writing-scraps

[writing-scraps]

Westworld, seasons 2-4

I accidentally watched Westworld seasons 2-4 right before it disappeared off HBO. Westworld seasons 2-4, like The Blacklist, suffer from a particular pathology where deception and plot twists turn the series predictable in its unpredictability.

It's not immense narrative complexity that makes one lose interest in who Raymond Reddington really is or what consciousness and motives hides behind the face of Charlotte Hale this time. It's that the text gives us no reason to care. The emotional and ethical weight of Westworld season 1, with the hosts waking to consciousness and the humans suppressing them, gives way to low-stakes uninventive action. Action was always low-stakes in Westworld; we knew the fights were pointless and rigged. Now that we are supposed to care, to think that our heroes can actually get hurt, paradoxically, it is even less interesting, because it's just like any action film.

As for The Blacklist, the exciting menagerie of quirky bad guys that the Concierge of Crime guided us through with characteristic arrogance and style is eventually revealed as nothing but a shed of plot devices. Once the title card reads "Mr. Kaplan (No 4)", it's too late. Even this awesome, dark butch icon (Susan Blommaert) turns into grist for some harebrained scheme. She's supposed to be doing what she's doing out of some deep conviction related to her character, but we are painfully aware that she's doing what she's it because of some writers' brainstorming session.

As narrative ruins character, it also ruins dialogue. It doesn't matter that Thandiwe Newton and James Spader fire up their best cocky attitude and that Jeffrey Wright and Tessa Thompson have world class serious looks and voices, when those cocky attitudes and serious voices are used to speak words that don't matter. It's not that the dialogue has necessarily turned worse. The lines in Westworld and The Blacklist was always hammy. But you could forgive that when you cared about the speaker.

There has been so much double crossing, so many rugs pulled, mirrors flipped, so much smoke blown,digital incense burned, that the text loses its texture. The twists and turns of the story make the losses lose their tragedy, and the reunions lose their triumph. We lose emotional gravity, leave the orbit of the story, resume disbelief. You can't guess what comes next but you can foresee that it won't matter.

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An antisemitic shitpost from the Swedish extreme right

Rebecka Fallenkvist is a representative of the Swedish extreme right wing party Sverigedemokraterna, currently supporting the new right wing government, who recently published an Instagram post calling Anne Frank horny, set to the music of Kanye West.

The post contains a picture of a Swedish edition of Anne Frank's diary, three burning candles, and the text

"50 sidor in och hittils har Anne Frank endast slagit mig som sedeslös. Kåtheten själv ... 50 pages in and so far Anne Frank has only struck me as immodest. Horniness personified"

Let's look more closely at the translation of the two key words: "sedeslös" och "kåthet".

The latter is easy; "kåt" translates straightforwardly to "horny", and "kåthet" is the nominalisation.

"Sedeslös" is trickier. The word is archaic, means lacking in good morals or not following accepted social norms ... immodest, immoral, indecent, depraved, in particular in sexual matters. The tone is like that of a joke where one uses old-timey or formal language for no reason.

In modern parlance, she called Anne Frank a slut.

***

The Kanye song, specifically, is "Praise God", and the post shows quoted lyrics

"Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night"

Kanye West recently expressed his wish to murder the Jewish people in his Twitter post -- "going to go death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE".

The extreme right wing communicator is put on leave, temporarily one might expect, and produces an excuse. She never meant to take away from the evil of the holocaust; she wanted to make the (trite, puerile) observation that the girl's innocent normality contrasted with the evil of Nazism. But the use of the Kanye song shows that she is no fool. She knows what she's doing. This is her job.

***

Fallenkvist is a host, or journalist of sorts, at Sverigedemokraterna's online newspaper and video channel Riks. Yes, that is the same word as the German prefix "Reichs-", and it's used the same way in Swedish, for naming national things: the Sveriges riksbank -- Sweden's central bank; Riksantikvarieämbetet -- the Swedish National Heritage Board etc.

The name probably isn't an explicit Nazi reference, but an example of an inflated sense of self-importance. Of course, our YouTube propaganda channel, where we make little skits (starring Fallenkvist) about how women in burkas must be deported, is comparable to national news!

***

Let's not be disingenuous. Teenagers are horny. They should be, and they are free to write about it in their diaries. That is not the issue at stake.

Talking crudely sexually about a child murdered in the Holocaust is vulgar and monstrous.

This is the kind of thing that extreme right wing pundits and their fans specialise in, and will happily send you messages about if you publicly criticise their views. This is how Sverigedemokraterna carved out their political niche: they are happy to say things that no polite person will say, but that a significant chunk of the voting public likes.

Bringing a child murdered for her race into a lewd or speculative context is distasteful on its own. When Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel claimed that the lyrically rich and captivating record In The the Aeroplane Over the Sea was inspired by Anne Frank, that was embarrassing and slimy. Why would you bring the murdered child into your tapestry of intensely personal and sexual lyrics?

However, it does not erase the poetry of the record, with lines like

"Now how I remember you How I would push my fingers through Your mouth to make those muscles move That made your voice so smooth and sweet"

And we should not let the vulgarity of calling Anne Frank a horny slut take away from the content of the dismissal:

"50 pages in and so far Anne Frank has only struck me as immodest. Horniness personified"

According to the right wing extremists, there is little to learn, from the diary of a child murdered in the Holocaust, except that teenage girls are immodest. Peel off one layer of antisemitism, and there is even more below.

[writing-scraps]

The Matrix Resurrections

I watched The Matrix Resurrections in what was probably the best possible conditions for watching The Matrix Resurrections, namely in the last hours of a 9-hour flight, tiny screen and cheap headphones, stopping at about the point where reality starts to blur, and Tom finds himself facing Bugs a second time, and going with her ... follow the white rabbit.

The matrix never had an everyday before, even when Neo started out in the original, vanilla Matrix, the world was just a backdrop for the Agents & Hackers drama that was going to happen. It never occurred to me that Neo's world had therapists and stupid co-workers who would make MILF comments about your secret crush, or that the Matrix admitted fiction about the Matrix.

Because any story that has the real world break open to reveal magic or science fiction becomes meta-fiction. Resurrections goes all out and represents a full-blown Matrix trilogy within itself.

Two texts for comparison -- both contemporary and shallow -- Black Mirror’s USS Callister and Rick and Morty's incessant thing-within-a-thing episodes (metatextual and self-referential to the point where, on iteration oughty-eleven, it reads more like a cheap cop-out than a clever trick).

In USS Callister a game developer uses the Star Trek franchise like Resurrections uses the Matrix franchise to do wish fulfillment and Mary Sue-ing. In USS Callister, Daly takes away the female protagonist’s pussy; Tom Anderson puts her on a cool motorcycle in a black catsuit. Daly creates sentient copies of people, forced to live out his fantasies on repeat, and apparently so does Tom, in the program version of Morpheus.

The confusion is dream-like, full of irony, repetition, unfamiliar faces on familiar bodies, sometimes for in-film reasons and sometimes not, and while it’s unexplained, quite brilliant.

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Samson (Regina Spektor), part 2

Let's talk about the poetry of "Samson".

Most of the phrases are simple. If there are adjectives or other adornments, they are usually simple too. "Your hair was long when we first met. You are my sweetest downfall. A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light. The Bible didn't mention us, not even once."

Another lovely touch of simplicity is the words attributed to Samson. He says that the narrator has "done alright" with the haircut, and when he first comes to her bed, it's with these words:

"Samson came to my bed Told me that my hair was red Told me I was beautiful, and came into my bed"

This is not much of a compliment, when you think about it. You know what colour your hair is. But it's the kind of simple statement that could make someone incredibly happy if they are already in love, and we know that the narrator is.

A couple of lines stand out as more complicated and metaphorical than the others, and those are the lines with "beneath". "Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth" and "Beneath the stars came falling on our heads". They both change meaning slightly while sung. Because "beneath the sheets" comes before "of paper", there is a brief prefiguring of the later scenes in bed. "Beneath the stars" is uncomfortably superimposed with "beneath, the stars". Beneath what did the stars come falling? It doesn't matter, "they're just old light."

The first verse consists of phrases that would seem disconnected:

"You are my sweetest downfall I loved you first, I loved you first Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth I have to go, I have to go Your hair was long when we first met"

Spektor sings them as if they were part of the same sentences, like the later narrative verses. They belong together because she tells us that they do.

"Samson" uses repetition heavily. Repetition both legitimizes and complicates. That Samson comes to bed three times makes the time and place uncertain. Are these separate occasions, real or imagined? There are many repetitions on a smaller scale: hair and light comes up again, and the the sames are reused over and over.

Some parts of the text seem to flow from the rhyme scheme:

"Samson went back to bed Not much hair left on his head He ate a slice of Wonder Bread and went right back to bed"

This part appears, like cubist metafiction, driven by the structure of the text itself. Samson doesn't come back to bed in full clown makeup after biting the head off a child, or whatever a cubist writer would have had him do, but the repetition of similar phrases and the cat--hat--sat rhymes propel the text forward independently of story and character.

It is a mark of good poetry to do much with little. It's also a mark of good poetry to allow for many readings, many stories, emotions, level of irony, that may be completely at odds with each other, and at the same time to be very specific about some important things.

"Samson" is very specific in the opening and closing lines, where the narrator or Delilah professes her love and sets up her opposition to the biblical story. In the bible, Samson falls in love with Delilah, and she is his downfall. In the song,

"You are my sweetest downfall I loved you first"

The song is also very specific about the pivotal hair cutting moment:

"I cut his hair myself one night A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light And he told me that I'd done alright And kissed me till the morning light"

Again, in opposition to the Bible, where Delilah cuts Samson's hair while he's sleeping so that the Philestines can bind him, here the cutting of Samson's happens with consent. Samson and Delilah together purposefully take away his strength, allowing them to be together, at least for a time, instead of going down in biblical history.

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Samson (Regina Spektor)

“we couldn’t bring the columns down we couldn’t destroy a single one and the history books forgot about us and the bible didn’t mention us not even once”

There are some things there that are certain: Samson and Delilah, the cutting of the hair, the biblical portrayal of the man with superhuman strength, the evil duplicitous woman. There are some things that complicate the picture: the sheets of paper hiding the truth, eating a slice of Wonder Bread and going right back to bed, having to go, the stars that are just old light.

The biblical story has Samson and Delilah play a game of threes; he succeeds, three times, in fooling her with bogus explanations for his superhuman strength. The fourth time, inexplicably, he tells the truth, she cuts his hair and the rest, as we say, is history.

In Spektor’s version, the narrator does an alright job cutting Samson’s hair, and they cuddle up in bed. The stuff we read about in the bible, the ambush, the destruction of the temple, none of it happens. It’s too easy to play up the melancholy of the song; listen to the Live in London recording which sounds downright cheerful. After all, even the best love story will end in separation. It’s all that lovers can hope for, really, to be forgotten by history.

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narrative, bah, humbug

We love narrative. Life runs on narrative. The human mind is perfectly attuned and evolved towards baselessly proclaiming the importance of narrative.

Narratives about narrative are popular enough that any structure, it seems, whether it has anything to do with storytelling or not, must be called a narrative. Your bullet list of figures and tables to put in a scientific paper is a “storyboard”? Only by stretched analogy.

Much like graphs, cybernetics, the free energy principle -- large claims to generality, little explanatory power.

After watching weeks of horrible television, I’m convinced that the point is usually either ideas or characters. We want to explore the fascinating premise. We want to hang out with these intriguing people. Narrative, plot, story at best unobtrusively give a structure for the above to happen. Worst case, they put the ideas and characters on rushed time table that strains belief and drains enjoyment.

I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than others, but the majority start out with the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau. I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down. (Stephen King, On Writing)

Have you noticed how our lives do not, in fact, unfold according to a narrative? Narrative structure is only imposed after the fact, by the lies we tell ourselves.

In that sense, life and television are like poetry.