Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 12

Plus ca change

Here's an interesting little passage I stumbled on recently.  See if it chimes for you the way it did for me:

"The formula is one of "near-tragedy".  Four acts of tragic violence and guilt are followed by a fifth act of redemption and innocence regained.  "Near-tragedy" is precisely the compromise of an age which [does] not believe in the finality of evil.  It represents the desire…….to enjoy the privileges of grandeur and intense feeling associated with tragic drama without paying the full price. This price is the recognition of the fact that there are in the world mysteries of injustice, disasters in excess of guilt, and realities which do constant violence to our moral expectations. The mechanism……allows [the hero] to partake of the excitement of evil without bearing the real cost."

Has this guy nailed the current malaise in Hollywood mainstream, or what??!!

Well…….

Not as such, no.

In fact, this is a quote from George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy, which I'm re-reading for the first time in about twenty five years.  The book was published in 1961, based on lectures given even earlier, and takes as its subject matter (as you'd probably guess from the title) what has happened to tragic vision in art and literature since the time of Shakespeare.  The excerpt in question deals with the abject failure of the Romantics to carry on the Elizabethan/Jacobean torch in their own attempts at tragedy.  I've taken a couple of liberties with the original here to disguise it – [does] was in fact "did", the elision in the fourth sentence hides the full phrasing "….the desire of the romantics to enjoy…..", and in the final sentence "The mechanism of timely remorse or redemption through love – the arch-Wagnerian theme – allows the romantic hero to partake…."  It's not contemporary Hollywood that's under attack here – Steiner's talking here mainly about a period from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.

But the cap does fit rather well, doesn't it.

Anyway, it's always nice to be reminded that the cultural tectonics you find yourself getting so hot under the collar about are not , in fact, some new and alarming Decay in the State of Things, but more often than not the simple re-iteration of age-old patterns in human behaviour.

What's of most interest to me, though, re-reading this section of Steiner's book, is the close parallel in didactics between the Romantics as he describes them and what seems to have happened to Hollywood movie making in the period since the rise of Reagan and, even more intensely, in the last ten years.

According to Steiner, the Romantics insisted on exemplary lessons in their story-telling – the Essential Goodness of Humankind, the Perfectibility of Man, the Redemptive Power of Remorse and Love – despite the corrosively detrimental effect it had on the drama itself, and this was why they failed dismally to produce any decent tragedy to compare with Shakespeare.

Now map that onto mainstream Hollywood's similarly crass penchant for crowbarring into everything the endlessly recurring themes of:

the Noble Heroic Male (and latterly Perfect Family Man) who Triumphs over Evil, and goes home to wife and kids/gets the girl, apparently completely unscarred and untroubled by his trials,
the jeered at/put upon/low-born young No-Hoper (but with a Hidden Talent or Destiny), who Follows His Dreams and Shows Them All,
Stranded Fatherless (or Father-distant) Masculinity, redeemed at last through hideously unlikely father/son rapprochements,
and of course, latterly, to a sinister and alarming degree, the implication in the narrative of Gaaahd.

All with, I should add, similarly catastrophic results when it comes to decent story-telling.

In defence of the Romantics, I suppose you can at least say that their aspirations were thoroughly modern and forward-looking for the times, nominally encompassed the whole of humanity, and seemed at the time to have a justified basis in the emerging rationalism of the period.  By contrast, the didacticism of contemporary Hollywood strikes me as increasingly paternalistic, parochial and backward-looking.

And that's a bit of a shame, for the most advanced movie-making machinery on the planet.

When the WIP comes down…..

Look – you've all been very patient.

Thank you.

Here's a little something to tide you over until The Cold Commands actually hits the shelves.  Strictly a Work In Progress, but I doubt it's going to change very much in final draft, so here you go:

Nothing in the known world reeks like this.

Ringil's seen grown men piss themselves in terror at the smell, seen hardened soldiers turn pale beneath their campaign tans.  It is unmistakeable.  Those who've faced it, never forget.  Those who haven't...

Hopeless Dreams

.I find almost every thought I had on seeing Inception last night began "Is it asking too much….""Is it asking too much that a large scale SF movie shouldn't have an assault rifle wank-fest jammed into it regardless of applicability to plot?""Is it asking too much that a large scale SF movie, having hired exceptionally talented actors, should give substantial time to character development such that we give a shit what happens to these people?""Is it asking too much that a large scale SF...

Hardboiled in Harrogate

Oh yeah – for anyone who's interested; somehow, I've managed to get invited to the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.  Very kind of them, I must say.

So, for anyone who's within a short drive of the Yorkshire dales this coming Friday, I'm on at 2pm as part of a panel titled Togas, Gas-masks, Neon and Ray-guns – make of that what you will.  I'll certainly be trying to.

Tickets and more details right here

Blanded by the Light

Had a curious (but very telling) Sy-Fy viewing experience a couple of days ago – surfing channels, I tripped through three or four concurrent SF&F shows and suffered the disturbing sensation that actually I was just watching a long continuous knitted skein of the exact same fucking programme. In one breath I was in a space ship full of bright young West Coast American creatures having a group-dorm argument about What to Do; in the next I was in a forest with what I swear were the same group o...

If you only read one SF book this year….

….make sure it's Ian McDonald's The Dervish House.

Nightmare work commitments over the past few months have kept me from reading The Dervish House (or indeed much of anything else) until now.  But it was always there in my top three most-eagerly anticipated SF novels (along with Peter Watts' State of Grace, due some time next year, and Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief coming this September).  Ian McDonald is one of a very small and select number of writers whose work actually makes me...

Stop Press….

For those who haven't heard – Kiana Firouz has been given leave to remain in the UK.  More detail here.

To all those who wrote letters, got the word out etc…  This victory is yours.  Enjoy!

And to all those in the left/liberal press who steadfastly ignored Firouz's plight throughout – fuck you very much.

Do Something

Proof positive, if you ever needed it, of how hollow Britain's Human Rights rhetoric is.  Thanks to damaia for the link.

Remember all those exhortations for intervention in Afghanistan – how Cherie Blair et al bollocked on about saving women from a repressive fundamentalist regime.  Remember, more recently, all the hand-wringing when the riots kicked off in Tehran – the dreadful abuse of democratic rights in Iran.  David "Crush the Chagos Islanders" Miliband in sombre, lecturing mode.  Oh, we ...

Left Liberal Fail (Again)

No, not the election – that's not fail, it's just long-overdue chickens coming home to roost.  If we weren't all so terrified of the Tories, it would have happened last time around.

Still, nice to see Jacqui Smith in tears – only a shame it couldn't have been David Miliband too.

No, the fail I'm talking about is here, in an interview by award-winning Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. It's really pretty impressive (as you'd expect from an award-winning writer, I suppose) – I don't think I've...

Command Update

For those who've come to this site more recently than a couple of years ago, I should probably re-iterate that I no longer reply to specific fan-mail.  So if you're one of the very large number of people who've mailed me with kind words over the last couple of months, many thanks and my apologies – you are not being ignored, you're simply victims of logistics.  It reached a point those couple of years back when the volume of traffic got so high that it was eating more time to answer the...