Jim Taylor

A ponderer with delusions of grandeur...

A History of Violence? Game of Thrones and ‘realism’ in fantasy fiction

Jun 222015
 

Stannis

It would be fair to say that HBO’s Game of Thrones is no stranger to controversy.  Brutal scenes of murder, torture and rape have been a regular feature of the show since it began in 2011, but have continually garnered the show-runners as many plaudits for their gritty realism as they have criticisms for their perceived gratuitousness.  But the backlash against Game of Thrones‘ depiction of violence (particularly violence committed against women) reached something of a crescendo this year after the airing of the ninth episode of season five, which contained a scene where a much-loved character is burnt alive.  Indeed, so distressing was the scene in question that it prompted a raft of online articles, including two notable ones from The Guardian and Den of Geek, arguing that the show had now “crossed a line” and possibly become “too brutal to enjoy”.

It would be easy to dismiss, as many commenters already have, these articles and others like them as mere ‘hand-wringing’, testament to nothing more than the oversensitivity of their authors.  But this is far from the whole story, because the common arguments in these pieces raise two very important questions worthy of further consideration, the first concerning depictions of onscreen violence and the second concerning the complicated relationship that fantasy fiction like Game of Thrones has with ‘realism’ (both historical and contemporary).  I will say only a few things about the first question (which may possibly become the basis for a future Geekzine article in its own right), because in this article I want to focus very much on the second question, that of realism in fantasy fiction.  As the makers of Game of Thrones defend their onscreen brutality with appeals to historical realism, and the same approximated realism is now worn as a badge of honour by many contemporary fantasy writers, it’s worth asking just how much of it is necessary in stories whose main strength has often been their emphatically unrealistic imaginative depth.

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Ramsay Bolton: fans love to hate him

Violent Consequences

Many of the criticisms directed at Games of Thrones‘ recent onscreen horrors have been less concerned with the fact that certain events have taken place than with how those events are depicted.  Is this simply a matter of audience squeamishness?  Possibly.  Many viewers appear happy to accept that violent acts frequently occur in the show, but don’t wish to be exposed to their ghastly consequences.  There’s an element of hypocrisy here, or at the very least naivety.  Fans of the show enjoy having truly villainous characters like Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton to despise as it enriches the storytelling, and a large part of what makes these characters villainous are the many violent and horrible things they do over the course of the TV series.  In other words, the entertainment many fans derive from Game of Thrones consists in part of the very things they are now complaining about being shown.

But do these things actually need to be shown?  Isn’t it enough to suggest, or even make explicit, that certain horrible acts have taken place off-camera, just out of shot?  This cuts to the heart of a much larger question about onscreen depictions of violence which I cannot do justice to here, but surely any writer or director who wants to depict violence in their story has a responsibility to also depict the consequences of that violence in all their horror.  Films that portray violence irresponsibly, for example, are not unflinchingly brutal movies like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, they are the family-friendly summer blockbusters which show a sanitised type of violence that has little in the way of distressing consequences.  Violence is horrible, and must therefore be portrayed horribly.  This may seem like a de facto argument in defence of anything and everything put on screen by Game of Thrones and other similarly gritty films and TV shows, but it’s also hard to deny that there is a line where unflinching depictions of violence slip over into being simply gratuitous.  Where precisely this line lies is open to debate, but there’s little doubt that it exists.  This argument about responsibly depicting violence also fails to address the question of whether a violent act should be used in a story in the first place, irrespective of how it is depicted (‘fridging‘, for example, remains rampant in science fiction and fantasy storytelling, and is more often than not simply the result of lazy writing).  The argument about responsible depictions of violence is not, however, the one advanced by most defenders of Game of Thrones‘ liberal approach to onscreen brutality.  Though it may seem strange in the context of a fantasy show, they appeal instead to the importance of historical accuracy.

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Drive: an unflinchingly violent film

‘Realistic’ Fantasy?

It seems more than a little ridiculous to discuss the supposed historical accuracy of a fantasy story, but historical precedent is by far the most common argument advanced in defence of Game of Thrones‘ more hard-to-watch scenes.  Even George R. R. Martin’s comments on the matter, which initially seem to bear a strong resemblance to the argument about responsibly depicting violence (detailed above) are ultimately justified with reference to actual historical events and people.  The argument goes that because Martin’s world is inspired by medieval Europe (and in particular 15th century Britain), it is bound to portray societies that are extremely patriarchal, authoritarian and rife with acts of wanton brutality.  That others take issue with this depiction of actual medieval life is why comments forums across the internet are currently playing host to historical debates with reference to a fantasy TV show.

But beyond the disputes about accuracy lies a bigger question: just because a work of fiction is inspired by a particular time and place in the real world, does that mean the world portrayed has to slavishly adhere to the societal practices of the period?  Would it really shatter our suspension of disbelief if the writer or writers were to make a few tweaks in this regard?  This is an issue that affects all of science fiction and fantasy, in other words all fiction that takes place in a world not our own: how ‘realistic’ should made-up stories be?  Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency has advanced the argument (with particular reference to how female characters are treated in Game of Thrones) that it’s ridiculous to insist that a TV/book series which features magic and dragons hews as close to historical reality as possible in its depictions of violence and gender politics.  If taken to the extreme, this argument represents one end of a spectrum, where nothing in a fictional work needs to bear resemblance to what we consider reality, whereas the other end would be an advocacy of straight up ‘realist’ fiction, where no fantastical elements are included at all.  All works of science fiction and fantasy sit somewhere along this spectrum, because however outlandish their setting might be, their portrayal of human (or human-analogue) interaction always retains a realistic dimension.  In a way, as Sarkeesian’s argument suggests, there are two ‘realms’ within works of fantasy: that of the wider setting and that of character interaction (both on a societal and personal level).  This distinction is present in all fiction up to a point, but is particularly stark in fantasy stories that strive for some manner of ‘realism’ in a deliberately unrealistic context.

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The War of the Roses: one of GRRM’s biggest influences

The Two Realms

What is open to the ‘realist’ treatment in fantasy?  Game of Thrones is considered realistic because of its willingness to kill off major players, the motivations and actions of its characters and its unflinching depictions of sex and violence.  Its fantastical deviations from reality, apart from its unearthly setting, are in its wider context; magic exists in this world, as do fictional creatures like dragons.  Now, imagine if this scenario were flipped: the story is set in a world completely analogous to our own, but the societal and personal interactions between human beings are completely fanciful and removed from reality (insert your own joke about soap operas here).  This would technically still be a fantasy story, but one that could surely alienate many readers and viewers.  Why?  Well, there’s definitely an argument to be made about suspension of disbelief.  If we believe (sensibly) that a society’s nature influences the way people within it behave towards one another, then it would stretch our credulity to breaking point if we were presented with a vision of our world which portrayed radically different societal and personal human interactions….unless there were some external cause, i.e. a fictional adjustment to the world’s wider setting.

So does this mean that Game of Thrones‘ brutality is justified with reference to the type of society it’s portraying?  Not really, because this just returns us to the ludicrous debate about historical accuracy which I mentioned above, and the reason that this debate rages on is that we can’t really know what life was like in, say, the 15th century, the way we can know what life is like in our own time.  We are therefore not jarred in the same way by unrealistic depictions of human interaction if they appear in a historical setting, rather than a contemporary, relatable one.  But there’s another reason why unrecognisable interactions between characters would alienate an audience, even in a completely fantastical world, and that’s because in any story characters must have a measure of relatability.

Characters are the conduit through which we enter and experience a fictional world.  We either see things from their viewpoint, or understand the drama of a story through their reactions to events.  As such, we need to be able to empathise with them, at least minimally, otherwise we simply can’t bring ourselves to care about what transpires on the page or screen.  Human beings (or their fictional analogues) are defined by their relationships to one another; in other words, the way that characters interact is a major part of what makes them relatable, and thus a major part of what allows us to engage with the story of which they are a part.  What this means is that any story, no matter how fantastical its setting, needs to maintain a certain base level of realism in the way its characters treat each other, otherwise this minimum relatability is not achieved and the audience will not feel as engaged with the story.  So yes, injecting realism into fantasy, specifically in the realm of character interactions, is a good idea for storytelling purposes, but it’s also the first step on the road to gratuitous, unnecessary violence.

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Too brutal to enjoy?

Obligatory Brutality

A popular fallacy among genre fans is that because a base level of realism is necessary in fantasy, this must mean that even more ‘realism’ makes for better storytelling.  There’s an unfortunate tendency here to equate ‘realism’ with darkness and brutality, or at the very least to emphasise the worst elements of interpersonal human relations in the real world, and this can result in a perceived obligation to depict gratuitous acts of brutality with alarming regularity.  This, however, is a mistake.  Just because characters’ interpersonal relations and societal structures must be moderately realistic in order to effectively engage the audience through empathy, this does not always have to be the thin end of the wedge.  It’s not that fantasy writers shouldn’t depict brutal violence in their work, it’s that they shouldn’t think themselves beholden to do so.  Sometimes a bit of brutality serves the story, but this is not always the case, and just because a work takes inspiration from an actual place and time in human history, there is no overarching obligation for it to slavishly replicate the societies of that time if the storytelling will not be enhanced.  This, of course, completely preempts those peculiar debates about historical accuracy mentioned earlier.

Thanks in part to the success of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, fantasy authors like Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch have been heralded for their ‘gritty realism’ (although both are talented writers anyway), and over the last few years this approach has become fashionable in the genre as a whole.  Whether this is because it provides a unique selling point compared to more fanciful material, a reaction against fantasy fiction’s historical excesses or genuinely interesting storytelling possibilities is uncertain (although in the cases of Martin, Abercrombie and Lynch the latter does appear to be the case), but it’s undeniable that making your fantasy more ‘realistic’ is becoming a badge of honour among aspiring writers and producers.  The question remains, however: how far does this realism need to go?  Unless you’re aiming for a truly avant-garde creation a modicum of realism is always necessary, but in a genre historically celebrated for its imaginative depth and willingness to depart from reality, there should never be a perceived obligation to cling to the mundane, or rather one person’s perception of it.  For the record, I think very little of the onscreen violence in season five of Game of Thrones was unnecessarily brutal; for the most part, what was shown was as brutal as it needed to be.  That’s a contentious view, and there’ll be many who disagree, but I do believe these things need to be judged on a case-by-case basis.  Sometimes brutality is justified (in storytelling terms), but there is such a thing as too much ‘realism’ in fantasy.

We’re at the 2015 Edinburgh International Film Festival!

Jun 162015
 

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No, really; we’re here.  Over the next couple of weeks, your humble Geekzine will be bringing you reviews galore from the festival’s various screens throughout the city.  Just like in previous years, the EIFF has excelled once again in delivering a goodly amount of geek-friendly fare among its programmed offerings, and we’re particularly excited about (to name only a few) Henry Hobson’s zombie tear-jerker Maggie (which reportedly features Arnold Schwarzenegger actually acting), Brit director Justin Trefgarne’s ambitious SF/crime thriller Narcopolis, and fascinating indie fantasy One & Two.  Edinburgh residents, let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments below!

Intrepid reporter Jim Taylor has lined up before the press registration booth, weathering the looks of those cynical faces which say, “this man can’t be a press delegate, surely!”.  But don’t be deceived by his appalling lack of fashion sense and sweaty, wheezing aspect – within lurks the shrewd mind of a man who will happily knock out a solid 300 unplagiarised words per picture.  Probably.  Join him on this grand cinematic adventure!

Retiring the author: ‘Blade Runner’ and Deckard’s (in)humanity

May 032015
 

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Last month saw the BFI’s nationwide cinema release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Ridley Scott’s definitive edit of his 1982 SF-noir classic about an ex-policeman tracking down rogue androids (called “replicants”) in a near-future Los Angeles.  As well as putting Scott’s arresting visuals back on the big screen where they belong, the film’s release has reignited one of the most well-worn debates in SF fandom: the question of whether or not Deckard (Harrison Ford’s hard-bitten hero) is himself a replicant.  Over the last three decades, this question has become an inescapable part of the film’s legacy, to the point where it’s difficult to have any sort of conversation about Blade Runner without bringing it up.  Of course, the ambiguity over Deckard’s true nature is one of the film’s greatest strengths, but that hasn’t stopped critics and fans alike from trying to settle upon a definitive answer to the question, and the way they go about this usually involves totting up the opinions of people involved in the production of Blade Runner, an example of what the TV Tropes website calls Word of God.  But this is a problematic approach, especially when a creative team is as divided in its opinions of a work as Blade Runner‘s is – which is something we’ll see below.  It’s also problematic for more principled reasons, as I shall argue in this article.

It’s undeniable that the film (at least in its Final Cut incarnation – more on that later) drops some pretty heavy hints that Deckard is something more (or less) than human.  The discovery that replicants can be implanted with human memories, Rachel’s unanswered question to Deckard about whether he’s ever turned the Voight-Kampff test on himself, Gaff’s loaded line about doing “a man’s job” and of course the (in)famous unicorn sequence are all suggestive, but enough ambiguity remains that plenty of room is left for debate.  And this debate continues to rumble on 33 years after Blade Runner‘s original theatrical release, mainly because the cast and crew themselves remain so divided on the issue, as demonstrated by Mark Kermode’s recent vlog on the topic.  While Ridley Scott has appeared on camera stating definitively that Deckard is meant to be a replicant, Harrison Ford and Michael Deeley (producer) are adamant that he isn’t.  Screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples are less clear-cut in their views, unable as they are to remember which of them was responsible for casting doubt on Deckard’s humanity; certainly in the story they were adapting – Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – the main character is not an android.  In terms of pure numbers, then, the ‘non-replicants’ seem to have it.  But fans have tended to lend far greater weight to Scott’s opinion, that Deckard himself is in fact a replicant, perhaps because in the world of cinema directors are conventionally seen as the true ‘author’ of the work.  The problem here, though, is that authorial intent does not have a monopoly on a work’s meaning.

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The elusive unicorn.

I’ve written before on this site about Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, but as it’s particularly relevant to this discussion, I’ll repeat the definition I gave in an earlier article:

In his landmark 1967 essay The Death of the Author, literary theorist Roland Barthes argued that authors do not have a monopoly over the meaning of any work of art they have created.  Once that work is out in the public sphere, people will begin experiencing it and forming their own myriad interpretations of it, none of which, according to Barthes, is any less legitimate than the author’s intended interpretation.  Another way of articulating this idea is to say that, once it is completed, a work of art exists independently from its creator.

What does this mean for our interpretation of Blade Runner, in terms of Deckard’s biological humanity or lack thereof?  Put simply, it doesn’t matter what Scott, Ford et al think; the conclusions of any given viewer based on the available evidence (i.e. what’s on screen) are just as legitimate as the beliefs of the creative team.  If you come away from Blade Runner believing that Deckard’s a replicant, then he’s a replicant.  If not, then he’s not.  In other words, there is no definitive answer to the Deckard question and never can be – the ambiguity so central to the film’s lasting appeal ensures it.  Taking a poll of the film’s cast and crew will not yield such an answer, even by majority vote; it will only reveal what their individual interpretations of the movie are.  Instead of asking “what does Ridley Scott think?”, anyone seeing the film should simply be asking themselves “what do I think?”.

There is a final complication, though, and it’s one that potentially opens up a rabbit hole of speculation.  If we can only form judgements about meaning based on what is presented to us, questions must inevitably arise about the editing of a work.  Blade Runner has been released in numerous different cuts over the last three decades, some of which do not feature key scenes held up as evidence by the “Deckard is a replicant” camp, the most notable example being the excising of the full unicorn sequence from the film’s original theatrical release cut.  The Final Cut, released in cinemas last month by the BFI, is considered to be Ridley Scott’s “definitive” cut of the movie, but if this version seems to lend more weight to Scott’s own interpretation of the Deckard question, why should we consider it more legitimate than, say, the original theatrical version, re-cut as it was by the studio?  Following this line of logic too far would have us constructing labyrinthine theories about our favourite films and books with only the most tenuous connections to the story available to us, and at that point, we’d be as well just to go ahead and write fan fiction.  It seems to me that a measure (albeit a small one) of authorial intent must be accepted when interpreting the meaning of a work, but this intent extends only as far as the work’s editing.  As such, we must form our opinions of Deckard’s (in)humanity based on Blade Runner‘s final cut, because this is the film as Ridley Scott intended it to be.  Beyond that, though, nothing he (or any other ‘author’) says should sway our personal interpretations.

It’s also why we can ignore Blade Runner 2 (currently in pre-production) if it’s terrible.

Flash vs. Arrow: the silver age, the dark age, and where comics adaptations might be going

Feb 252015
 

While DC’s (i.e. Warner Bros’) upcoming glut of Marvel-aping blockbusters is being eyed warily by fans and critics alike, the TV adaptations of its comics are garnering a far more positive reaction across the board.  FOX’s Gotham and NBC’s Constantine have admittedly had a somewhat mixed response (both in terms of reviews and viewing figures), though both shows have had at least as many high points as low ones (particularly Constantine, which despite its perilously low ratings has managed to go from strength to strength), but also returning to UK screens this month are The CW’s Flash and Arrow, two of the biggest success stories of TV superheroes thus far produced.

Since debuting in 2012, Arrow has become one of The  CW’s most watched shows, maintaining consistently high ratings while also winning awards for cinematography, stunt coordination and visual effects, and receiving an average Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 93% for its first two seasons.  In 2014, encouraged by Arrow‘s success, The CW spun off Flash, another big-name adaptation which created a shared televisual universe for DC characters on the network.  Finding its feet far quicker than its parent show (which drew early criticism for its portrayal of main character Oliver Queen), Flash has also racked up huge viewing figures and won plaudits from publications such as IGN and Entertainment Weekly, and in the space of only half a season has won over viewers who’ve never even picked up a DC comic before.  Being network buddies, it was inevitable that the two shows would cross over (indeed, a pre-Flash Barry Allen made his first appearance in an episode of Arrow), and that’s exactly what happened in the episodes Flash vs. Arrow and The Brave and the Bold, which aired back in December.  What could have simply been gimmicky fan-pleasers actually made for very interesting viewing, because these episodes threw into focus the stark differences between the two shows which mirror a battle for the soul of comics that’s been going on for decades: the influence of the silver age vs. that of the dark age.  They also, tantalisingly, offer a vision of the future for on-screen superheroes which transcends this simple dichotomy.

The silver age Flash

As Grant Morrison explains in his 2011 book Supergods, the so-called ‘silver age’ of comic books ran from (roughly) the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and saw a number of stylistic conventions established in the medium.  Superheroes overtook cowboys and scientists as the protagonists of choice; science fiction triumphed over horror, magic and romance; new artistic styles came to the fore that would heavily influence the ‘pop art’ movement; and (primarily during the 1960s) a more psychedelic aesthetic became popular with comics creators.  Simply put, the silver age was the era of primary-coloured crime fighters having crazy adventures without much regard for realism.  Almost as a reaction to such wanton whimsy came the so-called ‘dark age’ of comics, whose touchstone titles were massively popular and influential series like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986/7) and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986).  This was an era of grim, gritty (pseudo-)realism in comics, with darker storylines and psychologically complex characters taking over from the bright and fanciful tropes of the silver age.  Social and political allegory became a much more regular feature of comic book narratives, and it was around this time that comics first began to attract notice from ‘serious’ literary critics.  The great artistic leaps taken during this period would pave the way for series like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Garth Ennis’ Preacher and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, all of which are widely considered to be among the best comics ever created, and coincided with a emerging understanding that comic books were no longer “just for kids”.

Because of Hollywood’s post-millennial intolerance for whimsy and innocence in its action movies, the influence of the dark age has been pervasive throughout the recent deluge of superhero movies, and this stylistic tendency has also largely been passed on to subsequent TV adaptations of comic books.  From the very beginning, Arrow presented itself as a child of the dark age: capitalising on the then-recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie trilogy (which took its cues from particularly grim print titles like The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween), Arrow re-cast bow-toting vigilante (and DC comics stalwart) Oliver Queen as a tortured shipwreck survivor who brutally murdered gangsters, drug dealers and corrupt property developers as part of a crusade to save his city from moral ruin.  Although subsequent seasons have somewhat lightened the tone and developed Queen into a more traditionally heroic character, the show remains rooted in the grim, gritty legacy of dark age comics.  In stark contrast to this stands spin-off show The Flash, which from its very first episode has been characterised by a more lighthearted approach.  It’s true that the show makes use of the dark ‘murdered parent’ trope to motivate its central character, but past trauma doesn’t define the character of Barry Allen like it does that of Oliver Queen.  The heroes of The Flash are quicker to make jokes, less prone to dark introspection (although they still have their share), and given to applying amusingly quaint pseudonyms like “Captain Cold” and “Reverse Flash” to the villains they encounter (both nods, of course, to the original comics).  The show also has a brighter visual tone than Arrow, with far fewer scenes shrouded in darkness and an abundance of primary colours to accompany the red and gold of the Flash’s trademark costume.  While it still betrays the influence of the dark age in its attempts to keep a fantastical idea relatively grounded, The Flash revels in its silver age roots and most of the time feels like a show that just wants to have fun.

The resolutely dark age ‘Arrow’

The appearance of actual meta-humans in The Flash may not be entirely unrelated to its silver age tendencies.  In Arrow, Oliver Queen has no superpowers and faces no superpowered villains (unless one counts the drug-enhanced physical prowess of Deathstroke), whereas The Flash features superhuman protagonists and antagonists, as well as a heavy dose of science fiction.  It’s more difficult to keep a story grounded and gritty when it features actual superheroes (although that hasn’t stopped Zack Snyder from creating his defiantly dark age Superman), so it perhaps makes sense that The Flash would be more inclined to the unashamed exuberance that so defined silver age comics.  Whatever the reason, though, the two shows clearly have as many differences as similarities, so their crossing over in the episodes Flash vs. Arrow and The Brave and the Bold could have been a jarring clash of silver and dark age styles: the shadowy, blood-soaked world of Arrow versus the more upbeat, wacky world of The Flash.  What actually happened was a lot more interesting: aside from a few obligatory moments of in-jokery and meta-commentary, both shows remained undiluted in their crossed over incarnations, but instead of coming to a clattering tonal impasse, Flash and Arrow simply….blended.

According to Grant Morrison, we are now living in the “renaissance age” of comics – the successor to the dark age.  This postmodern paradigm has seen creators blending genres, styles and imagery with a freedom hitherto almost unknown in the medium, and while an element of marked self-awareness is a commonality frequently observed by writers and artists, there are almost no defining characteristics of this age, aside from the shrugging off of established norms and boundaries.  Here the sugar-coated poignancy of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim can rub shoulders with the grim trauma of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, and the politically-aware adventures of Wilson and Alphona’s Ms. Marvel can sit alongside the genre-bending dystopia of Hickman and Dragotta’s East of West.  The tropes of the silver and dark ages have now become so many colours on a painter’s palette, and the renaissance age – for the most part – represents the best sort of synthesis of its historical forbears.  This is the situation in print, but TV and film adaptations are lagging defiantly behind, still clinging to the tropes of the dark age.

A renaissance age Flash?

Flash and Arrow‘s crossovers signal the way forward for comic book adaptations, catching up with the comics and moving towards the creative liberation of the renaissance age.  Post-9/11 Hollywood action cinema has been a perfect fit for dark age themes, and even the apparent lightheartedness of Marvel’s cinematic universe is frequently undermined by a drive towards gritty pseudo-realism.  Now, like their printed counterpart, on-screen superheroes must slip the restrictive bonds of grim, bleak violence, and their writers must embrace the full range of storytelling possibilities open to them.  In Flash vs. Arrow and The Brave and the Bold, all the main players retained their trademark characteristics, and the dynamics of the two shows remained intact.  The result – thanks to some high quality writing – was a televisual spectacle that felt like a blueprint for the renaissance age of on-screen superheroes, a mixing of the silver and dark ages without any jarring incongruities.  These tentative steps towards a renaissance should increase as movie studios look for more obscure and adventurous properties to adapt, having exhausted the stable of comic book mainstays.  Disney’s Big Hero 6, which balances unbridled superheroics with genuine angst and sorrow, is a good example of this trend, and we should hope for many more.  On-screen superheroes deserve their renaissance, and the storytelling possibilities afforded by it will be innumerable.

TV REVIEW: ‘The Man in the High Castle’ (pilot)

Jan 202015
 

New York, 1962.  A young man walks the evening streets, passing bars, clubs, liquor stores….and a giant neon swastika.  Across the country in San Francisco, citizens take morning aikido classes while the image of a rising sun adorns shop fronts, billboards and traffic signs all over the city.  This is the head-spinning world of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, where the allies lost the second world war and America has been partitioned between the forces of the German Reich in the east and the Japanese Empire in the west, with only a narrow, desolate neutral zone separating the two.  After years of trying to get a TV adaptation of Dick’s classic alt-history novel off the ground (first with the BBC and then the SyFy channel), showrunner Frank Spotnitz and executive producer Ridley Scott (no stranger to adapting Dick’s work) have finally found a home for the project on Amazon’s instant video service, where this episode is airing as part of their latest pilot season.  Based solely on this first episode, we here at Geekzine hope that the show does well enough to get picked up for a full series, because it’s frankly excellent.

Following the story of Joe (Luke Kleintank) and Juliana (Alexa Davalos), two young people who get mixed up in an underground resistance movement, The Man in the High Castle ambitiously blends elements of period drama, spy thriller and (just a little) science fiction.  As our heroes journey to Canon City, Colorado to deliver a mysterious film reel to an unknown contact, we get a disturbing overview of what life is like in this alternative America.  An uneasy truth has existed between east and west in the years since the war ended, but as Adolf Hitler’s health continues to fail, and his belligerent lieutenants vie for ascendancy, the very real spectre of nuclear war begins to loom large.  Various factions work in secret to either prolong the truce between Germany and Japan, or root out those who would seek to undermine the military might of their respective imperial masters.  In the first camp is Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s Japanese trade minister, whose troubling readings of the I Ching convince him to risk his life in order to extend the world’s fragile peace, and in the second is Rufus Sewell’s diabolical SS officer, a man of ruthless calculation and unchecked brutality whose eye is now firmly fixed on Canon City.  There’s only so much time in this pilot episode to flesh out so many story threads, but all of them feel like genuinely compelling parts of a larger puzzle, one steeped in the atmosphere of paranoia so characteristic of Dick’s work.

There’s solid work all round by a cast made up of unknowns and character actors (Sewell is probably the closest thing to a big name), and the episode crafts an intriguing premise whilst leaving enough mystery to make you want more.  It’s in the realm of production design, though, that The Man in the High Castle really shines.  To create a believable vision of Dick’s fictional 1960s America is an massive feat on a non-HBO television budget, and despite some ropey CGI and the drawbacks of an oppressively muted colour palette, Spotnitz and his team have pulled it off in impressively understated style.  But the grandeur of the big picture never overwhelms the power of the episode’s little touches: New York’s elevated railway being dubbed the “U-Bahn” and adorned with swastikas; the bitter incomprehension and resignation of the older generation who fought and lost the war; and the horrifying moment by a country road when Joe discovers what the strange grey snow falling from the sky really is.  All these moments contribute to a fully realised world at once radically different and yet eerily similar to our own, and it’s that jarring resonance, although with the enticing possibilities hinted at by the show’s plot, that makes this pilot episode such a compelling watch.  We can but hope it gets picked up for a full series.

The pilot episode of The Man in the High Castle is currently airing on Amazon’s Instant Video service.

FILM REVIEW: ‘Birdman’ (15)

Dec 292014
 

By now you’ll have read/heard any number of gushing reviews of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s black comedy Birdman, which stars Michael Keaton as a washed-up Hollywood actor best known for his superhero movies, now searching for credibility and relevance in the social media age.  The thing is, they’re all right.  Birdman is brilliant.  So good, in fact, that it’s difficult to pinpoint where it succeeds most strongly; acting (Keaton has been rightly lauded, but Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Zach Galifianakis are all superb as well), directing (Iñárritu presents the film in an astonishing, unbroken single take, albeit a digitally aided one) or music (Antonio Sánchez’s all-drum score is refreshingly unusual yet vibrant).  Actually, I think the film’s greatest strength is the way it manages to weave together a host of different ideas and themes, all within an ostensibly simple story about one man’s failing Broadway vanity project.

Riggan Thomson’s (Keaton) disaster-ridden attempt to stage an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story is both a love/hate letter to Broadway theatre and a meditation on the nature of truth.  It also asks questions about what constitutes “art” (setting ‘high’ culture against ‘low’), and – appropriately enough given Thomson’s (and Keaton’s) past – mimics the narrative arc of contemporary superhero films.  It’d be no exaggeration to call Birdman a response to the recent glut of blockbuster comic book adaptations, but to do so would reduce the whole wonderfully complex movie to only one of its many facets.  Ambiguous enough to keep us guessing about the apparently deteriorating mental state of its main character (on top of an internal monologue delivered by his belligerent, costumed alter ego, Thomson begins to believe early on in the film that he has gained real superpowers), Birdman treads an intentionally uncomfortable line between tragedy and comedy.  And it is a very funny movie.  Keaton, Norton and – unsurprisingly – Galifianakis in particular show exquisite comic timing, and as dark as the film gets it’s never far away from a moment of levity.  It’s just that you might find yourself grimacing as you laugh.

The single-take conceit of the film means there are no perceptible cuts to break the tension that ramps up as Thomson’s doomed adaptation approaches opening night.  The audience is unable to look away as everything starts to fall apart and come together at the same time, leading to a shocking climactic scene on a Broadway stage.  Such canny direction and editing, couple with uniformly terrific performances from the ensemble cast, ensure that however cerebral and anarchic Birdman becomes, you still feel every moment of it in your gut.  It’s a film about many things, but also one that demands to be experienced rather than analysed.

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