Category: TV Page 1 of 14

REVIEW: Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Contains spoilers for a 207-year-old book)

On 05/07/2020

In Annoyance, Books, Film, Freebies, Link, Pictures, Review, TV, venting

This year, I’m making a concerted effort to read more books by women, and so recently I decided to read some Jane Austen. I read Emma years ago at school, but that was a different kind of reading (and I guess that with it being decades ago, you could say that I was a different kind of reader). Austen’s often cited as a great writer, and arguably her most famous work is Pride and Prejudice, so that was the one I picked.

My emotions, once I’d finished it, were kind of mixed – to follow Austen’s approach to titling, I’d sum them up as being Amusement and Anger.

Let me explain…

The opening line of P&P (as the groovy cats all call it, so I’ll call it from here on) is famous, and oft-quoted – so much so that I commented on this in a tweet from 2015:

That’s right, I’m quoting myself to back up my point. Bold, I know.

But… well, okay, let’s just quote the line for those of you who may not be familiar with it:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Pretty bold assertion, really, presented as something which is both true and held to be true (reminds me of that bit in the US Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”), and I’ll be honest with you, it’s never really rang true for me – I understand that Austen’s setting out her whole premise for the book, really, but when ever I’ve seen this line quoted it seems to be saying ‘this is the basis of the story, and everything spins from here, so accept it as true’, and that’s never really sat well with me – not just because the social aspect lurking in it is very old-fashioned to modern eyes, but also because there must have been people even in Austen’s days who didn’t feel that way (must have been some men with a fortune who didn’t want a wife, for whatever reason, surely?).

As I say, I’ve only ever seen this line quoted with no knowing wink or suggestion that it’s a joke, and … well, to my mind, it is a joke (or at least the setup of one), because the next line totally undermines it – here it is:

“However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters”

… so Austen says that ‘everyone knows that a single man with money wants a wife’ and then follows up by saying ‘I mean, if one moves into your town, unmarried daughters basically think he’s their property’. Feels like a joke to me, and – olde worlde language and ideas aside – not a bad one (probably not least because I’d always seen the first line presented as a self-contained statement of fact, not the feed line of a sarcastic joke).

So, that was page one, and I started to wonder if the people who’ve adapted Austen’s books over the years, and who talk about her work, seem to be misrepresenting; the seeds of my amusement and anger, before I was even a page into the book. Hmm.

Because as I read on, amusement was a consistent feature of my experience of P&P, as it is genuinely funny (though as I mentioned above, some of the jokes are kind of buried in the formal language, or poking fun at social conventions which are now very outdated, though in its way that shows how progressive Austen’s thinking was), with the dialogue in particular containing a lot of sharp retorts and … well, the ancestors of the sort of snappy patter that so many onscreen will-they-won’t-they couples have traded ever since.

This TV show lived – and died – by that dynamic

As I say, quite a bit of the humour has a sarcastic edge to it – for instance, there’s a sequence (I read the feedbooks ePub version – this was p54 if you want to read along) where Miss Bingley tries to flirt with Darcy (don’t forget it’s universally acknowledged that he has money and a pulse and therefore is up for grabs) by sitting next to him while he reads, and pretending to read the book that follows from the one he’s reading – though of course she has no idea of what it’s about, not having read the first one, and then she says “There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”

Oddly enough, I often see this quote on tote bags and the like, attributing it to Austen herself, which feels a bit off as the character who says it hasn’t even been reading properly, and the line’s designed to show she’s insincere – odd that it’s often quoted straight when it seems to be sarcastic in intent.

One thing which I really enjoyed was that Austen seems to be very aware that people kind of ‘enjoy their emotions’ – I don’t just mean the tendency which a lot of people show nowadays to be ready to be offended (often on other people’s behalf, which feels a bit hmm), but Austen’s very astute about the fact that people get a bit of a thrill about holding strong opinions on things – obviously there are people on TV and in the newspapers who’ve made a career out of being professionally controversial (my thoughts on that career path, in summary: I question their sincerity), but I’m also reminded of a lot of people online who seem to enjoy being firm about their opinions, at being appalled or impressed by something, and jumping quickly into whichever team that makes them part of, all of which may not leave much room for nuance or uncertainty, which is often much-needed.

Austen seems to have a terrific handle on this, both the phenomenon and the delight people take in being part of it, as she wrote that Elizabeth Bennet wallows in her feelings by taking “a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections” (ch 14) and later that she “meant to be so uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason” (p215) – that latter remark feels very much like today’s online snarking and trolling, to my mind.

Colin, the energy vampire from What We Do In The Shadows wants to tell you why you know nothing

I mentioned a couple of lines ago about people enjoying being on a team where they’re all holding one opinion, and Austen seems aware of how team spirit can turn into mob mentality, noting that a group of people “indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of their dear friend’s vulgar relations” (ch 8) and that other people could be swayed by this pack mentality when it comes to holding opinions as “their indifference… restored Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her former dislike” (same chapter). I think Austen’s on to something quite important here – not only the way people behave, and the opinions they hold, but the way it makes them feel when they do so; delighted to have someone to look down on, or just pleased to be able to hold a strong opinion.

Of course, the problem with aligning yourself to a position this way is that if you turn out to be basing it on an incomplete picture, or there’s some dramatic change of events, you need to change your position, but without in any way looking like your judgment might be as flawed as it actually is, and Austen nails this fickleness of opinion, and our ability to rewrite it on p275 when it turns out that one character was a bad ‘un, and we’re told that “Everybody decided that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness”. I’m sure we can all think of a number of instances where people have suddenly claimed never to have liked someone or something because there’s new evidence against, even if they seemed a fan previously…

Generic image: impose your own idea of someone whose work you liked but who put you in an awkward position psychologically by turning out to be profoundly unpleasant

The social stuff underlying much of the story looks pretty old-fashioned now, and the plot arc seems to tend inescapably towards characters getting married, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the men are all moustache-twirling predators (though some are close – I’ll get to that in a few lines’ time) and the women utterly subservient and happy to marry someone as long as he’s got a good fortune and a backbone.

The main character, Elizabeth Bennet, is solidly defined, with her own opinions, though this does bring her into conflict with some, as (in ch18) Mr Collins cheerfully says “… I consider myself more fitted by education and habitual study to decide on what is right than a young lady like yourself.”

This would be his Twitter avatar

Whoa. I mean, he’s modern in that he comes over like a man replying to a woman online – and actually, in the story, he proposes marriage to her the next morning, so in a way he’s like some kind of proto-Pick Up Artist, ‘negging’ Elizabeth in the hopes that that her self-esteem will take such a bash she’ll do anything to get him to like her (spoiler: it doesn’t work, she marries Darcy).

Speaking of Darcy, the romance element of the book was almost surprising to me, as I’d been under the impression that the whole thing was like Much Ado About Nothing or When Harry Met Sally or the like, in that I expected Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy to say they didn’t like each other until the final chapter or so, when misunderstanding would be untangled, and they’d declare their love for each other at an annual ball or something like that.

But Austen uses the narrative trick of a generally quite all-knowing narrator, and so we get insights into the characters which kind of short-cut that sort of thing, as in ch10 when she states matter-of-factly “Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by [Elizabeth]”. According to my e-version of the book, this is about 13% of the way in, and when it comes to Elizabeth actually being made aware of this, even that isn’t at the end – what would probably be expected to be the big reveal at the end comes about midway through it… reminding me of the terrific revelation in Gone Girl (both the book and the film).

Spoiler: the girl is gone

As an aside, I found it interesting how little of the time Darcy’s actually present on the page – he’s like Holmes in The Hound of The Baskervilles or a plot catalyst like the imprisoned Hannibal Lecter, with other characters reacting to him and speculating about him. Perhaps this is a version of the ‘blank page’ thing, where the other characters and the readers alike, in the absence of concrete details, project their own ideas and expectations onto him?

On a related note to the above, one thing which stood out to me was a general absence of physical details or descriptions of the characters, though Austen often them as being handsome or agreeable-looking without being specific; in a way, this makes their appearances almost future-proof as if she knew that what was attractive in 1813 when P&P was published might well change; a healthy tan from the sun isn’t likely to have been an expected feature at that time, I’d imagine, but now that might be cited as appealing. Similarly, Austen sometimes cites character traits without actually showing them in action, which feels like a classic case of telling, not showing, but generally it works.

Just to break up the format a bit here (and mindful of the long sentences I appear to be unable to avoid using), some bullet-points with stray thoughts about the book:

There’s a character called Jane, who we’re frequently told is attractive, and this made me laugh – yes, I know she wasn’t named on the cover of the book at the time of publication, but this is kind of funny and would probably be rare now… though when I think about it, Clive Cussler put himself into loads of his Dirk Pitt novels, and it seems pretty obvious that James Bond was living a life Ian Fleming seemed to want. So perhaps Austen was one of the first women to do this kind of self-fictionalisation?
Quite often, I lost the thread of who was being talked about – there are four ‘Miss Bennets’ in the book, and it’s not always clear who’d being discussed, and sometimes pronouns like ‘she’ are used in sections with multiple female characters, so you can end up having to re-read bits to make sure of your understanding. The sort of thing that might be caught by a line edit nowadays, I guess.
There’s a very Wildean epigram (pre-dating Wilde’s birth by four decades, so I’m not suggesting plagiarism) on p319: “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing”
There’s a key turn of events just after midway in the story when Darcy writes Elizabeth Bennet a letter, revealing to her (and the reader) a whole load of stuff which has happened off-page, but which Elizabeth has reached inaccurate conclusions about. In terms of sheer text on the page, the long letter from Darcy is a huge infodump, but then again it’s realistic for a means of communication at the time … there’s a follow-on sequence of Elizabeth working through her emotions and thoughts as a result of the fuller picture she now holds, which in all honesty I found kind of dense and often tangled, and I was wishing by the end of it that this section had been woven in to the narrative of Darcy’s letter (alternating his comments and her reactions), though then again it did shine a light on what we’d now probably now call ‘cognitive dissonance’ on her part (that is, she thought Darcy was more mean-spirited than he actually was).
I alluded to the omniscient narrator approach above, and there’s a slightly odd case of this when the reader only sees how ‘vulgar’ Elizabeth’s sisters are in their demeanour after Darcy’s letter comments on this, and Elizabeth re-views events through that lens now (esp in Pt2, Ch16), but this feels like a bit of a need for the reader to also go back and re-frame their perception of those events, as we haven’t actually had this depicted as sharply in the narrative before. I guess it’s not exactly an unreliable narrator here (I refer you to Gone Girl, cited earlier), but we could charitably refer to this as withholding, or what m’colleague has referred to before as a ‘veiled plot’, but then again one might argue it makes it necessary for the reader to the kind of re-writing of ill-informed conclusions that the characters in the books have to do on a number of occasions.

So, the above is (whether it’s clear or not) derived from my Amusement… what of the Anger I referred to? Well (takes breath)…

I’m angry and annoyed because I feel I would have read Austen for fun much earlier in my life if it had been pushed as being funny – because it is funny; it’s got snappy lines and comedic setups and misunderstandings and cutting putdowns and the like, and lurking under it is a very astute angle on the social expectations of the time (in, to be fair, a very limited section of society). But aside from people occasionally talking about Austen as a social commentator or satirist, I’ve never come across any promotional material for an adaptation of Austen which made this the principal selling point.

Instead, the film and TV adaptations are all lavish, with expensive sets and accurate costumes, but nowhere do they seem to play up the comedy angle. It feels like convincing me to see Bridesmaids because they’ve got a beautifully-recreated set of a wedding shop, and forgetting to mention the funny. I used to say (and I’d be surprised if I was the first to do so) that costume dramas on TV were all costume, no drama, and it feels like the sheer comedy of Pride and Prejudice has been lost as people get distracted by the bonnets, balls, carriages and so on.

Take out the gags, show this pulling up outside a Manor House, it’s what Jane would have wanted

As I was reading the book, I was reminded of how Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss had said that the reason Sherlock Holmes was update-able material was because at its core, it’s not about gaslit streets and visiting cards on silver platters and all that Victoriana, it’s about the mystery, and the characters, and so on. And just as the film Clueless took Austen’s Emma and updated it and made it clearly a romantic comedy, I can’t help but think that the fact that P&P is a comedy at heart (and it has heart, yes, it’s a romantic comedy) means it should be eminently possible to adapt it for the screen without getting fixated on the production design. Pride in the big budget adaptations, it seems, led me to develop a Prejudice against the source material.

Because if you can do that, I suspect you might find there are people who would be pleasantly surprised to realise it’s actually a comedy. Because – if I haven’t made it clear from the thousands of words I’ve expended right here in this blogpost – I’m one of those people, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who can get over being Annoyed (at having felt at arm’s length due to mis-selling of the material) if you can make me sufficiently Amused once you draw me in.

On Reflection

By John

On 26/06/2020

In BBC, Books, Comics, Film, Hype, Pictures, Review, TV

So, with a bit of time on my hands and a tendency towards the indoors (lockdown is only really responsible for amplifying one of those), I thought I’d watch Fleabag, as I’d only ever seen bits and pieces of it; it was quite the thing about a year ago, with coverage of it almost everywhere, usually accompanied by references to the genius-level abilities of its creator and star, Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Usually accompanied by this picture, too

And I watched it, and I enjoyed it, though clearly not as much as some (well, maybe lots of) other people did, but that’s fine, and I’m generally not going to try and argue that people shouldn’t like stuff I don’t, as there’s more than enough stuff for everyone to pick their favourite, and I’d rather enjoying stuff than arguing the toss about stuff I didn’t care for. So, I had a few laughs, and a few ‘ooh’ moments, and that’s about all I wanted, so it’s a win.

(As an aside, I haven’t tried to describe the show as a ‘comedy’ or ‘drama’ above, as one thing that came to me while I was watching it was that it felt rather like a drama with the tone and pacing of a comedy, as overt jokes are almost thin on the ground but the show has the light touch of a sitcom even as it deals with some pretty dark topics. Which is interesting.)

But to my point: I was watching it, and enjoying it well enough, though it occurred to me that I wasn’t thinking This is the greatest TV show of all time, oh my god what a time to be alive, which was kind of the tone of a lot of coverage, and the reason for this came to me, oddly fully-formed: well, I thought, that’s probably because I don’t see myself reflected in it.

That’s just how I felt, Theodore.

And whilst this is by no means any kind of new insight on culture and the like, for me it was a thing that I don’t think I’d necessarily thought that directly, but it made total sense to me – my female friends saying how great it was probably saw more of themselves in the main character, for example, than I did.

This was still bouncing around the generally-empty cavern of my mind when I heard a podcast a week or two later which wasn’t directly talking about this idea, but was both unintentially relevant and very funny; in it, the subject of James Bond being played by Idris Elba (and by extension of this idea, any other non-white or non-male actor) was being discussed, and the speaker got very agitated about this, saying it was tokenism and wokenism (okay, he didn’t use that word, but I realised it would rhyme, but he did use the word ‘woke’), and that it was patronising to do this to attract certain sections of the audience and so on. But the funny bit came in when he then started to talk about how he’d feel alienated and distant from connecting to James Bond if they made this kind of change, and how he’d liked the character for years and so on. In essence, he appeared to be saying that he wanted to see himself reflected in some slight way in the portrayal of the character… which seemed to be the root of where the idea of re-casting Bond as a non-white actor had come from. I found this irony (or was it lack of empathy?) kind of funny, but then again I’m a smug git – but you can probably see how I made the connection.

There’s obviously an intent of greater racial representation at the core of the Elba-as-Bond suggestion, and whilst you might argue that the vehemence with which some people have argued against it comes from the decades-old depiction of Bond in a particular way (and I can understand that approach, as I have a knee-jerk reaction to productions of Shakespeare which are set on Neptune or otherwise changed for reasons which seem to be more about showing off than amplifying the story), but I came across this line in a book I read recently which I feel describes an underlying aspect of the reasons for this attitude:

White people are so used to seeing a reflection of themselves in all representations of humanity at all times, that they only notice when it’s taken away from them.

That’s from Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, (aside: a very good book, and definitely worth your time), and it reminded me of the way that there were very vocal (well, mainly typed in online, but you get the idea) negative responses when Marvel Studios announced they were making Black Panther with a predominantly black cast and crew, and similarly when they announced they’d be making Captain Marvel, which would star (oh, clutch my pearls) a woman as a superhero.

I enjoyed both films, in case you’re wondering

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that much of that objection came from white males, and I’d suggest that the reason for that vociferous reaction is also the response one should give to get people to calm down: “Look, I know you’re angry because the film isn’t about you, but … well, sometimes – quite a lot of the time in life, actually – it isn’t about you.”

(Side thought: I wonder if this is more prevalent in media which tell stories about the current time, and the status quo: I know the worlds of SF and Fantasy are much better at this kind of thing … perhaps because a story set 500 years in the future will inevitably involve looking back at our current society in the same slightly embarrassed way we look at eras in our own, more recent, past?)

And when I talk about seeing yourself reflected in film or TV or books in some way, I’m not even talking about some kind of representation of a social or ethnic or gender basis, that also covers the whole load of emotional or intellectual needs that we all have: sometimes a song or a film just resonates for you (my nose isn’t that big, but as a teenager I certainly related to Cyrano de Bergerac’s inability to express his romantic feelings), and that’s cool too.

Sure, that means that a lot of the time, there’ll be stuff which doesn’t in some way meet your emotional or intellectual needs, or you don’t relate to the characters or their experiences in some way, and that’s okay – there are a lot of things which aren’t part of our experience – but of course we need there to be stuff that all sections of the audience can relate to or in some way be interested in, because (artistic reason) we always need new angles on experience and stories and music and the like and (commercial reason) without an audience… creators tend to struggle to eat and stuff like that.

Video: A Taster For A Show That’s Very Much To My Taste

By John

On 14/04/2020

In Music, TV, Video

Startling to realise – after the event, of course – that even though I bigged up the TV comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine in my lengthy post the other day, I didn’t take the opportunity to link to an episode opening which acts as a good indicator of the general flavour of the programme, and also makes me giggle like a damned fool.

So, since it probably deserves more than me simply going back and adding a hyperlink into a previous post, here is some silliness:

Lovely. Hope you’re looking after yourself.

What Year Is This? Who’s The President Now?

By John

On 23/02/2019

In Music, Pathetic Excuses, Personal, TV, Video, Writing

… all of which is to say: has it really been that long since last I blogged? Crikey (though a part of me is oddly relieved to see that it hasn’t been a whole calendar year, because – let’s face it – it wouldn’t be the first time that long a gap had happened between posts).

So, as is so often the case on this blog, I open with apologies to anyone who’s been visiting on a regular basis in the hope of finding updates – thanks for your patience, and sorry the only things that have greeted you have been silence and cobwebs.

I haven’t been writing on the blog, granted, but (by way of long overdue update) I’m glad to report that I’ve made good and hearty progress in the world of long-form prose; my novel Captives has been through multiple drafts and re-drafts, and my test readers have all made very useful suggestions which led to a few bits of re-re-drafting, and now it’s out for consideration by literary agents.

Trying not to let the momentum dissipate, I’ve started on the next novel featuring the same detective protagonist, which currently has the working title of Refuge. I won’t get into the details of it here, but I like to think that the shape of the books is almost akin to that of the films of Dan Brown’s novels – the first one (The Da Vinci Code) is full of flashbacks, but the second is a ticking-clock race against time (Angels and Demons). So I’m working hard on making sure it has that all-important sense of forward motion, which I’m increasingly finding is a good way to stop me from waxing too lyrical, as if the words don’t serve plot or character, then they’re probably not needed… but I’m sure I’ll talk about that more in future blogs.

As is so often the case in my relationship with blogging, this return is intended to be the clearing of the throat before more sustained communication; in these politically and socially divided times I’ll probably steer clear of too much in the way of politics or similar, but I’ll try to compensate for that by sharing thoughts on writing, the odd review (and not necessarily of new items – one of the wonders of the internet is our easy access to things from the past), links to things which amuse or interest, and the like.

Speaking of things which amuse, I’ve recently discovered Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a TV police comedy which is genuinely as good as its fans make out, and I recommend you have a watch of it, if you’re not already a fan. That show has led me to enjoy the musical stylings of cast member Andy Samberg and his cohorts in the group The Lonely Island, which in turn led me to the following video… hip-hop isn’t really my thing, but ludicrous comedy and utterly committed performances are very much my things, so (in the nicest and most praise-filled way possible) I urge you to look at these idiots:

The Allure Of The Unexplained

By John

On 02/05/2018

In Film, Oddities, TV, Uncategorized, Video

So I’m ferociously late to the party in appreciating this (late in doing everything, one might argue, evinced by the limited posting in recent years), but nonetheless I wanted to share the sketch from Saturday Night Live which – tech permitting – you should find below.

I wish I could explain what I find so oddly compelling about it – it could the performances, the funky dancing, the line ‘Any questions?’, or the reactions from the normal people in the sketch, which escalate in confusion but also make absolute sense. I can only conclude that, sometimes, plain stupidity is enough – and with that failed attempt at explaining myself, and/or the sketch, I shall get out of the way.

Behold:

…told you it was compelling.

REVIEW: Dawn of Super-Heroes Exhibition at the O2, London

By John

On 30/04/2018

In Comics, Film, Link, London, Pictures, Review, TV

Well, the book is finished and the submission process underway, so I have time to blog – so thought instead of making apologetic noises without posts actual substance, I’d share a pseudo-review (with photos). Is that okay? Yes? I’ll take your silence as the sound of nodding.

As I may have mentioned, I live in London, and I read comics regularly, so I was intrigued when I saw this poster on the tube recently:

A bit of internet searching dug up that it’s an exhibition which has previously been shown in France (where comics are treated like any other medium), and stated that as well as original art pages from lots of comics, they’d be exhibiting costumes from most of the DC Comics-based films and TV shows, so yep, I was into that.

(Sudden realisation: ‘DC Comics’ is one of those redundant phrases like ‘PIN Number’ or ‘TSB Bank’, but I don’t see myself changing the way I say it in any kind of hurry. Anyway…)

So I booked and went along the other day, and (TL;DR summary) I thoroughly enjoyed it. Good array of items from DC’s history on page and screen, and as they don’t mind you taking photos (in fact, staff seemed keen to let me know about it), here are some pictures – not necessarily in order – and my sillysod comments…

Unsurprisingly, it starts with Superman (who’s 80 this year, though with all the reboots and reimagining, he looks pretty good on it, I think we can agree). Quite a few original art pages from Action Comics both old and recent, but then I spotted this:

Yep, that’s Christopher Reeve’s costume from the first Superman film. And yes, it’s tall, but he was tall, and he also gave one of the most enduring performances of the character (I mean, look at the videos of his transformations on this page – that’s acting). Terrific actor, and great to see his costume up close.

Speaking of up close, I certainly leaned in to look at these original art pages from Superman Annual 11:

The art’s by Dave Gibbons, from a script by Alan Moore, and … well, they’re two creators who have had an immense impact on the comics field (and beyond) – probably because they’re both immensely talented.

The middle of the exhibition is about Batman, one of my favourite comic characters, and spans pretty much all the filmed appearances – here’s one of Frank Gorshin’s Riddler outfits from the 1960s Batman TV show:

A selection of costumes from the Keaton/Burton films:

And then from the Kilmer/Clooney/Schumacher films:

And on to the Bale/Nolan films – both costumes…

…and prop vehicles:

There’s more comic art, including painted pages from Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s brilliantly brain-bending Arkham Asylum:

And pages from Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (a series which certainly helped make the Batman films from the 1980s onwards possible).

There are also props and costumes from a lot of the more recent films – the Snyder-era films, Suicide Squad, and Wonder Woman.

Have to admit that I haven’t seen the Jenkins/Godot WW film yet, but I hear good things about it, and I’m favourably inclined towards it (just haven’t got round to it yet, it’s as simple as that), and it’s interesting to see the differences between the costume from the fondly-remembered Lynda Carter TV show –

and the more battle-oriented costume as worn by Gal Godot:

Granted, there are differences in the materials etc available, but even back in the 70s they were able to make chain mail and other armour stuff for films, so I tend to imagine it reflected 1970s thinking that the emphasis was on a ‘softer’ ambassador role for Diana, rather than the more warrior-based version I gather we see in the recent film. Both are equally valid readings of aspects of the character, to my mind, and show how (as with any long-running character, really) successive generations take what most resonates to the perceived audience at any given time, and focus on that.

But I digress (as my long-time readers will recognise as a statement of policy more than an occasional observation); there’s a lot of interesting and nostalgia-provoking stuff to be seen at the exhibition, as well as a pretty good gift shop, so if you’re interested in DC superheroes on the page and/or screen, I heartily recommend a visit – this link gives more info. It runs until September, I believe.

If you do go along, why not leave a comment about what you thought of the exhibition (or just remind me of key elements I forgot to mention – I’m sure there are some)? Keen to hear other people’s opinions on it!

Ah, Remember When Columnists Used To Talk About The Wire All The Time? Those Crazy Bygone Days

By John

On 14/03/2012

In Books, Hype, Pictures, TV, Uncategorized, venting

I’ve come to appreciate that there’s a lot of hype and nonsense around many TV shows – particularly ones which a lot of journalists are watching but in which yer general public show less interest (The Wire, Mad Men and the like), but the quote on the front of this forthcoming novelisation of the TV show The Killing may set some new hyperbolic record:

Seriously, Radio Times? Sarah Lund, who’s been in 30 episodes of a TV series in the past five years (and only shown in the UK in the past 15 months) is the top female detective in the world? That seems rather short-sighted, almost as if the person claiming it has a very short memory indeed, or at best is a bit caught up in Killingmania. Has the source of that quote never heard of Jane Marple? Or even Jessica Fletcher?

Now, it’s possible that the publishers of that book are being rather selective with the quote, so I went looking, and found this: The Radio Times Rundown Of The Top TV Women Police Officers, November 2011.

Sarah Lund above Jane Tennison? Oh, Radio Times, you disappoint me.

Big Ups To All My Haters, As I Believe The Song Puts It*

By John

On 28/09/2010

In Books, Music, Personal, Pictures, TV, Uncategorized, venting

Well now. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? If it provides any kind of justification for my absence, I’ve recently had a job which took me out of London (and away from easy access to a full-size keyboard), but now I’m back.

And what, you may wonder, have I decided is the best way to re-commence regular blogging activities? Why, tis nothing less than the perennial subjects of love and hate… well, kind of.

Love and hate, we’re often told, are two sides of the same coin. Or there’s a thin line between them. And so on. Basically, we’re often fed the idea that the two of them are very close together – it’s simple enough to see why, they’re both extremes of feeling or opinion, and particularly in the field of emotion, disappointment and annoyance with someone we’ve formed an attachment for can easily cause us to become equally vehement in our negativity towards them; in films and TV shows, it’s often quite common for characters who spend a long time being antagonistic towards each others to end up smooching, though I have to say that (relaxed licensing hours notwithstanding) I haven’t seen that happen quite so frequently in real life.

If we’re going to be honest about it – and I think we ought to, as life is often more complicated than simplistic presentations of emotional duality in programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show would have us pretend – there’s actually a long distance to travel between love and hate, if we’re using the words in their strictest sense. I love reading, and it would take quite a lot of negative reading experiences (that is to say, bad books or whatever) before that affection for the activity turned into hate. I’m sure you can think of things which you enjoy immensely – would it really take the equivalent of a coinflip, or a hop over some imaginary line, to make you hate them with equal intensity? I doubt it.

In reality, the line between love and hate, when viewed in three dimensions, manifests as a vast plane, with slight disaffection and indifference and irritation with at various stages between the two extremes. And if love and hate are sides of a coin, we should be honest enough to admit that it’s actually more of a cylinder than a coin, with enough stages and distance from one side to the other as to make the particle acceleration corridors at CERN look like a cupboard for the electricity meter.

I increasingly feel that there’s a problem with people presenting arguments or opinions in a way that suggests you either love something or you hate it; you’re either a fan or a hater. And whilst we’ve often seen this used to simplify political debates – in 2002, a popular simplification was to suggest that any doubts about military action in Iraq equated with approval for the regime of Saddam Hussein – it also seems to be used increasingly in relation to more everyday issues.

Let’s take an issue which, in and of itself, doesn’t really matter, but which is often portrayed as some kind of ideological battle; the question of whether Apple products are better than PCs. To read a lot of review columns, or to hear people talk, you’d think that one was vastly superior to the other, and that using the opposition’s products is the action of a seriously ill-informed person, whose brand allegiance (in whichever direction) is akin to that of a brainwashed dupe. The reality, of course, is a lot more nuanced – let’s be honest, both have their merits (Apple’s stuff is visually appealing, reportedly more stable [the iPhone 4 signal problems and iOS’s tendency to eat battery life could be argued to have undermined this in recent times, though], and generally held to be technically superior; PCs are cheaper, and used in more workplaces and so more familiar) and their flaws. But the problem is, nowadays, you’d think that people either have an Apple or Microsoft logo tattooed on their heart, and this means that the discussions tend to be polarised – and this simplification means that facts get overlooked – such as the fact that Microsoft helped Apple financially in the 1990s by giving them $150m to bundle Internet Explorer with new Macs as the default browser; so, that big hatred and fighting between them you read about in the press? Probably more like business rivalry, but of course that’s not so interesting, and it’s more fun to portray their customers as engaged in some teeth-baring hatred.

The major problem I have with this situation is the way it reduces everything to a non-discussion, and removes any possibility of people conceding that their so-called opponent has a point (watch the way politicians will invariably try to ignore facts or events in debates, even if empirically and provably true, which don’t make their argument look entirely true, as opposed to the best-guess opinion it really is). It means you can’t point at flaws in anything without being labelled a ‘hater’ or ‘anti’, even if you’re only trying to say that something has weaknesses in certain areas (cases in point: Lady Gaga is really not as stunningly original as many people insist, and Steig Larsson writes a lot of exposition).

As I’ve mentioned with tiresome regularity on the blog, my favourite TV programme of all time is Twin Peaks (it is my equivalent of Mark Kermode’s love for The Exorcist), but I’ll cheerfully admit that it’s got flaws (the second season loses its way, certain storylines are just risible, and it’s painfully clear at certain points that they’re just making it up as they go along). As long as the catalogue of weaknesses in something doesn’t overwhelm the things we like in it, then there doesn’t seem to be any problem in liking it, but there’s equally no problem in admitting it’s not perfect – very few things are unimprovable (despite what the most vocal supporters might say).

Am I asking too much? Is it really now the case that you’re either a rabid fan of something or a hater? I’d like to think not, and I’d also like to think that it’d be possible to see discussion of topics (and by ‘see’ I mean ‘encounter’, though if televised debates – on whatever topic – would like to actually show people admitting the strengths in their opponents’ arguments and the weaknesses in their own, I’d welcome that) which actually reflect that there are many waystations between the positions of support or loathing for something, whether it be a political stance or a work of art or a brand of cola or whatever. Much of the time, opinions on things fall into the median, grey band of ‘meh’, and it feels to me that pretending that you have to pick a position at one end of the spectrum and fight it doggedly with closed ears and mind is oversimplifying, and doesn’t actually enable a proper discussion to take place.

Although – ahem – I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’m not so convinced of this that I don’t welcome discussion of it. That would be hypocrisy, and of course the Post Comment button exists for your input (and not just about Apple, Gaga or Larsson, ideally)…

*That would be the number “They Know”, by Shawty Lo Featuring Ludacris, I believe. Not really a fan, but it seemed appropriate to refer to it, by way of illustrating that merit may lurk where we don’t expect it.