Posts Tagged Writing
My Ruined Tolerance of the Disposable Black Man
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Film, Television, Uncategorized, Video Games, Writing on April 30, 2013
Is IronE Singleton aware that the internet’s support for him is ironic in nature? Hell, is the internet aware? (SPOILERS for the TV show The Walking Dead, the movie Chronicle, and the video game Binary Domain.)
According to this picture, it’s a… maybe?
Perhaps the support is part comic, part pity, and part ironic. Perhaps there is legitimate respect in Singleton’s portrayal of T-Dog, the now-deceased African-American character on the hugely popular but extremely flawed The Walking Dead. Perhaps the internet – showing a surprising amount of critical savvy in the realm of developed characters – supported Singleton because he was working with so little of a character, with so little worth. T-Dog, metaphorically, was awesome because T-Dog, literally, was not, and Singleton did the best he could.
This is nothing new. African-American characters dying in horror films (and in all forms of entertainment nowadays) have been normalized to the point way past parody. I’m not even concerned about that, per se, as problematic as it is. The Walking Dead, however, seem to have codified it into something uncomfortably explicit – practically a rule of the show. To be specific, when another African-American male was introduced in an episode, they would kill off the previous one. They killed T-Dog when they introduced Oscar. They killed Oscar when they introduced Tyreese. They barely even let an entire episode pass by without two African-American males alive and well, and they never even spoken to each other at any length. (To be fair, there are two African-American females – Michonne and Sasha [and they have not talked to each other yet either]. I don’t have too much hope for Sasha, but as of right now, progress is progress.)
T-Dog’s death was particularly sloppy. A character whose development was as detailed as a sponge, T-Dog suddenly had a religious epiphany as he sacrificed himself to save Carol, which left Glenn alone with the wonderful, completely-out-of-nowhere exposition of detailing T-Dog’s background (he apparently drove old people to church). I’m willing to give a little benefit of the doubt though. The Walking Dead has had a number of issues behind the scenes, with creatives and executives alike. It has a number of issues with its female characters as well – a point that deserves its own essay and has been written about extensively. But being alive, they can redeem themselves – or at least redeem themselves in death, which Lori in some ways had done (lesser so with Angela, but writing isn’t the show’s strong point). The Walking Dead has made its black men disposable to the point that two black characters can’t even talk to each other, without a dramatic reason why. The Token Black Man Death has gotten so uncomfortably common that I can’t even laugh at it anymore.
I was watching Chronicle, a short but interesting film that takes on the emotional struggle of mentally unstable teens through the thematic use of burgeoning super powers. It was a taut, surprisingly thorough film that kept me quite interested… up until the point that they killed off Steve (Michael B. Jordan). I wish to god that didn’t effect me like it did, but my heart sank and I had to leave the room for a moment. Steve was nice, charming, and genuinely helpful towards the end of his life. He tried to really help the troubled teen Andrew as he grew more angry and antagonistic. The film clearly used that death to spur the impetus to get Andrew’s cousin, Matt, to deal with Andrew once and for all. But the “death as motivator” trope is already overdone. Adding that racial component only speaks to the systemic issues within the creative field.
How overused has this become? When reading a list of underrated video games of 2012, many people mentioned Binary Domain as one of them. And it was a surprisingly solid game, with tight mechanics, great graphics, and a delicious and deep sci-fi plot bolstered by very unique, personality-filled characters. It didn’t take itself seriously, and the VO was perfect for the tongue-in-cheek dialogue. Boss fights were tough and huge. Everything was running smoothly… until the end. The black character, Bo, sacrifices himself to save the love interest of Faye, in service to protagonist, Dan. There’s a dramatic, touching scene of Dan talking to Bo as he lay dying. It’s well done, especially in context with the series of big reveals that came before it. But of all the characters – and there are a lot of them – did it have to be Bo? And why only him? There’s five other perfect characters that could have been the lamb.
Here’s the kicker. Three completely different pieces of entertainment from three entirely different media all killed off their only black male characters solely in service to the white protagonist. This is ridiculous. And yes, people of all races, generally speaking, were killed (not so much in Binary Domain, but it’s a moot point since mostly everyone were robots). And I’m not claiming that creators should be forced to do something they do or do not what to do, creatively. The problem is that there are already so few black characters in our media, fewer of them developed beyond a single note. (Odd, since The Walking Dead is located in Atlanta with a high black population, and Binary Domain often deals with military groups, groups that often have large African-American numbers.) Why can’t they live happy lives? Why can’t they survive? Why are they seemingly always killed to ensure the happiness/survival of their white peers? Why did THREE totally different development teams all make this same decision?
Women in media are killed for white, male protagonist to go on revenge sprees (add in a little rape or refrigeration to make it “serious”). Black men, on the other hand, are killed in sacrifice to save their Caucasian others. Both are awful, but at least now there seems to be an attempt to really make it a point to bring the treatment of female characters in media to light. African-Americans and other minorities need to definitely speak up and campaign strongly against this, and demand better from writers and creators.
Moffat and the Allegorical Doctor Who
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Film, Television, Uncategorized, Video Games, Writing on April 16, 2013
Of all the events that transpired in the Doctor Who episode “The Rings of Akhaten,” the one thing that stuck with me was the moment that the Doctor and his newest companion Clara talked with an alien about renting a space moped. In lieu of cash or credits, the aliens on the world of Akhaten wanted objects of sentimental value. The more sentiment behind the object, the Doctor explains, the more its value, its worth. The episode continues then with all these other concepts like gods, stories, memories, songs, meaning, and “the most important leaf in human history” (and we’ll get to this in a second), but for the most part I kept thinking about this concept of buying a tangible object with another tangible object that has intangible meaning to a single individual. Then it hit me – this really is fucking stupid.
Why? The idea of an alien species valuing an object with meaning behind it is not even science fiction. It’s not even LIGHT science fiction. It’s the hacky, emotional reject of an young adult fiction novel. Of all the goofy, fun moments in The Fifth Element, no one said that the idea of “the fifth element being love” was one of them. As dark as Harry Potter gets, Harry surviving Voldermort’s attack when he was a child due to his parents love is not exactly well-respected. So when Doctor Who trades Clara’s ring (which was passed down from her “mum”) for the moped, we’re way past a soap operatic science fiction show. We’re entering allegory territory. The problem isn’t that science fiction can’t have allegorical concepts; it’s that the overall show as an philosophical allegory is just not interesting. We’re not watching a show with real characters and crazy plots that build around a theme; we’re watching a show about concepts, ideas, and themes, embodied in random characters and plots. Doctor Who is all about meaning now, and it’s bothering me.
Moffat seems strangely obsessed with myths, concepts, and intangibles. He’s weirdly taken to ideas, ideas so specific that it’s off-putting. His clever-by-half take on the series embodies this, where characters seem perfectly quippy and quirky, speaking in Lost-ian like language that no human (or alien!) would actually, or even theoretically talk like. It’s getting to House-like levels of silliness now, when in it’s final three or four seasons, every character talked like observational theorists, able to suss out the essence and emotions of every other character. Everyone became a fucking detective of human life.
The entirety of Doctor Who is now a “fucking detective of life”. This would explain everything – the lack of urgency, the labyrinthine story arcs, the obsession over the “Doctor Who?” question (which was always played for a joke… until now!), the questionable presentation of Manic Pixie Dream Girls as companions, the ideas of fear and love and song and memory being catalysts for plot contrivances, the nonsensical EVERYTHING involving River Song, the ruination of potentially great monsters like The Silence and The Fallen Angels. All of these plots and characters are nothing but vessels for Moffat and his writing staff to muse on life and the universe’s greatest mysteries, like the meaning of love and fear and friendship and death. Moffat probably decided to avoid returning to Daleks because he couldn’t make them into a metaphor for anything. The Cybermen, though? The cold, mechanical robots with no feeling? Oh, yeah, we’ll see them again.
Beyond this all being questionable sci-fi, the bigger issue is that these themes and his opinion on them are NOT universal. He doesn’t seem to present a nuanced side to these things, nor seem to delve to much into various opinions of it. His arc concerning the Doctor’s death could have been a powerfully dramatic moment for the character. Matt Smith sells it well, but it ultimately leads to nowhere, branching out into bizarre one-note areas, like in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” where he was poisoned and, for some reason, ran back to the TARDIS to talk to an image of a young Amy Pond to… express regret? It’s a nice moment but had absolutely no bearing in the actual plot of the episode and felt rather extrameous. Or in “Vincent and the Doctor,” a dramatically powerful episode to many, but its clear that Moffat wanted to talk about depression and loss, not necessarily create an actual plot-driven episode of TV that supposed to last 52 minutes. (And the less said about “Closing Time,” the better.)
And so we’re back to the “most important leaf in human history,” which – what? The most important leaf in human history gave you a raccoon tail and ears and allowed you to fly. Clara, your leaf being apparently stronger than the history of the Doctor’s travels is nonsense. Even worse, his metaphorical nonsense doesn’t even hold under scrutiny. Moffat (or in this case, writer Neil Cross) holds that history is finite but the future is forever, and somehow the leaf represents infinity but the Doctor’s life doesn’t, despite the fact that the Doctor, presumable, will be living a LOT longer (and his experiences bare more for the future), but the leaf actually represent past events (the marriage of Clara’s parents) and kinda doesn’t bare anything to the future, save for what Clara would believe and — do you see what I’m getting at here? A whole lot of run-around bullshit. And it’s bullshit that lacks the foresight of contrarian and differentiating viewpoints, so it’s not even WELL-THOUGHT bullshit.
I was somewhat pleased with “Cold War,” which gave purpose and agency to the characters, and even allowed Clara to feel vulnerable and unsafe for once. I wasn’t too pleased with the deus ex machina of the Ice Warrior’s arriving ship, and it seemed like Clara’s fears were tossed aside in the end. But at least those critiques come from elements of substance, writing, and character, instead of the broad swath of allegorical ideas that seem to be present nowadays. Here’s hoping that we can see Doctor Who become more character and plot based as the season winds to a close.
SIMPSON CLONE ATTACK FORCE, Part 3 – Family Dog
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Television, Uncategorized, Writing on March 12, 2013
Who would have thought that, after watching a series about walking and talking mice and insects and a series about fish cops and robbers, the show that most closely resembling The Simpsons template was the worst one of them all. Family Dog broke me and left me a shallow form of my former self – it was only the adventurous and delightful Ducktales that helped me regain my senses. Family Dog left me ranting and screaming on Twitter, turning my mind into a mushy gooey as my synapses fired on all cylinders, trying desperately to make sense of the bland, empty scenes crossing my screen, and the writing contained with in. It seemed to decry everything that TV had tried to do. It was like… like anti-TV, a show that deconstructs the very structure of not only TV, but storytelling, direction, sound design, and animation. Oh, it’s not on purpose. This is bad fucking television right here, folks.
If I was a kinder man, I’d allow it because Family Dog is based on the animated short with the same name, a format that is usually known to break traditional conventions in storytelling. But with the sheer amount of talent involved here – Steven Spielberg, Brad Bird, Tim Burton, Paul Dini, Sherri Stoner, Martin Mull – there’s no possible way I can be kind. Family Dog is awful.
Family Dog – (1993)
Director: Klay Hall
Starring: Martin Mull, Molly Cheek, Danny Mann
Screenplay(s) by: J.D. Smith, Brad Bird
I should have known I was in serious trouble when it became clear that the dog in question had no name. Yes, the family in which this white, sharp-nosed, rat-like canine has been entrusted to failed to legally ascribe it a nomenclature, despite it having a collar and presumable getting its shots. They simply refer to him as “the dog,” which is dumb in so many ways, beyond logistics, but in a way, there’s a logic to it: the Binsfords failure of giving their pet dog a name is indicative of perhaps the worst family in the history of America.
Seriously. The Binsfords family – patriarch Skip, mother Bev, son Billy, and daughter Buffy – is a horrific depiction of suburban sociopathy. There is an air of disgust and contempt among everyone in the family, a thin layer of murderous annoyance that makes watching the Binsfords an uncomfortable, slightly offensive affair. A lazy, good-for-nothing father mumbles bitterly about having to -actually- do stuff while the mother nags extensively to herself, a caricature of the caricatures of women that already dot the Lifetime Channel. Billy is clearly meant to mimic Bart Simpson but is nothing more than the kids from Problem Child and The Good Son combined into one holy hell of a demonic delinquent. And Buffy is something out of a science lab, a special school child that would be rejected from even the most special needs accommodations.
And suffering the brunt of this dysfunction is out titular dog, a nameless swath of white that is as useful or as as interesting as an animated depiction of an actual dog would be. I love dogs, but watching a show that depicts the world “through the dog’s eyes” is not as nearly interesting as it sounds. For one thing, dogs primarily are interested in eating, sleeping, surviving and breeding, which lends no narrative conflict other than expanding the contrived situations that would arise from the need to eat, sleep, survive, and breed. And so we follow this dog through his attempts to eat, sleep, survive, and breed while at the INSUFFERABLE mercy of what could be charitably called his owners.
I should mention that the CBS 10-episode run was based off three Family Dog shorts that were part of an Amazing Stories anthology series that aired on NBC between 1985 and 1987 – seven years prior. They were quite a hit, the most popular part of the anthology. I watched these shorts, and they weren’t too bad, perfect little shorts that made their point. There was nothing about them that demanded a TV series, though. The Binsfords were fairly cold here, bickering nonsensically and forcing their sadism and blame on the dog, but as a short, that WAS the gag, so you could easily look past it. It also helps that the shorts, with their limited running time, could get away with simple plots and not worry too much about rambling.
But a series, especially one with a family at the center, needs to make its characters sympathetic, and their motivations need to be clear. They don’t need to necessarily be likeable – the parents in Rugrats are one handgun away from a family massacre – but there’s always that sense that the family loves each other, especially the babies. Family Dog lacks any of this. It’s a cruel, sadistic take on suburban life, coupled by a minimal sense of community and location, and stories that are less stories, and more or less premises. The pilot, “Show Dog,” is representative of this. The father forces the dog – a dog that no one seems to like or care for – into a dog show? The dog doesn’t display any talent, but they just force him to attend this thing because – what, the father once was in a dog show before? Is this what human beings do?
It gets worse from there. “Doggone Girl is Mine” is a long and tenuous tale of watching the dog chase after another canine for love and “Call of the Mild” has the dog running with a pack of strays in an attempt to connect with his wild side. Both long-term premises require deft animation and action to keep the audience’s attention – something akin to Wile E. Coyote or Scrat-like. But there’s no exaggeration or development for comic affect. It’s moment after moment of stuff happening without displaying it in any interesting or comic fashion. What the shorts had were nifty visuals and interesting ways of depiction the scene. What the series had was a long, arduous showcase of tedium.
When the show tries to something like “character development,” it fails miserably, partly because there’s no sense of “character,” and partly because there are no strong plots to sustain itself throughout an episode that would trigger any development. So we’re forced to deal with awkward asides, dream sequences, and tedious, extended scenes that lead nowhere, all marred in the vileness of the family. “Eye on the Sparrow” is particularly egregious, in which Billy spends a full ten minutes torturing the dog, while the family nary bats an eye, only to turn his viciousness towards a sparrow. He hurts it and suddenly starts to feel bad, which is supposed to instill in the kid the idea of consequence, but comes off as a convenient character change for the (admittedly stupid) story. The ending is particularly stupid, in which the injured sparrow flies towards the window, so Billy BREAKS IT WITH A ROCK so it can be freed, and it’s so poorly done that it’s practically rage-inducing.
The show reveals in the treatment of its moronic, spiteful characters, like in “Dog Days of Summer,” where the family, for some reason, is harassed by a bunch of punk kids at the beach, because KIDS AMIRITE? The episode feels so bitter, but made stupider by the addition of a dream sequence/flashback to the purchase of the dog, mainly to fill time. The epitome of that bitterness comes to fruition in “Enemy Dog,” where the family unites, finally… in their utter hatred of their neighbors. This perfect family buys their own giant vicious canine and invites the Binsfords over for dinner so the dogs can play – AND THEY GO. After some of the worst, partially sexist dream sequences in all of TV.
Watch this episode if you can. Just watch it. It’s so mean, bitter, antagonistic, and boring. It’s cringe-worthy and embarrassing, and some scenes are straight-the-fuck-up inexplicable (like the scene where Billy tries to goad the dog but the dog is completely indifferent – what’s the goddamn point?) Watching this is definitely a lesson in what-not-to-do in any film or TV endeavor.
Family Dog broke me and left me bitter and angry, just like the family in the center of all this. This show ran 10 episodes way too long. It’s represents the bottom of the barrel in a time-period where adult cartoons where trying to find its way, and wouldn’t be until 1994 when The Critic renewed audiences faith in the field that The Simpsons dominated (sure, The Critic only lasted two seasons, but everyone at this point knows that was a mistake.) Still, it’s a tenuous point in the history of adult cartoons: the triple failures of Fish Police, Capitol Critters, and Family Dog served as the dead corpses of which Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and the entire Adult Swim lineup could flourish.