Multiple Enthusiasms

Infinite jest. Excellent fancy. Flashes of merriment.

Tag: supernatural

In the midst of all my traveling and holidaying, I think I missed that the Hollywood Foreign Press association had announced their nominations; they’ll name the winners on Sunday night, apparently. E! online has a full list of the nominees right here, if you’re interested.

I was, until I then read them, after which I felt decidedly less interested.

I admit I used to be into the Globes and the Oscars. I watched them every year during college. I generally recall very little about the winners; I remember the year Roberto Benigni stepped on Spielberg’s head as he made his way up to accept his acting award for Life is Beautiful, beating out the likes of Edward Norton (American History X), Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan), and Sir Ian McKellan (Gods and Monsters). He didn’t, unfortunately, beat Joseph Fiennes, who was basically the only person not nominated for Shakespeare in Love even though he was, in fact, Shakespeare in love. The only thing I remember about the Globes is the year Jack Nicholson gave part of his acceptance speech (As Good As It Gets, I think) out of his ass, a la Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.

So, this year’s Globes nominations.

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Sad the news that the 11th Doctor is now on his way
To usurping the Tardis with companions new and d’verse.
Just a few specials before Tennant goes on his merry way
To other projects, other lands, and other roles.
I would call his portrayal of the Time Lord my favorite
But have I in fact on real frame of reference;
I’ve seen no other perform the role, the acts
of heroism and humanity for which I’ve come to know
the Doctor as played by Tennant. Not Eccleston nor
Atkinson, nor Bakers double, Pertwee, or Hartnell.
Indeed, Doctor Who was my favorite with twice
The Tennants in the house of Tardis, as always
Bigger without than within. Much like the show.

In tribute to Tennant with dedication to Tate,
In recognition of the BBC and the departure of Doctor Ten:

With apologies for the bastardization/bardolization. But seriously, there are few things in the world better than either Doctor Who or Shakespeare, and the combination of the two?

Rad.

I’m sad to hear Tennant is leaving (after a critically acclaimed turn as Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, mind), if only because he’s the only doctor I’ve ever known. That’s a deliberate choice, too, because he’s the sort of character I want to be. I love the tenth doctor for his childlike glee, for his unflappability, for his grin and his humour. He is one of my all time favorite characters in any medium. Up there with House and the brothers Winchester, not to mention Tristran Thorn, Richard Mayhew, and Fat Charlie.

(characters from, respectively, House, M.D., Supernatural, Stardust, Neverwhere, and Anansi Boys)

Because it debuted before The Dark Knight, which, this past weekend, became the single most successful movie to open ever, the trailer for Zach Snyder’s Watchmen garnered a lot of attention. Lots of (well deserved) drooling, lots of controversy. My particular favorite note came from Galleycat, which said:

“Remember earlier this week, when a well-placed movie trailer turned Watchmen into a hit 22 years after the first installment of the graphic novel appeared in comic book shops?”

As if it were a trailer for the book and not for the upcoming moviezation. Also, I’m pretty well certain Watchmen has been a “hit,” off and on, for the better part of two decades. I’d bet that, if comic books sales systems pulled a Soundscan to remove the bestsellers overall from the charts (because stuff like Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon still sells so many copies, so many years later, it would affect the sales reporting), Watchmen would rank up there along with The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman; books that still sell well so long after their original publication.

And so now this is where I admit something: I couldn’t get through Watchmen.

I tried. I picked up the book at some point either during college or shortly thereafter. I’m pretty sure I bought it at Midtown Comics in Manhattan, which I still consider the single coolest comics shop I’ve ever been to. Back then, I was a regular commuter between midtown Manhattan and southern New Jersey, and I often picked up comics or entertainment magazines at Midtown to read on the Greyhound back home. So I’m pretty certain I intended to read Watchmen on the bus, and I know I started it, but I also know I got about 30 pages in before I gave up on it. Even still, that paperback is somewhere in my parents’ basement.

I’ve picked it up again to skim a few times, hoping each time that I would appreciate it, get into it, like I hadn’t before. I hated Shakespeare until my sophomore year of college, when a professor-prompted epiphany finally demonstrated to me how awesome King Lear was. I read both The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye in high school but appreciated neither until I read them on my own while in college; I reread Gatsby a year or so ago, and discovered it was even better.

I keep hoping I will experience something similar with Alan Moore.

Because it’s not just Watchmen; I’ve read enough people I admire praise him that I’ve tried lots of stuff by him. Promethea. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Lost Girls sounded vaguely interesting, because I always like modern fiction that remixes and revamps old stories to change the way we look at them, but I never did pick it up. But I’ve discovered the cool reaction I had to Watchmen is roughly the reaction I have to anything Alan Moore writes. And I really do want to “get” him, I think; I know he did seminal work on Swamp Thing, and I know he wrote a bunch of Superman stories a lot of people I admire think are awesome, and hell, the man gave Neil Gaiman what may be the most awesome nickname ever (“Scary Trousers”), which comes with one of the single coolest nickname stories in history:

(For some reason, WordPress doesn’t allow embedding of Google videos, so here’s a link instead.)

But I don’t. I never have, and I am unsure I ever will.

I keep hoping it will come with age. That as my taste becomes more sophisticated, I will begin to appreciate the writing, the nuance, the genius of Mr. Moore.

Because that’s his big thing isn’t it? That he’s such a genius? That he’s so smart, and he crams his writing so densely with references to literature and popular culture, that his work is above the understanding of most mere mortals? From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to From Hell and such, everything I’ve seen of his is dense and verbose and meticulous, but more in the way that I want to say, “Yes, Mr. Moore, I understand you’re intelligent. Now if you’ll just stop attempting to demonstrate/prove it, can we please get on with the story?”

It’s because, of course, he wants to “keep out the scum.” No, really, that’s what he says. In this interview with Forbidden Planet, when asked about his to-come novel Jerusalem, the interviewer asks if it will have “one of these intractable, impenetrable first chapters like with Voice of the Fire,” to which Moore replies:

“Now, I did deliberately put the Hob’s Hog chapter in Voice of the Fire. I have been asked since why I did that. The only thing I could think of was, to keep out scum.”

Well, hey, mission accomplished, Mr. Moore. This particular scum? Totally kept out.

The thing about the Watchmen movie, though, is that I totally loved V for Vendetta, so maybe, I figure, this new one will be all right. I know a lot of people hated V for the changes it made to the story in the original comic, but I had the distinct advantage of never having read the comic before I saw the movie, which, on its own, I think, is just spectacular. Having only read a few dozen pages of Watchmen before putting it aside for something I might enjoy more, I can’t help wondering if I’ll have a similar experience with Watchmen; I’m one of the people interested in the movie but with no real investment in it either way. I like a couple of the actors (Crudup ftw! And seriously, the dad from Supernatural? Hell ya!), and the visuals, from what I saw on the giant IMAX screen with the holy-shit sound, were certainly impressive.

So who knows? I may just watch the Watchmen.

Reading it, though? Whole other story.

(Cross-posted to Mightygodking.com.)

I will admit that I nearly opened with a joke about being given the keys to the Impala, but I figured, best just use that one to the once.

I don’t remember how I first encountered Supernatural; I’m sure it was an online discussion somewhere, but I don’t remember the specific pointer like I remember The Shakespeare Code. In fact, the first thing I remember about Supernatural is its Wikipedia page, which notes that its creator, Eric Kripke, cites Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and American Gods as influences.

That was really all I needed. I’ll state a caveat here in the interest of full disclosure: Neil Gaiman is the only person on Earth who has ever sent me into total fanboy catatonia. I had been 23 just a month when my best buddy trekked up to Jersey City from regions farther south so we could see Gaiman open for The Magnetic Fields at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village. I had been corresponding (roughly) with Neil for nearly a year by then on The Well, but still I couldn’t bring myself to say hello (it took an introduction from Claudia Gonson of the Fields to actual render me speechful).

I had, by then, read everything Gaiman had written except Sandman, and I was totally looking forward to American Gods (the copy on my bookshelf, just a few feet away, was the first one signed on the American Gods tour, and it was signed at the Borders WTC. It has, of course, become somewhat of a talisman in my life).

I wanted to love American Gods, but I’ll admit, back then, I didn’t; my visceral reaction was that it read very much like exactly the debut novel it was–a writer learning how to write a novel as he did so. While it has grown on me in the years since, I still think Coraline and Anansi Boys are better, novel-wise, than American Gods was (Anansi Boys is, I believe, one of the greatest novels ever: very nearly fully achieved and perfect for what it is. It seems like it understands, in a way some few books do, what it means to be, and quite successfully achieves it).

My point is that I’d been reading Gaiman for a few years by then, and that he’s one of two novelists I continue to both read and enjoy (the same I cannot say for either King, Koontz, Carroll, or Pratchett [the other novelist is Rowling]). Which was why, when I saw that citation of influences, I just had to check out Supernatural.

Supernatural: two slightly dysfunctional but also very cool brothers drive around in a vintage Chevy Impala while listening to Asia and hunting things that go bump in the night.

And if that’s not very nearly a perfect logline, I don’t know what is.

Over three (so far) seasons, Supernatural has followed the brothers Winchester, Sam and Dean, as they drive back and forth across the country hunting . . . well, just about everything for which a season does not exist. Vampires? Check. Werewolves? Check. Djinn, changelings, and killer clowns (though not from outer space)? Check, double check, and wait, let me confirm–yep, check all over again.

And I think it’s way better than it has any right to be. I mean, one of the brothers is best known for a recurring role in the Gilmore Girls while the other has the sort of suitably pouty lips directors hire make-up people to moisten every ten minutes, but hell if it ain’t Tiger Beat heartthrobs battling evil, and boyhow does it work.

Don’t get me wrong; there are a couple of things about the series that, ultimately, unfortunately, fall flat, the single biggest being that the series seems to have an undue amount of trouble letting characters stay dead. Perhaps this is a reaction on my end, in that both television shows I’m currently most into (Supernatural and Doctor Who) don’t seem to want to let anyone actually die. And, of course, there is some wriggle room in Supernatural; when you’re dealing so much with things that go bump in the night, you are, story-wise, generally allowing that things do bump in the night, and the things that bump in said night probably used to be alive in some way, which means that there is acknowledgement of the afterlife. Especially when you’re dealing with demons and Faustian bargains and a bunch of characters who care about people they love more than they care about themselves.

When people keep dying but keep not exactly staying dead, it reduces tension for the viewer. It makes suspense and danger (not to mention: death) not mean nearly so much. You stop worrying when a character seems about to die, because you think, well, no biggie, they can just bargain that out of the way.

In most cases, the stakes are at least changed (and sometimes raised), but still, I feel the creators stumbled a bit with all the dead-not-dead stuff.

Even still, I remain impressed by the adventures of the brothers Winchester. Most of the episodes are self-contained, which is a hallmark of the shows I love (e.g., Doctor Who and House, MD), with development over arcs contributing to but not overwhelming the self-contained nature of each episode (or two-parter). I’ve always been the sort who avoids anything in multiple parts each of which can’t be enjoyed on its own, mainly because I’ve always felt like I’m being strung along (part of the reason I’ve always enjoyed TPBs to single-issue comics. Fuck single issues. Fuck waiting a week (or worse) to find out what’s going to happen next [the Harry Potter series is the notable exception, but then again, reading Harry Potter is a bit like watching a season DVD all in a go]).

Which is the other nit I pick with Supernatural; apparently, renewal goes to the creators’ heads, as each season pretty much ends on a cliffhanger of some sort. There’s a way to pique interest to keep people watching (or reading) and there’s a way simply to infuriate them.

But Kripke and McG (who exec produces) manage to avoid trouble by consistently putting together terrific, clever episodes. Some of my favorite bits: the names the Winchesters use to pose as detectives (Landis and Dante, Page and Plant, Bachman and Turner); the way Dean Winchester is written; uber-hot chicks in just about every episode; and layers. I’ve watched straight through Season 3, and all the characters seem so fully realized; the highest compliment I can pay, I think, is that you believe these characters had lives before you started watching, and you believe they had lives after the screen goes dark. I tend to think that in addition to the cited influences, Stephen King’s canon casts a long shadow across, at least in terms of character dynamics and interactions, as well as humor and story (and that’s one of the single highest compliments I would pay. Say what you will about Stephen King’s writing [hey, I like it], but you can’t claim he’s not a great storyteller).

I worry about next season; three seemed a bit uneven, though I wonder if that was mainly because it was truncated due to the writers’ strike (a lot like House, MD).

(cross-posted to Mightygodking.com.)