Bellator 96

The question of sport versus spectacle is one that's haunted mixed martial arts since the beginning, but seems increasingly relevant now that the sport seems to be here to stay and its promoters are attempting to create a stable, mainstream platform for it. The UFC, which mostly focused on legitimate championship battles and the struggle to move up the rankings (plus a reality show and the occasional freak show fight), ended up beating out rival promotion PRIDE, which focused on showmanship and spectacle[1]. However, despite the introduction of official fighter rankings, the past year has seen several UFC title matches put together for the sake of a "big draw" that have little to no competitive justification. Jon Jones vs. Chael Sonnen is the most obvious one of these, but a similar case could be made for Aldo/Edgar, St. Pierre/Diaz, Aldo/Pettis, and now Rousey/Tate 2.

Bellator MMA, the UFC's most prominent competition in North America, would seemingly have a greater claim to legitimate competition. Its tournament format was designed in the name of objectivity, and makes unearned title shots like the ones mentioned above theoretically impossible. Of course, as ever, perfect objectivity is a mirage which always seems to be just over the next hill -- as I mentioned in a previous post on MMA. The presence of judges and referees already adds a layer of subjectivity to a seemingly self-contained cage fight. And while Bellator may not control who advances in the tournament, they do control the field and the bracketing. So there is some reality to the shade being thrown on Bellator's matchmaking as of late.

The four-man tournaments featured in this event, the first of the annual "Summer Series", have been cited by pretty much every MMA writer as an example of the promotion trying to game the system that it created itself. The light heavyweight tournament in particular is seen as a showcase for big-name signing "King" Mo Lawal, who now only has to beat a distinctly less-than-impressive field of losers from last season's tournament in order to secure a title shot. As such an air of perfunctoriness hangs over the entire venture. Still, without the tournament system one expects Lawal would have been given a title shot the moment he signed a Bellator contract. One can see the four-man tournaments as Bellator struggling with itself[2].

These divisions reveal themselves even in the opening hype video. The tournaments, carrying with them connotations of serious and objective competition, are present in only a subordinate role. The main focus of the video and its narration are on the card's three big names (Renato “Bablu” Sobral, King Mo, and War Machine, all former UFC and Strikeforce fighters), and their quest for “redemption” after recent setbacks. This is a nice narrative, but it puts the unavoidable focus on star fighters and their personalities. As in wrestling, the matches themselves will be staging grounds for these interior struggles – the video suggests that winning their match tonight would provide narrative redemption. This makes sense for King Mo and Babalu, who are trying to get over recent losses, but one wonders if a low-stakes MMA victory will really signify that War Machine has overcome his stint in prison[3]. Still, this sort of thing is common in sports narratives

The first fight of the TV broadcast, featuring the promotional debut of controversy-creator War Machine (yes, that is his legal name), is another example of sport and spectacle clashing. From a sporting standpoint, War Machine's match with Blas Avena is more or less irrelevant and probably doesn't deserve a spot on the main card. The former Jon Koppenhaver is an Ultimate Fighter washout and general journeyman who is mostly known for a spectacular flame-out involving ill-advised MySpace posts, a stint as a porn actor, and a couple of years in prison for assorted assaults and bar fights. The fight is against another journeyman, the 8-7 Blas Avena, and War Machine wins in easy but not particularly impressive fashion. Out of context, it all appears spectacularly pointless.

But of course, it isn't out of context, because any fight – like any sporting event, like any text – has a context which we are never not aware of. And Bellator makes particularly sure to highlight these contexts, as the hype video for the fight extensively references War Machine's time in prison (although not what caused it). Some have deemed Bellator's promotional use of War Machine's prison time as exploitative, and there's certainly some truth to that, but this is really a regular part of their presentation.

Bellator's pre-fight videos tend to focus as much on the athletes' personal lives and stories as they do the upcoming fight. Loving shots of family, mumbled stories about growing up in the favela, and shots of the fighter's hometown are commonplace. By contrast, the UFC's pre-fight videos tend to focus exclusively on what that fighter has done in the cage, along with an assurance that it will be a good fight and will most likely end in a finish. Ironically, the show whose format focuses so much on competition uses personal narratives much more in its promotion.

There is a reason for this outside of aesthetic choices (which also play a part). Bellator doesn't have the luxury of assuming that the audience knows who their fighters are. The UFC's athletes are not household names, other than maybe major stars like Silva and St. Pierre, but they do have a minor sports media centred around them and a large fan following who can be counted on to remember at least the upper echelon of UFC fighters. By contrast, Bellator doesn't get a lot of coverage from even the MMA media, and when it does that coverage is generally related to their shady legal maneuvering.

The pre-fight videos, then, are a way to provide an instant narrative for the fight. Major sports can generally rely on the media to create and cultivate these narratives, but Bellator has to do it themselves. Before the videos, this is just another MMA fight between two unknown guys with bad tattoos. After the videos, it's a struggle between a devoted father trying to provide for his family and a talented athlete who escaped from poverty. The tournament structure is also a part of this instant narrative, providing stakes for the fight and suggesting a progression that will unfold over the course of the season. The pre-fight videos put the fight in two separate personal narratives akin to what one might see from a Hollywood boxing movie. The viewer learns what happened before the fight and what can happen afterwards, depending on the battle's outcome. The fight becomes the intersection of a series of intersecting narratives and contexts.

Ultimately, these personal narratives are competing along with the fighters. Typically, a video suggests that the fighter in question needs to win, and that only a victory will provide narrative catharsis – the hero triumphant, the son making his father proud, the veteran proving he can still hang, etc. But there are two videos for every one fight, and only one fighter can win (barring draws and other bizarre circumstances). Thus any given episode of Bellator is a procession of tragedies: a father who does not win enough to support his family, a fighter whose MMA dream doesn't come to fruition, a lover who has to go home beaten and bloody to his girlfriend. These narratives are rarely emphasized on the broadcast – they exist as shadow narratives, suggested by the events that unfold but not explored or spoken aloud. It's customary for commentators to interview the winner of a fight, but rarely the loser.

The night is heavy on finishes, which is generally seen as a good thing. The finish is the money shot of MMA – it adds to a fighter's highlight reel, makes an impact on the viewer, and suggests triumph much more than an announcement by a panel of judges. Of all finishes, the most privileged is the straight knock-out, preferably from one big standing punch or kick, and we get a couple of those in Bellator 96. Babalu's loss, where the referee steps in to save an obviously messed up but still standing fighter, feels much less viscerally satisfying. Beyond the violence, there's a level of aesthetic beauty to the knock-out – the fluidity of movements, the singular element of the punch, the ripple of its impact against the opponent's cheek, the sudden loss of human function.

The Babalu-Noe fight is the only one that goes past the opening minutes – other than that we get a lot of quick finishes and one-round fights. This makes for almost ideal television – a fight is over before the first commercial break, and there's always a new fight around the corner. But after a while it starts to feel like having ice cream for every meal. A quick finish means little if it's easily attainable, and such results seem to suggest one-sided matches. And some of these were clearly created as showcase matches, notably War Machine/Avena and the Mo/Peteruzelli main event. On the other hand, Rich Hale and Ron Sparks are legitimate fighters who have looked scary in Bellator before, but from watching only their fights tonight they could easily appear as cans.

I can’t help but compare the overall aesthetic of this broadcast to Vince Russo's idea of “crash TV”, which he attempted to apply to wrestling in the late 90s to decidedly mixed results. The essence of Crash TV is that it never leaves the viewer alone with their thoughts – every thirty seconds something new is happening, and usually happening with bright colours and loud noise. This is the same philosophy that motivates the rapid-fire editing of reality television, and has even started to trickle down into scripted programming.

Legitimate sports like MMA can't be aesthetically manipulated as easily, and they usually have their moments of dull contemplation – that lull in watching a soccer ball being traded aimlessly around, or in watching two fighters circle each other for a long minute. The long action of a sport forms together a kind of rhythm interrupted by flares of bravura. Bellator 96 is all flares, with the advantages and disadvantages I've outlined above. It makes for a more immediately appealing product. But it's important to remember that Crash TV sort of destroyed wrestling, as the art of the long, gradually-building match was lost from the mainstream. This doesn't apply as much to MMA cards, which assemble themselves in their own aesthetic forms and are indifferent to the wills of their promoters, but it should give pause to the desire to see all knockouts all the time. The cards full of knockouts are more meaningful because of the cards full of decisions.

Still, there is a great deal of beauty in a show like this. The highlight is King Mo's ground strike to finish off Seth Petruzelli – a long, diving punch, like a fist from heaven, shattering his opponent and forcing him (it turns out) into retirement. It is good enough to make Mo look impressive in winning a fight he was the heavy favourite in. By contrast the War Machine victory, while quick, is pedestrian and even ugly.

The only fight on the card which escapes the trend of quick knockouts is the three-round battle between Babalu and Jacob Noe. It would be easy to turn this into a Hollywood story: the aging legend gets beaten up in the first round, comes back in the second, and then eventually passes the torch and rides out into the sunset. The opening video package follows this formula to the T, with lots of softly-lit images of Babalu teaching children jiu-jitsu and reference to his legacy. Instead of focusing on the importance of Sobral winning the fight, it basically retires him beforehand.

As is usual, there are different narratives that could be told of Sobral. He could be a villain, capable of acts of cruelty such as the illegal choking which got him kicked out of the UFC. He could be a failure, a man who has fought many big names but beaten few of them. All of these have as much grounds to them as the saintly picture Bellator paints.

As for the fight itself, it follows the script above, with the surprising comeback and the inevitable defeat. But it's not the barn-burner that Hollywood would depict. The fight has a lot of clinching against the cage, leg kicks, and slow fighting for position. It is the same story, but told in a cruder vernacular, or perhaps a different language altogether. Anyone can understand a one-round knockout; to understand a fight like Sobral/Noe and the narrative that weaves through it you need to be fluent in MMA.

And then there's the knockout. Instead of a punctuation mark, it is more of an ellipsis. Sobral is stopped on his feet, being questionably ruled unable to continue. Babalu's career, if it really is over now, ends with him complaining to the referee. It is the final fight everyone wanted, but everything is a bit off. The end of this battle is faintly pathetic. I mean that in the classical sense: it generates pathos, a strange combination of sorrow and fulfillment. One is unsure how to feel after this fight, but that uncertainty is more powerful than the simple, cliched satisfaction of the retiring fighter riding into the sunset.

This is where the easy narratives peddled to us by the sports media fail us. Bellator and others like it want us to believe reality is like a movie, with heroes, villains, climax and resolution. Of course, movies are full of uncertainty as well – rather, they present reality as the image of a trite and melodramatic sports film. But real life, even the heightened version of it presented by competitive sports, is the stuff of uncertainty, contradiction, and confusion. We need art – and yes, B-league MMA broadcasts are a kind of art -- that reflects these contradictions and finds the truth and beauty within them.

[1] As much as I'd love to see this as a vindication for competitive matchmaking, PRIDE's collapse had more to do with its shady business practices, including ties to the yakuza, and shaky accounting.

[2]It may be silly to draw an analogy between the practices of a second-tier MMA promotion and larger political tactics, but this struggle within Bellator suggests that institutions that are designed to merely create the illusion of fairness or accountability can nevertheless prevent gross injustice. Up here in Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office is a good example of this. This doesn't mean that we should trust these institutions, just that we can use them as barriers to slow down the worst tendencies of those in powers. Bjorn Rebney may not exactly be "in power", but Bellator is owned by media giant Viacom, so it's not that much of a stretch.

[3] Everything in an athlete's life is a difficulty that they nobly overcome, even things which they are entirely responsible for. See The Onion for more.

Community 4-08: Herstory of Dance

It's kind of hard to talk about any fourth-season episode of Community without placing it in comparison to the first three seasons, which have been reduced to a homogenous mass of quality, ignoring the ways in which Community has always varied greatly from season to season and even episode to episode. If we want to praise a fourth-season episode, we say that it could comfortably fit into the first or second season. Most of this discourse is the very boring discussion of quality and "jumping the shark" which takes up so much of TV criticism. A lot of it is also grounded in the figure of Dan Harmon as auteur, an idea which ignores not just the death of the author and all that jazz but the hundreds of other people that make Community what it is [1]. Another issue with the way people talk about this season of Community is that it papers over both the discontinuities within the Harmon-led seasons and the continuities between new and old.

Despite the undeniable changes, the fourth season of Community is engaging with the same question as the second and third (maybe not so much the first) were: in a cultural landscape cluttered with a century of pop-cultural referents and a thick layer of irony and media-savviness, how is it possible to create something as seemingly straightforward and sentimental as a sitcom? How can we get past our postmodern detachment and recognition of having seen this all before in order to reach some kind of genuine moment of catharsis, whether it be a big emotional Winger speech or simply a belly laugh?

"Herstory of Dance" attempts to grapple with this problem in several ways. Plot-wise, it's a very conventional sitcom episode. The A-plot is about a character telling a small lie, and piling increasingly ridiculous lies on top of it to avoid embarrassment, which is the basic formula for many if not most sitcom episodes. The B-plot is about a character going on two dates at once, which is openly lampshaded as a cliche. Every joke carries with it the weight of history; we cannot watch it without being aware that this, like any other sitcom episode, is a rehashing and recombination of long-established tropes.

Maybe that last bit isn't entirely true. There are sitcoms that occasionally have the power to surprise, and certainly plenty of sitcoms that do their best to make the viewer see their content in a straightforward way, not comparing it to comedies past.. But Community sees this all as misdirection. In its view, every TV show (and maybe every cultural product) is a rearticulation of what's come before, and that's wonderful. It celebrates the cultural literacy of itself and its viewers, and maintains a half-ironic, half-sentimental relationship to the hackiest of plotlines. This is true in not just the broader sweep of the plot but also small gags that work as tributes, like the line of tape between the two dances in this episode, reminiscent of every sitcom "feuding siblings split the house in two" plot. Abed has become the core of the show because he's simultaneously the most culturally literate and the least cynical. Unlike Jeff (the ostensible lead) who simply disdains the predictability of the world around him, Abed celebrates it and makes it work for him.

These ideas, and the ways in which "Herstory of Dance" communicates them to various degrees of success, are all circulating in the opening scene. This is one of Community's much-vaunted table scenes, where the characters interact with each other and make jokes at each others' expense without the pressure of an ongoing narrative. These moments are kind of utopian, just long enough for one to get a glimpse of the kind of camaraderie and free exchange that exists when the group is in stasis before the events of any given episode disrupt this status quo. They're usually the funniest part of the episode, and one often feels the desire for a whole episode of nothing but the study group sitting around the table chatting. Part of me thinks that such an episode would be the best thing Community has ever done, and its best episodes are usually ones that hew close to the study space but never entirely dissolve into plotlessness ("Competitive Calligraphy" and "Remedial Chaos Theory" com to mind). On the other hand, fully giving into the temptations of simply hanging out with the characters would probably result in disappointment. Maybe it's best if the study space hang-out is some glimmering place we can only ever see glimpses of.

We get especially few glimpses here, as the plot intrudes early. What back-and-forth there is centres around the Pierce-designed American version of Inspector Spacetime, a callback to a plotline in the generally (and somewhat unfairly) pilloried "Conventions of Space and Time". This is ultimately then not much of a table scene (although it was more of one in my memory of the episode), so the big paragraph above about the utopian space of the study-room table is conjured entirely by the presence of the study-room set. Which may just speak to my ability to be easily sidetracked, but I think it also demonstrates how sets can build up complex emotional associations over the course of a show, sitting right in the centre of series space. As a single-camera comedy, Community doesn't have a lot of sets that have this quality, but the study room definitely does.

The Inspector Spacetime jokes aren't funny, but they do serve an important purpose here. In its opening seconds "Herstory of Dance" draws the same dichotomy that fans and critics draw all the time -- between somewhat obscure but clever and complex cultural objects and popular but simple and stupid ones. The dichotomy between the British and American versions of, well, anything usually illustrate this [2]. Community aligns itself with the obscure and the outsider, befitting its status as a cult television show.

If we imagine TV shows as existing in a Bordieu-esque cultural field, Community has made a conscious move towards the sphere of autonomous art, although not necessarily the kind of avant-garde work that Bordieu meant by that term. Instead it gestures towards the status of the cult, which falls somewhere in the middle in terms of cultural prestige, esteemed by nerds and pop-culture aficionados (like Abed) but not necessarily by a higher cultural authority (although one wonders whether such authorities even exist in a significant form today). Community has made similar moves in the past by referencing cult texts ranging from Dungeons & Dragons to spaghetti westerns, but the connotations of these references are distinctly different. With the dismissal of Dan Harmon fans are more inclined to see new Community episodes as not autonomous works of genius but as a commercial production affected as much by studio whims as by artistic inspiration. So the kind of references and in-jokes that would once be seen as simply a natural expression of the show's cult aesthetic can now be read as an attempt to preserve that aesthetic and reassure fans that Community is still Community. The exact same joke or reference could take on radically different meanings depending on which season it occurred in. This is not to suggest that either of the previously-mentioned readings are incorrect or distorted, but rather that a text's meaning is always rooted in the historical conditions of its production and reception.

There's a much more natural and effective example of meta-humour that immediately follows this, which is the black-and-white Dean that comes in to invite the group to a "classic Greendale dance" (another reference to the show's past). This is a great visual gag that the costume commits utterly to, which makes it all the more jarring. The Dean's black-and-white image stands in contrast to the typically bright colours that Community uses, and he literally looks like a segment of film cut from an old film or TV show and transplanted inside the world of Community. The Dean is not dressed as anything natural, but as a mediated image. His jarring presence within the colour world of the study room also makes us see the seemingly natural world of the TV mise-en-scene as an artificial, mediated image as well. This defamiliarization, the act of making the audience aware that it is watching a TV show, is the result of much of the Community's meta-humour, but the Dean's costume defamiliarizes in a way that is new and hence much more productively jarring. And all of this without much in the way of explicit reference to or discussion of his costume.

So anyway, the Dean's announcement of the Sadie Hawkins dance leads to Britta calling out the fake feminism of that kind of event and proposing a counter-dance. Of course, she confuses Susan B. Anthony with 90s alt-folk singer Sophie B. Hopkins, and spends the rest of the episode scrambling to cover up this mistake. As in most of the plotlines that draw on her quasi-activist side, Britta is more or less right about the dance, which sort of makes me uncomfortable with how ridiculous the show makes her. Britta's a much stronger character when the writers get away from the trope of the flighty, superficial female activist, which is both reactionary and misogynist (see also: Bluth, Lindsay). Of course, this is a comedy and it has no obligation to play anything straight, but it's disappointing to see a generally intelligent program fall back on hoary stereotypes that ultimately make any kind of political engagement look ridiculous [3]. Abed's pop culture obsession, on the other hand, is the source of a lot of jokes while nevertheless being presented as valuable and worthwhile in a sincere way.

But politics aren't really the point of "Herstory of Dance", despite a title that references the long-mocked rhetoric of 1970s feminism. The A-plot quickly becomes about Britta's stubbornness and refusal to admit she's made a mistake. Again, this is a standard sitcom theme, and interestingly enough it's one that isn't openly identified within the episode. The usual story of this type would result in increasingly strained and ridiculous attempts to maintain the charade, with lies piling upon lies until the whole thing collapses, the lying character fesses up, and there's a moment of cathartic reconciliation. This is not what happens here.

Britta is mentored in duplicity by Pierce, who identifies with her desire to not give Jeff the satisfaction of his usual cooler-than-thou mockery. As others, this is a bit of a rehabilitative turn for Pierce, whose character has basically degenerated to a stock racist old coot since his central role in the second season. Even if he is motivated purely by spite, he is unusually supportive of Britta and ultimately responsible for the plot's happy ending. Chevy Chase's affect in this episode is even notably different from usual, less angry and more happy and open.

Moreover, through the scenes of Pierce sympathizing with and supporting Britta, "Herstory of Dance" introduces the idea that being the butt of a joke matters, and it's something that characters like Britta and Pierce are aware of and have to live with. Which is really one of the central ideas that "Herstory of Dance" and Community at large insist on: jokes, the ways we tell them, and the ways we remember them, matter. Using "Britta" as a synonym for "mess up" is funny, and Community lets us laugh at it, but it also reminds us that it's much less funny if you're Britta. A seemingly extraneous scene of Jeff berating Britta, right after the premise is established, helps to reinforce the stakes and produce Jeff's status as the cool jokester as a kind of hierarchical position. Jeff physically looms over Britta in the scene, which is in part simply due to the heights of Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs, but the framing of the camera specifically seems to emphasize the smallness of Britta. By contrast, in both the opening and scene Jeff and Britta are seated, in a position of equality and equilibrium, and in the conclusion Jeff sits down when he admits he has been bested.

This scene is repeated a couple times as Britta's pretense that she originally meant Sophie B. Hawkins balloons into a pretense that Hawkins herself will play the dance. We anticipate the usual payoff of confession, forgiveness, and reunion, but then Sophie B. actually shows up, summoned by some obscure Pierce magic. When Jeff asked if she did it, Britta says "If it's possible to make something happen by willing it, then yes". While there's a plot explanation for it, "Herstory of Dance" subtly suggests that yes, perhaps it is possible to make something happen by willing it -- or by proclaiming it forcefully enough. The lie becomes truth, and discourse becomes reality. Instead of Britta being punished for her deceit, her stubborn pride and insistence on a coherent narrative -- her "commitment to the bit", as Jeff puts it -- ultimately win the day.

An ending like this could only be found in a comedy as thoroughly postmodern as Community. Not only does the main plot of "Herstory of Dance" invert the usual sitcom moralism, it draws on the idea that our discourse and the stories we tell ultimately shape the reality we see around us. The struggle over the definition of "Britta" in this episode suggests the mutability of language and discourse. "Britta" was first simply a name signifying an individual, but it eventually came on to take on a second meaning of "screw up", which of course stemmed from and influenced the meaning of Britta the person. This suggests that rather than there being a simple one-way relationship between a word and its meaning (or its sign and its signifier, if you will) the two are part of a complicated web of ideas. Community celebrates this mutability of meaning and the free play of signifiers, most frequently in its rapidfire wordplay but also in larger plots such as this one.

The B-plot in "Herstory of Dance" also rests on distinctly postmodern grounds (which is to say grounds that are shaky, uncertain, and possibly entirely ficticious). Abed re-enacts a plot from countless sitcoms by trying to go on two dates at the same time. As is typical of Abed (and of Community) he does it not out of any interest in either of the women involved but out of a desire to fulfill a trope. "I'll get to wear two outfits, mix up their names, maybe hide under a table" he enthuses.

This is more than a simple lampshade hanging. Community emphasizes the performative aspect of comedy. The humour in Community does not arise from an unplanned and organic collision of characters but from people actively deciding to be comedic characters. In the background of this episode is Troy desperately trying to create a set of wacky hijinx, openly attempting to put together a comedic plot as a rival to Abed's. "Herstory of Dance" also suggests that, while Abed's enactment of these tropes may be artificial, so would any other choice. Prior to embarking on the two-dates scheme he was making a conscious effort to "display growth" -- that is, to perform an idea of character development that is just as artificial and referential as zany sitcom tropes[4].

But not all of Community's characters have equal access to irony and performativity. In this plotline Abed is the postmodern author, self-consciously regurgitating tropes and stories -- and four women are the passive characters in his scheme. Annie, Shirley and the girls they suggest Abed to are not allowed much if any meta-knowledge, and are left out of the play of tropes and texts. Unlike Abed, the women are motivated by straightforward, unironic emotion, and "Herstory of Dance" largely does not take these emotions seriously -- Abed's two dates vanish once their narrative purposes have been served, and Shirley and Annie are swept up in Abed's new romance. None of them seem to mind being passive objects in Abed's shenanigans, and Community has suggested in the past that this is the right attitude to take for those not blessed with metafictional magic (most notably in "Virtual Systems Analysis").

This gives the Abed plotline a distinct lack of stakes. In a straightforward rendition of this trope, the tension would consist of the protagonist trying to avoid having his plans exposed and being rejected and humiliated by both women. But for Abed said humiliation, rather than being legitimate emotional damage, would just be another part of the story -- he would be rather pleased that his shenanigans resolved as they always did on TV. Because of this there's little to no dramatic tension. While dramatic tension is certainly not necessary for a comedy plot, it's hard to centre ten minutes' worth of jokes on self-consciously repeating something everyone has seen before (as Community has discovered the hard way several times).

Enter Brie Larson's Rachel, the lowly coat check girl. Rachel proves herself a better love interest for Abed than either Shirley's churchgoer or Annie's "quirky girl"[5]. She immediately recognizes the appeal of Abed's play and is conversant in the same tropes and references that he is. Unlike the other women in this plotline, Rachel is fully fluent in Abed's meta-language of cultural references, and can partake in his narrative play as a full and willing participant. Notably, though, she still only takes on the role of helper, providing costume changes and distractions for Abed as he exercises his master plan.

Rather than becoming an equal participant in Abed's metafictional play, Rachel takes the role of a viewer substitute. She responds to Abed's antics just as an idealized Community viewer would, with a mixture of unquestioned enjoyment and savvy understanding. She figures out the tropes he's playing off without having to be told, loves them ("it's one of my favourite bits") and moreover loves Abed's re-enactment of them ("I think it's awesome"). Her reactions signal that the viewer should see Abed's ruse as entertaining and not sociopathic. I'm quite interested in this subject of viewer substitutes in TV, which occurs in everything from Homeland to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and hope to do some Serious Academic Writing on it in the future.

But back to "Herstory of Dance". Abed is so caught up in his performance of the two-dates plot that he fails to realize the romance plot he is now involved in, and as a result alienates Rachel. As he says, "I was so caught up in one trope that I missed the trope that was right under my nose -- that the right girl was right under my nose". Of course, he deals with it by making a big public declaration of love, a trope that Rachel had previously identified as being one of her favourites [6]. She accepts it, and even the direction of the scene is straight out of any teen movie. (These movies aren't usually set at college, but Greendale is basically high school for adults, so there you go).

And so we have a romance plotline told entirely through metafictional play, moving from trope to trope like a high-wire act, without ever touching some kind of authenticity. Except Community isn't content to leave it at that. Before the proverbial cane pulls Abed and Rachel off stage, Rachel proposes that on their upcoming date they act out another sitcom plot. Abed is tempted, but ultimately wants to "do real". The suggestion is that Abed has "shown growth" by moving past his complex meta-jokes and embracing authentic and emotional human interaction. But "Herstory of Dance" has already established that this romance plotline is just another trope, and "doing real" would just be another kind of performance. If Abed and Rachel went out for a dinner and a movie, they wouldn't be doing so out of some kind of authentic prehistoric desire, but because a dinner and a movie are part of the cultural romance narrative. Community knows this, but it seems to want to forget it in favour of a traditional form of closure.

This is the central tension at work in much of Community. For all of its postmodern awareness, it also has a penchant for moments of straightforward sentimentality. When Jeff uses "Britta'd" positively, it may be a message delivered through postmodern wordplay, but it's also one that conveys an honest friendship, an emotion that the show takes seriously. When it comes to the relationships between its characters, Community is about as far away from cynicism and critical distance as you can be, often resulting in big emotional speeches and group hugs.

This is something that a lot of contemporary artists seem to be grappling with -- how to tell stories with genuine human emotion when we live in a postmodern culture that distrusts any such straightforward emotional displays. This is why former postmodern authors like Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon have drifted over to writing stoutly naturalist bourgeois family novels. Community has a more complex answer to this challenge. It suggests that real emotions and genuine desires are still in abundance, but the way we express them now is through reference and metahumour. Even Jeff's final text message in "Herstory of Dance" is narrated in a sarcastic voice (as Britta presumably reads sarcasm into the message at first). This is the postmodern condition, according to Community: sappy sentiment conveyed through cynical posturing.

What's striking is that it does this while often being line-for-line the funniest comedy on TV. (Less so in the fourth season, admittedly). Postmodern theorists often talk about the liberatory potential of linguistic play, but it's hard to find anything joyful and liberating in struggling through a volume of Derrida. (Although I'm sure old JD was having fun while writing it). Community actualizes the joy of postmodern play and makes it broadly accessible. The endless referentiality of Community's script may admittedly be a shallow idea of play that depends the objects of commercial mass culture, but if nothing else it provides an example of how metafictional play can happen in the broadest-aiming, most conservative cultural realm -- that of network television. And that's no small feat.

[1]Arguably the exodus of writers and directors from the show over the past couple of years has made much more of an impact than the departure of Harmon alone has.

[2]Of course, many British shows that are held up as obscure works of genius in North America are viewed in their home culture as broad entertainment, Doctor Who being the most prominent example. Anglophilia has more than a bit to do with this, but I would say that the difference mainly demonstrates how the public status of a work shapes our view of it.

[3]In this respect Britta forms a dyad with Shirley, whose devout Christianity is the source of most of the jokes surrounding her character, and is never really anything but a joke. Some would praise "going after both sides", but I think ultimately this suggests a "centrist" politics that views both political extremes with equal horror, which ultimately supports the status quo if not absolute apathy. (The linear political spectrum is also a heavily flawed idea). This ultimately obscures the radicalness of the current state of the world. Of course, Community isn't and doesn't have to be about the neoliberal world order -- it takes place in a comforting fantasy world in more ways than one. But invoking real-world politics as a source of jokes makes it easier to believe that we actually live in that fantasy world where everything will be all right by the end of the episode.

(I may have just Britta'd this review.)

[4]Just think of all the things that dramas (and increasingly comedies) do to flag to the viewer that they're developing characters and are hence Quality Television. Think of long philosophical monologues, revelations about a tragic childhood, or extended romance plotlines. Alternately, just think of every flashback plotline on Lost, and you should have a good idea of what I mean by performing character development.

[5]The "quirky girl" Kat is a pretty expert parody of the archetype that appears in countless movies and films, the one who is supposed to be a loveable free spirit but more closely resembles, as Troy puts it, "a toddler with a growing disease". Nathan Rabin famously dubbed this trope the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" and denounced it for the nice-guy misogyny it embodies. I can't really argue with Rabin, even if the term he coined has been overused, nor can I deny that Community gets a lot of good comedy out of Kat. However, it's interesting to contrast the portrayal of her and that of Abed, who suffers from a similar level of oddness and arrested development. Abed is self-consciously aware of his quirkiness and the tropes it embodies, and expresses his strangeness through approved American popular culture. By contrast Kat seems to be remarkably unaware of her strangeness and expresses her strange personality in a straightforward and honest manner. For this she is entirely a joke, someone that can be shrugged off without incident, whereas Community sympathizes heavily with Abed's eccentricities. Of course, not every character can have a complex internal life, but one wonders if Kat would be presented as more relateable if she made the occasional comment about how she totally resembles that girl from Garden State right now. There's a larger point to be made here about postmodern metahumour and social deviance, but this is already a bit of a tangent.

[6]Interestingly enough, when Kat makes this comment, Abed dismisses the public confession by say ing that it "takes something private and makes it a public performance". This is funny in a kind of subtle and ironic way, as Abed is clearly in the midst of making a public performance out of private romantic affairs. Whereas in a straightforward two-dates plotline the man (and it's always a man who attempts this) wants to keep his plans entirely secret and private and is doing the scheme because of internal motivations, Abed is performing for an audience -- himself, Troy, Rachel, and implicitly the TV viewers. Abed should know better. In Community, everything is always already a public performance. Maybe he just needs to read his Butler.

The Reem 1-03: Back Home

We're in the midst of a kind of renaissance for sports documentaries, especially on television. ESPN's 30 for 30 series is the standard-bearer here, and has some level of objectivity, but most of the genre exists for explicitly promotional ends. Despite being essentially commercials, these documentaries are often quite compelling, visually striking, sophisticated pieces of cinema.  HBO's 24/7 series, used to promote its boxing pay-per-views, was the first to attain this kind of quality, and 24/7 has been followed in mixed martial arts by both the UFC's official Primetime shows and a bevy of fan-made web videos. Of this latter set The Reem stands out as a trendsetter.

The Reem is a strange mixture of hype video and cinema verité. It's shot in slick black and white and set to a soft hip-hop soundtrack that imposes a sense of flow and rhythm onto seemingly mundane moments like Alistair Overeem playing video games or walking through an airport. Some would say that this is just a very ordinary video dressed up in flashy film-school techniques, and there's a degree of truth to that. But technique matters, and even aside from it there's an undeniable charm to The Reem that deserves consideration.

A big part of the series's appeal is the quiet charisma of the athlete at its centre. Alistair Overeem is a masculine fantasy, a physically massive and incredibly conditioned man, once a lanky kickboxer but now grown into a literally larger than life figure. Joe Rogan used to sell Brock Lesnar by saying that he looked like the man who would play the cage-fighting world champion in a movie, and Alistair Overeem arguably fits that description even more. (For one thing, he doesn't have a tattoo that looks like a dick on his chest). And despite this he is quite soft-spoken and reserved, possessing a quiet confidence but not bragging about it much. When Overeem takes a limo home from the airport, he seems kind of abashed by the luxury, as if acknowledging the ridiculousness of his own success. Even when he attempts to call out Fedor at the end of the video he is polite and complimentary of Fedor's ability. Watching The Reem is not to imbue godlike traits in an ordinary man, as the average sports narrative would have you do. It is to begin to think of an almost supernatural man as ordinary.

The usual brash and arrogant sports personality often seems to stem from social awkwardness and introversion (in MMA, Brock Lesnar and Nick Diaz are the best examples of this phenomenon). Overeem seems to be the opposite -- his quiet nature belies an internal arrogance that it's hard to not get drawn into. It's this arrogance that cost him his last fight[1], and it's on display here when he points at a wall and remarks that "all my [championship] belts will be coming there". It's kind of hard not to be drawn into Overeem's outsized ambitions, especially when his physique seems to promise that he can accomplish all these things, and he makes for a strangely likeable protagonist. There is, after all, a thin and perhaps nonexistant line between arrogance and charisma.

The scene where Overeem looks at his trophy case is interesting as a whole. In one sense, this scene is a further confirmation of the promotional nature of The Reem, serving as a device to highlight all of Overeem's accomplishments over his decade-long fight career. But the scene works much more effectively than, say, a highlight video would. Trophies tap into Walter Benjamin's ideas of the historicity of objects. Benjamin believed that objects carried historical moments with them better than human memories did, with the ruin being a prime example. The trophy serves a similar purpose in this scene, acting not so much as a proof of victory but as a trigger for memory. Overeem spends the most time lingering on a small, dinky-looking plaque he won for his second fight. He says "Even that stupid plastic card thing that came with my second fight... I know what effort I put into it, I know what tensions came with that fight, I know I was always very dedicated...".  Overeem values the trophy not as an object in itself or as a marker for accomplishment but as a trigger for memory, a physical representation of the past.

From here we move into a training sequence that takes up most of the episode. The training montage has become a cliché by now, but The Reem uses it in an interesting way. Instead of the heavy epic-rock music from classic training montages like those in Rocky or The Karate Kid, the subdued but steady beats from earlier scenes simply continue. There's a kind of fluidity to the cuts between different shots of Alistair's training: instead of building to a crescendo, they're strung together in an abstract and obscure but fascinating way, a bit like visual jazz. There's the sense of process, of repetition and slow building, and the impression that all of these things - Overeem visiting his family, playing video games, training, fighting -- are all part of one continuous pattern. It's easy to see why the gym (traditionally the boxing gym, but a MMA gym serves the same purpose) has been so attractive to filmmakers from Clint Eastwood to Frederick Wiseman.  The gym combines ordinary, procedural reality, with the hyperreality of fight sports.

We get a bit of a sense of the other members of the gym, from Alistair's less-famous teammates to his trainers, but they are very much supporting characters, spending most of their interview time praising Overeem and establishing him as truly special. Overeem does stop to put over Siyar Bahadurzada, who would go on to achieve a bit of name recognition among MMA fans, although nowhere near as much as Overeem. Once again, the larger-than-life picture the other interviewees paint stands in pleasant contrast to Overeem's seemingly subdued personality.

It is a bit shocking to see Golden Glory painted in such an idyllic light, given how far south things between Overeem and them would go. In many ways this episode (unintentionally) sets up a status quo that is later dramatically knocked down. The episode also (more intentionally) lays out a path for the rest of the "season". Alistair lists his goals at the end in a combined interview/call-out, setting his sights on a fight with Fedor, the DREAM heavyweight title, and the K-1 grand prix. Not all of this would go according to plan, but "Back Home" establishes a clear pattern that affected audience's expectations. In this it is perhaps not so different from a typical TV show after all.

[1]There's a strange time displacement in watching and talking about this episode when you haven't seen the rest of the series but know what happens to Overeem in the future. It's like being spoiled, but not exactly.

New posts coming soon!

Hello out there to the loyal fan(s)! Because I'm biologically addicted to textual analysis, I'm going to be posting on Episodist again. My critical project will largely be the same, trying to write about television in a way that's more rigorous and detailed (as well as informed by various critical methodologies from literary and film studies) than most TV writing on the Internet. I'm also going to stay committed to the single-episode format, maintaining the focus on the episode as the fundamental unit of television (sorry, David Simon). I'll still be randomly selecting from every kind of television-relating thing I watch, from anime to sports, both minor and major episodes, as well as a handful of "wildcard" episodes from shows that I don't regularly watch. Random selection is a means of getting me to go off the beaten path and devote critical attention to things that might not get it.

The main difference between the old Episodist and the new is schedule and length. Adhering to a weekly schedule before lead to some rushed and downright bad writing, and I often felt as though I couldn't really explicate my arguments or get to everything I wanted to. I also have to balance this with my various other writing projects, as well as grad school and all the other drains on my time, such as occasionally venturing into the outside world. Because of this Episodist will now take the form of longer (probably around 5000 words, although it depends on how much I have to say -- the first one will be substantially shorter) essays on an occasional basis (probably about once a month). Hopefully this format will allow me to take into account all of the various tendencies and influences going on in any episode of television, or at least all of them that I can understand.

I have a couple entries already written, so you'll be seeing them fairly shortly. The new Episodist begins soon with an analysis of web sports documentary series The Reem. The first one, and we're breaking all the rules!

Coma

I recently started my PhD program, and with that has come a dramatic decrease in my spare time.  This alone probably wouldn't be enough to kill the blog -- I maintained it through my MA year, after all -- but there seem to be an endlessly proliferating amount of demands on my time, and to be frank this blog isn't exactly setting the world on fire.  I've got a third of a post on Eureka Seven AO typed up, but I can't really be arsed to finish it, and I don't want to do the kind of half-assed job that I (or the creators of Eureka Seven AO) have been doing lately.

I may return sometime with a new format, or a new blog all together.  Or I may vanish into the aether of the Internet forever.  I'd like to thank all of the people who stumbled across this site looking for porn, my two loyal readers that may only be a figment of my imagination, and all of the television I grumbled about over the past year.  Sorry, guys.

Mantracker 6-05: Priscilla & Colt

The dual trends of reality television and cable proliferation has produced a host of shows that manage to produce several seasons without the vast majority of the population being aware they exist.  Such is Mantracker, a Canadian[1] reality series that my too-complicated wildcard system happened to stumble across.  It's a cheaply-produced show, obviously formulaic, and on some levels laughable, but critics would be foolhardy to ignore the vast bulk of cable detritus, which taken together is a pretty significant cultural phenomenon.  So down the rabbit hole we go.

As much as I can gather from one episode, Mantracker is basically The Amazing Race (or, more accurately, extreme tag) crossed with the plethora of nature-based reality shows, with the titular mantracker (given a name in the intro but mainly referred to by "Mantracker" or "Tracker") filling in the role of grizzled host.  The format involves a team of "prey" travelling on foot across the wilderness, trying to evade the team of "Tracker" and "Sidekick" (yes, that's the actual name the show gives him), who don't know where they're headed but get to travel on horseback.  It's a basic one-off competition format, with the contestants either winning by reaching the finish line or losing by getting caught.  There's a bunch of extra stuff to attempt to balance out the asymmetric nature of the game, but that's the gist of it.

Of course, the fact that this chase takes place across wilderness -- in this episode the Canadian shield -- is crucial.  For one, the setting helps change the central metaphor of the competition from "tag" to "hunting", which is much more dramatic.  Moreover, the wilderness provides inexpensive beauty -- when the drama of the series fails, the opportunity to experience nature from the comfort of our sofa is enough of an appeal.  There are even a number of educational bits about local wildlife (possibly just there to justify government grants).


The natural setting also helps produce an ideology in which the show is meaningful.  "It's more than just a game," the overly-agressive narrator insists in the opening.  "This thing called Mantracker is a return to the animal instincts hidden deep in the human DNA."  It doesn't really get much more explicit than that, folks.  Mantracker positions itself as a return to something real -- the wilderness, life-or-death struggle, and biological imperative -- in contrast with the postmodern world.

This is a distinctly gendered discourse.  Priscilla is constantly portrayed as an anchor on her husband Colt, ranked (very scientific-like) as having less physical ability and being easier to capture, and the narrative of the episode goes on to confirm this.  On a broader level, the nostalgia for a time when trackers on horses were really societally important is at least in part a longing for a physical, masculine world where men could actually fulfill all the aspects of their traditional gender identity.

The narrative of the episode plays out cyclically: the prey come up with some plan or scheme tto fool the tracker, and we then cut to the tracker immediately figuring out what they've done.  Priscilla & Colt are portrayed in the time-honoured manner of minor villains, making half-hearted jokes about the tracker's age and scheming about leaving prankish traps for him, which the tracker interprets as nice gifts in one of the episode's more amusing interation.  The usual reality TV staples are all used in an attempt to create tension, ranging from confessional interviews to pre-commercial previews which make the upcoming events look much more dramatic than they actually are.  (In one egregious exampe, the preview suggests that one of the teams encounters a bear, which never comes close to happening.)

For all these tricks, though, there isn't much actual tension in this episode.  Whether it's the imbalance of the format or simply the weakness of these two particular contestants, Priscilla and Colt never really seem to have a prayer of winning.  The tracker basically finds them not far from the starting line and lets them get away, presumably because they need to fill up an hour with this chase.  Reality competition shows usually don't ask for much suspension of disbelief, as their format openly and obviously forces competition and drama, but this scene ruins any ideas that the narrative is not entirely predetermined.  On a slicker-produced show, I might have bought Priscilla and Colt's escape, but here it comes off as blatant manipulation, which kind of spoils the whole "survival of the fittest" aspect.  But that's the danger with reality television.  The producers may think they're in control of what really happens, or at least what makes it to air, but so often reality is in control of them.

Next week: "That's the only connection I have between my Mom and I.  It's not a weapon!"

[1] This may help to explain my ignorance of this show, as I (like most Canadians) don't pay any attention to Canadian TV.

Fist of the North Star 103: A Challenge From the Devil! Fudo, Be the Demon for Those You Love!!

Okay, let's get this right out of the way: no episode of Fist of the North Star is as good as its title.  The amount of bold, over-the-top heroics suggested in sentence fragments and redundant exclamation marks is enough to set anyone's blood a-boiling, especially when screamed out by the hyperactive preview narrator.  The actual episodes usually pale in comparison, often seeming like the thirty seconds of awesome-looking moments from the trailer stuffed together with twenty minutes of stalling.  With next-episode previews affixed to just about every anime release, Fist of the North Star ends with that distinct soap opera kick: "that was terrible, and I need to find out what happens next."

I was exaggerating: the show's not terrible.  It's perhaps not the classic that certain spheres of anime fandom have built it up to be, but it has a certain charm that's mainly to due with the anarchic animation and larger-than-life characters and accompanying mythology.  It was also incredibly influential, which may make it a classic depending on your particular definition of the word.  Of course, not all influences are for the better.

Many of anime's distinctive stylistic traits were developed in the 60s and 70s as shortcuts to cut animation costs.  While some of these are reviled today (speedlines, anyone?), many have become cherished parts of the anime aesthetic.  Similarly, the shortcuts and narrative duct tape used by Fist of the North Star have become distinct traits of the shounen genre that it heavily influenced.  In particular I want to look at its economical way of portioning out story -- or, to be slightly more direct, its use of filler.

Shounen today is famous for its long battles that can stretch on for several episodes.  This episode's featured battle, between Raoh and Fudo, is only two episodes, as it isn't tremendously important and the standard of fight length had yet to be really established.  But whether two episodes or twelve, in most of these episodes there's remarkably little fighting going on.  In "A Challenge From the Devil!", for instance, the Raoh/Fudo fight doesn't' get started until three quarters of the way in.  In general in these episodes significant events happen at the start and the end of the episode.  This is not simply poor writing, but a factor of the format and economics of mass-market anime.  There's only so much manga to adapt, and said manga is usually incomplete when the anime adaptation starts.  So plot must be rationed, spread out amongst the constant grind of weekly episodes.

So what do you do when there's not enough plot to go around?  Flashbacks are one staple.  In this episode we have an extended flashback to Raoh's past encounter with Fudo, the only man to ever truly frighten him, as well as Fudo's eventual conversion into the gentle giant of the present.  This conversion was, of course, at the hands of Yuria, the idealized female figure who, as an object of desire, has driven this last arc.  Simply witnessing her kindness is enough to reform Fudo.  We're also reminded again that the young Yuria looked an awful lot like Lynn, furthering the idea that all of the significant female characters in the series (all 3 or 4 of them) are basically the same person.


(The perspective here is a great example of the grandiose overstatement inherent in Fist of the North Star's style, with characters like Fudo and Raoh being not only giants but also growing and shrinking at the whim of the animator.)

There's a kind of paradoxical nature to the recent flashbacks in this series.  On the one hand, any flashback establishes the primacy of the past as a way of understanding who the characters are today.  This logic works for both mythic (e. g. Fist of the North Star) and psychological (e.g. Lost) ideas of character.  When Fudo is forced to don his old battle armour again and become "the Ogre", it's the return of the repressed writ large and violent.  Kenshiro's new ability to channel the skills of his defeated foes also plays into this dynamic.

But at the same time these late-series flashbacks are a bit of a retcon.  Characters like Raoh and Fudo are ascribed motivations that have never been mentioned before but are suddenly all important.  At the same time as the in-story past is made more important, the past that we ourselves remember -- the past of the series -- has become less important and even cast as unreal compared to these characters' newly-established backgrounds.  This is the essential paradox surrounding retcons, both the obvious dimension-bending ones seen in superhero comics and the subtler ones seen elsewhere.

It is not that flashbacks are necessarily filler -- they can often reveal crucial information.  And in Fist of the North Star they reflect one of the main ideas of the series, a lost age of peace and prosperity ruined by degeneracy and complacency.  But they stop the narrative momentum of the series in its tracks, and interrupt the flow inherent to any good fight scene.  As the fights become talkier and more flashback-dominated, it becomes less of an action series and more of a series that uses fights as an inciting dramatic event but is basically not really interested in them.

Another key time-filling technique can be seen in this episode's interstitial action sequence with Kenshiro.  This is a familiar pattern for the fourth and final "part" of the series: while Raoh and the Goshashei have plot-relevant battles at the start and end of each episode, Kenshiro takes on minions in the middle.  These guys are basically the image of your average Fist of the North Star mook, a mixture of 80s countercultures that embody youth degeneracy.


There's a bit of a change to the formula of these battles, as at this point in the plot Kenshiro has been blinded and has to take on the bad guys without use of his sight.  This allows for moments of mortality, such as when the leader of the thugs in this episodes actually hits him.  But for the most part it's the usual exhibition of invulnerability and superman strength.  This was once, of course, the meat of most episodes, but now it seems as though Raoh has become the true protagonist (if not the hero) of the narrative, whereas Kenshiro is just a relic of the older story, a supporting character in his own show.

Of course, what fans deride as filler is not always a bad thing.  If we put prejudice in favour of serialized stories aside, the journey can be just as fulfilling as the destination.  There are great shows that are entirely episodic, and thus from a certain perspective all filler.  But at this point in Fist of the North Star we're just seeing conflicts and ideas we've seen many times before re-enacted again.  Worse yet, there is genuine plot advancement in the episode, which makes the redundant majority of its runtime even more aggravating.  So I would argue that the reliance on time-filling in what is, after all, not that complex a story is a flaw of Fist of the North Star.  But it would very quickly become a flaw of the genre.

Next week: "You haven't ignored the last of me!"