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six things that bugged me about heroes S3.E01
So last night was the season premiere of the third season of Heroes, a show that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with, albeit one that is increasingly slipping towards "hate." I should preface this by saying that even when the show was at its best I always thought of it as little more than junk food. Even junk food has its hierarchy, however, and by the end of the second season the show had slipped in my mind from being somewhere around "basket of cheese fries" to somewhere around "fistful of jimmies." The third season is being promoted as a return to form, but as I settled down to watch it I sent out a Twitter update predicting that it would make me cringe with dismay at least six times. Did it? They didn't rely on their most aggravating plot device, that of having major characters run into one another at random, but there were still some serious annoyances. Roughly in order from most to least "cringeworthy": 1. Hiro's unwillingness to travel backwards in time still doesn't really make sense. Every time-travel narrative, from Primer to Back to the Future, inevitably touches on the perils of messing with the past, and those perils are real enough that we could reasonably expect a character to be reluctant to do it. But a blanket refusal under all circumstances strikes me as a Lazy Writer's solution to the problem of having invented a character who is too powerful. We should be able to expect that where the reward for going backwards is great enough (or the risk of not going backwards is severe enough) that the temptation to do it should at least be acknowledged. In this episode, Hiro takes a secret formula out of a safe only to have it stolen out of his hands by a gamine with super-speed, yet he never even considers going back in time to stop himself from taking it out of the safe. Recall that it is only Hiro's willingness to bear messages into the past in Season One that allows the other heroes to "save the world." 2. Mohinder's current plotline is cribbed directly from David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. Crawling up the wall, amping up the sugar intake, becoming hyper-masculinized and -sexualized, and then... observing hideous transformations in the bathroom mirror! If you're going to be derivative, The Fly is pretty good material, but it's such a lift that it smack of laziness. 3. Giant shockwave that destroys Future Tokyo. Pretty cool-looking effect, but isn't that really only one degree removed from the "giant shockwave that destroys Future New York" that governed Season One? Come to think of it, Season Two's "apocalyptic plague that destroys Future New York" was also only one degree removed from Season One. It's like they're using a broken combinatoric wheel to write this stuff. At this point, I'd love to see a season from this show that wasn't based on Having to Avert an Apocalyptic Future. 4. Nathan's "religious conversion" at this stage seems... random? This strikes me as the kind of thing you do when you aren't sure what to do with a character. It would bug me less if the Heroes writers weren't already struggling with writing consistent characters. 5. Subtitles have Hiro say "discrete" when they mean to have him say "discreet." In reference to detectives. "These detectives are very discrete." As in they do not blur together into a single detective. 6. Usage of standard-issue black street thugs and introduction of a black "Level 5" supervillain doesn't improve the show's track record in terms of African-American representation. There are a few more, but those are some of the big ones. Should I stop watching this show? Labels: heroes, media commentary, rants, writing
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
provoking meaning (part two): excess information
Okay, so I'm following up on my last post here, which dealt with Henry Jenkins' assertion that (let's recap): "To be marketable ... new cultural works will have to provoke and reward meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe." There's four traits in that sentence: eventually, I'd like to give sustained thought to all four, but for today I want to focus in on that "excess information" one. Let's start with a given: fandom is a culture that processes information pretty swiftly and intensely (especially now that it has the ability to very closely watch / rewatch / analyze television episodes in DVD or media-file formats, and the ability to share the results of this "close viewing" via the Internet). It would stand to reason, then, that giving this culture extra information to process, then, is beneficial: there's a certain kind of pleasure that can be taken from, say, tracking down all the occurences of the "Lost numbers." And yet... there's a problem here. There's a certain point at which this kind of self-referencing can begin to snarl up the narrative. If the information we're talking about ends up directly referenced and heavily weighted in the show (in the case of Lost, this process begins in Episode 18, "Numbers"), then it can't truly be said to be "excess," as Jenkins would have it: it becomes one of the mysteries that the show then has a duty to solve. Compare this, for argument's sake, against the Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers (1988). In this film—I'll just quote the Wikipedia entry—"the numbers one to one hundred appear in order, sometimes seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters." If you know this, it's fun to watch the film with this in mind, but it functions strictly on a formal layer: the characters never comment on it, it never attains the status of mystery (or even a diegetic occurence, for that matter). If Lost were taking that sort of approach with the occurrence and re-occurence of the numbers, it might function as a fun sort of game (whether that's appropriate for Lost's supernatural-adventure genre is another question entirely). But blowing it up into high significance (having Hurley repeatedly exclaim "The numbers are bad!" in the first season's finale, for instance) drives up the interest in having a narrative explanation for what may be functioning as a formal device. Uh oh. This is a situation, I would argue, that is actually not possible to resolve in a way that will provide audience satisfaction, and the Lost producers seem content to throw it into the heap of things "explained" by the all-purpose "fate" excuse. This problem was already beginning to reveal its intractability over a year ago, when producer Damon Lindelof said, w/r/t the question of the numbers: "I think that that question will never, ever be answered. I couldn't possibly imagine [how we would answer that question]. We will see more ramifications of the numbers and more usage of the numbers, but it boggles my mind when people ask me, 'What do the numbers mean?'" Hey, man, don't blame us: you're the ones who raised the question in the first place. (Postscript: I'm worrying that Heroes is going to make this exact same mistake with occurrences of their recurring symbol, referenced now as a diegetic occurence a couple of times. It appears in some places that can be explained without having to rely on "fate" or "synchronicity" as a pattern-making force, and other places where it can't. (They may be building themselves an "out" by the fact that the symbol itself references actions of God made manifest in the world, although it would be a touch unusual for a show that's been at least partially Eastern-focused to shift to an explicitly [?] Judeo-Christian orientation. But this is feeling like too much digression, and so I'll stop here.)) Labels: fandom, heroes, lost, media commentary, narrative
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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