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Love/Hate Relationships
Dec. 21st, 2010 07:12 pmI read very bad advice columns, third-stringers like "Margo's Mailbox" and "Ask Amy" and the ones where message board visitors give their opinions. I do this just about every day. I relish hating the people involved, particularly the advice givers. With the exception of once-a-week Miss Conduct and Savage Love, if your advice is useful or even tangentially relevant to the question at hand, you don't make my reading list.
When it comes to the people who write in, I find it useful to see how they tell stories in which they have not come off well. How do they distance themselves? What do they think someone will and won't need to know to be able to help them? Given that these advice columnists rarely have any credentials or dispense advice (one in particular almos always says "this sounds serious! You should contact a counselor immediately!"), I have to assume it is the satisfaction of writing out this narrative in itself which is soothing. So you'll get paragraphs about whether air in the living room is fresher if you open a window or don't, and then in the last sentence it's "and I wouldn't care, but we haven't slept in the same bedroom for several months and the floor is covered in molding pizza."
The real joy for me is the advice itself, which is either "oh dear, ask someone else; this is a pickle!" or (particularly with the message board responses) seizes on a single word in the question as an excuse to talk about something else entirely, like their cousin's relationship with her husband, who is a pilot and never around, and what they wish she would do, or at the slightest excuse jump to what every woman should know or all men do.
I like to read these responses when I first wake up, because getting angry is a better stimulant than coffee. But I also like them because they make me feel better about a lot of off-the-wall responses to various work of mine; they're a solid confirmation that even people whose entire job is to pay attention to a story often do not pay attention to the story and if their criticisms are not things I see in my own work, I'm probably the one who is right.
Which is all a long way of saying I don't know what to do about the TRON movie. I want to see it, because it looks pretty and has a score by Daft Punk. I am also positive I'm going to hate it worse than even Avatar. All I have to do is look at the trailer, and I know the lead is charismaless, the script is hackneyed, and it was made by someone with no connection to spirituality or the way computers work behind the GUI. If I don't see it in theaters, I'm never going to see it, because the only way it will be enjoyable is on a huge screen. At the same time, if I see it, I am definitely going to be terribly angry for at least two weeks, during which I will pick fights with everyone. It's not a good tradeoff.
This is the problem with bad movies if you're a filmmaker. Everyone assumes you can't relax and have fun, but you can. You can relax and have fun watching them. But you saw the movie more than anyone else, and you remember it better than everyone else, and you understand how much thought went into even tiny decisions like who wears false eyelashes, and you can't excuse it. It will stay in your head for months. It's like you get a hangover nobody else gets. Your job is to solve the problems in the movie, but it's finished and you'll never get a chance. It is like a piece of music that doesn't resolve.
I am, of course, already angry about the TRON movie, not for itself, but for other people's responses to it, and the way they try to re-judge the original. Over at the AV Club, they described it as having a plot in which a hippie programmer deliberately enters a computer-generated utopia he's created.* The always reliable Wesley Morris** talked about how the original movie was like Apple and the new movie is like Microsoft*** before finding time to make random digs at Mulholland Drive.
Best of all is the neverending jaded chorus of "the original movie wasn't actually good; you just thought it was good because you were young and sentimental." (People love this argument about all kinds of things because it lets them be superior to both you and their younger selves. They've learned things. They're worldly.)
TRON is an extraordinary piece of mythmaking. The performances are stylized, which can read as unnatural, but they are appropriate given the archetypal nature of the characters, the epic and melodramatic struggle that has to be understood by children even amid technical terms, and the German expressionist-inspired visuals. (Rewatch Metropolis and then tell me the performances aren't deliberate and suitable.) This leaves aside the unique visual style and venerable electronic score.
You don't even have to get the references to computer architecture, although it certainly made an impression on child me that I should be a responsible programmer, it's important to keep good records, and it's useful to know physics when you need to solve things. Sure, there are plot threads that don't lead anywhere, because it's a millieu piece, just like Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, or Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The random encounters are the plot.
I mean, if someone doesn't like TRON, fair enough. I can see that. It's weird as hell. But it's not a bad movie, and if you say it is, it just tips me off that you're uneducated in alt-film, and that you want to make my artform smaller than it is. And I'm sure not inviting you to watch any Guy Maddin movies with me.
* No.
** Worst movie reviewer I've ever read. There are plenty of reviewers I disagree with, but at least I can get some information from them. Wesley Morris doesn't really write about the movies he sees so much as maintain a Wesley Morris blog to quip about whatever subjects strike his free-associative fancy, and then find some way to link that to the movie he was assigned.
*** The original movie is set in a UNIX system, which is essential to the plot, which is based around the commands you might enter in a UNIX system. And all the characters are gamers (a PC-using group, not Mac) and programmer/developers (PC-ers again). Graphic designers think Macs are great and utopian. Hackers think Apple's "user friendliness" is Big Brother trying to tell you how you're allowed to use things you own or make and view the 1984 commercial with no small degree of irony.
When it comes to the people who write in, I find it useful to see how they tell stories in which they have not come off well. How do they distance themselves? What do they think someone will and won't need to know to be able to help them? Given that these advice columnists rarely have any credentials or dispense advice (one in particular almos always says "this sounds serious! You should contact a counselor immediately!"), I have to assume it is the satisfaction of writing out this narrative in itself which is soothing. So you'll get paragraphs about whether air in the living room is fresher if you open a window or don't, and then in the last sentence it's "and I wouldn't care, but we haven't slept in the same bedroom for several months and the floor is covered in molding pizza."
The real joy for me is the advice itself, which is either "oh dear, ask someone else; this is a pickle!" or (particularly with the message board responses) seizes on a single word in the question as an excuse to talk about something else entirely, like their cousin's relationship with her husband, who is a pilot and never around, and what they wish she would do, or at the slightest excuse jump to what every woman should know or all men do.
I like to read these responses when I first wake up, because getting angry is a better stimulant than coffee. But I also like them because they make me feel better about a lot of off-the-wall responses to various work of mine; they're a solid confirmation that even people whose entire job is to pay attention to a story often do not pay attention to the story and if their criticisms are not things I see in my own work, I'm probably the one who is right.
Which is all a long way of saying I don't know what to do about the TRON movie. I want to see it, because it looks pretty and has a score by Daft Punk. I am also positive I'm going to hate it worse than even Avatar. All I have to do is look at the trailer, and I know the lead is charismaless, the script is hackneyed, and it was made by someone with no connection to spirituality or the way computers work behind the GUI. If I don't see it in theaters, I'm never going to see it, because the only way it will be enjoyable is on a huge screen. At the same time, if I see it, I am definitely going to be terribly angry for at least two weeks, during which I will pick fights with everyone. It's not a good tradeoff.
This is the problem with bad movies if you're a filmmaker. Everyone assumes you can't relax and have fun, but you can. You can relax and have fun watching them. But you saw the movie more than anyone else, and you remember it better than everyone else, and you understand how much thought went into even tiny decisions like who wears false eyelashes, and you can't excuse it. It will stay in your head for months. It's like you get a hangover nobody else gets. Your job is to solve the problems in the movie, but it's finished and you'll never get a chance. It is like a piece of music that doesn't resolve.
I am, of course, already angry about the TRON movie, not for itself, but for other people's responses to it, and the way they try to re-judge the original. Over at the AV Club, they described it as having a plot in which a hippie programmer deliberately enters a computer-generated utopia he's created.* The always reliable Wesley Morris** talked about how the original movie was like Apple and the new movie is like Microsoft*** before finding time to make random digs at Mulholland Drive.
Best of all is the neverending jaded chorus of "the original movie wasn't actually good; you just thought it was good because you were young and sentimental." (People love this argument about all kinds of things because it lets them be superior to both you and their younger selves. They've learned things. They're worldly.)
TRON is an extraordinary piece of mythmaking. The performances are stylized, which can read as unnatural, but they are appropriate given the archetypal nature of the characters, the epic and melodramatic struggle that has to be understood by children even amid technical terms, and the German expressionist-inspired visuals. (Rewatch Metropolis and then tell me the performances aren't deliberate and suitable.) This leaves aside the unique visual style and venerable electronic score.
You don't even have to get the references to computer architecture, although it certainly made an impression on child me that I should be a responsible programmer, it's important to keep good records, and it's useful to know physics when you need to solve things. Sure, there are plot threads that don't lead anywhere, because it's a millieu piece, just like Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, or Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The random encounters are the plot.
I mean, if someone doesn't like TRON, fair enough. I can see that. It's weird as hell. But it's not a bad movie, and if you say it is, it just tips me off that you're uneducated in alt-film, and that you want to make my artform smaller than it is. And I'm sure not inviting you to watch any Guy Maddin movies with me.
* No.
** Worst movie reviewer I've ever read. There are plenty of reviewers I disagree with, but at least I can get some information from them. Wesley Morris doesn't really write about the movies he sees so much as maintain a Wesley Morris blog to quip about whatever subjects strike his free-associative fancy, and then find some way to link that to the movie he was assigned.
*** The original movie is set in a UNIX system, which is essential to the plot, which is based around the commands you might enter in a UNIX system. And all the characters are gamers (a PC-using group, not Mac) and programmer/developers (PC-ers again). Graphic designers think Macs are great and utopian. Hackers think Apple's "user friendliness" is Big Brother trying to tell you how you're allowed to use things you own or make and view the 1984 commercial with no small degree of irony.
