||[Jul. 11th, 2010|10:21 pm]
As I mentioned in my last entry, I've been watching Babylon 5 lately. It's not a perfect show, but it has one big advantage: it's consistent and believable.
Contrast this with Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun to watch, but if you think about it for more than two seconds you notice it's full of plot holes and contradictions. Things that cause time travel paradoxes that threaten to destroy the universe one episode go without a hitch the next. And the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor's biology gain completely different powers no one's ever alluded to depending on the situation. The aliens are hysterically unlikely, often without motives or believable science, the characters will do any old insane thing when it makes the plot slightly more interesting, and everything has either a self-destruct button or an easily findable secret weakness that it takes no efforts to defend against.
But I guess I'm not complaining. If the show was believable, the Doctor would have gotten killed the first time he decided to take on a massive superadvanced alien invasion force by walking right up to them openly with no weapons and no plan. And then they would have had to cancel the show, and then I would lose my chance to look at the pretty actress who plays Amy Pond.
So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.
I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".
Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.
Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.
So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.
Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.
Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.
I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).
So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.
You're using Dada as a counterexample?
The entire existence of Dada is based upon the idea that fiction must make sense, and then trying to deconstruct that idea, to try to come up with some sort of "meta-sense" that comes out of nonsense.
You know, there are a couple meanings of "the exception proves the rule." One of the ways that the phrase is used is to state that, "if something is created as an exception to something, that demonstrates that there exists some rule to which that IS an exception."
Dada was specifically created as an exception to the rule that things in fiction must serve identifiable purposes. Which demonstrates that there exists a rule, "things in fiction must serve identifiable purposes", to which Dada is an exception.
And even with that, the nonsensicality of Dada serves a purpose of forcing people to engage with the rule that "things in fiction must serve identifiable purposes." And to consider that, in contrast, "things in reality don't always serve identifiable purposes."
The fact that such a movement as Dada can
exist demonstrates that, in the general case, "Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense." Because Dada has to be specifically created to try to fight against that.
Yes, there is Dada, there are nonsense tales for the entertainment of children; there are stories written by
children that don't follow normal narrative rules. Like Axe Cop
But the thing that attracts us to those things is their very strangeness and difference. They don't follow the rules, and that can be fun, as an occasional treat.
But there exist rules that those works are not following
. The joy in them is the subversion of being allowed to break rules. That's why children love nonsense tales, both listening to them and making them up -- they get a safe and approved way to break the rules.
But, unless the fiction is created specifically to break those rules, it follows those rules. People actually have to make effort
to create fiction that doesn't follow those rules.
"You're using Dada as a counterexample?"
I'm using Dada as a time limiter. I could've said WWI, but hey.
I would use James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Nevil Shute, and Peter Carey as counterexamples off the top of my head. (I suppose I could mention Derrida, just to get the French in here, but he's more of a trickster figure than a writer per se.)
The key word in my sentence was, "since." No doubt it's my fault as a writer that I didn't make that more clear.