L. A. Law 1-14: Prince Kuzak in a Can

I wanted to start this post off by saying something like "L. A. Law might be the strangest show to ever become a massive hit", but it occurs to me that that's not really true.  A lot of times the most popular TV shows are the ones that are quite unusual in a way that captures the public's interest -- think Twin Peaks or Glee.  (Well, that's probably the first time those two shows have been used in the same sentence before).  For L. A. Law, it took some of the strange and experimental aspects of Hill Street Blues -- the serialized storytelling and the use of out-of-place humour -- and brought them into the mainstream by attaching them to a sexy lawyer procedural.

What results is a show with wild clashes in tone, veering from dark socially-conscious drama to lighthearted farce to the 80s network equivalent of one of today's soft-porn cable dramas.  All of these elements are done fairly well on their own, although the comedy is very broad, but what's really strange is that they all feel like they rightfully exist in the same universe.  This episode's most serious plotline deals with ostensible lead Michael Kuzak (played by 80s artifact extraordinaire "Handsome" Harry Hamlin) dealing with the public suicide of another lawyer, a character whose mental breakdown was first played entirely for laughs.  The absurd and the serious exist in continuity with each other, and L. A. Law recognizes how they can frequently be two sides of the same coin.

Despite the jokey title[1], "Prince Kuzak in a Can" is one of the more all-around serious of L. A. Law episodes.  The story about the suicide of Sid Hershberg, the main serialized plot, is pretty unrelentingly bleak -- Michael attends his mostly empty funeral, and is entirely unable to put the death behind him, to the extend that he begins following Sid's path itself.  The most comedic part is an episodic plot with Victor representing a computer geek who falls head over heels for the office secretary, but even here his affections are treated as a serious matter and not an absurd joke. It does enable a brief reprisal of the show's sexual fixation, in which Arnie has a lengthy monologue about his first time that sounds like a piece of (competent) erotic fiction.  But the non-dramatic moments in this episode are still more subdued than usual.

This is because the plotline has started to tug at the just-established foundation beneath L. A. Law's narrative house of cards.  The show as a whole is a mess of contradictions, and I mean this in a good way -- it has an ambivalence to it that no amount of grandstanding by the characters is able to tease out.  The aesthetics of the series are no exception.  I talked a bit about 80s cheese last week, but this is a much more direct example of it: the garish colour palette, the jazzy score, and of course, the hair.

So, its visual style and general aesthetics are very much in line with 80s soaps like Dallas, and there's more than a bit of a soapish element to the plotting.  It is a show about the affairs of sexy rich people that  you can live vicariously through.  But at the same time L. A. Law makes no bones about the essentially vacuous nature of its protagonists' profession.  For every high-stakes trial involving big speeches there are at least three or four that are petty battles settled through bureaucratic gamesmanship.  Its lawyers don't usually fight for justice, or injustice for that matter: they are tools to more powerful forces.

This vacuousness and drudgery is what was established early on as the source of Sid's madness.  As a small-time lawyer representing prostitutes and hoodlums (possibly a public defender, although I can't quite remember now), he existed at the ugly bottom of the judicial system, where his clients were nothing more than dim pieces shuttled between the dual machines of crime and punishment.  This is visible in his first scene, where he yells at a repeat offender he's representing about not being able to come up with an alibi (a scene most likely inspired by ...And Justice for All).  The setting of his public suicide, where he pleads with the jury to consider his client as a human being beyond judgement, just further highlights that this is a man who is not insane by nature but completely destroyed by the meaninglessness of his profession.

In this episode, Michael starts following in his footsteps.  He takes on two of Sid's cases, both of which emphasize this kind of small-stakes futility.  In one, he represents the above-mentioned prostitute, who has already been arrested again before he finishes dealing with the first charge.  To some extent, the show demonizes criminals like her, who are generally portrayed as dim, mean-spirited and hopeless.  They aren't the monsters that you would see on something like Law and Order, but they are to an extent grotesques.  There is a condescension inherent in the series, which usually treats the life of the proletariat non-lawyers as only causes to be fought for, although it is at least fairly conscious of it.

This is further cemented by the other client, a hit-and-run driver who gets his grandmother to lie on the stand to provide him with an alibi.  This is, as the judge suggests to Michael, a fairly ordinary situation: witnesses lie, and it's the job of the prosecution to ferret it out, not the defense.  Michael doesn't even have conclusive proof that the witness is lying.  But it drives home not just the subjectivity of the legal system, which reduces truth to a rhetorical outcome, but the banality of evil -- or, to be more precise (because his client is not exactly Eichmann) the banality of crime.

At the same time, Michael's refusal to proceed, and subsequent jailing for contempt of court, restores the meaning to the courtroom.  It becomes a trial not of his client but of him himself, and of individual righteousness against systemic malaise.  Of course, this is solipsistic in the extreme, and the series never lets us believe that Michael has accomplished something.  Instead, this echoes Sid's first appearance.  Righteousness -- a belief in what you learned about the legal system in high school civics -- is, in L. A. Law, a form of madness.  And this is another contradiction.  The show has a distinct lack of irony, and bears down with all of the raw, embarrassing emotion of its era, but for all that it has an essentially cynical heart.

There's also a kind of Shakesperian element to the drama, in form if not in quality.  There are plenty of monologues that start out as ruminations on plot events but quickly turn to more philosophical matters, with Sidney's death scene being one of the best examples.  Michael's stand in this episode, as well as Arnie's monologue about his first time, are similar -- dramatic gestures that undercut themselves at the same moment they commit entirely to the drama.  Or maybe it's just that the American court system lends itself to such performances, and is a kind of theatre in itself.

It's also important to note that L. A. Law was possibly the first truly popular serialized show in America.  Of course, once again the ground was paved by Hill Street Blues and a couple other predecessors, but this brought it into the mainstream in a new way.  And this doesn't mean series-long storylines as is commonplace today, but stories that stretch across two or three episodes and are done, which is in some way a less committed version of serial storytelling but is in another way a more natural version of it: each storyline takes however long it takes.  Sometimes these stories seem less like whole-formed stories and more like a kind of bizarre association, with each spinning off a minor detail into a new story.  (For instance, the next episode deals only briefly with Michael's problems, but has a storyline with the judge who throws him in jail in this episode.)

I hate to use a "land of contrasts" conclusion, but L. A. Law lends itself very well to that.  It is simultaneously conventional and experimental, serious and silly, high camp and high art.  All of these elements together make it a bit of a mess, but they also may be what made it popular: there was something for everyone, even snot-nosed amateur critics writing  two and a half decades after the fact.

Next week: "Sing, RahXephon.  In order for everything to become one again."

[1]Looking at the episode titles reveals how lightly the show's staff took even its most serious plots.  I mean, the episode before this, where Sid commits suicide, is named "Sidney the Dead-Nosed Reindeer".  No matter how dramatic (or melodramatic) L. A. Law got, there was always a winking feel to it.

UFC 1

Mixed martial arts is one of the few sports, and certainly the most successful one, whose invention took place in modern memory.  There are weird predecessor fights like Muhammed Ali fighting Antonio Inoki and whatever shit Helio Gracie got up to, but as an ongoing sport and not a freakshow it mainly dates back to the early 90s.  The consequence of this is that pretty much the entire sport has been recorded and is available for perusal by both legal and not-so-legal means.  And what's more, due to the relatively slow schedule, one can actually watch, say, all of the UFC events in order.

Doing this would, I imagine, have a curious effect.  On the one hand, the seemingly discrete fights and tournaments would merge into a broader narrative, one about the rise and fall of particular fighters, and the quest for legitimacy by the sport in general.  Narratives are what draw us into sports, and the narratives of mixed martial arts have the benefits of being largely true.  When we like a fighter, it's because of the way he presents himself, not because he's been slapped with a jersey with our hometown on it.  UFC 1 contains an easy narrative, one that's been reworked into founding mythology by the promotion in its later days: Royce Gracie, the smallest man in the tournament, comes in and beats everyone else because he simply has the better technique, and in the process demonstrates the efficiency of his Brazilian jiu-jitsu style over less effective martial arts.  In the new UFC intro video, the first thing we see is this event's fight between Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock.

At the same time, there are moments of narrative discord.  This is, again, the case with all sports: the facts rarely fit the predetermined narrative exactly.  The plucky underdog hometown team makes a decent showing but goes down in the quarterfinals.  The intimidating, dominant fighter gets laid on for three rounds by a dorky wrestler.  And so on and so forth.  We can see that even in the heavily mythologized UFC 1: the finals are not Gracie/Shamrock, but Gracie against the now-forgotten kickboxer Gerard Gordeau.  Gracie/Shamrock itself lasts under a minute, and while being one of the more competitive fights, still looks very sloppy compared to modern MMA grappling.  At the same time as sports tend towards narrativization, they resist it.

UFC 1 (the "1" was, of course, added in later) hardly looks like the start of a global sport.  It portrays itself as an one-off exhibition of martial arts, and the one-night tournament format certainly doesn't suggest attempts at an ongoing league.  It's very much a competition between sports, with the matches subtitled as "Boxing vs. Jiu Jitsu" or "Kickboxing vs. Karate".   Speaking of the graphics, they evoke less of a sense of epicness and more one of 80s cheese.  Which has kind of come back around to epic again.

(Wait, is that GSP?)

There's a general sense throughout that an 80s martial arts movie has escaped the limits of fiction and entered into the real world.  The announcers do their best to sell it as a legitimate competition, by focusing on the nebulous "strategy" and the martial arts credentials of the fighters involved, but they don't really have the kind of legitimating framework that Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan (today's UFC commentators) now do, and it's hard to make up these kind of things on the fly.  Curiously, though things are much more brutal than the present-day sport -- in the first fight, Gerard Gordeau knocks out Teila Tuli's teeth, two of which were allegedly embedded in his foot for the rest of the night, while the commentators bemoaned the fight's early medical stoppage -- there's much less focus on the brutality.  There are no nu-metal highlight reels of brutal knockouts, and no direct comparisons to the gladiatorial arena like there was in one long-running UFC intro.  Watching it, it's kind of hard to decide whether it's barbaric or totally lame.

Of course, UFC 1 has an ending fitting for an 80s martial arts movie, with the small foreign guy in a gi winning everything despite seeming to be an underdog.  However, to some extent the fix was in.  The Gracie family was a major force behind the creation of the event, and it was designed to showcase the effectiveness of their style.  You can tell this early on from the fourth commentator who seems to be there entirely to heap praise on Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  That's not to say that it was Gracie against a bunch of tomato cans -- Ken Shamrock was certainly a legitimate competitor who would go on to have a storied career -- but he was far from an underdog.

One can begin to discern this in his quarterfinal fight, against boxer Art Jimmerson ("ranked 10th in the world by the IBF!").  Jimmerson comes in wearing one boxing glove, an absurd moment that would soon go down in UFC lore.  This was caused possibly by the ad-hoc rules summit[1] between the fighters that only highlights the unstable foundation that the entire event rested on, or it may be a comically literal attempt to embrace the mixture of martial arts -- one hand to box, one hand to grapple.  In any case, it's the boxer that comes off looking like a fool, as he is flabbergasted by the ground game and taps out despite not seeming to be in any particular submission hold.  Even next to the sumo fighter Jimmerson seems like a joke.

Once again, this seems to be according to plan.  The commentators predict and then describe Jimmerson's loss as caused not by his own skills but by being a boxer -- he's said to have "too many rules" and to be too limited in a "real fight".  This is a deliberate shot across the bow of the most developed combat sport, and an argument that mixed martial arts (a name the sport had yet to officially adopt) is more "real".  The rivalry between boxing and MMA continues to this day, with everyone from fans to promoters routinely getting in arguments about it, and the UFC using Jimmerson as a fall guy might be the first shot fired [2].

Gracie/Jimmerson also plays into another curious factor about this first event: most of the fights are rather one-sided.  None of the fights go past the first five-minute round, and the only one that seems really competitive is a sloppy but enjoyable slugfest between Zane Frasier and Kevin Rosier.  This is mostly because of the uneven development of skills, but in a way it adds a kind of verisimilitude -- after all, most streetfights are quick and one-sided.  The present-day UFC, with its carefully even matchmaking, comes off as more of a sport but less of a spectacle.

And that's the comparison that one can't help but make.  The UFC today is in many ways what UFC 1 disavows.  The opening credits state that there are "no rules, no judges' scores, and no time limits" -- all things that the current product has, and for good reason.  Mixed martial arts has become a discipline just like boxing has, dependent on its rules, and of somewhat questionable application in a real fight (can you imagine Ben Askren in a bar brawl?)  The weird combination of brutality, 80s cheese and spectacle has morphed into a sleekly marketed, carefully regulated sport.  It's a sport I really like, and the dominant narrative of the sport cleaning itself up and becoming legitimate after these early wild days isn't wrong.  But something's been lost since this crazy, fly-by-night first UFC, and even if we've gotten something better in return it's hard not to miss it.

Next week: "At first I thought it must have been a dream, but I had these waffly black and blue marks all over my leg, and my complexion was totally cleared up."

[1]The early UFC events were often marketed as having "no rules", but this is mainly a marketing ploy -- low blows, eye gouging and biting were banned, along with a host of unstated rules that the system couldn't have functioned without, like no weapons.  The "no rules" bit is, however, one of the few attempts to market this early product for its violence.

[2]The modern UFC more or less repeated the Jimmerson fight when they brought in James Toney to fight Randy Couture a few years back, showing that these early freakshows sometimes pop up in the modern professional product in what could almost be described as the return of the repressed.  Toney faired about as well as Jimmerson did, although he got paid a lot more for it.

Community 3-18: Course Listing Unavailable

This episode of Community begins where so few do: directly where the last episode left off.  That episode ended with longtime supporting character Starburns being killed off in an off-screen meth lab accident, a surprisingly dark ending for a joke character.  It seems to presage a deeper shift.  As I mentioned in my last post on Community, much of the third season has been about the central characters facing or not facing adulthood, which comes with the realization that there are consequences to your actions -- even actions meant in jest.  For the past couple episodes, especially in the Troy/Abed story arc, it feels as though the show has been coming down on the side of childish naivete -- but in "Course Listing Unavailable" (a title that directly suggests the failing of usual modes of understanding) things swing around dramatically to the other side.

We begin with one of Community's trademark round-table scenes, where as usual the jokes are flying fast and furious.  The main question at stake seems to be how to react to Starburns' death, and more generally to the death of an acquaintance.  Jeff's everybody-dies refusal to mourn at all seems a little harsh, and a not entirely genuine application of nihilistic philosophy into real life (as Jeff so often does), but the insistence of Annie and the rest of the group on reacting to it as a major tragedy seems also a bit disingenuous, given that they hardly knew Starburns, referring to him entirely by a nickname.  They seem to be more upset by the idea of death intruding on their happy fantasyland than anything else.

And then comes the Dean in a silly outfit to give them more bad news.  This is a familiar comic beat, but interestingly enough we see the moment before it: the Dean receiving the news himself and trying to decide what to wear.  We see his closet full of costumes which, while fabulous, is nowhere near the comic dimensions it could have taken in one of the show's more surreal episodes.  One of the series's most outlandish, over-the-top characters is connected, at least notionally, to real life.

The plot then unfolds pretty directly from there.  What's most notable about it is that it's driven by the only instance in the episode of someone behaving like an adult and taking responsibility for their actions, the Biology professor resigning for letting Starburns steal his equipment.  (Once again, Community riffs off Michael K. Williams' iconic Omar character, who is often said to be the only one in The Wire who took responsibility for their actions.)  This quiet, off-screen act is a strong contrast with the hysteria we see on screen, and the overreaction and the denial of responsibility from both the study group and Chang and his minions.

Because, after all, what the study group does at Starburns' memorial is basically a textbook example of inciting a riot ("Let's burn this mother down!").  Of course, inciting a riot is kind of a bogus crime, but that's neither here nor there.  It's a funny segment, involving lots of one-liners, a pinch of meta-commentary and a call-and-response rap, but it doesn't hide the fact that the study group is basically turning a memorial service into a binge of whining about having to go to summer school.  And the riot, crucially, starts before Chang and company swarm in, making the issue of causality more complicated than the group later admits to.


There are obvious political resonances, of course, from the crackdown on the Occupy movement to the Patriot Act (the piece of crayon writing that Chang makes the Dean sign to authorize force).  Perhaps this is a kind of apology for the cavalier dismissal of protesters in "Geography of Global Conflict", which coincidentally aired during the peak of the Occupy movement.  But if it is, it still rests a great deal of the blame with the study group -- and, by analogy, protesters.

What comes as a surprise is the characters having to face realistic consequences for their actions.  Greendale has disintegrated into much worse conditions before, such as during the pillow and blanket fort wars few episodes ago, or any of the paintball mayhem.  But the smaller scale of this episode's riot almost makes punishment seems more acceptable -- we're no longer entirely in the land of whimsy, as we are in the concept episodes.  Of course, there's still a good deal of silliness here, such as Chang producing an impostor Dean to get him off the hook, but it's firmly in the less surreal register of Community's "normal" episodes.

Community has become fairly notorious for ending its episodes on a big speech, usually by Jeff, a trend that the show itself poked fun at in its fake clip show last season.  (To be fair, it goes to this well less often than a lot of other shows that shall not be named here).  Here, we have Troy giving a much shorter speech, which basically amounts to "we're together, so everything is going to be alright".  This is, in the end, what the series has the most faith in: connection, as well as good humour.  The sentimentality of this moment, accompanied by treacly music and a mise en scene that might have come out of a Boston Pizza ad, could be easily mocked, but for viewers that have been watching from the beginning it uses their familiarity with the characters -- their TV friends, as sitcom characters are designed to be -- this is a tender, genuinely affecting moment.  The "we" in this scene seems to implicitly include the viewer as well as the characters, and could be read as a sign of appreciation for Community's loyal cult audience.

And as far as the good humour goes, we can see that in Annie's reaction to the heavy drink she poured herself in a moment of desperation just a few minutes ago.  She scrunches up her face and shakes her head, as though laughing at the foolishness of her previous angst.  More than anything, this final shot suggests that the ability to laugh at yourself is just as important as togetherness.


This ending calls back repeatedly to one of the series's most high-concept episodes, and one of its best, "Remedial Chaos Theory".  This is the same type of whimsical episode that "Course Listing Unavailable" so decidedly sets itself against.  But the comparison only makes the current situation look more dire -- there is no more gimmick, no reset button that can make this go away by the end of the episode.  As much as the sentimental moment of togetherness may bolster the group's spirits, the fact remains that they're expelled, and as the episode closes there's no solution to that problem in sight.  Once again, we return to the title, and the breakdown of Community's standard approaches.

"Course Listing Unavailable" is directed by Tristam Shapeero, who has become one of the series's go-to directors (having done about a third of this season) and has a script attributed to regular, non-standout-ish writer Adam Countee[1], although once again this doesn't mean much given the collaborative nature of American comedy writing.  Shapeero has previously done a lot of the gimmickier episodes, but here he does similarly well with the gimmick of the complete loss of gimmicks.  Even the "normal" episodes have a distinct look, involving bright colours (although not to the extent of something like Suburgatory), clean lighting, and a lot of quick cuts.  There have been a lot of "normal" Community episodes, even if they aren't the ones that grab the most attention, so there's a definitive stylistic template that Shapeero employs well here.

And that, in the end, makes "Course Listing Unavailable" a bit paradoxical.  It's a "normal" episode, but it threatens to destroy the prospect of future normality entirely.  It fully explores the fear Community has been playing with all season -- that sometimes normality is the most terrifying thing of all.

Next week: "You're about to see something that you've never seen before."

[1]He doesn't have a Wikipedia page, so I'm assuming he's a schlub.

The Amazing Race 20-09: Bollywood Travolta

Most episodes of The Amazing Race stick to the show's established formula pretty rigorously.  The challenges and route are created to give rise to a specific type of competitive narrative, and usually they do as they're supposed to.  This is why most Amazing Race challenges are only moderately challenging: they ultimately have to be surpassed in order for the narrative to progress.  Sometimes, however, things don't go according to plan, and the editors (the real authors of any given reality shows, if you have to pin it down) have to stitch together a different narrative.  These are the episodes where reality television is most fascinating, if not necessarily at its most entertaining.

This particular episode is set up to be a pretty harmless, disposable leg of the race, complete with the non-elimination anticlimax at the end.  It's the usual trip to India, a staple because of its crowded foreignness and ability to provoke mental breakdowns and bouts of racism from the racers, both of which make for can't-miss TV.  The Amazing Race has gone to this well so often that they're down to hitting up Cochin in search of a new city.  The challenges are pretty standard fare, with none of them seeming immediately difficult: they have to perform a Bollywood dance routine, then score a point in cricket or learn how to drive an Indian taxi.  This is the usual MO: use stereotypical "foreign colour" to provide an opportunity for your contestants to embarrass themselves.  This is especially promising on this season, full of hate-worthy characters.

But things get derailed at the seemingly innocuous dancing challenge, when redneck-caricature team Mark and Bopper fail over and over again.  What was initially an opportunity for some easy laughs now becomes surprisingly physical and brutal, as heatstroke starts to set in and Mark gets rejected again and again.  There's almost a deconstructionist tone to the episode, as the pratfalls and broad humour of the race are turned into something stomach-churning.  The repetition of the peppy Indian dance music starts sounding almost nightmarish.

The narratives of competitive reality are not too different from the narratives we associate with sports, the way we turn an objective, almost scientific competition[1] into a story.  Usually The Amazing Race draws on a competition story, revolving over who's going to win and who's going to lose, and whether or not good will prevail.  But in "Bollywood Travolta" that's all but dispensed with.  There's little suspense as to who will clinch first place, as frontrunners Dave and Rachel cruise to an easy victory, remaining ahead of their competition the whole way (with the exception of a confusing airport scramble that puts Ralph & Vanessa momentarily ahead).  There also aren't any of the usual editing tricks to build suspense as to who will come in last -- the cut-aways to the other teams checking in at the pitstop seem increasingly perfunctory as the story turns more and more towards the travails of Bopper and Mark.

What we get instead is the other sports story narrative, in which moral redemption is achieved through the act of playing the sport and not necessarily through victory.  These are mainly hard-luck stories in which simply making it to the game represents a triumph over adversity.  The most obvious examples would be the original Rocky and much of Friday Night Lights.  These narratives are really no less sentimental and silly than the more conventional version, but because of their association with underdogs have become associated with gritty urban realism.  And indeed, there's a kind of blue-collar dignity that makes you want to cheer for Bopper & Mark, no matter how stereotypical they act.  They talk constantly about their family, which seems designed to present them as having more real concerns than the pretty twenty-somethings that seem more like glamorous fairy creatures.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily add up to a more effective episode than the boilerplate Race standard it was designed as.  For starters, while the drama is genuinely affecting in the moment, further consideration makes it seem rather silly.  Bopper tells his friend that the race isn't worth his life, and this seems to be a sticking point, as though a dance competition would literally kill him.  This drama, with Bopper begging Mark to quit and Mark refusing, is repeated again and again until Mark finally does quit -- only for their positions to seemingly reverse, with Bopper urging his teammate to give the challenge one more shot.  This doesn't seem to have a diegetic reason, although  most fans have decided that it was producer interference outside the episode's narrative.

This is followed by the standard sappy goodbye montage of the eliminated team enjoying the race.  This is the kind of gross, affecting but entirely overplayed sentiment that has made The Amazing Race such a long-lasting series -- it plays to the cheap seats, and is unabashed in doing so.  In this case, the montaged team isn't actually eliminated, which makes the whole thing sort of silly.  There's a similar montage next week when they're actually eliminated, and I believe there was one the first time they were saved by a non-elimination.  Even broad reality shows can't show their editing tricks too often.

(Bopper & Mark have really gotten lucky with these things, which you think would invalidate them as hard-working underdogs, but for some reason it doesn't.  This is mainly because reality shows present their formal caprice as a reflection of the internal values of the team.  The fact that Bopper & Mark keep getting saved shows their never-say-die attitude, despite the fact that the teams that didn't get lucky never got a chance to never say die.)

The rest of the episode is pretty prosaic.  The race's ongoing storylines, such as a ridiculously petty squabble between Rachel & Dave and Art & JJ and the continued catfighting between the ex-Big Brother team and Ralph & Vanessa.  There's been an awful lot of drama between teams this season in a show that usually focuses more on the relationships between teammates, which makes it a bit more like a conventional trashy reality show but also kind of more entertaining in a guilty-pleasure way.  This culminated in an episode a few weeks ago that went over 20 minutes without a challenge, just a lot of drama and arguing between all the teams except the happy-go-lucky hillbillies.  (That was another episode that messed with the standard format, an encouraging sign at least in theory.)  Nobody comes out very well in these arguments other than Bopper & Mark for not getting involved in them, which is what makes them such clear heroes in this episode.  But they physically can't win, and that leaves us with a conundrum, as the finale seems set to be a showdown between four villains.

What other narratives do we have to latch onto, then, besides good versus evil?  "Bollywood Travolta" offers up a lukewarm battle of the sexes, a trope that reality television always falls back on when it's desperate.  Art and JJ make several bitter comments at the Roadblock about how the girls will have a natural dancing advantage over the guys ("I'm telling you man, dudes do not move like girls.  It doesn't look the same"), but are then hoisted by their own petard when Rachel (the redhead one) beats them at the sports-based cricket challenge.

This would be a standard liberal pseudo-feminist narrative if it weren't for the fact that the episode seems to suggest that Art & JJ have a point.  After all, the three male/female teams all send their female member to do the dancing roadblock, and all three finish before the two all-male squads (although Art and Mark are hardly the type of men you'd want in a dance contest).  The same Rachel that later triumphs in the Detour remarks at this challenge that "I'm a girl, of course I'm going to be emotional", making her hardly a feminist heroine.  She generally lives up to, or is edited into, the misogynist diva character that many reality-show women have inhabited before her.  To their credit, The Amazing Race casts plenty of tough chicks, fey guys, and generally vaguely gender-non-conforming individuals -- but it also casts plenty of meatheads and divas, and they're the ones that have survived this season.  The detachment of the format, which generally doesn't explicitly judge its contestants, here seems like a weakness -- it's possible to read this episode as a reaffirmation of misogynist principles, and indeed that's easier than any other reading.

In the end, "Bollywood Travolta" does strike narrative paydirt in the ongoing tribulations of Bopper & Mark, making the fate of a comedy team something serious.  But it's an unsustainable narrative -- the bad thing about underdogs is that, in the end, they usually lose.  And what's worse, it seems to come about almost entirely by accident instead of producer or editor creation.  The last thing a reality TV show wants to be is dictated by reality.

Next week: "Come on, I Dean / Oh my hands are so clean / And at this moment / I am stapling".

[1]This applies more to sports to reality shows -- the latter are often patently unfair, but sports are a regulated system designed to create an impartial test of athletic ability with no external variables.  Of course, this works great for a science experiment, but as people we require a bit more narrative oomph, which is why the ref is always screwing over our home team.

Jormungand 1: Gun Metal, Calico Road

In the past decade or so of TV there have been an awful lot of antiheroes and other protagonists who are evil by any objective morality, but the cast of Jormungand just might take the cake.  They're arms dealers who sell to the highest bidder, and (at least judging from the pilot episode) the show isn't interested in excusing their behaviour by having that always happen to be the "good guys" in a conflict.  Koko, the leader of the crew, exploits Jonas, a former child soldier, forcing him into new battlefields.  It's hard to imagine picking anything more disgusting off your shoe.

In the first half of this premiere episode, when a government type interferes with an arms shipment to his country on the grounds it will cause war, he's undoubtedly in the right -- or, at the very least, we're never given any reason to doubt him.  But when Koko, Jonas, and the rest of the crew take off to settle their problems, it's hard not to pump a fist or two as they blow up the guys tailing them and blast through a government blockade, all to pumping techno music.  It's an expertly shot sequence, almost immorally so.

(Sorry about the crappy image resolution.)

Part of this is just the aesthetics of action, which has a tendency to glorify any kind of violence no matter how strongly the context may condemn it (which is why anti-war films like Full Metal Jacket end up increasingly being used as war propaganda.)  Sometimes this can be used intentionally, in order to jar the audience and make them question their emotional reactions.  Take, for example, the basketball scene from early on in American History X, which uses every sports movie cliche in the book to get you to root for the white supremacists before you even realize what you're doing.  Or any given Paul Verhoeven movie.

Is this what Jormungand is trying to do?  Or is it just mindlessly glorifying the exploits of these arms dealers?  Furthermore, even if it does have anti-war intentions, are they completely erased by the badass action seqences?  It's probably too early to answer any of these questions, but they are the ones that Jormungand -- intentionally or unintentionally -- poses.

Jormungand begins with one of those cryptic prologues that anime series love, that leave their relation to the rest of the story (flashback, flash-forward, nondiegetic abstract imagery) a mystery for now.  We are immediately immersed in foreign-ness, with still shots of what looks to be an offshore oil platform juxtaposed with bellowing African music.  The camera seems to focus on the brutalistic contours of the platform with a kind of cyberpunk industrial malaise.  We see glimpses of the main cast (although with the conspicious absence of Jonas) watching as a rocket shoots off the platform and into the air.  Meanwhile, a voice-over intones with deep gravitas about being Jormungand, the world-serpent that is the hard-to-spell mythological allusion in the series title.

This prologue suggests that we are headed into a world of monstrosity.  The sequence draws an explicit comparison between the monsters of mythology and the horrors of modern warfare, with both being something grown out of all proportion in order to envelop the world.  These characters are part of the entity of war, which has a will of its own beyond the men who wage it.  (To me this is sort of a cop-out for the men who wage it, but it's a stirring image nonetheless).  The trail of smoke left by the rocket, just the latest in a long line of weapons used to kill, matches up perfectly with the mythological snake of the title.

The essentially foreign character of this violence is interesting.  The idea of a violent and primal but nonetheless more real cosmopolitan world seperate from the more subdued realm of modernity is similar to Black Lagoon's Roanapur.  Jormungand goes a bit farther, however: we don't even have a Japanese audience-surrogate, nor are any of the characters given a definitive nationality.  The nation they arm in this episode is never identified.  While this is probably political ass-covering, it adds a curious subversive quality to the arms dealers and the violence they bring.  It is the irrepressible factor that does not fit into the framework of nation-states and is ultimately their undoing.  The other way of reading this is that by estranging the violence from its target audience, Jormungand makes sure that it is always essentially elsewhere and can be safely enjoyed by a priveleged, peaceful nation.  Or that it turns the attention from economic violence to the more direct kind.  But this kind of estrangement can never be total: remember that in Black Lagoon the cosmopolitan violence eventually came back around to Japan.  Although that arc was kind of crappy.

The Black Lagoon comparisons aren't just fair, they're ones that Jormungand practically invites.  Despite being generally well-liked, Black Lagoon isn't really the canonical type of series that TV shows feel compelled to define themselves against.  But its American-movie-style violence and grit are clearly what Jormungand is trying to imitate, and it's willing to pay its debts.  Although the two series are from completely different studios and crews, the art style and character design are extremely similar.  The opening credits, which as I've said before are really the soul of an anime, are remarkably similar, with both being techno-rock with a female singer growling out Engrish.  They're also both pretty cool, so here they are for comparison.

The two aren't identical -- the credits for Jormungand show a lot more of the cast, for instance -- but there's a lineage here that you don't usually see so directly acknowledged.

After this, we're introduced to our characters in a fairly perfunctory manner.  Jonas and Koko are the most developed, and they form a dynamic contrast.  Koko is the instigator, a ball of energy and emotion that is as much a danger as it is endearing.  Morality doesn't really enter into her actions -- it would require too much thought.  Jonas, on the other hand, has a strict anti-war morality, but that doesn't seem to influence his actions at all.  If anything he seems almost entirely passive in this episode, obeying the orders of the arms merchants even as he voice-overs about how he despises them.  The internal thoughts of Jonas seem almost entirely divorced from the quiet character we see on the screen.  When he reflects on the end that he is now travelling with warmongers, he talks about it as though it was something he had nothing to do with, and as if he completely lacks agency.  Neither of them really makes a great hero, but perhaps a combination of the two would.

The rest of the cast is less developed here -- we have the tough chick who's totally devoted to Koko, and a bunch of pretty quiet tough guys.  I guess it's kind of refreshing that some of the arms dealers can be standard grunts instead of quirky weirdoes.  Even if most of the characters are vague for now, there's an undeniable sense of community among them, and when Jonas joins the group at the end it's almost heartwarming.

Is this a glamourization of a dirty business?  Sort of, but I think it hints at an underlying truth.  Even horrible people have friends, have gangs of comrades that tease each other and have meaningful  relationships with one another.  Their life narrative isn't about stomping puppies, it's about brotherhood.  The external context for their brotherhood may be unfortunate, but that's not the narrative they're focused on.  This doesn't make it right, but it does make it easy to understandd not just how these people live with themselves, but how Jonas joining the group can feel like a personal triumph even as it is a moral failing.

Of course, we don't get to see the personal friendships of the people these weapons destroy, so maybe in the end it's still a slanted portrayal.  But most action heroes are almost as bad, and are much less self-aware of it.  Jormungand isn't perfect, but it manages to succeed as an action show while still giving the audience something to chew on, and that's rare enough.

Next week: "I made it a lot more fun and I hit a bunch of poles."

Mad Men 5-04: Mystery Date

There's a lot I didn't like about this episode of Mad Men, but I'll start with the one storyline that really worked, which didn't start until about halfway in.  As part of Roger's ongoing rivalry with the ascendant Pete, he hires Peggy to do some on-the-side overtime for their big new client.  The scene where this happens is kind of brilliant, with a flustered Roger trying to hide his desperation through his carefully-developed slick machismo, and Peggy completely seeing through it and managing to empty out his wallet in exchange for a little overtime.  This isn't the first time we've seen this scene, either.  Roger made a similar payment to Harry a couple weeks ago for his part in a battle over office space.  Roger is no longer able to fast-talk his way through the world, a failure that seriously bothers him.  Unlike his partner Bert, he still entertains fantasies of being a sexy young thing, that are plainly undercut by the younger generation's actual reaction to him.  But even in these moments of humiliation he still has recourse to the privilege of his wealth.  The changing epoch brings not necessarily a crumbling of the smooth old power relations, but it does make their barbarity bare.

This leads to Peggy staying up late working and discovering that Dawn, the company's accidentally-hired black secretary, has been sleeping in the office for lack of a late train home.  So Peggy offers her her couch in a moment of solidarity.  Peggy is, to the extent she has a strong ideology, a second-wave feminist and this colours her attempts to relate to Dawn.  She explicitly describes gender as the critical dividing line, and implies that Dawn and her are comparable: "We need to stick together.  I know we aren't exactly in the same position, but I was the only one like me there for a long time".  Racism and sexism are then the same thing in the same package, and can be addressed the same way (and that awareness of one necessarily entails awareness of the other).

But "Mystery Date" cuts the floor out from under this notion even as Peggy tries hard to argue it.  Of course, part of this is just having Peggy be sloppily drunk during the conversation, which is a pretty easy tactic.  But it's also in the assumptions that she makes, and her imagination that she should be a role model for Dawn.  Peggy asks if Dawn wants to be a copywriter, clearly imagining a yes, but receives a firm no instead.  There's a culture gap here -- Peggy can't imagine Dawn having any other goals than the middle-class white ambitions that she herself grew up with, and the value on creative and mental work that went along with that.  She then starts dumping her insecurities onto Dawn, reducing her to a supporting character in her life.

And then there's a brilliant, almost silent moment where Peggy goes to take her purse into her bedroom, away from where Dawn is sleeping.  She stops herself, but Dawn notices, and whatever trust was established between them is broken instantly.  This scene is brilliantly underplayed by Elizabeth Moss, who is able to convey her thoughts so effectively without words, and is aided by Teyonah Parris's world-weary look and the efficient direction that triangulates eyeline matches between Peggy, Dawn, and the purse.  A friendly, if one-sided, conversation is suddenly turned into a struggle between two opposing forces with the prize in the middle.


The social commentary of Mad Men has always been a bit of a mixed bag.  A lot of people have criticized it for using the past as a contrast to suggest contemporary society is enlightened and equal. There are times when the show embodies the patriarchal institutions it claims to criticize -- witness how, in this episode, it simultaneously castigates Betty for being a too permissive mother and Pauline for being a strict killjoy.  But it also recognizes the complexity of oppression, the many different forms it comes in and how women, for instance, can function as enforcers of patriarchy.  (Elsewhere in this episode, Sally's step-grandmother Pauline shows this through her half-disguised prurient delight at the Richard Speck murders and the punishment of girls in too-short skirts.)  Peggy, the hip barrier-breaking liberal, succumbing to racism despite her best intentions shows the complexity of oppression as well as anything else the show has done.  On the one hand, it's not as though Peggy does anything really wrong -- she ultimately leaves the purse there, seeming disturbed by her racist thoughts.  But the mere intention of eradicating racism doesn't eliminate the kind of internal racism learned since childhood, and that will always be an obstacle to being an "ally" to oppressed groups.

Along with all the racial dynamics, Peggy's paranoia over her purse reflects the overarching concern of the fear of the stranger that takes place throughout "Mystery Date".  The obvious historical referent is the mass murder dominating the news, one of those nice forgotten-history moments that Mad Men uses so well.  There the stranger is literally murderous and a genuine threat, but this threat is distorted in ways that make the normally precocious and tough Sally terrified of the outside world, with all its frightening Otherness.  And then you have the sexualized stranger, the other woman (or perhaps the Other woman), an old flame who Don runs into in the elevator and, through her role as a stranger, becomes a threat to the new marriage of Don and Megan.

To tell the truth, this is one of the plotlines that majorly misfires.  Don's ex-lover is made into the kind of evil temptress stereotype that seems to exist solely for men to project away their own responsibility for their infidelities, as well as their own sexual attraction (to play a bit of Six Degrees, Christina Hendricks played another rendition of the Evil Sex Lady way back in Firefly.)  Even if this is ultimately revealed to be an illusion, "Mystery Date" still depends on us reacting in the same way a soap opera audience would to a temptress character -- hissing at the vile woman and hoping that the sanctity of our favourite couple stays strong.

Of course, this whole plotline is eventually revealed to be Don's fever-addled dream, as becomes obvious when Don accidentally kills his seducer.  The main problem with this is that dreams don't really work like that.  Media constantly treats dreams as narratives, and often uses them in order to make meta-narrative commentary (hello, Inception).  The use of dream sequences on Mad Men certainly plays into the show's meta-narrative contemplations, with the dream being possibly just another story being "pitched" much like the characters pitch advertisements every day.  But dreams operate on a fundamentally non-narrative, non-linear structure that could, even if it could somehow be represented accurately on a television screen, could never be confused with a realist drama like Mad Men.  This, in addition to the inherent hackiness of the "it was all a dream" twist is what makes this plotline feels so contrived and groan-inducing.

I think that Matthew Weiner (both creator of the series and accredited writer for this episode) is trying to get at something interesting, though.  When Don kills the woman, he stuffs her under the bed, the same place where the lone survivor of the Richard Speck murders hid.  The sequence suggests that maybe Don is not so far removed from the horror-movie serial killer, that his misogynist use of women is just a bit less extreme.  Perhaps the viewer is also implicated here, through what was presumably supposed to be anger at Andrea for being a homewrecker, and then the startling result of that anger.  I personally never felt that way, which signifies that in my mind this is still a failed storyline, albeit one with interesting intentions.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the show's visual style (which is, at any rate, much more critically interesting than this week's Joan plotline that sits squarely in the evening-soap portion of Mad Men's generic makeup).  This may merely be echoing the visual aesthetics of the time, but in a lot of ways Mad Men looks like a commercial: bright lighting, soft and comfortable colours, and attractive people in generous makeup.  This can even make the series a bit off-putting at times, as it's a style that evokes coldness and restraint at the same time it glamorizes the proceedings.  This looks and feels like professional, institutional television (as opposed to, say, the rough stylistic realism of Friday Night Lights or the gonzo arthouse stylings of Breaking Bad.)  It's a style so well developed that episode director Matt Shakman, who's worked on a seemingly endless array of entirely different television shows, can easily step into the house style and direct an episode that looks just like any other Mad Men episode.

Halfway through "Mystery Date" things change -- night comes down, and it gets hard to tell what's going on as the frame becomes more and more covered in shadow.  Rather than glamorous, the characters look ugly, with the sweat-slicked and feverish Don Draper being the most dramatically debased.  This coincides with the nightmarish experiences of both Don and Sally, and (at least theoretically) pulls the audience into their dreamscape.  Even the conversation between Peggy and Dawn takes on a frightening tinge.  This is one of the advantages of developing a consistent, identifiable style -- when that style changes, it's immediately jarring, and this can be deployed to any number of effects.

At the end of the episode, the long night has past, the cinematography is back to normal, and we and the characters have escaped danger.  But the Other is still out there -- and this is the paradox of Mad Men, and most other serial dramas.  Each episode comes to its own narrative conclusion, but the underlying issues seem to be never truly resolved, because things are never resolved and done away with in real life.  Instead of pretending that these characters are ever going to reach a genuinely happy conclusion, Mad Men presents us each week with ruminations on a theme.  And this is what makes the sometimes clumsy execution so forgivable.  After all, how many TV shows out there privilege theme over narrative so consistently?

Next week: "Today armies, countries, organizations and families have changed for you.  You are an egg that hatches into a comrade."

Martian Successor Nadesico 2: Leave the Blue Earth to Me

Giant robots aren't really in vogue right now in anime.  Sure, there are the occasional series for the diehards, and there have been a handful of successful franchises over the past decade (Code Geass, Gundam SEED, Gurren Lagann) but they've mostly been replaced by lower-budget shows about cute girls doing cute things.  Which isn't really a problem -- unlike some fans, I'm not overly disturbed about generic mecha shows being replaced by generic moe shows -- but it does suggest a kind of malaise in the genre that seemed so vibrant in the 90s[1].  From that era, Martian Successor Nadesico is one of the more interesting but also mostly forgotten series, and in a way it represents a road not taken, which might have lead the genre to a better place.

Fans have for a long time divided mecha shows between "super robot" and "real robot" shows.  Of course, realism is not very high in either, but "real robot" shows (like most of the Gundam franchise) treat mecha fights as an actual war, and the robots as an important but destructible parts in a semi-realistic military.  The "super robot" genre functions more like a superhero or sentai show, with the robot being a god-like force for justice piloted against superhuman evil.  These are generalizations, of course, but they generally show the two approaches to the genre: as childish fun or serious social commentary.

As easy as it is critically to say that "real robot" shows are better, these have a tendency to devolve into melodrama and are no less reliant on fan pandering, as can be seen by most of the recent Gundam iterations.  There have been a lot of recent attempts to reclaim the naivete and energy of super robot shows, but most of these attempts end up insular and retrogressive, only attracting a fading generation of older fans.  Even when successful, these shows indulge in a nostalgia that doesn't really take us anyplace new.  The mecha genre is at a similar place to superhero comics: its attempts to be darker and grittier have grown tiresome, but it's not possibly to go back to the four-colour either, and artists seem split between their attempts to revisit the 90s and the 70s.

Nadesico is from the 90s generation, and is very much of its era, but it's a little different than Evangelion and its imitators.  For one thing, it splices together the morally-ambiguous real robot sub-genre with the kind of broad relationship-based comedy that was also very popular in anime of that era (e.g. Slayers, Ranma 1/2).  Like those shows, it subsists off its constantly blossoming cast.  Even if most of these cast members only have a few jokes, between them there's enough variety to suspend a series seemingly indefinitely.  We're very early on, but there are still a whole host of background characters who will obviously be expanded in later episodes -- the purple haired ex-voice actor, for instance, is obviously not going to spend the whole show simply shouting technobabble.

Just to give you an idea of the size of the main cast, here's the cover to the DVD box set.

Anyway, the comedy here is generally very typical for its genre -- there's a lot of walking in on people in the shower, for instance -- although it avoids its worst impulses.  It's really most notable for its self-awareness.  This episode sees the introduction of Gekigangar, the show-within-a-show, a hot-blooded giant robot anime of the old school.  The heroic simplifications of Gekigangar are often placed in stark contrast with the complicated realities playing out aboard the Nadesico.

However, Nadesico is never entirely dismissive of its legacy in these types of shows.  A lot of pivotal works that break with their genre traditions do so in a totalizing way, explicitly or implicitly castigating the genre for leaving out the real world (which often amounts to graphic sex and violence, plus swear words) -- think Watchmen or, again, Evangelion.  This is fine -- these types of works need to make a complete break with the past.  But in Nadesico, Gekigangar acts as a kind of inspiration for the characters, who strive to uphold its values even in a more complicated world.  When Gai and Akito pull off a move from the show in battle in this episode, it's a pretty cool moment, and Nadesico is okay with us enjoying its coolness.

Gai, a slavish devotee of Gekigangar who tries to mimic the heroism of four-colour characters, is sort of a buffoon but he's also a kind of mentor for Akito.  When they watch Gekigangar together, he tells Akito to "accept it for what it is" -- which is not especially deep or new, but I think it accurately sums up Nadesico's position to its forefathers.

(Of course, this is partly because it's still quite early on in the series, and so there's still a level of naivete allowed here.  In later episodes -- hell, by the end of the very next one -- the bloom will come off the rose and we'll start to see where old mecha anime don't provide an adequate framework.)

"Leave the Blue Earth" in particular is part of the early arc in which the Nadesico has to escape the earth's orbit despite the interference of the hostile government.  The Jovians (the aliens at war with Earth) also appear as a strange, inhuman threat.  The Nadesico and its crew are thus positioned between two opposing forces in war, just as the show is between two opposing forces in the genre.  While this freedom is uncomfortably identified with the private sphere, it still suggests a capacity to stand outside of titanic struggles between two opposed but pretty similar factions -- and with election season coming up, that's an important thing to remind ourselves of.

The major surprise of this episode is Yurika, who goes from being a ditz who somehow wound up as a starship captain to at the very least a Miss Marple-style ditz savant.  In this episode her seeming dimness is what allows her to get important information regarding Akito's past from the government forces.  She then manages to escape their ship after revealing that she did have a back-up plan after all.  Crucially, Yurika's happy-go-lucky personality isn't a complete facade -- she really is bubbly, and has no-bones-about-it affection for Akito.  But she's shown to also be able to deploy that ditziness for strategic purposes.  The big-eyes-small-mouth style, as maligned as it frequently is, is perfect for Yurika's oversized displays of emotions.


(Not to go back to the same idea over and over again, but I could compare this to how Nadesico is able to at the same time be the silly robot show it appears to be and use that appearance for strategic ends.  There's a definite balance being struck here between self-awareness and self-enjoyment.)

Akito, on the other hand, seems to embody Nadesico's ideal reader, someone who is able to navigate his way between two monolithic ideological sides without fully joining either, as well as someone who can enjoy and participate in genre tropes while at the same time not letting them define him (witness his constant insistence that he's just a cook).  Gai gets the upper hand in this episode, but in the long run Akito's method of reading, recognizing cliche and construction without condemning it, may prove to be the better one.

It's still early going in Nadesico, at the very start of its serialized narrative (they haven't even left Earth yet).  The quality is a little patchy, especially when it comes to the humour, and it'll take a while to see the long game of the themes that the series is starting to develop.  But looking back over it, there are already the seeds of a refinement of the mecha genre into something that can engage with its tradition constructively instead of deconstructively or nostalgically.  The only series which has really embraced this approach since was Gurren Lagann.  As I mentioned above, this is very much a road not taken, which probably makes it more attractive than the ones we did take.  But there's no denying that it makes me wistfully wonder "what if".

Next week: "And when you're over there in the jungle, and they're shooting at you... remember that you're not dying for me.  Because I never liked you."

[1]The 90s were very recent, and I will never stop thinking of them as such.