District 9 (2009)

It isn’t difficult to understand why District 9, a South African film directed by Neill Blomkamp was nominated for Best Picture in the expanded category at this year’s Oscars. It is an exciting film that does some amazing things with special effects, especially in representing the alien ‘prawns,’ and the whole point of doubling the field from five films to ten was to allow such crowd pleasers into competition in order to make the awards seem more relevant. I watched the film last week, and while I see why others are so fond of it, I was slightly disappointed by the way the film’s narrative was executed.

Twenty years before film’s beginning, a huge spacecraft appeared and stationed itself directly over Johannesburg. An exploratory team discovers over a million sick and starving members of an alien people who have no leader. Morality being what it is, the people of South Africa began to care for this leaderless population, and set up a section just outside of town and directly underneath the ship called District 9. Flash forward twenty years and the place is a slum, a horrible place inhabited by creatures that are rendered as disgusting and animalistic. A drain on the economy of Johannesburg and a source of great angst for the citizens, a decision is made by the government and military corporation Multinational United (MNU) to move the 1.8 million aliens to a new camp 200 kilometers away. Tasked to lead this relocation is Wikus Van De Merwe, played engagingly by Sharlto Copley, a field operative from MNU.

All this is established within the first ten minutes. What seems like a ridiculous amount of exposition is crafted into the main narrative through the device of the documentary. A series of interviews and broadcasts, taking place after the film’s main timeline is complete, provide the viewer with all the information listed above. These interviews not only set the stage for the story to play out, they also provide a richness that makes the story more believable, answering questions like where the rest of the world stands on the alien issue and other concerns necessary for verisimilitude but outside the needs of the film’s narrative. News reports form Johannesburg, complete with cameramen on the ground with Wikus as he serves notice of the evictions to the aliens as well as overhead shots common to anyone watching a breaking story on cable news, provide us with the bulk of the first act. However, even while most of the first act is shown from this perspective, Blomkamp breaks from this conceit into classical film narrative in order to introduce two aliens who are preparing some sort of mysterious black fluid, which Wikus later finds and is accidentally sprayed with.

Straying from the idea that the audience is only privy to the information being shown because it was recorded feels like a misstep to me, though it is near impossible to imagine how Blomkamp would have presented the rest of the story if he hadn’t. The aliens have weapons that have some sort of biological lockout, meaning they can’t be used by humans. After being exposed to the black liquid, Wikus’s arm begins to change into that of the aliens, making him capable of firing these weapons and of great interest to MNU, the evil military corporation run by, coincidentally enough, Wikius’s father-in-law. It’s understandable that the story moving in such a direction necessitates the shift away from the documentary format, but because Blomkamp presented so much of the early parts of the movie through this perspective, the change feels a bit jarring, at least to this viewer. By transitioning from the documentary to the news report to the omniscient eye of film, he loses some of the magic that drew me into his story.

In the third act, Wikus escapes MNU and teams up with the alien who created the black liquid in order to retrieve it so he can return to the mothership and restore Wikus to human form. Without giving away the film’s ending, Blomkamp returns to the documentary device at the conclusion, with journalists and others speculating on the questions left at the end of the narrative, some of which is dramatic irony since the audience knows things that the citizens watching such a documentary wouldn’t.

Perhaps it is not the choice to move from documentary to news report to classical film narrative and then back again that irks me, but rather the lack of a segue to ease the viewer into the changes. District 9 presents itself in the first act as being a narrative composed of previously recorded material (in the film’s universe) only to drop it abruptly and embrace a classical style. As I said before, it is near impossible to conceive of how the film would change had Blomkamp stayed with the documentary format, so I don’t fault him for going the way he did; it is a good film, and one worth seeing.

Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve known about Gary Vaynerchuk for a few years now; being in the restaurant industry and selling a lot of wine turns one onto new approaches in the name of the almighty dollar. But I avoided his business book Crush It! for several months because his manic style just wasn’t all that appealing to me. But after one of the professors on my thesis committee recommended it to me, I finally found myself, copy in hand, wondering if the principles he lays out for building a personal brand can really help me and if I have the energy to fully exploit them.

Vaynerchuk wants you to find the one thing you want to do more than any other and then build a personal brand around it. The immediate problem for me? I have no idea what I want to do more than any other. In fact, I think such a dilemma has been a struggle for a long time now, as I am unenthused about this blog yet unwilling to abandon it. How does someone with near equal fascination with foreign policy, Green Lantern comics, NASCAR, and Scrooge McDuck supposed to figure out what he is truly passionate about? However, one thing seems to be overarching in not only my academic research but also the above wide ranging interests: narrative. I dig how stories are told, how events unfold and are presented to an audience. Currently, I am blowing through LOST at an incredible pace, not only because I want to figure out what happened with the Dharma Initiative, but also because the use on nonlinear narration gets me literally excited.

So Vaynerchuk wants me to build a brand around this interest. First is to set up a blog and start reaching out to likeminded individuals by coming up with the topics for fifty posts. I already have a blog, though honestly I think I may be moving it soon to a domain with more freedom (more on that when and if it comes). But I wonder if I really can sit down and come up with fifty topics. That’s ten weeks at five posts a week, a total that I have been aspiring to without actually really trying. So this evening, as I sit and watch the Super Bowl, I am going to brainstorm certain topics that might fit these parameters. Even if I can't come up with fifty, maybe I can come up with twenty and at least get started.

Getting your name out in the community is another of Vaynerchuk’s missions for the entrepreneur. Not only does he want relentless promotion of your content across a wide range of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other sites I’ve only heard of, he wants you out there on specific forums, responding insightfully to others discussing your interests. I’ve already adopted a few of these myself, but what I really don’t do is participate in the larger conversations about narrative. The reasons are plentiful, but they boil down to a failure to remain comfortable with the unstructured communication blitz one encounters in all sorts of places online; it’s hard to parse what is relevant and real. However, joining Twitter has helped me adjust to this slightly, so perhaps I am moving in the right direction. And if I am engaged in discussion about narrative with others, that seems less a task to be completed as it does a passion to be fed.

Monetizing such an enterprise is where Vaynerchuk seems a little weak. For a person who does not offer tangible goods for others to purchase, there seems little one can do really make a living off something like this. Sure, you might end up getting some advertising revenue and be asked to speak at a few places, but pulling in something in the mid-five figures seems nigh impossible. That said, if I pursue my research further in getting a PhD and working in academia, branding myself as one of the guys to talk to when you want to know about disjointed narratives will serve me well. Perhaps I couldn’t earn my living purely through a thriving blog about narrative and technology, but it could supplement my work as a scholar and give me the opportunity to attend conferences on someone else’s dime.

Writing everyday will also help me hone my personal style, hopefully working out some of the disastrous kinks when it comes to me writing humor. Again, a study in narrative.

This post is not a review of Vaynerchuk’s book, nor is it likely to be of use to anyone reading it. It’s merely a way for me to work through the issues that Crush It! inspired after I finished it, and to formulate a plan on where to go from here. Let’s see how it goes.

Reading List: January 2010

Though the past couple of months have seen posts of substance, said posts have been infrequent at best. I hope they have been entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, and while I hope to post more often, I wonder if I have the discipline to actually knock out thoughtful posts on a more frequent basis. Nevertheless, discipline is something I sorely need to improve upon in several walks of life, so I shall try. Progress on my conference paper has been proceeding fairly well, though I need to organize my thoughts again and define the parameters of my question in order to adequately yet concisely address the emerging film genre of hyperlink cinema.

Over the past month I only managed to complete six books and two graphic novels, which is due to a changing emphasis on my reading. Joining Twitter has provided me with a near constant stream of links to new stories and essays on film, and I started to watch Lost online, which I have generally enjoyed. Anyway, I've decided to return to the old format of capsule reviews instead of a dry list, so here it goes:

1. The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe: Obama for America campaign director Plouffe recaps how the current administration navigated the tumultuous primaries and slaughtered John McCain in the general election. A fascinating behind the scenes account, the author too often shoulders the responsibility for anything that went wrong and rarely characterizes any candidate missteps as mistakes, proving his loyalty but making one wonder how accurate such an account is. It would be interesting to read the Obama sections in Game Change, to compare and contrast.

2. Green Lantern Corps: Sins of the Star Sapphire by Peter J. Tomasi, et al.: After the Sinestro Corps War, new lanterns across the color spectrum were created and have led up to the current Blackest Night storyline. The Star Sapphire Corps represent love, and as the Guardians order that relationships and love by Green Lanterns are forbidden, a hole in the feeling spectrum is filled. Overall, I found the story to be mediocre, seeming only to be putting pieces into place for later storylines. In addition, I've never really liked Guy Gardener, so Tomasi's work here doesn't resonate with me on two levels. I'm taking steps to get the collections on the Red and Orange Lanterns, so expect updates to follow.

3. Flight, Volume 3 edited by Kazu Kibuishi: The third excellent collection in this series. Overall quite entertaining, though I was a bit disappointed that certain storylines that continued from the first volume to the second weren't followed through here. That aside, such collections collect and display emerging talent, and I look forward to reading more by several of these creators in the future.

4. Mendoza in Hollywood by Kage Baker: I am interested in the mythology surrounding Baker's Company, but it only serves as a background to a mediocre story about a British plot to steal California during the Civil War. The narrative is bogged down with a twenty page recount of a D.W. Griffith film, and I struggled to make it through the whole thing. I understand that there is more of a focus on the Company in future novels, but I honestly don't know that I'll be going back.

5. The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott: Heaps of praise made me want to read this new 'crime memoir' by an author whose work I have previously enjoyed, and while this was a decent book, it falls short of the expectations I had for it. While covering a murder trial, Elliott simultaneously investigates his relationship with his father, who abandoned him into foster care as a teenager, as well as his penchant for masochistic relationship. Good, entertaining, just not great.

6. Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson: Highly recommended. Read my thoughts on this book here.

7. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman: Klosterman writes intelligently about pop culture; in this book he has new essays on topics like the liberalism of the NFL, time travel, and the parallels between David Koresh and Kurt Cobain. Such essays are fantastically entertaining, but even at their most insightful, they seem to lack resonance. Perhaps this is one of the hazards of writing about pop culture, a lesson that perhaps I should learn in a hurry.

8. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde: Fforde's new universe imagines a future in which social castes and protocols are regulated by one's individual color perception. Protagonist Eddie Russet is looking to marry up when he and his father are shipped to one of the outer territories, where he learns that the rigid rules of society have a dark side as he begins to question the status quo with the help of Jane, a Grey who exists as a menial servant due to her apparent lack of color perception. While the story moves along quickly enough, the creation of this world seemed to take precedence over telling an entertaining yarn, setting up for future stories at the expense of this one. However, a new work by Fforde is always welcome, and I am excited to read future stories set within this universe.

There it is. As always, I welcome comments, questions, corrections, unrelated hilarity, and other notes of substance. I'll endeavor to post more often over the coming month, but of course, I've said that before.

Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

While I may never forgive Carl Wilson for getting that Titanic pan flute music stuck in my head for the better part of a week, it is his fantastic book on the French Canadian singer Celine Dion that has me doing the unthinkable: getting me to reconsider why it is that I dislike the pop star. Let’s Talk About Love is part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series about various record albums (I read a dry one about Let It Be by Steve Matteo last month), but this book isn’t really about the Dion album or the singer at all. Instead, it uses her as a prism by which to investigate the nature of taste itself.

What motivates aesthetic judgment? Why does a woman who has sold tens of millions of record albums cause so many others to run screaming when they hear her voice? Wilson compares the ideas of Kant, who would have us believe that taste involves a universal instinct for beauty-assessment, with those of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist who maintains that taste is never disinterested, but instead a form of cultural capital. In other words, those who hate Celine Dion are not merely making an aesthetic choice; it is an ethical decision made in order to elevate oneself above her fans, who tend to be poor, middle-aged, white women from Middle America. While we use what we like to define who we are and who we are not, we do the same with what we dislike. And as much as this bothers me on a personal level, the (perhaps) subconscious elevation of myself above others, I find it to be almost inarguably true.

Though Wilson does undergo a sort of journey as the narrative progresses, seeing Dion in Vegas and comparing the messages in her songs to his own life as he endures a painful divorce, he never is won over, becoming a fan. But what he does come to believe by the book’s conclusion is that we should move toward a new sort of ‘democratic’ criticism, where we aren’t so much open to all sorts of new ideas, but rather where we refuse to indulge in those cultural capital instincts that elevate us above another taste set, no matter what it is. While Wilson seems to limit himself to the medium of music, such principles remain applicable to just about anything that is judged on taste.

Pop criticism has always tried to articulate the genius behind the underappreciated or devalued. And while there are now canons in rock, rap, and country (not to mention other media like film and television), why should Celine Dion be beyond our capacity for praise. What Wilson accomplishes with Let’s Talk About Love did not make me like Dion’s music, but did help me understand what its appeal might be to others. By defining schmaltz as ‘an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived,’ a label that is slapped on Dion’s music by all sorts of people including me, Wilson is able to turn the definition onto other genres of music. After all, he writes, ‘you could say that punk rock is anger’s schmaltz.’

Extralinguistic Texts in Film/TV Narrative

To finish my minor in Literature last spring, I took a class in Film & Feminism, my first real exposure to critical approaches of the medium. And while found the class to be a bit underwhelming, I was able to familiarize myself with much of the seminal critical articles in film literature and make the connection that the critical approach to film and to television isn’t all that different. As a result, I have been rethinking my investigation of hyperlink cinema and George Landow’s axes of hypertextual development through this prism, and where I was previously stymied by examples of extralinguistic texts in film, a word of advice from my friend Steve Mollmann has sent me in the right direction.

Landow maintains that hypertexts contain extralinguistic texts, as claimed in his second axis for identification. Whether than take the approach of identifying linguistic elements that are nonnative to film, my focus here is on narrative and there are many elements of narrative that take place apart from the narrative presented on the screen, especially in shows like Lost and Heroes and even in films like the George Lucas’s prequel trilogy. And while I cold run through Landow’s four axes pretty quickly with regards to a show like Lost, I want to pause here and look at how complex the narratives become because of their reliance on other forms of storytelling to inform their narrative.

Perhaps Heroes, which debuted in 2006, is a good place to start. The show, of course, relates the experiences of ordinary men and women discover they have superhuman powers. The story emulates the storytelling style of American comic books as well, an example of remediation, and while the premise is straightforward, the narrative world imagined by creator Tim Kring and the writing staff is a complex one. A viewer is able to watch the show as it comes on each week and receive a more or less complete experience. However, NBC selected this show to expand into the digital space, creating a television show whose primary narrative outlet is supplemented by web comics and other strategies that expand the universe of the show, providing back stories and additional character development outside the confines of the screen. I would argue that such a use of extra-narrative strategies is an example of the extralinguistic elements that Landow asserts are a central component of hypertexts, embodied here within the medium of film.

As the first season progressed, the web comics often provided additional background information on the main characters from the show, but about halfway through a new character, named Hana Gitelman was introduced. Although appearing briefly onscreen in two episodes, the character primarily exists within the supplemental material. Thus we see that the creators are in fact using the web comics in order to enhance the world their characters inhabit, and make the connection between events in the web comics and effects in the television show. In comic 68, ‘The Man with Too Much Brains,’ teenager Matt Neuenberg is introduced with the ability to remember incredible amounts of information. He ‘downloads’ the Company’s database in order to prevent it from being accessed by Gitelman, who has the power to control transmissions, showing that a plot hole in the series can be filled in the supplemental material. In yet another example, comic 115, ‘Truths,’ relates the thoughts of Arthur Petrelli in the moments before his death, something difficult to do with effectiveness within the medium of television, and impossible within the episode because it would have derailed the overall narrative, yet possible in this additional medium and providing a richness to the character and scene that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Heroes also has been expanded in a novel, Saving Charlie, detailing what happened when Hiro traveled back in time by six months in an effort to save her from being killed by Sylar, only to lose her to some sort of cancer in the episode ‘Six Months Ago.’ Again, the supplementary material is able to tell stories that aren’t practical to tell on television, due to narrative momentum and cost concerns.

While I could go on and on, I believe that I have effectively demonstrated the use of extralinguistic texts affecting film narrative, which would again indicate that film is indeed remediating the digital into itself. In fact, television shows like Heroes perhaps are a better example of hyperlink cinema, at least analyzed through the perspective of George Landow, but there are examples in film as well. Most obviously, there is the prequel trilogy of Star Wars in which characters had huge histories in cartoons and such that are completely unapparent in the film. I still have no idea who General Grievous was, or what the hell he was supposed to be.

Should I branch towards television in examining hyperlink cinema? 24 is the most often mentioned show in the genre, but it seems like I may want to ground my paper in film since I put ‘hyperlink cinema’ in the title. I would imagine that I will blend the two, but what do you think, about this or anything else? Feedback is greatly appreciated.

George Landow & Hypertext Evaluation

I’ve spent the past two years working on novels that contain visual media, arguing that they can be considered hypertexts existing in print rather than electronic form, and thus can be analyzed using tools developed for hypertext. In fact, I maintain that the definition of hypertextuality must be expanded to include such works, for analyzing them with the traditional literary techniques can leave the new possibilities for literary creation unseen. In making this argument, I relied heavily on the work of George P. Landow, specifically the four axes he developed for determining whether a text could be considered hypertextual in nature or not.

In examining hyperlink cinema, the supposed new genre of movies influenced by the Internet that contain a playfulness with time and interwoven storylines, I think it is important to use some of the same techniques in order to determine if one can actually see the remediation of the digital within these films, and to attempt to determine if their existence is confined to a certain genre or a precursor for a coming revolution in film and film studies.

The first axis of hypertext that Landow identifies is the most vexing in terms of evaluating hyperlink cinema: does the text involve reader choice, intervention, and empowerment? By its very nature, a film possesses none of these traits. Films exist on large reels, meant to be fed one after another at a constant pace while the viewer merely watches; it is a passive experience in many ways. And while one might say that as films are created and produced digitally more and more often, we might begin to see efforts that allow for an audience to affect the narrative as it progresses, the films that have been categorized as hyperlink cinema retain the traditional approach of passive viewership. Yet even as we realize that the medium of film limits the hypertextual nature of a narrative, we begin to see how the hypertext has influenced these films despite the medium’s restrictive nature.

Landow’s second axis maintains that hypertexts include extralinguistic texts. While in the novels I mentioned before extralinguistic texts can refer to the visual media included (among other things), the way one goes about defining extralinguistic texts in a film is a bit trickier. In fact, while I know what devices I have categorized as extralinguistic in films, I am a bit of a loss as to understand why they exist outside the language of film. More research is in order.

I didn’t post this for a couple of days because I wanted it to be a fully formed thought, but then I realized that such missteps are the heart of research, and if I intend to research and write this paper through a sequence of blog posts, such missteps should be visible. And, this is the sort of time that the community here could suggest possible ways to interpret the extralinguistic in film. Thoughts?

Meanwhile, I am going to do some more research into new media and revisit this in the coming days.

2009 Reading Statistics

I wasn't going to post this until tomorrow or the next day, but since I can't sleep due to anxiety over graduate school applications, I compiled all the data as the sun came up. Each month I post a list of the books I completed over the previous one, so there is no need to recap that here. Yet this does give me the opportunity to reflect upon how I spent my reading time, and perhaps how I could better spend it in the future.

This year I completed 240 books, plays, and graphic novels, surpassing my previous high last year of 230. Since statistics are fun for everyone, or at least me, here is how it all breaks down:

• 35 novels (14.6%)
• 17 short story collections (7.1%)
• 42 works of nonfiction (17.5%)
• 144 graphic novels (60%)
• 2 plays (0.8%)

With an overwhelming majority of my reading coming from graphic novels, the overall total here appears greatly inflated. And while I enjoyed making my way through series like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming's Powers series, I wasted a lot of time reading things like Ultimate X-Men & Spiderman. I doubt that will be happening again in 2010.

The biggest reason for the shift in these demographics is due to the economy, at least indirectly. I was out of work for a period at the end of 2008, and as a result things got a bit tight. In order to save money, I switched from buying books frequently to utilizing my public library on a weekly basis, if not more. Fortunately, I live in a large enough town to have a better than average library system. The huge numbers of graphic novels are directly due to my ability not only to easily read pretty much any comic I wanted on a whim, it also took what would have cost maybe $1000, even at a used book store, and made it free.

I'm also very surprised that the number of novels I read fell by almost 50% from last year, something I am at a loss to explain. Both nonfiction and short story collections remained relatively even, but I suppose the ebb in my interest in fiction, which I touched on early this evening, has been more protracted than I had originally believed.

For 2010, I predict that these numbers will go down for a number of reasons. The first, I have exhausted much of the library's supply of graphic novels, at least ones that I am interested in, and there isn't much on the horizon that I really want to read. But more importantly, as I apply to another graduate program, I plan on being incredibly busy (and happy) come the fall semester, assuming someone lets me in and greases the financial wheels. As a result, I'll have less time to read, at least casually, but I think I am finding real satisfaction with my academic work, so it is a trade I will happily make.

I used to come up with a list of my top five books of the year, but this year I think I'll pass. However, here are some authors I read this year that I hope you will check out: Dan Chaon, Aleksandar Hemon, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Stieg Larsson, Tom Bissell, & Maile Meloy.