Gah! Why isn't Fall over yet?
Oct. 25th, 2006 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itsallovernowOne of the main symptoms of depression (certainly my depression) is a literal inability to do anything. It's not procrastination, it's just lacking any of the will or energy or focus or sheer impetus to do anything. Frequently, doing something will help spark a little regression in the depressive cycle (for me), but it is so nearly impossible to get to that state that it turns into a nasty little vicious circle.
And now I also have the plague, but the plague at least allowed me to watch approximately a gazillion hours of television on Monday night, including Heroes (thumbs up with glee) and Supernatural. (I continue to suspect that this is not the show for me because mostly I wanted to hit Dean with the shovel, and he is just not the type of pretty that pings for me. I may watch the first season DVDs to see if I can get more emotionally attached. Or I may not).
The show does, however, fit in to something I've been thinking about, so I may go back to watch just to further outline my theory. Because SN is about urban mythology come to life, I think. The theory, or well, the thought is that serialized television is a way of writing our own current mythology, some of the best episodes and themes in many shows go back and play with our older fairy tales and myths. Loss of innocence is often a trope used to tell a story, but the particular child vs. wolf dichotomy is particularly interesting. Red Riding Hood=Innocence, Goodness, the wolf=duplicity, evil, hunger. But our current mythologies have turned this idea on it's head so that the little girl lost is no longer such an innocent, and also no longer need rely on the hunter to save her. She's got her own axe to wield. In particular. I was thinking of the episode "Hush" from Buffy, Farscape's "John Quixote", and The X-Files' "Paper Hearts."
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all of these, but I very much like the Big Bad Wolf themes (and if I wasn't sick and exhausted, I'd look at the whole Bad Wolf mythology from Dr. Who S1), and how we've taken them into our own contemporary fears. For Buffy, it was talk. Words taken = hearts lost. And words are essential to Buffy. They keep her human, allow her to maintain her sense of self, her youth in the patterns of her speech, in the manner of her interaction. In the X-Files, it's the loss of innocence, of life, represented again by the heart (abduction, the hearts of children, Mulder's connection to the killer), and in Farscape, it's the loss of the heart's vessel, betrayal as blood rite - again, innocence, trust, love. (And I've got a whole 'nother theory about how everything in S4 wraps back up into what we're given in JQ - blood vows and biloids and false fronts and wormholes. How we saw the fairytale first, then watched reality refract against it until the green video game fields became the field of flowers).
But back to our three fairy tales, all three innocents robbed in three different ways, all three stories incredibly effective not only because they individually tapped into our own fears, but into the fears and dichotomies addressed by each show. And (with the exception of Buffy in that ep), none of the heroes came out unscathed. They in fact had to discover their own wolfish side, their own wolfish nature, and then set it back down in order to retrieve the lost innocence.
On an entirely unrelated note, the LA Times Book Review particularly pissed me off this weekend with it's review of Steven King's new novel. Basically, the reviewer says that King could be a great author if he'd set aside the "genre conventions". If he'd give up horror as a metaphor, and just write straight literary fiction. Because, you know, there's nothing to be found in any sort of writing that isn't straight and narrow and mired in reality. Because we've never found transcendance in fear, or blood, or the world beyond the one we know. Asshole. I know this is an old gripe, but it just pissed me off.
ETA: Now that I think about it, those two things aren't unrelated. It pisses me off that the reviewer dismissed King's efforts because he's saying that our modern mythologies and fairy tales don't have resonance, and I call bullshit on that. We need the fairy tale, we need the post-modern mythology as much as we need the cleanness of modern literary fiction because we find our hearts in our fairy tales, we uncover our fears, we expose and slay them. We reach transcendence, we don't just recount it.
And now I also have the plague, but the plague at least allowed me to watch approximately a gazillion hours of television on Monday night, including Heroes (thumbs up with glee) and Supernatural. (I continue to suspect that this is not the show for me because mostly I wanted to hit Dean with the shovel, and he is just not the type of pretty that pings for me. I may watch the first season DVDs to see if I can get more emotionally attached. Or I may not).
The show does, however, fit in to something I've been thinking about, so I may go back to watch just to further outline my theory. Because SN is about urban mythology come to life, I think. The theory, or well, the thought is that serialized television is a way of writing our own current mythology, some of the best episodes and themes in many shows go back and play with our older fairy tales and myths. Loss of innocence is often a trope used to tell a story, but the particular child vs. wolf dichotomy is particularly interesting. Red Riding Hood=Innocence, Goodness, the wolf=duplicity, evil, hunger. But our current mythologies have turned this idea on it's head so that the little girl lost is no longer such an innocent, and also no longer need rely on the hunter to save her. She's got her own axe to wield. In particular. I was thinking of the episode "Hush" from Buffy, Farscape's "John Quixote", and The X-Files' "Paper Hearts."
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all of these, but I very much like the Big Bad Wolf themes (and if I wasn't sick and exhausted, I'd look at the whole Bad Wolf mythology from Dr. Who S1), and how we've taken them into our own contemporary fears. For Buffy, it was talk. Words taken = hearts lost. And words are essential to Buffy. They keep her human, allow her to maintain her sense of self, her youth in the patterns of her speech, in the manner of her interaction. In the X-Files, it's the loss of innocence, of life, represented again by the heart (abduction, the hearts of children, Mulder's connection to the killer), and in Farscape, it's the loss of the heart's vessel, betrayal as blood rite - again, innocence, trust, love. (And I've got a whole 'nother theory about how everything in S4 wraps back up into what we're given in JQ - blood vows and biloids and false fronts and wormholes. How we saw the fairytale first, then watched reality refract against it until the green video game fields became the field of flowers).
But back to our three fairy tales, all three innocents robbed in three different ways, all three stories incredibly effective not only because they individually tapped into our own fears, but into the fears and dichotomies addressed by each show. And (with the exception of Buffy in that ep), none of the heroes came out unscathed. They in fact had to discover their own wolfish side, their own wolfish nature, and then set it back down in order to retrieve the lost innocence.
On an entirely unrelated note, the LA Times Book Review particularly pissed me off this weekend with it's review of Steven King's new novel. Basically, the reviewer says that King could be a great author if he'd set aside the "genre conventions". If he'd give up horror as a metaphor, and just write straight literary fiction. Because, you know, there's nothing to be found in any sort of writing that isn't straight and narrow and mired in reality. Because we've never found transcendance in fear, or blood, or the world beyond the one we know. Asshole. I know this is an old gripe, but it just pissed me off.
ETA: Now that I think about it, those two things aren't unrelated. It pisses me off that the reviewer dismissed King's efforts because he's saying that our modern mythologies and fairy tales don't have resonance, and I call bullshit on that. We need the fairy tale, we need the post-modern mythology as much as we need the cleanness of modern literary fiction because we find our hearts in our fairy tales, we uncover our fears, we expose and slay them. We reach transcendence, we don't just recount it.
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 09:57 pm (UTC)in re: Hush, yes, Buffy does come out unscathed -- which is actually one of the more consistent -- I hesitate to call it a flaw, because it isn't ALWAYS or necessarily one -- aspects of Buffy, which is limited responsibility for your actions, or only transient responsibility unless it is a Big Theme, and even then, only as it serves the story telling (consequences for Willow's dark side, yes, but only insofar as she can still be part of the gang, be the hero at the end, for exampl). Anyway, I think you ARE onto something interesting here.....
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 10:27 pm (UTC)I have this same malaise going on - that and the "should I bother posting? There's really nothing interesting going on" thing. And each time I've thought something like this lately, there it is, in your LJ. You just say it much better than I can.
*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 01:27 am (UTC)Regarding Supernatural, I watch it for the relationships, not the plots primarily. I haven't cared this much about characters on my real-time TV since John and Aeryn, though the levels are not nearly equal at this time. On a side note, if Katya hasn't sent you FMA yet, I can do so this November. I would seriously love to read an analysis-contrast-compare of the two pairs of brothers and their journeys (in several senses of the word).
To me, Stephen King taps right into the American psyche, the heart of the ordinary. He knows what scares, what gives us joy, what it means to be me or you living our lives and having the seams come apart. Or to have that little bit something extra that turns the known world into magic and dust and fear, that brings a spark of courage and necessity to life in some, while others fall prey to madness and terror.
Some of his work is overblown and bloated, but when he's sharp and focused tight, his writing is what I'd call quintessential American horror, and that's not to be dismissed as if the word 'genre' were a dirty thing on the tongue.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 03:21 am (UTC)Supernatural was explicitly set up, in its first season, so that each episode was about an urban legend = modern myth. Their actual aboutness -- engagement below the text-level retelling -- varied considerably, as one might expect; but the show's creatures, like the villains in Grimm, are remarkably bloodthirsty, indiscriminate, and in need of destruction rather than redemption.
(I will pay cash money if there is an episode some day about Hansel and Gretel, where Sam gets caged to be fattened up for the fire.) (Even the thematics fit! Children all bitter about having been left to fend for themselves, somebody comes along and offers them everything they want, and, and, Dean in a dirndl! Okay, not that last.)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 04:41 am (UTC)And there's some terrific bloody fairytale stuff in Supernatural, I'm just still not sure that the story format is for me. But I'm giving it more of a chance because I like American fairy tales. They're so bleakly destructive. I think I want to like Supernatural because I so loved American Gods.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 12:13 pm (UTC)Supernatural does have an arc through the season, so you can't just watch episodes at random like some shows, despite the MOTW format. It's not a plot arc so much as an emotional arc, and the crew/cast have been faithful in maintaining it.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 12:14 pm (UTC)