The Queen
Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I like stories about Kings and Queens. It doesn't seem like I should but I do. Maybe it's because only constitutionally free citizens can really get any meaning out of the rise of Prince Hal or the fall of Lear. One certainly doesn't imagine Elizabeth the First (or, currently, say, King Abdullah of Jordan) getting much out of them--Shakespeare's kings are written for merchants, actors and pimps. They're democratic kings, willing to abase themselves in greasepaint before the public.

I just got back from seeing Hellen Mirren portray Elizabeth II, and though my mind's not blown I had a pretty good time. It takes place during the week after Diana's death in 1997, and it's novel to see contemporary queenship shown so explicitly--it has the anachronistic effect of science fiction. Yet how could it be mind blowing, really? There is no raging or weeping or any other kind of big-money payoff. The epigraph quotes Henry IV--"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"--but in this case all the Falstaffs are in court--quite untroubled--and all the princes are out of it. In the scene where Tony Blair stands up and defends the Queen against the snide Labour party insiders, he is violently asserting his authority over the Queen's existence and not the other way around. The movie serenely skewers the Royal family, portraying them as lightweight dolts, with Helen Mirren giving an excellent, frosty performance as the Queen dolt, reduced rather than aggrandized by the falseness of her eventual public openness. What these royals are first, besides being funny, is boring. She is perhaps the first English Queen ever to be portrayed as such: someone powerful and removed enough to be absolutely mindless and without real qualities at all. She neither rages nor falls nor really weeps, and can tell us absolutely nothing about our roles in a democracy. The Queen is sort of like a Masterpiece Theatre Ubu Roi, abstractedly destructive of anything unregimented, yet maximally genteel, and requiring tea.

This movie actually wallows in the language and manners of democracy like a pig in shit, yet it assumes that the democracy Elizabeth is learning to love has something to do with loosening up the old sash and chilling out with Elton John at Princess Di's funeral. As merchants and pimps we can rage and weep all we want, but we'll never be invited to do that.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 5:07 PM, ,  


I know when someone knows their Buffy
Tuesday, October 17, 2006

I'll say this: I know when someone knows their Buffy or not--anyone who loves it has explored it thoroughly for subtext, and anyone who hasn't can't really be a fan. On the other hand, I never know where someone who's quoting DeToqueville is coming from, since its so easy to pin the tail on that particular donkey and get a prize out of it.

A lot of people say they like the third season of Buffy best, and I have to admit that it's tighter than the fourth season and the seasons preceding it. That is to say, it's a lot more like a 22-hour movie, with plot turns and misdirection sliding into place like the functions of an intuitive computer application. It reformulated an element central to the Buffy universe; that anyone can be demonised or find themselves gone over to demonhood simply by working too hard, or too unhappily, as with Faith the Slayer's unhappy plot arc, or by a simple twist of fate, as in the alternate universe in which the shy, vulnerable Willow has long since been turned into a neck-licking vampiress. (Incidentally, non-military alternate universes are my favorite fantasy staple, as per the Chris Claremont X-Men, of which Joss Whedon is apparently a fan, because they fulfill a need for comparison we rarely get but deeply need.)

On the other hand, the fourth season seems to be everyone's least favorite--all the familiar landscapes have been blown to dust along with the familiar and handy school library, in which at least 70 per cent of the first three seasons were held and which served as the show's set. Buffy goes on to college, a holy grail of middle-class striving one step removed from the forced microworld of high-school. There, she walks into a library far too vast to ever be considered private enough for arcane research. She suffers a loss of identity and becomes vulnerable to more obvious charms than action and adventure, like boys who sleep with her and then don't call back. It's an alternate world she can't back out of. The writers obviously struggled during this chapter of the show's existence to keep the show on track, but in uprooting the world of the show they made a decision that bolstered the show's strengths. Plus, Season 4 brought us the best show of the Season, "Hush," a beautifully gaudy, affected spectacle in which all the characters lose their voices and find themselves reacting to a silent Mernau-scape somewhere between Nosferatu and Sunrise (which is a great idea if you think about it, and something that would never get done on the big screen unless John Maddin were involved). Plus the cast--and Whedon, the director--must have had a great time doing it, because it's palpably there on the little screen.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:17 PM, ,  


Melvins

Saw The Melvins in Hoboken last night. Big Business opened for them--they're a decent younger band who combine Melvins-y sludge with some of the kniveyness of Judas Priest. They're solid citizens all around. But when the Melvins came on, they did not take the stage as a seperate entity but actually incorporated the younger band, oozing on to the stage like a virus attacking a host body, and suddenly there were two drummers pounding in harmony, and King Buzzo was there, and the odd thing was that he looked like the spitting image of the singer for Big Business, but older and more ravaged, like a golem overseeing every club they he ever played in the twenty years he's been around, and reminding the lead singer for Big Business that this, too, shall pass. And suddenly the band just sounded sick and double-headed and wonderful, like a glow-in-the-dark bumblebee superglued to a human skull.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:04 PM, ,  


Television
Sunday, October 15, 2006

It's hard to keep up with television. Even the bad shows require complete immersion to be understood. You can't just jump on the ride in the middle and say you've seen a show. "I haven't seen it seen it" is a TV formulation, a way of saying you've glanced at it but don't understand it. Anyway, I'm not keeping up with television very well. I've never seen Lost and I haven't seen seen 24. I hear they've both got all the excellent post-millennial angst we're not really getting from the movies these days.

I have excuses: I work nights and don't have cable. Plus, it's hard to find people to talk to about the medium, even people who like it, who don't also find it necessary to laugh it off, so that nothing gets done in sharing it with others. I'm halfway through the entire run of Buffy right now, and well inside of season 2 of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I guess I'm watching about 4 or 5 episodes of television a day, up from the last five years which were a starvation diet of zero-TV-watched. Now I'm looking at other shows I might have missed: Veronica Mars? Carnivale? and wondering when this fascination is going to run its course, and whether or not it will lead anywhere. Am I wasting my time?

With serialization, nothing is sure. Maybe that's why television is the only medium that satisfies right now. That, and video games--about which, more later--are the only media that have zero anxiety about their status as well-made objects, ignoring the fine sentiment of novels and the vacuous iconoclasm of contemporary art. I've gone pre-modern in my reading as well, and get a lot more satisfaction from viewing today's world through the fractured lens of Sir Thomas Malory than through the well-vetted theses of John Updike or Jonathan Safran Foer. The new Hardyment biography doesn't seem to be anything too fresh, but it's well-written and brings the more homely elements of Malory's 15th century world to life, and reading Le Morte D'Arthur next to T.H. White's The Once and Future King is a great education in what happens when you bring ancient pre-modern bloodrites into the modern world. Here is Malory on the "noble" art of Jousting, written during the English civil war: "And if so be ye can descrive what ye bear, ye are worthy to bear the arms. As for that, said Sir Tristram, I will answer you; this shield was given me, not desired, of Queen Morgan le Fay; and as for me, I can not descrive these arms, for it is no point of my charge, and yet I trust to God to bear them with worship." And here is White, after World War One, on the same subject: "But Sir Ector...said that the battle of Cercy had been won on the playing fields of Camelot. This made Merlyn so furious that he gave Sir Ector rheumatism two nights running before he relented."

The point is not that these little nuggets are especially great or central to the art of the stories which incorporate them, but rather that they are revealing asides, worked over, contradicted and reaffirmed by their authors through the process of long-haul serialization, and further undermined by the retelling, at a remove of 400 years, of the same story by two authors. They are antithetical to the spirit of what we like to think of as great art but are more entertaining and affect us more in an uncertain time, when anything very certain is surely also very destructive. In this sense, the old saw about television telling the same old story over and over again seems more and more like a good thing.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:58 PM, ,  


Buffy
Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Buffy:A Big No and A Little Yes

The title story in Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners describes a television show called The Library. I'm led to believe that television in its original, Platonically perfected state would look something like The Library. Link writes:

This is one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves...Fox and the dashing-but-treacherous pirate-magician Two Devils are never played by the same actor twice, although in the twenty-third episode of The Library, the same woman played them both.


Jeremy, a character devoted to the show, "supposes that the casting could be perpetually confusing, but instead it makes your brain catch on fire. It's magical."

The Library's themes are death and resurrection, and require ornate episodic development. During one episode, Link writes, Prince Wing is turned into a teapot, crushed "into a hundred pieces", and buried in a cigar box. Later, when his friends dig the teapot out of the ground and resurrect Prince Wing, he "looked about a hundred years old, and as if maybe there were still a few pieces missing." He feels suddenly betrayed by his friend Fox, who resurrected him. "He stuffed a handful of moss and dirt into her mouth so she couldn't say anything, and then he accused her of plotting to murder Faithful Margaret by magic." He then kills Fox and runs off. The adolescents who watch the show are heartbroken but never less than impatient to find out when and in what way Fox will be resurrected in turn. They become inconsolable when a rumor spreads that Fox's death may be permanent.

Though extreme, this shares many similarities with my now-favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I suspect Link was a fan, too.

I know my fandom is a long way behind the curve. I never saw Buffy during the time that it aired. I gave it a shot after my friend Adam compared such-and-such episode to Antigone, but this was near the fifth season and I lost the thread about ten minutes in. Without the necessary immersion in backstory it looked like a lot of smart-mouthed kids talking about the top demon or the head vampire or something. Now that I've seen the first two seasons on DVD I'm turned around on the subject, averaging about three episodes a day, and a little helpless to the addiction. It's been more useful to me than anything I've read this year with the exception of the reissue of Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism and Charles Stross's Accelerando, about which more in the future.

There is a lot to be said about what has already been said about the show. The writing holds a balance between dark and light humor, and the near-rhythmic drumming of its singular one-to-one metaphor, the episode-to-episode equation of the demons which haunt teenaged life to the literal, dribbling kind, is as deliberate as can be expected but much, much smarter. The breaking of Angel's "curse" in the second-season episode, the one in which Buffy gives up her virginity only to find Angel the next morning literally and conclusively "fulfilled" and therefore without a soul, is handled with a great text, read by actors good at projecting vunerability and loss, and an incredible sensitivity for subtext. Everywhere layers of meaning--political, emotional, dramatic--lay crosshatched in complement by a writing staff and actors who understand what they're doing. David Borenanz, as Angel, knows whose point of veiw he's under, and plays it accordingly, switching from devil to savior to brooding lost soul as the lead Slayer's emotions turn him around for inspection.

Buffy is the best that episodic narrative can do this side of Dickens: better even than the entertainingly chickenhearted morality of The Sopranos or even Deadwood, which cannot help but congratulate themselves on the boldness of their beautifully rendered sins with blue ribbons and bluefaced quality aw-cting.

This isn't to say there aren't a few bum episodes; the Inca Mummy Girl episode from season one was pretty pointless. The point is, to nail it every single time would wring the pubescence from it. Later episodes may prove me wrong, but at least up to season three Buffy retains all the awkwardness of real stage fright and Grand Guignol rubber masks--adolescence to you and me--and acknowledges them in a way I can't see David Milch ever doing, with all his brilliant, macho Shakspearianism. Deadwood's violence is poised and supposed real. There is no mistaking the violence in Buffy for anything but catharsis, and Buffy is above all, even above its metaphorical dexterity, as cathartic as laughter.

What is best about Buffy is the very real act of exorcism it performs on the pop culture of the twentieth century. It resuscitates the weird twentieth-century obsession with death by and against the young, from Leopold and Loeb to Charlie Starkweather and Columbine, from Rebel Without A Cause to They Drive by Night, from Freddy to Jason to Gangster rap, from Ypres to Baghdad, and posits a hyperkinetic feminine response, fists and feet hurtling in a great, clarifying NO to all that death, to corpses that walk unredeemed, to the specifically American notion that life always exists on a pencil-thin line only the strong can walk and outside of which all forms of death are deserved. I can't believe it existed concurrently with September 11th.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:51 PM, ,