One-Way Street

Worldmaking and Showrunning: The End of Game of Thrones

So I watched the series finale of Game of Thrones on Sunday night. Watching the finale it occurred to me that GoT, like all limited series, ends both too early and too late. Game of Thrones didn't end when it should have because of the differences in its source material and the imperatives of television production.

 

Adapted from George R.R. Martin's novels, GoT started as the history of an entire world and ended with a reformed libertine dwarf sobbing in front of his brother, "You were the only one who treated me well." At some earlier point in the body count GoT reached the limits of its known world and became a melodrama of interpersonal relationships--with dragons. Perhaps not coincidentally, somewhere around season five GoT switched from a literary adaptation to an original TV production--in other words, from novelistic worldmaking to costume and set design for celebrity actors.

 

This isn't to say that the novel is a superior medium to television. I want to suggest merely that GoT extended its story beyond what Martin's initial premise could support. The series finale made choices that made sense given developments from the last few seasons but were unsatisfying dramatically. Tyrion is arrested yet again, but he doesn't suffer his long-overdue execution. Experience has softened his self-interest, so he's thrust, almost literally, into a position in which he speaks for the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Tyrion argues for Bran's ascent to the throne, even though Bran is a flimsy vehicle for such power and narrative weight. In effect, Tyrion posits that storytellers are ultimately more important than the people, which is consistent with Martin's original vision of the series but inconsistent with the ways in which the showrunners have developed the female characters, especially the Stark sisters. His creepiness and lack of charisma aside, Bran is a disappointing king because he isn't a storyteller. Rather, he's a repository of narrative details which he dispenses whenever the narrative wheels threaten to grind to a halt. A novelist would have handled these problems through a third-person narrator. A television series needs a character to provide the same information. Bran is sort of the hand of the showrunners. Ever the narrative functionary, at the conclusion Bran was there to brush aside unresolved conflicts.

 

Storytelling is important, and so is television production. The narrative sped up to television pace up once the series moved beyond Martin's novels. At some point in season five GoT transitioned fully to television production and, consequently, to spectacle in place of text. In the finale we saw lengthy scenes of Jon and Arya being whisked offstage with barely a word. There's no more meaning to be gleaned from these scenes. The characters have nothing left to say.

 

The hastiness of the last season and the last episode in particular goes against the essential pleasures of long narratives and continually partial knowledge they offer. In the endgame of GoT Cersei was clearly only a placeholder, her power arising not from change but from delay. Pretty much all she does in season eight is stare our from a balcony, waiting, like us, for a just ruler to appear to bring the story to an end. Daenerys' mad strafing of King's Landing in the penultimate episode moved the series toward this ending, but she never really explains herself, having been consumed by her passions so her lover can be freed from his. She survives only long enough to bellow out her tyrannical plans before meeting her inevitable end.

 

Westros is spared another bloodthirsty (and colorful) tyrant. Instead,  GoT resolved itself into fantasy rather than tragedy, in spectacle rather than mimesis. Sure, there could be a sequel that follows Arya to whatever is west of Westros (or Restros, as someone joked on Twitter), but updating the adventure narrative with its exoticism may prove too great a challenge for HBO's showrunners. It would also be expensive to shoot. 

 

Now that it's over, what to watch next? How about impeachment hearings?

They Don't Talk About Movies Like They Used To

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, has made a movie. According to Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, Chase would have been better off spending his time, say, repainting his living room. There's no way Not Fade Away (still above) will have the cultural impact of The Sopranos because, O'Hehir says, no one really cares about movies anymore.

On the eve of the start of the New York Film Festival, O'Hehir declares,

Film culture, at least in the sense people once used that phrase, is dead or dying. Back in what we might call the Susan Sontag era, discussion and debate about movies was often perceived as the icy-cool cutting edge of American intellectual life. Today it’s a moribund and desiccated leftover that’s been cut off from ordinary life, from the mainstream of pop culture and even from what remains of highbrow or intellectual culture. While this becomes most obvious when discussing an overtly elitist phenomenon like the NYFF, it’s also true on a bigger scale. Here are the last four best-picture winners at the Oscars: "The Artist," "The King’s Speech," "The Hurt Locker," "Slumdog Millionaire." How much time have you spent, cumulatively, talking about those movies with your friends?

O'Hehir's claim about film culture is not new, although he does a better job of saying what film culture is now--mostly celebrity gossip and deal analysis. However, film culture has changed since the Susan Sontag era because film's place in upper reaches of the cultural hierarchy is now secure. Sontag wrote during a period when the boundary between high and popular culture was under contentious debate. The cinema was one topic in that broader cultural debate. Outside of a small international coterie of film buffs, few people in 1962 considered films of any kind an art form on par with opera or painting. Now the NYFF is hosted at the Lincoln Center. Like literature, movies are respectable enough to have people actively avoid seeing the best examples of them.

Unlike in Sontag's day, when the cinema was part of a larger reconsideration of cultural value, discussion and debate about film has refocused on questions unique to film. The dominant topic of discussion about contemporary cinema is the the nature of film in the digital age. The stakes of the debate are actually higher now than they were in the 1960s. It's simply that the questions are relevant to cinema by itself.

As for the comparison between cable television drama and international cinema, of course more people will talk about Breaking Bad than Song Fang's film Memories Look at Me. The audience for the former already exists, while the audience for the latter needs to be created. The AMC series enjoys vastly superior advantages in distribution, publicity, and production budget. Fang's film has to compete with thousands of international films for theatrical and DVD distribution, not to mention critical attention. Breaking Bad has been carefully placed in television's one percent. In its time slot it has to not fail. Its audience is already there, waiting for it.

On the Shore

I don't know why this is happening--summer doldrums? boredom with summer movies? a desperate hope that the show has developed culturally redeeming values?--but a surprising number of critics are watching Jersey Shore really closely right now. The Atlantic gathers together some recent critical takes on the series. The most interesting take, to my mind, comes frm Slate's Dana Vachon, who interprets the show as symptomatic of the state of the economy.

We were watching Jersey Shore, filled with the sort of people we'd deny ever knowing pre-Madoff (lifeworn bikini models, drivers of Clinton-era Hondas, Ronnie Magro) but couldn't get enough of post-. The cast, having apparently sat out the prosperity, were powerfully able to show the rest of us how to go on living now that it was over.

La Femme Nikita's People

The Egyptian uprising was noteworthy for, among other things, the ways in which Barack Obama had to tiptoe around the question of the fate of Hosni Mubarak. Obama called the uprising a legitimate expression of popular opinion and urged the Mubarak government to acknowledge their grievances. This is not quite what the protesters in Tahrir Square wanted. They denied the very legitimacy of the government. Obama eventually came to call for a "lawful" transition, although it was never clear under which legal framework a transition could take place. The Egyptian constitution was designed to ensure Mubarak continued his Pharaohic rule indefinitely.

Of course, Obama's ambivalent position was hardly new. Every American president since the beginning of the Cold War has had to hold his nose while voicing support for some venal tyrant under siege from his own people. Yet many people on both sides of the political divide were furious at what they regarded as Obama's morally compromised position on the Egyptian uprising.

It's been the job of spy novelists to educate us on the nasty subtleties of superpower geopolitics. Everything you need to know about Cold War (and post-Cold War) ethics can be found in John le Carré's novels. His heroes struggle to maintain personal and professional integrity while facing conflicting personal, institutional, and ideological loyalties.

Unfortunately, the spy genre has been taken over by television. PopMatters' Kit MacFarlane shows how much American TV has ruined the genre. Instead of exploring the gray zones of geopolitics, American TV is

skirting around the US’ (and its allies’) willingness to outsource moral and democratic transgressions to those off-shore ethical dead-zones and rely on the benefits of morally bankrupt rules, although rarely to the point that it truly compromises or muddies the foundations of a show or its lead characters. Reactionary drivel like Law & Order replicates the arguments, but always from a safe and sensationalised distance, while shows like 24 and The Unit still propagandise about tough, steely, always-right American men being all that hold the world together, in spite of a general array of evil-doers and idiots (i.e., anyone who disagrees with them about absolutely anything).

MacFarlane claims you have to go back to the late 1990s to find a television drama that captures the ethical complexity of the literary genre. He argues that the 1990s Canadian series La Femme Nikita was uneven but, "at its best, Nikita created a dour and miserable world of moral compromise and moral stasis that works as a strong antidote for the trivial nonsense that most spy shows present."

MacFarlane has a detailed analysis of the series' most representative ethical dilemma, and it's worth reading. I would only add that I think violence is as important a factor in the spy genre as loyalty. What the spy genre allows readers and viewers to experience is the disavowal of the results of violence. In geopolitics violence is used for us, but we can assume an ethical position as if it's being used against us. Meanwhile, it can't be traced back to us.

To put it in the terms of the uprisings in the Middle East, we can cheer on the protesters in their struggle against tyranny, knowing there's always a George Smiley to plunge into the murky aftermath, and he will suffer for us.

My 2010

Since I started this blog in 2006, I've concluded every year with a review of the year as I saw it as a blogger. I don't do "best of" lists. Rather, I write about those books, buildings, movies, recordings that will stay with me.

This morning, just before I sat down to write the entry for 2010, I had two experiences that seemed to capture how the world has changed this year, and how it will be different in the coming year.

I was playing with Google's Ngram Viewer, launched this morning, when I was called into an emergency meeting. In my day job I manage web development projects for a major publisher. Marketing executives called the meeting to inform me that the project I'd been managing since last February, a massive redesign of every website in the company, was being put on indefinite hold. When I return to the office on December 28th, I will start another project: building apps for mobile devices, starting with the iPad.

That my company was leaving behind, or at least de-emphasizing, the desktop Internet was very significant. The iPad launch was the latest step in a general trend that became more prominent this year. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are placing more complex data sets literally in the hands of individuals. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, these same devices are generating data about how we read, listen, watch, talk, write, walk, drive, run, and fly. All of this data is being transmitting in real time, stored, and processed. Ubiquitous computing, as these technologies are known, are changing how we see the world--and how we shape it.

One of the highlights of the year for me was working with Iker Gil and the MAS Context team. Through them I encountered projects that expanded my understanding of what design can and should do. For example, Belinda Tato and her team at Ecosistema Urbano built an ecoboulevard in a bleak mixed-use development on the outskirts of Madrid. The "eco" part of the project impressed me less than the "boulevard" part. Ecosistema Urbano created an elegant design addressing a complex set of social, technical, and political problems. A smaller-scale yet similarly ingenious projects was featured in the ENERGY issue of MAS Context. Elizabeth Redmond, founder and president of Piezoelectricity, has created the POWERleap, a device that generates electrictity when people walk across it.

The POWERleap (at left, from MAS Context) and Ecosistema Urbano are both products of a way of looking at cities as complex systems made up of interlocking data sets. A single POWERleap unit doesn't generating a meaningful amount of electricity by itself, but they can be dispersed in enough places and linked together to contribute significantly to a power grid. The design philosophy of Ecosistema Urbano defines the city as a complex ecosystem in which no one structure can be separated out from its environmental, social, and technological context.

The ecosystem metaphor reflects a new way of seeing cities. In my fumbling way, I was making this point in my contribution to MAS Context's INFORMATION issue. While researching the essay I was struck by how urban planners and architects have had to rely on imprecise and static data to make design choices. With ubiquitous computing technologies a city bus, a gas meter in a private home, and a middle-schooler texting her friends can become data points contributing to a comprehensive view of a metropolis, or a single city block. Furthermore--and this is the real breakthrough--it's possible for planners and designers to see how their choices alter behavioral patterns.

The implications of this are enormous. For example, in 2010, for the first time, it has become technologically feasible to craft an advertising message for a single person--that's you, dear reader. I work in an eMarketing department, and we're just now coming to terms with this possibility.

Until you get your own private Internet on your mobile device, you can use your iPad to read 500 billion words written since 1800 on Google's Ngram Viewer. You can enter any combination of words and see how often they appear over time. For instance, if you want evidence of post-structuralism's decline, enter "Derrida, Foucault, Lacan" and see how mentions of all three figures have been in steady decline since 1998 or so.  I'm dubious about quantitative approaches to criticism, as are others, but one thing is undeniable: they challenge how we see literature. According to Raymond Williams (in his invaluable Keywords) "literature" separated itself from "being literate" in the middle of the 18th century with the rise of professional writers such as Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson. Since then, literature has been tied up with a certain definition of authorship. However, unlike literature professors, machines can read everything available to them. In the data warehouse, literature is just another data subset. An author is no longer a source of meaning. He or she is little more than a keyword for a search. American literature becomes the entirety of imaginative writing produced (and scanned) by Americans. Trust me, the Ngram Viewer technology isn't just being developed to analyze writing; the totality of image and object production will be searchable too, and very soon. Then the cinema will be Hollywood every cellphone video ever shot--a cinema without directors. Architecture will be every building in the world, from dog houses to supertalls--architecture without architects.

Of course, buildings have been erected for millennia without any involvement from a licensed architect, but architecture as a discipline, with a set of rules and a history, has always revolved around a select number of practitioners and a limited number of buildings. The same holds for the cinema. It's one thing to consider Robert A.M. Stern's use of pilasters or Jean-Luc Godard's jump cuts, but it's quite another thing to study the pilaster in every building built in post-World War II America or every discontinuous edit in France since 1964.

My blogging practice, I'm starting to see, consists mainly of monitoring data streams. There's a literature data stream, a film data stream, and an architecture one. Plus, I keep an eye out for anything else that seems interesting.  Here's what the streams have told me in 2010:

This year isn't the year of the ebook, but next year might be. LEEDS certification and reality television have become fixtures in the culture, so people aren't as preoccupied with them as they were in the past. The Social Network and Freedom are this year's most important film and novel, respectively. Everyone hates Daniel Libeskind. Herta Müller's Nobel Prize award in 2009 was widely denounced, but she's drawn international attention to German and Middle European literature. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is this year's Cristian Mungiu. Everyone wants an iPad, but not because they want to watch feature-length films on them. If Zsa Zsa Gabor was famous for being famous, Snooki and Kim Kardashian represent a new kind of celebrity type: famous because they shouldn't be famous. Philip Roth has become a national treasure, which is a weird place for him. 3D films and Sarah Palin are still niche products, and current indicators are that they will remain that way, but that could change. The Shanghai World Expo was the most important architectural event in 2010. American independent film is in serious trouble. Jeanne Gang has emerged as a major architect. Francis Ford Coppola's artistic comeback is never going to happen. But the city of Detroit's might.

Keywords

Roger Ailes presses all the buttons all at once, starting with Jon Stewart ("liberal," "atheist," "socialist," "Norman Thomas," "crazy") before moving swiftly on to NPR:

They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.

Howard Kurtz comments delicately, "trotting out such Third Reich rhetoric seems, shall we say, disproportionate to the situation." True enough. It's just one keyword after another. To become a "24-hour politico, pundit, perpetual panic conflictinator," as Stewart puts it, all one has to do is mix and match the keywords, endlessly.

Fun Friday: The End of the World as We Know It Edition

It's now been scientifically proven that the Internet totally destroys your attention span, so I will keep this Fun Friday post as brief as possible because I may have already lost your attention. 

You see, Web surfing actually rewires your brain so that we can't help but focus on crap instead of, say, on an entire Dickens novel or any of the biographies of his overstuffed, antic, distracted life. Some people say having the attention span of a firefly allows us to use up all the time people used to devote to watching television, which, as we all know, broadcasts nothing but crap. Even when they show something worthwhile, television networks manage to reduce it to crap, such as when Fox News edited out the applause during Obama's speech at West Point. Our attention spans will be further reduced once we all start wearing computer screens sown into our clothes in a few years. Then we can use the time we used to spend watching Lost to Google ourselves obsessively. Freed from the constraints imposed by desktops, laptops, even iPads, you can roam around like a flâneur as your location is geo-tagged and mapped so that the surface chaos of the wireless crowds reveals deeper structures. 

As advanced reproductive technologies become more pervasive, inducing new levels of distraction, buildings will accommodate our eccentric gazes. We may overlook little gems of world literature and lose interest in questions of how we see other cultures through the cinema. We won't notice that the end of the world as we know it may already be here.

Fun Friday: Oscars Edition

In this week's edition of Fun Friday, two praise-worthy decisions from unlikely sources and what to read--and avoid reading--about the Oscars this weekend. 

Cook County Hospital saved from wrecking ball: Chicago has a long history of destroying its architectural landmarks, most recently the Walter Gropius-designed Michael Reese Hospital campus. The fate of the old Cook County Hospital, a Beaux-Arts pile on the scruffy West Side, was in the hands of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, who for years had been determined to tear it down. But last Tuesday, to everyone's surprise, the board approved a plan to turn the old hospital into a medical office building. One the eve of a contentious vote on health care reform, the Cook Country hospital is a reminder of a more humane era in American healthcare, when there was still a sense of shared civic responsibility for the health and well-being of ordinary people.

Walmart isn't (quite so) evil anymore: With its PX-style big box stores and remorseless economic logic, Walmart has long been a symbol of corrosive American giganticism. Only the Hummer (company motto: "Yes, you can become an even bigger asshole!") carried more toxic sociopolitical baggage than Walmart. Then the Atlantic's Corby Kummer noticed that Walmart now sells a very credible line of locally-grown produce. “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart,” as one dedicated locavore puts it. It's as if Dick Cheney suddenly became a vegan.

Slate at the Oscars: I've always been of two minds about Slate. I like their cultural critics and their political commentary is better informed than Salon's, although it isn't as smart as the New Republic's. Slate's chatty model, on the other hand, also lends itself to useless fluff like today's "Help! Is It Okay to Sleep With the Nanny?" feature. Lately I've noticed that Slate has been infected with Googleitis. No, I don't mean tracking your keystrokes and selling the data to the CIA; rather, Slate has picked up Google's habit of launching more features than it has the resources or the attention span to maintain and develop.

Slate's annual Oscars coverage is usually pretty good, but this year it's sloppy and predictable. Every year they have somebody predict the Best Picture winner based on Oscar history, and this year history points to Inglorious Basterds, according to Grady Hendrix. Trouble is, Basterds is exactly the kind of film that doesn't win Best Picture. If you're looking for an upset contender, the smart money is on The Hurt Locker, primarily because of the changes in voting procedures introduced this year, about which Hendrix seems unaware. (Hendrix also cites a 1989 study on the economic value of an Oscar nomination. That study is out of date.) Another regular feature of Slate's Oscar coverage is the allegedly brave contrarian takedown of a well-liked Best Picture nominee. This year it's Up in the Air. While this film has its problems, it doesn't deserve to be Dennis Lim's straw man. 

One-Way Street at the Oscars: Sunday is my daughter's third birthday, so we will be busy with birthday festivities during the day, which will include a visit to the Chicago Children's Museum before they bury it. As for the Oscars broadcast that evening, I will avoid the red carpet part of the ceremony, partly because it's boring, and partly because I've always found Joan Rivers horrifying--I've always thought of her as the daughter Gollum would have had if he'd settled down with a Na’vi bride on some collagen-rich planet. This year we have to be extra vigilant about little Jillian's exposure to celebrities after she recently spotted Paris Hilton in a dentist office magazine and declared, "I want to be her." Once the stars are settled in their seats, however, I will tune in and live blog the ceremonies right here.

What's Happened to Cultural Discourse?

In the Conversations section of the New York Times, David Brooks asks Dick Cavett, once known as "the thinking man's talk show host," the provocative and wide ranging question, What’s Happened to Cultural Discourse?

Brooks says there are plenty of political chat shows but virtually no cultural or sociological chat shows on television. "You can turn on the TV at any moment and find 5 shows debating the Tea Party movement," he writes, "but almost none debating changing parental norms, changing definitions of masculinity, etc. It’s hard to recall the last time a novel generated a national discussion, or even a history book."

Cavett responds by saying that networks need ratings, and for talk shows big names mean big audiences. This may have been true when The Dick Cavett Show was still trying to catch up to The Tonight Show in the early 1970s, but in the age of cable television and microcasting, some other factors must be at work. Besides, as Brooks points out, "This imbalance also holds outside of TV — on blogs, op-ed pages and so on." With plenty of bandwidth available for cultural chat, programming executives simply bypass cultural issues as inessential, cutting to the chase of what they imagine everyone is really interested in: their faction's prospects for taking over the world.

Brooks tries to link the absence of cultural discourse in the public sphere to the Americans' refusal to engage in a "national project." This thread, potentially the most interesting, goes nowhere, possibly because Brooks doesn't set it up very well. He implies that without a national dialogue on cultural issues we can't subscribe to a common political goal.

I suspect he's onto something; too bad Cavett wasn't up to the task of continuing the thread. At the same time, I think there's already a national consensus on cultural issues, but it's an entirely phony consensus. There's a broad consensus on American popular culture: Avatar, the Super Bowl, American Idol and so on. A national debate arose around Avatar as a political allegory, but these kinds of conversations are rare.

American Idol is a more interesting case. The show sparks intense debate about the merit of its contestants. The show's currency is opinion, just like political talk shows on its corporate cousin, Fox News. The difference is that American Idol is entertainment--something unreal, frivolous, merely pleasurable. Fox News purports to be about the real, the consequential discussions about American life. In fact, Glen Beck and The O'Reilly Factor need American Idol, that exuberant exorcise in phony American populism, to appear serious and consequential. So that all viewers are clear about what's fictive and what's real Fox even keeps its entertainment and news entities separate. Interestingly, a third Fox enterprise, its business channel, is doing poorly, possibly because, from a business perspective, the Fox News looks like a purveyor of politically-driven fantasy, something American Idol never would have revealed.

In a way Brooks is wrong about the paucity of cultural debate on television and in the public sphere as a whole. There's all kinds of debate about it. The E! channel is devoted exclusively to cultural issues, usually expressed in terms of celebrity gossip and matters of style. Of course, E! is utterly vapid, and that's precisely the point. On television culture must be empty and unreal so that furious discussions of ideology may appear real and consequential.

The Digi-Novel

Another new publishing model has emerged.

Anthony Zuiker, the executive producer of the ubiquitous CSI television series, has announced the launching of what he calls a "digi-novel," which is a bound book, in this case a crime novel called Level 26, with "cyber-bridges" every 20 pages. The cyber-bridges are short online films linked to the story, but Zuiker says you can skip them if you like. He's billed the digi-novel as a breakthrough in convergence, but the experience truly converges only on a device that doesn't exist yet except in a spider hole in the Apple development labs: the Apple tablet. Otherwise, you have to switch back and forth between a book (or an ebook reader) and a PC.

Despite its name, Zuiker doesn't see the digi-novel as the future of the novel, but as the future of television:

Every TV show in the next five, 10 years will have a comprehensive microsite or website that continue the experience beyond the one-hour television to keep engaging viewers 24/7. . . Just watching television for one specific hour a week ... that's not going to be a sustainable model going forward.

The digi-novel is less innovative and elegant than the projects in development at Vook, but Zuiker has hit upon a radical idea: The book rescuing television from the short attention spans the latter exacerbated.