Dear Television, The Music Video Love

3 Ways of Looking at Arcade Fire

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Dear Television,

EVERYBODY HATED “Bound 2.” I don’t mean the song. In fact, if you ask Yeezy purists, probably too many people liked the song (the lone example of Kanye West’s more mainstream chipmunk soul on an uncommonly aggressive album). No, everybody hated Kanye West’s video for “Bound 2.” (My favorite description of the background imagery is Andrew Goldstein’s suggestion that it’s the stock footage “playing under every Chinatown karaoke song I’ve ever sung.”) Critics and fans alike were upset by the video’s apparent lack of self-consciousness, its decadent embrace of cheese, its radiant narcissism. After months of bonkers interviews, groping publicity, and the greatest stunt-naming of an infant to occur in my lifetime, Kanye had finally lost it, and the result was his very first truly bad work of art.

Essentially, these criticisms were directed at West’s naivete. It’s terrible, but he thinks it’s good. Ha ha ha, what an idiot. From this perspective, Seth Rogen and James Franco released their wildly successful shot-for-shot parody, which parodied the video simply by reproducing it and adding in a tasty little bit of gay panic. The Rogen/Franco video assumes that, in order to turn a serious video into a joke, all that needs to be done is to call it a joke. In other words, what’s funny about this video is that Kanye West doesn’t know how funny it is. Rogen and Franco frenching and canoodling on that motorcycle mirrors the way they reach out their hairy hands to us. We exist, with them, on the side where people have self-knowledge. Kimye exist on the side of total, blissful, vulgar innocence.

What puzzled me so much about the reaction to this video was the public’s willingness to assume Kanye West is stupid. Kanye West whose albums basically have a time-share in Pitchfork Media’s top 5 albums of the year; whose production for Jay-Z and others defined the sound of the early 21st century; whose 2013 stage tour is literally bringing music critics to tears; and whose most recent album Yeezus dropped like the Second Coming on the popular music world this year. Despite this, Kanye West, apparently, has not earned our trust.

I don’t know what to do with “Bound 2.” Jody Rosen and Jerry Saltz have made convincing cases for what Kanye’s doing with visuality and the uncanny in the video. But, regardless of whether I agree with those readings, or whether I personally understand the video or not, it seems foolish to settle for a surface-reading of a video made by an artist with such weird, craggy depths. Upon closer inspection, “Bound 2” might not be anything, but a lot of critics went straight to assuming that it’s nothing.

Yesterday, Annie laid out, in grand fashion, a kind of aesthetics of music video emptiness. Today, I’d like to venture a read of music video ambition — or, put another way, music video fullness. To that end, I present three ways of looking at Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife”…

Afterlife #1: Black Orpheus


It’s not every year that “cultural appropriation” is on the public radar. This year, however, following the multi-stage debacle that was Miley Cyrus’s Twerkface Minstrelsy routine, critics have been enormously, unusually, alert to the dynamics of racialized cultural power onscreen. All of which is to say that I was shocked that this lyric video didn’t provoke more than even a small reaction in the online critical sphere. This video — the lyric video for “Afterlife,” released as a teaser for Arcade Fire’s new album Reflektor — is comprised of shots from Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus, which retells the Orpheus myth in the setting of Brazilian Carneval. The film was a huge hit upon its release — the music became a sensation of its own — and its infectious rhythms and brilliant color remain irresistible. In retrospect, though, it smacks of colonialism and somewhat uncomfortably portrays its Afro-Brazilian characters as naïve and superstitious. Arcade Fire here takes shots from the famous macumba ritual that occurs late in the film and cuts them together with shots of our protagonist Orfeu earlier in the film dancing and singing. The images are taken out of their context and recut to build the kind of vaguely sinister, vaguely danceable aesthetic Reflektor embodies. White people, black bodies, representation and control, authenticity and performance — why was this not a thing?

Rather than jump at the bait, this video made next to no impression on the critterati. Mashable, for its part, called the lyric video an “intensely romantic mini-movie.” The short piece does not mention that the footage is from Black Orpheus, but it does quote Arcade Fire’s Will Butler explaining that the song is structured around a Haitian percussion loop. This widely circulated pull-quote would explain a lot if the video featured any Haitians at all and was not, in fact, comprised solely of French and Brazilian actors portraying Brazilian characters. It’s not terribly ungenerous to say that this is a slightly wobbly rationale for what’s going on here. In any case, it strikes me as fishy that so few people were interested in asking a follow-up to this flimsy, potentially offensive, artist’s statement.

One notable voice for the minority of people who were at all interested in talking about this video was Hayden Higgins at The Atlantic. Higgins noticed this weird disconnect, in fact, and wrote a spectacular essay about Arcade Fire’s exploitation of Haiti and conflation, in the rhetoric surrounding this album, of a variety of African and Afro-Caribbean cultures. Arcade Fire, for Higgins, isn’t interested in these cultures so much as in the aesthetic they lend to whatever they touch. If we take Higgins’s reading seriously, it’s not hard to claim that Arcade Fire sought out a “black” sound just as much as Miley has been pilloried for doing. But Arcade Fire is smart, they know what they’re doing, and so we assume that they are the ethical, artistic, well-read folks here. (In fact, the Huffington Post headline claims that the lyric video, “acts as a Film Studies Course too.”) If it seems like nonsense, it must be because it’s over our heads.

Annie has pointed out that most music videos are all surface, and that seems to have led us to read only for surfaces. How are the dance moves? How little clothing is she wearing? What kind of shark is that? It took Miley bringing the minstrel tradition to the very top of the mix for anybody to notice it was happening at all. But just because we only practice surface reading of these texts doesn’t mean that some videos aren’t, intentionally or unintentionally, deeper. I suspect that the blatant artificiality, the fetishized surface-ness of “Bound 2” belies something more. Likewise, the surface of this lyric video — comprised almost entirely of dancing Brazilians, exotic-looking rituals, an ominous fellow in a skeleton suit, and, if you recognize the clip, a high-brow cultural reference — belies the work of appropriation and authentication Arcade Fire is trying to pull. Win Butler described the album’s sound as a “mashup of Studio 54 and Haitian Voodoo.” That statement only makes sense if you understand it as a description of a costume the band can wear, and that’s exactly, and all, that it is.

For their single “We Used to Wait” from The Suburbs, Arcade Fire commissioned a multi-media, Google Chrome spectacular — they also worked with Chrome to make a video for “Reflektor” — that essentially produced a personalized video experience based around the Google Satellite maps and Google Street View of each viewer’s childhood home. This was a video experience that dealt, literally, in surfaces. But the filmmaker behind it blended traditional music video footage with animation and the generic but intensely intimate images of Street View to create an experience of surfaces imbued with deep nostalgia. The video, even today, makes you feel, but not just through spectacle. It’s an admirable and beautiful experience, and it nods to the immersive possibilities of technology even as it bemoans the alienation of online communication. It’s a reminder that we ought to take Arcade Fire as seriously as they take themselves, if only because they don’t always get it right.

Afterlife #2: Greta Gerwig

What does Arcade Fire get from Black Orpheus? The veneer of intellectualism? The exotic groove of the African diaspora? Closeness to and superiority over ecstatic religious experience?

Ok. But what then does Arcade Fire get from Greta Gerwig? Indie chanteuse, post-mumblecore muse, gangly goddess Greta Gerwig has had, by some accounts, a pretty good year. In the spring, Noah Baumbach released his critically-acclaimed Frances Ha, a film starring and co-written with Gerwig. Regardless of whether you loved the film or hated it, it’s hard to deny that Gerwig’s aura is its reason for being. A satire of post-graduate malaise and Brooklyn hipsterism as well as a surprisingly conventional growing-up story, Frances Ha is inconceivable as a project without its star. It’s less a love letter from this filmmaker to his lover than an attempt to capture her spirit — capture like a picture and like a trap — to hold up as an amulet against the melancholy of aging. And so Frances Ha too is an act of appropriation.

Central to Frances Ha, in the same way that Diane Keaton’s singing is to Annie Hall, is Gerwig’s lurpy dancing. Both an object of ridicule and a thing taken weirdly seriously in the film, Gerwig’s technically bad, somewhat affecting (affected?) moves — she plays a struggling ballerina in the film — symbolize the protagonist’s awkward lunges toward connection, love, and adulthood. And the camera lingers on those moves, in practice, onstage, and even in the street. Gerwig’s dancing is the most honest thing in a film filled with dishonesties small and large (I would argue a fair number of those dishonesties belong to Baumbach). She can’t dance any better than she does, and that limitation is freeing. Each step is a statement of identity that can’t be either exaggerated or undersold or otherwise lied about.

Gerwig, despite the struggles of her character, has a blast in that film, and she brings that joyful energy to this, the best of the three videos. The video is — mostly — a long tracking shot of Gerwig dancing as Arcade Fire plays, and the video captures some of the same madcap intensity of director Spike Jonze’s great “Weapon of Choice” (is Greta Gerwig our generation’s Christopher Walken?). For a majority of the video, we are in a medium shot of Gerwig dancing to the camera, reaching out. It’s mesmerizing even as it’s maybe a little precious. The blazer Gerwig wears offers an additional physical constraint that, as those shoulders bunch up, becomes almost moving.

But this video isn’t good because Gerwig is Arcade Fire’s demographic or because it’s got a sense of humor, though the latter doesn’t hurt. Instead, this video is good because Gerwig is dancing to the song. Part of what makes the lyric video so uncanny and ultimately uncomfortable is that the dancers in the video cannot possibly be dancing to Arcade Fire. On a visceral level, the appropriation of their spontaneous, impassioned movements feels almost more invasive than the appropriation of their skin color or “exoticism.” The lyric video commits a low-grade historical fraud by forcing its subjects to dance to “Afterlife,” a song that is really only modestly, theoretically even, danceable.

And that’s what the lyric video is. It’s a theory, an aspirational collage made out of magazine clippings, a look book. This is what we want to be, this is how we want to sound, this is how we want people to respond to us. Jonze’s live video is exactly that: live. I don’t know whether it was Jonze’s direction that Gerwig should be suppressing an enormous smile the whole time, but whether it was intentional or not, it’s effective. It feels genuinely communicative with the music. And, oddly, that organic relationship — between the awkwardness of Greta Gerwig as a dancer and the awkwardness of “Afterlife” as a dance song — is made all the more tangible when Butler walks onstage behind Gerwig to croon the bridge. He’s all humorless sincerity — the shallow depth of the undergrad open mic poet — and Gerwig is all hysterical sincerity. They’re on a spectrum, but Butler sets Gerwig off. And a smile erupts because the beat is able to be separated from the band. Gerwig makes the song her own in a way that the dancers in Black Orpheus can’t — she’s given that control. And it really is a joy to watch.

Afterlife #3: ?

This last video, the official music video directed by Emily Kai Bock, is essentially a short film about a father and his two sons. The video begins with a dinnertable scene in which we’re introduced to a variety of tensions — between the father and his eldest son over what the father does for work, between the father and his youngest son over the son’s (presumed) Americanization, between all three over their seeming financial straits. The video then proceeds as three interwoven dream sequences (one for each character), all of which lead to the image of a presumably deceased wife and mother.

There’s no dancing, there’s no rapture, just beautifully shot longing, loss, and regret. On their last album, Arcade Fire aimed to represent the experience of the suburban teen. This album aspires to something maybe a little more universal, and so too do these videos. It’s clear the band thinks this song has legs, more precisely that there’s a profundity to it that can sustain multiple interpretations, multiple angles of entry: the primal energy of the macumba ritual, the awkward energy of Gerwig, now the experience of struggling immigrants.

There’s a lot to like about this third video as a piece of filmmaking, but it also feels a lot like overkill or overreach. Particularly, for a band that has thus far inhabited richly detailed worlds of intimate experience — the razor’s edge between childhood and adolescence, suburban ennui — this video reads as a kind of trick. Everybody experiences loss, right? Brazilian samba dancers, late-20s Brooklynites, the children of Mexican immigrants — it’s the Family of Man.

Except that it isn’t. More often than not, music videos revel in shallowness. What if the song is set in a high school? Hit me baby. What if she’s in love with a cartoon cat? Straight up! For two or three minutes, with the right song, a filmmaker can sustain any premise. Sometimes a nonsense premise yields a genuine emotion. Sometimes, however, a complex, dramatic, high-concept premise yields only the illusion of depth. At the end of the day, I get what’s going on in this video. I understand the narratives of regret and loneliness and class and pride because, however artfully made, they’re familiar. I’ll listen to the song, but I won’t watch this video again. I’ll watch Greta Gerwig dancing up a storm, or I’ll watch Kanye and Kim with my jaw on the ground, or I’ll cue up Black Orpheus and hear the sounds that made those people in the film really, actually move

Oh my God, what an awful word,

Phil.


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Dear Television, The Music Video MusicVid

How to Make a Music Video About Nothing: Ke$ha, Pitbull, & “Timber”

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Dear Television,

WE WATCH MUSIC VIDEOS for three overarching and often related reasons: hotness, dancing, and story.

You might not like to admit to the first one, but the amount of hotness in videos can only suggest that we like it. Whether the video is for Drake or Tim McGraw, Miley Cyrus or Celine Dion, one of its goals is to reaffirm the singer’s overarching attractiveness. The camera fetishizes different body parts depending on the singer and the type of music he or she sings: Rihanna’s videos focus on her thighs and stomach, One Direction’s focus on their smiles, Adele’s focus on her highly emotive face. Even the video for, say, Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit,” with its slo-mo headbanging and anguished close-ups, is invested in fetishizing their particular brand of alternative hotness.

Not all videos have dancing, but those that do are addictive. Think of the best videos of the last 30 years: dance figures prominently in 72% of them, with noted exceptions for a “story” entries described below. All of Michael Jackson’s videos, Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?,” Britney’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” N*Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover,” Janet Jackson’s “If,” Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,”  Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Shoop,” Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” — we watch them again and again, because the dance, in singular or group form, is hypnotic.

But the hotness and the dancing are (very rarely) narrative: they’re the descendants of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.” Gunning used the term to describe the style of very early film shorts (think “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” and “What Happened on 23rd Street”) that didn’t adhere to established forms of narrative established by the theater. These films were operated like a game of “now you see it, now you don’t,” manipulatively addressing and arousing the spectator’s curiosity. Whereas “normal” narrative pretends like it’s a world unto itself, the cinema of attractions always knows it’s being watched. It presents a scenario, builds the tension, and then lets it explode. The muscles of Sandow the Strongman were an attraction; same for Annabelle and her Butterfly Dance. They’re on the stage; they even sometimes stare into the camera. They’re performing for the camera gaze rather than maintaining the subterfuge that the camera doesn’t exist. It’s vaudeville instead of theater, the variety show instead of the soap opera.

As camera technology became more sophisticated, the cinema began to adopt the three-act structure we now associate with narrative film, but the cinema of attractions never completely disappeared. Instead, moments of self-conscious spectacle integrated themselves into several genres: you see it especially in the musical number, the five minute fight scene, the never-ending gross-out joke. Even the slo-mo male gaze on a female body is a cinema of attraction, willfully violating codes of realism.

The narrative tries to paper over just how weird and implausible it is for, say, an entire school to know the choreographed danced moves to a song (hey Step Up), sometimes more successfully than others. But those moments of spectacle become the moments that matter: they’re the meat of the film trailer and the stuff you’ll find clipped on YouTube. They make SO LITTLE NARRATIVE SENSE, but we love them.

If music videos are hyper-condensed cinema, then it makes sense that they’d embrace and amplify similar techniques. On one end, you have the pure music video of attractions, replete with hotness, dance, and beautiful locations. These videos never detract from the message of the song, but they don’t add much to it other than, well, oomph. Beyonce’s Bob Fosse-inspired choreography has nothing to do with “Putting a Ring on It” other than, well, the moment when she points to her finger. It doesn’t mean they’re bad — see Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” in which the “narrative” is that a.) The Boss is handsome and b.) You could dance on stage — it just means that their mode of attraction is straightforward.


On the other end of the spectrum, you have the purely narrative video: something like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s video for “Sacrilege,” Mumford & Son’s “Lover of the Light,” or Sigur Rós’ “viðrar vel til loftárása,” all of which could be short, silent films unto themselves.


And somewhere in-between, the narrative meets spectacle. In a full-length film, you have enough narrative and exposition to suture over the moments of spectacular rupture. But in a music video, there’s just so little time to do that narrative work, which is why so many videos that attempt to tell stories, especially stories that don’t precisely match the lyrics of the accompanying song, fail so dramatically. Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie,” featuring Megan Fox and Dominic Monaghan, works because the conceit is relatively straightforward: two people love each other yet abuse each other.


It’s quite literally melodrama: melos (Greek for melody) plus drame (French for drama), in which song is allowed to speak and amplify the drama onstage. Same for all of Taylor Swift’s oeuvre, which is characterized by its generally facile acting out of her songs. (See “Begin Again,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Love Story”). Michael Jackson’s best videos — “Bad,” “Billie Jean,” “Thriller” — all functioned this way; same for Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy is Mine,” or Britney’s “Toxic.”

But these videos aren’t without their moments of spectacle:


In contemporary Hollywood, executives use the term “blammos” to describe moments of spectacle — a sex scene is a blammo, as is an explosion, a car chase, a fight, or a musical number. Rumor has it that some execs institute a “blammo quotient” on blockbusters: one every eight minutes, for example — a calculation that certainly rings true when you watch the current summer fare. Applied to the condensed form for the music video, you generally have about ten seconds of narrative before you cut away to a spectacle shot, usually of an objectified body, best exemplified by “Toxic’ but also visible in, say, the “strut breaks” in Rihanna’s “What’s My Name” or the periodic return to longshots of Jennifer Lopez in “Jenny from the Block”; in A$AP Rocky’s “Wild for the Night,” there are no naked women, so the spectacle becomes the slums of the Dominican Republic, while Dr. Dre’s “Let Me Ride,” switches between the very suggestive sucking of a popsicle and close-up shots of cars.

My favorite videos are either full on spectacle or manage, improbably, to balance the semblance of a narrative with requisite spectacle. They’re not bloated or overly ambitious like Lana del Ray’s “Ride” or Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors.” They tell a simple, legible story, but they tell it with flash, but that flash somehow seems appropriate and motivated instead of gauche or awkward.  Videos as diverse as Madonna’s “Vogue” and Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” can do this — it’s all a matter of vision and fit

Which brings us to “Timber,” the new single from Pitbull and Ke$ha. Pitbull is a fascinating 21st century pop creation: he’s a Cuban-American entrepreneur who has wholeheartedly embraced product placement in his songs and image at large. His songs are incredibly catchy, always topical (“Timber,” for example, references a naked Miley Cyrus), and super radio-friendly. With his perma-uniform of white suits and sunglasses, he has come to stand in for my entire understanding of Miami. He is completely inoffensive — a rapper whose lyrics say very little and evoke even less. (Sample: “Me not working hard? / Yeah, right! Picture that with a Kodak / Or better yet, go to Times Square / Take a picture of me with a Kodak / Took my life from negative to positive / Just wanted y’all to know that”) As a Latino who signifies, visually and aurally, as “white,” he’s competing with Macklemore for most palatable, non-threatening, and highly lucrative rapper in the industry.

And as for Ke$ha, she’s a postmodern nightmare. As I’ve written elsewhere, she’s all surface, no substance. She seems to signify beauty, and sex, and rebellion, and weirdness — but poke that image and it deflates. From “brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack” to getting “sick and sexified,” there’s just no there, there. I have no doubt that Kesha Rose Sebert is an intelligent and savvy woman, but that doesn’t change the vapidity of the Ke$ha image.

There’s something alluring about an image that bereft of substance: I love hearing Ke$ha in the car the same way I love eating those pink, orange, and brown wafer sandwiches at church coffee hours. I taste something sweet, and then I taste nothing at all, save my unsatiated hunger.  Ke$ha, or the people who handle her image, have played with this vapidity: her video for “Blow” opens with the promise that “No mythical creatures have been harmed in the filming of this video,” and features a bunch of unicorn-masked men drinking champagne and getting shot at with rainbow guns by Ke$ha and special guest James Van Der Beek. It’s all mildly amusing and failed high concept, not unlike the self-staged play of your six-year-old niece.

It’s no surprise, then, that the collaboration between Pitbull and Ke$ha is at once completely meaningless and wholly addictive. It’s pure musical pastiche: there’s a power-country harmonica sample, a hip-hop vocal hook (that’s Ke$ha), and solid Miami club 4/4 beat.


Pitbull’s pre-hook:

Swing your partner round and round
End of the night, it’s going down
One more shot, another round
End of the night, it’s going down
Swing your partner round and round
End of the night, it’s going down
One more shot, another round
End of the night, it’s going down

Ke$ha’s hook:

It’s going down, I’m yelling timber
You better move, you better dance
Let’s make a night, you won’t remember
I’ll be the one, you won’t forget

Like so much of contemporary top 40, this is a song built on beats, not lyrics. The New Yorker’s recent piece on massive hitmaker Dr. Luke affirms as much: Luke (and other super producers like him) set a beat, and then they have people come in and shape words over them. The lyrics themselves matter far, far less than the song’s ability to make people move: all they need to be, in truth, is inoffensive.

The problem with these narrative-less, cliche-ridden songs, however, is that they make it really difficult to make any sort of coherent music video around them, especially if you don’t have any good dancers to just Ciara it up and make everyone forget that any music video should ever have a narrative ever again.

The only solution for a song of hollow signifiers? A video of the same. Only this particular video is so nonsensical, so completely unjustifiable, even on the basest of levels, that is perfectly manifests the state of the contemporary music industry.

I take that back: one half of the video makes quasi-sense. The video is “down home” in the way that True Blood is “down home,” which is to say that there’s a crappy, poorly-lit bar filled with women dressed like they’re auditioning for the Jessica Simpson role in the remake of Dukes of Hazzard. Ke$ha, of course, is one of them, and the spends this narrative foundling and dancing around various visual signifiers of backwards Southern/Westernness: saloon doors, antlers, cowboy hats, chaps, big beards, line dancing, jukeboxes, old trucks, long nails, fake bullriding, chickens, long nails, and trucker hats. It’s poor copy of Coyote Ugly, which is in itself a poor copy of an imagined South and/or West in which the “ladies of the night” paired cowboy boots with cut-off jeans and danced on the table instead of succumbing to syphilis and opium-addiction.

But! That’s all par for the Ke$ha course: this video could follow that narrative and be highly passable, if not notable. But how do you fit that with Pitbull’s brand? How does a white suit hang out in places with grass, or wood, or dirt? Especially if that white suit is too busy making paid club appearances to coordinate schedules with Ke$ha, who almost certainly recorded her hook days and states away from the verses of this song?

You put him on a beach. Playing with sharks? Maybe in Miami? With a girl. There’s some very brief gesture to the idea that the video of beach-bound Pitbull is playing on the jukebox in Ke$ha’s Western-Southern bar, but it’s fairly illegible. In order to distract from the gaping narrative disjunction, the director simply employs a full minute of rapid crosscuts between moments of spectacle: Pitbull touching sharks, Ke$ha leaning over truck suggestively, Pitbull with dancing lady friend in the background, Ke$ha fondling her own breasts, a single inexplicable shot of some brand of Vodka on a counter to coincide with its namedrop in the song, Pitbull’s tropical location, an aerial shot of a single shark, Ke$ha shaking her ass at the camera while grasping a saloon door, and so forth. The more rapid crosscuts, the more we’re led to believe that these narratives do, in some distant if indescribable way, belong in the same music video together.

The best videos either eschew narrative altogether or mindfully manufacture a space in which it can blend, as seamlessly as possible, with the requisite spectacle necessary to sell a contemporary music act. “Timber” suggests that in the age of computer-assembled mega-hits, there’s not only any need for artistry or originality — there’s not even a need for coherency. Why even gesture towards meaning when you can assemble a rapid stream of images that connote sex and money? Why choreograph, or plan, or direct, when you can just pile the things that please the most people most of the time onto one song and, by extension, one video?

I’ll always love the music video and celebrate the narrative experimentation — and revisiting of old classics — that MTV and now, YouTube, has afforded. But “Timber” is half-hearted masturbation without an orgasm; it’s citing everything you know without ever making a sentence, let alone an argument. It’s not new or experimental or exciting or evocative: it cost at least a million dollars, and it’s nothing at all.


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Thanks for the Memories, Dhaka: Selected Notes From the Hay Festival, Bangladesh

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IMG_5377by C.P. Heiser

A few weeks ago I found myself in Bangladesh for the Hay Festival.  I was visiting the capital Dhaka at the invitation of our friends at Bengal Lights, a literary journal and book publisher affiliated with the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In the typical Western imagination, a literary festival is not what crops up first at the mention of Bangladesh. Instead you get, if anything, a Third World potboiler of cyclone disaster, garment industry horror, and political unrest, backed by a George Harrison soundtrack (if you’re old enough to remember).

But get this: Bangladesh, the People‘s Republic of Bangladesh, is a nation of Muslims with a secular constitution. It provides more U.N. peacekeeping forces than any other nation in the world. And since the Liberation War with Pakistan in 1971 (the same year Ravi Shankar got his buddy George to write a song about it) Bangladesh has made great strides in primary education, gender equity, population reduction and health services.

The capital Dhaka is also home to one of the many Hay Festivals that have proliferated around the world.  Now in its third year, I arrived at the Hay with a contingent of Americans, including Mario Bellatin, the Mexican novelist, David Shook, poet and translator, and Eliot Weinberger, the essayist and renowned Octavio Paz translator. Dhaka, a megacity, teems. With a population of 15 million, it is perhaps the densest city in the world. It surprised us at every turn.

Tariq Ali, British Pakistani writer and journalist

Tariq Ali, British Pakistani writer and journalist

Tariq Ali, the British Pakistani journalist and novelist headlining this year’s Hay Festival in Dhaka, had not been been back to Bangladesh since before the ’71 Liberation war. At that time, he predicted that anything short of independence for what was then East Pakistan would not be enough. His return was, to say the least, well received. He appeared several times on panels and speaking engagements and each time the Q&As had to be cut short due to time constraints. His rather grim assessments of global capitalism’s destructive path – Ali’s unrelenting focus – were incapable of dampening the enthusiasm of the Hay attendees. But this iconic figure was not the only one to enjoy such a reception. Other panels were equally enthusiastic, whether the topic was translation or Latin American fiction or “world literature” – Tariq Ali or no Tariq Ali – Dhaka’s literary and intellectual scene is engaged, opinionated and focused on a global discourse. It was inspiring to witness such involvement given what so often feels like a parochial and self conscious community back home. Even the headliner Ali, who lives in London and clearly brought a very contemporary brand of First World pessimism, could not dampen the mood. In fact, his pessimism seemed, refreshingly, out of place.

Rickshaw art from the "CIty of Rickshaws"

Rickshaw art from the “CIty of Rickshaws”

In the street, the bicycle rickshaw prevails in Bangladesh though it’s virtually disappeared in other South Asian cities. Confiscated rickshaws get impounded by the police and sit, waiting to be recouped in lots outside the city. You can buy a new bicycle rickshaw for about $300, but a majority of the drivers rent their rickshaw for a few dollars a day. In trying to wrap your mind around Dhaka – an impossible task to be sure – it might be best to simply ride with the rickshaws.

The sheer awesome human effort of the drivers, collectively, might just power not just their own movement but the city’s daily electrical output as well.  Even in nightmare traffic, even in the chaos of streets without apparent rules, some of the happiest faces I’ve seen in any urban setting are passengers on the bicycle rickshaw – mothers and children, friends, lovers – when they are suddenly breaking free onto an open stretch and sailing in the open air with a contentment you never see inside a New York City cab. Dhaka never lets you forget what a city is for.

Dhaka skyline.

Dhaka skyline.

Like other “emerging market” cities, Dhaka (and its economy) grew from a provincial capital to an unplanned megalopolis in less than forty years.

Dhaka’s architecture defies easy category, then – finished, unfinished, ruined – it’s not always immediately clear. But the primacy of rebar is without question – sprouting like weeds from concrete pillars and pilings on rooftops of apartments and office buildings wherever you look. At first, you think every building is perpetually under construction, or in the process of demolition.

A masterful dystopian effect, it has everything to do with lax construction practices though not what I first guessed was a kind of rainy day move: why finish a building when you might want to add on a story or two later? It should have been obvious there was no intention of adding to the weather-beaten urban-stained buildings, the kind which you mostly see in Dhaka. Instead, the city’s tax code – which collects only on completed buildings – compels the rebar rooftop style. It’s hard not to wonder at such monumental tax evasion. It’s also hard not to see that this endemic kind of corruption will be solved as the Bangladeshi middle class continues to grow and prosper.

And this is the thing about the Hay Festival Dhaka, and Bangladesh generally: though the political and social realities are still very difficult, there is ambition, and energy, and debate. Returning from Dhaka, back to our own problems in this country, I was reminded that the future is still a possibility.

Thank you, Dhaka.

With poet Ahsan Akbar (far left) and Bengal Lights editor Khademul Islam.

With poet Ahsan Akbar (far left) and Bengal Lights editor Khademul Islam.

 

 


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Writing about China and Eponymous Adjectives

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By Paul French

In the wake of new Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “Third Plenum” — the first policy-focused general meeting he’s presided over since being anointed a year ago — the term “Orwellian” is once again getting a work-out.* It’s long been and remains a great favorite among China writers: the Great Firewall is Orwellian, censorship is Orwellian, the Chinese police are Orwellian, Beijing’s policy pronouncements are Orwellian Double Speak. But while Orwellian may be the most overused eponymous adjective (an adjective derived from a real or fictional person, as you’d know if you’d been paying attention in your English grammar class), plenty of others are available to the writer on China, beginning with that derived from the name of Orwell’s one-time French tutor at Eton, Aldous Huxley, who has been in the news lately due to sharing the anniversary of his death with JFK (and C.S. Lewis).

There has been, in fact, a lively eponymous adjective debate lately among foreign writers and journalists covering China over whether the PRC is Orwellian (repressive and brutal as in 1984), Huxleyite (psychologically manipulative, a society bought off by consumer goodies and where stability maintenance is the primary concern, a la Brave New World), or a bit of both. Over the years, and over numerous events from Tiananmen Square to the riotous opening of a new Apple store, views have swayed between emphasizing Huxley’s “velvet glove” and Orwell’s “iron fist” (as opposed to Jack London’s capitalistic Iron Heel).

Those looking for more nuanced eponymous adjectives can reach for other terms. When discussing society the Chinese people can be Brechtian and detached from the action, or Pinteresque with extreme detachment in the face of absurdity (you could substitute Beckettian if you prefer). Certainly more than one Chinese Foreign Ministry official faced with an awkward question from a foreign journalist has displayed an admirable Pinteresque pause in the past. The unkind see Chinese society as full of Asimovian robots performing endless Olympics opening ceremonies. For the new China commentator faced with the overwhelming onslaught of China, Daliesque – denoting the surrealism of the whole show – is popular (some have suggested mixing surrealism with alienation to become Murakamiesque, but it hasn’t caught on yet), and the science-minded eponymous adjective lover might see the whole thing as a Baconian cipher (the message being hidden in the presentation rather than the content).

The China debate of course moves fast, and so can at times appear almost Joycean (in the sense of rapid subject change as opposed to lyricism – China is rarely lyrical) and more than one commentator has displayed a Vonnegutian approach, relying on gallows humor to try to decipher Beijing. I myself admit to having reached for the notion of understanding China as akin to going “through the looking glass,” though Carrollian sadly doesn’t really work as an eponymous adjective.

Business writers really like Kafkaesque (well, his books were short) and all that endless shunting from office to office for permits, opaque laws and never getting a straight answer is reminiscent of poor old K. as he strives to untangle the bureaucracy of The Castle. Younger commentators might go for Gilliamesque (surreal and a tad Kafkaesque, in a Discworldy sort of way).

The debate around China’s future brings forth a whole new slew of eponymous adjectives, often written in a Hemingwayesque style. China could be seen as Byronic (seemingly ideal but with a hidden dark side). More often the analysis tends to the Lovecraftian, courtesy of the early H.P. Lovecraft and portending horrible future prospects, or Ballardian, envisaging a definite dystopia with a veneer of science on top (a Ballardian coffee with a Huxleyite cream if you like). Ballard may be onto something as he was at least born in Shanghai; and all those empty swimming pool motifs engendered in his childhood during the Japanese occupation still seem of-the-moment when writers tour those half finished luxury villa developments on Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road. Of course those looking for The Shape of Things to Come in China often reach for Wellsian — and that includes those who predict it’ll all end in a War of the Worlds.

The Victorians are useful when describing China’s factories – Dickensian is perennially popular. But if you really can’t make your mind up about China, then, without doubt, Shakespearian is the eponymous adjective for you. Take your pick – comedy, tragedy, farce? King Lear gets dropped a lot when the leadership is being discussed, as does Julius Caesar, but I don’t think Romeo and Juliet got a mention in the Bo Xilai/Gu Kailai saga.

Of course all this can get a bit tedious, a bit boring, a bit Franzenesque (okay, I made that one up). One hopes of course that the best writing about China should be Proustian (ornate, detailed, rich with memory and recollection), but it’s not always, sadly. And finally, do remember the eponymous adjectives that nobody outside China uses are Marxist, Leninist, and certainly not Trotskyist – but none of them wrote fiction so they’re no fun.

So go ahead next time you’re asked to write an article on China (and with so many words spilled on China you will eventually be asked) – select an eponymous adjective, press send, sit back and relax – someone out there will agree with you.

A very partial list of Orwell-related commentaries on China can be found by clicking here, here, here, here, and here.


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Dear Television, SNL SNL-CEO-baby

Saturday Night Live’s Alumni Problem

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Dear TV,

WE’RE TALKING SNL this week, and I’m … excited. Which isn’t a feeling I’ve gotten from SNL in quite awhile. I wasn’t even aware of how much my enthusiasm for the show had waned until I legitimately guffawed at Noël Wells’s Hannah Horvath and Kate McKinnon’s Jessa in the Girls sketch during Tina Fey’s week hosting, an experience recently topped by Beck Bennett’s incredible sketch of the financial wizard in the body of a baby. That was some of the best physical comedy I’ve seen since David Hyde Pierce’s “A Valentine for Niles” and Maria Bamford’s entire oeuvre. So… what gives? Is SNL good again?

A lot of ink has been spent bemoaning SNL’s awfulness over the years, and I’m not particularly interested in investigating the merits of that critique, which I’ve been hearing for as long as I’ve been aware of TV criticism. What does interest me is the persistence of that narrative. If Anne Helen Petersen walked us through how stars use SNL to “thicken” their celebrity persona, I want to think about how the show is dealing with its own image problem: namely, that it’s routinely perceived as being, at best, mediocre TV.

The fact is, the comedy we have available to us on tap these days outperforms SNL on the regular. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are consistently sharper and funnier than Saturday Night Live. Now, those shows use a different format, they’re scripted, they’re not live, and they don’t require that there be laughs every second, but the point is that if I want a topical laugh, Saturday Night Live isn’t where I go for clips. In its own sketch comedy genre, Mad TV was already making SNL look a little passé back in the late nineties, but — to return for a second to AHP’s post on how distribution changes everything — now that we can stream old favorites like A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Kids in the Hall and newer sketch shows like That Mitchell and Webb Look, get all of Louis CK’s standup for $5, and see Bamford’s entire show on Youtube for free, SNL suffers by comparison. This is strange to say of a live format, but it’s just too polished relative to the gritty low-production-value comedy that’s since come to define the experimental, spontaneous and new. Garfunkel and Oates, anyone?) It’s become the slightly square authority where it was once the rebel, and it’s low-octane comedy these days, comedy that’s a little too glitzed up to be much good, and it’s even competing against itself: you can stream the old (and always “better”) Saturday Night Live on Netflix!

SNL’s position as the Jay Leno of comedy isn’t helped by the fact that its alumni have done as well as they have and have aged publicly. It’s hard for people of our students’ generation, for instance, to believe that the Chevy Chase of Community was ever comedically innovative, or young, or game. When asked whether he learned anything from “established” comedians like Chevy Chase, Donald Glover:

Chevy’s like hilarious cuz he will do, um … none of it ever makes it, but he’ll be like, let me show you something really good, and it’s always like an old dude kinda joke, and I’m like oh, and it really helps me with my comedy science, like why doesn’t that work anymore? … It’s kinda like you learn more from a bad movie than you do from a good movie.

Now, Chevy Chase is the SNL alum extraordinaire: his infamous (second) Comedy Central Roast (which Comedy Central buried because it was so vicious, but you can see parts of it here) amounted to a revolt of younger comedians against everything they perceived Chase to represent — namely, the self-serious egomaniacal sellout who made a huge number of crappy movies for the dollars and not the laughs but still considered himself a comedy genius. But Chase is only the oldest and most embittered of a whole slough of aging SNLers who have in one form or another addressed their time on the show and — perhaps accidentally — degraded its image. Let’s face it: comedy fans these days are purists and they’re weirdly idealistic. We believe in the truth-telling power of comedy in ways we don’t believe in much else, and while that isn’t new — it’s a tradition that dates back to long before Shakespeare’s various Fools — it has intensified recently. Louis CK has disciples.

SNL hasn’t typically honored that priestly tradition, and former cast members have a habit of taking self-referential roles that further erode the sacred character of what we’d like comedy to be. Adam Sandler’s later-in-life turn toward serious acting culminated in the appalling Funny People, which explicitly framed his old comedy (much of which was based on SNL characters) as a hollow ploy for bucks without any regard for quality work. Jimmy Fallon’s turn to late-night hosting only confirmed what we always suspected when he broke in every sketch: he likes chatting up celebs and wearing suits. Rob Schneider. ‘Nuff said. Then of course there’s 30 Rock. I genuinely believe my estimation of SNL subconsciously suffered thanks to Liz Lemon’s world-weary cynicism regarding 30 Rock’s TGS, which is clearly an SNL knockoff and never represented as being anything other than pure crap. 30 Rock’s Achilles heel, in my opinion, is that Jack so often turned out to be right: there is no meaning to Liz’s work.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a certain artistic bankruptcy built into the brand of comedy SNL puts out. It’s always billed as a bit of a hack compromise, albeit with very talented hacks (this quality comes through in both Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch’s autobiographies). It’s live, it’s what we could write in a week, it’s what the host could stomach. In the end, of course, the Famous Person is the weak link. Structurally, the host is a built-in generator of comedic mediocrity: he or she is a contaminant virtually guaranteed to dilute the funnies unless she miraculously possesses or develops comedy chops.

And that was all fine until recently: in a way, it was a version of Celebrity Jeopardy! (one of SNL’s most successful ongoing skits). You get to watch the famous people do something different and burnish their celebrity profile, and you’ll laugh! But this side of the equation, the See the Famous Person side, has collapsed too: we have way more access to famous people than we ever had before thanks to Twitter, fashion sites, gossip sites, deleted scenes, interviews, reality TV and paparazzi. We aren’t starved for the phenomenon of a celebrity unfiltered — LIVE! — the way we once were.

But what — I hear you ask — about SNL statesman Bill Murray? He’s the exception that prove my theory that there are just too many SNL alumni running around degrading the brand. One reason we keep hearing how much better SNL used to be is because most of the old cast members have obligingly faded from view, and Murray has in the interim demonstrated a kind of lifelong comedic integrity: a dedication to comedy as an art form that has taken them into serious spaces without ever abandoning the funny or condescending to the audience. This has retroactively branded their time on SNL as purer and more brilliant (I’m talking about the PR narrative here) and so has death: Andy Kaufman, Chris Farley, and Jon Belushi are comedy saints.

But these guys only got quiet and intense with their funny as they got older, and that’s important. SNL comedy has a certain profile that fits it best, and however muted and prophetic its elder statesmen have since grown, that profile wasn’t subtle or understated or melancholy or wise, it was loud and brash. I’m talking Rachel Dratch and Will Ferrell’s wonderful The Lovahs and Carvey’s Church Lady and Ferrell and Gasteyer’s singing duo and Molly Shannon’s armpit-sniffing and Maya Rudolph’s Donatella Versace and Cheri Oteri’s Get Off My Lawn bits. What these all have in common is that they’re buffoonish and, again, loud. But SNL was tapping into another comedic vein in the ironic 2000s. Let’s call its practitioners the Clever Clan. This is the Seth Meyers/Tina Fey/Amy Poehler/Bill Hader/Jimmy Fallon style. It’s smirky. I like these comedians individually (except for Meyers, who I find likable but totally unfunny and Fallon, an incredible performer but an average comedian) but — to return to where I started, which was wondering when my enthusiasm for SNL had waned — they’re a winky, good-looking bunch, and the ensemble effect was more wry than hilarious. I think this hurt the show. Wry is not a mood Saturday Night Live does well. There are, as we’ve seen, simply too many other people doing it better.

Now, no one says SNL has to be great comedy. It isn’t and doesn’t; as I’ve said, the show’s constraints make greatness almost impossible. But it should be good comedy: you should be laughing a few times a night.

Here’s the sketch that made me realize how quietly bored I’d become by SNL — or at least, how far I’d drifted from an actual laugh into Mildly-Amused-But-Sort-Of-Waiting-For-It-To-End-Land:

This made me laugh my head off. The physicality is SO DISTURBINGLY RIGHT. It’s not a clever meta-joke, it’s an in-your-face belly-joke. For Beck Bennett, who’s new to the show, it’s an instant classic and total triumph. What seems to me really wonderful about a few recent SNL offerings is that the cast is willing to go broad with gusto (and without winking). The turkey sketch Annie mentions is one example; so is the possum sketch with Edward Norton. Aidy Bryant is a delight, Cecily Strong is great (though I wish they’d kill that Girlfriends Talk Show sketch), and Bobby Moynihan’s face is a national treasure. (I want Vanessa Bayer and Taran Killam to do a sketch called The Killer Smiles where they play a couple, the Smiles, whose creepy grins have convinced everyone in the neighborhood — wrongly — that they’re serial killers.) It feels, this season, like there’s less eye-rolling and more energy in the room.

Embrace your inner hack,

Lili


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Dear Television, SNL hutcherson

Good, Giving, and Game: Towards a Theory of SNL Hosting

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Dear Television,

WHEN PHIL FIRST emailed to ask if we wanted to cover this week’s Saturday Night Live, he was not optimistic: “It’s a new one, but it’s with WhoGivesAShitJoshHutcherson.” (It was also with HAIM, whose employment of “bass face” merits a column unto itself.) But people do care about Josh Hutcherson — the Youngs care about Hutcherson, and SNL cares about the Youngs, or at least cares about their demo, which is why the hosts and musical guests seemingly oscillate between things 30-something bourgeois hipsters like (HAIM, Tina Fey, Ed Norton, The Alabama Shakes) and things 16-year-olds like (Hutcherson, Lady Gaga, Ne-Yo, Justin Bieber). Then there’s obvious ploy to get anyone over 40 to DVR the show, on display every time they invite a classic host (Steve Martin) or classic comedian (Martin Short, one last season’s best hosts).

So SNL picks hosts to attract demographics, that much is clear. But why do the celebrities pick SNL?

On the surface, the answer is clear: Publicity. Exposure. Promotion, especially for a new movie or album or season of television. But hosting Saturday Night Live also offers the opportunity to add necessary texture, humor, or substance to a star image — to turn “that guy who plays Peeta in Hunger Games” into a national name, something more than sum of his franchise parts.

Star images are the culmination of a star’s publicity, promotion, and textual appearances, but they’re also something more. They’re everything the star says in interviews, every outfit they’re photographed wearing, every appearance they make in films and commercials and award show podiums. But certain sound bites and outfits and appearances are accentuated over others and come to compose the core of the star’s meaning. Julia Roberts did all sorts of things before she was in Pretty Woman, but once she was in that film, it became the foundation of her image, inflecting every choice, every romance, every hairstyle. When she cut and dyed her hair to appear in Mary Reilly, for example, her fans balked. It wasn’t “right,” it was “all wrong” and unnatural — which is another way of saying it wasn’t her Pretty Woman hair, which was the way that audiences wanted to understand her.

We like to think of star images as natural — a reflection, just ever-so-slightly mediated, of the “real” person. But they’re the result of complex strategies of star production: a whole team of people who make decisions about what the star should say, who he should say it to, and how he should say it, and how that will make the star seem to mean a certain thing, like “cool girl” (Jennifer Lawrence) or “your ideal boyfriend” (Ryan Gosling). (I’m not suggesting that J-Law isn’t, in fact, dorky and self-effacing, but her PR team has absolutely told her to amp that performance to 11).

And if star images are products, then SNL functions as a prime, privileged means of image production. It can’t set the image core (at least not for its hosts), but it can inflect that core, give it something like heft and complexity and charisma.

As SNL has aged, it’s amassed an enormous pool of hosts, which means that there are relatively “open” spots in a season, especially for untested non-comedians. But every season, a few would-be stars get their chance. Most of these performers already have something big going for them: a teen franchise (Taylor Lautner), a huge album (Justin Timberlake), or a hit television show (Jon Hamm). But their images, at least at that point, are one-dimensional. Taylor Lautner was Jacob from Twilight and nothing more; Timberlake was a boy bander-turned-solo-pop-star; Jon Hamm was handsome Don Draper.

And then SNL proved that they — or at least two of those listed above — were something more, something bigger and star-worthy.

To excel at hosting, you must be what Dan Savage calls “GGG” — good, giving, and game. Savage uses it to talk about sex, but it applies to comedic performance as well: you’ve got to be a decent actor, you’ve got to give your time and energy to doing it right, and you’ve got to be up for the weirdest shit the writers throw your way.

Timberlake and Hamm are “good” because they are, bluntly, good actors. (Timberlake may falter on the big screen, but that’s usually an issue of casting: if he were playing his Social Network and Bad Teacher roles at all times, we wouldn’t have a problem). They can take direction, they hit their marks, they don’t “break” in reaction to a punchline.

They’re generous to their co-performers (Timberlake was always happy to let Fallon have the joke), but they’re also “giving” in a slightly different way: they learn their lines. It’s clear they’ve rehearsed — that they’re taking this comedy diversion seriously. (I enjoyed parts of Kerry Washington’s hosting turn from a few weeks ago, but she was visibly reading the cue cards 75% of the time).

And Timberlake and Hamm are both “game”: Timberlake was willing to do weird Color Me Badd riffs (before the ’80s were even that cool again) that involved a.) his penis and b.) having sex with his friend’s mother. But it’s more than just the viral hits — watch Timberlake in “The Barry Gibb Show,” from one of his earliest hosting appearances, and see a man willing to own the ‘70s androgynous pantsuit/temper tantrum.

(Right around 37:00 mark).

And Jon Hamm is likable and Jon Hamm-ish throughout his hosting gig, essentially reifying his Jon Hamm-ness, but he’s also so gamely bizarre in skits like “Jon Hamm’s Jon Ham,” about a bathroom stall ham dispenser.


After hosting SNL, the discourse about both Timberlake and Hamm changed. Suddenly, Timberlake was more than just a former Mickey Mouse Clubber who dated Britney Spears and might be the next MJ: he was funny, maybe even smart, with an indelible charisma that you have to battle to dislike. With that sort of layered image, it became impossible to write Timberlake off as just another boy band star turned solo. It thickened his image, made it stick — which is precisely why he’s still around today and not just an aging 30-something with an arguably disappointing third record.

As for Jon Hamm, he became something more than Don Draper. The famous Don Draper satire skit showed just how performative Draper is — how easy, in other words, it is to “play at” being Draper-ish, with the added bonus of highlighting Hamm’s distance from the Draper character. (You don’t make fun of who you are, just who people think you are). Television stars always have this problem: because you see them playing the same character week after week, their star images are overdetermined by their onscreen characters, making it very difficult for them to move on to marketedly different roles. (See: Jerry Seinfeld, the entire cast of Friends, etc.) Unlike movie stars, who only play a role for two hours, television stars are equated with a role for years.

Hamm could have been stuck to Don Draper forever, but he/his people made two calculated and, in hindsight, genius moves: he appeared as a very unsuave, unDraper womanizer in Bridesmaids, and he was very, very funny on SNL. And now he’s a bonafide star, with a Hollywood future that will extend far beyond season seven of Mad Men. He’s charismatic and handsome and talented, but lots of television actors have that. With the help of SNL (and the lack of underwear), however, Hamm built himself an actual star image.

As for Lautner, there’s many reasons why that kid isn’t a star, and lack of trying isn’t one of them. After the success of the first Twilight, his publicity team did a fairly masterful job of promoting his road from scrawny teenager to jacked werewolf, and he was signed to a slew of action roles that promised to make him into the next Tom Cruise. But unlike Cruise, Lautner can’t act. He also has no charisma, or agility as a performer, or even, it seems, a robust sense of humor — all of which were on prime display in his turn as SNL host.

The lesson: SNL can turn you into a legitimate star, but it can also prove that you maybe shouldn’t be one.

Which is why Josh Hutcherson’s turn as host was so quietly delightful. Here’s a guy who, on paper, should be a horrible host. He’s the (relatively) boring straight man from a franchise (albeit a better franchise than most) and his acting, at least in the first one, isn’t noteworthy. If there’s one thing people know about him, it’s that he’s not who they would’ve cast as the hot, strong-armed baker-turned-Katniss love interest.

From the beginning of the episode, Hutcherson was all about redeeming himself. In the first sketch, he roundly ridicules the passivity of his Hunger Games character, and in the digital short “Matchbox 3,” about a crew of subway performers who do their acts in very, very confined spaces, he not only makes fun of his height, but gives himself over fully to the role.

AHP1

(There’s something so winsome about the way he throws his hand in air in the intro).

And then there’s the most bonkers skit on the show, in which Hutcherson brings home his “new girlfriend” for Thanksgiving, only to surprise his family with the fact that she’s….a turkey.

It’s a classic example of weird, end-of-the-night SNL. It’s not funny, exactly, nor is it entirely satire, but Hutcherson’s ability to straight-facedly make out with a turkey should make us consider him as something more than sad-faced Peeta.

Because Hutcherson is, indeed, more than just a franchise star: he was convincing and embarrassed in The Kids Are Alright, and he’s been slogging through bit roles and kid parts since 2003. Like Hamm, Timberlake, and other recent SNL charmers Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Miley Cyrus, Hutcherson is a workhorse — in classic Hollywood, they called actors like them “troupers” because they’d paid their dues, often since they were young children, in vaudeville troupes, where they’d laugh, cry, sing, dance, do stunts, and then do it all over again 24 hours later in the next town. They were GGG because their very livelihood depended on it.

Cary Grant was a trouper, so was Judy Garland — and both would’ve made superlative SNL hosts. Because when it comes down to it, SNL is the vaudeville show for the 21st century, with the ability to bring out the best and worst in its hosts. A hosting gig will always provide visibility. But if the performer is a GGG trouper, that gig can also make him or her a star. It didn’t quite happen with Hutcherson, but who knows: given another chance and more, weirder, material, it might yet.

Googling “Jon Ham,”

AHP

20 Minutes into the Future, Week 8 almost human

Robot Revolutions: “Almost Human”

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THE LAST OF THIS YEAR’S new science fiction programs, Fox’s Almost Human, debuted this week, a co-creation of J.H. Wyman and J.J. Abrams, who seems to have his hand in most things science fictional these days. Wyman and Abrams first teamed up for Fringe, a reinvention of The X-Files with less government conspiracy theory and more of Abrams’s distinctive Lost sensibility. Billed as the next stage of police television, Almost Human is much less innovative than it claims, reworking the well-known terrain of the cross-ethnic cop-buddy formula common in the 1980s. Graham Baker’s film Alien Nation (1988), written by Rockne S. O’Bannon and adapted to a short-lived television drama, extended this formula into science fiction by pairing its human detective Sykes with an alien “newcomer” partner in stories that directly confronted issues of racial prejudice long before Neill Blomkamp used the same conflation of aliens and racial “other” in his District 9 to similar ends. In the cross-cultural, cop-buddy drama, the “neutral” white partner’s stereotypical attitudes toward the racial other are gradually eroding so that friendship and new understanding can emerge. The police drama In the Heat of the Night, adapted to television in the 1980s along with the television Alien Nation, paired white and African American cops policing rural and overtly racist Sparta, Mississippi, and gives a sense of what is at stake in such dramas. And long before Alien Nation used the cop-buddy formula to explore issues of racial difference, ABC’s Future Cop (1976-78) explored the idea of contrast between theory and practice in its fraught relationship between veteran cop Joe Cleaver, played by Ernest Borgnine, and his letter of the law robot partner Haven, played by Michael Shannon, now well-known for his work on Boardwalk Empire, whose most recent SF appearance was a General Zod in Man of Steel.

While Alien Nation paired its crusty human cop with an alien, Almost Human pairs hard-boiled John Kennex, played by Karl Urban who plays McCoy in Abrams’s new Star Trek, with an android partner played by Michael Ealy. This, too, is hardly uncharted territory. In the 1950s Isaac Asimov’s detective Elijah Baley worked with robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw in Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, works that have been adapted to screen a number of times. The Asimov film adaptation I, Robot, (2004), directed by Alex Proyas, draws on this formula in its pairing of Will Smith’s detective Del Spooner with the robot Sonny, including the ubiquitous need for Spooner to overcome his irrational suspicious of all robot others. Mann & Machine (1992) tested the limits of this formula to interrogate gender difference when it paired its Detective Mann with a sexy robot partner Eve Edison, played by Yancy Butler, who went on to star as another sexy, supernatural detective in the live-action, comic book adaptation Witchblade (2001-2002). But it is the Canadian television series Total Recall 2070 (1999), taking its atmosphere from Blade Runner although its title from another Philip K. Dick work adapted to screen, that comes closet to the look and feel of Almost Human. Its detective David Hume (Michael Easton) is paired with android partner Ian Farve (Karl Pruner), in a cyberpunk-style future in which the corporate Consortium dominates. Like Almost Human, Total Recall 2070 investigates crimes linked to illegal research and abuses of technologies related to genomics and memory. RocoCop, returning to big screens in 2014, is another antecedent here, which its vision of the formally human Alex Murphy and its plot about a dystopian Detroit destroyed not by rising crime but by the privatization of the police service in the interests of the evil OCP, Omni Consumer Products. Once a character in a satirical film about an exaggerated dystopian future, RoboCop has now become a mascot of sorts for a contemporary Detroit economically abandoned by the rest of the country, a dark city of the science fictionalization of everyday life captured in the documentary Detropia (Ewing and Grady 2012).

Yet just because Almost Human is not original does not mean that it cannot do interesting things with its established formula. Unlike Future Cop, for example, which continually emphasized the necessity of Cleaver’s ability to respond to situations contextually and intuitively over Haven’s overly rigid use of abstract laws, Almost Human in many ways presents Dorian as more human than Kennex. Kennex is the quintessential isolated and cynical outsider cop, well known from police procedurals such as Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, and as such doesn’t know how to play well with others. Kennex is also haunted, as such characters always are, by a past in which his human partner was killed, an incident in which he lost a leg and then spent two years in a coma, further emphasizing his isolation from the rest of the world which went on without him. As the series begins, Kennex blames androids for his partner’s death in the familiar formula of rule-based values vs. human values: the android refused to help evacuate the mortally wounded man, explaining that he needed to focus on aiding those “with a better statistical chance of surviving.” Yet as the rather clichéd melodrama over the first two episodes reveals, Kennex is projecting into blame his own guilt for leading the men into what proved to be an ambush; worse, as he discovers using an illegal technology to accessed his memories of that day, they were betrayed by his girlfriend who disappeared after the event.

Almost Human might be a really good series. Our comfort with robots interacting with us as ubiquitous parts of our daily life has increased since the 1970s Future Cop, which articulate then-contemporary fears about humans being replaced with automation. In the neoliberal era of precarious labor we have perhaps become all-too-comfortable with the idea of humans being replaced by machines, evident in our interactions in automated call-center help-lines, our companionship with Siri, and all the other ways in which we perform for ourselves, with machines, tasked once performed by humans, from bagging our own groceries to refilling our prescriptions online. Wyman has said that Ray Kurzweil’s rapture of the nerds articulated in The Singularity is Near is an influence on the show, and so if nothing else Almost Human marks a significant shift from its predecessors in the greater sympathy we have for Dorian: unlike other cross-cultural buddy shows, our identification is immediately with Dorian rather than gradually won alongside the winning over the human partner. Kennex, too, is  won over pretty easily and, contra theories of the uncanny which suggest that we find most disturbing artificial beings that are almost but not quite human, preferring a clear distinction of the evidently artificial and evidently human, Dorian is all the more sympathetic when contrasted with the inhuman coldness of the more recent android models who do not have this “flaw” of programmed emotion and empathy.

The most promising innovation of this series is that it is really Kennex rather than Dorian who is almost human: he has a synthetic leg to replace one lost in the explosion that killed his human partner, and he struggles, as his fitness-for-duty evaluation states, with “psychological rejection” of this synthetic body part. He is also fusing with machines in his memory-recall experiments, and his obsession with vengeance for the attack that killed his partner makes him considerably more rule-bound and rigid than Dorian. Yet Almost Human fails to explore the metaphor of ethnic and other prejudice rooted in this formula, as did the earlier Alien Nation and even Mann & Machine. Dorian objects several times to the term ‘synthetic,’ which Kennex clearly uses as a slur, but thus far the plots of the episodes, particularly the second one about slaughter woman women to create better quality skin for synthetic sexbots, emphasize and reinforce the difference between humans (who count) and androids (who don’t). The episode narratives are thus in tension with the thrust of the series premise, positioning Dorian as the “exceptional minority” except from a prejudice that is otherwise warranted against others of his kind, making the politics of Almost Human potentially more regressive than those of the 1970s Future Cop.

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Uncategorized West Park Asylum, Epsom, Surrey, United Kingdom. © Bradley Garrett

Life Hacks and the Undead: On Urban Exploration, “The Walking Dead” and “Revolution”

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By Brigette Brown

A deserted prison sits in the middle of an open field, fenced in with gates several feet high, and topped with barbed wire for good measure. Padlocks keep possible trespassers from opening the gates but they don’t keep them from climbing the fences and dropping down on the other side. Infiltration is possible despite the walls, locks and fences that say otherwise. It’s easy to get in if you really want to.

Embedded social norms keep everyone in their place because of the fear of what could happen. Boundaries often go untested.

River Tyburn, City of London, United Kingdom. © Bradley Garrett

River Tyburn, City of London, United Kingdom. © Bradley Garrett

That is hardly the case for Bradley L. Garrett and the dozens of urban explorers he chronicled in his book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. Garrett, an ethnographer who spent three years on place-hacking missions in Europe and America, describes urban explorers in his book this way: “Urban explorers, much like computer hackers in virtual space, exploit fractures in the architecture of the city. Their goal is to find deeper meaning in the spaces we pass through every day.” They go to the places they’re not supposed to be, places that are normally off-limits, to photograph and share their experiences. The point is to show that nothing is impenetrable, that beyond the walls set up to keep it out of reach, a secret city exists.

Our experience of the city is more or less dictated by the rules of a capitalist society, and the choices we make to move through these spaces everyday are therefore not our own, but those already laid out for us. Urban explorers choose to do as they please. They challenge the “underlying message of constant and immanent threat promised by neo-liberalism that is used to codify the urban environment for our ‘safety,’” ultimately calling the bluff of that threat.

Decaying structures and ruins hold a special promise for explorers who love to document disused spaces for their aesthetic value, for the image of the post-apocalyptic future and the liberation from the fast-paced urban environment. It’s about the exploration of urban space as much as it is about exploring a period of time; the now, the past and the future locked in an environment that is largely ignored. These confrontations with urban space also include infiltration. Urban explorers enjoy breeching the security apparatus at corporate and state sites and networks, not to damage the property or exploit the system, but to show that there are chinks in every suit of armor. The illusion of security is just that.

But urban explorers don’t necessarily care if the general population engages in these exploits.

Gartloch Hospital, Gartcosh, Scotland, United Kingdom. © Bradley Garrett

Gartloch Hospital, Gartcosh, Scotland, United Kingdom. © Bradley Garrett

The excitement and the possible danger of exploration often exist in the phantasm of our dreams, as fleeting moments of rebellion — boundaries, in actuality, go untested. The adventure comes to us. Our aspirations are played out on our televisions.

Take the mass appeal of The Walking Dead (2010–) or Revolution (2012–), for example. Both television shows run with our fascination with a post-apocalyptic future (something urban explorers are also driven by) and transform our views of the city today into something at once more magical, more dangerous and more exciting. We hold our breath as we watch the stories unfold.

Walking Dead season 3, Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Photo by Frank Ockenfels/AMC.

Walking Dead season 3, Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Photo by Frank Ockenfels/AMC.

In The Walking Dead, zombies infest our cities, laws and accepted social practices go out the door, and we are free to roam…anywhere. That prison which had previously been secure, guarded and untouchable is now home to anyone who wishes to take it over. The prison becomes not a place of exclusion, oppression and punishment, but a shelter that functions more like an apartment building, an urban garden and a soup kitchen all in one. The meaning of space has been altered.

The lights were turned off in Revolution, and though the city tries to function as it once did, citizens are more daring and fearless than ever before. They take what they feel is theirs and don’t give it back without a fight. Rather than enslaving people with the imposed practices and boundaries of city life, the post-apocalyptic city works for the people. It’s free.

Revolution season 2, Sebastian "Bass" Monroe (David Lyons) and Charlotte "Charlie" Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos). NBC

Revolution season 2, Sebastian “Bass” Monroe (David Lyons) and Charlotte “Charlie” Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos). NBC

It’s freedom at its most pure and we fantasize about liberating ourselves from the holds of the present. We dream of a world where we can take our own risks, solve our own problems, and do all the things we were told not to. Still, most of us aren’t bold enough to take those risks in real life. We can’t give up our nine-to-five jobs or risk our lives or spend years paying legal fees and avoiding jail just to explore. Boundaries and exclusionary practices are in place to keep us safely tucked away on our couches, not causing problems for anyone, oblivious of the fact that we aren’t really free.

But as Garrett and his fellow explorers tackle boundary after boundary, skyscraper after skyscraper, and tunnel after tunnel, they demonstrate to us what freedom can feel like. Though we can hardly imagine a world where freedom of exploration, discovery and risk are the norm, it is possible to take back our urban spaces by exploring one “new” place in our backyards every now and then, with or without fear, with or without the zombies.

Dear Television, Week 7 AHPimage

In Praise of Quitting

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Dear Television,

I’VE QUIT ONE JOB, I’ve quit two sports, I quit one (very ill-advised) diet. I finish all my books and once I start an article, I can’t stop reading it. But I quit television shows all the time — and more to this week’s point, I quit Homeland before Season Three even started. I quit The Bridge after four episodes; I quit Justified two weeks in to Season Four. I’m especially skilled at quitting teen dramas after two seasons, which is exactly what I did to The O.C., Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars and even Veronica Mars. I quit Breaking Bad, and I will fight you if you try to shame me.

I don’t have any solid quitting policy: there’s no “three shitty episodes” limit or a checklist of unforgivable televisual offenses. It’s usually a matter of atrophy. A show is a priority until, gradually, it isn’t, and the unwatched episodes pile up in my DVR queue like moldering Moneysavers on the front porch.

The atrophy of fandom is nothing new. What I want to suggest with this post, however, is that in the contemporary attention economy, it’s a necessity — an ability to be cultivated and celebrated, not denigrated or shamed. Quitting television shows, especially shows that have betrayed us, is tremendously liberating, almost akin to removing oneself from a toxic relationship. I broke up with Homeland, in other words, and I feel great. 

We all know there’s too much good television. There’s too many good movies, too much good journalism online. But it’s only “too much” because we feel like we don’t have enough time to consume all of it — there’s a bountiful cornucopia of media out there, media that soothes and challenges and compels.

But in order to get to the good stuff, you have to be willing to embrace two contradictory impulses: You must be ruthless, but you must also be patient. You must be willing to allow a show’s voice to develop — to weather a first dysfunctional season, for example, or to reach a point of seriality that “boring” suddenly morphs into “gripping” — but you must also be ready to listen to the voice inside your head that says this makes me feel shitty.

At the beginning of the year, I’m always open to new stuff. A supernatural procedural that blends 18th century historical figures with contemporary crime solving? Okay, fine, sure. I receive some guidance from the people whose job it is to watch every new fall show (A thousand voices telling me to avoid Dads). But with everything else, I follow the mom-enforced dinner rule: take one bite. But I also follow the second part of that rule: namely, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it anymore.

If you’re going to practice this quasi knee-jerk strategy, however, you have to refuse to be stubborn. I hated tomatoes as a kid, and my stubbornness made it so that I didn’t even realize that the watery, mealy things on the top of burgers could be transformed into tangy, complex things when fresh and salted. You thus have to be willing submit (and often re-submit) yourself to a show and its charms. I didn’t like American Horror Story’s pilot; now it’s one of my favorite feminist shitshows on television. I refused to watch a show with Zooey Deschanel; now I’m in love with New Girl’s Nick Miller. I thought any show on ABC Family was regressive bullshit, but then Emily Nussbaum made the case for Switched at Birth and I saw the light. I’m always ready to be convinced of my wrongness, especially if that convincing only takes 42 minutes of my evening. A willingness to be wrong — to admit it, and celebrate seeing the light — might even be a hallmark of a good critic.

But then you also have to be willing to make unpopular choices. Quitting Homeland isn’t all that unpopular: every Sunday night, my social media feeds are filled with those dropping from it like once-manic flies, hoping to escape before the show reaches some lobotomizing stage. But quitting Breaking Bad was much more shameful. The first time I quit, it was because of “Grilled” — an episode that made me feel so anxiously nauseated that I couldn’t describe my relationship to the show as anything other than masochistic. Breaking Bad was filled with what I’ve termed “sticking points in serial television” — episodes that are so profoundly affecting that you can’t bring yourself to go beyond them.

The famous Friday Night Lights episode “The Son” was one of my most significant sticking points. Because of similarities to my own life and experience, that episode generated more than weepy sadness. I cried so hard the computer screen in front of me shook. It was a sticking point, but it wasn’t forever: quitting FNL after that episode, and not seeing what happens to my beloved Matt Saracen, would only make me feel more grief, not less.

But what would I gain from watching more Breaking Bad? People love to talk about the relatability of anti-heros, and I get it some of the time (Tony Soprano, Raylan Givens, Juliette Barnes), but Breaking Bad became one alienating adrenaline rush after another. The seriality pulled me along, but I finished each episode feeling a little more empty than before. Breaking Bad was, somewhat ironically, not all that different from drug addiction: it made me feel shitty, but I couldn’t resist its narrative gravity.

Don’t mistake me: Breaking Bad was doing a lot of complicated, fascinating, and daring stuff, and it’s certainly an excellent show that deserves (nearly all) of the accolades piled on it. I powered through my sticking point — all the way through Season Three — because it’s my job, both as an academic and a writer, to be conversant in these things. But professional obligation only needs to go so far: film critics should probably watch Saw, but do they need to watch all six? To be conversant in European Art Cinema, must I watch every Ingmar Bergman? Or can I just watch a few, figure out they’re not my thing, but appreciate them for what they are?

I needed to watch Breaking Bad, and I needed to be patient with it. But I didn’t need to finish it and feel horrible while doing it.

When you love a show, however, it’s difficult to feel generous towards others who don’t. In the summer of 2010, television scholar Jason Mittell wrote a lengthy piece “On Disliking Mad Men,” effectively lighting an academic/quality television fire storm. Mittell works on “complex television” and has published broadly on The Wire and Lost; Mad Men should be a natural fit, taste-wise. But he watched a season, though about it broadly, and decided to stop. Many readers (myself included) begged him to go farther — in essence, we wanted him to understand our own devotion to the show. But our arguments (mostly about characterization, nuance, its treatment of history) didn’t address his fundamental, deep-rooted dislike  It was an unpopular decision, but he stuck by it. He quit, and he felt great.

When a sitcom is no longer funny to you — when you laugh once or twice a show, and mostly yearn for the days when you couldn’t conceive of anything funnier — it’s time to quit. When a show’s racism becomes egregious and or its moralizing becomes consistently ham-handed, it’s time to quit. When you force yourself to watch something just so you don’t feel left out, it’s time to quit. Find a new show! Start a new conversation!

When a teen melodrama has exhausted all possible couplings and resorts to car crashes, the underworld, or unmotivated changes in sexuality, it’s time to quit. Unless, of course, you start to think of it as a wholly different type of pleasure. I think this is what Phil is describing about his relationship with Homeland: it’s bad in the service of (hopeful) good, and he’s willing to suffer for the pay-off. Nashville has always been somewhat bad, but I’m endlessly willing to suffer that badness for the wonderment that is Hayden Panettiere’s storyline. When I watch The Notebook, I fast-forward through the nauseating old people parts; when I watch Nashville, I fast-forward every time I see Peggy or Lamar’s face. I make my own edit, and that edit makes me feel no pain.

Feeling chronically bad or bored or offended is always enough reason to quit a show. But there’s also something to be said for quitting before the show goes off the rails, thereby preserving its immaculate memory in your mind. This strategy involves a mix of clairvoyance and the ability to read entertainment trade journalism. Because sometimes you just know. Your favorite couple has broken up, or gotten together, or someone died, or someone didn’t die. The narrative has run its course, but the powers that be drag it on, hungry for the 100 episode-mark that will allow the series to be sold into syndication and create a huge financial windfall. For these shows, quitting while ahead just isn’t an option: so long as the show’s drawing the numbers the network wants, it’ll keep it alive until the showrunner’s contract runs out. It’s death by slow, overwrought, narratively exhausted torture, and it’s a fate shared by everything from Grey’s Anatomy to The Office.

Alternately, the industry itself gives you all the hints you need to know better. The show switched to a new network (Veronica Mars), it has a new showrunner (Community), it’s being revived nearly a decade later (Arrested Development), or one of the stars is outta there (Downton Abbey). Phil mentioned that his ability to stick with a show is predicated on trust — especially of a showrunner — and the above moves should signal that your trust in a show is no longer warranted. In these cases, a refusal to heed the signs of a show’s demise yields little more than a general distrust of the product you once loved. You didn’t quit, and now you’re bitter.

A combination of clairvoyance, industry news, and access kept me from watching the downhill seasons of so many of my cherished shows, which allows me to live in ignorant, willful bliss.  Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls are frozen in amber on their graduation day, and Carrie Mattheson is the strong, centered woman who said goodbye to Brody at the Canadian border. Unlike Phil, my investment in television is less with the process than the overarching product: he loves watching Homeland try its damndest to “add up”; I find it — especially when watching “real time,” with a week between each episode — infuriating. I don’t like the person I become when I hate a television show and continue to watch it. Instead of disliking myself, then, I just stick to disliking (and abandoning) the show.

Television viewing used to be characterized by its passive inertia: the ability of the network flow to glide you seamlessly from one show to the next. Why make a decision about what to watch when your favorite network has made it for you? A modicum of flow still remains (see, for example, the Netflix timed countdown from the end of one episode to the beginning of another) but most of us dictate our own media consumption diets. But we need to be economical: there’s too much out there to love, so why spend time watching what you don’t?

Don’t misinterpret this as a pass to avoid shows that are complicated or different or slow. We should all expose ourselves to things that challenge us and our tastes, and do so regularly. But we shouldn’t feel like our tastes should hew to everyone else’s: chances are we’re all lying about being caught up, or even liking, a show that we’re supposed to. I love watching television shows, after all, but I also love the liberation of quitting them. You might too.

AHP

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The China Blog boxers+saints

Gene Luen Yang on Relying on Stories, Creating Boxers & Saints

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By Angilee Shah

It’s not that the concept of Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints is complex: two volumes tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion from two perspectives.

But within this simple structure, Yang’s graphic novels build a compelling story around a war of identity, set 100 years ago in China. It combines mysticism with the very concrete ways that people decide who they are, in this case a leader in a secret fighting society and a Chinese Christian convert. It has the remarkable effect of allowing readers to explore how stories — saints and spirits — can shape physical events — the blood, gore and battles of history.

A book like this, both approachable and profound, could not come at a better moment. When you can imagine China’s history with foreigners this way, it becomes very difficult to oversimplify the mix of views Chinese people might have today about their spectacular entrance onto the world stage.

Gene Luen Yang spoke with the “China Blog” about Asian and Asian American identity and how people come to embody their stories, and the empathy he felt while investigating the Boxer Rebellion.

Shah: [One of your earlier books] American Born Chinese is about identity and stereotypes in a head-on sort of way. Is Boxers & Saints also about understanding identity?

Yang: I think so. Both American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints come from the same root. Issues of identity and how people construct identities for themselves really interest me. Specifically, I’m really interested in the way people who are caught in between cultures end up negotiating for themselves.

In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized a group of Chinese Catholic saints. I grew up in a Chinese Catholic church that still meets in the San Francisco Bay Area. My home church was really excited about these canonizations because this was the first time that this deeply western church had acknowledged Chinese citizens in this way.

When I looked into the lives of these saints, many of them were martyred during the Boxer Rebellion and their canonization was actually very controversial. The Chinese government issued a letter of protest to the Vatican saying that the Roman Catholic Church was honoring people who had betrayed their Chinese culture. That tension between eastern and western world views and how they existed within the same community, within these Chinese Catholic communities, really interested me.

Shah: If the impetus for your interest in the Boxer Rebellion was the canonization of these saints, how did you come to understand and get into the nuance of this complex event in history?

Yang: From what I’ve read, it seems like the Boxers went through different phases of how they were perceived. Immediately after their defeat, they were seen as backward groups who had succumbed to superstition. Once the Communist Revolution in China got underway, it seems like Communist leaders recast them as patriots, almost as people to be admired. Nowadays, it seems like most modern scholars see them as more complex figures. They embody both some xenophobia and also patriotism.

When I was reading about them, I just felt like their motivation was really understandable to me. It made a lot of sense. I had also read a little bit that compared the Boxer movement to Ghost Dancers here in America. Native American groups, when their cultures were under attack and they felt that they were dying as a people, they came up with this thing called Ghost Dancing. It was really similar to the Boxers, where they believed they could achieve mystical powers by going back to their roots and relying on their stories.

When it feels like a culture is existentially threatened, not just with defeat but with annihilation, these types of things come out. In one way, it’s an act of desperation. But it another way it’s like the stories of the culture embody themselves within these people. I was pretty fascinated by that idea as well.

Shah: Speaking of stories being embodied in people, how much has changed since you began creating graphic novels for representations of Asians?

Yang: I’ve been doing it for 15 years, which seems like a long time to me, but in terms of history it’s a blink of an eye. We’re in the midst of a developing Asian American culture. The term “Asian American” hasn’t been around for a long time. My parents, I don’t think, would call themselves Asian Americans. They call themselves Chinese Americans. It’s only pretty recently that we started thinking of ourselves as Asian Americans.

But there is an emerging Asian American culture where we are starting to tell our stories and make our own music. We’re starting to create a culture that is a subculture of American culture that draws heavily from Asian cultures but is distinct from the cultures of our parents and our grandparents.

Shah: When you starting working on American Born Chinese in 2000, do you think there would have been a market for a book like Boxers & Saints?

Yang: Maybe not. In 2000, it wasn’t just comics about Asian and Asian American issues that weren’t selling. Comics in general just weren’t selling. In the late ’90s, my friends and I would go to these comic book conventions and we’d listen to publishers and artists and authors talk about how we were about to see the death of the American comic book. Marvel Comics, which was — it still is — the biggest comic book company in American, was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time. [They went into bankruptcy in 1996.] People were predicting that if they just blinked out of existence, it would take down the entire American comics infrastructure, that all of the comic stores in America would shut down. The ’90s overall were seen as good times, but within the comic book industry it was a little bit apocalyptic. People were predicting some pretty dire things.

To go from there to now, where every book store has a pretty substantial graphic novel section — where people know what a graphic novel is — it’s pretty remarkable. I do think that some of the reasons that happened are tied into Asian American issues. One of the reasons why comics revived was the growing popularity of Japanese culture in America. Japanese anime and comics, manga, became really popular. For a while, manga was the fastest growing section of the American book market.

It’s gotten to the point that nowadays, I’d say any cartoonist 30 or under draws in a heavily manga style. If you watch TV and look at the American-produced cartoons, like Avatar Last Airbender, which is a Nickelodeon production, and even the latest incarnation of My Little Pony, you can see heavy manga influence on the drawing styles. There’s a blend within modern American cartoon culture, both in animation and comics, of eastern and western styles. So there’s interest in both eastern and western cultures and the way they come together.

Boxers & Saints probably has benefitted from both those things, that comics are no longer a dead media and that there’s this interest now in Asian cultures.

Shah: For people who are interested in China’s history, what’s your number one Boxer Rebellion book?

Yang: The one that I relied on most heavily when I was doing my book? It was Origins of the Boxer Uprising by Joseph Esherick. That was the only one that really took the Chinese side. There were other ones out there but it seems like they were always either mixed in terms of their perspectives or they were heavily European and American. Esherick’s had the most fascinating little details too.

There’s also another one by Ignatius Press that isn’t about the Boxer Rebellion in particular, but it’s called Christians in China. It talks about the movement of Western religion throughout Chinese history. That was helpful as well.

Angilee Shah is an editor and journalist. She co-edited Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (UC Press, 2012), a book of essays about everyday life in China. You can find her on Twitter @angshah.


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