Christmas Cheer

 As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to start setting up Christmas decorations. Nothing too fancy, just a tree, some spherical ornaments, and the presents that have come in so far. There aren’t going to be any exterior decorations to my knowledge, but other people certainly have put theirs up. A part of me does wonder why, especially with fewer people (supposed to be) out and about this year, there certainly won’t be as many eyeballs on light shows.

I mean, the rest of me -- the less cynical part -- gets it. They’re traditions, and better still, they’re traditions that don’t involve more people showing up and being in close proximity to each other. Maybe they are a bit silly, but they can provide stability, right? Thinking about it like that also led me down this path of separating them entirely from the reason they were started, though. Like, if this one is one we can do in the middle of a pandemic, and this one isn’t, that’s two separate qualities. That means traditions can be ranked.

I mean, that seems against the point of traditions like this also. The way it was taught to me, at least by modern media consumption, traditions are just something you do. I know that means you’re not supposed to think about them, but in that way, they do feel kind of secular, now completely divorced from the thing they celebrate. “We put lights up for Christmas because that’s what we do every Christmas” creates its own circular loop.

Again, I’m not trying to bash these things. Like I said, I’m about to do some of my own. Besides, maybe just wanting to do these things is enough. Completing a task like this, even if it is odd to think about, still provides the same sort of happiness.

-F

Seasons of Change

 It’s fall now. Autumn, whatever you want to call it. There’s always an air of change, I think, with the equinox seasons, not just in palette (though that’s certainly there too) but in the general mood as well. And maybe that’s because the palette informs the mood. I’m certainly not calling that out of the question. I don’t know, that’s not something I’ve thought about. But autumn also seems like it’s normally “the bad change.” It’s a lead-in to winter, which is typically this symbolic psychopomp (unless it’s holiday season but we’ll leave that aside for now).

At the same time, though, fall’s supposed to be this season of plenty, right? Harvest festivals and stocking up a surplus for those upcoming winter months. And the new colors on the trees aren’t treated as the trees dying or even hibernating, but the marker of this specific atmosphere.

It’s a weird dichotomy. I thought it might be a glass-half-full/empty situation where it depends on how you look at it? And you have to choose? But that doesn’t sit right with me either. What might work, though, is a synthesis of these two ideas, like, you need to prepare for hard times, but that doesn’t mean you have to be sad about it. The act of preparedness is promising enough, or something like that.

I don’t know, it’s just something I think about.

-F

Books I'll Never Read

I’m sitting near a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as I write this. It’s a book that is not only almost six-hundred pages long, it also has a reputation of being at times incomprehensible to those not taking an entire university-level course on the subject thanks to the author’s questionable prose. It’s not something I plan to read anytime soon, and indeed, when I picked it up, I joked about how it could sit on my shelf of the books I have but have never read.

To be fair, it’s not like I went out and bought a copy of Hegel. The exact circumstances with which this book came into my possession aren’t really something I feel comfortable talking about on this blog, but the closest analog, I suppose, would be something akin to a gift. The important thing is, I didn’t spend any money on it. If I had, I feel like I would have a different attitude towards it; I don’t generally go out and buy books I know I won’t read. If I bought it, I’d be more likely to at least give it an honest effort.

If a book cost me twenty dollars and I don’t read it, then I feel like I’m out twenty dollars. If someone else bought it, then I don’t feel like that person’s twenty dollars matters whether I read the book or not. That probably sounds flippant or ungrateful, but I guess a better way to think about it would be this: if I bought it, I spent twenty dollars so I could read a book. If somebody else bought it, they spent twenty dollars so they could give me a book. In the latter, the transaction is already completed -- I got the book, didn’t I?

This sort of thinking does discount libraries, of course, which (in the before times) I imagine would be a middle ground of sorts. I wouldn’t have spent anything besides the time searching it out, but that’s still my time, right? That’s not nothing.

There are definitely other factors I’m discounting by thinking like this. I’m just trying to make sense of what I’ve already been doing, reasoning out actions I’ve already taken instead of talking about the thought process that led up to a decision and this is where my mind went to first. Maybe I need to read more books about it.

-F

More Thoughts About Spoilers

I don’t know how I got into this mindset, but whenever someone tells me something they might consider a spoiler, if I ever read or watch or play that thing they’re talking about, I assume they were lying? The first example that comes to mind is a narrative game called Firewatch, which has a twist that can come out of left field if you’re not prepared for it. And even then, after watching a video where someone mentioned it, I had a hard time piecing together just how it had happened while playing. Like, I knew, but I hadn’t accepted it yet.

Maybe it’s that I just don’t care? That seems like an elitist way to phrase it, though. “Oh, you shouldn’t care what other people say happens to these people” seems awfully mean to the people who do really care, and have good reasons for caring. That’s one of the points of media, after all, to provoke empathy. And it’s not like I made a conscious decision to ignore knowing the ending, it just sort of happened, if that makes sense.

In a way, I might compare this to what I talked about when I complained about biopics because those are kind of spoiled by default. People know what happens to Freddie Mercury, for example, just like how pop culture has made the initial genre shift of Psycho less effective. But both of these can be made up for with good elements elsewhere, compare Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Gus Van Sant’s near-shot-for-shot remake and you’ll see what I mean.

This also ties in with a recent trend of creators feeling like they need to be smarter than the people they’re catering to. Westworld ran into this most directly -- series head Jonathan Nolan mentioned changing the twist of an episode because people on Reddit had already guessed the twist they’d been going for. And that seems like a weird way to be making something to me, just shoveling in twist after twist without a thought to cohesion.

The twist in Firewatch, upon reflection, is actually thematically cohesive with the rest of the work. I won’t talk about it here, but it does tie in with the game’s themes of coping with loneliness and dealing with familial issues. So maybe that’s why I didn’t mind knowing about it ahead of time. It seems difficult, to me, for something with a twist for a twist’s sake to have a similar effect, but those media will likely be hamstrung by the passage of time anyway. Once everyone knows what’s up, it’ll fade from the zeitgeist, never to be meaningfully talked about again.

-F

Eurydice

If you’re unfamiliar with the evolution of vocabulary used by “the youths” (scare quotes mandatory), you might not know what a “hot take” is. It’s not an especially difficult phrase to parse once you break it down -- a “take” is an opinion on something (e.g. “What’s your take?”) and the adjective “hot”, well, that has a couple synonyms ranging from “controversial” to “brand new” or even “poorly thought out”, decided through context clues, but no matter how it modifies the take, it’s always something that will bring energy to a given conversation. The opposite would be a “cold take,” one that people have heard before and/or just doesn’t get the blood boiling anymore.

Anyway, here’s a hot take: Eurydice, feminist icon?

I mean, obviously not according to the text itself. The surviving versions of the Orpheus myth paint his wife as not much more than an object for Orpheus to desire. She dies on her wedding day, having been bitten by a rattlesnake, and a major plot point in the myth is that Orpheus isn’t even allowed to look at her as he rescues her from the underworld. That’s Greco-Roman mythology for you. But as time has marched on, I’ve noticed both a resurgence in tellings of this myth in general and interpretations of Eurydice specifically.

To preface all this, I wouldn’t call myself either a classics expert or a feminism expert. I didn’t even know it was pronounced “you-rid-i-see” until earlier this year. But when you experience two pieces of media like this in relatively quick succession, you kind of have to make note of it.

The first is Hadestown, this year’s Best Musical according to the Tony Awards. On its surface, it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth replacing ancient Greece for depression-era America, creating a narrative distance between Ovid et al. to justify a couple things: its folk-opera aesthetic, and the ability to reinterpret the characters as it pleases. Hades, for example, is depicted as an oligarch who signs people into his employ permanently in exchange for a pittance while the Fates and Hermes are made into dueling narrators, each trying to influence the story in their own way.

But let’s focus on Eurydice. With the major story beats of the myth still there, it’s not like she’s a main character, but she does get, you know, an actual character. The Hadestown version of Eurydice is a realist who is attracted to Orpheus’ optimism, and instead of being killed unceremoniously, Hades attracts her to his underworld by promising her steady work and food to eat. She’s seduced into it, but it’s still a bit more agency than Eurydice has in the individual myths.

These choices are made at the beginning of the story, though, and from Eurydice’s perspective, the story plays out largely the same way once she arrives in Hadestown. To contrast, let’s look at this other piece of media, a film this time: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (trailer).

Portrait isn’t a myth by any stretch of the imagination -- it’s a romance drama between two women and set in the eighteenth century -- but it does spend a lot of time commenting on the myth. The introductory scene to this theme features its main characters sitting around a table with one of them reading aloud. The question arises: why did Orpheus turn around? To paraphrase using some modern (and not French) parlance, “If it were me, I would just not turn around.” The answer the characters come up with is, “Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around. She wanted him to remember her as she was.”

Already, too, the film has emphasized the two romantic leads’ looks at each other. “How you see me” is a recurring phrase throughout the film, as well as several shots of following someone close behind, so this scene, in essence, serves as the thesis of the film. But an idea like “Eurydice said something to Orpheus” isn’t exactly supported by the text of the myth, so the film then serves to demonstrate its reasoning by itself. There are several more callbacks to the myth, but I’ll skip ahead to its conclusion.

The final scene of Portrait is of its two leads, Marianne and Héloïse, having in the meantime been forced apart, attending the same musical performance by chance. Marianne sees Héloïse, but, as the camera lingers, it becomes apparent that it’s a look they won’t share. Héloïse is distracted by the music. Now it is the audience’s turn to ask for a look.

As a reminder, the film is set in the eighteenth century. The relationship between these two women was doomed from the start. And yet, all we want is a turn of the head and a look of recognition in Héloïse’s eyes. Héloïse chooses otherwise, though. She stays with the memory of Marianne as she was.

The symbology is reversed, but the message is still the same. Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents Eurydice as a woman who recognizes that her relationship with Orpheus will fail -- on a meta level, it almost presents her as someone who realizes she is but an object of inspiration to him -- and chooses to live in Hades with the happy memories of their courtship than to have them ruined by the passage of time.

Bookending Hadestown is a line sung by Hermes: “It’s a sad song, but we’re going to sing it anyway.” This is one of the major themes of the musical: its own commentary on using old stories to make commentary on modern issues (a joke title of Hadestown that gets passed around is “Orpheus Starts a Union”). And I thought that was worth talking about in regards to one figure that these two wildly different pieces of media share.

-F

Nostalgia (Part One)

Alright, so it turns out that this is actually going to be a multi-parter thing. Length is still an issue, but I also have some concerns about my ability to talk about Kentucky Route Zero in a meaningful capacity given how recently it was completed (and how recently I completed it. I’ve got a lot to think about). In the meantime, though, I guess the other piece of media I recommended catching up on can serve as as good an introduction as any. Let’s talk It Makes A Sound.

But not right away.

Last week I mentioned that I was interested in dissecting a small piece of Americana. I was actually inspired by a set of posts I came across talking about how “western-centric” media has tended to be, especially “America-centric.” This was in response to Kentucky Route Zero’s release, which is why it’s so important to discuss in this series, I think, and the general reaction to these posts was, well, that may be so for a lot of media, but KRZ couldn’t really be set anywhere else -- it’s an Appalachian ghost story and it sticks to each word in that genre description very seriously.

I don’t want to link these posts here for a couple reasons. Firstly, it would have the potential to add fuel to an already (thankfully) dead discussion, but secondly, I’m more interested in the implicit question being posed here. What makes a story “American”?

We’ve seen attempts at this. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have led the charge in terms of American Fantasy Epics in The Stand and American Gods respectively, and what they both seem to emphasize is the country’s vastness. America is huge and varied, and yet the central “American-ness” of an individual town or city’s location can be connected. The Road Trip Novel is this sort of genre.

But America has another feature that, for better or worse, has become a facet of the country’s identity: The American Dream. The idea that this is the place, more than anywhere else, where hard work is rewarded. Of course, the idea only had to be thought once before it was viciously deconstructed. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle ends with a massive plea for socialism (that went unnoticed because the descriptions of the meatpacking industry were too visceral), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reveals that its titular character, despite his hard work, still didn’t get anything that he wanted, and so on, and so on. This is even ignoring a large number of black and other people of color’s experiences, or the native population’s experiences, or…

The point is, the failure of the American Dream also feels -- to this American writer, at least -- like an intrinsic part of quote-unquote American stories. It also ties in neatly with its last point: recency. America is a young country, and that youth means that locations can change massively at the whims of fate. There’s an entire subculture, for example, dedicated to exploring malls that were set up at the end of the last century only to collapse since the online shopping industry established itself.

I do want to stress, at this point, that these are large generalizations. Any one of these statements could easily be found to be overly broad. Some of that is the point, though. Defining a country’s “genre” is basically about finding its stereotypes, and stereotypes are nothing if not overly broad generalizations.

Anyway, It Makes A Sound is a podcast by Jacquelyn Landgraf set in the fictional town of Rosemary Hills. “Golf Capital of the World” it proclaims itself on its water tower, and yet, signs of decay appear everywhere, and the remaining population largely consists of old and sedentary people who have nowhere else to go. In the midst of all this, Deirdre Gardner (voiced by Landgraf) comes home and discovers a small piece of her childhood, a tape recording of a concert performed by local genius (her words) Wim Farros. It being one of her few happy memories as a child, Deirdre is desperate to share the music with the world.

One of the common initial impressions of It Makes A Sound is that, well, its first few episodes are a bit of a slog. Sure, it can end as strong as it wants (and it does end strong, I promise), but the first two episodes largely feature Deirdre waxing fake lyrical about her childhood crush without much to support any of that. And this is what attracted me to writing about it, because it’s in that instance that I think the nostalgia the story is going for takes hold. Remember Robert Mckee’s words from Adaptation.? “The last act makes a film. [...] Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

This actually goes one step deeper in the podcast’s album. A lot of attention is spent on Wim Farros’ concert, and so of course at the end of the podcast, the group’s next production would be a professional production of those same songs, performed by the cast of the show. And it’s a good album. I like it, at least. But what I find interesting is how different the show’s recreation and the recorded album sound.

It may be a bit pretentious for me to say, but I find it interesting that a show about memory and nostalgia creates its own nostalgia for itself. The early foibles are forgotten, replaced by a sort of “No, no, it was charming in its attempts to appear amateurish” and its brief nine-episode length also contributes to its quaintness.

It’s in that, though, that I also find the most “American” (heavy quotes there) qualities. It Makes A Sound is set in a town that America has forgotten in its rush forward, and all it can do for its characters is have them look in that same direction. Always forwards, and it guides its audience there too, through its music and its hopeful resolution. Just something to think about.

I don’t know when this series will continue, but I do hope that it was a good enough introduction to the things I want to talk about through it. It’s kind of like Raindrops on Roses but with a clearer overall theme than just “here are some things I like,” though of course that will see its own continuation soon as well.

See you soon, and remember Wim Farros.

-r

What We Talk About When We Talk About Work

I’ve noticed that the quantity of work-related posts has increased on this blog recently. I wouldn’t chalk that up to more things to talk (read: complain) about per se, though we are approaching a couple of major changes that are worth bringing up. The menu is going to be changing soon, we’re going to be handing out silverware soon, and I’ve been told the employee roster is going to change in a major way soon, though outside of some new hires I’ve yet to see anything there that is really that significant.

I don’t really talk about any of that because, well, it’s much more fun to complain about things. Like how the grill is broken or how coworkers can be a bit too nosy. It also keeps things a bit more universal in application. Everyone has nosy coworkers and appliances that refuse to work, or at least can sympathize with the idea of them. Less so the minutiae of silverware logistics; there are definitely fans out there, just fewer, I think.

Taking the complaining route also benefits because it’s simply a stronger emotional reaction, one of the few ones left once one gets into a working routine. It’s a moment of catharsis, excising frustrations because everyone has those.

I have talked about before, though, how I don’t want this blog to just be complaining about random things. There’s a danger to a wholly negative mindset, I think. It can bleed into not only the work one might be complaining about -- becoming the cause of complaints rather than relaying them onwards -- but also the rest of one’s life. That’s one of the reasons I started the Raindrops on Roses series, just to be nice to things on occasion.

So while I could talk at length about how, instead of replacing the grill, we now have a new dishwashing machine, I’m going to just leave it at half a sentence in a concluding paragraph. And next week? I don’t know yet, we’ll see. But it’ll hopefully be something a bit nicer.

-F

RicerCAR

Well, this is actually something I hadn't really encountered yet. I've been pretty happy with my output so far on this blog (the less said about NSS Reviews the better, but I think I made peace with that a few weeks ago), but this last week I had a particularly acute case of writer's block. Fortunately, I have backup plans in place for such an occasion. For example, here is a story of mine I don't think many of you have read before:

"The Biopic Problem"

I’ve been trying to avoid complaining about so-called “predictability” in films. I’ve found that that sort of thinking is generally reductive. Like, when someone asked Roger Ebert what film had the least cliches, he responded with My Dinner With Andre, a film that consists entirely of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having a dinner conversation, and even that has a TV Tropes page. But at the same time, I’ve started to have a negative view of what are commonly called “biopics,” and the simplest reason I can give when pressed on this is, to put it simply, that they’re too “predictable.” I promised over on NSS Reviews that I was going to try and resolve this little hypocrisy, so here I am.

In a typical three-act structure, there’s generally some sort of climax in the second act with the intention to meet two quick goals. The first is, loosely, to let the characters demonstrate how they’ve changed since the beginning of the story, and the second is, on a meta-level, to keep the audience from getting bored. Apollo 13, for example, has the “square peg in a round hole” sequence, while another space biopic, Hidden Figures, features the main characters slowly breaking down the institutional racism that surrounds them.

There’s a little trap there, however. The second act climax isn't the only climax in the film. To paraphrase the fictional Robert Mckee from Adaptation., the last act is going to be fresh in people's minds, and can even get people to forgive earlier mistakes, so make sure it's a good one. So if the movie's climax isn't as good as the second act's, it just comes across as poor pacing. Wonder Woman (which isn't a biopic but I've found superhero films can fall for similar traps, probably due to their mythological inspirations inspiring more stock story structure), for example, has a rather intense sequence where Diana leads a trench run on the way to taking back a French town, while the final act has a three-part battle to raid a German stronghold. On the surface, this seems like a fine escalation, but when the film throws a misguided twist at the viewer, followed by lasers that weren't especially well set up, it runs the risk of breaking the audience's immersion.

(In regards to “the misguided twist”, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'm of the opinion the film had one villain too many)

How does this relate to biopics specifically? Well, accuse me of judging films by their trailers if you must, but I've found biopics are more likely than not to be “safer” experiences, which means they are much more likely to fall into this kind of trap. But there's another reason as well. A reason related to the whole selling point to biopics in the first place.

“Based on a true story” is one of those phrases that can get people rolling their eyes. It's frequently meaningless, relying on names that might be recognized even if the true stories aren't. The Wind Rises, for example, takes very large liberties with its main character, Jiro Horikoshi that it's easier to read that particular film more about the nature of art and those who make it than a serious look at an engineer's life as war approaches (it also does the thing people decried Patch Adams for, introducing a fictional love interest and then killing her off, though Patch Adams had other problems as well). These “true stories” are naturally placed at the climax of the movie; people don't want to see Apollo 13 land back on Earth and then NASA faffing about for another forty-five minutes, they want to know if they landed in the first place. But with enough public knowledge, the tension of these movies is killed in the scripting process. People know how the story ends, so when movies like First Man ask, “Does Neil Armstrong land on the moon?” the audience knows they're in for a waste of time.

The solution, therefore, is to move the goalposts a bit. Again with First Man, the goal of the third act is to provide closure for Neil Armstrong's two major relationship conflicts: he and his wife and he and his daughter. It doesn't particularly work, as the daughter subplot is more or less dropped for over an hour until the final scenes make it relevant again, but it's a good try. Movies like Hidden Figures miss this, so when John Glenn finally goes up, the movie wastes ten minutes pretending he might not come down.

Look, I get it. I get why people like these movies. They can be really sweet stories and my heart's not entirely black just yet. Heck, I enjoyed a lot of these movies I mentioned here, even some of the ones I disparaged. But to get fully into a picture, I want to see some spark of creativity shining through, and it's very easy for biopics to not, so I tend to avoid them.

-F