The Guardian again
Oct. 21st, 2008 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfI just read a piece about Hemingway, celebrating his 75th birthday. The writer of the article complains about the lack of masculine virtues in the 70s, the fact that the 70s are an 'anti-heroic age'. The article is ripe with exactly the kind of nostalgia that we also find in Life on Mars; with 1974 posing as the lifeless, pale, tame and boring 2006... This is the last sentence:
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)
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Re: *masculine* in focus
Date: 2008-10-21 05:36 pm (UTC)Yes, I meant the third sentence; it just seemed counter to how most fen, and esp. fen who are nostalgic, saw it. The present was the pale, lifelless, tame and boring time compared to the Sweeney past (not for me, either).
No, sorry, just flistflist-ing again these days.
Well, welcome, then. :-)
Date: 2008-10-21 05:42 pm (UTC)Hehe. Well, you've got me there: I'm an official Life on Mars dissident. ;-) No, seriously: I'm so at odds with the fandom, and have been so vocal about it, that I am probably still a persona non grata with many of the people who remember those debates... The fandom made me feel rather like Wonko the Sane, for a while - to employ another Douglas Adams reference. *g*
Thanks - and retro-sorry for the previous times I'm sure I barged in.
Date: 2008-10-21 06:04 pm (UTC)Re: Thanks - and retro-sorry for the previous times I'm sure I barged in.
Date: 2008-10-21 06:16 pm (UTC)Hahaha! Oh yes. I hear you. I'm laughing, hard, because I just bitched about a very similar issue to a couple of friends a few days ago. (The issue? An opinion uttered by someone that portraying Sam as strong and competent was somehow a daring new concept. My bitching reply? No, it's not a new concept, it's calling writing Sam in character! *insert more bitching here*)
>OUTSIDE of the asylum
Y'know, we (=the tiny minority who wasn't deliriously happy about 2.08) actually founded a comm, back in the day, to serve as a kind of 'outside of the asylum'. It's not terribly active anymore, but I still occasionally go there when I need to bitch. Feel free to have a look around! (http://community.livejournal.com/jumping_off)
BTW, I'm pretty sure you never barged in here before - it happens so rarely I'm pretty sure I'd recognise your name if you had. Anyway, no need to apologise, this is a public LJ after all. :-)
*puts tootpick in mouth and chews*
Re: Thanks - and retro-sorry for the previous times I'm sure I barged in.
Date: 2008-10-21 06:23 pm (UTC)I'm actually avoiding the US version now and still heard that they will make a much better ending. Um. Maybe I'll love the UK one then. Having not watched ATA either, which IMO made the end much worse ...
Ah, then I just thought of doing so before and refrained, good-i- *cookie*
It's refreshing...
Date: 2008-10-21 06:44 pm (UTC)Do you know
And yeah, I find certain types of Gene adoration slightly scary, too... It's not just young girls and fannish types, though. *Everybody* thought LoM was all about Gene - reviewers, mainstream viewers, everybody. That's also part of why the ending worked so well for most people, I think - they couldn't *stand* the idea of the show ending in a world without Gene. What fun would that have been? But Sam went back to Gene, the all-important centre of the universe, and so All Was Well - even if the reasons why he went back, and the way he did, and the whole bloody context of it, did not make any sense at all within the larger structures of the show.
(I don't dislike Gene; I recognise that he's a crucial part of the dynamic that makes the show so interesting; but the emotional heart of the show was always Sam's journey, for me - and that's not just a subjective 'feeling', but actually founded in the narrative mechanics of the show. He was the main character, and so his psychological journey was, essentially, what it was all about.
Of course, it turned out Sam's 'journey' was not much of a journey, in the end. It went in a circle, pretty much. Or perhaps a spiral - downward. *sigh*)
Oh, and sad as it is to say, I do think the American version has a chance of creating a better ending... even if it's inferior in every other aspect. (I'm not watching it - but nearly any ending I can think of would be better than the one we got, so it shouldn't be too difficult to top that one. *g*)
Re: It's refreshing...
Date: 2008-10-21 06:56 pm (UTC)prettyslightly smaller and slimmer and younger never made him less alpha, actually more so for his standing up to the big one who was also superior officer. And to decry humanity as that-PC-crap yet again - oh gahd - no, the only time I laughed about that was Gene's fitting comment about "Ireallyreallylikeyou"-murders. Because Gene was also there to show up racism and corruption - I thought. Before that wank then ...I think I read only about half a dozen fics in all, maybe some of hers, then I preferred to be a sad lonely fan. Because as you said, mainstream was also so deluded. And when in the end even the makers said stuff that made no sense if you actually watched the show ... it really scared me, actually, both on the gender level as on the celebration of police violence, when I'd thought it was a critique, stupid me.
I used to think I was a slasher, long before such fandoms even existed, but I cannot abide this fixation on one guy only doing something because of the other (who's the fandom favourite). Sometimes I like people jumping off buildings, sometimes I like open, unsettling non-conclusions. But neither what you just said nor that only interview with the maker I read made sense with what I saw, and my one talent is being a very good observer. Of what is actually there.
(Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, yes, yes. I'm also not into superpsychoanalysing but they were all parts of him you could say, and I'm also not a shipper but Annie was also very important to and for him and it's funny, I never actually talked about LoM due to hm, dunno, just watching it. So actually the only question I have is if you have interview knowledge how come the makers who clearly wrote Sam's story later said it was all about the cool Sweeney times?)
I should rewatch it. But it's still too expensive to buy. I bet I could offer you a spin on the end that you could accept.
Anything rather than admit that a Hollywood ending is better.Sorry for the late reply. I was posting from work and then I had to go home...
Date: 2008-10-22 12:14 am (UTC)>Just because Sam was pretty slightly smaller and slimmer and younger never made him less alpha, actually more so for his standing up to the big one who was also superior officer.
Yeah. There's something at work there that I call the Frodo fallacy: it's a combination of taking a lack of physical bulk for a lack of masculinity, and misinterpreting the mere presence of suffering as proof of weakness - the latter is actually even more annoying to me than the misjudgement based on physical features, because enduring suffering *takes immense strength* - neither Frodo Baggins nor Sam Tyler is weak in the slightest, and yet their respective fandoms keep portraying them as woobies just because they are suffering in canon.
>I think I read only about half a dozen fics in all, maybe some of hers, then I preferred to be a sad lonely fan.
There *is* some great fic in this fandom, really. I'm currently slowly working my way through the memories at
And, outside of the letter A, really, do check out
>Because as you said, mainstream was also so deluded. And when in the end even the makers said stuff that made no sense if you actually watched the show ... it really scared me, actually, both on the gender level as on the celebration of police violence, when I'd thought it was a critique, stupid me.
Yeah... the mix of all this also plays a part in why I am uneasy in my interaction with the fandom nowadays. There are some very, very disturbing undercurrents in some people's love of LoM.
>Sometimes I like people jumping off buildings, sometimes I like open, unsettling non-conclusions.
If only it *had* been open. But it's pretty clear what happened, and it's mind-bogglingly stupid. :-(
>But neither what you just said nor that only interview with the maker I read made sense with what I saw, and my one talent is being a very good observer. Of what is actually there.
I am so with you. Really. I kept arguing with people about their happyhappy interpretations of the ending, asking them what the textual evidence was, or asking them to disprove my own, considerably more depressing interpretation with textual evidence. In vain. The happyhappy interpretations were based entirely on preconceived emotions; any evidence that did not fit those emotions was discarded - all in the name of some nebulously defined freedom of interpretation, which apparently nowadays means that an interpretation does not have to be based on textual evidence at *all*.
That the writers of the show themselves apparently didn't see what a terribly bleak ending they'd written made it all even more disturbing. I still wonder if some day, maybe a decade from now or so, Matthew Graham will pop in the DVD, watch the ep, and be horrified by what that ep actually says - you know, getting a bit of distance from something you've written often brings it more sharply into focus once you do approach it again...
(TBC in the next comment)
Reply, part two
Date: 2008-10-22 12:14 am (UTC)But what really topped it all off was the mainstream media reaction, the ecstatic glee all over the newspapers and the internet. That really showed me that, whoah - emotionally and rationally, I was living in an entirely different universe than nearly everybody else. Because to me, 2.08 said things that disgusted me deeply, on all kinds of levels (levels far beyond simple storytelling or character development - levels like actual, real world politics and ethics), and here was most of Britain *celebrating* that ep in a way that suggested it filled some deep, desperate need in people's souls.
>So actually the only question I have is if you have interview knowledge how come the makers who clearly wrote Sam's story later said it was all about the cool Sweeney times?
I'm sorry, I can't explain it, because it. does. not. make. sense.
It's strange, isn't it, but I really do think they lost sight of what their own creation meant. They got caught up in the 'fun' aspect, much like Sam got caught up in the 1970s. It's a study in self-delusion, both on a story level *and* on a meta level.
>I bet I could offer you a spin on the end that you could accept. Anything rather than admit that a Hollywood ending is better.
I can easily invent three dozen interpretations of the ending that would feel okay, by ignoring a little here, inventing a little there, emphasising something slightly different... But that doesn't change the fact that if I go strictly on what the actual *episode* says, by just looking at the textual evidence, the only interpretation I can truly consider as canon is despairingly bleak, destroys the character of Sam Tyler as we thought we knew him, and removes any kind of deeper meaning from the show.
Anyway, as for a Hollywood ending, the LoM writers essentially *did* give the show a Hollywood ending, in the worst sense of the term: abandon all reason, sprinkle fairy dust over it all, let the guy kiss the girl, and let them all ride off into the sunset together. Joy!
Seriously, the American version can only do better than that. And American TV can be pretty brilliant; I wouldn't be so fast to expect a mindless ending there.
good think you told me there's pt 2, got no notification
Date: 2008-10-22 07:42 am (UTC)Sadly, that makes sense, and is sort of what I said at the end of my first reply.
*jump* So, yes, it destroys Sam as the text had shown him - or was it just Simm who made it all that? I didn't think so. I'm not even happy we share the same frustration because what does being able to correctly read texts mean if the majority reads them differently? Just that we are wrong in this postpostppppmoder times :)
Ah, but there's one interpretation you maybe haven't considered: it's not a Hollywood ending at all if you see it as a HORROR ending, if you see it as Sam coming to the wrong conclusion, and see the girl as a figure like a horror clown. A Twin Peaks ending, you know. It's still terrible for Sam, but as a non-happy ending it makes sense to me.
I've just never seen a single adaptation that wasn't worse, but if I'm still around I'll be interested to hear what they do :)
good morning
Date: 2008-10-22 07:34 am (UTC)I already read all of mikes_grrl's shorter fics - I always start that way, and I tend to dislike threesomes with people I care about. I actually stopped reading fanfic when personal backstabbing made me stop writing it, but it was pleasant indeed. I think the only name I knew (again, flistflisting) was lozenger8.
Astrid Lindgren's Brothers Lionheart probably predestined me to see the jumping in a positive way, and IIRC I liked the girl switching off the TV, but Sam committing suicide to stay in the perfect 70s rather than the boring 2000s didn't fit him in my mind at all, but jumpingoffroofs currently got replaced by Tony Hill in my mind ... actually, I'm sure you know, in mikes_grrls fic where Gene falls into the coma, did he jump to get back, too?
This is so sad, and yet it's comforting that not only SGA fandom is ruled by frustrating blinkeredness. Again, I only knew lozenger's frustrated reaction although I can imagine - with difficulty - what other fen might have dreamed up.
Hah. Wishful thinking. He's got a spin-off and a US deal and no need to ever rethink. Only positive spin I can think of: what he said in interviews was after the fact, to tell them what they wanted to hear AND he's not the only one who actually made the finished product. Are there Simm commentaries? I need to get those DVDs I think now that I can feel again it's really not the Sweeney glorification I came to fear.