Mediation

"The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity"

Yeats - The Second Coming

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"Coming to this cinema soon!

The tender, compassionate story of one man's love for another man in drag. Thrill to the excitement of a night emission over Germany, when the pilot, Jennifer, has to choose between his secret love for Louis, the hot-bloodedly bisexual navigator, and Andy, the rear gunner, who, though quite assertive with girls, tends to take the submissive role in his relationships with men, and sensational Mexican starlet Rosetta Nixon plays the head of bomber command, whose passion for seabirds ends in tragedy! With Ginger as the half-man, half-woman parrot whose unnatural instincts brought forbidden love to the aviary, and Roger as Pip, the half-parrot, half-man, half-woman, three-quarter badger, ex-bigamist negro preacher for whom banjo playing was very difficult, and he never mastered it though he took several courses and went to banjo college... uhhh... and everything...

Don't miss it! Coming to your cinema soon!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Light Entertainment War (S4E3, 1974)

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I resent the Pythons pre-empting my criticism of identity politics content generation with that hilarious movie trailer spoof, and for doing so more sweepingly and at once more thoroughly by mixing in overdone settings. That entire Light Entertainment War episode is more or less a drawn-out sigh of frustration at the endless tirade of war dramas churned out in the decades after WW2, most of which had nothing to say but all of which held themselves above criticism by the inviolable tragedy of national pride. The movie trailer segment in particular rings painfully true against contemporary media and their desperation to rehash every single idiotic cliche with special interest demographic twists, narrowing down to ever more obscure niches.

 

Reminds me of trying to sit through a bad movie called Summerland, which starts as a tale of wartime hardship during the Battle of Britain as a boy is sent to the country to live with a cantankerous female writer. Comedy... or something, should ensue, but we soon scrap the odd couple setup to segue awkwardly into a tedious lesbian romance having nothing to do with the intro besides one monstrously overblown contrivance. Seriously, they have to actively remind you there's a war on, or what year they're living in. One gets the distinct impression that Summerland's writer(s?) could find nothing either irksome or piquant in the 1940s besides closeted carpet-munching. Which likely stems from lack of research, as neither dialogue nor comportment support a period piece* and everyone's only mode of communication seems limited to copping attitude like sassy brit-com bit players. Why even bother? If you wanted to make yet another movie pitting glorified lesbians against the injustice of whatever, you could simply have made that movie, without resorting to a time period you can't accurately portray, or the informed existence of a war, or a child as prop, or confused gratuitous mysticism, or a man conveniently dying to clear the way for morally superior girl-girl love.

 

The story seems contrived backwards from homosexuality being SRS BSNS to the need for a dramatic backdrop and what the hell, WW2's only been milked for cheap drama for seventy years and counting, what's a few more? Blame it on inertia, I guess. Entertainment industries long ago grew so accustomed to copying and repackaging as to standardize even the packages. "Set piece" was not a slur to start, but earned its status as such, and it's hardly just special interest summer filler cinema getting bogged down in conventionality.

 

If you play any so-called "MOBAs" (LoL, DotA2, etc.) more properly remembered as Aeon of Strife games after their Starcraft beginnings, you might wonder why your inventory has six slots, exactly six slots, no more, no less. Six shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be six. Seven shall thou not count, neither count thou five, excepting that thou then proceed to six. Eight is right out. If you expect some convoluted justification based on class balance, match pacing or numerological progression, prepare to be disappointed: DotA, the one they all copy, was a custom map for Warcraft 3, not a single-character RPG but RTS with simplified skills/inventory for its hero units. In other words the 6slots were not a design choice but an incidental, arbitrary external restriction, slavishly copied by imitators for twenty years now like Corinthian columns on Howard Roark's house, for absolutely no reason besides looking more like a custom map for a game with early-2000s limitations. The same was true of the map size or shape (diagonal to fill more space, with lanes angled to fit Warcraft 3's square maps) or the 5-player teams (limited by War3's 12-player match maximum = 5+1 AI per team) though at least there five players coincide with a good multiplayer class mix.

Hardly an isolated example. If you step into The Lord of the Rings Online you might wonder at Bree's max-level NPC town guards, since monsters usually leash away from town's edge so there's nothing for them to actually fight. Well, World of Warcraft had town guards at launch partly to provide safety on PvP servers, and LotRO as WoW-clone with zero open-world PvP mindlessly copied over the superfluous guards into original launch content.

 

Don't get me started on random genres forcing you into platform jumping quests just because nothing says "video game" like Donkey Kong.

Don't even try to sell me on the artistic merits of pixelation. Pointillism's merit as clever novelty waned with the rest of the belle epoque.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don't like opera, or musical theater in general. Not to say opera doesn't occasionally offer some bangin' howl-alongs, but the few times I was dragged along or tried sitting through an entire performance I quickly grew aware of the genre's massive amounts of filler. Yes, yes, I can appreciate lavish mood/scene-setting, but generally speaking, I shouldn't have time to read the whole libretto while the plucky squire's still recitatatin' 'bout the sandwich he had for lunch. The covers are too far apart, to borrow Bierce's witticism. But the filler was originally part of the selling point, wasn't it? An evening at the theater is just that, isn't it? An evening, a social event, with the theater as pretext. When it took strapping on a corset, quadruple-tiered flowery hat and three layers of petticoats, plus a creaky carriage ride across town behind a horse's hind-hole to reach your entertainment, the least they could do was provide an entire evening's worth, complete with intermissions to intermingle. Also, singing troupes in full costume with orchestral accompaniment were the height of technological and choreographic achievement for about three centuries, the most impressive spectacle you might witness. Nowadays? Not so much. Pretty sure Industrial Light and Magic can out-glitz a dozen prancing ponces in puffy pantaloons. The strictures of form imposed by 18th-century avant-garde stagecraft no longer serve their function.

But if opera might be dead for most relevant cultural purposes, the simple observation that ILM was founded to illustrate a *space* opera speaks emphatically of its lasting influence, and the same is true of other dead forms whose functions outlived them. Romanticized drama persists.

 

Are silent films dead? Move your lips to say yes. Still, entertainment industries learned well the power of silent scenes. Peaceful vistas bloom onscreen a few seconds before the music score winds up, lovers wake alongside each other in wordless reverie, and rare is the thriller which doesn't include some nerve-jangling aural crater as the plucky squire hides... from... the... vill- BOOM, HEADSHOT! Talkies did not abolish silence, merely counterbalanced it.

 

Are radio dramas dead? Tell it to Morgan Freeman, The Narrator. Is letter writing dead? Then what the hell am I doing right now? Can you make a war movie? Sure, if the war's actually relevant. Are fairy tales dead? Not if superheroes have anything to say about it. Is ballet dead? Yes. Yes, that one is dead.**

 

A medium is not a goal. It's a means, a vehicle to be used to whatever extent it carries meaning. And that word, medium, reminded me to dig up my copy of Nicomachean Ethics:

"decision is either understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought; and this is the sort of principle that a human being is."

Sapience is decision, the ego between id and superego. You are the process of processing. Somewhere between memories and impulses, between desire and thoughts, between desired effect and learned technique, there should be a choice, a chooser, a creator whose decisions shape those simpler elements into something worth creating.

That endangered species, the creators, have dwindled with every decade. All we have are industry standards cut and pasted, "babble babble, bitch bitch, rebel rebel, party party" as another brilliant philosopher once put it. Mercenary pandering renders bad art grotesque by its subhumanity, the degenerate, inbred, troglodytic effluent of caged animalism. The new media of the electronic age helped... for a bit... but as they outgrow their Betty Boop stage, they too have been choked with standardization and mass appeal, all features trimmed away which do not maximize short-term profit. Even the supposed alternatives do little but fetishize meaningless, outdated forms without function.

 

And the final nail in our cultural downfall is that the only members of our society now permitted to be heard are the ones saying nothing the loudest, the ones peddling moralistic prurience, desire without either thought or decision.

Activists.

 

 

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* Compare character word choice, tone and mannerisms to The Dig, set almost exactly in the same time, place and social stratum, and representing it far more believably. By the way, The Dig also managed to make a point of sexual repression. Just a marginally more dignified one.

** Nope, wait, never mind, we do have strippers.