Category: Art

What’s Next for TV? I Hope Something Is

In 1981, Hill Street Blues went on the air, and the soap opera met the drama and nothing was the same again.  The difference was the story arc: TV dramas no longer automatically reset to zero at the end of an episode.  Now, in fact, I get impatient and annoyed any time I’m watching something that resets to zero–I expect, demand, that there is movement during the season.

But there are a few things that came along with this change.  One of the big ones is the romance tease–will these two characters become involved?  How long can we stretch it before we give you an answer?  Sometimes it is timed well (I think Burn Notice did a good job with that).  Sometimes, not so much.  I rather like Castle, but by the end of the, I don’t, 90th season where the characters failed to get together, I found myself rolling my eyes and saying, “Oh, come on.”

Additionally, when it does happen, there is a fear among the writing staff that so much dramatic tension will be lost that you can actually see the writers straining to invent a problem between the characters  (The West Wing Season 5,  is an especially egregious example, along with the current season of Burn Notice).  Joss Whedon, probably the best writer/show runner working in US Television today, had this problem all through Buffy,and Angel.    Much as I loved the shows, it got irritating–even the love among secondary characters had to be prevented at all costs, for fear of losing dramatic tension; as if romance were the only place tension could come from.  Willow and Oz?   Xander walks out on his wedding day?  Tara gets shot? Oh, come on.  (Firefly didn’t have this problem, though I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if it had continued). Now, me, I love the “Thin Man” movies–a well adjusted couple solves crime while enjoying booze and repartee and the relationship between them is never an issue.   But you can’t do that on TV, because . . .well, let’s look at that.

There is no end.

In a book, you get to the end, you get closure, you get the satisfaction of turning the last page with your life a little changed, with a sense of resolution and satisfaction.  But TV is episodic, like an open-ended series.  There has to be dramatic tension.  There doesn’t have to be romance, but, at least in the opinion of the writers, if there is, it must always be threatening or threatened.  Because if you lose tension, you lose the viewer, then you lose the series, then you lose a whole lot of money (if you’re the writer, you don’t lose that much money, but you do lose your job).

I am not saying that romances may never be threatened or torn apart; anyone who knows my books knows I don’t believe that.  But any problems between characters needs to come from within, from the story, from the characters.  It needs, if you will, to be organic. The feeling that it was artificially introduced is just irritating, and makes us think about the writing at a moment when we should be lost in the story.

It isn’t just romance, of course.  That’s the most obvious, but, well, you’ve created the character arc, now you must live with it; characters cannot reach a true resolution, or they’re done.  In life, people do reach resolutions; while change never entirely stops, growth happens, and a new being is established, and the person moves on.  This can’t be done in open-ended episodic television.

We all know what the solution is: just like a series, you write toward a resolution and then stop; this frees you up artistically to concentrate on making it good.  Or maybe you close each season with a satisfying resolution in case you don’t get renewed.  Leverage and The Wire are stunning examples of doing it right.  But most TV can’t or won’t do that, so, however good it is, at some point the viewer finds himself rolling his eyes and saying, “Oh, come on.”

Maybe this is inevitable.  Where money is the thing that drives art, there may be no way around it.  But, until Steven Bochco came in in 1981, we all just figured that character growth in episodic TV was impossible.  So I wonder if something will change.  I wonder if some genius will come up with something.  Maybe a show in which characters vanish and are replaced?  More likely something that hasn’t occurred to me.  But there is just enough TV doing it right, that I can’t help but hope someone comes up with something.

 

 

Random, disorganized, scattershot thoughts on Cook’s post

I’m talking about this post.  And, yeah, my blog post makes no pretense of being organized or coming to any conclusion.

1. I think I need a new category tag that goes, “I’m not a feminist, but…”

2. Just because a bunch of people all get upset about something, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong.

3. In his post, giving examples of pure SF writers, he starts with this: “Issac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein to name but four…”  Um, excuse me.  Theodore Sturgeon?  Is there a different Theodore Sturgeon than the one who put human love and sexuality at the center of more stories than I’ll live to write?  Because surely he can’t mean that Theodore Sturgeon as an example of writers who avoided romance.  Am I missing something?

4. I DO agree with him about false advertising, however. I mean, when I pick up a book that claims to be well written, and, in fact, it turns out to suck galactic moose, I get really annoyed.

5. Book of the New Sun, fantasy or science fiction:  Apparently it’s fantasy, on account of the failure of the Earth to wobble properly.  Well, glad we’ve got that settled.  Let’s not talk about Doc Smith, all right?  Next up will be Lord of Light.

6. I really am uncomfortable when I find myself on the same side as so many people I so vehemently disagree with on so many issues.  It’s like when I say something on a panel and the audience applauds–it makes me think I’m taking the easy way out.  I don’t have a pathological need to be in a minority, but not being in the minority makes me twitchy, and I have to wonder if I’m letting myself fall into groupthink.  But then I remind myself that I agree with Republicans on some things–like a passionate hatred for Roosevelt (in my case, because he saved Capitalism), so I guess it’s all right.  And, you know, see point 2 above.

7. What kicks it over the edge for me is the phrase, ” the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors.”  There is something so utterly, well, EWWWWW about that, that as an admirer of Bujold, I am just unable to not say something.  So I’m saying something.  Here’s what I’m saying: EWWWWWWW.

Okay, that’s all for now.  More later on how women are ruining science fiction.

 

 

Rape, Art, Me

For the most part, my attitude can be found in a short-short I sold to Sword and Sorceress XXV.  Since it isn’t worth running out and buying the anthology just for that, I’ll state it here: For a long time now, I’ve been really tired of “strong female characters” who must have been raped in order to find their motivation to be strong.  I mean, c’mon.  Lazy much?  Or, for that matter, female characters who are raped only in order to inspire the male character to seek vengeance.  Stop making me vomit in my mouth and yawn at the same time; it’s messy.

So far, my opinions don’t challenge any orthodoxies, and you all know how much I hate that; let’s move on.

Have I ever depicted a rape in one of my stories? No.

Would I ever depict a rape in one of my stories? Maybe.  I’m unwilling to say that rape never belongs in a work of art.  Or even that it never belongs in a work of art created by a man.  For example, I think it’s pretty clear that the world would be poorer without Gimbologna’s “Rape of the Sabine Women.”

The thing is, whenever there is human suffering of any kind, you don’t want to make it cheap.  You don’t want to make it easy.  You don’t want to make it meaningless.  For fuck’s sake, there is enough meaningless suffering in the real world–one purpose of art is the struggle to find meaning in things around us that appear meaningless.

But, okay.  In my opinion, murder is a worse crime than rape.  There are people who have recovered from being raped; no one, so far, has managed to recover from being murdered.  I am willing to write about murder (in fact, a lot).  Why have I not been willing to write about rape?  Well, one answer is that it’s never come up; there has never been an occasion where I felt that the story called for it.  But that’s evading the question.

One of the things that most drives my work is a deep fascination for what’s happening in someone’s head in a moment of crisis, of danger.  In my arrogance, I believe I can successfully explore that when the danger is mortal.  My imagination runs free, and I put myself there, and I go, “what am I feeling, if I’m this person?”  One trouble with writing a rape scene, is that I’m not interested (or able? or willing?) to put myself into the head of the attacker or the victim deeply enough to do a competent job of it.

If I’m ever confronted with a situation where the story demands it, I don’t know what I’ll do.  I hope I won’t shy away from it.  I hope I’ll approach the subject honestly and respectfully, and not let myself be intimidated by a difficult subject, or by fear of social consequences from those who believe it ought never be written about, especially by a man.  On the other hand, if I never write a story that demands it, I’ll be just fine with that.

But I love the saying that, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” In my case, that is not a fact, but it is something of a goal (so long as it falls short of me having to be raped or murdered just for the experience; there are limits to what I’ll sacrifice for my craft).  In other words, I do not believe that rape, or anything else that is part of the human experience, is forbidden to anyone working in any of the arts.  I merely (merely!) demand that everything an artist explores be explored honestly, with all of the tools available, and that the artist avoid cheap, stupid tricks.

Now I’ll have to do another blog post about when and where I’m in favor of cheap, stupid tricks.  But let’s wait on that.

 

Anthem of the SFWA-Fascists

We’re the SFWA-fascists, all of us agree
On every single subject as long as it’s PC.
We follow every liberal fad.
But we aren’t ALPHA, which makes us sad.
We are the SFWA-fascists within the SF world.

We control all publications as you can plainly see.
We won’t let you speak if we think you disagree.
All SFWA officers are in cahoots,
Goosestepping in rainbow striped jackboots.
We are the SFWA-fascists within the SF world.

We get special treatment from each publisher in town,
And if you don’t agree with us, why, we will shut you down.
Sign our petition for your royalty checks;
Mystery and romance will be next.
The evil SFWA-fascists who run the SF world.

Mainstream publishing we will redesign;
To write we have to see your name on the dotted line.
Our liberal agenda will leave you awed.
We even ignore the voice of God.
Concieted SFWA-fascists who run the SF world.

We’ll shut down all the flirting, but that is just the start.
If you talk to anyone we’ll move you two apart.
No mercy no quarter and no truce
Till the human race can’t reproduce.
That’s how the SFWA-fascists will rule the SF world.

The SFWAs were created for the straight white males.
We must hound them to oblivion until publishing fails.
Gould and Swirsky head the lists
With all those other socialists.
We are the SFWA-fascists who are the SF world.

——————————————————————

Tune: Lily Marlane/D-Day Dodgers

Lyrics: Steven Brust