Home for Christmas

I always forget how beautiful it is in Saskatoon, even in winter. Such clear skies, such white snow. Wow.

About a week ago I went to see the movie "Stranger than Fiction" with T and her lovely mother. In spite of the fact that it's awesome -- something the whole family can enjoy too -- I was a little crushed by the intersection of its originality with its formulaic banality. The premise is wonderful (and I shan't ruin the experience for my 1.2 readers by revealing it) but BAM! right where you'd expect that first act plot twist to throw you into Act II of the 3-part screenplay formula, there it is. Enter the romance, the finding yourself, the insulated eremitic loner blossoming into a butterfly.

It never ceases to disappoint me to be reminded yet again that a motion picture is an extremely confined vehicle for storytelling and artistic expression. The limitations that make it a cookie-cutter are self-evident: the 2-hour running time; the necessity to reveal everything as a 2-dimensional image plus dialogue, sound-effects, and score, with nothing left to the imagination. Because it is necessary to show a completely self-contained story in such a short time, strict rules must be followed. With these old cinematic saws and precepts comes a consequent repetitiveness that starts to detract from the experience the more used one becomes to it. I honestly feel pain for the well-known movie nerd Roger Ebert. How many movies he must have watched! Repeatedly! I'd much rather be a literature critic, where the possibilities are endless and the blasted thing doesn't demand to be read all at once.

Just because film is repetitive in some ways doesn't mean movies can't be good, though. Many have succeeded and do succeed by eschewing some of the most pervasive Hollywood platitudes -- big explosions, car chases, million-dollar CGI effects, trendy scores, Clive Owen, and so on, in favour of quaint little niche aspects like convincing acting and a decent story. "Stranger than Fiction" succeeds along these lines and, though it foists that greatest Hollywoodism of all upon us -- the "unexpected" Happy Ending -- we forgive it. A good storyteller knows what kind of story he's telling and this one needed the ending. No matter that it looks a wee bit awkward.

One of my roommates and his addiction to science fiction of all kinds has unintentionally got me thinking about the narrative possibilities of a different visual medium, the television series. Once you go serial, you're in a whole new world of course, what with the entirely different revenue model of advertising (not to mention new inventions like DVD box sets of entire seasons and Podcast) and the ability to plan around twenty hours worth of drama (or more if you're ambitious enough to span seasons!) at a go. You pay for some of the advantages with a host of unique drawbacks: commercial breaks that dictate both the pacing and often the very content of the drama; cancellation or time slot juggling in the face of ratings adversity and the resulting effects on budget; the rising cost of talent with success; and that talent's death or departure for money, career, or boredom.

The possibilities and liabilities of television manifest themselves in different ways, from the rondo-like static worlds of the animated "South Park"/"Simpsons"/"Futurama" crowd to self-contained "Law & Order"/"Star Trek" styles and the ongoing stories of shows like "Smallville". The show I'm thinking about now is not lame-o "Star Trek" nor awesome but cancelled "Firefly" but a new phenomenon which -- I'm told -- is earning rave reviews from mainstream publications on the gamut from "New York Newsday" to "National Review": the 3-year old revision -- more correctly, to stress the point, re-vision -- of Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar began with a bang in a 2-part 4-hour television miniseries. Literally. In an absolutely horrifying nightmare to watch, an artificial race spawned by human technology and arrogance attacks its twelve colonized planets in a surprise nuclear carpet bombing that gave me chills to think about¹. What few survive reactivate a soon-to-be mothballed battleship, relic of a previous Cylon war, and head out into uncharted space fleeing an enemy relentlessly intent on their total annihilation. This stuff makes excellent drama², superb TV, especially the miniseries and the first TV episode to air, "33", in which the narrative has unstoppable motive power and the action never lets up. After "33", exactly the same thing happens as that "Stranger than Fiction" first act twist: a pattern becomes apparent. Ensuing episodes digress into one-off side plots involving sabotage, prison ships, search-and-rescue, flight deck accidents. Just as well, because the single battlestar³, Galactica, can't take the pounding of constant combat with its superior opponents any more than (much as we might desire it) we battle-loving audiences can take the eventual repetitiveness this implies.

My dilemma is this: I’m loving the show for story and execution, especially for the war and the battles. Based on parameters set by the creators so far, the story could be carried on to a logical and pleasing conclusion: the war could be won, the Cylons finally defeated or outrun. The first third of the problem is that, because they provide the conflict that moves the plot forward, the Cylons are necessary until the end. The second third is that being infinitely more powerful and numerous than the humans it will be difficult to craft a believable story arc that keeps them as a threat right up until their final defeat without resorting to tasteless Deus Ex Machina. The third third is the worst part: it’s in no one’s interest to conclude any time soon because the show is popular and critically acclaimed.

As a television show it doesn’t have to end. As a powerful revenue generator, it is desirable that it does not. Where these two factors intersect they must almost certainly thwart the necessity for Galactica, as a story and a piece of art, to stop before its finite creative/narrative potential is used up and it degenerates into one of its own doomed space fighters, billowing smoke and spiraling haphazardly but ever so slowly toward an ignominous and forgotten end. I don’t mind side plots and quirky episodes: these were invented a long time ago in the space opera/epic style of television show both to provide variety and to stretch those budgets -- especially the visual effects ones -- as far as they can go. I've come to accept this. My fear is that built in levers like the treacherous narcissist Dr. Gaius Baltar⁴ and his controlling Cylon program Number Six will be thrown whenever needed to wrench the story this way and that as writers and other creatives go through the revolving door yet the show lurches on with no clear destination in sight. To this end, the Cylons will be brought in for a victory whenever the humans seem to be getting too cozy.

There you have it: an amazing new story in a well-known medium quickly betrays signs of the rigid stage on which it is acted. The signs can't destroy the storytellers' achievement but they worry anyone who wants a story in the end and not network vultures biting the last rotting dollar bills from a corpse that could have had a dignified end had it, when living, known where and when to stop.

¹: Worth noting that not merely the idea of actual total armageddon is creepy: also the certain knowledge that someday, somehow, some body dehuman enough to blow itself into bloody smithereens just to bring a few innocents with it will manage to strap on not Semtex or C4 but a bomb of fissile uranium or hydrogen. In a world where it's possible to retreat into lonely insanity and still have the world at our fingertips and taking our cell calls and all you need is one in six billion, it IS only a matter of time.

²: Not that plot without major chinks, some catastrophically distracting to a nitpicker such as myself. Most glaring first example: apparently the Cylons started the first war. Ended in a draw and some sort of armistice. Subsequent armistice, an outpost established in neutral space for diplomatic relations between the races where, year after year, humans send an ambassador. Cylons not only don't send an ambassador in all the forty years they are absent, they bloody disappear. A nation of realists confronted with such a vicious inexorable and inhuman opponent would stop sending the ambassador long before forty years elapse and start looking for the frackin' bad guys. I suppose on the other hand, a nation of reality TV watchers would bore of vigilance and opt for the fantasy approach: recall John Bolton and send Colin Powell to shift papers in a vacuum, endlessly, when the end in fact is nigh. If America can become that ADHD superpower who flips the channel when interest lost at peril of its life, we can't begrudge same to Ron Moore and his made-up space warriors, can we?

³: Because in this paragraph I do so dearly love footnotes! For the uninitiated, a battlestar is some sort of water recyclin' behemoth spaceship that acts like the interstellar hybrid of battleship and aircraft carrier.

⁴: Gaius Baltar is Tony Blair and Number Six is Cherie Booth. Seriously.