genre and the horizon of expectation
Sep. 7th, 2011 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethor, why adaptation to movies lets the zing out of genre work
all stories, all art, all work, exists as part of a conversation, massively multivocal and with strands going back to the beginning of humans. some stories, some art, some works, stand out, and say something new, something that pushes the limits you maybe weren't even aware were there, something that says, this is what we can do, this is what the genre can be. This is the power in it.
Fan works can do that, working in tension with the source text and the grab bag of tropes fans have been using and the general background of cultures. I have been reading from the voting long list on spec fic work, and watching the vids, and I keep on going back to the list to change my vote, usually away from some novel I've read years ago to some fan thing I just read or watched today. Because the novel, that was great when I read it, that did the brain flip thing, the new thought, the new way of looking at the world. But the fan works, those are the ones that show me a new angle here and now about the works I've spent the most time with for years. And they stand up as SF, and the really satisfying ones simply would not work with the serial numbers filed off or if you tried to detangle them from the fan discourses.
Written by the Victors wows as Atlantis fic. ... I know I keep saying I don't watch Atlantis, but I'm pretty sure on this. Today I read Ardhanarishvara, which is also definitely Atlantis, and plays with a ton of familiar fanfic tropes, like sex swap and undercover as slaves and planet of the prostitutes and planet of the amazons and planet of the really creepy misogynists, only it doesn't use it as a one episode backdrop or simply a catalyst for slash, it digs in and makes each a society and shows them interacting and puts the Atlantis team in the middle of it and illuminates them thereby. Which takes 30 parts and really really a lot of words and quite a lot of time to read. But it's that wow feeling again, that feeling that I never knew our little subgenre could do something quite like this. And the parts of SG1 that I wanted to see explored, the clones and symbiotes and interactions of identity and duty, there's incredible fic out there for that as well. It's awesome.
Recently I have also been going back and re-reading other stuff I thought was awesome. And it was, in the early 90s. Or 80s, or 70s, or whenever the book was from. And the first time I read it, when I was a lot younger, and everything in it was new to me, and I hadn't yet read the things that make it look so obviously incomplete, or limited, or plain wrong. Now? Expectations shifted. Some of the old stories go in the 'of course' pile, and some just make me squirmy and facepalm about my younger self, because really self? That? But at the time, that was water in a desert. That was what the genre could be.
I read a bit of a book of essays about SF from 1975 today, and had to put it down because wrong wrong wrong. Some of that was because they just don't mean the same things by the initials. Their SF might have been like that, but it sounds so limited from here and now.
One bit was about how early stories were about 'look! we can has rockets!' and then writers started to put actual characters in their rockets, and the glory days began. ... okay, that wasn't how they phrased it, but they made it sound like A New Thing. Their idea of good SF starts with a character and uses the SF elements as a metaphor to illuminate aspects of that character. And that definition drives me nuts, because SF is about the impact of technology on characters, it's about seeing how one tweak in the environment remakes us as people, about how many of the things we take as normal and natural are really malleable constructs in response to our environment, and perhaps how many are not. Tech like rockets changes some things. Tech like a sex change machine changes others. Aliens that can climb in your brain and start to chat shift the boundaries on 'self' some. Make you think about it differently. Snake in the brain doesn't think of itself as a snake, no more than we think of ourselves as some squishy grey matter. Weird thought. But all those different techs, they happen to people. So both the essay's straw man 'look! rocket!' stories and their 'metaphor' tech just leave me cold, aren't playing with the full deck. There's so much more they could be doing. Take a tweak and apply it and see what happens. End up with all kinds of everything.
SF on TV doesn't always do that. Or, you know, often. Quite a lot, SF on TV is about blowing things up real good. Is sad. But then fans get hold of it, and sometimes wow happens.
Sometimes porn happens, but there's quite a lot of illuminating the surprising malleability of identity involved in that sometimes too.
The movie adaptations thing, that sounds like a fanwork. Transformative. Take source text, turn it into something new. Only it doesn't. It reinflects it, yeah, and there's always a tension between what the original did and what seems normal or understandable now. But adaptations, the good ones that are recognisable, they don't break new ground. They don't push the boundaries of possible, except sometimes in terms of FX. Those things have already been said. In a great many cases, they've been said twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. There's obvious commercial appeal in taking a text that stood the test of time, that sold and continued to sell, and applying the vast investment needed to turn it into a movie. I get the impulse. But all it does is echo. Sometimes a distorted echo. But it doesn't expand.
Am I over generalising? Is there a movie adaptation, or inspired-by, or sequel, that engages with the source and makes something much better out of it? Maybe if it did I wouldn't know of the source at all, the movie being more famous.
TV shows do a different thing, with the setting up to run and run and run. I'll think on them later. Short version: I like TV, but the pressure to be episodic kind of kills what I like about it.
Same with comics. They keep going around and around, because they're being more-of, not more-from. It works up to a point, but it stops working. To keep echoing the way the text was when I was a kid is bad enough, that being twenty plus years ago, but the people in charge now at DC want to push it back further, to the way it was before I was born. That was set up in such a different discursive setting it simply isn't saying the same thing to repeat it now. You need to adapt it just to get the same message. Like saying gay to mean happy, some things have the world shift out around them, you've got to change them to keep up. Translating from ancient languages be tricky, but translating from our own youths be bloody tricky too, if we want it to mean the same thing now.
Case in point: Star Trek vs Reboot, considering only casting. When the original series was put together having Uhura on the bridge at all was shiny new and daring. (More or less. I'd want to do more research and cite an essay, but it's my blog and I've been awake a really long time.) The United Colors of the Federation approach was a game change. And putting a Russian on the bridge? Yowza! Implies the future is different than the now! Who could think! ... yeah, we can think from here, but We have always been at war with [x]. /1984
So in the Reboot, if you want to say the same thing, what do you do? Because Uhura on the bridge just doesn't do it any more. (See songvid themed 'too many dicks on the dancefloor'.) This many years on, you don't break ground by having The Girl around. And a Russian? Has no fear power any more. All he has are accent jokes. Does anyone making the reboot remember why you laugh at a Russian looking for nuclear wessels? It skimmed bloody close to the fear place, is why. Nowadays it's the same sort of funny as a stutter, pretty much empty. (and, speaking as little as possible as someone with a stutter, it's not bloody funny and assistive tech should be a damn sight better by the future. why does the computer care what your accent is like?) If you want to do the same thing you have to take a crew made up of today's enemies. You have to take whatever seems unthinkable now and make the future seamlessly integrate it. You have to make heroes out of whoever gets the seperate but equal argument in this generation, whoever shocks just by sharing a kiss with them, whoever scares hell out of significant portions of the audience just by their ethnicity. Repeating the words, redrawing the characters, just completely loses the meaning. It's cosy, now. It's trying to say look how far we've come, look how normal this future looks now. But it's just highlighting how far we haven't come.
Cultural studies class provides a model for some of this. Emergent, dominant, and residual. You get a cultural dominant at all times, but there's new stuff emerging, and old stuff hanging on. So the ground breaker, the first comic to go there, the first on screen kiss, that's the emergent, the cutting edge. Once it sinks into the cultural dominant, then it all just looks normal.
So if the liberal of yesterday looks like the normal of today, we've won, right?
... not so much. Because by putting it up there big and shiny and proud of it, they're saying it's still the new thing, it's still worth advertising, pushing, trying. It hasn't become normal. The cutting edge just got blunted on damn tenacious residual ropes.
Why this is about SF? SF gets power by saying the future looks like this, this is the new dominant, this is the new normal. If the future looks like the past imagined it would? We be so screwed. Nothing new under these suns. *shudders*
So there's works that show you something new about humans, something about identity, society, possibility.
And there's works that show you that these works, genres, tools, can illuminate the great questions in this way.
... also works that restate old horrors in new ways. There's a lot of edges. They strike out in many directions.
Works that can grab you and make you shiver are few and far between.
And most of them can't do it twice. Not with years between. Reader and text have changed too much, as the discourses shift.
Science fiction, on one border, strikes out trying to push your expectations higher.
Films adapting SF written generations ago? Don't.
But fanworks based on them can do so again.
all stories, all art, all work, exists as part of a conversation, massively multivocal and with strands going back to the beginning of humans. some stories, some art, some works, stand out, and say something new, something that pushes the limits you maybe weren't even aware were there, something that says, this is what we can do, this is what the genre can be. This is the power in it.
Fan works can do that, working in tension with the source text and the grab bag of tropes fans have been using and the general background of cultures. I have been reading from the voting long list on spec fic work, and watching the vids, and I keep on going back to the list to change my vote, usually away from some novel I've read years ago to some fan thing I just read or watched today. Because the novel, that was great when I read it, that did the brain flip thing, the new thought, the new way of looking at the world. But the fan works, those are the ones that show me a new angle here and now about the works I've spent the most time with for years. And they stand up as SF, and the really satisfying ones simply would not work with the serial numbers filed off or if you tried to detangle them from the fan discourses.
Written by the Victors wows as Atlantis fic. ... I know I keep saying I don't watch Atlantis, but I'm pretty sure on this. Today I read Ardhanarishvara, which is also definitely Atlantis, and plays with a ton of familiar fanfic tropes, like sex swap and undercover as slaves and planet of the prostitutes and planet of the amazons and planet of the really creepy misogynists, only it doesn't use it as a one episode backdrop or simply a catalyst for slash, it digs in and makes each a society and shows them interacting and puts the Atlantis team in the middle of it and illuminates them thereby. Which takes 30 parts and really really a lot of words and quite a lot of time to read. But it's that wow feeling again, that feeling that I never knew our little subgenre could do something quite like this. And the parts of SG1 that I wanted to see explored, the clones and symbiotes and interactions of identity and duty, there's incredible fic out there for that as well. It's awesome.
Recently I have also been going back and re-reading other stuff I thought was awesome. And it was, in the early 90s. Or 80s, or 70s, or whenever the book was from. And the first time I read it, when I was a lot younger, and everything in it was new to me, and I hadn't yet read the things that make it look so obviously incomplete, or limited, or plain wrong. Now? Expectations shifted. Some of the old stories go in the 'of course' pile, and some just make me squirmy and facepalm about my younger self, because really self? That? But at the time, that was water in a desert. That was what the genre could be.
I read a bit of a book of essays about SF from 1975 today, and had to put it down because wrong wrong wrong. Some of that was because they just don't mean the same things by the initials. Their SF might have been like that, but it sounds so limited from here and now.
One bit was about how early stories were about 'look! we can has rockets!' and then writers started to put actual characters in their rockets, and the glory days began. ... okay, that wasn't how they phrased it, but they made it sound like A New Thing. Their idea of good SF starts with a character and uses the SF elements as a metaphor to illuminate aspects of that character. And that definition drives me nuts, because SF is about the impact of technology on characters, it's about seeing how one tweak in the environment remakes us as people, about how many of the things we take as normal and natural are really malleable constructs in response to our environment, and perhaps how many are not. Tech like rockets changes some things. Tech like a sex change machine changes others. Aliens that can climb in your brain and start to chat shift the boundaries on 'self' some. Make you think about it differently. Snake in the brain doesn't think of itself as a snake, no more than we think of ourselves as some squishy grey matter. Weird thought. But all those different techs, they happen to people. So both the essay's straw man 'look! rocket!' stories and their 'metaphor' tech just leave me cold, aren't playing with the full deck. There's so much more they could be doing. Take a tweak and apply it and see what happens. End up with all kinds of everything.
SF on TV doesn't always do that. Or, you know, often. Quite a lot, SF on TV is about blowing things up real good. Is sad. But then fans get hold of it, and sometimes wow happens.
Sometimes porn happens, but there's quite a lot of illuminating the surprising malleability of identity involved in that sometimes too.
The movie adaptations thing, that sounds like a fanwork. Transformative. Take source text, turn it into something new. Only it doesn't. It reinflects it, yeah, and there's always a tension between what the original did and what seems normal or understandable now. But adaptations, the good ones that are recognisable, they don't break new ground. They don't push the boundaries of possible, except sometimes in terms of FX. Those things have already been said. In a great many cases, they've been said twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. There's obvious commercial appeal in taking a text that stood the test of time, that sold and continued to sell, and applying the vast investment needed to turn it into a movie. I get the impulse. But all it does is echo. Sometimes a distorted echo. But it doesn't expand.
Am I over generalising? Is there a movie adaptation, or inspired-by, or sequel, that engages with the source and makes something much better out of it? Maybe if it did I wouldn't know of the source at all, the movie being more famous.
TV shows do a different thing, with the setting up to run and run and run. I'll think on them later. Short version: I like TV, but the pressure to be episodic kind of kills what I like about it.
Same with comics. They keep going around and around, because they're being more-of, not more-from. It works up to a point, but it stops working. To keep echoing the way the text was when I was a kid is bad enough, that being twenty plus years ago, but the people in charge now at DC want to push it back further, to the way it was before I was born. That was set up in such a different discursive setting it simply isn't saying the same thing to repeat it now. You need to adapt it just to get the same message. Like saying gay to mean happy, some things have the world shift out around them, you've got to change them to keep up. Translating from ancient languages be tricky, but translating from our own youths be bloody tricky too, if we want it to mean the same thing now.
Case in point: Star Trek vs Reboot, considering only casting. When the original series was put together having Uhura on the bridge at all was shiny new and daring. (More or less. I'd want to do more research and cite an essay, but it's my blog and I've been awake a really long time.) The United Colors of the Federation approach was a game change. And putting a Russian on the bridge? Yowza! Implies the future is different than the now! Who could think! ... yeah, we can think from here, but We have always been at war with [x]. /1984
So in the Reboot, if you want to say the same thing, what do you do? Because Uhura on the bridge just doesn't do it any more. (See songvid themed 'too many dicks on the dancefloor'.) This many years on, you don't break ground by having The Girl around. And a Russian? Has no fear power any more. All he has are accent jokes. Does anyone making the reboot remember why you laugh at a Russian looking for nuclear wessels? It skimmed bloody close to the fear place, is why. Nowadays it's the same sort of funny as a stutter, pretty much empty. (and, speaking as little as possible as someone with a stutter, it's not bloody funny and assistive tech should be a damn sight better by the future. why does the computer care what your accent is like?) If you want to do the same thing you have to take a crew made up of today's enemies. You have to take whatever seems unthinkable now and make the future seamlessly integrate it. You have to make heroes out of whoever gets the seperate but equal argument in this generation, whoever shocks just by sharing a kiss with them, whoever scares hell out of significant portions of the audience just by their ethnicity. Repeating the words, redrawing the characters, just completely loses the meaning. It's cosy, now. It's trying to say look how far we've come, look how normal this future looks now. But it's just highlighting how far we haven't come.
Cultural studies class provides a model for some of this. Emergent, dominant, and residual. You get a cultural dominant at all times, but there's new stuff emerging, and old stuff hanging on. So the ground breaker, the first comic to go there, the first on screen kiss, that's the emergent, the cutting edge. Once it sinks into the cultural dominant, then it all just looks normal.
So if the liberal of yesterday looks like the normal of today, we've won, right?
... not so much. Because by putting it up there big and shiny and proud of it, they're saying it's still the new thing, it's still worth advertising, pushing, trying. It hasn't become normal. The cutting edge just got blunted on damn tenacious residual ropes.
Why this is about SF? SF gets power by saying the future looks like this, this is the new dominant, this is the new normal. If the future looks like the past imagined it would? We be so screwed. Nothing new under these suns. *shudders*
So there's works that show you something new about humans, something about identity, society, possibility.
And there's works that show you that these works, genres, tools, can illuminate the great questions in this way.
... also works that restate old horrors in new ways. There's a lot of edges. They strike out in many directions.
Works that can grab you and make you shiver are few and far between.
And most of them can't do it twice. Not with years between. Reader and text have changed too much, as the discourses shift.
Science fiction, on one border, strikes out trying to push your expectations higher.
Films adapting SF written generations ago? Don't.
But fanworks based on them can do so again.