Imagination

I've been Netflixing some over the break.

That's a verb now.  (I've declared it to be so.)

Netflixing describes that sort of watching that has been enabled--or, rather, encouraged--by the patterns of availability of online streaming of television shows.  (I've been doing it over Amazon Prime, just as much as over Netflix, but we'll give the tip o' the hat to Netflix.)

One can't watch the current season of one's favorite shows on Netflix, so one dredges the catalog of available shows and wonders what calculus of licensing fees, popular demand, and bandwidth capacity led to, for example, the choice of only seasons four and five of Inspector Lewis being available, while the entire run of Midsomer Murders is on tap; Psych but not The Mentalist; or only two or three Jane Austen adaptations at a time (and never the best ones).

Still, one finds a series and watches it from beginning to end--in binges, if it catches one's eye or if one has some obligation to avoid, over a more prudent time span if it is merely enjoyable.

One could do this in the olden days, too, back when DVDs still existed.  But everything old is made new, and we'll let the young'uns believe that they invented glut-viewing.

I've been watching British mysteries, because I've already watched the entire run of West Wing (twice) and Firefly (seven times), and because when a nation decides it would rather have four well-written episodes per year than twenty-two episodes of, well, Castle, they do tend to crank out some decent stuff.

Also, the cliches of a different culture are always new to you, for at least the first several seasons, and even cliched and hackneyed dialogue sounds very fine in at least three-fourths of the different British accents I can more or less identify now.

In any case, once I started to get a feel for British cliches, I noticed one standout among some of the older shows.  They almost never end in armed confrontations, and even when they do, the arms rarely get used.

It's a very interesting contrast to American cop shows, which may, for the first season or two, play with different ways of creating tension and resolving the final show-down.  But if a show survives into the third season, you'll find the number and intensity of shoot-outs increasing dramatically as the series wears on.  (They run out of more interesting things to do, I guess.)

But Inspector Lewis, Inspector Barnaby, Inspector Lynley--they don't carry guns.  So they can't wrap up a case with a nice, satisfying shoot-out.  Oh, there's the odd villain threateningly waving around a weapon, the occasional deranged mass murderer whom the plucky detectives must confront without recourse to anything but their wits and their words.

Interestingly enough, British TV writers can come up with words for that sort of moment.  (The few times the writers of Castle have tried have been painfully cliched and strained the limits of suspended disbelief.)  Perhaps constraint--not being able to write in a shoot-out--is a goad to creativity rather than a limit to it.

Perhaps if writers of American crime shows set themselves a constraining goal--"Hey, let's write five episodes this season where the cops don't draw their weapons!"--they might come up with something better than "She wouldn't have wanted you to do this, would she?" at the pivotal moment.

Whether artistic creativity might be a goad to other sorts of creativity--the moral and intellectual resources to do something other than kill threatening individuals when they come our way--is another question entirely.

Or perhaps not.

On Not Being Jane Austen

If I hadn't learned French first, I might have enjoyed learning German.

But, alas, after mastering (more or less) the glorious beauty of the French tongue, speaking German felt like gargling used motor oil.

I suspect the same might be true of my appreciation of Elizabeth Gaskell: if I hadn't read dear Jane first, I might have really liked Mrs. Gaskell.

I finally finished Wives and Daughters last week, which rather felt like I was doing my duty by Gaskell than anything else.  

Perhaps not--it was a story worth finishing, but I would have preferred that she had wrapped it up a hundred pages earlier.

(Everyone does, in fact: her death left the novel unfinished, by a mere one or two chapters.  An appended reflection by her editor and publisher was highly unsatisfying.)

I am being too tepid in my praise.  There are some real gems in here--scenes, observations, turns of phrase, characters.  Hers must have been a tremendous skill, to have created such characters, with such modest, quotidian virtues and vices, such realism in their very multi-facetedness.  

I mean, really--who can create such a character as Cynthia Kirkpatrick nowadays?  Her comment about being a "moral kangaroo" will be my epitaph, I'm quite sure.  What passes for a flawed hero or a "complex" character now is too easy: add rudeness or grumpiness or an inexplicable sense of having a "tortured" soul to an otherwise perfect character, and you're done. 

The plot, too, is delicate, realistic, modest.  Gaskell has too much innate charity to write a genuinely immoral person into her narrative.  The very meanness of her worst "villain" prevents her from having any worse effect than the domestic discomfort of those around her.  This is no small evil, in a tale of domestic proportions, but a Willoughby or a Wickham has more effect on the social body than does Mrs. Gibson.

But I never could quite overcome my annoyance at being spoon-fed throughout. No character has a thought, a motivation, a movement of the spirit that Gaskell does not report--in as charitable and gentle a manner as could ever be, but, nonetheless, with a thoroughness that began to grate long before the tale's denouement.  Austen could have conveyed as much, and more, with half the words.  There is a great artistry in saying things by leaving them unsaid, and it is not the sort of artistry that Gaskell displays.  I never got past the first chapter of Little Women, for that very reason.  

Gaskell's work is worth persevering through, however.  There is delicateness and subtlety here, in spite of the wordiness, and the moral sensibility, on full display throughout, never trips over into frank preachiness.

Incidentally, the BBC film version of this novel does a lovely job of bringing to life those complex characters.  Cynthia, Mr. Gibson, and especially Squire Hamley are beautiful creatures, and the production has far less of the odor of typecasting than the BBC Pride and Prejudice does.  I highly recommend it.

Adventures in the World of Books and Movies, Part I

It's a well-known fact that my mother has great love in her heart for Jane Austen and her many literary works.  It is also a well-known fact that my mother has memorized all of the aforementioned literary works and their various film adaptions.

It is a slightly less well-known fact that I actually enjoy reading only one of said literary works, thus eternally shaming and tormenting my English-major mother. But hey, Pride and Prejudice is the only one I've read in the past 8 years, so it's possible that my opinions have changed since I was still homeschooled.

Either way, that's why when I learned that a major portion of the assigned reading was in fact P&P, I didn't run away screaming: "Pages and pages of itty-bitty print! British girls complaining about men not falling in love with them! AIEEEEEEEEE!"

Having watched the BBC film adaptation at least 5 times through, and having read the book about the same number of times, it's safe to say I've reached my memory threshold for Bennet & Co. That is to say, I remember all the good lines, who (whom?) everybody is (does, loves, owes, has, is related to, etc.), and the plot (and setting, and theological arguments, and moral arguments, and feminist arguments, and all the other things my mother gushes about in her virtually nonexistent spare time).

Anyway, while at the grandparents a week ago, the Keira Knightley version of P&P was on. Keira Knightly is an actress. From somewhere that makes unfaithful adaptations of great literary novels. She is known for having a unique smile and the other female endowments necessary to be an actress. Anyhoo, she was Elizabeth Bennet in the non-BBC version of P&P. Mom said I should watch it.

-- "Why?"
-- "Because it's bad, and will allow you to fully appreciate all the wonderful plot pieces that it omits."
-- "Seems legit."

It was horrendous. I'm usually an expert at analyzing failure, wierdness, other people, or really anything else, but I couldn't get it. There were so many things wrong my brain hurt. I'm sure all the actors and actresses are wonderful people when they're not playing from a bad script, but I could get past the 17 times I said "Wait! That's not in the book!" in the 5 minutes that I watched the movie. I was told that the K.K. adaptation is the most unfaithful Austen film except for Mansfield Park, and I never really like Mansfield Park in the first place.

Comparatively, I liked the non-BBC Collins better than the BBC one, but I think that's kind of the point. You're not supposed to like him. As for everybody else... meh. BBC is just so perfect. You can't top that. So don't try beating Brits at their own game. That's today's lesson.

Cheers,
Isaac