Milgrim, the over-medicated, over-educated translator upon whom one of the strands of Spook Country‘s plot focused, wandered through that novel in a drug-addled haze, apparently doing nothing of his own volition and presenting little to which a reader could relate or even sympathize beyond misery and pure need.  He reappears, now sober and rebuilding his life and indeed his very personality,  as one of the protagonists of Zero History — the title refers, in its most literal sense, to Milgrim’s having emerged from years of addiction and street living with seemingly no past.  This lack of a history is a state of being that our rapidly transforming contemporary society, in Gibson’s estimation, simultaneously resembles, covets and fears.  In having Milgrim wake into a technological world almost unrecognizable to him, Gibson brings home the strangeness of our society, the “science-fiction-is-now” premise that has always been the crucial factor of his created landscapes, but with an immediacy rarely seen, whether in his novels or any other.  And in so doing he has given us, finally, a protagonist whose reactions are not so alien — or, as is too often the case, simply so tough, streetwise, “cool” — as to kick us out of the story.

The plot does leave something to be desired.  Like many of Gibson’s plots, it puts a lot of balls in the air, and then lets us see them coming down in brilliant, unexpected patterns only momentarily, out of the corners of our eyes — or rather, out of the corners of the eyes of the surveillance cameras that constantly hover over the novel’s action.  After nine  novels, beginning with Neuromancer in 1985, that all feature a similarly deflected central plot, we can by now safely say that this lack of narrative satisfaction is by design: Gibson writes about a world, already our world, in which one may make choices, and set events in motion, but the implications of those choices and the culmination of those events, if truly significant, are also beyond our capacity to control or even imagine.

It is a testament to Gibson’s prose, which has become over the years even more sharply observed and deft, with a razor of a phrase, that the novel is still a gripping read.  It centers on the search, by the financial speculator and branding genius Hubertus Bigend, whose quasi-menacing presence ties this trilogy together, for the source of Gabriel Hounds, a vanishingly obscure, and correspondingly almost infinitely fashionable and coveted clothing line.  Milgrim and Hollis Henry,  the erstwhile singer of a modestly famous indie rock band and another protagonist from Spook Country, are assigned to track down the designer of the brand.  Along the way, they run afoul of shadowy and menacing ex-special forces types who hope to profit from the very same conjunction of the fashion world and the military supply chain toward which Bigend himself has turned his attention and his terrifyingly massive resources.  What Milgrim and Hollis uncover, unsurprisingly, is less important than the path their search takes them down, and its implications for Bigend’s corporation and the world at large.

Not to mention for Milgrim and Hollis, who are rewarded by Gibson for their participation in his labyrinth of blind alleys and impenetrable symbols with happy endings: They both end up, shocking themselves most of all, in love and with the ones they love.  This is a resolution almost unknown in the grim world of cyberpunk, and Gibson seems to be signaling to us that something important has happened here.  The plot of this novel may be as claustrophobic as any of his others, but the combined trends of its dark and vertiginous themes opens up true possibilities for emotional growth and knowledge.

There is a significant image near the beginning of Zero History, when Hollis is shown a Gabriel Hounds-designed piece for the first time.  There is no “exterior signage” on the denim jacket, and

The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts.  On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places.

This description brings into sharp focus the etymological roots of the word ‘brand,’ an association we do not often make when thinking about Coca-Cola or Nike or Toyota.  Or even Levi’s, which often bear their own stamped or branded leather patches.  By focusing on the original meaning, evoking for us the very real image of hot metal being pressed into leather — which is, after all, flesh — and leaving its singed mark, Gibson is able to suggest in a more forceful way than usual that the effects of product branding, on us, on our selves, on our bodies and embodied minds, are more than a little sinister.  That branding is more altering than we imagine, that it may not ever be entirely voluntarily accepted, and that it is quite possibly permanently damaging.  In a novel, and a trilogy, whose events center on a branding company, Bigend’s Blue Ant, this is more than a little revealing, and it tells us a great deal, both about how the cyberpunk themes of Gibson’s earliest novels have evolved to speak directly to our contemporary world, and how we might navigate the increasingly treacherous media of this world to find the real human emotion experienced by his protagonists at the end of Zero History.

Gibson has always been at his best when describing products, technologies and surfaces, and our encounters and relationships with these objects.  In his earlier novels, it was the “bodiless exultation” of cyberspace, and the vaguely organ-like plastic shells of the “decks” used to access it, the crown of electrodes pushing into the forehead, fingers stroking pads and toggles.  The invented brand names of the future: Ono-Sendai, Maas Biolabs.  The drugs, delivered via transdermal patches gummed to the skin.  And the “mods,” voluntary surgeries that modify the body, allowing some of the novel’s more radically altered characters to insert data directly into their brains, like a thumb drive into a USB port.

Now, writing novels that take place in the present, more or less, Gibson has turned this deep attention to the products that we already possess, often with real brand names and incisive descriptions of how they feel, look, act.  On the very first page of Zero History,  we get a London taxi whose fake leather upholstery is “a shade of orthopedic fawn,” a Gore-Tex jacket that is “multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled,” a “loose warm mass”  of coins that “still retain the body heat” of the casino machine from which they have emerged.  This focus is not as intense in the pages that follow, but remains a potent part of the narrative.  Bigend, and apparently Gibson, are obsessed with the smallest details of products like clothing, the feel of seams, the names of parts (“gussets”) and colors (“foliage green”).  And much of the action of Zero History is mediated by characters moving things around on the screens of their ubiquitous iPhones — bringing us to the somewhat awkward realization, seen through the eyes of a technological novice like Milgrim, of what we look like, gathering in public to stare at and fiddle with our little touchscreens.

And of course this ubiquity, and this awkwardness, are precisely the point.  We have adopted these technologies so fully into our lives that our methods of seeing, our interface with the world has changed.  With its mega-effective branding, Apple has infiltrated our consciousness in a very real way.  Whether we want to treat this as deleterious or menacing, or simply the current state of affairs, Gibson suggests, is up to us — he is fascinated with the tools at least as much as any early-adopter.   But if it is a situation of which we remain ignorant, that we accept unquestioningly and unthinkingly, then we put ourselves at the mercy of forces that clearly, whatever else we might say about them, have something else besides our best interests at heart.

It turns out, then, that cyberpunk, with its imagined future of fusions between the human and the machine, of people who neglect their bodies for the thrill of cyberspace, or who cut into their flesh for new kinds of access, was always about the present moment of ever-present advertising, the ways in which products find their ways into our brains, with or without our acquiescence.  It was always a metaphor, at least in part, for branding.  The trilogy that began with Pattern Recognition, whose protagonist has a physical, allergic response to all logos that requires her to sand the branding off of the buttons on her jeans, ends with a novel whose main characters must learn to reclaim their own personalities, their own selves — or whatever shards of such selves are available to them — from a world whose brands are seemingly benign, even comforting.  That they are able to find real connection in the end is Gibson’s suggestion that their experience in Bigend’s orbit, their refusal to accept the brand, and the profit motive, and the comfort of the familiar, has allowed them to become whole people, able to dream and love.  Placing his novel in a world that is ever-more-recognizably ours, the father of cyberpunk has finally found a way to be hopeful and admonitory in a way that does not diminish the force of either.

And then there is the extraordinarily classy expedient of having Zoë the gigantic robot look not only like itself/herself in all of its/her one-ton, chrome-pistoned, glowing-red-eyed glory, but also at times, reflecting her subjective point of view, like Alessandra Torresani, the actress who played the late Zoë Graystone in the pilot. (Briefly: In that first episode, Zoë creates a virtual second self, an independent copy of her consciousness, which exists only in a virtual world similar to our cyberspace. Then the real-world Zoë is killed, but this “avatar” lives on. Her father, the Bill Gates of the Caprica universe, discovers this and tries to use this virtual mind to control a Cylon war robot that will fulfill the terms of a lucrative defense contract. Thinking he has failed, he succeeds, and this Zoë-consciousness ends up in the robot prototype.)

After this pilot, when what was apparently the only remaining copy of the Zoë program wound up in the Cylon body, I was troubled by the direction in which the writers seemed to be taking us. The prominence of Ms. Torresani in the promotional materials for Caprica, in the credits, etc., suggested that her role on the show would continue to be a central one, but since she now existed neither in the real world nor in the virtual-reality world, but only in the robot, it was difficult to see when the actress herself could reasonably expected to appear. I feared that the writers were heading toward a quick evolution of the robot technology into a perfectly human-looking android (in BSG, which takes place 50-some-odd years later, the Cylons have advanced to develope models that are indistinguishable from humans, known colloquially as “skinjobs.”) in order to have the actress continue on the show, creating a whole host of technological contradictions, not to mention messing dramatically with the continuity of BSG.

But my doubts proved unfounded, as the writers are cleverer than I. What they have done is continued to use Ms. Torresani in the most intruiguing way. On the show, the Cylon robot alternately looks like itself and like Zoë, depending on whether the writers want to highlight the point of view of others, or that of Zoë, who still feels like a teenage girl and not a killer robot. Most often, this image switches back and forth many times in a single scene, giving us a rather novel and jolting visual representation of a character’s subjective viewpoint embedded within the camera’s nominally objective gaze. It also makes the viewer feel Zoë’s constant and horrifying body dysmorphia so much more effectively that having her tell us about it would. And finally it gives us visually lovely shots and scenes that are emotionally and ethically confusing for the viewer: the technicians are strapping down Zoë as a big hunk of robot, and then they’re strapping down Zoë as a vulnerable teenage girl, treating her like a thing.  Which of course she is, and so we know we shouldn’t blame them, but we can’t avoid it. Or Lacey embracing her best friend, and then hugging a huge mass of steel that could crush her in a moment, a tender moment shot through with confusion and alienation. Truly an amazing idea, and if the show keeps up like this it may quickly approach the heights attained by its predecessor.

For now, I want to focus on something else I noticed about the show’s first few episodes: to wit, its subtle but unmistakable references to vampire fiction. Most noticeably, the Graystones have a robot butler in their house, a little bowling-pin-shaped fellow named Serge, who has to be given explicit instructions on who is invited into the house and who is not. (Central to many vampire tales, of course, is the rule that a vampire may not enter one’s house uninvited.)

But also interesting are the constant references to Tamara’s missing heartbeat. (Tamara, another teenage girl killed in the same bombing as Zoë, is also made into a computer program, but not having had her real-life counterpart around to “show her the ropes” of her virtual life, doesn’t have any idea who or what she is, and is understandably little able to deal with the fact that she seems to be only somewhat alive. The show represents this by having her freak out about a) the fact that she can’t remember how she got to the virtual room in which she lives or b) the fact that she can’t feel her own heart beating.) This somewhat clumsy plot-element—do we really notice our heartbeats enough that you would feel immediately if yours was missing?—seems to indicate that this is more than just coincidence, that the writers have been doing this deliberately. And in these days when just about every pop culture outlet seems to have bloodsuckers on the brain, it is worth looking at why the thoughtful writers of seemingly non-vampire-related program might have chosen this particular bandwagon to hitch a brief ride on.

Of course Caprica is a show about altered bodies, and bodily alienation, and the intimate interweavings of sex and violence, and how we use/abuse those we love, and issues of resurrection and immortality—all questions that vampire fiction brings to the fore, no doubt. (And of course Jane Espenson, one of the executive producers and writers for Caprica, was an exec. prod. and writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) But Battlestar Galactica, which certainly dealt with all of these themes, (and of which Espenson was also an executive &c. &c.,) had no real connection to the vampire mythos, or if it did at moments, was certainly not so concerned with it that it would have been this noticeable in a mere 3 episodes. In fact, if anything, BSG tended to use its altered bodies and its images of resurrection to reference not vampires but angels.

Which points, of course, to the fundamental difference between the shows. BSG took place after the world was destroyed, humanity all but wiped out. Its emblem was the angel because the fundamental question around which its images of resurrection revolved was whether humanity, having immolated itself, could ever be redeemed. And whether the price of that redemption could ever be paid, without destroying anything and everything it might have once meant to be human. (Angels may be emissaries of god, but they are also horrible, in that to look directly at one would ruin your brain forever.)

We don’t know that much about Caprica yet. We don’t fully know what its fundamental questions will turn out to be. But, being a prequel, we do know how it must end. It ends with the destruction of its whole civilization, and its story must be—already is—the story of how the wheels of that destruction were set in motion. Its emblem is the vampire because vampire stories are not about rebirth but about prolongation. Not about redemption but about decadence. The show tells us this from its very first moment: on the screen, the title “Caprica” is joined by a subtitle (perhaps seeming the subtitle for the whole show) “58 years before the fall.” This is superimposed on a picture of the globe, and the sound of a party. And then we see the party, with every cliched vision of what the word decadence has meant throughout history: group sex, drug use, murder, human sacrifice. We find out soon that this is only a virtual world—an underground creation known as the “V Club” (an initial presumably meant to stand for ‘virtual,’ but whose associations should by now be clear if not overdetermined)—but the message is no less immediate. This is a society, these images shout, in the process of partying itself to death. The attraction of the show, at least at the outset, is that it promises to give us front-row seats to this particular apocalypse, the world dying in blood and laughter and orgasm.

Where BSG was about whether it would ever be possible to go home again, to return to ourselves and our bodies, Caprica, so far, is about escape, about the things we do to leave home, to extend our lives or our minds or our orgasms at the expense of our bodies. The vampire is a potent image for such a show—and this speaks in turn to why it is such a potent image for contemporary American culture. We may keep it hidden from our minds, but our obsessions indicate that we know there is something troubling about the path we’re headed down, in which instant gratification seems ever more instant, less expensive, and apparently more consequence-free. The vampire rears its head when a culture feels that it has prolonged some aspect of itself beyond what is strictly healthy, and when that culture becomes anxious about the unexamined and unadmitted costs of such decadence.

Far be it from me to suggest that any given aspect of our culture is bad, wrong, troubling, decadent. I am the last person to rant about a return to the values of old (all of which contained their own decadent strains, of course) or to condemn the pursuit of pleasure. Nor would I claim that the writers of Caprica have crafted a jeremiad against a culture of Internet porn, celebrity gossip and casual drug use. If BSG is any indication, this show will be far more measured and complex than that. My sense is that if it has a lesson to teach, it is not abstinence but awareness: Can we feel our own hearts beating? If we’d stopped being able to, would we even know?

I’m teaching Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey this semester, and I wanted to reread it to prepare. My free desk copy hadn’t arrived from the publisher yet, so I downloaded a free version on my partner’s brand new Kindle and read it that way. Contrary to the prognostications of some of my old-media colleagues, the world did not end, great literature did not die, and the text itself was, in most any way that mattered, as enjoyable to read as it would have been on the page. I had some minor quibbles – the font size I used was slightly too small, but the next one up slightly too big; there seemed to be annotations, but I couldn’t easily navigate to them – which would probably have been mitigated had I purchased the Kindle version of a published edition (with a real editor and real notes) instead of the free fair-use text, or had I bothered to read even a single page of the device’s instruction manual. And I did miss the physical heft of a book, the solid weight that even a paperback novel has, letting me know by its presence that it exists in the world, in my hand or in my bag – as opposed to the Kindle’s almost comical lightness, which emphasized the ephemerality of a text that would disappear when I shut off the machine or left it alone for several minutes running.

But overall it was a very satisfying experience. The device was convenient, easy to use, relatively easy to read. Austen’s text was clear and uncorrupted; I didn’t feel like I was reading her novel on the page in the same way I had the previous times I’d read it, but this was, to my reading mind, no particular sacrilege. After all, these earlier experiences with the text (in paperback, with an introduction and extensive notes, in updated typography, etc.) were clearly themselves very distant from the form in which Austen’s original audience must have encountered it (together with Persuasion, in 4 volumes &c.).

Then, in the very last chapter of the novel, after the final obstacle had been placed in the way of the marriage of the protagonists Catherine Moreland and Henry Tilney, I came upon the following not-unfamiliar passage:

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. The means by which their early marriage was effected can be the only doubt…

And suddenly I felt the physical difference between the book and the screen open up beneath me. I had no “tell-tale compression” to guide me, no feeling of the thinness of the pages remaining to reassure me that the happy resolution to the novel was just around the corner. I was reading something different, something unanticipated, a new version of the novel, where there were no pages, no end, just the screen I was on, forever, until I clicked, and then there was the next screen, again forever.

I am being overly dramatic, to be sure. The Kindle has a little bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you know how far through the text you have come, together with an indication of the percentage of the book that is behind you. When I came to the above-quoted passage, the bar was almost fully dark, with the number 99% appearing above it, a fact of which I was undeniably cognizant at the time. If I did not have an actual compression of the pages, I had its representation and its analogue. I was never in the dark about how close the end of the text was, and Austen’s narrator’s self-referential remark was in no way lost on me or misdirected.

Nevertheless, that there was a real disjunction here was obvious, and it provoked further speculation about the relationship between reading and screens. After all, in many ways Northanger Abbey is a novel about the novel genre as a medium, about novels as objects that populate its characters’ world. It is appropriate, therefore, that it should draw its reader’s attention to its own physical form, and that a reader of its text in another format would be made keenly aware of the differences between the media of its consumption. (I have never seen either of the TV movie versions of the novel, but I would not find it surprising if they seem in places to be teaching us lessons in the difficulties of film adaptations of literary texts.)

But this must cause us to wonder about other novels, novels without such passages in them, that do not turn the reader’s focus to the medium, but primarily to the story that they convey. Surely other novelists, as they near the end of the story being told, have considered the fact that their readers, at feeling the thinning of the remaining pages, must know that the resolution to the story’s conflict must be at hand. Other novelists have likely invented their own narrative techniques to deal with the effects of this awareness on the part of readers, without recourse to the ironic and self-referential gambit taken by Austen. These less-obvious ways in which their authors dealt with this problem, which I can only speculate about, are at once integral parts of novels’ texts and artefacts of the medium of the book. This is an observation, however, that only becomes available when we read them in a different format.

And perhaps it is therefore necessary, when we pick up an ebook, or in general, as the world of reading becomes more and more mediated by screens, whether we aren’t missing something. Whether reading a novel written a century ago on the Kindle is really reading the same text at all, or if it is more like reading a novel in translation: sure, we get the meaning, the story, the idea expressed in each word, but it is not entirely the same. When we read a text that, unlike Austen, does not remind us to pay attention to the medium itself, maybe we are missing something we can hardly describe, and, what’s more, missing the fact that we are missing it.

Perhaps nowadays, most novels are composed on screens, and then are sometimes read on screens, and so a novelist may reasonably be supposed to have at least considered a Kindle audience in the process of composition. I have certainly read novels recently that read as if they were written with their eventual translation into audiobook form firmly in mind. But what are we to say of the novelists of the past centuries, who wrote in longhand, or on a typewriter, thinking of printing presses and bound volumes? How are we to interpret their narrative conventions and techniques, the unformed ideas that they set into words, when we read them on a medium that they could not possibly have anticipated? When I read Austen, I can look up what a ‘curricle’ is, or how the social world of Bath worked, or the political implications of ‘inclosure.’ But it is less easy for me to look up what I don’t know I am missing: the relationship of the words to the pages, or the ideas to the form in which they’re bound. The advantages of these new technologies are exciting, but we have to give some thought to the “bandwidth” we might be losing.

I often find those who write about the future of the book, on all sides of the discussion, quoting an old line that the novelist Annie Proulx wrote in the New York Times:

“Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever.” It’s always struck me as a strange and remarkably shortsighted thing for anyone living in the first world in the last years of the twentieth century to have written. Certainly, the technologies of the ’90s appeared a poor replacement for the book. But Proulx must have known that the technology would improve, as it always does, and that the screens wouldn’t be “twitchy” forever. That the conclusiveness of her repeated “Ever” would eventually come to seem like the wasted wishful thinking that it does now, now that the screens are smooth and easy on the eyes, with no backlight or flicker, almost (almost!) ink on a page, and people read novels on them every day.

But now that I think about it, there’s another way to read her statement and its urgent finality. Logically, Proulx could also be saying, if people start to read them on twitchy little screens, then what they are reading won’t be novels anymore. They’ll be fictions, certainly; they’ll contain the same stories, the same characters. But the name ‘novel’ belongs to texts written for and read in a particular medium—the rise of the European novel being related to the advent of the printing press, after all. The novel achieved a particular nature or character in relation to and conjunction with the media of its composition and distribution, and so a novel written for a screen is simply a new genre of fiction. (A new genre whose potential has not been truly explored, as it is only in its mewling infancy and so still relies entirely on the conventions of the older novel, much as the early novel relied on travelogues, conduct books and romances.) And someone who reads a pre-computer-age novel on a Kindle cannot be said to have read a novel, any more than someone who reads a novelization of The Odyssey has read an epic poem, or than someone who has seen a movie adaptation of a novel has read that novel.

I’m being extreme again, of course, and intentionally provocative, but I do think that these are issues we have to start thinking about, if we want literature, literary culture, and art in general to remain a part of our world. It is far too easy to decide that nothing is being lost, that we’re not missing anything. And the better the screens get, the easier it is to think this. It makes me wish for just a little bit of that old “twitchiness” back, to remind us of where we’ve come from and where we are going. Perhaps that’s why I seek out texts that are themselves “twitchy,” like Northanger Abbey—texts that break the illusion every once in a while, that draw our attention to the relationship between the story and the medium of its telling. Such twitchy texts (the novels of Richard Powers, the films of David Cronenberg, Battlestar Galactica) show us the things we might have missed, and might be missing a lot more in the future unless we start looking for them now.

Something to chew on, anyway.  In the meanwhile I remain,

Yours sincerely &c.,

Dewey Canard

One of the through-lines that ties the different episodes of this show—each with its own FBI mission in which Bomer’s character, master forger Neal Caffrey, plays an instrumental role as a “consultant”—together is Caffrey’s search for his girlfriend Kate, for whom he broke out of prison with only weeks left on his sentence.  Kate is either being held against her will by or willingly assisting an unknown man who is trying to find the location of an item that Caffrey stole.  By the end of the show’s last episode back in December, “Free Fall,” Neal knew the following things about Kate’s captor/partner: he wears a recognizable pinkie ring, he is close enough to be able to monitor Neal’s movements, and he works for the FBI.  The show was clearly trying to throw audience suspicion on the members of the FBI team with whom Neal has been working, including on his handler, Agent Peter Burke, with whom Caffrey has grown close.  Caffrey thinks Kate’s captor may be a recently introduced character, an FBI agent named Fowler, who has opened an internal investigation of Burke.  But the audience is led to believe that this cannot be the case, not least because it would deflate the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust with which the writers had clearly tried to reinvest the show’s central relationship.  As the first few episodes of the show had succeeded one another, the natural mutual distrust between the criminal and the feds had lightened as the ever-charming Caffrey ingratiated himself and closed cases, thus creating closer, more interesting relationships, but losing some of the show’s driving tension in the process.  This new information made the tension even higher, returning us to distrust but raising the stakes, because now these characters are friends.

Therefore, when Fowler tells Caffrey that it isn’t he but Burke who has Kate, Caffrey doesn’t know what to think, but to the viewer it “feels” right.  No matter that it makes little sense: it would be a satisfying twist that makes the setup pay off.  In fact, its lack of sense is what makes it a good last-minute reveal.  The viewer likes the relationship between Caffrey and Burke, and doesn’t want to see it ruptured, and the fact that some of Burke’s past actions don’t seem to make any sense at all if he is the guy makes our suspense for how the show is going to make all of it work that much higher.  The end of “Free Fall” gives that last-second reveal to the viewer, and does so in a fulfilling way: Kate enters a hotel room, the light comes on, and Burke is already sitting there, looking like the canary-eating cat, wearing the pinkie ring.  She calls him “Peter” and he says, “We have to talk about Neal.”  End of episode, end of show for seven weeks.

A good twist.  But now in last night’s episode, “Hard Sell,” when the writers have to make that twist pay off, they flub it in every way there is.  Granted they were given a next-to-impossible task: figure out how to make the twist work in the existing show without destroying the qualities that make us enjoy it, including the relationship between Caffrey and Burke.  There were solutions to this problem, some better than others and all slightly suspect (Burke was playing a role in order to flush someone else out, Burke was being manipulated by someone else, etc.).  But the writers chose the worst one of all—instead of explaining away Burke’s actions, explain away the scene, and thereby make your audience feel both stupid and cheated.

So, the show is telling us (at least for now), it wasn’t Burke at all, and he had just gone to see Kate for the first time in 6 years (since he busted Caffrey the first time) to pump her for information and get her to leave Neal alone.  Wait, so why was he sitting in the dark and looking menacing?  Because he believes that Kate is not a captive but using Neal, and he wanted to intimidate her.  Ok, but why was he wearing the incriminating ring (which it turns out many FBI agents, including Kate’s real partner/captor, own) which he doesn’t usually wear?  So he could make some weird and vaguely threatening reference to it.  Al…right.  But why didn’t he tell Neal that he had contacted her and that he knew how to find her?  Because Neal wasn’t ready to hear that Kate wasn’t in love with him and was just manipulating him.  Logically, it all works out.  Emotionally?  That’s not a story, that’s just an explanation.

 However convincing the exposition is, viewers know that the scene at the end of “Free Fall” had all of the narrative and cinematographic tags associated with the “good guy turns out to be bad” scenario: already in the room when someone enters, lamplight snapped on, sneeringly out of character, and closing on the climactic moment of creepy familiarity.  Burke looked and sounded evil as hell, and completely out of character, and the show used every possible technique to make us think this.  In showing us that, had we seen it all from another angle, and had we been around for the next few minutes, we would have known otherwise, the show is admitting to having manipulated the viewer.  Shows do that, we know we are manipulated.  But when we feel manipulated we want compensation, and here we get none.  To what end did the show manipulate us?  Simply to create suspense and then to take it away?  To create the kind of distrust that the show needs to sustain our interest and then have it evaporate in only one episode?  To then cast suspicion back on Fowler, a character who has only just appeared on the show, to whom we have no emotional attachment, and whose antagonism toward Caffrey and Burke is neither surprising nor interesting?

Imagine if The Empire Strikes Back had ended at the moment of Vader telling Luke he is his father, and thirty minutes into The Return of the Jedi, we see a flashback where he says, “no, only kidding, but you should have seen the look on your face!  And it took you off guard for long enough for me to cut off your hand, sucker!”  A logical move on Vader’s part?  Sure.  Sporting of the writer/director?  No.  Satisfying?  So deeply unsatisfying it ruins the original twist beyond repair.  This is an extreme example, but the fact remains: if you are going to take back your twist, do so in a way that is narratively fulfilling, not one that follows the dictates of logic while making your viewer feel wronged.

Contrast this with my analysis of Chuck.  The writers of both shows had similar problems: incorporate a new twist without changing the dynamics of your show too much.  Chuck did so in a way that made no logical sense, but made emotional sense, and gave us many compensatory pleasures.  White Collar did so in a way that made nominal logical sense, but was emotionally empty, encased in an episode about a particularly boring kind of crime (boiler room stock manipulation?  Yawn.  They had to clumsily add in skeet shooting and a fire-prevention system that can suffocate you in order to give it any drive at all.).  The one satisfaction offered by the show in order to get us to swallow the bitter pill of being obviously manipulated: Burke finally admits that Caffrey is his friend, something we have been waiting to hear him say.  But of course he says this to Kate, meaning that the one fulfilling moment of the episode is the one that actually makes zero logical sense.  (If Burke really believes that Kate is in cahoots with Fowler, he would never show them how vulnerable he is when it comes to Caffrey; he would have kept on the carefully cultivated evil expression and said “I have my reasons.”)

Attentive readers will point out that I am watching highly mediocre television shows and then complaining about them.  These readers would be correct (and I may drop this particular show from my viewing list).  But I am deeply interested in what makes one mediocre show more enjoyable or popular than another, and I am convinced that it is not because audiences are stupid.  It is because good writers understand the particular ways in which audiences are smart—and the ways in which it doesn’t matter.  Last week I mentioned that Chuck succeeds despite its logical dumbness because it is at heart an emotional show, and it understands those emotions well.  White Collar is a failed if stylish attempt, because it is like Caffrey’s forgeries and impersonations.  It pretends to have complex logical ideas at its core but in fact is just a silly idea dressed up in a fancy suit. It talks down to its viewers while pretending to talk up to them, which is a trick that only works a few times before we start to see the squibs and the wires.

Until next time, dear readers, I remain,

Eternally yours &c.,

Dewey Canard

You don’t have to read these previous posts if you don’t want to, but it might help.

Before I dive into this, a short note on spoilers: If you are someone who watches/might one day watch the TV shows or films that I discuss in a given post, and you like being “unspoiled” about the events/twists/revelations of the latest episodes of that show, then you shouldn’t read that post.  In many cases I will be discussing an episode from the night or nights before, and I am not going to hold back or allude my way around new information.  I will put the name of the show(s) I will be discussing in the tags above each post, so you can know to stop reading if you’re not up-to-date on that show.  (There is, of course, a lot to be said about the entire concept of spoilers, and whether the fact that foreknowledge may actually ruin a work of narrative art for the viewer says anything about the quality of that work [short answer: yes and no], but I will reserve that for future posts.)  (Perhaps this whole disclaimer or a version of it should appear somewhere on the sidebar. I’ll put that on the list of technological things I must learn how to do.)  And so: onward.

As I have been saying, one of the crucial distinctions between a television episode or season that ends on a cliffhanger and an episode or season that culminates in one of the increasingly popular devices for sustaining suspense that I have been describing—two of which I have termed “the last-minute reveal” and “the game changer,” (any resemblance to the title of a  recently-published sensationalistic book is purely coincidental)—can be found in the impetus to speculate that they inspire in their audiences.

Cliffhangers reduce audience speculation to a choice between given alternatives: will the beloved character live or die? Game-changing or revelatory endings of shows/seasons, on the other hand, inspire speculation of a much more creative, protracted and wide-ranging sort: but wait, if that is true, then what are the implications for everything we thought we knew about this show? And what might happen next?

This provides us with another, even more intriguing (to me, anyway), explanation for the apparent waning of the cliffhanger and the ascendancy of these other devices.  Audiences deeply enjoy engaging in this latter kind of speculation.  Not only is it a mental challenge, but it gratifies our desire to become involved in the story, to participate in the show we love.  While this is in a sense only one version of the kids of desire that keep us reading/viewing/engaged with any narrative (we “enter” the story or become “immersed” in it, we “identify” with the characters, &c.), it is not far-fetched to suggest that in our communication- and information-saturated culture, contemporary television audiences feel uniquely inspired, entitled and even empowered to become involved in the progress of their favorite narratives.  This sense of emotional engagement in narrative speculation drives, and is likely driven in turn by, the kind of online forums I briefly discussed in my post on seriality and suspense.

Television writers today know all of this, and their episode endings, and particularly their season finales, thus employ a range of methods aimed not only at leaving audiences in suspense, but specifically at provoking their speculation.  Which makes watching the following season’s premiere episode particularly interesting, both for those who have engaged in the speculation and those who are interested, like I, in examining suspense, speculation and narrative desire as social phenomena.

All of which is to say, season premieres are just plain fun to look at critically.  My favorite kind is the one referenced in the title of this post.  When a season premiere ends in a game-changing move, I like to speculate not about what the next season will be like, specifically, but about what must be going through the writers’ heads as they try to figure out what the next season will be like.   Will they have the guts to let the game-changer be just that, and render the show a very different animal when it comes back?  This has been known to happen (J.J. Abrams has proven himself particularly fearless in doing so, and if Fringe lasts a few more seasons, expect to be spending a lot less time in Walter’s lab and possibly a lot more time in alternate universes), but it is a serious risk.  Writers and runners of popular television shows have, by and large, proven themselves to be rather tone-deaf when it comes to understanding what it is that keeps viewers coming back to their shows week after week (even Joss Whedon, whom I love and who does game-changing turns better than almost anyone, seems not always to see the basis of the attraction of his own shows, vide Buffy season 6), and messing with the formula too much can thus cause the fans to write the show off.

But nobody can accuse the creators of the silly but extremely enjoyable show Chuck of not understanding what keeps the audience into the show.  They would have had to be blind not to get it, really: in a nutshell, the sexual tension between Chuck and Sarah, the ridiculousness of a main character who has a computer in his head and goes on secret missions but has to work at a shittastic job, the amazing cluelessness of the other denizens of said shittastic job, and the sexual tension between Chuck and Sarah.

And last season’s finale, in which Chuck quit his job at the Buy More, and then got an even bigger computer downloaded into his head, which gave him the ability to kung-fu-disarm four gunmen, among other things, threatened to upset if not negate all of those qualities. This “game changer” suggested that now Chuck will be an actual spy, a super-spy, rather than a bumbling guy who saves the day by being clever and determined, that he will no longer need to work at the Buy More, and that either he and Sarah will either be able to be together, or they will be separated by circumstances for good.  The fans, while almost universally in favor of seeing Chuck kick some gunman ass, were understandably apprehensive, and it was with some pleasure over the last five months that I imagined the writers of the show saying, “oh shit oh shit oh shit what the hell are we going to do now?” How, in other words, were they going to reset the show, after this development, to retain the elements that the fans enjoy without simply going back to the way the show was before (by, say, having the new knowledge, but not the old, taken out of Chuck’s head somehow)—which would squander the exciting narrative possibilities offered by this change, and would still alienate audiences, who would end up feeling manipulated into speculating about a game-changer that went nowhere.

I have to give kudos to the writers, therefore, (the episode, “Chuck versus the Pink Slip” was penned by Chris Fedak, the show’s co-creator, and Matt Miller) for showing a remarkable understanding not only of their show and its audience, but also of the nature of the expectation and speculation that their season-ender inspired.  I say this not because they managed to find a way to incorporate Chuck’s new talents into the story while retaining his bumblingness, putting him back in the Buy More and prolonging his tense relationship with Sarah, but because they did so in a way that clearly banked on the fact that satisfying their audience’s desires and rewarding its speculation in this way would be enough to make everyone ignore or forgive that the storyline made absolutely no sense whatsoever.  In a show that asks us to suspend a whole lot of disbelief anyway, this was a very smart gamble, and despite its logical insanity, was one of the most cleverly managed season premieres I have ever had the pleasure of seeing.

Briefly: The new intersect computer in Chuck’s head gives him access to practical knowledge like kung fu and mariachi guitar, but Chuck still has to learn how to access this knowledge, and he is a total bust at that part.  His emotions get in the way and he either can’t access the knowledge when he needs to, or suddenly accesses it when he doesn’t (he has to physically restrain himself from automatically using his martial arts skills on his bullying ex-boss).  And he is still the only person with the intersect.  So to continue using his knowledge, and to protect both him and others, he is put back into the Buy More, Sarah and now-colonel Casey are reassigned to be his handlers and, with a few significant but not unwelcome differences (along with the new skills, Morgan is now Chuck’s roommate), all is pretty much back to normal.  Oh, and in the intervening time Chuck broke it off with Sarah to focus on being a superspy, so they’re back in the long-lingering-looks phase again.

Very satisfying—emotionally.  Logically….What?  So Chuck’s problem, which is making him a) useless to the government and b) a danger to those around him, is that he is not in control of his emotions.  So the CIA’s solution is to put him back in a place where he has to lie to those closest to him, to work every day with a the woman he loves but can’t be with, and to use as cover a job that makes him feel stifled and inadequate.  Great way to get those pesky emotions under control, government!

But my point here is that it doesn’t matter.  At all.  The writers of Chuck understood that a game-changing season finale is, at heart, an emotional appeal, not a logical one, and so keeping their viewers happy meant satisfying their desires, not their understanding.  And in fact, the logical incoherence of the episode has its own emotional appeal—as it sets up a central tension for the coming season, between the theory that Chuck is a better spy when he is in control of his feelings, and the sense that viewers connect with, that Chuck is a better spy (or at least a better one to watch) precisely because he is not in control of them.  (A possibility that, while intriguing, doesn’t make the episode any more logical, as the very person who propounds the former theory, General Beckman, is the one who assigns them their new-old roles.)

In the end, it is an extremely silly television show.  But it is a show that is fundamentally about two things: information and desire.   Specifically, the prolongation and deferment of desire, and the ways that we use incomplete information to interpret the world.  And of course, these are what narrative theory is about as well.  I’d be hard-pressed, in fact, to come up with a better definition.

To summarize the plot so far: Cliffhangers.  Ending one episode of a serial narrative with a situation whose outcome is precarious and uncertain, in order to generate suspense for the following installment.  A frequent feature of serial novels, melodramatic film serials, and one that is still very much in use in contemporary television shows.

The use of the cliffhanger in prime-time television shows appears to have waned somewhat, however.  In fact, an over-reliance on cliffhanger endings in a single show seems to be one of the factors (along with awkward compression of time-frames, a tendency to treat character/personality/alignment as fundamentally mutable, and too much focus on romantic pairings at the expense of the central drama) that make viewers complain that a given show has become too much like a soap opera , because soaps, the modern version of film melodrama, employ cliffhangers at the end of most episodes.  I posit that this may be a sign that contemporary audiences deem cliffhangers  too overt a manipulation, that the emotional appeal of this narrative technique is so obvious that they often have the opposite of their intended effect, alienating the viewer, bringing him or her out of the story.

This is doubly true when it comes to season-finale episodes, for which writers, faced with the task of getting a viewer to hold on for a hiatus of months and tune in again for the next premiere, have largely abandoned the season-ending cliffhanger, so familiar from Dallas’ “Who Shot J.R.?”* and the like.  (There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as one of my favorites, HBO’s True Blood, both of whose season finales to date have ended on cliffhangers, not to mention roughly half of its midseason episodes.)  Along with the problem of giving audiences much more time to become alienated by the manipulation rather than coming along for the emotional ride, season-finale cliffhangers run into the practical problem that, in some cases, the makers of a show do not know whether the show will be picked up for another season when they are writing/filming the finale.  They thus run the risk of ending the show, or rather having it ended for them, in a deeply unsatisfying way.

But wait just one minute, I hear you say, I watch enough TV to know that that just isn’t true.  Most shows do still end their seasons with big mysteries or revelations, how can you say that cliffhangers are less popular now?

Well, that is the distinction that this entire line of thought has been heading toward.  Certainly the ending of a TV show’s season will often have some kind of twist or revelation.  Television writers and showrunners have not gotten rid of the need to keep viewers interested from season to season.  Far from it.  They have simply turned to slightly different ways of doing it.  And so we find the two most common ones, which I will call “the last-second reveal” and “the game-changer.”

The last-second reveal is a favorite of mystery-based shows, especially those that unwind a single long mystery (or several) over the course of a season.  An analogue of the “twist” that has been a feature of many recent Hollywood films, the last-second reveal is an intentional surprise, an unexpected turn that brings certain formerly incomprehensible or unremarked aspects of the show’s plot into focus and sense.  This is a narrative technique that is different in an important sense from most films’ twist endings, in that it usually answers only some of the questions raised by the show’s mystery, while leaving others open and, most importantly, creating new questions that often form the center of the next season’s mysteries.

The game changer is a turn of events at the end of the finale episode that, well, changes the game.  It is a pivotal moment, in other words, that suggests to the viewer that in the following season, things about the show to which viewers have become used, the template or pattern or conventions or setting &c., will be totally different.  While it runs the risk of irritating viewers who have come to cherish these aspects of the show, this technique banks (wisely, in this scholar’s opinion) on the fact that even these viewers will tune in to the next seasons premiere, if only to see how badly their favorite show got cocked up, giving the show big numbers for the premiere and giving the writers at least one more episode to reel these apprehensive viewers back in.   (More on that in the next post, on, finally, Chuck.)  This technique is also a great favorite of writers who are placed in the aforementioned precarious position of not knowing whether a next season will be forthcoming.  Unlike a cliffhanger ending for a show, or a show that ends on a last-second reveal that leads to yet more questions (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica), a game changer is a satisfying and natural ending for a show, as narratives stretching back at least to Greek drama tend traditionally to end on a moment when everything changes.  The audience is left in the pleasurable position of being able to speculate about the characters’ new future without worrying whether the playing out of that future would make a good, or recognizable, show.

I don’t want to put too much pressure on the distinction between last-second reveals and game changers.  In general, reveals cause the viewer to reflect back on and reinterpret earlier events of the show, while game changers cause the viewer to speculate about future ones.  But there is clearly a great deal of overlap between the two; many last-second reveals are also game-changers, and vice versa, and some writers will interlace one of each, or more than one of both, into a single episode.

I do, however, wish to stress the difference between these two narrative techniques and that of the cliffhanger.  Under a less precise definition of ‘cliffhanger,’ such techniques might be included, the one as a kind of cliffhanger for the viewer’s logic (“will they be able to make this twist make sense, jibe with everything that has come before?”) and the other a cliffhanger for the viewer’s emotional connection to the story and its characters (“will they be able to maintain these as the characters and show I love, given this new situation?”)

But under the strict sense of cliffhanger that I have expounded, in which a cliffhanger is an installment that ends on a event whose outcome is uncertain, these other techniques do not generate cliffhangers.  (Which is not to say, again, that an episode may not contain both a cliffhanger and a game changer, as they sometimes do.)  The uncertainty in these cases does not concern an event, but the entire past or future of the show.

A fruitful way to understand this distinction is to examine the kinds of speculation that the different ways of ending episodes/seasons invite. Cliffhangers ask viewers to spend the intervening time speculating about the outcome of a binary—either the protagonist lives or he dies, the poker hand wins or loses, the marriage proposal is accepted or not—and only secondarily, what the implications of one or the other eventuality might be. Game changers and last-minute reveals, on the other hand, encourage the viewer to speculate about a broad range of events and outcomes, a range that in effect embraces the whole of the show in question.  This provides a further reason that cliffhangers feel somewhat “crude” to contemporary audiences, while these techniques have the appearance of sophistication, leading, among other things, to statements in the popular press about the increasing complexity of recent television shows—and a parallel increase in the “jaded” and “demanding” nature of modern TV audiences.

When we return: Why the hell did I tell you all of this? And so what?

*Note that under the distinction I make here, the cliffhanger of the “Who Shot J.R.” episode is not the titular question of who did the shooting, which falls into none of the categories/techniques I outline here, but is simply the creation of suspense by means of a new mystery whose solution is deferred to the next season.  The episode’s cliffhanger is the question of whether J.R. lives or dies.

]]> http://drcanard.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/toward-a-taxonomy-of-season-finales/feed/ 1 drcanard http://drcanard.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/cliffhangers/ http://drcanard.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/cliffhangers/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:46:25 +0000 drcanard http://drcanard.wordpress.com/?p=36 ]]> Yesterday we began a discussion of the techniques used by writers of serial fictions to inspire and harness the desires of their audiences.  Notable among these is of course the cliffhanger, such as we find at the end of the penultimate chapter of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, where Nell is left ill and at death’s door.  Perhaps somewhat crude, but by the same token one of the most effective ways of ensuring that people will tune in for the next installment: Get them invested in the protagonist’s well-being, and then leave that character in jeopardy, with the outcome uncertain until the next chapter or episode arrives.

The word ‘cliffhanger’ (although by no means the overall concept) seems to have been originally applied to Thomas Hardy’s early novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, which was released serially in 1872-3.  The novel, not at all a critical or a commercial success, has a protagonist who is left literally hanging from the edge of a cliff at the end of a volume.

Later, the term came into much more widespread use to describe the 1914 silent film serial The Perils of Pauline, in which the main character, the classic “damsel in distress” figure, ended every segment in a situation that seemed sure to end her life (including one in which she is, again, hanging from the edge of a cliff) only to be saved at the beginning of the next installment.

It is worth noting, however, that readers of A Pair of Blue Eyes or viewers of The Perils of Pauline were never really in doubt that their heroes were going to be rescued—their rescue was in effect guaranteed by the genre conventions of those works.  People ran to the next installment primarily to find out how the rescue was to be carried out, not whether it would be.  This is not, of course, how we use the word cliffhanger today; the word has come to mean a situation like that of Dickens’ Nell, in which the audience is unsure as to the outcome.  In fact, it appears likely that this is what facilitated the widespread acceptance and use of the term to describe this kind of ending: A metaphorical description of the situation of the protagonist within the story, it also provides an apt description of the emotional state of the audience while waiting for the next installment.  The hero in whom we are emotionally invested is left in peril for the week or month until the story can continue, and so we feel as if we are ourselves suspended in midair as we wait.  It is this evocative connection to the subjective experience of being an audience of such a fiction that has allowed the term to become applied quite generally: not simply to the protagonist or his situation, but to the technique itself and this moment in the story (we do not say that “the hero is left in a cliffhanger” but that “the chapter’s ending is a cliffhanger”).  Also, it is not used merely to describe situations in which a main character’s life/health/safety is in danger, but more liberally to any ending in which the outcome of a situation is in doubt: whether a lover will accept a marriage proposal, for example, or whether a hand of cards will win in a crucial poker game.

The key, of course, is that the narrative stops at the moment when a situation could go either one way or another.  Some use the term erroneously to refer to any situation of change or uncertainty at the end of a segment.  These are not true cliffhangers, however, but other techniques for building suspense between acts, and it is these (often more subtle) techniques, used very often in television shows today, that I really want to talk about.   But that will have to wait until my next post.

(I also wanted to point out that the 1993 Sly Stallone film Cliffhanger, while it contains more than one scene in which a character is hanging off the edge of a cliff, does not contain any actual cliffhangers.  It does, however, have what is in my opinion one of the best post-climactic-fight lines in the history of action films.  After Stallone jumps off of a disabled helicopter, leaving the bad guy to plummet with it to his death, he gets to the top of the mountain where the FBI is waiting, and says: “If you’re looking for Qualen, try about 4,000 feet south of here.  He’ll be the one wearing the helicopter.”)

As both a English professor and a great lover of TV, I tend to think a great deal about the dynamics of serial narrative*.   One of the most interesting things, to me, about serialization, is how deeply such narratives are entwined with questions of the audience’s emotional involvement.  Audience desire, while clearly an aspect of any story, seems to play a more active role in the progress of a serial, whether in its fulfillment, its deferral, or its frustration—all of which are choices made, whether actively or not, by writers, showrunners, studios and networks.  The week-to-week nature of a show’s progress creates expectation, which inspires and requires particular choices to be made within the narrative: will a character in peril live or die, will a flirting couple finally come together or will their sexual tension continue for another week, &c.

And the emotions of TV shows’ audiences run high in response to these choices.  This is nothing new, of course; older serialized narratives, such as the novels of Charles Dickens, most of which were released serially in weekly or monthly journals, have often elicited outsized responses from their audiences.  In perhaps the most famous example, the climax of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel released in weekly installments in 1840-41 in the magazine Master Humphrey’s Clock, evoked an international reaction that may seem to us remarkably contemporary:

When The Old Curiosity Shop was approaching its emotional climax — the death of Little Nell — Dickens was inundated with letters imploring him to spare her, and felt, as he said, “the anguish unspeakable,” but proceeded with the artistically necessary event. Readers were desolated. The famous actor William Macready wrote in his diary that “I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain. . . . I could not weep for some time. Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken.” Daniel O’Connell, the great Irish member of Parliament, read the account of Nell’s death while he was riding on a train, burst into tears, cried “He should not have killed her,” and threw the novel out of the window in despair. Even Carlyle, who had not previously succumbed to Dickens’s emotional manipulation, was overcome with grief, and crowds in New York awaited a vessel newly arriving from England with shouts of “Is Little Nell dead?”

David Cody, via The Victorian Web

Today, thanks to the magic of lots of people (like myself) sitting in their bedrooms/dorm rooms/offices typing their excitements, frustrations and opinions and sending them off to forums where they may be read and responded to by the like-obsessed, we have access to detailed examples of this ongoing phenomenon of audience involvement.  Virtual conversations full of praise and complaint, wish, speculation and regret, ‘shipping** and fanwanking†, can now be found surrounding every episode of many, many television shows, an exhaustingly large archive of audience response to individual episodes of everything from Top Chef to The Office.

There is clearly a great deal that can be said about and learned from these archives, a task of which academia has barely brushed the surface with a dust-free cloth.   I certainly hope to engage with some of it in this space at a later date.  One thing that stands out, though, is how very emotional such responses tend to get, from the anguished letters that flooded in to Dickens imploring him to save his heroine, to the online posters who declare that the latest development on a television drama is has “ruined everything forever,” or made someone “so happy I can barely breathe.”

On one level, of course, audiences of serial narratives feel personally connected to the story, feel emotionally authorized to complain if the story is going in a direction they are not sanguine about, because of the commitment that the narrative demands, and that they have given to it.  Watching a one-hour drama that unfolds a complex story in installments over the course of a year (or two, or five) is an investment with a long term (and often, given the quality of much programming, rather doubtful returns).  This gives viewers a sense of emotional ownership of the narrative (particularly of its characters), but with absolutely no control over it, a frustration that, when given a forum, can express itself with passion that is understandable if sometimes extreme.

This explains in part why such emotional responses are elicited by television shows much more often than they are by movies.   Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in general, a moviegoer who pays as much as $15 for a ticket will complain briefly, if at all, about the stinker s/he just saw, while the same person, viewing a network TV show for free—a show s/he as a rule enjoys—will rant for pages about a minor infringement of consistency or taste.  This makes sense: Unlike a television show, a single film requires much, much less of a time commitment, and the viewer can decide whether to give it an emotional commitment on a film-by-film basis.  Those who get worked up over films, particularly those who spend time complaining about them online, tend to reserve their particular passion for sequels, franchise films, “cult” films, remakes and adaptations, all of which secure commitments of time and emotion of their own, for various reasons.

But this coin has another side.  The fact that we respond emotionally in this way to serial narratives is not a new phenomenon, as I have demonstrated.  I would venture to say, in fact, that it is somewhat natural to have such feelings about this kind of serial story (if not necessarily to express them with screeds in public forums).  This is not a fact that is lost on the creators of such narratives, the best of whom tend, because they craft stories about people, to have pretty good understandings of human nature.  In order to secure and sustain the audience’s ongoing commitment, in other words, writers have an arsenal of methods for manipulating the very desires that inspire viewers’ frustration with, speculation about and exhilaration in their favorite shows.  These are the techniques used in all narratives, the elements of fiction: character development, plot complication, reversal, suspense, &c.  And they are so intertwined with our expectations of/from narrative that it is fruitless to speculate whether writers created these techniques and now they have become second nature such that they inspire our desires, or conversely, our responses to stories are natural or innate, and these methods grew up as a way of harnessing or manipulating them.

But serial narratives are a special case, as the greater time commitment they demand, and the pattern of regular breaks in the narrative that they display, provides us with a way of seeing these techniques in what we might call their most extreme or thoroughgoing forms.  Dickens’ audience didn’t flood him with letters and stand shouting on docks simply because he hadn’t told them the end of the story yet; they were left in such emotionally overwrought suspense because he broke off his story at the very moment when his heroine’s life was in jeopardy.  In single-volume novels and single films, we have suspenseful scenes; in serial novels and television shows, we get cliffhangers.

For anyone who (like myself) is interested in the interconnections of narrative and desire, serial narratives thus provide a special kind of case study—and television, in all of its vagaries and cul-de-sacs, pretensions and counter-pretensions, rabid fan-bases and interfering networks, offers us more than enough variety of such narratives and responses to them to last several lifetimes, or at least until someone offers me a book deal/radio show/large sum of money to stop writing/padded cell.

That’s all for now, though.  I want to talk more about how these techniques, like cliffhangers and last-minute revelations, operate in actual TV shows (I just watched the season premiere of Chuck and have much to say about that), but for now I will take my constitutional, perhaps a drink, and we will continue this conversation later.  I remain,

Your servant &c,

Dewey Canard

*serial (adj): 2 : appearing in successive parts or numbers <a serial story> (MW online)

**A ‘shipper is a fan of a television series who has an emotional investment in seeing a particular pair of characters become romantically or sexually involved. The verb “to ‘ship” generally denotes the fan’s expression (generally in an online forum) of the desire for the pair to become a couple.

†Fanwanking is the construction, by a fan of a television series, of a convoluted and unlikely narrative, to explain away one or more of the show’s plot holes, inconsistencies or contradictions.

For someone who is supposed to be a representative of the ivory tower, I sure watch a hell of a lot of television.  Some of it startlingly bad television.  I love narrative — one might say I am addicted to narrative — but I can’t get my fix only from Middlemarch anymore.  The secret truth is, everyone except a handful of my most aged colleagues knows that Glee and 24 and Battlestar Galactica are simply more relevant to today’s world than Dickens, or Conrad, or even Philip Roth.  But for that very reason we shouldn’t take these shows at face value, any more than we take those novels at face value up in that ivy-encrusted edifice.   I feel the urge, daily, to use my training (such as it is) as a reader of fictional narratives to think, talk, teach, about how these newer narratives are relevant, how they reflect our world, our minds, our changes, how they draw us in, and how they use that allure to convince, compel, distract, reveal.

That’s what this blog is/will be.  There are others out there doing this, and most better than I (you’ll see their names appear in my posts here before long), but some things still need to be said.  I hope some of it falls out to your liking. I remain,

eternally yours, &c,

Dewey Canard