The anti-Western

I've written in this space before how Die Hard works as a meta-level defense of the masculine American hero, with its tacit ridicule of McClane's doubters and naysayers in corporate sleazeball Harry Ellis and Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T Robinson. Total Recall does something similar… both formally in its male fantasy plot, and informally during the pivotal pill scene with Dr. Edgemar. The evidence supporting Dr. Edgemar's argument that Quaid dreamed everything after going under at Rekall is rock-solid, but you the viewer reject it because the adventure you're on is too fun to not believe in, real world be damned.

Westerns on TV and the big screen featured the kinds of heros Die Hard extolled, but the genre suffered a mortal blow in the late '60s and '70s when a darkening of public thought retinged American history with cynicism and shame. The revisionist Western, featuring morally gray heros, became de rigueur.

If anyone was going to revive the Western, it would have been Clint Eastwood, star of Sergio Leonne's Dollars trilogy and other Western classics like Two Mules for Sister Sarah, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and my personal favorite, Pale Rider. Spoiler alert: He did not.

"We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work… I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST." –Sonia Chernus, screenwriter of The Outlaw Josey Wales

Unforgiven won the Academy Award for Best Picture and is hailed by many as the best Western of all time. It's supposedly so good that it's the reason no one has tried to make a Western in 30 years (except for the vastly more entertaining Tombstone). That's wrong. No one has tried to make a Western since Unforgiven because Unforgiven systematically deconstructed and destroyed the genre. As film critic Jason Hellerman says, "what we saw made us not want to look back for a long time."

If Die Hard and Total Recall tried to revive or at least venerate heroism and escapism, Unforgiven shoots them in the back and stomps them into the mud. It's brutal, nihilistic, and joyless. The "hero," an assassin who abandons his young children, would be the villain in any other movie. (He even has a Villains wiki page.) The "villain," a sheriff protecting a Wyoming town from assassins, would be the hero in any other movie. The inversion is masterfully executed, but I hesitate to call it "good."

Daggett: "I'll see you in hell, William Munny."

Munny: "Yeah." [shoots Daggett in the head]

An example of how this movie deconstructs the Western is its portrayal of "saloon girls." What some women did to keep food on the table in the Old West was rarely hinted at in Hays Code–era Hollywood, to the extent the hero could flirt with a prostitute and a child who happened to be watching would be none the wiser. Unforgiven is not so politic and duly earns its Restricted rating in the very first scene by showing a man butcher a prostitute's face because she laughed when she saw his penis.

If that doesn't sound like typical Western fare, that's because it's not. The point of that scene (in addition to initiate the plot) is to hit the viewer between the eyes with the vulgarity of the Old West. It's a comment less about the Old West and more about the genre that artfully obscured the vulgar and profane to tell you a story, maybe even a wholesome story about men with moral fiber. Put another way, those stories were lies. This, here, is unvarnished truth. Get it?

As if Eastwood's intent wasn't clear enough, there's a character called Beauchamp, a writer of pulp Western novels, who is portrayed as a coward who lives vicariously through his heros, who sugar-coats and glorifies violence. The sheriff takes him under his wing to teach him how the West really is: lawless, amoral, unheroic. Even the way gunfights play out comes down to dumb luck. You see? Everything is meaningless!

It's ironic when a fan of this movie talks about this movie with any kind of reverence when the movie all but screams that it doesn't want to be revered. This person might even say his favorite scene is when Eastwood's Bill Munny shoots up a saloon to avenge his friend. It's a great gunfight, and it stands out as the only time the ostensible hero lets morality direct his actions. The same gunfight with same set-up would have a bigger impact in a true Western.

It took chutzpah for Eastwood to make Unforgiven, an indictment of the genre that made him famous. I'd hold it against him personally if he didn't have oodles of good will stored up from everything else he's acted in and directed. But for those whom the Western is near and dear, I wouldn't be surprised if he's still unforgiven.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Morally gray heros?

One of my readers told me he thought the villain of Tendrils to the Moon was the good guy until he was almost through with the book. That confusion was not my intention, but I can see why it happened:

• Tendrils has two lead characters, and neither consistently exhibits villainous or heroic behavior. (Tropes would have served me well here, to communicate to the reader how to feel about the characters.)
• During the drafting phase, I understood who the villain was long before I settled on a character for the hero. The tortured choices the villain makes drive the conflict. This resulted in the villain having a stronger presence until well into the second act.

Theoretically the story is a corruption arc for the villian and a redemption arc for the hero, and they're pushed into conflict by the villain's choices. I could have executed the latter a lot better, because it's not clear what Col. Montgomery Ames (U.S. Air Force–retired) needs redemption from, if anything. Writing that book was a learning experience, but I'm glad people who've read it enjoyed it, even if I do rank my second book higher.

The occasion for this is Yakov Merkin's post about the disconcerting trend of morally gray heros in fiction. Here's a highlight:

What’s important is seeing the hero we like face down these challenges, come to the edge of falling to them, but then finding a way to get through. The hero refuses to betray his friends even under intense pressure. The hero refuses to let himself return to being a merciless conqueror when the opportunity presents itself. Consciously deciding to stay a hero. Physical threats don’t give you that sort of opportunity, most of the time.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m not saying a hero needs to be a literal boy scout. Batman’s policy of never killing his many murderous foes is idiotic and not heroic. There are times when a truly good hero must take harsh action against evil in order to protect the innocent. Don’t mistake that for a falling into darkness.

The moral-graying of heros is a symptom of naturalist and deconstructionist movements to eschew artistic representations of the ideal. In the real world people are complex and do good or bad for a million different reasons. You're drawn to the villain because he's not simply evil; he got to be this way. You often hear how interesting a villain is, like Killmonger in Black Panther. The audience expects there's a reason this person turned bad. (This is so prevalent, it's now considered subversive to have the villain just be the villain.)

The flip side of that is the audience's assumption that all people start out good, or at least okay. Thus the hero's backstory doesn't have as much juice as the villain's. To give the hero's role weight to at least counter the villain's presence in the story, the writer morally shades the hero.

The problem with that? Moral shading diminishes the most powerful emotion an audience can feel: catharsis; the triumph of good over evil. Look at what Zack Snyder tried to do with Superman, perhaps the most idealized hero in American culture. Snyder transplanted him into a darkly shaded setting and narrative. The result? Superman doesn't feel like a hero.

What we can learn from Snyder's failure is you can't have your cake and eat it too. Some characters, like classic heros and villains, can't be moral-grayed without creating dissonance in the audience. If we want better heros, we're going to have to cut down on the moral-graying.

Side bar: I'm no Batman aficionado, but the no-kill principle is indeed idiotic. And I thought the tongue-in-cheek "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you" line in Batman Begins acknowledged it as such, until the sequel showed Batman refusing to kill the Joker while the Joker was on a murder spree. Why are we even fighting if we're morally opposed to killing the bad guy in defense of innocents?

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

End of the line

The fledgeling Marvel Television Universe will not get physical media releases. This is my shocked face. ComicBook.com has the story, if you're interested. I want to key in on what Marvel Studios frontman Kevin Feige said when the physical media question was put to him in January:

The truth is, I don't know. That's a good question for which I will look for the answer. I don't know. You can pay a very low fee per month and have access to something that you can put it on your TV whenever you want!

At the risk of sounding obtuse, you can watch a DVD whenever you want, and you don't have to pay Disney+ or an Internet service provider a monthly fee. But that's not in Disney's interest. They want recurring, predictable income. For the cost of producing an episode of TV per week and the occasional 2-hour special, they're getting it.

Don't get me wrong. This doesn't affect me in the slightest. Anything shiny Hollywood produces these days has to be really special to demand my time.

However, on a macro level, it's hard to deny we're at a turning point. If old Hollywood is going to make streaming work, it will be at consumers' expense. With everything going to streaming, it won't make sense to mass-produce Blu-rays and DVDs anymore. Why sell people the means of bypassing your cash cow? Likewise for Blu-ray and DVD players. In 2019 Samsung stopped releasing new Blu-ray players for the U.S. market.

I hesitate to tie this in to Klaus Schwab's Great Reset, but this pivot to streaming would be nothing less if it was being deliberately implemented with that agenda in mind. Imagine everything in your life is single-use like the plastic cups you put in a Keurig. You will own nothing. Your viewing habits will be monitored and new content will be curated for you to ensure you meet your consumption target. You'll gobble up the latest disposable offerings, forgetful of past iterations of the IP after they're digitally erased from the 'Net. (Hackers or a computer virus will serve as a scapegoat early on, when pretenses have to be upheld.) The past won't be so much rewritten as overwritten. It's always year zero to the cult of the new.

The past is worth preserving. If you haven't started building your library yet, start now. The future depends on it.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Bezos's unexciting stunt

When Jeff Bezos was soundly beaten by Elon Musk to be NASA's partner in getting back to the Moon, Bezos pivoted to space tourism as the future of his aerospace company. He recently auctioned off a seat on Blue Origin's first commercial flight for $28 million.

To be clear, that's $28 million for a 10-minute flight, 3 minutes of which you could argue occurs in "space." The identity of the winning bidder remains a secret, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't someone who used the publicity to hawk something like plant-based meat to the public. "It's the future of meat!"

Bezos, who will step down as Amazon’s chief executive officer 15 days before the flight, posted on Instagram: “Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.”

The trip comes amid increasing competition between the some of the world’s wealthiest men. Blue Origin is vying with Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies and the Richard Branson-backed Virgin Galactic Holdings to offer trips to space.

Bezos may be out of Branson's league, but he can't go toe to toe with Musk, who combines the wealth of the former with the charisma of the latter. I've been critical of Musk's Twitter shenanigans and his reliance on subsidies to keep Tesla and SolarCity afloat, but he has moxy, and you need that to send men into space (in addition to billions of dollars). He also understands what dogged the space program after Apollo: a lack of excitement. More than all of SpaceX's innovation in the field of VTOL rockets, the "Starman" stunt renewed many people's interest in space exploration.

Bezos's sub-orbital stunt is 10 years too late, and he doesn't have the charisma to make it interesting. Personally reaching space before Musk pales in comparison to what Musk will accomplish in the next 3 years. Feel free to look past this nothingburger to Artemis 1, an unmanned version of Apollo 8, which will be as much a test of NASA's wildly overpriced SLS rocket as of the Orion spacecraft. Or you can watch Russia's future space partner build their own space station in low Earth orbit.

The launch of #China’s first manned mission to its #space station. It’s pretty incredible what humans can do. The rocket’s chief designer told me after so much work, she was sad to see it go... but ‘thrilled’ that for 10 key minutes ‘it did its duty’.
This was my view.@NBCNews pic.twitter.com/ofDNV8XXU5

— Janis Mackey Frayer (@janisfrayer) June 17, 2021

WATCH: China’s Shenzhou 12 docking to Tiangong Space Station Core Cabin Module

pic.twitter.com/mvi82lyKEI

— ASB News / MILITARY〽️ (@ASBMilitary) June 17, 2021

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Addicted to success

The creators of many successful IPs are surprised by their success. Their product, borne from a labor of love, appeals to more people than they thought possible. Sales boom. The creators, whose production team started small, scale up operations to meet demand, and launch sequels, spin-offs, crossover products, etc.

Eventually they reach their commercial ceiling, or they release back-to-back mediocre products. A regression to the mean occurs. The creators face having to scale back down to align with this more realistic demand (i.e., lay people off). Or, they reason, they can fudge the essence of the IP to "broaden the appeal."

Essential to any IP's identity is what it excludes. "Broadening the appeal" is to remove what is distinct and special. John Anderson is more right than he knows. Whatever you like about an over-the-hill IP, subsequent iterations that "broaden the appeal" will, at best, still have that content, but bury it under a bunch of crap. The watered-down product may boost sales, but it doesn't cohere like it used to. The original consumer base splinters and the hardcore enthusiasts check out.

This is how most IPs enter what David V Stewart calls the corporate IP death cycle. Their most creative and productive days behind them, the creators or license holders become more concerned with sustaining the largesse they built up to maximize profits. There's little of the creator left in them, for they've become addicted to success.

If you've been following E3, as Bradford C Walker and T J Marquis have, you may be struck by the lack of diverse offerings from the gaming industry. That's because most creators with a big enough presence to present at E3 are well past the initial expansion supported by a singular, well-executed idea. They have organizations to run, and organizations tend to stifle creativity.

"Where's the next [x]?" is a common refrain you hear in dissident circles yearning for quality entertainment that isn't in its fifth or sixth title. The answer is it's being lovingly crafted by someone you've never heard of in their parents' basement. That's the nature of surprises. You don't see them coming.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Managing the flow of information

One of the reasons I hated Tenet, the movie that flopped last summer at the height of the epidemic and failed to save old Hollywood, was the obscurity of its action. Some of this could have been fixed with better acting, editing, sound mixing, and musical scoring. But most of it owes to the central conceit of the movie, that people and things can pass through a portal and invert their passage through time.

The Protagonist: "The cause comes before effect."

Laura: "No. That's just the way we see time."

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to make a $200 million action movie that reverses the order of cause and effect. The result is action that's impossible to understand, a muddle that doesn't make sense until it ends—or starts, whatever.

I've thought about that movie and what I can learn from it a lot since last summer. These big-budget blockbusters have no equal in terms of production value, but their scripts, whether written by committee or by one man, consistently fall short. Tenet doesn't work because of the fatal flaw of reverse chronology. Nolan's so devoted to the concept he withholds information until after you needed it. The action, instead of thrilling, is confounding like a Rubik's cube and similarly lacking in kinetic energy.

That's not to say I don't make these kinds of mistakes. A writing skill I've yet to master is managing the flow of information to the reader. That's giving the reader what he needs before he needs it. No more, no less. It sounds simple, but you can get really mixed up writing a scene with just two people, each one trying to deceive the other. I was working on a book years ago, which I never finished, that had a scene just like that. I must have written 10 versions of that scene. I couldn't keep straight what the two men knew, what they were pretending to know, and what they didn't know.

My go-to tactic to manage the flow of information is to hide it from the POV character. This can be achieved through simple ignorance or deception by other characters. That necessitates a reason for the POV character's ignorance, such as he's new in town, or young and naive. In the case of deception—well, people lie for all kinds of reasons. If you can link that reason to a unique facet of the setting, you're doing well.

The Martian by Mike Weir is many things. What I admire about it is the amount of information Mike Weir includes without being boring. The choices he made for the main character's personality, the narrative structure, and all the screw-ups and surprises facilitated the exposition. That information was essential to the book's plot and tone, which created a vicarious feeling of working side-by-side with NASA engineers on a high-stakes space mission.

It's wild thinking about the general lack of information in the pre-Internet era. Remember when you had to look things up in an encyclopedia? Now I can find the answer to any question that pops into my head in seconds. That we can instantly satisfy our curiosity about any topic under the Sun caps our imaginations a bit. When Michael Crichton wrote Timeline, he counted on the fact that you couldn't see through his quantum deception without doctarate-level research. If he wrote that today, would he take the same risk with the facts, knowing we could fact-check him on the spot? If not, we would have been deprived of what I regard as his best book.

With so much information at hand, it takes as much time to discern what's important as it does to discern what's true. The book I'm writing now has stonemasonry in it. I know nothing about stonemasonry, but the Internet knows everything. I don't have time to become conversant in stonemasonry or a hundred other topics my book touches on. I don't want to regurgitate every fact about stonemasonry to show the reader the stonemasons in my book are the real deal, either. What a writer does is show the basic knowledge of what's necessary for the scene to unfold—to know what's important—and discard the rest.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

The upside of restrictive formats

David V Stewart, always a great source for thoughtful content and commentary, dropped a video yesterday explaining how the format switch from vinyl record to CD in the '80s resulted in a decline in album quality. If you're like me, and music is something you love but know little about, David's video is worth a watch.

In summary, albums on vinyl were limited to two 23-minute sides. Often you would listen to one side of a record, encouraging continuity and/or contrast among the songs that composed that side. CDs, on the other hand, can hold nearly 80 minutes of music. When listening to a CD, you can use the skip buttons to hear your favorite songs.

As with most new trends, the downside of CDs wouldn't be felt until years later. As a rival to vinyl, cassette tapes owned the '80s and didn't begin to fade until the early '90s. David notes around that time bands and their producers started to stuff their albums with filler to make them longer, because why leave "wasted" space on an 80-minute CD? The end result was albums with watered-down quality. Metallica's Load famously boasted 78 minutes and 59 seconds of music, which was probably 30 minutes too long.

The constraints of the vinyl record used to force bands and their producers to tighten up the songwriting and select the best material from a recording session. The CD does not impose that kind of discipline.

Look at the top-selling and top-rated albums during vinyl's heyday. Led Zeppelin I, II, III, and IV were all under 45 minutes. Dark Side of the Moon? Forty-three minutes. (My favorite Pink Floyd album is Wish You Were Here, at 44 minutes.) Pet Sounds was a paltry 35 minutes. Michael Jackson's Thriller and Back in Black both clocked in at 42 minutes. You hardly ever hear anyone complain these albums are too short. What they are is good.

As I said in an earlier post, time is an essential constraint of any media. Because media formats evolved quickly and shed material boundaries (books to ebooks, albums to iTunes, movies and TV to Internet streaming), creators have the freedom to put out entertainment of any length they want.

As with any new freedom, it's easily abused. Excesses in books, music, and movies prove by the blessing of hard boundaries. It's better to err on the side of being too short, leaving the audience wanting more, than too long, and overstaying your welcome. Assume the listener (or reader, in my case) has something marginally less important to do than pay attention to your very best effort. That will keep your quality up.

Aside: Cassette tapes, at 30 minutes per side, matched well with vinyl records at the cost of lower quality. When I was little, my dad had more cassette tapes than any other format. He would listen to the A side on his way to work and the B side on his way home, then switch the tapes that night. When I turned 16 and he gave me his car, one of the first things I did was burn my CDs to tapes so I could listen to them on the road. It wasn't until the summer after I turned 17 that I realized installing a CD player in the dashboard was an option. All my friends and I had CD players installed in our cars in the span of a few months. Best Buy doesn't offer that service anymore, and I doubt it ever will again.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

Vindication

It seems like a long, long time ago that Worldcon banned Jon del Arroz for "racist and bullying behavior," an intentionally vague catch-all term for everything outside the Death Cult's influence. Despite living in a cynical age, many people are credulous when it comes to this kind of thing. All it takes is an accusation and the court of public opinion will skip the trial and go straight to the sentencing. Cultural incentives favor consent by silence. To object has the feel of declaring war, for control based on falsehood faces an existential threat from the truth.

The very public and humiliating announcement was no straightforward case of disassociation. (People are free to choose who they want to be around. That's a fundamental human right.) It was a de facto fatwa placed on Jon's livelihood. Nowadays you don't have to behead someone to be rid of them. You just have to coordinate a consensus among the commissars that any who choose to transact with a "racist and bullying" person is guilty by association. Effectively starving that person to death.

It goes without saying the charges were without merit. Rather than sit down and mutter to himself in the shadows to which he'd been banished, Jon fought back and defended his good name. It took over 3 years of wrangling in the California court system, but he finally got a retraction and an apology.

Worldcon also ponied up $4,000 in damages, a paltry sum compared to the lost book sales that come from wrecking an up-and-coming writer's career.

We call this vindication. If I were Gina Carano, I'd have my lawyers draft suit against Lucasfilm immediately. Their charge against her, "social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities," is similarly bogus.

The Wild West has the reputation, among modernity's supposed moral betters, of being violent and uncivilized. What will future generations say about the slanderous social media culture of 2021? At least in the Wild West men had recourse via fists or guns when others defamed their character. This encouraged grudging respect among rivals. Nowadays there are hardly any consequences. Slander and libel are notoriously difficult to prove in American civil courts. Not coincidentally, they are the Death Cult's go-to weapons in crushing their enemies.

Thanks to Jon, maybe they'll think twice before pulling that trigger.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.

UPDATE: Jon takes a well-deserved victory lap:

Hobbit sex

A Twitter mutual brought to my attention a 1958 essay by Murray Rothbard about naturalism, or realism, in modern literature. It's one of the most succinct and pertinent articles written about its subject matter that I've read, right up there with C S Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

But first, a quote from George R R Martin, to give fuller context to Rothbard's observation.

Martin's stock and trade is "humanizing" his characters by shining a light on their most intimate, often illicit, activities. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, leaves it to our imaginations what hobbits do in the bedroom. I wouldn't categorize the writing style as asexual or celibate, but rather chaste in the sense that sex is best undertaken within the frame of conjugal love as part of God's created order.

In answer to Martin's challenge, I find it almost too easy to imagine hobbits falling in love, getting married, and having lots of baby hobbits. They're farmers, and farmers get it on more than any other profession.

But let's get back to this preoccupation with representing sex in detail in fiction. It's indicative of a certain type of writing that leaves no privacy to the characters or to the reader, that relies on carnal impropriety to pivot the story this way or that. It's been known a long time that man is fallen and, left to his own devices, perverts God's order. Why then has this writing style become more popular since Tolkien's heyday?

Rothbard writes (click to enlarge):

By employing this rationale, the GRRMs of the world absolve themselves of responsibility for the contents of their books. "Are people, especially those in power, not depraved?" they argue. "If so, you have no reason to object. I'm just writing to reflect reality."

Not so fast. One of the most underrated responsibilities of the writer is to choose what to put in and what to leave out of his book. Chekhov's gun dictates that every story element should contribute something to the story. If you fail to discriminate what goes in your book on large scale, everything will come out looking muddy and meaningless.

For the sake of argument, let's say Middle-Earth appeared to Tolkien's imagination fully formed, hobbit sex and all. He left that part out, preserving the characters' nobility in a tale of epic moral scope. As difficult it is for Martin to imagine hobbits having sex, can you imagine how absurd it would be to read about how Sam ravaged Rosy Cotton after years of pent-up longing?

Those who have waited to be inspired to write a book know that's not how it works. The writer creates what goes on the page. It's hard enough work to not take credit, whether the audience loves or hates it.

Rothbard continues:

The fact of the matter is Martin writes about sex because he wants to write about sex, and he'd rather you not treat him like a guy who likes to write about sex. So he employs a red herring, detracting from Tolkien because the latter, to his credit, didn't write about sex.

I suspect the reason we have more popular writers like Martin and fewer popular writers like Tolkien today is because atheists and secularists subverted the art landscape and reshaped readers' expectations. There's no time like the present to reverse that trend. I encourage you to patronize indie creators listed or otherwise engage their work, as they have engaged mine.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.