. 30 years later we’ve got to go so “dark” that the kid’s biting people, or we won’t be accurately depicting all of that childhood frustration. Guess what - it’s way more frustrating to be an adult than to be a child, and if my kid was such a moody little Arcade Fire-listening twerp that he acted out by biting me, he’d find out about MY wild side. As I vaguely recall, Sendak’s book was about a kid still being in touch with his wildness (remember the Lost Boys in their animal costumes?), not “developing monsters” in response to socially-created anxieties - which, incidentally, has been a kid’s movie framing device since at least The Wizard of Oz, so let’s not place too much praise or blame on Eggars and Jonze.

Or maybe he bites mom because of the Oedipal complex. Now that would be Awesome.

Primal Masculine Therapy for little Emo Boys? You decide…

--Tagged under: where the wild things are--

--Tagged under: stephanie zacharek--

--Tagged under: film--

Now here's a sensible man

Ferociously erudite, intimidatingly ironic, preditably exacting, and surprisingly generous (even, sometimes, warm) in equal parts in his essays, Gore Vidal explains why Oscar Wilde doesn’t need academics (only bright, spirited teenage readers):

The problem with Wilde is that he does not need explication or interpretation. He needs only to be read, or listened to. He plays no word games other than that most mechanical of verbal tricks: the paradox. When he rises to the sublime in poetry or prose there is so much purple all over the place that one longs for the clean astringencies of Swinburne. [By the way - lol.]

On those occasions when Wilde is a true master, the inventor of a perfect play about nothing and everything, we don’t need to have the jokes explained. One simply laughs and wonders why no one else has ever been able to sustain for so long so flawlessly elegant a verbal riff. [And it’s quite true that TIOBE is perfectly immune to academic criticism - although Paglia’s theory of epicene comedy at least manages to poke at it.]

Also recommended:

Vidal on Mailer: As usual, after completely destroying a celebrated writer, Vidal still holds out a place in the canon even for his old rival, although I’m fairly sure Mailer didn’t get past the opening salvo calling The Naked and the Dead “a fake.”

Vidal on Tennessee Williams: The warmest, most affectionate essay on a (well-known) contemporary (and his work) I’ve yet encountered as I work my way through the section on writers.

Vidal on Henry James’s The Golden Bowl: Extremely perceptive although Vidal is not nearly perverse or just plain sick enough a reader for James’s purposes. He rightly sympathizes with Amerigo and Charlotte, but James’s own interest lies in his terrifying monsters of morality, Adam and Maggie. If you can’t be enthralled by Maggie’s victory in discovering the “flaw” in her marriage and repairing it with nary a single direct confrontation by “sacrificing” her father (that is, choosing her husband over her father as she should have done in the first place - cake and eat it too is Maggie’s whole problem), you’re too faint-hearted for this novel and can only read it subversively; but no one’s of strong enough stuff to actually believe in Maggie’s morality, as James genuinely seems to. These characters are abstract forces of a Blakean kind, and as in Blake the thing that’s most important is dominance and submission (which James makes further abstract with his Hitchcockian epistemological fetish).

Vidal on Henry Miller: Still generously extending open the canon to include this “proletarian autodidact,” Vidal nevertheless, apparently guilelessly, arranges that no one but one as generous as himself will ever again take Miller seriously by producing endless quotes exhibiting Miller’s dumbfounding, deranged, humourless (although very humourful) egotism. Trust me, you will ROFL. It goes on for pages, but it’s a sample from a 600ish-page book.

EDIT: One million bonus points for the phrase “the AIDsy eighties.”

EDIT 2: I’m beginning to understand the Vidal essay-writing method: starts out tart and extremely skeptical, grows increasingly persuaded, and ends with the best he has to say for the subject, which is often scant praise. For Wilde, however, he rises to a note of positive sweetness (after devoting languid aphoristic scorn to the section devoted to the Bosie affair in a manner that has bumped Balzac’s Lost Illusions way up on my reading list - look out for the coach house scene!):

But whatever Wilde might or might not have done and been, he was an extremely good man and his desire to subvert a supremely bad society was virtuous. Cardinal Newman, writing of their common day, said, ‘The age is so very sluggish that it will not hear you unless you bawl - you must first tread on its toes, and then apologise.’ But behavior suitable for an ecclesiastical busybody is all wrong for Oscar Wilde, whose only mistake was to apologize for his good work and life.

--Tagged under: henry james--

--Tagged under: henry miller--

--Tagged under: gore vidal--

--Tagged under: oscar wilde--

--Tagged under: norman mailer--

--Tagged under: tennessee williams--

If you strike Jane Austen down, she becomes more powerful than you can possibly imagine

In the 18th century they changed the endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies to make them happier. I used to think that was ridiculous, but now, in the 21st century, we add zombies to the classics.

I’ll tell you what bugs me about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Okay, besides the laziness of the way the mash-up was conducted, besides the dorm humour of the premise, besides the implication that classics and chick lit are the same thing and both are boring and need zombies and ass-kicking action to be palatable.

It’s the people who’ve actually read Pride and Prejudice yet claim that if you don’t want to read P&P&Z it’s because you haven’t got a sense of humour.

Because P&P is itself already a comedy. It’s the most perfectly-constructed romantic fantasy of all-time, true, but it’s also the funniest book I’ve ever read. Well, the wittiest book; if you want ROFL kind of humour, you need to go to Austen’s Juvenilia, in which Austen indulges her own juvenile sense of humour (she wrote the sketches in her teens) in the form of broad parodies of ridiculous literary conventions. Add zombies to Middlemarch if you want to perk things up, or, please god, to Vanity Fair, or any other brilliant-but-stuffy-and-overlong Victorian novel, but don’t pit your wit against Jane Austen’s. Because you will be PWNED like a BITCH.

Everyone I know who’s excited about the novel is very young, 19-20, and seems to view it as a reason to finally get around to reading a classic that they were putting off for fear that it would be too girly and/or too difficult (and it’s the girls who’re afraid it would be too girly too). It’s great if the trend will get young people to read the classics. I had my own fears about P&P when I was a teenager whose favourite novel was William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Fuck Zombies - that novel is hardcore. Then a teacher forced me to read it because otherwise I would fail, given that I hadn’t come to class all year. And I was hooked from the opening sentence, and never looked back. Bye bye, Little Miss Hardcore. Hello, actual real literature.

--Tagged under: pride and prejudice--

--Tagged under: pride and prejudice and zombies--

--Tagged under: jane austen--

--Tagged under: reading--

--Tagged under: trends--

More geekery: Buffy, Angel, nuWho, and Torchwood

Today’s question is: Was Buffy really and actually the best show ever on television?

I grew up on TV like a normal person (previously I gave the list of the hundred or so shows I watched regularly between the ages of birth and eighteen), with the relationship climaxing around the time I started to develop some critical discernment, in my late teens, when the number of shows I liked shrank radically but had more generation-defining powers for me than anything else in pop culture except maybe music. After that the relationship fell apart. I’ve still probably watched more TV post-teens than I’ve done anything else besides sleep, and yet I’ve watched extremely little compared to an awful lot of people.

In fact, post-teens, there have been only two shows I’ve followed for more than a few months: Buffy and House. (I’m not counting shows I’ve checked out via the internet - not even those I’ve followed while they’ve aired on YouTube or via downloads. I’m not sure how to categorize those, but the level of commitment they require is definitely different. If you’re bored you can sit down and watch an entire season of a show in one day, which is not like tuning in every week for a period of years.)

House is by no means one of the best shows ever on television, except for the one factor outweighing everything: the character of House himself and Hugh Laurie’s portrayal. The formula medical dramas lost interest after the first season; the first team of Foreman, Cameron, and Chase was annoying; the replacement team managed to be both annoying and personality-free. Cuddy is a decent character and Lisa Edelstein the least annoying woman on the show, but that’s all you can say. Wilson is Watson/Horatio, a necessary dramatic device, but no more.

Buffy was, in fact, something different. Looking back, in the seven-season run I can only recall about a dozen great stand-alone episodes. Buffy was always soap opera-style, and in general what was memorable about it was the seasonal arcs (Angel and Faith being two of the greatest ever on TV IMO, with Dawn being a good try even if The Slayer had to become Messianic to revive our interest), and what was memorable about the individual episodes was whatever happened to the regular characters in it.

On the other hand, Angel was pretty much crap. It became pure soap opera early, so that you had to watch every week to know what was going on - and watch I did, although I wasn’t sure why. Lila was a good character (and hot actress) who kept up interest for a season. Dark!Wesley was compelling until he became quasi-psychopathic and then just irritating. Connor, Angel’s son, was possibly the most annoying character in TV history, although at least the story arc had dramatic interest (following the rule established on Buffy that when you need stakes, invent a family member). A major problem with the premise was that Angel can’t develop as a character. What made him a tragic character from a distance made him a ridiculous one close-up: he can’t fall in love or (as that Darla episode established) have anything but hate-sex. The Cordy relationship was a neat innovation that kept my interest at first, but of course it couldn’t go anywhere, and then things got way full of crack when Whedon went all Rosemary’s Baby with her. Why did I watch? Well, because I was invested in the ‘verse and the Buffy carry-over characters, which is a perfectly good reason to watch a show. And Angel always looked great stalking around in that coat. But I always sort of knew that it was at best crack, at worst crap. In a way, it had the kind of crack that you always kind of wanted in Buffy but knew better (in other words, like Torchwood though differently, it was fan fiction of its mother-show).

It’s true that House and Doctor Who also can’t fall in love, have relationships, or develop as characters (this season’s “nice House” isn’t a character development - which is quite beyond that show - but “House lite”). But there’s something patently absurd about having a hero who, as soon as he knows he’s in love, also knows he can’t have sex. It worked brilliantly as a one-off storyline; as a fact of the character, it’s silly. What should have happened is that Angel should have got a revamp (shut up) where he kept and lost his soul under some other conditions. A vampire with a soul is a cool enough concept without sex being his kryptonite.

Since Buffy wasn’t a stand-alone-episode show, and because it was in general a character-driven drama posing as a fantasy show, it’s only as I’ve watched Torchwood struggle in the first two series to come up to Buffy’s level that I’ve started to appreciate just how cleverly Buffy used its fantasy conventions. Even a lackluster late episode like the one where Buffy’s turned invisible by the geek squad uses this fun convention to make a memorable dramatic point about where her character’s at. You had the feeling that the Buffy team thought first about the character point they wanted to make, then how to use a nifty fantasy premise to do it (“first” and “second” in order of importance if not in order of chronology). That’s a cool thing for a fantasy series to do, and other fantasy shows should emulate it. It’s also, to judge from the results on Torchwood, an extremely difficult thing for a fantasy series to do well. Funny enough, the best Torchwood episodes, IMO, have dealt not with alien-killing but with time travel - especially the stand-out Series 1 episode Out of Time, where they meet and take care of three people from the early 50s, with the neat twist that it’s these “innocents” who want to go (not back to their time, which they can’t, but into some great beyond or another), while the team wants to keep them. If you’re guarding a Time Rift, after all, why would that generate aliens? By sticking to the Hellmouth/demons formula too closely the show misses its chance to imitate Buffy’s simple and effective dramatic logic while developing its own unique premise and territory.

I’ve only just started the Children of Earth mini-series that constitutes Torchwood’s third series, and it does seem to be a big step up in writing and acting. But if the show ever wants to become something more than a poor man’s Buffy with man-on-man (and not even very much of that), it’ll have to figure out its identity, separate not only from the Whedonverse but also from nuWho.

One thing hugely working against it is that while Captain Jack Harkness is the most interesting character on the show, its mythical nu-superhero, and its reason for existing, John Barrowman cannot act. And by cannot act I mean he cannot act worse than David Boreanz cannot act. (Boreanz, unforgivable as that Irish accent was, had a nice line in goofy comedy that made a good contrast with Angel’s brooding misery.) He cannot act worse than Sarah Michelle Gellar cannot act. (Gellar was a competent TV actress who believably performed all of Whedon’s epic storylines and dark character twists - the kind of actress who’s so unobtrusive, in fact, you never thought about her apart from the character.) If you’re going to breathe life into epic fantasy storylines of the Whedon/Russell T. Davies kind, you’ve got to be emotionally believable, whether you choose to underplay (like the ever-reliable James Marsters) or overplay (like Tennant’s Doctor or John Simm’s Master). In the Series 2 finale, Barrowman is actually out-can’t-acted by the actor who plays his brother, meaning the whole foundation of the epic storyline is shaky, while Marsters, the most interestingly written character in sight, even if he’s essentially Spike mixed with the RTD-era Master, is given breathtakingly short shrift by the script. Not only does he not get to save the day after all, his moment at the end of the episode with Barrowman is horribly anti-climactic (a peck on the cheek and “see you around”), although it still could have been slightly saved if Barrowman had given him anything instead of staring tormentedly into space. (That’s not acting, that’s a facial expression.) Or if Marsters had been allowed to say what he was thinking: “You know, you’re worse than Buffy.”

It seems to be Barrowman who’s made the series popular (and he’s the reason Davies made the series), so I’m in the minority in finding him a bland embarrassment. But if Torchwood (provided it comes back for a Series 4) is ever going to become a fantasy show in Buffy’s league (although Buffy’s not perfect), or for that matter RTD-era Who’s league (although that run has been uneven), it had better get some more interesting writers and more interesting supporting/guest actors (something nuWho manages to a degree that puts American TV acting to shame), because Barrowman is one fixed point in space and time that’s going to continue to work against my enjoyment of the show or taking it seriously.

--Tagged under: angel--

--Tagged under: buffy the vampire slayer--

--Tagged under: doctor who--

--Tagged under: geeking out--

--Tagged under: joss whedon--

--Tagged under: russell t. davies--

--Tagged under: science fiction--

--Tagged under: television--

--Tagged under: torchwood--

--Tagged under: house m.d.--

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