Dr. No-Carbs; or, The Yumminess of Bond

Over Thanksgiving, I watched (or re-watched, it's not always easy to keep track) Dr. No, the first Bond film; and I also watched the Tippi Hedren-Alfred Hitchcock HBO film The Girl. There wouldn't seem to be a connection between the two: one is the blueprint for all Bond plots to come (i.e., spy + girl vs. international evil); the other is a docu-drama of Hitchcock's creepy obsession with the star of two of his films, The Birds and Marnie.

The only real connection is this:

• Dr. No (1962), starring Sean Connery
• The Birds (1963), starring Tippi Hedren
• Marnie (1964), starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery

In The Girl, Hitch tells Tippi the idea of the movie Marnie--a frigid woman is blackmailed into marriage with a man who repels her (as all men do)--and that her co-star will be Sean Connery, from Dr. No. Tippi's response is that she'll have to be a very good actress to be frigid towards Sean Connery.

With that line in mind, when I watched Dr. No, I couldn't help but notice how differently this film treated Bond than some of the later films. Yes, at least one partly unclothed woman throws herself at him in his first appearance; but the main Bond girl doesn't show up until the second half of the film.

(And that woman is the almost realistically named Honey Ryder. Sure, that's ridiculous, but compared to Pussy Galore, Christmas Jones, and Holly Goodhead, "Honey Ryder" could be something out of Stephen Crane for its realism.)

On top of that, for a big chunk of the third act of Dr. No is Honey Ryder-less, with Sean Connery losing more of his clothing as he climbs through the air vents. (This was before supervillains realized that air vents are bad.) The camera doesn't follow Bond's body in the way The Avengers starts by showcasing Captain America's butt, but it also doesn't ignore his body as a consumable product of pleasure. What's especially notable here is that there are no women in these scenes who are comparably undressed. James Bond being naked for sex is one thing--James Bond stripping for the visual pleasure of the audience is quite another.

This takes something of a backseat in many of the later Bond films, where the camera lingers most on the women in James Bond's sights, or, at most, on Bond's clothing and gadgets. But Dr. No is a helpful reminder that the Daniel Craig James Bond movies aren't coming out of nowhere, but a return to the source.

My take on Bond, the shorter version

My last two posts on Skyfall were pretty big, so just in case you thought it was too long, here's the shorter version:

1) I am a moderate Bond movie fan.

2) I especially liked Daniel Craig's Bond in Casino Royale, which uncovered some of the ironies of Bond's status as a "man's man."

3) Skyfall made some good choices, but also some choices that I felt were strange and/or politically retrograde.

4) Most disturbing to me was the queering of the villain, which mainly seemed to elicit uncomfortable laughter when I saw it.

5) Skyfall seemed committed to nostalgia for Bond, which comes with fine nods to Bond history (the Aston Martin, M's hilariously padded door) and a resetting of women's roles in Bond: not head of the department, but maybe a glorified secretarial position.

Addendum: If your first impulse is to say, "of course there's misogyny, it's a Bond film," I will start bite through my lips again. If you want the same old Bond, you can watch the films that were made in a time when misogyny was more pervasive and less discussed; a Bond film made today doesn't get any passes about what was common or accepted back then.

Skyfall's major problems (it's nostalgia) (Bond, Part 2)

It's uncomfortable when just about everyone agrees that Skyfall is a good movie and you are left with only the company of the New Yorker's David Denby, notorious culture scold. If I agree with that guy, I must be wrong, right?

Now, I didn't hate Skyfall. In fact, I found it entertaining enough to keep my attention; and there were certain issues that I think make for good changes to the Bond formula. For instance, the big one is that instead of some ludicrous high-stakes villainous plan--remember Tomorrow Never Dies, where the villain wants to start a war between the UK and China to help his news empire? Woof--Skyfall focuses on a more personal stake of friendship and loyalty and feelings of obsolescence.

And yet I can't help not loving Skyfall as much as, say, Roger Ebert. Now here's the part where I confess to loving Roger Ebert even though I don't always agree with him: he seems to perfectly balance a populist interest in entertainment and a love of the craft and art of film-making. But I don't understand Ebert when he says that "here is James Bond lifted up, dusted off, set back on his feet and ready for another 50 years." Let me count the ways that I don't agree with that sentiment (and give some spoilers on the way):

My problems with Skyfall
One is for the length. I wasn't bored through much of the film, thanks to the use of clear goals for the main characters. But seriously, there were certain sequences and certain shots that could be shaved down. How many times do we need to see an establishing shot of the London skyline before cutting to the MI6 location that we've already been told is in London?

Two is for the villain Silva, a blond-dyed Javier Bardem, whose motivation and character feel like a real step back. This is such a complex of annoying choices that I have to give it its own numbering system:

Problem #1: Silva's character design and backstory: Unlike some other Bond villains, this one comes with backstory (a backstory that's a little too close to Janus's/006's history in Goldeneye, if you ask me):

Silva used to be M's favorite when she ran the Hong Kong bureau, but he got a little fresh with the Chinese, so to preserve a peaceful hand-over (and a couple of other agents' lives), M gave him up; the Chinese tortured him and when he realized that M had abandoned him, he took his cyanide capsule, which only resulted in massively disfiguring his face if he's not wearing his prosthetic cheek bones; and now he is in charge of a ruthless and well-funded terrorist/spy network for hire and a master hacker.

The leap from tortured prisoner to head of network is one of many things that you'll just have to either take or leave here, because there's no explanation of it, and I just have to shrug. At least Janus's backstory of being a traitor to MI6 involved his secret Russian activities before he faked his death, which explains why he went on to run his own Russian-based intelligence operation.

And then there's Silva's pointlessly disfigured face--is that why he's out for revenge, because his cyanide didn't work right? Maybe he should see Q Branch about misfiring gadgets. It seems like a quick way to give a little visual pop to the confrontation scene with M, but honestly, if you need a visual pop, maybe that's because you skimped on the emotional pop.

Problem #2: What does it mean to Silva to get M? It's always clear that this Silva is out to get M, but the parameters of that "out to get" aren't particularly clear: at one moment, he's trying to torture her by attacking her institution and at another point, he's just trying to old-school shoot her.

It's not a problem that his idea here changes, only that it's not sufficiently examined or explained. His first plan is to attack her reputation by exposing an MI6 list of some NATO spies that are under cover in terrorist organizations. That would strain Britain's relation with her allies, which would be a problem for M. (Now, Silva got that information from a hard drive in Turkey in the first action sequence--and no fair asking why the British hard drive with that information is in Turkey rather than safely in MI6 somewhere. Like Silva's transformation from Chinese prisoner to terrorist world leader, SHUT UP THAT'S WHY.) He also uses "computer hacking" to leak gas and blow up part of the MI6 building.

So that's Silva's plan: ruin M's reputation. No, wait, because then Silva allows himself to get captured; confronts M with her crime against him; and then escapes and tries to shoot her at a committee meeting. Why has his plan suddenly changed from "elaborately ruin M and expose her powerlessness" to "shoot M"? (It's especially weird that he interrupts the committee meeting which is exposing her to the public--yech--in order to shoot her. Dude, why interrupt one plan with another?) You might say, "maybe after the confrontation with her he decided to change his plan"; which would be a fine guess except that his plan clearly was set up before he was captured and confronted her. (Or else how would he have contacted his minions to bring him a cop's uniform and meet up with him to shoot her?)

This issue of Silva's motivation becomes especially bothersome in the final act, a siege of the old Bond estate of Skyfall Lodge. At first, Silva seems like he wants to take M out personally--otherwise, instead of infiltrating a government meeting with a gun, he could just use his magical computer network to hijack some missiles or something. And yet, Silva's attack on the lodge plan is a) let faceless minions go in and shoot first; b) let his helicopter use its massive gun to shoot up the lodge; c) throw grenades into the lodge. Now, if you can spot the "personal touch" in any of that, you've got better eyes than me.

Problem #3: Silva's queerness: This is a complicated topic, but let me just tell you my experience: here in West Texas, when the villain starts to caress Bond's chest, neck, and knees, there was laughter that seemed to be about the very expression of queerness. For comparison, when a man touches Bond: laughter; when Bond touches a woman at a bar or in a shower: nothing.

And for further contrast, when Silva makes a comment about Bond trying homosexuality for the first time, Bond archly asks Silva why he thinks this would be Bond's first time--and the biggest laughter in the audience was from my girlfriend, not from the people around us. ("Homosexual villains are all well and good, but a hero who engages in homosexuality--you go too far, sir.") If I had been watching this movie alone in my house, I might have thought "well, that's a character choice that seems antiquated." But seeing it in a theater where the primary response to homosexuality was uncomfortable laughter, that makes me uncomfortable with the stereotypes of homosexuality as predatory, weird, laced with trauma and sadism.

Silva's fourth problem is actually a problem everyone shares, so:

Three is for how everyone has to act a little stupidly in order for the plot to go on as needed. Silva may be the prime example of this: he controls a well-funded, well-armed, and well-staffed network, but nothing can ever be done simply. This might have been fun if they had established him as a game-player, the sort of villain who needs to prove his mental superiority; but as it stands it just seems unplanned, chaotic, and a little crazy. (And after Heath Ledger's Joker, if you're going to bring a crazy character to life, you better bring it.)

But everyone has to act a little stupid:

• When Bond fights with three bodyguards/captors of Silva's ladyfriend Severine, one of them knocks him into the Komodo dragon pit and the other two... stand around instead of shooting him?
• In fact, why do they even care about killing him when their main job should be to keep Severine from running away? Why is she even allowed off of Silva's secret lair on an island? (Some of this could be explained by saying that Silva needs to lure Bond to capture him and bring him to London, but there are easier ways to get captured--and easier ways of getting to London.) 
• Why does Silva hire an assassin to kill an old man when Severine is in the room with the old man, so he's clearly gettable? (Again, this might be a crumb Silva leaves for Bond, but it's just another odd thing. At the very least, when Bond notices that Severine is in the room and in the casino, he might think "that's odd" because he's superspy who is supposed to notice things like that. So maybe this is Bond acting dumb instead of Silva.) 
• Why does the Bond family's old gamekeeper shine a flashlight when he's trying to hide from Silva's minions? 
• Why is the new M glad to hire 007 when, let's review: Bond played dead and went AWOL for a while; he failed his physical and mental reviews; his plan to kill Silva by using the old M as bait resulted in her death? Who looks at that record and says, "I'd like to offer you a position"?
• If M's philosophy is that it's better for one person to be given up than for a whole group of people (which is what she did when she gave up Silva to save six other spies and preserve relations with China), then why doesn't she just give herself up to Silva at the first possible moment? Because the longer she fights, the more spies and civilians are going to end up killed and wounded. (Honestly, M trying to sacrifice herself while 007 tried to protect her against her wishes would make a pretty awesome character dynamic.)

Maybe not all of these questions show how these characters have to act idiotically; but they do show that the plot requires these characters to act strangely, unrelatably, or contrary to their characters.

Four is for the nostalgia and the cheap nods to Bond's history and fandom. The problem of nostalgia is thematized here with the conflict between the old and the new, the conflict between raw human spirit (fuck yeah!) and intermediated computer networks and technology. There are quite a few lines here about how espionage is a young person's game and how the new Q--a hipster Sherlock knock-off--can do more damage than 007 without getting out of bed. We're clearly supposed to be on the side of the aged here: Judi Dench's soon-to-be-retired M, 007 who knows when to pull a trigger or use a knife, the old gameskeeper Kincade and the historical secrets of the old Skyfall Lodge (like M, the house is referred to as an old lady). And then there's the tedious arguments about whether or not the world has changed and how many shadows there are left for spies to operate in.

Of course, that line is undercut by the fact that Silva has bridged this gap: he's capable of computer manipulation and shooting a gun. He even makes a show of using antique pistols. He lives in the old shadows still, but uses cutting edge tools. In fact, we could also point out that Silva is only beaten by Bond when he cooperates with the young Q; and the final images of the film involve Bond purposely destroying the old house (thus symbolically clearing the trauma of his family loss, with the trip through the underworld of the priest's hole as a symbolic rebirth, blah blah). So all this rah-rah nostalgia for the old days that people talk about--it's not upheld by the action of the film itself, except in a few key ways that are so obvious they might have hung a neon sign flashing "symbolic triumph of the old."

But what really gets me about all this nostalgia is that it goes beyond "computers are hard." If nostalgia were just "I miss handwriting," I'd understand and accept it. But so many times, this sort of nostalgia comes along with a whole host of "good old day" baggage that should be left unattended at the airport and then destroyed as suspicious. That't the kind of nostalgia that Skyfall treats in and I don't like it.

Finding the old Aston Martin in a warehouse is fine; remembering fondly that Bond has a long and gloried history of misogyny is not. And the end of this movie sees a certain retrograde movement that does not make me happy: the female M replaced with a male M? The reduction of female field agent Eve to the status of secretary Moneypenny? The queering of the villain? Yay, it's the 1950s-60s again--let's dig up Alan Turing's body and pump it full of hormones again.

(Curiously, gay computer expert Turing died from his cyanide poisoning, unlike Silva; and Turing's contributions to the security apparatus of Britain were similarly hush-hush. So maybe there's some Silva-Turing connection to be made. Though let's further note that Silva's real name "Tiago" is a form of "Santiago," which is Portuguese for, ahem, James.)

It's funny to me that the last scene involves Bond demolishing his own house, as if he were wiping away the childhood trauma that produced him and coming out of the tunnels rebirthed, a phoenix free of the past. But this movie is so drenched with nostalgia that I can't see any way forward for this Bond. Roger Ebert says this Bond is ready for another 50 years, and I agree if we're talking about the past 50 years.

And I'm Sky, I'm Sky-Fallin'! (Bond, Part 1)

First, I stole the joke of the title from Brendan Hay's twitter, which I recommend if you want to steal things.

Second, talking about James Bond is like talking about Batman: it's impossible to really say what Bond is like since we've seen several different iterations of him. For instance, you might think of Bond as a suave womanizer who looks like Sean Connery--until you watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service with George Lazenby as Bond. That iteration of Bond doesn't do so great at suave womanizing: his suavity is parodically reduced to re-using the same lines on different women; and his womanizing is replaced with marrying for love.

Third, I have seen a lot of Bond films and have opinions on them all. Or I would if I could remember them. Mostly they're a haze of villainous plots and snappy lines, like

Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

A lot of these "snappy" lines revolve around the women in Bond's life and bed (often the same thing), from Goldfinger's rather restrained banter, where Pussy Galore introduces herself and Bond responds, "I must be dreaming"; to the cringe-, nay, barf-inducing zinger in The World is Not Enough, where Bond gets Denise Richards's nuclear scientist Christmas Jones into bed and tells her how surprised he is since he "thought Christmas only comes once a year."

So, I would restrainedly call myself a Bond fan; at the very least, I recognize the title "The World is Not Enough" as the motto on Bond's family's crest (as mentioned in the movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service, though it's delivered by Bond to women, so maybe we shouldn't trust him too far here).

Fourth, even though I enjoyed the over-the-top Bond of earlier movies (men with metal teeth, space lasers, evil institutions with silly names likes SPECTRE), I thought Casino Royale was, for all its faults, a revelatory and exciting reinvention. Instead of suave womanizer with cool/silly gadgets, Bond was a brutal tool used and abused by institutional forces. Instead of gadgets and women, this Bond was placed as the central weapon and object of attention.

Again, like Batman, the Daniel Craig Bond in Casino Royale was an incredibly traumatized figure whose empty-hearted dedication to the job was empowering and re-traumatizing. (Try all you want, Batman--all those crimes that you prevent won't prevent the one crime that haunts you.) Put it this way: when Sean Connery's Bond wasn't working, he probably continued to do Bond stuff, like drinking, womanizing, and gambling--the job was an extension of his personality; when Daniel Craig's Bond was off the clock, I could picture him just sitting in a dark room, waiting to be called into action. The job isn't an extension of Bond's personality, it's a replacement of his personality.

Fifth, no matter how much I enjoyed Casino Royale, I recognize that you can't really make a franchise out of such a deeply cracked figure. Perhaps at most, you can make the Nolan Batman trilogy, where we see the making and then un-making of the traumatized superhero as he learns to live a human life. Casino Royale was very much 007 Begins, the making of Bond as super-spy with no particular soul. Now, that's a story you can't really expect to play over and over again: a character who achieves some apotheosis in one film will seem false to the audience if he starts over again. After you've hit empty, you need to find somewhere else to go. You can't keep doing "Bond kills remorselessly, finds love, loses his heart and becomes an institutional tool" arcs.

Sixth, people seem to love the new Bond film Skyfall. I did not. More on that tomorrow.

Missing the Point; or, Yes, But Can You Secede from Reality?

I am not a conservative or a Republican, and unless things change radically, I never will be. And I don't know many Republicans/conservatives that I talk to about political issues. But I do occasionally hang out on conservative websites and forums to see what people are saying; this doesn't give me any special insight into the conservative mind--for one thing, the people who go to those sites are a self-selected group, tending towards some extreme views.

In other words (and shorter), I'm just guessing here and don't have a nifty model like Nate Silver.

That said, what I'm reading is not making me hopeful that Republicans will wake up to reality after the drubbing of the 2012 election. The talk might occasionally nod towards soul-searching like an acquaintance--"well, maybe we should rethink our position on social issues since they're not winning issues for us."

But most of the talk excels at the sort of angry, reality-resistant positions that the right has perfected recently: Romney was a bad candidate (and even worse, a mushy non-conservative); the media was in the tank for Obama (sub-argument: there wasn't enough attention paid to Benghazi, Fast & Furious, etc.); things will never be the same with these new, non-traditional Americans (you know the ones we mean *makes racist comment*, not that we're racist); the takers just vote themselves more bread and circuses; etc.

In other words, everything is wrong with the world except our ideas, which are great.

And this isn't just from the no-name commenters; if you go to National Review's blog, The Corner, you'll see quite a few arguments like this, including:
1) the old GOP leaders don't work, we need new leaders (with, we assume, the same ideas);
2) Chris Christie betrayed us;
3) we can't change our ideas because they're our ideas!;
4) we need to educate the public about the meaning of liberty (sub-argument: destroy the existing colleges and schools); etc.

What really gets me about this (and why I'm taking precious NaNoWriMo time to write this post) is that these Republicans keep talking about how great their ideas are, without any hint that maybe possibly kind of we tried a lot of these ideas over the years and they're not. Low taxes on the rich create jobs? The Republicans are the party of small government? We need to do things unilaterally to show the world we mean business? Capitalism solves everything? Gay sex and abortion are terrible things that degrade the morals of society?

I hope I'm wrong about all this; I hope all this "a storm is coming, I'm getting guns" talk is just the immediate sting of the 2012 beating; but while hopeful, I'm not optimistic that this will teach the GOP very much. Maybe a few more election loses will knock some sense of reality into them.

So, who's ready for 2014?

Writing Excuses Marathon

I recently decided to go back and listen to all of the episodes of the Writing Excuses podcast. First, the background, then my analysis.

Background Info
Writing Excuses is a panel discussion on issues related to writing by Brandon Sanderson (fantasy), Howard Taylor (webcomics), Dan Wells (horror), and, starting in Season Six (iirc), Mary Robinette Kowal (fantasy, sf, and puppetry).

Each episode is about 15 minutes long and they frequently have other guests to discuss other issues. They do everything from live shows with random questions from the audience (most random question: "Would you like a bagel?") and very focused issue episodes: What is first-person narration? What is cyberpunk? How do you write a query letter?

Analysis
I started listening sometime in Season Five, so this is my first time listening to some of the early episodes. And there's some roughness there which are smoothed out in later seasons; for instance, they first tried to hum "shilling" music when one of them was mentioning his own work. In later episodes, they more simply just explain how they did what they do, which is what we come for if we want to hear people with experience in the field.

There are many interesting episodes, but I don't know if I can suggest marathoning as I did to catch up. Rather, since there are 259 episodes, it's probably better to pick and choose and concentrate on those episodes that offer the most help for your particular issue at a particular time.

So, if you have trouble with structure, just go to the website and find episodes about structure. If you want some help with character, look at the character posts. (It's also very nice that a dedicated fan has been writing down transcripts of each episode, and his use of tags might be superior.) If you're interested in a career as a writer, Writing Excuses probably has something for you; and if you're just interested in one or two topics, it's relatively easy to dip in for an episode or two (though they do have running jokes and other callbacks, especially easy since they appear to record many episodes all at once).

He said/He heard/He heard at the VP Debate 2012

After the VP Debate, I was incensed at a conservative tweet that characterized Biden's answer on abortion as evidence that he was a "shitty Catholic." I stupidly got into a conversation with this conservative, which helped clarify the difference here. Spoiler: the difference is that this person assumes the worst of liberals.

When Biden explained that he acts according to his religious belief but he doesn't force those beliefs on others, I heard a rousing call for religious tolerance, which, you know, is kind of a big deal in America.

What this conservative heard was something more like "I support eugenic genocide." Now, before I get accused of casting his argument in an absurd light, let me note that this is actually what he said on his blog:

The modern abortion debate is simply early 1900s eugenics tied up with a pretty bow labeled “woman’s rights.” Eugencis are all about rating humanity on an arbitrary scale of usefullness, and then manipulating it accordingly. (cite) 

Yup, "woman's rights" is just the pretty bow we use to hide our thirst for baby blood and a desire to weed out undesirables, which, in this case, is all babies ever. So, how do we have a political discussion over this?

In slight defense of this terrible argument by this conservative, I will say that he pivots quickly from "this is a religious belief" to "this is the scientific and moral truth." Of course, that has no bearing on the VP debate where the abortion issue was starkly cast in a Catholic frame, so it's a terrible argument on his part. But it does help clarify his POV, which is that abortion is a moral issue removed from religion. I do wonder who told him that fetuses were the moral equivalent of living women, but that's another issue.

Also, for comic genius, I can't beat a Romney supporter claiming that Biden is just being political expedient in his answer. Seriously: I cannot beat that for unintentional comedy.

Andrew Sullivan's Gut Has Shit For Brains

Alternately titled: "Andrew Sullivan is not America."

Andrew Sullivan is a useful blogger to follow for a few things; quiet introspection is not one of them. If you follow Andrew (affectionately known as Sully), you saw his meltdown over the first presidential debate, with such carefully titled posts as "Does Obama Want Out?" and "Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?" Since then, he's run some dissenting emails and some supporting emails, but the general message has stayed the same; even in a short post on how Clinton said something, Sully throws in a jab at Obama: "Could the president switch off ESPN for a second and take notes?" (cite)

Over at the Awl, Ken Layne pierces Sully's narcissism and hyperventilating. Layne notes that "There are no small moments in Andrew Sullivan's online world": everything is always the end of the world--as long as it affects Sully directly. (Seriously, check it out: he grudgingly admitted that there was a GOP war on women though he found the term "shrill"--and then he turned around and declared that there was a war on gays. Because if it affects Sully, then it's a serious issue in his world.)

So when Obama had a disappointing performance, it's not just a political issue for Sully, it's a personal attack and affront. Which leads to the second problem with Sully: overestimating his own feelings and thoughts. This is a common problem for pundits, who often claim that "politician X would be doing a lot better if only he embraced the issue that I care about." With Sully, this is Bowles-Simpson, a ridiculous grand bargain that smart people on the left call "the cat food commission" because of its likely outcome: slashing care for the elderly and needy. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Obama can safely lose the gay Anglo-American Irish Catholic Oxford-educated PhD vote without significantly altering his electoral chances. Only Sully's pride will be hurt.

This is Monday Morning Quarterbacking at its best: histrionic and self-assured. And what really drives home the lesson today is Sully's "woe is me" comments on moving to New York City with a very lucrative contract, a ridiculous post titled "New York Shitty" that ends with the plaintive cry of the oppressed: "Please tell me it gets better." Oh, pobrecito! Let's all make sure Sully finds New York bearable with his $1m blogging gig.

No, let's be honest: New York can be hard to deal with; Obama had a disappointing performance at the debate. And yet, the world still somehow goes on. Sully will often excuse his kneejerk wrong reactions by noting that he's thinking in real time (unlike the rest of us who somehow get extra time from our hook-up with the Gallifreyans?) and responding with his gut, but maybe it's time for Sully to take a deep breath and admit that his gut has shit for brains.

Xander: "You don't know how to kill this thing." Buffy: "I thought I might try violence.": Rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2 Episodes 12-22

Man, it's hard to cut Season 2 down. Now, here's a time for a confession: I love anything having to do with Giles, maybe because child-father figure stories usually get me. For comparison, anytime Clark Kent and Jonathan Kent get into a conversation about where Superman got his values, that's the sort of stuff that gets me all the time.

So, season 2 has some crucial plot and character arcs; and there are some excellent one-offs that I might want to include. Right now, my list of necessary episodes includes

1. Surprise and Innocence (13 and 14)--all about Buffy and Angel
2. Phases (15)--Oz goodness
3. Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered (16)--a fun episode
4. Passion (17)--Giles goodness
5. Becoming, Part One and Two (21 and 22)

That brings the total episodes up to ...

(2: Season 1, Episodes 6 (The Pack) and 9 (Puppet Show)
12: Season 2, Episodes 3 (School Hard), 6 (Halloween), 9 and 10 (What's My Line, Part 1 and 2), 11 (Ted), 13 (Surprise), 14 (Innocence), 15 (Phases), 16 (Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered), 17 (Passion), 21 and 22 (Becoming, Part 1 and 2))

... 14 episodes total. I do like the one-offs "Bad Eggs" and "Go Fish" and even "I Only Have Eyes For You" (with a young John Hawkes!), but at 14 episodes, my playlist is beginning to show a little bloat. I think I'll keep "Ted" in the list rather than swap out one of the other one-offs because, if I'm prepping this list for my girlfriend, I think she'd like John Ritter.

Now here's my second confession of the day: I'm bored by the fight scenes in Buffy--they may be well choreographed but they don't always have much besides spectacle going for them. Rarely do they examine character or make jokes; mostly it's just "there's a blonde girl who vaguely looks like Buffy from far away doing some roundhouse kicks."

A final note: because the episodes are thematically organized, it may be easy to turn them into afterschool specials. For instance, "Go Fish" clearly contains a lesson about the dangers of steroids. Some of these little lessons may be past their sell-by-date for certain audiences. (If I was going to take steroids, it would've been during my illustrious fencing career in college. Though the idea of a steroidally-jacked fencer is sketch-comedy worthy.) It's still a good episode, but might cause a little eye-rolling as they hammer the lesson home.

Super Short Review: Headhunters (Hodejegerne) (2011)

An excellent Norwegian thriller, available on Netflix now. Occasionally slips into Grand Guignol territory with the bloodplay--dog attack, stabbing, shaving without cream. But mostly focuses on suspense and mystery and human motivation.

"Did anyone explain to you what 'secret identity' means?": Rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2 Episodes 1-11

Season Two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is more solid than Season One; and starts to lay down the serious relationship material that will be instrumental in twisting the knife in Season Three. So it seems harder to pass up some of these episodes, and I worry this playlist may end up pretty long.

One thing that you should start to notice when you're 24 episodes into 144 is how well-crafted the episodes are, how thematically focused they are. For instance, the Halloween episode is all about trying out different parts of your (forming) personality, and we see this idea across the major characters, both magically-induced and stress-induced: Buffy becomes regular (and helpless); Xander becomes tough; Willow--seeking invisibility--becomes hypervisible; Cordelia continues her growth into a helpful partner; while we also see a first glimpse of Giles's darker past--the part of his personality that he left behind.

Right now, my playlist for the second season is

1. School Hard (3), which introduces Spike
2. Halloween (6)
3. What's My Line, Part 1 and 2 (9 and 10)
4. Ted (11)

"Ted" might be controversial, but I think it's important to show a "monster of the week" episode and I think John Ritter really sells the 1950s psychokiller.

"Enough with the hyperbole!": Rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1

It's long been a dream of mine to come up with the perfect episode playlist for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the kind of limited list that you could give to someone if they asked you "Why do you love Buffy and what might convince me to love it, too?" To be honest, I think it would be impossible to make a list that would work completely for anyone--this list would have to be aimed carefully at the heart of the viewer. In other words, this is the type of quest best performed for a loved one who never got into Buffy but whose taste is generally a known quality, like my girlfriend.

So, I've been home sick this week with a minor fever that might warp my speaking ability but has left intact my Netflix-navigation acumen. So I rewatched the first, short season of Buffy, and here's my take:

The thirteen episodes of Buffy's first season set up the general dynamic for the long, three-season arc of Sunnydale High, including all the main characters--Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, Cordelia, Jenny Calendar, Angel, Principal Snyder; and yet none of the episodes reaches the level of must-see. Almost anything you need to know about those characters, a dedicated viewer could sum up in a sentence or two, or maybe just a phrase: slayer with a ditzy side, male friend with unrequited crush, etc.

The only episodes that rise to the top for me are those non-vampire, weird episodes that make the metaphor of monstrous teenagerhood into something real, like "The Pack," which is all about cliquehood (and involves the authentically weird moment where the students eat the principal); or "The Puppet Show," which involves issues of being out of place and out of control.

"The Puppet Show" has one advantage in Principal Snyder's introductory line about how children are criminals and any attempt to deal with them as humans is just "the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten." This is an issue that comes up a lot in the series: the powerlessness and assumed criminality of the young.

Also, another issue that comes up frequently: Xander's clothes are so dated.

How does a book shape a country?; Or, Why can't you read?

This is late news, but then again, this is a semi-moribund blog, so it fits.

Starting in late June, the Library of Congress put on a display of Books That Shaped America, which is the kind of title that demands to be shouted from the rooftops. It's a collection of 88 books by American authors that "have had a profound effect on American life." 

There are numerous problems with a list like this. For instance, presentism: we read the development of America from a particular point in time, so certain things will seem more or less important now than they once were. 

Case in point: Moby Dick, which has been around for roughly 150 years but pretty much only read for 100. So if you organizing this exhibit in 1900 and wanted to include Moby Dick, there's a chance you would've been locked up as incurably crazy. It's true that it's shaped reading lists in schools for the past century, but how has that really shaped America? Here's a counterfactual thought experiment: Imagine a US where Moby Dick was never written--what's different from our world?

Case in point (2): I would've included some Jonathan Edwards, an important theologian, author of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and intellectual forebear of the Great Awakening--even though he's not all that important to America today in a direct way.

Another problem--though it's probably a self-conscious strategy on the part of the LoC--is that the concept of "shaping" is inherently vague. So the exhibition can say that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a best-seller (in England), but that's a far cry from saying that it started a tradition of American supernatural folk-tales or somehow shaped America in some way besides making money.

So the list has problems, sure, but it also has a built-in argument that these are some of the books that shaped America. This isn't an exclusive list; and it isn't even presenting itself as a list of the books that most shaped America. This is simply an exhibition to start a conversation. If you don't like this list, make up your own to add the books that you think should be added to this category.

That said, there's a lot of predictable boo-hooing about how mean this list is to religious-Americans or otherwise fails--complaints that tend to cast more light on the writer's ignorance or perversity than on the list's failure. 

For instance, professor of religion Stephen Prothero complains that there's not enough religion on the list; we could call this the "Where's the Bible?" problem, as I've seen that question asked around the internet in comments. Except the list is clearly restricted to American authors and people would know that if they bothered to read the info. Prothero knows this, but oddly calls the restriction "a technicality," making it sound as if it's a quibbling little detail instead of the organizing principle of the whole exhibit. He probably means that it's "arbitrary," which is fair, but then most organizing principles are. It's especially telling that his list (in a book you can buy now!) includes several non-book items, like a memorial, which shows how non-conventional his thinking is--or how he refuses to obey the rules of the game.

On the more materialistic end of the spectrum, Reason magazine blogger Tim Cavanaugh complains that there aren't enough best-sellers (because, for a Libertarian, the market is always right). I agree in parts with Cavanaugh's argument about presentism, though it pains me to be on the same side as someone who can't bother to look up how to spell Edgar Allan Poe's name. But Cavanaugh's organizing principle ("Who made the most money?") is so blinkered and narrow that it comes out self-parodizing: "to shape America" is the same thing for this crowd as "to make money." Cavanaugh's entry ends on the perfect note, with a complaint that the LoC has too many librarians. Because who needs librarians when you have best-seller lists?