Month: November 2005

…not to have it be gruesome. I wanted it to be scary and shocking, but I didn’t want people to get disgusted by it. So I wanted there to be no red at all. So that the plane never had any red on the logo, no one wore any read clothes. Because once it became a bloody mess — which, you know, was something that is probably more realistic — once it looked like a massacre, to me it would just be untenable and people would tune out. I wanted it to be shocking when you saw blood….If we had been realistic and had as much blood everywhere as there probably would have been, seeing that blood…would have had no effect.

I find this interesting, because it gets to the heart of what storytelling is supposed to do: lie in order to find the truth.

On the first-season Deadwood DVDs, creator David Milch talks along much the same lines in his one-on-one conversation with series star Keith Carradine:

The truths of storytelling are not the truths of reportage. The truths of reportage finally depend on their correspondence to an externally verifiable reality. That happened. The truths of storytelling may incorporate the so-called real event, but they don’t depend for their effect on the fact that a researcher can corroborate the event occurred. They have to come alive in the imagination of the viewer, and, for that to occur, the necessary precondition is that they come alive in the imagination of the storyteller.

And so once I sort of knew the facts, I tried to let the reality of the facts come alive in my imagination. Certain times, at certain places, certain events lacked a kind of living reality, and that’s when characters who hadn’t existed in real life came to be.”

Milch talks about creating characters who are “essentially true and historical,” who could have lived in the real world even though they really didn’t. There’s an oft-quoted old saw that says that “all writers are liars,” and that’s true. But, in the lie, we find the truth. By creating characters who didn’t exist, Milch is better able to get inside the lives of those who did. By portraying events less accurately than they would appear in real life, Abrams gives those events greater resonance and meaning for the viewer.

The United Kingdom’s Sky One is said to be planning a new series inspired by the cult 1960s series The Prisoner….The show will not take place in the famous “Village” setting of the original — shot in the north Wales village of Portmeirion — the industry weekly Broadcast reported. But it is understood the themes of paranoia, conspiracy and identity crisis will remain, the BBC reported.

So it’s more like “something we wrote that on closer inspection is really just a Prisoner ripoff^* so we’re going to call it a remake instead?

See, we Americans don’t need to ruin classic British television shows by remaking them. They’re perfectly capable of doing it on their own.

Addendum: The Brits are also capable of creating their own original crap, too. No, I’m not talking about Coupling, the Friends ripoff with a lot more sex. (Although what I’ve seen of that isn’t very good either, and it’s not difficult to see why its American remake failed right out of the gate.) I’m talking about Space Cadets, set to air on Channel 4 in early December. In it, “contestants” will undergo weeks of training for what they think is a five-day orbit of Earth aboard a Russian space shuttle — but what is, in actuality, nothing but a hoax. In some ways, this is reminiscent of The Joe Schmo Show, in which “star” Matt Gould thought he was competing for the top prize on a weekly reality show, but where in fact all of the other contestants were actors and the show was essentially about duping him.

In a newly revised edition of [Goodnight Moon], which has lulled children to sleep for nearly 60 years, the publisher, HarperCollins, has digitally altered the photograph of Clement Hurd, the illustrator, to remove a cigarette from his hand.

The article goes on to say that “the move has touched off something of a tempest in the nursery, with some children’s booksellers expressing outrage.”

I’m reminded of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, whose famous opening line is apparently something of a mistranslation, yet whose “corrected” version sparked its own share of controversy and anger from fans who preferred the book they’d originally read to the new one. (Less controversial, I think, was the suggestion that Marcel Proust’s famous A la recherche du temps perdu actually translated to In Search of Lost Time, and not Remembrance of Things Past^*, as it had been known for decades. Although even there, too, there are arguments.)

This case, of course, is different in that the controversy stems from the removal of something from the original and not just from an unpopular correction. But I do think it is something of a tempest in a teapot. Websites like this one, which equate HarperCollins’ decision to the historical revisionism of Stalinist Russia, are overreacting, to put it mildly. This isn’t state-sponsored censorship or the erasure of our cultural and historical identity. This isn’t a revisionism of the facts of Clement Hurd’s life. The fact that the man was a smoker has not been expunged from our history books. It’s merely been removed from the back cover of a children’s book, because, in the years since the photograph was first taken, we’ve come to realize as a society that, hey, maybe this smoking thing is bad for you after all.

There is a solution that gives both sides what they want — at least in theory — and that’s to keep the original, unmodified photograph, cigarette included, but to append a large caption beneath it that provides the complete historical and cultural context in which it was taken, explaining to young readers that, in the sixty-some years since the book was first printed, medical science has advanced significantly, the dangers of smoking and tobacco have grown increasingly clear, and that just because you see somebody doing something on the back cover of your beloved bedtime reading, that doesn’t mean you should try it too.

1. “All that is now, all that is gone, all that’s to come, and everything under the sun is in tune”
   “Eclipse” by Pink Floyd, guessed by Eric
2. “Golden living dreams of visions, mystic crystal revelation, and the mind’s true liberation”
   “Medley: Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In” by the Fifth Dimension, guessed by Eric
3. “If you’ve got luggage keep it handy, but you’re running out of luck, ’cause the bellhops ain’t to organized and the elevator’s stuck”
   “Happiness Hotel” by the Muppets, guessed by Eric
4. “I still only travel by foot and by foot, it’s a slow climb”
   “Extraordinary Machine” by Fiona Apple, guessed by John
5. “Dark in the city, night is a wire, steam in the subway, earth is a fire”
   “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran, guessed by Eric
6. “Patriotism swells in the heart of the American bear.”
   “America” by Fozzie Bear (The Muppet Movie), guessed by Eric and John
7. “What I wouldn’t give to find a soulmate, someone else to catch this drift”
8. “A minute in the sunlight can take away a whole life”
9. “They be askin’ us questions, harass, and arrest us, saying ‘We eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast.'”
   “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West, guessed by Eric
10. “So you go to the village in your tie-dye jeans, and you stare at the junkies and the closet queens”
    “Captain Jack” by Billy Joel, guessed by Eric

Guess the lyric, be the envy of all you know.