Recent Movie Roundup 28

Here we are again at that special time of year where every single one of the previous year's prestige movies and Oscar hopefuls gets dumped in Israeli movie theaters at the same time.  I've found myself scrambling from one screening to another, just trying to catch up to movies that reviewers abroad have been talking about for months--I suspect I will have seen more than half the total movies I'll watch in 2018 before the end of March.  So far, my reports are mixed.  There are a lot of interesting movies among this year's Oscar nominees, but few of them have lived up to their reputation.  Of the five movies I discuss here, one is remarkable, two others are intriguing but frustrating, and two are genuinely bad.  Let's hope I fare better with the next bunch.

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the bizarre but oddly lovable The Lobster with a stranger, colder work that challenges viewers (like myself) who were willing to follow him into the woods of that earlier movie to keep going.  Perhaps what's strangest about The Killing of a Sacred Deer, however, is how similar it is to The Lobster in its style and approach, even though its tone and subject matter are much darker.  Successful heart surgeon Steven (Colin Farrell) is having regular meetings with Martin (Barry Keoghan), the son of a deceased patient, buying him expensive gifts and inviting him to meet his family: wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and children Kim and Bob (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic).  The early parts of the film operate within the familiar forms of a psychological thriller, introducing a seemingly normal (if suspicious) situation and slowly amping up the wrongness, as Martin insinuates himself further and further into Steven's life and makes more demands on his time.  But because Killing is written with the same stiff, oddball speech patterns, the same indifference to the norms of polite conversation, that Lanthimos used in The Lobster, it can be hard to tell where the wrongness we're supposed to notice ends, and where the kind that is the hallmark of this director's movies begins.  When Steven straight-facedly informs a colleague that Kim has recently started menstruating, or Bob and Martin debate whether the latter has sufficient armpit hair, that's a weirdness that is simply part of the film's world.  But when Bob, and then Kim, suddenly begin to suffer from a mysterious paralysis, and Martin informs Steven that he must choose which of his family members to kill before the illness kills them all, that's a weirdness that everyone notices (even if it takes Steven and Anna a while to believe in it).
  
  Killing is thus a parody of thrillers in which the unacknowledged guilt of overprivileged men comes back to haunt them, and a completely earnest example of one.  It is also an urgent, compelling movie.  Between the cast, Lanthimos's deliberate direction, and the intrusive soundtrack, the film expertly ratchets up the tension of its situation, and makes its characters, robotic as their speech and behavior can sometimes seem, into people whose fate we care about.  (In particular, Kidman is great at finding a person at the heart of her strange character, whose fear, desperation, and anger are palpable even as she explains to her husband that he should kill one of their children because they can still have another one.)
  
  Nevertheless, Lanthimos's style and the chilliness of Killing's story make for a challenging combination.  For all the distance it imposed from its characters, The Lobster was ultimately a compassionate film.  It saw them as foolish and weak, but also took care to remind us that it was the world they lived in, with its arbitrary definitions of what an acceptable relationship looks like, that allowed those traits to grow paramount and destroy the characters' lives.  Killing has no such compassion.  It derides Steven, who beneath his guise as a strong, benevolent patriarch is fundamentally weak, incapable of admitting fault, and constantly looking to make his horrific situation easy on himself regardless of how much pain that causes the rest of the family.  But it offers no respite in the form of Anna, Kim, or Bob, who as soon as they realize that Steven needs to choose between them start turning on each other and trying to manipulate him into making a choice that leaves them alive.  Even more disturbingly, as Steven's weakness becomes apparent, they turn to Martin, who embodies the virtues of male strength and decisiveness that their patriarch has proven himself incapable of.  It's obvious that Lanthimos is trying to comment on the destructiveness of male pride and self-regard, but in a film that lacks The Lobster's oddball warmth, that condemnation quickly becomes indistinguishable from depiction.  By the time the film ends, there's no one left to feel sorry for, and one is left with the feeling of having watched something expertly-turned but fundamentally empty.
  
  
• Molly's Game - There's really only one reason to seek out this movie, and that's the morbid curiosity aroused by the idea of Aaron Sorkin writing a female lead.  The result feels not unlike the famous comic strip needling Frank Miller for his inability to write women who are not overly-sexualized prostitutes.  Not that Sorkin is as casually demeaning as Miller, but that the attempt ends up being so revealing, not only of his hangups about women, but of his obsession with elites.  The titular Molly is Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a bright overachiever who stumbles into running high-stakes poker games for movie stars, CEOs, and trust fund kids, and after a decade finds herself at the center of a RICO case when it turns out that some of her clients were mobsters who were using her games to launder money.  The film alternates between flashbacks that narrate Molly's rise and fall, and two-hander scenes with her lawyer Charlie (Idris Elba, who rattles off Sorkin's dialogue with an ease and naturalism that puts nearly all the actors who have done so before him--a rather storied bunch, as you'll recall--to shame), who is initially reluctant to believe that Molly ran a clean game and had no idea who her shady players were.  (The film is based on a book by the real Bloom, who obviously has every motivation to make herself seem as innocent as possible.  For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to treat the film's Molly as a purely fictional creation, since between Bloom and Sorkin I have no way of knowing how close she is to the truth.)
  
  As much as the question of Molly's guilt dominates the film's early scenes, this is not the trial that it eventually puts her on.  The idea that she might have been in deep with the mob is quickly dismissed, and the film even makes a reasonably compelling argument that the seizure of her assets and the exaggerated sentencing recommendation made by the prosecution are intimidation tactics meant to secure her cooperation as a witness.  But what really occupies Charlie, and the movie, when they try to figure out its main character is the question of class.  By which I mean not the socioeconomic state, but the mode of being--is Molly a person of character and integrity, or is she a fame-whore?  This is, to state the obvious, a ridiculous question--on the one hand, completely irrelevant to the issue of whether Molly deserves to go to prison, and on the other hand, completely inadequate to summing up her moral failures.  By her own admission, Molly built her career by roping in enthusiastic but outmatched players for her regulars to fleece, and created an atmosphere of male hedonism and entitlement that she both despised and used to get rich.  The film hangs its approval of her on the things she didn't do--she didn't employ leg-breakers to collect her outstanding debts; she refuses to name the famous players in her games, or reveal the dishy tidbits of gossip she collected about them.  But not doing bad things doesn't make you a good person, and being morally upright in a den of debauchery and corruption that you yourself built is not the testament of good character the film seems to think it is.  If anything, it makes Molly look kind of stupid.  She had the privilege, resources, and skills to make a successful legitimate career at anything she put her mind to, but instead she chose to live half in the shadows, and ended up where people who do that usually end up.
  
  A much more plausible reading of the story Molly's Game tries to tell is that its title character is simply someone who found an easy, glamorous way to make money and rolled with it without thinking about the consequences.  Instead, the film tries to paint her as a saint for running a semi-honest game and refusing to name her players.  More importantly, it refuses to even consider the possibility that Molly was just as star-struck as her clients by the rooms she was moving in. Which feels not just like an expression of Sorkin's issues writing women, but bound up in his ideas about class, in a way that ends up exposing how much those two hangups have to do with each other.  When Molly first asks Charlie to represent her, he refuses because he sees her as someone who is cheap and tawdry, a tabloid queen who wrote a book to cash in on her infamy.  Even if you tried to ignore the way the film ties feminized behavior to a lack of integrity, Sorkin makes it impossible--Charlie, who is making his daughter read The Crucible, describes it as a story about "what happens when teenage girls gossip".
  
  Molly's journey of proving her worth, then, is a journey of demonstrating that she is above petty, girlish preoccupations with fame and celebrity.  This all culminates in a truly dreadful scene in which Molly confronts her domineering father (Kevin Costner) who explains to her that the reason she chose to torpedo her prospects by running a poker game is that she was trying to get back at him for cheating on her mother.  Throughout the film, there have been faint hints at an alternate explanation for Molly's actions, her simmering rage at the entitled, sneering men who will never see her as their equal.  But this scene takes that rage and pathologizes it, by pretending that all of these men were merely stand-ins for Molly's father.  In other words, this is what you get when Aaron Sorkin writes a heroine: someone who, in order to prove her worth, has to demonstrate that she transcends womanhood; someone who spends the entire movie earning the approval of men; and someone who isn't even allowed to feel anger at this situation before being informed that her problem isn't the world, but her own personal hangups.  Honestly, I shouldn't have expected any better.
  
  
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Martin McDonagh's third film has proven extremely polarizing, garnering both raves and condemnation.  But given how much I enjoyed his previous In Bruges, I was still surprised by how much it fell flat for me, its formal experimentation and political commentary constantly ringing the wrong, sour notes.  I do, however, feel like I've got a handle on why this film seems to divide its audience so starkly.  Despite its heavy subject matter--the aftermath of the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, and simmering racial tensions and police brutality in the titular small town--Three Billboards is a comedy (it actually deserved to be classed in the Golden Globes comedy category far more than Get Out).  What's more, it's a comedy that relies for its effect primarily on shock and outrage, on the vicious insults lobbed back and forth between its characters, the sudden violence that erupts between them, and their cavalier way with both racist insults and the accusation of racism.  That's the sort of thing that either really works for you or really doesn't, and in my case nearly every scene where Three Billboards tried to get a rise out of me, whether through shock or laughter, fell flat.  The film ended up feeling stagy and contrived, its characters elevated only by fine performances, not a cluttered, unfocused script or McDonagh's direction.
  
  The three billboards of the title are rented by grieving mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand).  Their text--"Raped While Dying" "And Still No Arrests?" "How Come, Chief Willoughby?"--is intended to needle the town's police department, who have failed to capture the killer of Mildred's teenage daughter Angela.  While Mildred's righteous rage is sympathetic, it's made clear very early on that it's also at least partly misplaced.  Despite severe problems in his department, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is a decent man who earnestly tried to solve the murder, but simply had no evidence to go on.  To add insult to injury, he's dying of cancer, which Mildred knew when she paid for the billboards.  For the rest of the film, Mildred's anger drives her to greater extremes of hostility and violence, even towards people sympathetic to her cause.  What's also made clear, however, is that the town is far more outraged by Mildred's actions than by Angela's murder--the latter they find regrettable but somehow within the "normal" scheme of things, whereas Mildred's choice to lash out in anger and tar an upstanding member of the community is perceived as beyond the pale.  She quickly starts receiving public condemnation, threats, and even outright violence.
  
  This is--or should be--the beating heart of the film, and yet Three Billboards can't seem to keep its focus on it.  It veers off in odd, increasingly theatrical tangents, such as a mid-story twist involving Willoughby that's meant to be touching but just comes off as melodramatic (and which results in him functioning as McDonagh's mouthpiece, informing the other characters who they are and what they want).  A few of these set-pieces land, most notably a confrontation between Mildred and Willoughby in which they trade increasingly nasty, personal insults until he suddenly starts coughing blood, horrifying them both.  But for the most part, I found the characters' behavior inhuman.  When it's revealed, for example, that not only were Mildred and Angela fighting the last time they spoke, but that Mildred ended the fight by saying "I hope you get raped", I had to roll my eyes.  This isn't the behavior of a well-written character.  It's McDonagh putting his finger on the scale, trying to wring the maximum amount of drama out of a story that would have been much more dramatic if it had simply been allowed to breathe.
  
  And then there's the matter of the film's handling of racism.  One of the reasons that the disparity between the reaction to Angela's murder and to Mildred putting up the billboards doesn't get the space is deserves is that most of Three Billboards's second half is focused on the character of Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a deputy in Willoughby's department with a history of violence towards people of color.  Dixon is initially portrayed as stupid, belligerent, and, yes, racist, but in the second half of the film he undergoes a moral awakening and comes to support Mildred in her quest for justice.  This has led to a flurry of condemnation of the film.  Though I'm not categorically opposed to redemption stories for characters like Dixon--if we're going to spend so much time with toxic male characters, it might be nice to see some of them realize that they want to be better, and make efforts to achieve that without someone else having to "save" them--I have to agree that the execution in Three Billboards is appalling, and like much else about the film, suffers from the script's sloppiness.
  
  Firstly, there is the way that Dixon's malice is minimized, and even made fun of.  Though the other (white) characters condemn him for his racism and racially-motivated violence, they also treat it as something of a joke.  It's as if racism were a cudgel that the various white people in the movie can use against each other, not something that affects actual marginalized people--as when Mildred hurls Dixon's past abuse of a black prisoner at him as a way of putting him on his back foot.  When the few black characters in the movie interact with Dixon, we see contempt, but not fear, as if Three Billboards genuinely doesn't realize that to some people, Dixon isn't just stupid or mean, but genuinely dangerous.  And when Dixon starts his process of growth, his interactions with people of color end.  In a touching scene, he apologizes to the man who rented Mildred the billboards, whom he had previously viciously beaten.  But this victim is white, and there's no sense that Dixon's growth involves recognizing the debt he owes to Ebbing's non-white residents.  This leads to the film's strange ending, in which Mildred and Dixon join forces to deliver vigilante justice to evildoers.  You can sort of see what McDonagh is going for with this final twist--the idea that these two damaged, rage-filled people can find absolution by having each other's back--but in the context of the story Three Billboards is telling, this once again feels like a poorly thought-out plot twist that doesn't really land.
  
  
• Call Me by Your Name - Luca Guadagnino's gorgeous, heartfelt movie takes place over a single languorous summer in rural Italy in the early 80s, where Elio (Timothée Chalamet), the precocious 17-year-old son of an archaeology professor (Michael Stuhlberg), falls in love with his father's summer assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer).  Viewers coming in knowing that Call Me by Your Name is a love story might find themselves feeling frustrated, as Elio and Oliver spend so long circling around each other and, in some cases, falling out of each other's orbits.  They spend as much of the first half of the movie's two-plus hours swimming, lounging on the grass, exploring the countryside, and hanging out with the other young people from the village, as they do pining for each other, much less making concrete steps towards acting on their attraction.
  
  This frustration, however, is very much a reflection of Elio's own feelings.  One of the things that Call Me by Your Name manages, which hardly any other story of first love even attempts, is to bring across the fact that Elio is in many ways still a child.  He can be intelligent and thoughtful, but also silly or moody.  He and Oliver go back and forth between serious conversations about music and philosophy, immature sniping that doesn't acknowledge the real reason for the tension between them, and boyish roughhousing, and for a while it's not clear which of these Elio truly wants--not even, one suspects, to himself.  Choosing to open himself up to Oliver means letting go of that last bit of his childhood, not just in the sense of surrendering his romantic and sexual inexperience, but also of having to engage with the world as an adult, not an indulged, favorite child.  It's been said many times, but whereas straight romances often sand down their characters' personality in the pursuit of vague notion of "love", gay romances seem to have an easier time treating their lovers as human beings with their own idiosyncrasies.  This is what happens in Call Me by Your Name, in which Elio's progress towards being able to articulate his desire for Oliver, and to demand that it be taken seriously as the feelings of an adult rather than a child's crush, is at the heart of the seemingly meandering first half of the movie.  (It's for this reason, also, that despite everything else going on right now, and despite Hammer being and looking much older than his character's age, the romance in Call Me by Your Name never feels exploitative.  We're never in any doubt that this is Elio's choice, and that he came to it on his own.)
  
  Even when that threshold is crossed, Call Me by Your Name finds ways of making the romance between Elio and Oliver feel like something that is about them specifically.  In their first love scene, they spend several minutes simply holding each other, overjoyed to finally be able to do something they've clearly been holding themselves back from for weeks.  Unlike the novel on which it was based, Call Me by Your Name avoids explicit sex scenes and nudity (male nudity, that is; there is a tossed-off scene of female nudity that feels all the more jarring given how carefully the film otherwise avoids prurience).  But it is very frank about the role that sex and physical desire play in Elio and Oliver's relationship, whether it's the difference in their experience, or their frustrated need to touch each other in public, or their joy in each other's bodies.  The film is also surprisingly, and refreshingly, uninterested in making homophobia or social disapproval the crux of its story.  These forces exist in the background, and Oliver in particular is clearly experienced at navigating them and teaching Elio how to do the same.  But this isn't a story about shame or self-loathing, and it ends on a profound note of acceptance--not just of Elio by his parents, but of Elio by himself.  The crux of Call Me by Your Name is the idea that love should be experienced, even when it's scary or socially unacceptable, and even when it's likely to lead to heartbreak.  It holds out the hope of a world that respects and accepts that love no matter what form it takes, and gives young people like Elio the space they need to explore who they are.
  
  
• Phantom Thread - Paul Thomas Anderson's latest study of a deranged genius cloaks itself in the guise of a measured costume drama.  Set in the aristocratic circles of 50s London, the film follows society dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he embarks on the latest of his affairs, with Alma (Vicky Krieps), a much-younger waitress he meets while on holiday.  It's clear from the film's opening scenes, in which Reynolds's previous girlfriend is efficiently gotten rid of by his sister and business partner Cyril (Lesley Manville), that these romances are common for Reynolds and generally follow the same trajectory--a period of intense infatuation followed by a sudden loss of interest, then wounded exasperation as the latest paramour tries to understand what she did wrong.  As his first encounters with Alma make it clear, Reynolds uses his lovers as muses, draping them with ever more elaborate and sumptuous gowns (the film is, if nothing else, an absolute delight for costume aficionados).  But it's not just when they wear his clothes that he seems to want them to be obedient dummies--a running theme through the film is his sporadic frustration at Alma making noise while at the breakfast table, which Reynolds finds unbearably distracting.  It's a portrait of the indulged, cossetted male artist, his selfishness and tantrums tolerated, and even encouraged, on the grounds that he needs total acquiescence to do his work.  The fact that Reynolds' art is rooted in the feminine, and that he is surrounded by women--not just Alma and Cyril, but also his clients, and the seamstresses who make his vision a reality but don't earn the designation of artist--is a reminder that the indulgence he enjoys is rooted less in his artistry (which is very real) but in his gender.  That he is able, by pretending weakness and delicacy, to bully all the women around him into thinking only of his needs and desires, never of their own.
  
  It's a brilliant depiction (not least because of Day-Lewis's performance, which turns on a dime from fussy and wounded, to outraged and malicious), but what Phantom Thread does with it, and with Reynolds and Alma's relationship, is unformed, maybe even glib.  It's clear from the first moment that Alma believes in Reynolds in a way that no one before her has, even as she sees his shortcomings more clearly.  In an early sequence, she is outraged on his behalf when a wealthy patron falls down drunk while wearing one of Reynolds's dresses, insisting that this is disrespectful to him as an artist.  But Alma also loves Reynolds for his presentation of himself as weak and childish.  She enjoys indulging him and taking care of him, and becomes frustrated when the real man--who is merely spoiled, not vulnerable--starts chafing against her attempts to become a true partner in his life.  Her solution to this--which is essentially to force Reynolds to become the weak, dependent person he has been pretending to be--should be a brilliant turn of the screw in what has turned out to be a twisty psychological drama.  But it ends up feeling empty and contrived.
  
  A big part of the problem is that we never get a strong sense of who Alma is and why she acts as she does (despite Krieps's captivating, emotive performance).  Is she a canny operator who realizes she's landed on her feet and will do anything to secure her comfort?  Is she a psychopath molding a victim into a perfect partner?  Is she a normal woman who has fallen in love with a monstrously selfish man, who must become a monster herself in order to keep him?  Or is Phantom Thread genuinely a love story, between two extremely weird people who just happen to be perfect for one another?  The film doesn't seem interested in answering that question, or even in stressing the ambiguity.  It appears content to luxuriate in its fine performances, gorgeous cinematography and music, and of course its beautiful dresses.  But there's something far nastier and cleverer at the heart of this story, and this is never developed as fully as it might have been.

Mad as Hell: Thoughts on Aaron Sorkin

Kind of an obvious insight, but the problem with Sorkin is that when you criticize his shows, you turn into a Sorkin character.
— emilynussbaum (@emilynussbaum) December 7, 2014

I had no plans to comment on "Oh, Shenandoah," the now-infamous penultimate episode of Aaron Sorkin's final (?) TV series The Newsroom.  I've tried not to think about Sorkin since I gave up on The Newsroom two episodes into its beleaguered run, when it became clear that the flaws that had marred his previous series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip--preachy characters who exist only to speechify, regressive politics, an elitism as overweening as it was unfounded, and a genuine disdain for women--were back in force, and it was actually a bit of a shock to discover that he was still capable of arousing as much outrage and indignation as "Oh, Shenandoah" did.  It seemed like a lot more fun to just sit back and watch the wall-to-wall pans appear--from Libby Hill at The AV Club, Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker, James Poniewozik at Time, Tara Ariano at Previously.TV, Ariane Lange at BuzzFeed, Todd VanDerWerff at Vox.com, Emily Yoshida at The Verge, Sonia Saraiya at Salon, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd at Jezebel, to name but a partial sample.

The episode came under fire for multiple sins, from the hackneyed and cheesy shuffling off of a major character to the return of an unearned romance between two increasingly unpleasant characters, but the plot strand that has garnered the most attention and the most outrage involves a producer in the titular newsroom conducting a pre-interview with a rape victim who, having been confronted with the indifference of the justice system to her ordeal, has started a website on which victims like her can name and shame their rapists.  As multiple critics have noted, instead of dealing with the real and legitimate questions raised by such a tactic (while also acknowledging that it may be the only recourse left to victims such as this character), the scene centers on the male character's discomfort with it, and on his unwillingness to believe the victim despite the plausibility of her story.  As Lange writes:

Sitting in a Princeton dorm room, Don tries to convince Mary to take her website down, "to ensure an innocent person isn't destroyed." What about the men, he essentially pleads. One example he offers of the type of person who might post a false allegation on the site is "a woman who feels rejected." And we're meant to be on his side, really. In rape culture, being accused of rape is worse than rape. In rape culture, when we have to decide whose story to believe, it is our moral obligation to believe that the alleged attacker is telling the truth and the alleged victim is a liar.

You can read more about the problems in "Oh, Shenandoah" in any of the links above--if nothing else, the material has inspired many of these writers to greatness--but as I said, I had no intention of joining the fray.  Until, that is, I saw what at first seemed like a mere appendage to the brouhaha, a series of tweets from Alena Smith, a former Newsroom writer.  I'm going to quote Smith's statement in full--because it's short, but also because I want to make some things clear before we talk abut the response to it.

As @emilynussbaum points out in her review of tonight's ep, you can't criticize Sorkin without turning into one of his characters.
— Alena Smith (@internetalena) December 8, 2014

So when I tried to argue, in the writers' room, that we maybe skip the storyline where a rape victim gets interrogated by a random man...
— Alena Smith (@internetalena) December 8, 2014

I ended up getting kicked out of the room and screamed at just like Hallie would have for a "bad tweet."
— Alena Smith (@internetalena) December 8, 2014

I found the experience quite boring. I wanted to fight with Aaron about the NSA, not gender. I didn't like getting cast in his outdated role
— Alena Smith (@internetalena) December 8, 2014

A few points worth making about this statement: it's brief and to the point.  It isn't angry or emotional (not that there's anything wrong with being angry or emotional, but it isn't).  It doesn't name anyone except Smith and Sorkin.  The only experiences, feelings, and ideas it reports are Smith's.  It doesn't violate anyone's privacy--except, possibly, Sorkin's, though only in the sense that it references a storyline that he had, by the time the tweets were published, already released into the world with his name signed to it, and which multiple sources had already condemned.  It's hard to imagine how Smith could have been any more civil or collegial in talking about her own experiences in the Newsroom writers' room--unless, of course, she chose simply not to talk about them at all.

Of course, if you've ever been a woman who has expressed criticism of a man--especially a more powerful man--in a public forum, you know that none of this matters.  How soft, polite, and matter-of-fact your statement is doesn't mean anything--the very fact of having made it puts you in the wrong.  And because the men who flock to the "defense" of the man you dared to criticize have some instinctive understanding that they can't actually say this, what you're in for (assuming it's not the more gruesome option of rape threats, death threats, and doxxing) is a death by a thousand cuts.  A million different ways in which you were wrong, not in what you said, but in how you chose to say it.  You've accused someone of the heinous crime of being sexist (which is of course far worse than actually experiencing sexism).  You've violated their privacy (by speaking about your own experiences).  You're calling for censorship and thought police (say the people who would just like you to shut up and go away).  You were rude (there's no actual response to this; the rudeness is inherent in your very existence).  You're just trying to get attention (what the hell is wrong with someone in the entertainment industry trying to get attention?).  You're endangering your career (somehow the concern-trolls who raise this prospect never actually do anything to make sure that it doesn't happen).

If all of this is starting to ring a bell, go back and read the excerpt from Lange's review of "Oh, Shenandoah" above.  Though the subjects at hand are very different, the same dynamic is at play.  A woman speaking out about her experiences makes a man uncomfortable, so he tries to argue that the choice to speak is inherently illegitimate--even though speaking out is demonstrably the only way to achieve any real change.

And here's where the whole thing becomes wonderfully surreal.  I've seen Sorkin defenders making these Don-esque arguments, towards Smith and towards the reviewers who criticized "Oh, Shenandoah" (though, for some completely unfathomable reason, only towards the female reviewers).  But yesterday their ranks were joined by Sorkin himself.  After largely ignoring the criticism of "Oh, Shenandoah," and confirming the details of Smith's account (though he also claims that she gave her "enthusiastic support" to a revised version of the rape storyline), Sorkin gets down to what he feels is the actual controversy of the day.  I don't usually go in for fisking, but this is simply too beautiful for any other approach:

I was surprised to be told this morning that Alena had tweeted out her unhappiness with the story.

Obviously, the real issue here isn't the tone-deaf and offensive rape storyline I wrote, but the fact that a woman publicly expressed her disapproval of it!

But I was even more surprised that she had so casually violated the most important rule of working in a writers room which is confidentiality.

This is a thing that an actual human being has written, and which he clearly expects other actual human beings to take seriously.  Even taking into account Sorkin's reputation for self-importance, it's a little hard to take in.

It was a room in which people felt safe enough to discuss private and intimate details of their lives in the hope of bringing dimension to stories that were being pitched.

Please note: none of these private and intimate details were mentioned in Smith's tweets, and neither was anyone other than Sorkin himself.  The notion that she has violated anyone's privacy is utterly false and plainly a derailment tactic.

That’s what happens in writers rooms and while ours was the first one Alena ever worked in

Not-too-subtle dig at female writer's inexperience, as opposed to the male writer, who Knows How Things Work: check.

the importance of privacy was made clear to everyone on our first day of work and was reinforced constantly. I’m saddened that she’s broken that trust.

Left unspoken: what other recourse Smith had given that her valid, legitimate objections to a storyline that has garnered near-universal pans were shut down by the person running that oh-so-private writers' room.

What we're seeing here is Aaron Sorkin becoming an Aaron Sorkin character, making the same arguments as Don.  In his conception of reality, a woman who feels that she's been treated unjustly and has no hope of redress from the hierarchy above her, also has no right to speak out, because doing so is Rude.

As beautiful as this conflation of fiction and reality is, it actually gets better.  Way back in 2007, Sorkin wrote the Studio 60 episode "4 A.M. Miracle," in which lead character Matt Albie tries to avoid a network lawyer who wants to depose him about a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment in his predecessors' writers' room--a storyline itself based on a suit filed against the production of Friends in 1999.  Though he initially dismisses the suit (and the woman bringing it) as frivolous, Matt is eventually persuaded that the atmosphere in the writers' room was indeed toxic and hostile to women (though it is worth noting that he only accepts this once he learns that the lewd, sexual comments rife in the room were directed at his on-and-off girlfriend, Harriet Hayes).  Nevertheless, he tells the lawyer, he will help to quash the suit, because "No conversation like this has ever or would ever go on in a room I was running.  But there's a lot of good writing that comes out of rooms I don't run."

It's a testament to how generally vile Studio 60 was on all fronts, including gender, that this quote didn't get more play at the time.  Matt isn't simply saying, as defenders of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen will occasionally do, that great art can be an excuse for the abuse of women and girls.  He's saying that the abuse of women and girls might be necessary to the production of great art (this is leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether Studio 60's titular show-within-a-show was art at all, much less the great kind), and that, as an artist himself, he has to prioritize that over the safety of women (or people of color, or LGBTQ people).  The possibility that those people might have voices worth hearing, and that the hostile environment that Matt holds more valuable than their safety might be preventing from speaking up, is never even considered.

What we have here is a pattern.  On The Newsroom, on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and in real life, we have Sorkin repeatedly prioritizing the comfort of men--powerful, privileged men like himself--over the safety of women.  To be clear, I'm not saying that Smith's experience was comparable to rape or sexual harassment.  I'm not even saying that Aaron Sorkin wasn't fully within his rights to shut down a conversation with his employee, or order her out of the room (I don't even think that Smith is saying this; her tweets seem mainly to be about venting the frustration of that argument, and expressing some well-earned schadenfreude at having been proven right).  But in all three cases, there is an assumption that a woman speaking out is fundamentally wrong.  That no matter how unfair her experience was--and please take a moment to admire Don/Matt/Sorkin for recognizing that unfairness--and how limited her options are in response, speaking about it makes her the bad guy, because the system and its smooth running are more important than she is.  True, this approach means that nothing will ever change, but... well... let's pretend that isn't exactly what Sorkin wants.

What makes the Smith incident and Sorkin's reaction to it all the more delicious is that, judging by what I've read by her, Alena Smith's worldview may not be that different from her former boss's.  Coincidentally (or not?), she had an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books this week.  "You Can't Make a Living: Digital Media, the End of TV's Golden Age, and the Death Scene of the American Playwright" is a long, interesting, perhaps tendentious piece that argues that writing for the theater has become effectively a hobby (and has been progressing towards that state since the 1920s) and that writing for television is going the same way.  Smith's analysis has many echoes of the bugbears that appear in Sorkin's writing: she discusses the advent of new media and the de-professionalization of many creative pursuits, the audience's shifting tastes which make it difficult for quality entertainment to get off the ground, and, of course, the internet.  The difference between Smith and Sorkin is that she doesn't come at the situation from a position of disdain.  She's identifying trends that she clearly views as problematic, but she doesn't depict them--as Sorkin often does--as the death knell of civilization.  Nor is she trapped by the delusion that these processes can somehow be reversed, returning us a golden age when everything was better.  This, not to put too fine a point on it, is what The Newsroom should have been.  There are obvious problems with new media, citizen journalism, and the effects that the internet has had on the creative industry that are worth talking about (just as there are obvious problems with a website where women can identify alleged rapists, that are equally worth talking about).  But the people we should be hearing from about these problems are people like Smith--thoughtful and cognizant of the inevitability of change--not frothing reactionaries like Sorkin, whose only real concern is with their own comfort and vanity.

I've been thinking for a while about Arthur Chu's essay "Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage."  It's a trenchant, thought-provoking piece that argues that flare-ups like the recent (and still ongoing, in some places) GamerGate are part of a reactionary stream within popular culture, which periodically explodes with the rage of white males' fear that their central role within it is being displaced--by women, by black people, by gays.  The whole thing is worth reading, and not just if you're interested in GamerGate, but it was this paragraph that suddenly lit a lightbulb over my head, and clarified for me why I've increasingly found Aaron Sorkin impossible to stand, and why even his earlier, better-written work has become nigh-unwatchable for me:

If you want to get a good idea of the "mood" of middle-class white people in the '70s, rewatch Network and pay attention to Peter Finch's Oscar-winning "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" monologue. Some of his grievances are legitimate. Some of them are incoherent, even bigoted. But all of them add up to a coiled-up rage, ready to lash out at the nearest target.

Network is, of course, Aaron Sorkin's touchstone text.  He references it, and its writer Paddy Chayefsky, repeatedly in both his writing and his public statements.  Both Studio 60 and The Newsroom are, in large parts, attempts to remake it for the modern era.  But as Chu notes, its influence on his writing is rarely revolutionary.  Sorkin has the reputation of being a liberal, but for more than a decade his commentary about our culture has consistently taken the form of that brave conservative self-conception, the man who stands astride history yelling "stop."  And it is, of course, always a man.  The Newsroom in particular nakedly yearns for the days when great men had a single platform from which to pronounce on the culture, determining right from wrong, highbrow from lowbrow, worthwhile from worthless.  Sorkin's depictions of the enemies of this manly authority are almost inevitably feminized.  His characters' enemies--bloggers, online journalists, gossip columnists, sorority girls, rape victims--are women.  The internet itself is perceived as the tool of women.  For years there's been an assumption floating around Sorkin that his misogyny is a trait distinct from his intellectualism, his idealism, his faith in humanity's potential.  What Chu's essay--and the events of the last 24 hours--have crystallized for me is that they all come from the same place, a world where white men like Sorkin have a platform and women who try to speak out against the system that benefits those men are, at best, misguided souls who must be condescended to by people who aren't really interested in grasping their experiences.  Sorkin thinks of himself as a liberal, but liberals seeks to dismantle unjust systems even at a cost to their own privilege.  As episodes like "Oh, Shenandoah" and his response to Alena Smith demonstrate, there is no injustice so profound as to convince Aaron Sorkin that such a dismantling is necessary.

if you want to be serling or chayefsky you must actively hate authority and privilege, not secretly yearn for it to become good and save us.
— javi grillo-marxuach (@OKBJGM) December 8, 2014

The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, I had what I imagine was a near-universal reaction: why would anyone want to make a movie about Facebook?  That bewilderment persisted even as the film's buzz and reception grew more and more ecstatic, so that it wasn't until a few weeks ago, when I finally gave up and let myself look forward to seeing it, that a more pertinent reason for feeling dubious about The Social Network presented itself: this is an Aaron Sorkin film about the internet.  Whether he's getting back at TWoP moderators by having his West Wing characters describe them as chain-smoking, muumuu-wearing Nurse Ratcheds, or bemoaning the fact that just anyone can start a blog and use it to say that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is not God's gift to the television medium, or blaming the internet for the birther movement, Sorkin's attitude towards the internet seems fueled by equal parts ignorance and disdain.  Even aided by Ben Mezrich's research into Facebook's founding, it seemed unlikely that Sorkin would be able to comprehend the site's importance, the effect that it's had on online and offline life all over the world, and the new kinds of relationships and communities that it has enabled.

It's a good thing, then, that The Social Network is in no way a film about the internet.  It's a film about business, about class, about the clash between old money and new ideas, and between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.  It's a film about being a nerd, but it is not a film about the internet.  The film is framed by discovery depositions in two lawsuits against Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)--by his former business partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), alleging that he was driven out of the company he helped created, and by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Arnie Hammer playing both roles with Josh Pence as a body double) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who claim that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook for them--but the events that these depositions flash back to span only the site's first year in existence.  They cut off when Facebook reaches its millionth subscriber--a drop in the bucket, as the film's closing credits concede--and thus well before it achieves its current cultural significance.  As the film ends, Facebook is still restricted to a small number of prestigious colleges, and Sorkin makes much of the appeal that exclusivity holds for Zuckerberg, who creates the site as a substitute for the Harvard final clubs to which he hasn't been invited.  But Facebook has long since been open to just about everyone on the planet with an internet connection, and the decision to make that transition is left out (perhaps because, in reality, exclusivity was not the site's purpose).  The early cut-off point also means that The Social Network fails to address the growing concerns about Facebook's violation of subscriber privacy and its vulnerability to identity theft.  There is, in short, no discussion in The Social Network of why Facebook works, what it means to its subscribers, and how it has changed the online world.  Indeed, the film could easily be a story about any smart young person who comes up with the next big thing, and has to deal, on the one hand, with an entrenched business establishment that wants to exploit him without understanding what he's created, and on the other hand, with the friends who have helped him get started but who are now a drag on his ambitions.  Sorkin and director David Fincher make riveting stuff of this story, but if you didn't know a thing about Facebook going into the movie theater, you'd probably walk out still wondering why the site was important enough to make a movie about.

Rather than being a film about the internet, or even about Facebook, The Social Network is a character study of Zuckerberg.  Or, more precisely, of Sorkin's version of Zuckerberg.  For convenience's sake, I'm going to keep referring to characters and events in the film as if they were their real-world analogues, but it should be noted that the film takes copious and often derogatory liberties with the truth, and is probably best thought of as a work of creative nonfiction, one that borrows significance from reality (and from the pretense that it is representing it accurately) while telling what is either a fictionalized story or just plain fiction.  Just as he did in his last film, Charlie Wilson's War, Sorkin has changed the facts of history and its players to suit the narrative he wanted to tell.  The crucial difference being that while Charlie Wilson's War was a quintessentially Sorkinish story--at least once Sorkin was done with it--The Social Network is neither the sort of narrative, nor does it have the sort of main character, that he tends to gravitate to.

Sorkin has always written about people--usually men--who are the smartest guys in the room, and his Zuckerberg is furiously intelligent, but he lacks the decency and compassion that Sorkin protagonists usually possess.  Whether they're fighting for justice (A Few Good Men), governing (The American President, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War), or even producing popular entertainment (Sports Night, Studio 60), Sorkin's characters are trying to do good and make the world a better place.  They're not motivated by personal gain, and certainly not by the desire for status and money, as Zuckerberg and his business partners are.  The closest thing to a typical Aaron Sorkin character in The Social Network are the Winklevoss twins, who hold off on suing Zuckerberg and Saverin because they're "gentlemen of Harvard" and find the idea of squabbling over money and going to court over who thought of what first distasteful.  That's an attitude that would have sat well in Sorkin's White House, whose inhabitants were above such petty concerns as money and status and tended to shake their heads over the litigiousness and money-grubbing of American culture (left unsaid is the fact that the West Wing characters, like the Winklevosses, already have money and status, which ties into my observation that the show often seemed to take place in the corridors of power of a monarchy, not a republic), though in The Social Network it's played for laughs--unlike Sorkin's idealized White House, the real world has no room for gentlemen. 

Zuckerberg is everything that the Winklevosses are not--physically unimposing, unsophisticated, unpopular, middle class at best, and, though the film doesn't make much of this, Jewish.  There are a lot of people like him in Harvard, hungrily looking in on the exclusive parties and clubs of the elite, but Zuckerberg is the sort of person who is left out of any party, even the ones he throws.  With a mouth that runs a mile a minute, eyes that seem to bore into whoever or whatever they're looking at, and absolutely no concern for, or recognition of, the feelings of others, Zuckerberg is all brain and no heart, and as the film's events unfold he alienates both friends and strangers with a mixture of arrogance, selfishness, and rage at a world that hasn't yet handed him everything he wants simply for being the smartest guy in the room.  It's a brilliant performance, and Eisenberg, Sorkin, and Fincher are to be commended for it, but it's not a person.  Zuckerberg is a type--the Angry Nerd.  There's nothing individual about him, nothing that doesn't conform to that type's familiar tropes--arrogance that conceals feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, social ineptitude, resentment of those who are wealthy, attractive, and popular, fear and incomprehension of women that quickly shades into hate.  The Social Network is a sufficiently good film, and Eisenberg is a sufficiently actor, that Zuckerberg always feels human.  It's clear that he has feelings, and that those feelings are neither unusual nor unfamiliar.  Like all of us, he wants to be loved and accepted.  But there's nothing unique to Mark Zuckerberg in this portrait, nothing that makes him a single, individual person rather than an emblem of an entire technophilic, socially maladjusted class that creative types like Sorkin enjoy poking at, possibly because they find them utterly terrifying.

The Social Network opens with a scene in which Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, to which he responds by posting vile invectives about her on his LiveJournal, and creating a website on which one can rate the attractiveness of Harvard's female undergraduates.  It ends, several years later, with him desperately refreshing her Facebook page, hoping that she will approve his friend request.  The implication is that Zuckerberg created Facebook, made billions of dollars, and changed the face of the internet because to do all these things was easier, for him, than to simply apologize.  This is a conclusion of Rosebud-ish triteness, and though there is a profitable comparison to be made between The Social Network and Citizen Kane, a crucial difference between the two films is that Zuckerberg isn't nearly as rounded a character--compelling and charismatic, even through his cruelty and selfishness--as Charles Kane.  Neither is he as monstrously evil as There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview, another modern attempt at the Kane type.  In fact, it's difficult to see just what he's done that makes him eligible for the Kane treatment.  Bad business practice?  The film is adamant that Zuckerberg both stole the Winklevosses' idea and drove Saverin out of the company with nothing to show for his initial investment in it, but it also makes it clear that none of these people had what it took to make Facebook what it is today.  What Zuckerberg did was wrong, but if he hadn't done it, there probably wouldn't have been a billion dollar company for Saverin and the Winklevosses to sue him over.  The film recognizes this even as it paints them as victims, but it doesn't extend the same generosity to Zuckerberg.  In the end, it's hard not to conclude that Zuckerberg is damned not because of what he's done, but because of what he is.  "You're going to go through life thinking that women don't like you because you're a nerd," his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend tells him in the film's opening scene.  "I'm here to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that it won't be because of that.  It'll be because you're an asshole."  It's a line that defines both the character and the film.  An asshole is what Zuckerberg is and it's what dooms him to misery, and the fact that along the way he's made a billion dollars is entirely ancillary to both of these facts.

In the end, maybe The Social Network is about the internet, in the sense that it reflects Sorkin's distorted view of it, as a means of elevating sociopaths like Zuckerberg to the kind of power and wealth that a civilized society would deny them, for their and everyone else's protection (but then, keeping power out of the hands of people not smart or compassionate or worthy enough to deserve or use it wisely is a theme that underlies a lot of Sorkin's writing).  It's hard to deny that Facebook, which so often rewards shallowness and cruelty, and which has been manipulated by its creators for greedy and exploitative ends, lends itself to this interpretation, but that's somewhat akin to John Sutherland reading Amazon reviews and concluding that there is no worthwhile criticism of books on the internet.  None of which is to say that The Social Network is not a good film or that it doesn't deserve the plaudits that have been, and will be, heaped upon it.  Eisenberg in particular should be singled out for his work, and Sorkin's feat of making, of a story in which people sit in front of their computers a lot and come up with the revolutionary concept of a relationship status indicator, an engrossing and exciting experience, should certainly be rewarded.  But it's not a film that says much to me--not about the internet, and not about being a nerd.  I already know a lot more about both of these subjects than it does.

Let's Put On a Show: A Comparison

Now that it is over, let us take a moment to praise a show that did not, in life, receive nearly its fair share of accolades. A show about show-making, which starts with the realization, by a respected creator and long-time veteran of the battle between commercial and artistic considerations, that he has stagnated, and allowed the venue for which he has been responsible for decades to stagnate with him. His violent abdication can be remedied only by the return of his former protégé, a brilliant man who parted with his mentor after a brutal humiliation. He, in turn, must find a way to balance his artistic integrity with the financial considerations of his employers, who have little understanding of art and even less interest in learning about it, while battling his attraction to his leading lady, an aggravating but furiously talented woman.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Canadian series Slings & Arrows, which wrapped up its three season run (making for a grand total of eighteen episodes) last year, and which is, in almost every respect, the anti-Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Set in the fictional town of New Burbage, and revolving around its renowned Shakespeare festival, the series's first season opens on the opening night of A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the festival's artistic director, Oliver Welles, this is the play's fifth production, and he sleepwalks through the preparations for a show that, as an unctuous critic puts it, "[doesn't] make demands of the audience," more concerned with ensuring that the audience can hear the bleating of his prop sheep ("Without the bleats, there’s no irony, Maria. Any fool knows that.") than with their ability to see Titania's face during a crucial speech. After the show, a drunken and despondent Oliver reaches out to the person he blames for his artistic malaise, Geoffrey Tennant (a magnetic Paul Gross), a former rising star who crashed and burned after giving only a few performances as Hamlet under Oliver's direction, and who, following this debacle, and a psychiatric commitment, faded into obscurity for seven years. Geoffrey has established his own theatre, situated in a dilapidated warehouse where the phones have been cut off, the toilet overflows, the electricity is dubious at best and the rent is three months overdue, but in which he can be his own master, not a slave to corporate sponsors and a panderer to the degraded taste of an audience that seeks to be comforted rather than challenged.

Nevertheless, when Oliver suddenly dies, Geoffrey reluctantly agrees to take over as the festival's interim artistic director, ultimately taking over the production of the very play that once drove him mad. Standing in Geoffrey's way are: the festival's financial director, Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney, who is also credited as a writer and co-creator, and who, in yet another parallel between Slings & Arrows and Studio 60, appeared in the latter show as the dour sketch writer Andy and co-wrote some of the series's less obnoxious episodes), an occasionally lovable, frequently unbearable buffoon whose real love is for musical theatre; his prima donna, former Ophelia, love of his life and the real reason for his breakdown, the neurotic, narcissistic Ellen Fanshaw; and, oh yes, the ghost of Oliver Welles, who appears periodically to revisit old fights, open old wounds, and criticize Geoffrey's vision of the play.

The most glaring difference between Slings & Arrows and Studio 60--one that at times seems to render a comparison between the two shows almost unfair--is that Slings & Arrows is remarkably well-made. The writing is clever, nimbly combining the obligatory, yet never trite, Shakespearean references with the behind-the-scenes antics of a raucous, ill-disciplined acting company. The pace is never slack, with every minute of screentime being used to its fullest, as opposed to the padded and repetitive Studio 60, which made a mockery out of Sorkin's signature dialogue by using repetition not as an emphasizing device but as padding (does anyone have an accurate count of the number of times the 'there's a company called Trask...' speech is repeated during the show's final plot arc?). The characters are appealing when they're meant to be, and infuriating when they're not. Best of all, the show is genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. Everything, in other words, that Studio 60 should have but never was.

This is not to say that Slings & Arrows is without fault. Although it never reaches the level of shrill hysteria which characterized most of Studio 60's treatment of the struggle between art and commerce, it is not particularly concerned with presenting a balanced and thoughtful position on the issue. The main antagonist in Slings & Arrows's first season is the American harpy Holly Day, a representative of the festival's biggest corporate sponsor who Lady Macbeths Richard into making a play for total control of the festival, as part of her plan to transform New Burbage into a theatrical Disneyland, with mega-venues for blockbuster productions of the Mamma Mia variety, copious shopping opportunities, and a tiny annex set aside for 'traditional' productions like Hamlet. Also, the show's treatment of the behind-the-scenes process often borders on the simplistic, imbuing Geoffrey with almost magical powers of suggestion, and the ability to draw a worthy performance out of almost any person willing to listen--the corporate drone on a management workshop who is inspired to give a stirring reading of 'Now is the winter of our discontent...' , or, beggaring belief even further, the action-flick star out of whom Geoffrey has to fashion a Hamlet. This character, Jack, is portrayed as intelligent, thoughtful, and talented, but he's never appeared on a stage before, and the notion that Geoffrey can not only get him to create a credible Hamlet but to sustain that performance for more than three hours, when by his own admission Jack has never "had to keep it up for more than three-eighths of a page," is nothing short of absurd. (It is here that Gross's charisma comes to the writers' rescue. He has such commanding presence, such an expressive voice and face, that it is almost possible to believe that he is the magician the writers make him out to be.)

In Slings & Arrows's second, and less successful, season, Geoffrey is persuaded to follow up Hamlet with Macbeth, which he initially stages according to detailed notes left by Oliver. Unlike the first season, which proceeded according to the standard let's-put-on-a-show template--beleaguered company triumphs over financial and artistic adversity--the second season starts with Geoffrey in a position of power and ends with him there still, having predictably delivered a stellar production, and the story is therefore rendered slack. There is too distinct a separation between Geoffrey's storyline and Richard's (a prolonged, and at times cringe-inducing, plotline in which Richard, in his attempts to re-brand the festival and draw in new subscribers, falls under the spell of a charismatic PR executive), and an unfortunate repetition of a first season plotline about two ingenues falling in love (in the first season, these were Jack and his Ophelia, a pre-Mean Girls Rachel McAdams; in the second season, Romeo and Juliet become lovers offstage as well as on).

Most problematic is the absence of a parallel between Geoffrey's story and that of the play. In the first season, Geoffrey is Hamlet, who runs away from his obligations and is finally forced to meet them through the urgings of an importunate ghost and his own conscience. At the beginning of the second season, there is an indication that Geoffrey's increasing obsession with Oliver's vision for the play mirrors Macbeth's with Duncan, and that Geoffrey will be forced to symbolically kill his king before he can make the play his own. If the parallel was ever intended, its execution is muddled, with Geoffrey's animosity soon transferred from Oliver to his star, Henry, whose personal vision of the character, and unwillingness to risk humiliation by trying something new, threaten to calcify the entire performance. Unfortunately, through a flaw in either the acting or the way the character is written, we never get the sense that Henry has a great Macbeth in him. He comes across as hammy and broad, and the ultimate triumph of his collaboration with Geoffrey feels unearned.

The second season is, however, noteworthy for two sequences that touch on a difference between theatre and pre-filmed television, one that viewers exclusively grounded in the latter don't tend to think about--the ephemeral quality of a performance, and the input that a live audience has into it. Fed up with Henry's insubordination, Geoffrey fires him and puts his unprepared, unsuited understudy Jerry on stage instead. The performance Jerry produces--halting, uncertain, and missing those chunks of the text he never managed to learn or forgot out of nervousness--is fueled by adrenalin and fear. It's a one-time feat, as Ellen later tells Geoffrey, an unsustainable high note. Later, Geoffrey forces Henry to perform the play as he was directed to by setting the rest of the company against him, even going so far as to have Ellen strip Henry naked on stage, and once again producing a performance rooted primarily in the actor's emotions.

In spite of the fact that it also revolves around a live performance, and that many of the show-within-a-show's castmembers cut their teeth before live audiences, there is rarely a corresponding acknowledgment in Studio 60 of the effect that an audience has on a performer and a performance. The audience in the studio is no more or less important, and makes no more of a contribution to the creative process, than the folks watching at home, and deviations from the script are invariably depicted as errors and mishaps (most notably in the fundamentally unapologetic apology episode "The Disaster Show", which also gave me a metafictional headache by casting Allison Janney as herself opposite her former West Wing alumni, who are playing fictional characters)--we never see the actors ad-libbing, for example.

"There's nothing more boring than perfection. Imprecision. Fear. This is what gets them to their feet." Geoffrey tells a terrified Jack before sending him onstage. He's speaking about the words of a man who epitomizes the Western canon, and he doesn't care, because although he loves and respects those words, his reverences is reserved for their performance, no two of which are alike, and no one of which has ever been perfect, or indeed what their writer envisioned. Studio 60 can't find it in itself to treat the script of a sketch comedy show with anything short of awe, or to consider that there is a component of the performance that doesn't come from the script (even the actors are given short shrift in this respect: Harriet is frequently referred to as a conduit, albeit an ideal one, for Matt's words, but I can't remember a single instance in which her performance adds the missing ingredient that sets those words on fire), because the show's emotional center rests with the writer. It's perfectly valid to tell a story about a writer, but setting that story in an ensemble piece about an intensely collaborative effort creates a dissonance that plagued Studio 60 throughout its existence.

Slings & Arrows regains its footing in its third and final season, which eschews the straightforward defeat-to-glory plot progression of the first season, and the shapelessness of the second. Geoffrey's Macbeth has had a triumphant season, culminating in a run on Broadway. When our hero announces his intention to complete the tragic triptych by staging King Lear, he is deluged by calls from every television and film actor over sixty (William Shatner is said to be particularly interested). Iconoclastic to the last, Geoffrey chooses a respected stage actor, Charles, for his Lear. At which point his life comes crashing down on his head. Charles turns out to be a tyrant, who ceases from berating and bullying his fellow actors only during those periods in which he's high on heroin. It finally emerges that Charles is dying, a fact which he begs Geoffrey to keep secret just long enough for Charles to perform in the play. Geoffrey reluctantly assents, and then has to act as nursemaid to a cantankerous and increasingly ill man whose performance veers erratically between transcendent and incoherent.

Meanwhile, Richard has finally realized his dream of producing a musical, a peppy Rent clone about hookers, pimps and drug addiction titled East Hastings. The musical's stratospheric success coincides with the collapse of the preparations for Lear, and Geoffrey finds himself first shunted off to a smaller theatre, and later, once his and Charles's deception is discovered, shut down entirely and fired. Geoffrey, however, is not the protagonist in this tragedy. He is Kent (a role which he also assumes onstage, returning for the first time in years to the scene of his breakdown), the man who watches, and ineffectually attempts to prevent, the death of something he loves--both Charles and the festival--but who survives that death, hopefully to flourish again elsewhere.

A lot of complaints against Studio 60 had to do with the show's built-in snobbery. It would have been hard for a show as intimately concerned with the culture wars to avoid offending anyone, but Studio 60 seemed to go out of its way to offend everyone, usually through straw man arguments and lazy stereotypes. The show's condescension was applied indiscriminately: from the FCC to the people who make and watch reality TV to Christians to rural Americans to bloggers to black people who aren't black in just the right way, but it was almost invariably expressed through the revelation that the group being condescended to this week didn't like Studio 60, or liked some other form of entertainment better. Given the tone this essay has been taking towards the two shows, this is obviously my cue to point out that Slings & Arrows respects alternative forms of media, and the various uses to which one can put a stage. In actuality, Slings & Arrows is snobbish to a degree that puts Studio 60 to shame, and nowhere is this more apparent than during the show's third season.

Throughout the series's run, it poured scorn on directors who eschewed Geoffrey's stripped-down yet emotionally resonant style: Oliver's lavish but soulless productions ("fry the life out of [the play] and smother it in sauce" is how Geoffrey describes the festival's attitude under Oliver's direction); the experimental antics of Geoffrey's nemesis, Darren Nicholls (a hilarious Don McKellar), who, when brought in to direct Hamlet, announces that he plans to take 'something's rotten' literally, and strew the stage with offal, and who later insists that Romeo and Juliet recite their speeches in blank monotones without looking at one another; a modern playwright so obsessed with capturing something 'real' that he cannibalizes his girlfriend's real-life experiences for material.

The gloves truly come off, however, in the third season, when Shakespeare is pitted against musical theatre, and if the inane plot and lyrics of East Hastings weren't enough to let us know who to root for, the season's ingenues-in-love plot involves a lovelorn Cordelia (Sarah Polley, whose delightfully bitchy performance keeps this plotline from being a complete waste of time) pining for Edgar, who, after initially disparaging the musical company, in a scene that presages several Jets vs. Sharks-type confrontations between the two troupes, falls in love with the musical's beautiful star only to discover that she's an airhead and rush back into Cordelia's arms. When it can spare a moment from disparaging the wrong kinds of theatre, Slings & Arrows gets busy laying into television, as Ellen is offered the lead in a series described as Prime Suspect in space. "There's never time to talk about anything: not a scene, not even a line of dialogue. If you ask a question they just say 'oh, shoot the alien!'", Ellen complains to Geoffrey when he comes to beg her to be in one last performance of Lear, and it is a testament to how thoroughly the show has got us on its side by this point that the monumental hypocrisy of this statement takes a while to register with the viewers.

It is precisely because Slings & Arrows is better at getting the audience on its side that it avoids being denounced for its snobbery as Studio 60 frequently was. Like Studio 60, Slings & Arrows caricatures the cultural artifacts it wishes to disparage. A good caricature, however, is an exaggeration of existing traits, and whereas Slings & Arrows delivers precisely this, Studio 60's caricatures are so far removed from reality as to be meaningless: Midwesterners so divorced from their culture that they have no idea what "Who's on First?" is; an FCC so rigidly devoted to its narrow definition of decency that it fines a network for airing an obscenity uttered in a live interview with a soldier as a bomb nearly lands on his head. Whereas Slings & Arrows is trying to entertain its audience, Studio 60 is trying to convert them (or, possibly, trying to make the already-converted feel smugly superior), and not doing a very good job of it.

Entertaining or not, Slings & Arrows's condescension should be off-putting, and the fact that it is so palatable can be directly attributed to Geoffrey's almost complete indifference to his productions' reception. At the end of the Hamlet premiere in the first season, Geoffrey and an awestruck Richard have the following exchange (like most of the quotes in this essay, this one comes from this transcript site):

GEOFFREY: The critics are gonna slaughter us.
RICHARD: What? How can they?
GEOFFREY: Because Jack is an American movie actor—that's all they're gonna write about, right?
RICHARD: They can't ignore what happened on this stage tonight.
GEOFFREY: What did happen, exactly?
RICHARD: I—are you—I don't know! This is all new to me!
GEOFFREY: Well, please, join us again! We do eight shows a week, matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays!

Geoffrey is entirely calm, even cheerful, during this conversation, because he knows that he's created something worthy. At the end of the third season, Geoffrey stages King Lear, with Charles in the lead, in a church assembly hall, for a single performance with maybe fifty people in attendance. None of it matters, so long as Geoffrey can bring the performance he wants into existence.

There are, obviously, some extremely lazy, perhaps even magical, assumptions at the root of Geoffrey's--and the show's--indifference towards the reaction to his productions. The show assumes that there is such a thing as an objective yardstick for quality in art, and that artists--good ones, at any rate--know when they have achieved it. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Slings & Arrows acknowledges the truth from which Studio 60 spent a whole season running--that the more sophisticated and challenging your creation is, the less people are going to care for it, and that if you let this truth stop you from making the kind of art you want to make, then you are no artist at all. Throughout its single season, Studio 60 kept pretending that by bombarding the public with high-quality art (let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether any of the writing in the show-within-a-show deserves the moniker) they can be made to crave it. Sorkin's characters can then have the best of both worlds, refusing to compromise their artistic vision without surrendering the audience's adulation.

Studio 60 clings to this fantasy not only because it is a comforting one, but because at the end of the day, the show isn't really about the creative process. Studio 60 was always about politics, just as the real culture wars are--first obliquely, through discussions of the kinds of humor and drama that do or don't play in Peoria (when Jordan tries to convince a writer to sell her his highfalutin script about intrigue in the United Nations rather than taking it to HBO, she makes a political argument--selling the show to HBO widens the gap between rich liberals and poor conservatives), and later directly, in a melodramatic plot arc that might have been unintentionally funny if it weren't so absurdly drawn out, and in which we learned that Aaron Sorkin's kindergarten teacher neglected to tell him that when you say something hurtful without meaning to, you should too apologize. It's important that Matt's words make it onto the screen unsullied, and that they be recognized as genius by everyone who hears them, because within the Studio 60 universe, liking Matt's writing is the same thing as agreeing with his politics, and getting people to do the latter is the primary motivation for achieving the former.

It might seem that this last paragraph invalidates my comparison between Slings & Arrows and Studio 60. Although the two shows have almost the same premise, the goals they try to achieve through that premise are nothing alike. Another way of putting it, however, is that Slings & Arrows actually does what it says on the tin, whereas Studio 60 was in constant search for the right kind of meat-loaf--behind the scenes intrigue, romantic comedy, melodrama--beneath which to conceal its political vegetables. More precisely, Slings & Arrows succeeds because it is trying to tell a story--not a 'little story', to use the phrase with which Aaron Sorkin once tried to weasel out of criticism, but a story, as grand and true as the people telling it can make it--whereas Studio 60 fails because it sublimates story to an agenda, both personal and political. That one can achieve such violently opposed results by developing the same hoary old premise is, I think, a valuable lesson. Perhaps we should all chip in and send Aaron Sorkin the DVDs, if only for the sake of the following scene:

GEOFFREY: What are we doing here, you and I?
OLIVER: Putting on a play.
GEOFFREY: Putting on a play. This isn't about us, is it?
OLIVER: No. Never was.

Professionalism: An Object Lesson

Over at Strange Horizons, Dan Hartland writes about Battlestar Galactica so I don't have to, and is, as usual, thoughtful and eloquent on the subject:

Moore these days seems almost exclusively interested in the endpoint rather than the journey. So "Unfinished Business" needs to be a story about Apollo and Starbuck's relationship, and thus crafts an entirely unconvincing sequence of flashbacks to justify the resuscitation of their on-again off-again love affair. We are expected to accept this ret-con of the characters without question, even as we beg to know why not a hint of this sudden backstory has been dropped before. Similarly, in "Hero," Adama reveals that just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies he had led an illegal incursion into Cylon space, thus arguably provoking the machines' devastating onslaught. The viewer resents such massive elements of backstory being conjured from nowhere. This is not merely another permutation of the show's hopeless attempt to equate the humans with the Cylons—there is simply nothing humanity could have done to fairly invite the holocaust delivered upon them by their robotic creations. It also exhibits a simple lack of respect for anything but the moment. If Battlestar Galactica wants to tell a story about Adama feeling guilty for causing Armageddon, it will tell it however it can. There is no pleasure in watching a series happy to rewrite its own mythology for the quick shock (predictably, in subsequent episodes, Adama's revelation has not been mentioned again).

(If you haven't done so already, check out Dan's previous Galactica essays: 1, 2, 3. I'm particularly fond of the second one, in which Dan lucidly diagnoses the Cylons' core disfunction months before the show's writers got around to acknowledging it.)

I came to Dan's article in a bit of a mood, having previously been pointed towards this write-up of a visit to the set of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which included a Q&A with Aaron Sorkin. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that the press gaggle in question was eager for a chance to bait the medium's resident enfant terrible, and he doesn't fail to deliver: first attacking the LA Times for what he describes as irresponsible reporting on his show, and then segueing to his favorite punching bag, online fan writers:

Next Sorkin ridiculed the whole idea that bloggers -- many of whom come from parts unknown, bearing grudges, perhaps, and not always a reliable sense of who they are and what they're really after -- be taken more seriously in the mainstream media than any random josephine walking down Main Street. "An enormous rise in amateurism," Sorkin said of the blogosphere. "And everyone's voice oughtn't be equal."

I do realize how futile it is, at this point, to get worked up over the fact that Aaron Sorkin doesn't understand the internet and takes every opportunity to parade his ignorance of it, but in the context of television writing, Sorkin's words are nothing short of baffling. When was the last time any of you looked to mainstream, professional publications for thoughtful, in-depth television reviews? Against Dan Hartland's Battlestar Galactica series, here is some of what the professional media has to offer:

• First we have Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker, whose alleged review of the show kicks off with the following paragraph:
  

  It’s easy for people who aren’t science- fiction enthusiasts to laugh at the genre—its earnestness, its lingo, its fans’ awestruck romance with the idea that God is in the details of equipment and uniforms and security code and how many moons orbit Planet X and why it’s called Planet X in the first place. Does it have something to do with the number ten, or is it meant to be a leaning cross, or is it a reference to the mark on Captain Blah’s forehead in the second episode of the third season of “Star Bores”? (Usually, a writer’s answer to such questions is “I called it Planet X because I liked the name.”) Making fun of science fiction became even easier after William Shatner, in a 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch set at a “Star Trek” convention, exploded at fans who asked him insanely pointless questions, “Get a life!” At first, even civilians who had never owned a “Star Trek" trading card or a toy phaser were a little stunned by this slap at the faithful; it’s amazing that Shatner ever worked again after inflicting that Vulcan nerve pinch. But his admonition was eventually incorporated into the fans’ self-image; you see self-aware, amused references to it in sci-fi blogs when someone goes on about something in a way that he knows may brand him as a geek.

  Not only is Franklin indulging in some of the most tired clichés about genre fans, she isn't even remotely close to her topic--how does she get from the new Battlestar Galactica to William Shatner? And while one can imagine bringing up fan reactions to a cultural artifact later in the article, how is it good writing to open with them?


• There are, of course, several variants on the 'I'm not a geek, I swear!' boilerplate. Attacking the fans is a popular option, but in her Salon article, Laura Miller chooses another old favorite--knocking down other works in the genre as a way of reminding the audience that the subject of her review is an abnormal specimen, and that she therefore can't be blamed for paying it any attention. "These shows have ranged from the passable ("Farscape") to the appalling ("Lexx," a sort of R-rated "H.R. Pufnstuf")," Miller wrote, and then got all excited over the fact that Galactica features a female character as innovative as Starbuck, who is a capable military officer and treats sex as recreation.


• Troy Patterson's essay at Slate needs no comment:
  

  Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or "speculative fiction" or "SF," or whatever you're supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-'70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir.

• And finally, Dan Martin writing just last week in The Guardian.
  

  Before the sci-fi Channel's re-imagining of the series formerly known as "The Shite Star Wars", the genre was hardly on fighting form. As the Star Trek franchise declined exponentially with every splinter series, a spawn of even drearier efforts like Farscape and Babylon 5 sprung up in its wake. The only glimmer of quality, Joss Whedon's Firefly, was hauled off air after just half a season.

  The grammar in this paragraph is so tortured that I don't honestly know what Martin is trying to say, but I'm fairly certain he calls Farscape dreary. I realize that Farscape isn't everyone's cup of tea, and genre outsiders in particular might find it a bit of a trial, but the fact that Martin uses this particular adjective to describe the show can only mean that he has never watched a single episode.
  

This, then, is what passes for television writing in professional venues: unthinking, uninformed, its authors more interested in distancing themselves from their subject matter than engaging with it, and while I do realize that, by focusing on mainstream discussions of a genre show, I've skewed the results, I don't think this fact undercuts my point. Dan Hartland is equally fair-minded and thoughtful writing about Deadwood as he is about Battlestar Galactica. His professional counterparts, however, were so terrified by the genre of their subject matter that they fell over themselves trying to assure their readers that they weren't taking it seriously. And here, I believe, is where Aaron Sorkin misses the point when he talks about the virtue of professionalism (beyond, that is, the fact that in his personal dictionary, the entry for 'amateur' probably reads 'a person who doesn't like my work'). A professional is one thing, and a person who takes their work seriously is another. The two qualities are neither mutually exclusive nor inextricably tied--there are professionals who don't give a damn about creating something worthy, and amateurs whose day jobs are nothing but a way of subsidizing a hobby to which they devote the bulk of their mental energies. It's the latter quality that discerning readers should be looking for, regardless of venue.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for Aaron Sorkin to figure out how little he understands either the internet or the various facets of professionalism (frankly, if there are any epiphanies in his future, I hope they involve making Studio 60 even marginally watchable). It's probably best, when faced with the kind of outbursts that have become synonymous with his name, to sigh philosophically and try to concentrate on his still-impressive body of work. That said, I can't help but chuckle when I notice that the writer of the Oregon Live (the online version of the newspaper The Oregonian) article, who laps up Sorkin's dig at the amateurism of bloggers, ends the piece with a reference to "Matt Albie's drug problem."

The Once and Future President

Strange Horizons's reviews section published a piece yesterday that I've been looking forward to for quite some time: Graham Sleight's retrospective on The West Wing, in which he argues that Aaron Sorkin's political drama can and should be read as science fiction.

On one level, of course, the claim is silly: there is nothing in the series outside the canon of current political or scientific possibility (or what we as outsiders might imagine those to be.) The West Wing is entirely mimetic. Of course, in another sense, it's trivially true that The West Wing is sf. It's a piece of alternate-world science fiction: presidential elections take place in 1998 and 2002, not in leap years; the September 11th terrorist atrocity does not take place; and global events in general follow a different track from our recent past. I want to argue, though, that it's sf in a more profound sense, the Roger Rabbit sense. It makes an argument, as sf does, about possibility, about what can be done, and it does so by presenting us with a world already showing a change from our own. (One might call this technique cognitive estrangement.) Science fiction has always, I think, been a peculiarly American genre because of its allegiance to a belief in possibility. Once this was geographical: a new frontier, somewhere out west, was always there to be discovered by anyone smart and brave enough. (And anyone who happened to be living there already might find themselves getting effaced from the story, like dumb aliens in a pulp magazine.) Sf moved this frontier out into space, the potentially infinite worlds out there to be discovered. But as the difficulties of space travel become more and more apparent, it might be better to say that sf's frontier is now temporal. It tells stories about what might be done with tomorrow, starting today.

I'm actually just in the right mindset to be reading about The West Wing right now. A local channel has been spinning the show's first three seasons again and again in daily strips, so that every couple of weeks I can catch an airing of "Noël" or "Bartlet for America". Which, as you might imagine, has given me an opportunity to think about the show, not to mention a unique perspective on it (there probably aren't a lot of people who know that "17 People" still hurts like hell on a fourth viewing). I don't disagree with Graham's reading, and certainly not with his assertion that The West Wing is unique for thinking about the future--an observation that is made quite poignant by the realization that so little of overt genre TV seems even remotely interested in this topic. Where Graham observes the show's themes and storylines, however, and notices an SFnal aspect, my repeated forays into The West Wing have caused me to pay greater attention to the interactions between its characters. On that level, I think the argument can be made that The West Wing is a work of fantasy.

Well, not really. Or rather, only in the trivial sense that Graham notes at the beginning of the paragraph quoted above--if we give undue significance to the marketing decision that folded alternate history into science fiction, The West Wing can be read as SF. By the same token, fiction that takes place in an imaginary, pseudo-medieval setting is usually packaged as fantasy even if there are no magical or supernatural elements in the story, and there is something downright medieval about the relationships, the exchanges of power and allegiance, between the show's characters. They'd call it loyalty, conviction, political idealism; I call it vassalage.

Aaron Sorkin is by no means the first person to equate an American white house with a royal court. The last time someone presented the American people with as coherent and complete a fantasy of goodness and idealism holding sway within the corridors of power as the one Sorkin created, they did so by drawing a direct comparison to Camelot, and in Jed Bartlet, Sorkin has created a character of Arthurian grandeur. A remarkable man, uniquely capable of taking on the burdens of leadership, Bartlet is driven by a deep-seated sense of purpose and the belief that he has been divinely intended for his role ("a boy king" and "blessed with inspiration" are two phrases used to describe him in an episode that flashes back to his youth). At the same time, Bartlet possesses a breathtaking capacity for arrogance and self-centeredness, qualities that allow him, for example, to dither until nearly the last moment before accepting a congressional censure that will spare his oldest and closest friend from a career-ending public humiliation, to obliviously insist until almost that same last moment that his choice to lie to the electorate about a degenerative illness was somehow not a terrible and inexcusable mistake, and to dismiss, with enormous cruelty and terrible wrath, a long-time advisor who had betrayed him over a matter of principle. When the time comes to choose Bartlet's replacement, the process is frequently portrayed as a Tolkien-esque passing of an age of giants. The two nominees who emerge out of a posse of contenders who scrabble for the crown are capable but somehow uninspiring--the grizzled veteran who shares some of Bartlet's gravitas and experience but lacks his integrity, and the young upstart, Bartlet's ultimate successor, who possesses vision and moral character, but is ultimately a less substantial, less heroic man--Telemachus taking over from Ulysses.

In itself, the fact that its central figure is lionized isn't sufficient to support my reading of the Bartlet white house as a feudal system. For that, we have to look at the relationships between Bartlet and his closest advisors, which are most frequently characterized by a complete, unquestioning loyalty that takes precedence over the characters' individual wants and priorities ("This is the most important thing I'll ever do ... more important than my marriage" Leo explains to his soon-to-be ex-wife in an early episode). The West Wing pays lip service to the notion that what brings its characters together are shared ideals and a mission to which they can all contribute, and this may very well be how they each came through the door. What keeps them in the west wing day in and day out, however, is individual loyalty, a sense of belonging to a team, a side, an 'us', and the terms in which that belonging is expressed seem, in many occasions, to have been lifted out of Shakespeare, or Dante's descriptions of the quarrels between the Guelphs and Ghibellines (it doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to picture Josh, Toby and Sam cruising the capitol hill, biting their thumbs at Republican congressmen).

"I told Leo McGarry that we could trust you, and Toby backed me up," Josh tells relative outsider Joey Lucas before revealing a closely-held secret. Translation: he and Toby vouched for Joey's honor, for her worthiness to be allowed into the inner sanctum. In that same episode, Abbey Bartlet petulantly accuses white house chief counsel Oliver Babish--a nominal insider--of blowing the potential ramifications of revealing the President's MS out of proportion "because defending the President in primetime looks good on a resume." Translation: no matter who signs Oliver's paychecks or what his job description is, he isn't part of the in-group, and his motives are therefore suspect. And then, of course, there's the end of the first season episode "Let Bartlet be Bartlet", in which Leo turns to each of the staff as they recite "I serve at the pleasure of the President of the United States." He isn't leading a pep rally; he's reminding them of their oaths of fealty, and reminding Bartlet, who is standing just outside the room, of the courage and devotion of the men and women he commands.

In Aaron Sorkin's hands, the west wing isn't a place for cold professionalism, and, whatever he may claim to the contrary, change isn't achieved solely through idealism or conviction. In Sorkin's west wing, everything is personal, and it is that capacity to personalize the impersonal, to sublimate their individual identity to their identity as members of a group, that allows his characters to do good. The only modern setting in which this kind of mindset is common is the war story, and it is fairly common for stories set in high-stress, male-dominated environments to make use of that genre's vocabulary, to reference foxholes and encampments or refer to the characters in military terms. Sorkin repeatedly avoids this device even when it might seem appropriate--when Bartlet's administration is besieged by enemies either foreign or domestic. Instead, he consistently turns to the terms of the medieval drama (even going so far as to include references to Henry V and The Lion in Winter in the show).

I was concerned, when I started writing this piece, that it might come across as a parody of Graham's article, or at best an attempt to devalue his argument by positing a parallel one. I'd be saddened if this happened, not only because I think Graham has written an excellent and compelling essay, but because I don't see the two readings as being at all incompatible. Rather, I think they bolster each other. In a response to a comment I made in this LJ discussion of Graham's essay, which showed up in my inbox just as I was getting ready to compose this paragraph, Niall Harrison suggests that all utopian stories evince a tension between fantastic and SFnal elements, and although we could go back and debate whether my choice to equate a feudalistic mindset with fantasy is legitimate (although that would bring us perilously close to the definitional argument--it's the third rail of genre discussion. Touch it, and you die), I think if we accept a more general description of utopian fiction being characterized by a tension between hope for the future and nostalgia for a past that may never have existed, we might come close to an accurate description of The West Wing, and of why it worked so well at both conciliating and uplifting its viewers. Yesterday was golden; tomorrow will be bright. How can today be anything but glorious?