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. 

Guest Post — Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan

One day I happened to overhear a student talking about Star Wars novels, and I told him that Del Rey Books has sent me some over the years, and that usually I donate them to libraries, since I rarely read series fiction or media tie-in novels (rarely, but not never; heck, I used Jeff VanderMeer's Predator novel in a class once). I asked him if he'd like the ones that were currently sitting in a pile somewhere in my house, and he said sure. I had recently done a big library donation, so didn't have much more than a few advanced copies, but I brought them in anyway. When I gave them to him, at first I thought he was disappointed that they were ARCs without finished artwork, but it turned out his silence and immobility were the behaviors of a die-hard fan in bliss, as I had given him a novel that was hugely anticipated and not due to be released for at least another month.

It was then that I hit upon an idea: Here was a thoughtful, articulate, well-read student who was also a knowledgeable Star Wars fan, and I wondered if he would be willing to write a post or two for this blog in which he explored not just the specific books I gave him, but the attraction of the Star Wars universe for him and other fans, since the audience for this blog, as far as I know, is not mostly composed of readers as committed to the Star Wars universe as he. I love learning how people value books and movies and art of all sorts, and this seemed like a great opportunity to learn about the attractions of Star Wars fandom.

And so I give you Michael DiTommaso with a post on Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan and the life and purpose of a Star Wars fan. He writes the "Ask a Star Wars Geek" column at T.X. Watson's Blog-Shaped Thing, and has recently joined the staff of Beyond the New Jedi Order. 

I hear that Michael is working on a comprehensive post about multiple Star Wars books and their attractions, and if we are kind and encouraging, perhaps he will allow me to post it here once he's finished...


Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan
reviewed by Michael DiTommaso

I am not Matt Cheney, just to get that out of the way. I am instead the self-proclaimed biggest Star Wars fan in New England — a contention that's yet to be successfully challenged. How could I possibly claim such an audacious title, you may ask youself. Well, I've read about 133 Star Wars adult novels, and about 15 more young adult novels, as well as a couple of the comics. I've played several of the games, and read a maybe a dozen more short stories, all of these licensed parts of the Star Wars franchise. Of couse I have seen the movies themselves, many times.

It's kind of my hobby. The fact that it is Star Wars and not something else derives from three factors: firstly, as a kid, I watched the original trilogy of movies, and got excited about the prequels coming out (by that time I had already begun reading the X-Wing series, one of my favorites to date). Secondly, Star Wars was accessable (my godfather owned over 90 books, which he eventually gave me, though by that time, my love of Star Wars had already been sealed, and I owned my own collection of books). The third and biggest factor, though, is I didn't want to stop reading, and for that, Star Wars was (and is) perfect.

G.I. Joe

Of course, most of my reading time is spent in my wood-panelled library, smoking my Meerschaum pipe and contemplating the imbrication of hegemonic discourses. Over the past two days, however, I decided to set aside some light reading I was doing (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which I tend to think of as the Goodnight Moon of philosophical texts) and instead plunge into two books someone at Del Rey had sent to me: G.I. Joe: Above & Beyond and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, both written by one Max Allan Collins.

The two novels are media tie-ins -- the second is a novelization of the screenplay for the upcoming film of the same title, and the first is a prequel to that. I haven't read too many media tie-ins (the only other that comes to mind is the novelization of Batman, which I read when I was about 13), but I am open to new experiences, and the fact that these two are about G.I. Joe sealed the deal.

Before I inhabited a wood-panelled library and smoked a Meerschaum and contemplated the imbrication of hegemonic discourses, I grew up in a gun shop (literally; it was attached to the house). I was seven years old when the G.I. Joe action figures hit the market -- and I got them all. I was not allowed to read comic books (they rot your brain), but an exception was made for the G.I. Joe comics. I watched the animated TV show every Saturday morning. I was hardcore.

I was also a bit of a young literalist -- early on, I decided it was problematic if my action figures killed each other, because I didn't think they could become zombies. My friends lacked this qualm; they routinely killed and resurrected their toys. This made no sense to me, and so I tried hard to avoid playing with my friends. I didn't want their zombie Joes infecting mine. Instead, I spent hours and hours creating complex détente situations.

As you can see, then, reading the new novels was something I simply could not avoid. I was particularly interested to see how the various creators (screenwriters, Collins) handled the problem of killing people. (The animated show had a simple solution: explosions and gunshots are not deadly. This was a dangerous message to the youth of America, but a useful trick for keeping the many important characters alive for the next episode.)

The novels (and, presumably, movie) handle death mostly by killing people who are not regular characters. There are, for instance, in The Pit, many random, unnamed Joes who serve as cannon fodder while the the action figures still get to make it through okay (with various cuts, bruises, etc.). There is one exception to this, but I shan't reveal it.

Both books are origin stories, with Above and Beyond being the tale of Duke and Ripcord's first encounter with the G.I. Joe team and The Rise of Cobra being the tale of how they join G.I. Joe and what creates Cobra (though Cobra as we know it does not appear until the final pages). Above and Beyond is a better novel -- more focused, with an effective and affecting downer for an ending -- while The Rise of Cobra is very much a screenplay that has been fleshed out in prose. I was very curious to know the movie's take on the characters and story, so I was fascinated by the novel, but without having yet seen the film I can't say if it offers anything the movie doesn't.

The changes made to the characters and background of the 1980s G.I. Joes are not terrible -- the group has been globalized instead of being part of the U.S. government: they are now a super-secret force approved by various countries to use any means necessary to destroy particularly cunning evil-doers, and the crew has been internationalized. Backstories are different, too, given that originally many of the main characters had been in Vietnam. Some of the biggest changes are to the stories of The Baronness and Cobra Commander, but to say any more about that would be to give away some of the biggest surprises of the two books...

The 1980s version of G.I. Joe feels to me like a mashup of Doc Savage, Rambo, and The A-Team. The new version still has a whiff of the Doc Savage novels, but with a big dollop of the James Bond movies during the Pierce Brosnan era added. The Rise of Cobra has an especially Bondesqe villain trying to take over control of the world and destroy it at the same time. Above and Beyond is more restrained, with a villain who merely wants to take over all of South America. As with Bond, the ideal audience seems to be adolescent heterosexual boys and maybe some lesbians -- the women are inevitably described as "attractive", while the men are muscular or smart or evil or something else, but never "attractive" (entirely contrary to my own experience, since even at a young age I thought those boys were hot!), and the books are full of soldiers who have lots of fun weapons and who never use a word stronger than "ass" or "bastard". Talk about fantasy!

A political analysis of the books is beyond my abilities, though it could be amusing -- the 1980s G.I. Joe helped post-Vietnam War kids feel good about the military and its endeavors and fear an imaginary all-powerful terrorist force that only a special branch of the U.S. military was skilled enough to combat. In Above and Beyond, the U.S. military and the Joes intervene in a fictional South American country when the saintly free-market-loving president is assassinated and the socialist rebels (who want to nationalize all the country's oil, presumably to make it more like Alaska) are blamed, though it is obvious from the beginning that a power-hungry, apolitical old general is really to blame, allowing a reconciliation between the free-marketeers and the socialists at the end that is brokered in a church -- God and guns being, apparently, the things socialists and capitalists can agree on. The Rise of Cobra is more of a War on Terror allegory, a super-heroes vs. super-villains story, but instead of vigilante super-heroes, the Joes are actually sanctioned by the leading countries of the world in their extra-legal activities (well, except for a brief moment when they have to go rogue, but it all works out for the best, so everybody loves them again in the end). Thus, the world's most powerful and organized and wealthy terrorists must be defeated by the world's best soldiers, with everybody scrambling to see who has the best gear and the best one-liners.

It's enough to make the eight-year-old in my heart swoon!

But now that I have digested the child within, I am returning to my wood-panelled library and my pipe...

Biological Determinism, Essentialism, and You

Cheryl noted that some new studies are best read in conjunction with Ekaterina Sedia's recent analysis of some older, similar studies. Now a post by Mark Liberman at Language Log takes a look at not only the stats in the new studies, but the way those studies have been reported:

If we do the same calculations for the means and standard deviations reported for the other categories, we get predictions that might have been presented as follows:

Rightward hemispheric asymmetry was found in the brains of 14 of 25 heterosexual males and 11 of 20 homosexual females, but in only 13 of 25 heterosexual females and 10 of 20 homosexual males.

How much media play do you think the study would have gotten, if the results had been spun like that?

Or to put it another way, how many readers of the media descriptions do you think understood the story in those terms?

I've just begun reading Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order by Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, which is a similar critique of essentialism and gives some perspective on the history of these studies. (Also valuable, as I mentioned in the comments to Kathy's article, is Science and Homosexualities, which presents various sides of the debate and history.) I have a natural (essential!) bias against such studies, and very little capability with stats, but I expect that even people who are not so odd and stubborn as I will find the Language Log article fascinating reading.