The Perils of Biopics: Life in Squares and Testament of Youth

The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares, about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas.

I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much; Testament of Youth is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance. 

The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're almost always destined to fail. (Of course, "what we want" is a rhetorical flourish, a bit of fiction that would more accurately be expressed as "what I think, on reflection, that I want, at least now, and what I imagine, which is to say guess, what somebody other than myself might want". For the sake of brevity, I shall continue occasionally to use the phrase "what we want".)

Sense8

It's possible that Sense8, the new Netflix series from the Wachowskis, is the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. I don't know, because from the second episode it put its hooks into me so deeply that my critical, skeptical mind could not keep up. Certain elements of this show appealed to me so deeply that I was overwhelmed and had no ability to keep critical distance. Those elements were all related to a kind of queer ethic and queer vision, an approach to life that I've been a sucker for for decades, but have hardly ever seen expressed in a mainstream pop culture item.

First, I should note that even in my soggy, sappy, besotted love affair with this show, I couldn't miss some of its more obvious weaknesses. The major one for me is its globalized Americanism, well critiqued by Claire Light at The Nerds of Color in a post I pretty much entirely agree with, especially regarding the lost opportunity of a truly global production — imagine if, instead of writing it all themselves with J. Michael Straczynski, the Wachowskis had worked more as showrunners and farmed out the writing and maybe even directing to people from the actual places they depicted. I appreciate, for instance, that they reportedly liked Nairobi Half Life (I did, too!) and so had one of its producers, Tom Tykwer, direct the Nairobi scenes. But what if they'd brought in the actual Kenyan residents who wrote and directed Nairobi Half Life instead of just the German director who supported it but didn't really have a lot to do with its production? (For that matter, why not at least help Nairobi Half Life get broader distribution? I was lucky enough to see it when it played for one night in a nearby theatre, but as far as I know it's not available for home viewing in any way in the U.S.) But no. Though Sense8 is remarkable in many ways, it's still a product of big money, big egos, and a traditional production process. An anti-hegemonic pose is a whole lot easier to achieve than actually doing something to undermine hegemony.

Despite all this, I still fell hard for Sense8, and a lot of that has to do with a thought I had during the first episode: "I'm watching a sci-fi action soap opera kind of thing with queer people in it," and then later, "I'm watching a sci-fi action soap opera kind of thing that actually has more than a whiff of queer ethos to it."

False Detectives, True Discourses, and Excessive Exegeses

I got caught up in the hype, got curious, and found a way to watch True Detective. It's my kind of thing: a dark crime story/police procedural/serial killer whatzit. Also, apparently the writer of the show, Nic Pizzolatto, is aware of some writers I like, and even one I know, Laird Barron. (Hi Laird! You rock!) What struck me right from the beginning was the marvelous music, selected and produced by the great T-Bone Burnett, and the cinematography by Adam Arkapaw, who shot one of my favorite movies of recent decades, Snowtown, and also the very good film Animal Kingdom and the marvelous Jane Campion TV show Top of the Lake. Something about Arkapaw's sensitivity to color, light, and framing is pure mainlined heroin to my aesthetic pleasure centers. If I found out he'd shot a Ron Howard movie, I'd even watch that.

So many other people have discussed the show that there are now, I'm sure, nearly as many words written about it as there are words in Wikipedia. My own opinion of the show is of no consequence, though for the curious, here's what I said about it on Jeff VanderMeer's Facebook page, where some discussion was going on: "I liked the music, cinematography, most of the acting and directing, but thought the writing was all over the place from pretty good to godawful. And episodes 7 and 8 were like the Goodyear blimp deflating mid-air and landing in a bayou of drivel. (The stars, the stars! Use the Force, Rust! The Yellow King is YOUR FATHER!!! Oh, wait...)"

Much more interesting to me is the discourse around the show. Why did this show inspire such a fanatical response? Why did we feel compelled to respond? Zeitgeist, genre, etc. probably all play into it, but a fuller answer would require some time and research, particularly about how the show was marketed and where and how it first caught on. 

I'm enough of a pointy-headed academic to hope one day for a whole book about the construction of True Detective's appeal, something that doesn't neglect the material aspects: budgets, advertising, Twitter. I'd also like to see analyses of fan responses to mystery/crime shows — for instance, a comparison of fan speculations between seasons 2 and 3 of Sherlock and fan speculations about the mysteries of True Detective before the finale. The choice in season 3 of Sherlock to offer a relatively acceptable but not definitive answer to the mystery of how Sherlock lived was, I thought, quite smart, because even though the creators probably had (unlike Conan Doyle) an idea of an answer when they wrote Sherlock's "death", they realized by the time it came to write season 3 that no answer they could provide would be satisfying after two years of fan speculations.  

True Detective took a different approach, partly because they didn't realize viewers would react the way they did, or that the show would be subject to so much ratiocination, and so they gave a rather ridiculous and clichéd end to the mystery, one that made not a whole lot of sense and tied up only the most obvious of loose ends. Pizzolatto's interest was more in the characters than the plot, or perhaps not even the characters so much as the mood and the projection of an idea of complexity rather than any actual complexity. 

The Affect Effect: Notes on Sherlock and Hannibal

Last night, viewers in the US got to see what viewers in other parts of the world have already seen: the first episode of the third season of the phenomenally successful BBC show Sherlock. I've already seen it — twice, in fact — because I enjoyed previous seasons of the show enough to work around the BBC website's geographical limitations and watch the episode when it first aired, and then I saw it again at a local cinema's preview showing, where my friend Ann McClellan gave a presentation on Conan Doyle and Sherlock. I've also seen the other two episodes of the season, watching episode 2 twice and episode 3 once.

Recently, I watched the 13-episode first season of NBC's Hannibal, based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter character, and I've been thinking about certain overlaps and significant contrasts between the two shows in their approach to their material. The comparison first occurred to me after I re-watched the first episode of Sherlock in preparation for the new season and heard, again, Sherlock refer to himself as a "high-functioning sociopath" — immediately, I thought, "No you're not. But Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal is..."* That then got me thinking about connections between the two shows.

A Few Words for Wallander

Some time in the winter, I fired up the Netflix machine and watched the first few episodes of Wallander with Kenneth Branagh. It was occasionally interesting, but I found Branagh's lugubrious, blubbery, hangdog acting insufferable. It's rare that I like Branagh in anything, so I decided to try out the other Wallander that was available for streaming: the 2009/10 Swedish series starring Krister Henriksson.

This week, I finally let myself watch the last two episodes available. I haven't loved a TV show this much in ages, and the final episode of series two is heartwrenching, though the last scenes are sweet and touching. I was moved halfway through the episode to send a frantic text to a friend (who, though she hasn't watched the show, has been amused by my growing obsession): "They killed Wallander's dog! The heartless Swedes!" I was, it turned out, jumping to conclusions and slandering an entire nation. But I have never been moved to send a text to anybody while in the midst of watching a TV show before.

"Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language": Bill Moyers and Barry Lopez

I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life.
--Barry Lopez

The final guest on the final episode of Bill Moyers Journal was Barry Lopez, and it's half an hour of riveting, inspiring conversation.  The video is here.

Ten years ago this summer, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Barry Lopez was my workshop leader.  Those were some of the most powerful and invigorating days of my life, because Lopez was exactly the person I needed to work with at that particular moment, a moment when I doubted the purpose of writing and felt that I had wasted the countless time I had spent in the activity of writing stories and plays and essays, almost none of which at that point had been read by anyone other than my friends and teachers.  I went to Bread Loaf because it felt like a last chance, and I went in cynical.  I left with the tools with which to build a stronger, less avaricious, more personal sense of purpose.  I still have a fraught, conflicted relationship to the idea of writing for an audience, and writing remains the most vexing activity in my life, but Barry Lopez gave me ways to work through the vexation, a way to use the despair that resides in the chasm between words and things, between writer and reader.

Basic Black

Last night I stumbled onto a great program on Boston's public tv station WGBH, "Basic Black", where host Kim McLarin talked for half an hour with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West about life in the Obama era (I was particularly taken with West's suggestion that Obama himself is "reluctant to step into the Age of Obama" and with the discussion of the meaning and implications of the terms "black" and "negro".)  The entire show is available as a streaming video.  (I've only recently discovered my tv gets WGBH, so I'm sure some regular viewers are thinking, "What, Cheney, have you been living under a rock?!"  Until a year ago, I hadn't ever owned a tv, so, well, yes...)

The website includes past shows as video or audio podcasts, and scrolling through the archives, I see lots of programs I'll be looking at soon, because the topics and guest lists are of the sort that are rare on U.S. television: thoughtful conversations with artists and intellectuals.  A roundtable on black theatre in Boston.  Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Major Jackson.  The great dancer Bill T. Jones.  Anna Deavere Smith.  Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Patricia Williams.  Wole Soyinka.

And lots more.

Slings & Arrows

It took a few recommendations (including Kelley Eskridge mentioning it and Abigail Nussbaum writing a comprehensive review), but I recently watched all 18 episodes of the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows, a smart and tremendously entertaining show about a theatre festival very similar to the Stratford Festival, where many of the actors in the series have appeared.

Stratford is a place of magic for me -- I have only been there once, in the mid-90s, but it was among the greatest theatre experiences of my life. Or, rather, two productions were among the greatest theatre experiences of my life: productions of Amadeus and The Merry Wives of Windsor (we also saw Macbeth and The Gondoliers -- the former was, I thought then and expect I would think now, dull and awful; the latter was well done, but it's not among my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan shows, so while I appreciated it, I didn't feel much passion for it). I have long lost the program from that summer, but two actors so impressed me that their names have stuck with me ever since: Stephen Ouimette and William Hutt.

Ouimette played Mozart in Amadeus to Brian Bedford's Salieri. He gave the role a range I had never imagined it could possess, making the character into something entirely different from what Tom Hulce did in the movie. Ouimette was also in Merry Wives, and one of the things I most remember is that I didn't realize it was the same person for quite a while. Here was an actor playing utterly different characters in repertory, something I had never experienced before, and which opened my eyes to what real acting can be: the challenge, the fun, the beauty of it. But the real revelation was Hutt as Falstaff. I had just finished high school, and up to that point had not seen any truly great performances of Shakespeare, and few performances of his comedies at all. They never seemed very funny to me on the page, and reading them was much more of a chore than reading the tragedies and histories. But I laughed throughout this production of Merry Wives, and most especially at Hutt's performance.

Stephen Ouimette was one of the stars of Slings & Arrows, and William Hutt was a guest star in the third season, giving a tremendously moving performance as an elderly actor who wants to play Lear before he dies (Hutt himself would die at age 87 in June 2007, less than a year after the end of Slings & Arrows). The presence of these two actors alone was enough to ensure my interest, but what held that interest was the intelligence of the writing and the impressively high quality of the acting from the first episode to the last.

From early on, Slings & Arrows was conceived as a three-season show, with each season following the ups and downs of putting on a particular production -- Hamlet in the first season, Macbeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. The events in the lives of the characters often parallel or echo the events within the plays, and the show deliberately explores ideas of youth in season one, middle age (and ambition) in season two, and old age (and mortality) in season three. It doesn't all work -- the second season is somewhat weaker than the first and third; I never bought the motivation for Paul Gross's character's insanity; the third season suggests an answer to the question of whether Ouimette's character is really a ghost or a figment of Gross's character's imagination, a question that should never have been answered, etc. -- but there are no episodes that felt like clunkers, and remarkably few episodes that didn't feel tightly conceived and cleverly executed.

One of the smart choices made by the writers of the show (Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney primarily -- Coyne and McKinney also play recurring characters) was to treat Shakespeare's works seriously and respectfully, but to make the series itself a comedy. All the characters are basically stereotypes, with a generally predictable range of personality and emotion, though the main characters do develop over the course of the three seasons (I would call the musical theatre actors in the third season caricatures if I hadn't lived with such people). But most of the real moments of vivid, multidimensional acting occur in the scenes from Shakespeare's plays -- not just because Shakespeare could write brilliantly complex characters, but because Shakespeare's plays offer us insight into what is going on within these character's lives. The characters don't become fully real, fully human until they are performing. Which is utterly appropriate to a show that is primarily about actors.

Because it is a comedy, there is very little about the arc of each season of Slings & Arrows that is a surprise. We know each show will be a huge hit (artistically if not financially) and that the main characters will all triumph in the end, just as we know that everybody will get married at the end of a Shakespearean comedy. Suspense about the end result is not what holds our interest -- what keeps us engaged is wondering how we will get to that end, and the marvelous individual scenes along the way. The Slings & Arrows writers loved symmetry, and they had great fun pairing characters and situations, creating subplots to comment on the main plots, etc., and the show's directors and editors took advantage of every such moment, particularly as they used the progress of one production at the festival to comment on another.

The overall vision of the show is a sentimental, idealistic, and simplistic one, a vision that very much celebrates the mystical, Romantic idea of actors as magicians and holy fools. In a documentary about the world of the theatre, such a vision would be infuriating; in Slings & Arrows it is charming. It charms us into believing -- at least for the hours we are watching the show -- that the lines between art and commerce can be clearly drawn, that art can heal wounds and make peace, that everyone has a great performance somewhere inside them, that sincerity matters more than anything else. Though its characters have their cynical moments, the show itself isn't the least bit cynical. If it weren't so funny, and if scene by scene it weren't so well written, the Pollyanna approach to life that is at the show's core would be insufferable. Instead, Slings & Arrows presents us with a fantasy world we all might want to live in. It's certainly one I was in no hurry to leave, perhaps because after years of disillusioning experiences with theatre at all levels, I still have enough of an idealist buried somewhere inside me to believe that maybe it isn't entirely a fantasy world.

Meanwhile, up at Stratford they're doing Taming of the Shrew, and so am I right now. They're also doing Romeo & Juliet, which I taught for the first time this past school year (badly, I must say, but so it goes). The company that produces our Shrew, Advice to the Players, also runs a camp for kids, and a bunch of those kids (from this year and past ones) decided to put on their own production of R&J, directed by and starring them, the day after Shrew closes. Because they thought it would be fun. Because there's something about Shakespeare and about the theatre that they love. Idealists and lunatics, magicians and holy fools! And it gives my heart great joy!