F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 41
April 1, 2017
The War Doctor
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Bear with me, but John Hurt was the best Doctor we never had.
Okay, we did have him. We had him in a wondrous hour and a half of TV. Apparently, he was concerned on accepting the role that he be taken seriously as a proper Doctor, and he more than etched himself a definitive place n Who history.
He was John Hurt after all. If anyone was going to pull off a secret Doctor no one knew about, it was him.
But really, there was never going to be a series of War Doctor adventures. Given the nihilism of the character when he first appears on TV, given that he is on the edge of actually committing genocide (even if an idea from himself three regenerations ahead means that he doesn’t actually go through with it) an actual series wasn’t a realistic idea.
And that’s ignoring the fact that Hurt was 73 when he took the role, so unlikely to sign up for a series with the demands and rigours modern Who entails.
His is an outlier Doctor, a Doctor at the edge of destructiveness. As such he was never going to be the comfortable, heroic viewing we’ve been used to these fifty odd years.
No, The War Doctor was never going to get his own series.
But then he did.
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Of course, Big Finish was going to step into the breach. If there’s a breach in Doctor Who, then Big Finish will work hard to fill it. I’m surprised they haven’t yet given us an episode telling us exactly what happens to that pirate who goes missing in ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’.
And once John Hurt has said that he’s interested in pursuing the idea, why the hell wouldn’t you?
Now, John Hurt had one of the greatest voices in English speaking history, and I’d listen to his dulcet tones read ‘The Complete History of Sandpaper – Volume One: Aluminium Oxide to Garnet’. So, of course, I was going to enjoy it. What’s more, I’m a big Whovian so I’m as primed to enjoy this as any bespectacled man alive.
And the results are highly entertaining. With The War Doctor’s travails against The Daleks and the Dalek Time Controller feeling like the grandest of space operas. Particularly, it has to be said, those episodes where The Sontarans throw their helmets into the ring as well.
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But what it doesn’t feel like is The War Doctor.
What it actually feels like is ‘Doctor Who’.
When he’s battling Dalek agents in Berlin 1961, or destroying a secret Dalek weapon on a distant asteroid, it feels like an adventure any one of thirteen Doctors could go on.
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Yes, he’s played by John Hurt at his most gravelly, and yes, he keeps telling people not to call him The Doctor (although he mostly ends up being called The Doctor anyway), but it doesn’t feel like The War Doctor as we saw him on TV.
There isn’t that darkness, that desperation, the hopelessness that leads him to blast “No More” into a Gallifreyan wall. This version is friendlier, still with hope, still looking for a peaceful solution.
Perhaps if John Hurt had lived longer we would have got more volumes. We would have gotten to the point three minutes before ’Day of the Doctor’ where, for him, all hope is lost.
But for now, we have twelve good to excellent stories (the length of a whole TV season now I think about it) which I’m immensely happy to have listened to. I just wish – since we’re not getting anymore – that we could have further explored The War Doctor at his worse, rather than at his most Doctorish.
March 31, 2017
Me, Writing, in 2017
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I’m writing each and every day at the moment.
I write in the mornings on my train to work, lunchtimes in cafes, on the train home in the evening. I even write in bed beside my lovely and patient wife. I wake up in the small hours of the morning and think over chapters, work out plot points far ahead.
What I’m working on now is epic in scale. I’ve never ever attempted anything like it, but rather than scaring me, it is exciting the hell out of me.
I’m currently working on one book, but I see it as the start of a trilogy (maybe the starting point of two trilogies, though that dream is so far down the line, I can’t afford to give much brain time to that. I can afford to get carried away with all this, but not too damn carried away). It will be a huge story. I’m no longer writing about men finding their own small worlds torn apart, but instead about events that could actually tear the whole world apart.
But as well as this trilogy, I envisage a long prequel story and as least ten other short stories, which will follow the earlier adventures of one of the major characters. There’s a lot of work needed, but I relish it.
I’ve never done anything like this before and it should be daunting, but I don’t feel daunted. I feel alive and enthused.
March 27, 2017
How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 5)
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He is absolutely a monster.
But one of the things which fascinates me about him is: does he know he is a monster?
Most people believe themselves to be good. No matter how they behave, they justify it to themselves and rationalise, maintaining the self-belief that they themselves are good. Even Hitler thought he was on the side of right, that what he was doing was a noble and just crusade.
When you look at Trump, particularly when you see his face at his most smug and repellently cocksure, you can’t help thinking that he’s enjoying being this walking affront to all decent values. He seems to love rubbing everyone’s noses in his stench, revelling in it because it doesn’t matter what we think. The only person whose opinion actually matters is the multi-billionaire Donald Trump, everyone else can just have their noses wiped in shit.
Yet for all that he clearly wants to be liked, he desires the affirmation of the crowd.
He’s a monster who wants people cheering for him even as he behaves monstrously and knows he’s behaving in monstrously.
How the hell do we get this in our story?
In the James Whale movie, the Frankenstein monster wants to be loved but isn’t because of the prejudice of the villagers and misunderstandings that happen because he is such an innocent in the world.
How do we write about a monster who sets himself up to be loathed, who rants and raves and behaves appallingly, but wants to be loved? Who thinks that despite everything, he deserves to be loved.
March 24, 2017
Me, Writing, in 2017
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I have so many ideas fizzing and popping away in my head.
That’s one thing I have never been short of, I’ve always had a surfeit of ideas.
If I had my own personal emoji it would be a man in glasses surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of thought bubbles.
But for the last few years, that’s been part of my problem.
I’d start writing something, get stuck somewhere along the way, but not be too bothered as I knew I had another good idea waiting for me.
(Or at least, it looks good at first flush. That’s the thing with good looking ideas. it’s difficult to really tell until you start getting them down on paper.)
The option has constantly been there though, to stop what I’m doing and focus on the next idea and the next and the next.
Above everything else, I’m trying to be more focused now, but these ideas are still there and some of them clearly look good, so how do I get all these ideas down?
How can I be as fast and productive enough to get even half of them down?
Even if I could give my writing a full sixteen waking hours a day (and I can’t because I have a wife, a baby, a job) then after about three hours of writing, it all starts turning to shit anyway. Three hours a day, which at my most productive would be 7,000 words.
But clearly to create all I want to create, I’m going to have to find a way to get twice as productive in half the time.
More focused, more productive, making miracles happen – these are clearly my 2017 writing resolutions.
March 23, 2017
Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart M. Kaminsky
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I am an unrepentant sucker for detective stories set in old Hollywood. Chandler was undoubtedly my gateway drug, before I moved on to James Ellroy, Ross MacDonald, Megan Abbott (Megan, I do really enjoy your new teen-focused novels, but if you want to write another noir feminist Hollywood mystery for old time’s sake, I’ll be first in line). Of course, when I discovered the existence of Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels, I was absolutely going to add him to the list. This is Hollywood detective fiction with actual movie stars and geeky film references rolled in. My kind of thing then.
But as much as I liked the first volume in this series – Bullet For A Star – I did have a pause before I picked up the follow up. The first volume had a tense scene of revelation actually take place on the set of Sam Spade’s office in The Maltese Falcon on the Warner Bros lot; while it ended with a phone call from Judy Garland asking Toby Peters to meet her at the yellow brick road. I was worried that as much as I’d liked it, it was going to turn into a smart-alecky set of books, more interested in in-jokes and star spotting than giving the reader proper detective fiction
I needn’t have fretted.
Yes, we have Garland, Clark Gable and Raymond Chandler in the cast of character, but actually we get a book here with a surprising amount of heft. It feels properly hard boiled, with tough guys, tough dames and a twisting mystery that has an undercurrent of real menace. Hollywood itself is indeed a character, but it’s a character like New York is for Mike Hammer. It doesn’t over-whelm all else. Okay, it’s easy to guess who did it, and that’s undeniably a flaw (though maybe one that’s improved upon in subsequent volumes), but this is still a damn fine thriller that feels like detective story first and Hollywood pastiche distant second.
March 22, 2017
Green Room (2015)
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A punk band finds itself trapped backstage in one of the least salubrious bars in movie history (Rick’s Café, this ain’t) by a group of violent neo-Nazis.
What I really like about GREEN ROOM was the tension.
Yes, violence does eventually (and brutally) happen, but I’m too old to be excited by vicarious movie violence. For me where the film really excelled, where it had me gripped, was in the staging of the suspense. In the scenes where two men stand either side of a locked door and try to negotiate their positions – a discussion made fraught because one side is convinced that the other is lying and determined to kill them.
Of course, one of these negotiators, the more dangerous of the negotiators, is played by Patrick Stewart, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. I’ll be honest, going in I had feared that the redneck accent would trip him up – that I’d be smacked out of the story by the incongruousness of a scuzzy redneck speaking like the RSC – but really, he’s too good for that. Such was his scary intensity of his performance that it swiftly stopped being in any way an issue.
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As much as I liked the first half though, this isn’t going to turn into a rave. When it came out at the cinema, there were a number of absolutely glowing reviews, and as much as I liked it I’m not in their camp, as for me the firm started to fall apart towards the ending.
MILD SPOILER ALERT: I couldn’t really believe that after Pat’s injury, which basically sees his hand almost taken off, he could then – with aid of duct tape – become a guitar playing Rambo.
More importantly, and as I said, what I realty liked about it was the tension, so when it left the room and became more violent and threw in some knife-wielding would-be thrills, then it did lose something for me. However, even then, it didn’t go so egregiously off the rails for me to throw popcorn at the screen.
But to finish on that note is unfair, it’s well-acted, well-staged, with a great (possibly unique?) scenario – which may have made some missteps – but was still, for a lot of its length, compulsive viewing.
March 20, 2017
How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 4)
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Scenario 1
A young staffer, who fits the profile of a young conservative, but keeps his far more liberal leanings secret, bonds with Donald Trump. The young man is happy to listen to him talk for hours about how the world is against him, how the republicans in congress are against him and the democrats even worse (and how smoking hot his daughter is quite probably, I don’t know. Obviously I’m going to have to put more thought about what vainglorious nonsense Trump might utter when he’s away from the cameras). The two of them find themselves up against some horrific pan-dimensional threat and the staffer must help move a Trump past his own nastiness and limitations to save the world.
I don’t like this scenario.
It feels hackneyed and bordering on odd couple cliché. It’s hard to imagine the character of the staffer being anything other than a cypher as Trump goes on his arc from sociopathic maniac, to less sociopathic, less maniacal President who has now done a good thing. Frankly, I also find it hard to imagine Trump doing the good thing that’s needed. In the face of an existential cosmic threat he’s more likely to try and nuke it and hope the blow-back isn’t too bad.
No, having Trump as a protagonist is a dead end. He’s the antagonist and always was going to be the antagonist. The point of writing a horror novel about Donald Trump is that he is the horror. He must be in the story. He has to be human, he has to feel real, but undoubtedly this book has to be about the horror that is Donald T Trump.
So he’s an antagonist. Yet this is a novel, so he has to be an actual character in it. He can’t just be the lunatic we scream at on TV when he says/does something ridiculous. That’s reality. And I want this to be a catharsis.
March 19, 2017
Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
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Faux Sherlock Holmes has been a thing practically since the creation of Sherlock Holmes. The originals were almost immediately ridiculously popular, so of course there were imitations. So many of them that ITV once ran a whole series adapting contemporaneous imitations of Sherlock Holmes. For the record, and if you’re interested in this particular shadowed literary corner, William Hope Hodgson’s ‘Carnacki’ stories are well worth checking out.
Having given us his Sherlock Holmes in the actually not bad ‘House of Silk’, Anthony Horovitz now gives us his fake Holmes in ‘Moriarty’.
Sherlock Holmes is dead, having fallen from the Reichenbach Falls, and stepping into the breach are a young Scotland Yard Inspector and a Pinkerton Detective – in the Holmes/Watson roles respectively. These new heroes are out to foil a new mastermind villain determined to take over London
The problem is that reading imitations of Sherlock Holmes is nowhere near as much fun as reading Sherlock Holmes, and The Great Detective hangs such a large spectre over this story that it’s impossible not to miss him. And if you actually take a step back and think about it, then this is someone other than Conan-Doyle writing about a detective who isn’t Sherlock Holmes and whilst not un-entertaining (which I know is absolutely damning with faint praise) in terms of inessential ephemera around Sherlock Holmes, this feels really inessential.
At the close of the volume we have a fake Holmes story – ‘The Three Monarchs’ – which links to the main book and, I guess, is supposed to serve as a palate cleanser. And even though it’s thin and insubstantial, I just wished that all that went before had been Holmes, rather than fake Holmes.
March 17, 2017
Me, Writing, in 2017
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The problem I have with writing at the moment, the issue I have hanging over me every day – every single time I put pen to paper – is that it’s years now since I finished anything.
Years!
True, since I last finished anything longer than a short story, I have changed jobs, met someone, married said someone, moved house, done up said house and had a baby, so the last few years have been eventful ones. But still it is a constant frustration, a constant worry, that the dedication and commitment I had to write two novels seems to have spent most of the last decade seemingly sunning itself in The Bahamas, miles out of my grasp.
Right now though, I feel more in touch with my writing than I have in a long time. I’m working daily. My mind feels focused, my resolve unbreakable. So, of course I can use the fact that I haven’t finished anything as fuel. As I work on this new book, I can tell myself I don’t want to fall into that enticing rut of nothingness again, that I don’t want this to be yet another piece of work – hard hours of thinking and working – that I just gave up on.
As the fear is always there. The fear that when I hit a difficult plot problem, or a flat chapter I can’t seem to immediately pump up, that it will just seem easier to give it up.
Not that I’d phrase it to myself like that, of course.
I have ideas popping and fizzing in my mind all the time, so I’ll just tell myself that I’ll write one of those instead and come back to this book later when I’m refreshed.
Then eventually I’ll hit a difficult point on that idea, and move onto something else and the cycle will just repeat and nothing will ever get finished.
That fear hangs over me, but I have to break the pattern. This time I am going to finish what I started and I’m going to make sure I’m goddamn proud of it!
March 15, 2017
The Purge (2013)
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Forgive me for my slackness. My wife doesn’t like horror movies and so I don’t get much chance to watch them anymore. So, my occasional reviews here will no doubt be of movies that other people have reviewed, debated and dissected ad nauseam, and I’m arriving at the party late and pretending that I have something new to say. But sod it, I might stumble across some worthwhile idea.
Clearly modelled on ‘Night of the Living Dead’, this is a brutal home invasion movie. In a dystopian future (although, interestingly, nearly every character we meet sees it as utopian – there’s normally a loud dissenting voice) Americans are allowed to be as violent as they like for one night a year. Rape, murder – nothing is off limits. They need to get it out of their system, as it were.
I chose it because it looked like it might be a fun if brutal satire, but the result felt fairly insubstantial fare even for one as starved of horror moves as me.
A couple of questions popped into my mind:
Why are the neighbours so resentful of the man who sold them their state of the art security system? It’s explained away as neighbourly resentment, but it would make more sense if our central family had a distinct superior air when dealing with those around them, instead they seem friendly which makes the desire to kill them seem somewhat strange.
How come the dad of a family which locks themselves away each year and never purges on principle, is suddenly so good at it that he’s able to take on people who treat purging so seriously they’ve actually bought masks?
Isn’t the daughter’s school uniform the kind of school uniform you only ever see in a Michael Bay movie? Oh, hang on, there he is as a producer
I guess it’s commenting on violence in America and because guns and violence are so endemic civilisation is always teetering on the edge, but it’s so lost in love with its own violence that its point gets rather lost.
