The Extratextuals

And with that, Lost is over. Predictably, my Twitter feed came alive last night as friends and colleagues tried to make sense of it. Equally predictably, the anti-fans were out in full force. There were those who never really liked the show anyways and wanted us all to know it, there were those who thought the finale sucked and needed to discuss it, and there were those who loved to hate the show publicly and who saw this as their best chance to make that hate even more public.

I’m not going to discuss the actual finale here, since a whole host of people with more words and thoughts than I have already done so, and, quite frankly, I want to sit on it a little longer before I pass complete judgment. Go here to see other reviews linked. What I want to discuss instead is those anti-fans.

Specifically, I find myself wishing we could institute a short mourning period for fans of a show once it’s over. I get anti-fandom, and realize that it’s as valid a cultural practice as is fandom. It would be ludicrous, and more to the point outright worrying, to suggest that one should only love the media – dislike and hate are necessary, especially if we ever want it to get better. Anyone who tells themselves that they’re a fan is definitely an anti-fan of something else, and anyone who isn’t a fan of anything is (not only a sad, sorry human being, but also) definitely an anti-fan of at least something else. So anti-fans aren’t going anywhere, nor should they.

But how pleasant it would be, though, if we could accept that fans need some time to decompress, to let go, and to savor the memory of their beloved show once it’s gone. I’d pose that if, as an anti-fan, you’re unwilling to honor that love in the small way of shutting up and letting the fans have a day or three, your anti-fandom has become an ugly beast. It’s now first and foremost dependent on ruining others’ experience, and it is supremely untrusting that those others truly find something worth loving in the first place. It is a radical narcissism. You know those jerks who picket funerals saying the deceased is going to Hell? That’s what you’ve become.

Granted, I say this now because I am a Lost fan. Some might question my use of the word “fan,” since I’m not in a Lost community, I don’t produce Lost fic or so forth, and the only time I’ve spent on speculation boards is when I’m studying them. But I consider myself a fan. As such, the naysayers are pissing me off and ruining my buzz. This is a self-interested plea, yes. But please feel free to throw this back in my face in the future – when Grey’s Anatomy ends (and boy will that be a good day), I promise to shut up and let the fans have their day or three. Which is not to say that I promise to like the show, because my understanding of the cultural studies project was not that we all had to like everything, nor that we all had to agree with everyone’s likes. Let us vigorously disagree, and if you want to know why I dislike Grey’s (apart from it causing an outbreak of students who can’t spell my name, that is), I’ll gladly tell you. I may tell you even if you don’t want to know too, because I’m invested in my answer. I just won’t do it after the finale.

So how about a moratorium on Lost hate till tomorrow?

anti-fans anti-fans, finales, Lost, Lost finale

On Mother’s Day, there are many things that remind me of why my mother, Anne Gray, is totally awesome. But I’ll share a media-centric one:

I am a child of Sesame Street, and I say this proudly. I watched a lot of Sesame Street as a child. These were the days before the wonderful Jim Henson died, before the freaky and annoying Elmo moved in, long before Cookie Monster went veggie, and before Mr. Snuffleupagus was visible to the adults on the street.

It’s that last part that’s important to this story here. I’m told that the writers eventually made Snuffy visible in part out of fear that kids wouldn’t share important things with their parents if they saw adults continually refuse to believe in Snuffy’s existence. And for sure, I shared Big Bird’s frustration that nobody believed in his imaginary friend … because my mum had a little game whereby she quite artfully turned her back or left the room momentarily whenever Mr. Snuffleupagus was on the screen. She’d then come back and I’d tell her Snuffy was there, hadn’t she seen him? Always the answer came, “No. Who is ‘Mr. Snuffleupagus’?”

Maybe the writers were right to make Snuffy visible to all, but telling my mum important things was never a problem for me. I do love, though, how she gave me this small bond with Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, realizing how identification with them could be fun and playful, and letting me have a private relationship with them. Perhaps I’m adding this in retrospect, but my memory, moreover, is that I knew she knew Snuffy existed, but that she continued to turn her back or look away as a small joke. It was a trusting joke, no less, one that let me know that it was okay to have my own relationship with TV characters, and a joke that I see as a symbol of how close she’s always been to me, and yet how much she’s always been willing to let me have my own space. It’s also a joke of which she doesn’t even remember being a part when I discuss it with her now, a fact that makes it all the more wonderful a story for me of how superb she is, since it shows how effortless her brilliant parenting can be.

So today, I’m sure Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus (and Grover and Kermit, no doubt!) join me in wishing my mum a Happy Mother’s Day.

Uncategorized Big Bird, mother, Mother's Day, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Sesame Street

I’ve heard the title of this post way too many times in the last few weeks. They bug me. But they also say something important about how we watch television, I think.

First, when Eddy Kitses and Adam Horowitz, two Lost writer-producers and University of Wisconsin Communication Arts alumni, visited Madison recently, several of our students shared a version of the lines with them. It’s popped up on numerous websites or Facebook threads I read. And it’s a general mantra as the show approaches its final episode.

But I really hope it is just a mantra, something that gets repeated over and over without a sense of why it’s there and what it means. Because if any fans are honestly pegging all their hopes, investment of time, and their ultimate evaluation of the show on how it ends, I have news for you: the show’s already failed for you.

Granted, a lot’s at stake, and I really hope the writers and actors pull it off. Granted, like most (all?) Lost viewers, there have been times in the last few years when I’ve felt as though they’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and making up the plot willy-nilly. And granted, I want a brilliant ending, something that honors the journey (t)here. But it’s been an incredible ride. If you’ve stuck with it all this time, and have immense anticipation and hopes for the cast and crew to pull off a fantastic finale, surely that’s because its level of quality has told you that it’s fair to expect this. If not, why are you still watching? If the value of the narrative and of the experience still hangs in the balance, you have only yourself to blame for lashing yourself on the back by watching something you’re not enjoying. If, by contrast, you’ve been enjoying it, where’s the “waste”?

I ask that question in part rhetorically, since I think what’s really being said by many fans when they suggest that Lost might have wasted all their time is that they want a conclusion that justifies the time they’ve spent watching the show to others. Conclusions to stories matter, of course, but when you’re really enjoying a story, they matter more to those not watching. Indeed, much negative analysis of shows that someone didn’t watch harps on their conclusions, either of the show as a whole (cf. Sex and the City) or of any given episode, as critics can easily lambaste a show for its apparent closing message rather than paying attention to the journey – a strategy common to lazy textual analyses. Censors and would-be censors love conclusions, too, because that’s where they look for the moral.

But if you love a show, the journey is the thing. For Lost, it might be enjoying Nestor Carbonell’s performance earlier this year, or Michael Emerson’s performance throughout the series; it might be getting swept up by Jin and Sun; it might be a fascination with Sayid’s tortured path; it might be the pleasure of the puzzle, and of endless guessing, hypotheses, and counter-hypotheses. Etcetera. But those are the things that non-watchers aren’t watching. Eventually, all they’ll probably know is that Lost began with a bunch of people who crashed on an island and ended with _______. And, yes, what fills that blank is likely going to make many people laugh. It already does. Smoke monsters, time travel, cursed numbers, and resurrection don’t instill confidence in too many non-watchers. So I wonder if fans who worry about “wasting” their time are simply expressing a concern that when it’s all over, others will think they wasted their time [and yes, I do enjoy discussing “the others” in a post on Lost].

This is where I diverge, though … and where surely many Lost fans should too. See, if you told me back in 2004 where the show would be now, let alone three weeks from now, I wouldn’t have signed up for the ride. Time travel is nearly always handled poorly. Smoke monsters? Alternate worlds? Not one, but two guys who can talk to the dead? Not the stuff I signed up for. But I’ve stuck around because somehow they’ve made it work, or between the bits that don’t work for me, I’ve found lovely moments and characters and storylines. The fact that I’m not alone, and that so many people are still here could on one hand suggest the huge market for science fiction, but we already knew that. On the other hand, it suggests how much the journey, not necessarily the conclusion, matters, even though our culture at large is fond of its mantra that the conclusion’s the thing.

Uncategorized conclusions, endings, Lost, mantras

I’m spending more time these days thinking about (and, once school ends, I hope, playing) licensed videogames, as I’m fascinated with how a narrative world from film or television deals with the challenges and promises of a move into game space.

Part of this fascination, though, lies in how film and television producers may be taking games more seriously, and making them matter. Along those lines, consider the following:

(1) I was pointed towards this New Yorker review of Clash of the Titans by Anthony Lane. Though the context makes the comment reek of game-hating snark, there’s still this interesting comment near the end:

what is at stake here is not an enlightening quest, or a Homeric journey, but a series of levels, each one tougher than the last. That is why I am, in all honesty, reviewing “Clash of the Titans” three months too soon. On July 10th, it will be released on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and only then, I feel, will it truly come into its own.

(2) And finally, with the new Doctor Who under way in the UK, we have news of four interactive games that the BBC commissioned to add to the story, and this intriguing quote from executive producer and BBC Wales’ head of drama, Piers Wenger:

There aren’t 13 episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ this year, there are 17–four of which are interactive.

(3) And yet, at the SCMS super-panel on transmedia with Lost’s Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, The Alchemist’s Mark Warshaw, Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Heroes’ Tim Kring, and Ghost Whisperer’s Kim Moses, in response to a question about whether we’ll ever see the transmedia “matter” to the story in a central way, Grillo-Marxuach noted that he’d want to punch any writer in the face if that writer expected him to see transmedia before or in addition to consuming the text at the mothership. Lindelof later said that perhaps the panel simply couldn’t envision an entity that could pull this trick off yet, but he expressed hope that someone would one day work it out.

So the question remains – can a game be an important part of the story, and if not why not? I’m inclined to think the answer can be found wherever the money trail goes. I’m not surprised to hear someone creating for the non-commercial BBC suggesting that the games might provide yet more sites for the story, entirely legitimate and central, since the BBC doesn’t particularly need viewers to go back to the “mothership” of the televised Tardis. As a public broadcaster, it can afford to think a little more openly about which sites matter or need to matter.

In a commercial context, meanwhile, DVD bonus materials have flourished in an era in which DVD sales make so much money. So once licensed games can make the money that a film or TV “mothership” can, we can expect to see Hollywood give a real damn about them. Until then, though, maybe some of the more interesting experiments will come from within a public broadcasting system, or will be held back by the need for “motherships” to matter being masked behind notions of the impossibility of the game mattering.

licensed games Clash of the Titans, Doctor Who, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, transmedia, videogames

This post is about the odd yet fascinating moments when real life and one’s media consumption seem to be stitched together, one informing the other, the text of life seemingly written in concert with the text at hand.

Last week was Spring Break, and I actually took a vacation, on a cruise ship of all places (no, I’m not 65, but it was cheap, I needed sun, and I needed something that required no energy from me). Which further meant I got to read a novel for the first time in a time span that I won’t mention in case my BA and MA in Lit are recalled. The lucky book: Julian Barnes’s excellent A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters. I grabbed it off my shelf having only looked at the spine, thinking, “it’s about bloody time I read some Barnes.”

Chapter 1 is set on Noah’s Ark. Chapter 2 involves a terrorist incident on a cruise ship. Chapter 4 sees a woman sail away from an abusive boyfriend and the fear of nuclear war. Chapter 5 is about a shipwreck. And Noah’s Ark and the shipwreck feature in other chapters too. In other words, while I was sitting on a ship, I was reading about a lot of events on ships. When I went to the gym on board one day, they were even playing Titanic on the screens.

The result was a wonderful layering of both experiences, textual and RL. Barnes makes a lot out of the separation of the clean and the unclean for the Ark, and playfully applies it to the cruise patrons in Chapter Two, though not before I’d already amusingly made the connection myself, staring out at the different passengers. As I read that Chapter Two, in which terrorists hijack a cruise ship, I heard a crew member warn a passenger not to venture too far from the pier alone in Guatemala due to local unrest. Titanic played as the ship listed in somewhat rocky seas. The final chapter situates the narrator in a personal heaven that includes the perfect breakfast for every meal, while I enjoyed a buffet breakfast everyday and sat around looking up at the sun and clouds for the rest of the days. And there were countless other small confluences of the world around me and the world(s) in the book, each close enough to one another to make me think more deeply about the unfolding texts, characters, themes, and plots around me.

I love these moments – when real life conspires with fiction to make you think, to add shades of meaning to something that is already demanding reflection. One could see a grander author at work, I suppose, narcissistically (or religiously?) seeing this as some sort of Truman Show scenario in which everything is there for a reason. Instead, I see it as yet more evidence of how much richer any text becomes on the back of other texts and experiences.

We often manage and control such processes, watching specific genres of film or television to match moods or seasons of the year, listening to sad songs after a break-up, etc., using life to fill a text even moreso, or vice versa. But when the moments occur at random, it’s a nice little sign that the chaos that is intertextuality sometimes produces beautiful structures, paths, and meanings.

Uncategorized intertextuality, Julian Barnes, novels

In honor of last night’s Oscar winners, here’s a very funny trailer I found for every Oscar winning movie, and I thought I needed to share:

trailers, viral videos Oscars, parody, trailers

Courtesy of The Huffington Post’s pre-Oscars “Worst Movies Ever Made” list, comes this spectacularly awful trailer:

HuffPo notes, “it sets you up to think you’re going to watch a teen film about dancing your way through the loss of a parent, but then it calls you a sucker and whips out some demons,” but the trailer doesn’t so much change directions as much as it adds a whole new layer. The result is a seemingly hilarious (and hilariously badly acted) genre hybrid of inspirational dance film and horror. The demons don’t interrupt the protagonist’s therapeutic dance, after all; they give it new (cosmic/spiritual) meaning.

I still don’t know why the title insists on spelling “see” with a “c”, either, though I’m wondering if they were paying whoever did the title card by the letter. Or maybe the film was pitched via text message. So gloriously bad, I’m almost inclined to watch it.

trailers C Me Dance, trailers

We all owe Jay Leno an apology. Many of us thought his show was awful. We also owe Jeff Zucker an apology, since we thought he had shown us the worst NBC could offer. But Zucker, it turns out, was just getting warmed up, and Leno’s inability to be funny seems kind of quaint and charming now that I have seen the horror that is The Marriage Ref.

It’s really hard to know where to begin with a review of something so utterly bad. I’d been led to believe that Seinfeld would be the host, but instead he sat there at the side like a creepy guy at a public park. The actual host was about as funny as a snuff film. The crowd were laughing, but I felt for their family members, who were clearly being held under duress elsewhere on the NBC lot, with threats of them being “disappeared” if the audience didn’t laugh, damn it, laugh.

As for the other celebrities, I didn’t know whether to feel more sad for Alec Baldwin or angry at him for agreeing to do this. I hope next time he’s up for an Emmy for Best Comic Performance, they discount this against him. Say what you will about According to Jim, but at least Belushi never did something like this (did he?). I note too that nobody outside the NBC/Universal family appeared on the show; indeed, if I ran any of the other networks, I’d be begging, cajoling, and pleading with my talent to stay away.

Despite those celebs, the whole affair was low budget, not in a fun and endearing way, but in a painful, bewildering way. NBC looks so broke, so destitute with this, and not just monetarily. The couples were rude, disinteresting, and entirely unbelievable (one of them wanted a stripper pole in his room, and NBC expects us to believe he’s earnest in thinking the judges would agree with him?), living proof of why the network will need to pay for real WGA writers, not just the hacks who created these scripts. The only thing that made it compelling was seeing how much worse it could get.

So, okay, the above’s a rant. You might be reading it and wondering what made me so grumpy today. But that’s the funny part. Nothing did: Canada won gold in men’s hockey. I couldn’t be happier. I’m riding Cloud Nine. And NBC gave me the win in full HD. So if ever there was a day in which NBC might’ve convinced me that something very, very bad was actually okay, it was today. Which makes me wonder: if this is how bad it is today, how much worse will it look when it starts for real?

When longtime television shows die, they’re said to have “jumped the shark,” courtesy of Happy Days’ dark days. Franchises can now be said to have “nuked the fridge” when they turn stupid as did Indiana Jones. In years to come, we may well find ourselves explaining to students that the by-then-well-known phrase for an entire network sinking into obscurity, “becoming a marriage ref,” came from February 28, 2010, when NBC announced that they really don’t care about quality any more.

new shows, reviews NBC, The Marriage Ref

I’m a sucker for a great opening credit sequence in television, especially as they become a dying species.

Showtime and HBO, for instance, deserve considerable praise for some of their excellent opening sequences: The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Dexter, United States of Tara, Weeds – all had or have superb intros that introduce the style, tone, and character of their shows, giving us a good sense of the kind of world in which they’re set.

So I’m on the watch for great examples of the form on network television. This year’s newcomer on FOX, Human Target, has a beautiful sequence. The animation is an intriguing mix of Chuck, Bond, and an edgy, grown-up graphic novel, hence promising an interesting marriage of fun, humor, action, and a little bit of darkness. Turn the sound off and it’s one of the better opening sequences on television.

But if you turn the sound on, it’s not only bad, but boring. Somebody at FOX put all the money into the visuals and forgot about sound. It sounds like the cheesy music you’d hear in low-budget war movie. Thus not only does it short-circuit all the beautiful workmanship of the animation, but it creates tonal problems. Test this out – listen to it with your eyes closed and ask yourself whether you’d watch or change the channel.

So let’s go back to Showtime for some remedial lessons: United States of Tara also has an animated intro, very different style, yet suitably quirky. The pop-up book sensibility neatly suggests the character’s multiple characters while also gesturing to her “three dimensionality.” The quick movements also note how quickly things can change for Tara and for the viewer. It all encourages us to watch for changes, depth, and connections. And yet the music works with the visuals, preeminently odd, setting the tone not ruining it. FOX, please take note.

opening credit sequences Human Target, opening credit sequences, United States of Tara

I had previously posted the following clip, but now have a few words in response. See, the thing is, I don’t really want a whole lot of answers on Lost. I like the idea that it’s just set in a world in which different things happen. Granted, I want some answers, but, for instance, if I never find out where Smokey came from, I’m fine; if I never find out why only four toes on the statue, I’m fine; and if I never find out what the numbers mean, I’m fine.

To all you who want a whole lot of answers, be careful what you wish for. Or, to reword: think of the midichlorians. Who cared why some people have The Force and others don’t? It’s not just suspension of disbelief we need, but suspension of needing to know everything. After all, our own world is hardly logical, and none of us can pretend to know why so many things happen here, so why do we need all the answers on Lost?

In short, if you’re out there Damon, it’s me Jonathan. And I’m saying, don’t tell me all the answers.

For those who want them:

viral videos Lost, viral videos