Sometimes the gags take a while to come. Comedy is hard, man. But it’s nice to see my relatively weak gag in yesterday’s post get beautifully developed by C G in the comments. You should pop across to his Sleep Dep blog and the funny, weird rhythms of his Joe Korea story (starts here).
And while I’m talking about gags, this tweet about Kiwi Karl Urban being cast as Judge Dredd was met with silence. Obviously my genius will only be appreciated after my death. (Context for durty furriners.)
This was from Stephen Judd if I remember right: Bruce Lee’s audition for Green Hornet in ’64. Dude is charming and moves like lightning. For once YouTube comments not full of inane 14yo insults, instead full of comments about how damn hot Bruce is.
From Jenni, Young Me Now Me – I think this has been developed out of another “recreating old photos” site, because I recognized a couple of the pics I looked at, but in any case it’s lovely.
Lego tattoos. No, the other way around.
Mash brings down the Baudrillard in a response to the “how to fix Doctor Who” post linkied last week.
Hyper-realist painters. I find it odd that they almost all paint commercial products – post-Warhol I guess.
WWII reconsidered as a poorly-written TV series
My friend the Ruggerblogger is decamping to the Northern Hemisphere and expanding her rugby bloggery! Rugby enthusiasts would be well advised to read along with her.
In honour of SDCC, aka nerd prom, here’s Improv Everywhere doing Star Wars in a subway car.
And here’s a Brazilian site that’s probably saying something mean about Cosplayers photoshopping pics of themselves!
And finally, here’s an Instant Darth Vader Nooooooo button!
Young me old me is the same thing as before, just with a much nicer website 🙂
Andrew: yeah, that’s my take on it. I suspect there’s a potent counterargument along the lines of: any story by virtue of being a story denies arbitrariness; arbitrariness in a story can only ever be a device within a larger structure, so what matters is how well that device is managed.
I suspect there’s such a counterargument, and that it’s potent, but I don’t actually have the philosphical balls to make it. Maybe Mash will pop over and clarify, and/or kick me in the supicions.
Ok, so in reading mashugenah’s post is he saying that the wrong-headed “how to fix dr.who” article was basically the author trying to ram a square peg (an arbitrary and random universe) into a round hole (a universe of pure cause-and-effect). I need to ask since I had to look up 3 words in the first paragraph alone…
It seems similar to when some people I know panned Torchwood: Children of Earth since it didn’t have a happy ending…
Interesting counterpoint. And one which I think a lot of writers struggle with in that I suspect it’s difficult to capture the arbitrary without it seeming like the dreaded deux ex.
However I’ve found both The Wire and Skins to be shows that have managed to straddle structure and chaos. Dr.Who not so much (unfortunately).
I mean deus ex, not 2 exes. 🙂
Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.
I seem to have time-travelled my response so it came before your question. Awesome.
I never knew Owen worked with Bruce Lee as a kung-fu sparring partner….
Young me old me is so lovely… I particularly like the sibling ones and the old couples’ wedding photos… I stopped with the guy on the nappy on pink fluffy rug because it seemed hard to top.
Bruce Lee is beautiful!
Yay starwars!
Yeah, sorry, that post was not my best writing. 🙁 Morgue – stop linking to not my best writing. 🙂
Basically my argument is that you start out with some kind of reality that’s affected by cause-and-effect on some level, but is also susceptible to systemic break-downs (randomness). We then construct a model of reality which we like and live in that model. That’s Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” and I’ve commented on that at length in earlier parts of trying to understand that crazy frenchie.
In terms of stories, the argument is that people create stories as a kind of template for understanding something about life. The kind of life you want to understand is either the tidy cause-and-effect kind, or the world-is-random kind. Now, all stories have aspects of both, but I think the dominant mode of writing at the moment is for a highly structured world where the author/creator purports to explain everything, so that even seemingly random events are eventually tied in to the story.
The writing on Doctor Who? is not of this kind. RTD and SM are not interested in approaching the Doctor Who? universe as a hard-SF environment, they pretty explicitly embrace the idea that stuff just happens, and they’re not interested in explicitly pointing out that butterfly whose flapping caused the typhon.
Now, that article is not arguing that Doctor Who should become hard SF, it’s arguing that the thematic ideas which emerge across all the episodes should be consistent and point to the same kind of thematic message. But this is just moving the cause-and-effect psychology out of the realm of physics and into a philosophical framework. It is the same basic approach though – philosophically it must be coherent and consistent.
So I think that the writers have not done this for the same reason as they haven’t obeyed a physics-based cause-and-effect particularly closely. It’s not Hard SF and it’s not Hard Philosophy.
I think that it’s deliberate. In the system of the Doctor Who? universe, the Doctor has always represented the butterfly in the plans of his enemies. He is the unpredictable, unaccountable element who is in almost all ways an agent of chaotic interruption of systems of domination and control. To pigeon-hole him into the thematic consistency that she wants is to destroy that greater and more pervasive thematic element.
I also think that on the level of practical criticism, the article is a refusal to engage with the show on its own terms. Here we are entering a second layer of simulation. If we think of the episodes that exist as the Doctor’s reality, her thematic analysis of the show becomes a simulation of that reality. She argues that because of certain desirable qualities of her simulation, that the reality of the show should have been changed to match it – she places far more importance on that second-order analysis than of the actual thing being analysed in the first instance.
The article thus goes far beyond practical criticism and into attempting to constrain the creative process for ultimately intellectual ends – which is the exact thing I belive RTD and SM are explicitly rejecting in their approach to story construction.
So those are my two responses to her article. First, I reject the necessity of her thematic/philosophical urge for cause-and-effect as something that the show is explicitly designed not to do. Second, I reject her elevation of a second-order thematic analysis as sufficient grounds for re-writing the details of episodes.
I’m not saying that Doctor Who? is a perfect show, but I really think that the “flaws” being identified are a matter of taste and divergence from wide-spread trends in the philosophy of writing, and hence not really fixable without scrapping what they’re doing entirely and doing something else. And I think there is plenty of good historical precedence for other authors employing the same strategies as RTD & SM to huge and lasting success – Euripides being my main cited example, but also virtually any of the surrealists (Garcia Lorca etc).
Does that clear things up for you? 🙂
I don’t think that Doctor Who is SF at all. I think it’s fantasy/horror in SF fancy dress. The Doctor is a wizard who doesn’t want to dress up like the other wizards, so he steals a magician’s box and travels the universe impressing people with magic tricks, taking a succession of lovely assistants with him.
Just look at the kinds of enemies he keeps running up against: the Loch Ness Monster, living shadows, statues that can only move when nobody’s watching, Egyptian and Norse gods, Morgan le Fay, etc. He even has to fight the Devil at one point. Not some SF abstraction of Ultimate Evil, but a huge red guy with horns who possesses people.
Nothing but a supernatural explanation works for any of these, despite the pseudo-science babble that often accompanies them. Even some of the doctor’s more technologically-oriented villains have fantasy/horror origins, e.g. the Cybermen are golems (and their one weakness being gold sounds to me more like folklore than science),
None of which excuses the finales to most series of the revived Doctor Who (I haven’t seen season 5 yet), which to me go beyond deus ex machina (which would be irritating enough) and outright push the reset button: “It’s okay folks – nobody really got hurt and all the dead people are alive again now!”
Apart from the sheer frustration factor, which for me is akin to a chess player insisting on taking something back they did five moves ago and replaying the game from that point, it’s sheer cowardice. If you’re going to introduce something shocking and terrible into your story, you should be willing to deal with the consequences of it.
@Pearce – I think you’re pretty much on the money here wrt it being non-SF. I think that’s a pretty crucial step to understanding what works about the show and what doesn’t work.
In terms of the season-ending wraps… I’m a bit inclined to agree in terms of a personal preference, I’m just not quite willing to chalk it up to “they don’t know what they’re doing”, but rather a deliberate stylistic feature.