1 Corinthians 13:11
May 19, 2015 8:30 AM   Subscribe

I09 criticizes Simon Pegg's recent interview with The Radio Times where he 'Worries The Love Of Science Fiction Is Making Us "Childish"'. Pegg responds.
posted by fearfulsymmetry (154 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love Pegg's response here:

Before Star Wars, the big Hollywood studios were making art movies, with morally ambiguous characters, that were thematically troubling and often dark (Travis Bickle dark, as opposed to Bruce Wayne dark)*.
posted by Nevin at 8:35 AM on May 19, 2015


Pegg basically sounds like he after 9 out of 10 nerd movies that I watch.

I mean, I keep watching the damn things, but still...
posted by Artw at 8:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


p.s. Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan are also Stormtroopers in The Force Awakens.

lol
posted by Huck500 at 8:44 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


A friend of mine's response to Pegg's writings was "Hollywood Man Sees World Through Hollywood Lens. Meanwhile the real world has a life outside of the movies it sees."
posted by Kitteh at 8:45 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


You are allowed to have an opinion as long as you keep doing a spot on Scotty.
posted by Splunge at 8:49 AM on May 19, 2015


It's never wise to assume Simon Pegg is an idiot. If you do that, you'll be missing out on something, and probably something good.

SF/F is a particularly effective tool for delivering the sugary adrenaline spike of mindless sexy action. No one knows this better than Pegg, and hardly anyone knows better than him the better uses it can be put to, or that this wasn't the doing of SF/F but rather of marketism as deployed by hollywood et al.

This was an exceedingly unwise rant; but before getting all self-righteous about it, y'all need to actually read his response. This is about adultolescence, not SF.
posted by lodurr at 8:49 AM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]


Meanwhile the real world has a life outside of the movies it sees.

I don't know, there seem to be an awful lot of people these days whose pop culture consumption is a/the central feature of their lives.
posted by enn at 8:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [38 favorites]


He's right. On one hand, there's certainly nothing wrong with enjoying some whiz-bang popcorn spectacle. On the other, it's just about the only thing being made these days, and Hollywood's cranking these franchises out by the dozens now. The law of diminishing returns is in full effect here. I wonder if Age of Ultron is the start of a broader backlash or downswing in the popularity of this sort of movie, coupled with the tremendous reaction to Fury Road pointing the way toward something else (I haven't seen it, but the reactions make it sound like it's far more than just popcorn spectacle.) Or generic formulaic superhero movies will continue to be half-heartedly cranked out for another decade. It's our choice as consumers.

Anyway, if you haven't seen Ex Machina yet you absolutely should.
posted by naju at 8:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]


we at Blasmoid dot com are wickedly pissed off at the suggestion that Zap Fighters: It's Zappening! is adolescent entertainment. adolescents cannot afford the 1/100 scale-model Shmooba Cruiser which our commenters love buying and taking pictures of themselves with
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [29 favorites]


he 'Worries The Love Of Science Fiction Is Making Us "Childish"'

Nonsense. We were childish long before science fiction.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]


From i09: It’s clearly not impossible to have a film with the Hulk fighting a robot and come out not thinking about real-world issues, or emotional journeys...

Sorry about dissecting the frog, but: this is a joke, right?
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:53 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]


He's 100% right. I been thinking about this a lot too as I just got addicted to Doctor Who completely despite not wanting to. Of course SF is a childish escape. Big, interesting stories and big, interesting emotions that you can experience in perfect safety, much better than small, boring, dangerous, confusing real life. It's ok to acknowledge that and still enjoy it.

The essay was just a great essay on its own terms though. I was not expecting academic style citations.
posted by bleep at 8:55 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think the issue people have is that he has targeted science fiction, and I think that's what he's examined because it's his wheelhouse.

More broadly, we're encouraged to define ourselves by what we buy and by what we consume, because we're a capitalist society, and capitalism directly benefits from this. We're well into what Dubord described as being declining into having, and having declining into appearing -- the social experience becomes colonized by and replaced with spectacle.

Obviously this isn't a new phenomenon -- I mean, Dubord was writing in 1967 about something that then seemed old to him. But it rises again and again, taking new forms, because there must always be something new to sell.

Nerd culture has always had a consumerist quality to it -- I mean, it had to, because it was rooted in book and magazine and later movie sales. This isn't unique to the culture, but it's the culture that got most thoroughly and completely colonized by spectacle in my recent memory, with a small and insular genre suddenly going mainstream, and being monetized in dazzling ways. Nerd culture is big business now, and the business does seem to focus on the most immature aspects of it, such as compulsive collecting, and a lot of the new products that are mass marketed are pitched at a mass market audience, with an understanding that children are a part of that audience.

I suppose from the inside it can look like the way spectacle colonized sci fi was to throw so much that is so infantile out so quickly as to quickly overwhelm the market. It kind of looks that way from the outside. I have a friend who collects Walking Dead toys. She has dozens of them. She doesn't play with them. She doesn't do anything with them. It's not a great show, but it is a popular show, and it has been converted into toys that people do nothing with, just to satisfy this great craving to own a piece of the spectacle.

And, you know, people can buy whatever they want to buy, and I'm sure my own purchases are equally silly, because we're all caught in this capitalist machine, we're all infantalized into being creatures that just watch and consume. But it happened so quickly with geek culture that it hasn't acquired the cultural cache of, say, collecting mass market paperbacks, or collecting music, or collecting antiques. And it's something Pegg both knows and has witnessed, and so it's what he chose to speak to.

But we're all stuck in his critique. We're better capitalists if we're reduced to consuming spectacle.
posted by maxsparber at 8:55 AM on May 19, 2015 [62 favorites]


Ironically that io9 peice is spectacularly dumb.
posted by Artw at 8:55 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]


On the other hand, for those of us for whom SF and Fantasy were an escape from our childhoods, this plays a bit more complex.
posted by Naberius at 9:01 AM on May 19, 2015 [18 favorites]


However if you actually look at Pegg's recent output, the only thing showing on an Air Cebu long-haul flight I took recently was Hector and the Search for Happiness. The work of a pre-Star Wars auteur it is surely not. My lasting memory of the Philippines. Argh.
posted by Nevin at 9:04 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


He's been involved in some awfully smart science fiction and fantasy recently, though. Boxtrolls was one of my favorite films from last year. The Word's End is only two years old.
posted by maxsparber at 9:09 AM on May 19, 2015


Saddest news out of this is that the Star Trek 3 script is to be made "less Star Treky" - I could have done with a NuTrek movie that had some actual science fiction or plot.
posted by Artw at 9:09 AM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]


On my most recent trip to England, we found a copy of his autobiography, Nerd Do Well, at a charity shop. We bought it for a pound, both read it, and as much as I do like Pegg, wow was that a dull unnecessary piece of writing. What I had hoped for was some background and minutiae of making Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and even Paul (which I haven't seen), but it was mostly name-dropping at rapid fire speed in the book. Except for the stuff about his childhood, which sounds like he had a good 'un.

In other words, I am not sure why that book existed.
posted by Kitteh at 9:12 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


While I have no quarrel with Peggs thesis that a lot of Hollywood entertainment serves to dumb us down, I'm not sure why he thinks Star Wars was some sort of turning point. In the years immediately preceding Star Wars, the highest grossing films included Rocky, Jaws, and The Towering Inferno. Not exactly the gritty art movies he longs for. And where do movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey fit? There are plenty of juvenile movies that aren't science fiction, as well as science fiction made for grownups. Interesting reads, though. I agree that the IO9 article was the weakest link.
posted by TedW at 9:12 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Did no one else think the bit about making Trek 3 into a heist film was him trolling the studio?
posted by lodurr at 9:12 AM on May 19, 2015


Fury Road...sound[s] like it's far more than just popcorn spectacle.

It's a little more, but it is mostly just spectacle. The reaction to it has far and away more to do with our current misogynist political environment than it does with any inherent virtues FR possesses as a film.

the Star Trek 3 script is to be made "less Star Treky"

I am not even sure this is possible.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [15 favorites]


On the one hand, I rankle at the suggestion that science fiction is somehow childish by nature. On the other hand, just about every science fiction movie I see these days leaves me feeling kind of hollow. Lots of flash, but not a lot of real exploration. (And here I mean exploration of ideas, not a paper thin story about a discovering new planet that barely serves to hang the special effects on.) Take Jupiter Rising - what kind of movie could it have been if it was a real exploration of how greed and capitalism play out in a post-scarcity civilization? Instead it was lots of crazy hairstyles and space rollerblades.
posted by Nothing at 9:15 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


I was definitely not expecting him to invoke Baudrillard:

"Recent developments in popular culture were arguably predicted by the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard in his book, ‘America’, in which he talks about the infantilzation of society. Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth? A time when we were shielded from painful truths by our recreational passions, the toys we played with, the games we played, the comics we read."

I don't think he's even trying to imply that he isn't complicit in this system. He's promoting the next Mission Impossible right there on his blog, since that is his next movie. But a lot of what he's saying rings true. I know actual human people who will discuss comic book movies for hours at a time, but say "I don't want to think about that" when people try to discuss actual events.

That instinct always existed (as long as humans have existed, basically), so it isn't like sci-fi movies invented it or anything, but it is interesting to think about how a genre originally created as a way to escape mindless consumerist drives has so easily been co-opted into their service.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [27 favorites]


It's a little more, but it is mostly just spectacle.

I'd say it is spectacle plus, like the films of Guillermo del Toro. We're not at a point similar to when directors had to work within the studio system of the 40s and 50s, where films are absolutely expected to deliver certain elements at certain beats. But just as mid-century filmmakers were able to work around the studio system through clever storytelling and inserting meaning into things the studio didn't care about, like mis en scene, contemporary filmmakers are able to deliver the sort of film a studio expects while saturating it with unnoticed commentary. It's unsurprising to me that both del Toro and Miller recently made huge spectacles that ostensibly star a man, but when you watch the film it increasingly becomes obvious that a female supporting character is the real lead of the movie.
posted by maxsparber at 9:18 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


as much as I do like Pegg, wow was that a dull unnecessary piece of writing.

Something of a square Pegg, was it?
posted by octobersurprise at 9:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


This is about adultolescence, not SF.

And as I've said in prior threads, CS Lewis said all that needs to be said about that particular nonsense.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


Before Star Wars, the big Hollywood studios were making art movies, with morally ambiguous characters, that were thematically troubling and often dark (Travis Bickle dark, as opposed to Bruce Wayne dark)

Wow. It would be almost impossible for him to be more wrong. Let's look at lists of box office hits, shall we? To find the morally ambiguous characters and troubling themes? These lists vary so I will shameless use whichever suits my argument better.

1977 -- Star Wars
1976 -- Rocky. Good movie, but... morally ambiguous? Troubling theme?
1975 -- Jaws. Maybe the shark is a symbol of the moral ambiguity of mankind, or the troubling theme is being eaten?
1974 -- Blazing Saddles and The Towering Inferno. I can't even.
1973 -- The Exorcist and The Sting. I might give him The Sting, but not much moral ambiguity to be had in Exorcist
1972 -- The Godfather. He gets that year.
1971 -- The French Connection, sure, but also Diamonds are Forever and Fiddler on the Roof. So all the moral ambiguity and troubling themes and darkness we've come to expect from James Bond and musical theater.
1970 -- Love Story and Airport. Uh-huh.
1969 -- Butch Cassidy. I love the movie, but not much in the way of what he's talking about.
1968 -- 2001... and Funny Girl. I could give him 2001, but then it would be an SF film making his point about how things were better before there were so many SF films.
1967 -- The Graduate... and The Jungle Book. Not the last morally ambiguous, troubling, dark Disney cartoon we'll be seeing.
1966 -- The Bible. Yep. The Bible.
1965 -- The Sound of Music. Uh huh.
1964 -- Goldfinger, My Fair Lady, and Mary Poppins. Bond, an old Shaw play with extra songs, and a Disney musical.
1963 -- Cleopatra and From Russia With Love. Yarp.
1962 -- The Longest Day, Lawrence of Arabia, and How the West Was Won. 1962 was a pretty good year.
1961 -- 101 Dalmations and West Side Story. Cartoon or musical, your choice.
1960 -- Swiss Family Robinson, Spartacus, and West Side Story. Disney, musical, or pretty silly costume drama.

And as you go back further, you see... lots more Disney movies. Lots more musicals. Lots more swords-and-sandals.

So... no. The era he talks about never existed.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:19 AM on May 19, 2015 [12 favorites]


TedW: "In the years immediately preceding Star Wars, the highest grossing films included Rocky, Jaws, and The Towering Inferno. Not exactly the gritty art movies he longs for."

In fairness, the original Rocky had some complexity to it. Even Jaws was more interesting than the extremely simplistic template used by the films that ripped it off.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:21 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


"I am not even sure this is possible."

Captain Luke Smoothtalker of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
posted by I-baLL at 9:22 AM on May 19, 2015


A lot of those films you described, ROU_Xenophobe, have a lot more substance than you're giving them credit for. I mean, "an old Shaw play with extra songs"? Spartacus is a "pretty silly costume drama?"

I mean, sheesh.
posted by maxsparber at 9:23 AM on May 19, 2015 [24 favorites]


And as I've said in prior threads, CS Lewis said all that needs to be said about that particular nonsense.

Oh, for pity's sake, if you have something to say about it, say it, don't cite an authority.

For what it's worth, Lewis's take on the matter was sanctimonious crap. Why should I care that he was ashamed to read fantasy as a kid? The fairy-story about the tortured accountant is just as much of a fairy-story as the one about how growing up is really a lethal trap we all have to avoid with all our might.
posted by lodurr at 9:24 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


A lot of those films you described, ROU_Xenophobe, have a lot more substance than you're giving them credit for.

Dark, troubling, morally-ambiguous art films they ain't.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


So, RUO_Xenophobe, that's kind of a narrow data set. You're making the assumption that you can assess the whole market based on the by-definition outlier that is its top-grossing film. I'd be much more interested if you listed the top 10 (or even 5) films for previous years.
posted by lodurr at 9:27 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


ROU_Xenophobe, I disagree with a lot of your assessments there, but especially with your dismissal of all the musicals. West Side Story is dark, troubling, and morally-ambiguous.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:28 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]


Dark, troubling, morally-ambiguous art films they ain't.

Spartacus? Have you seen these films?
posted by maxsparber at 9:29 AM on May 19, 2015 [14 favorites]


It's pretty counterproductive to argue that movies haven't changed since the 70s and that Star Wars, a marketing and merchandising juggernaut that is also the reason most people have heard of Joseph Campbell/, hasn't been a big factor in that.
posted by Artw at 9:30 AM on May 19, 2015


It's pretty counterproductive to argue that movies haven't changed since the 70s and that Star Wars, a marketing and merchandising juggernaut that is also the reason most people have heard of Joseph Campbell/, hasn't been a big factor in that.

I'd argue that a much greater factor is the hollowing of the film industry.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Did no one else think the bit about making Trek 3 into a heist film was him trolling the studio?

If we can get a Star Trek film with Bela Oxmyx and Jojo Krako out of it, I'm 100% on board.
posted by Guy Smiley at 9:36 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


I agree with Pegg here, but I think the problem is that we've lost BALANCE. For the past 10 years, virtually every big tent-pole movie has been about a superhero (or superheroes), with a few notable exceptions. Now, I like superhero movies (some of them), and I like escapist sci-fi like Doctor Who. But it would be great for those movies to be balanced with other things - other kinds of movies, other topics, etc. And I'd like the little there is to be balanced. Jamming all of the Oscar bait into December only means that I won't have time to see most of it.

This previous discussion on The Death of Mid-Budget Cinema is relevant, I think.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:36 AM on May 19, 2015 [8 favorites]


I am pretty sure the past 15 years have been the death of mid-budget everything.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:38 AM on May 19, 2015 [21 favorites]


It's strange to me that I always see the characterization of 'adultolescence' as something along the lines of what Pegg says:
One of the things that inspired Jessica and myself, all those years ago, was the unprecedented extension our generation was granted to its youth, in contrast to the previous generation, who seemed to adopt a received notion of maturity at lot sooner. The children of the 70s and 80s were the first generation, for whom it wasn’t imperative to ‘grow up’ immediately after leaving school. Why this happened is a whole other sociological discussion: a rise in the student population, progress in gender equality, the absence of world war; all these things and more contributed to this social evolution. What fascinated Jess and I was the way we utilised this time.
So he almost hits the nail on the head but then veers away. Paying most of our attention to the ways that we have reacted to these huge social changes kind of buries the lede: I know my age cohort (Gen-X) stopped identifying ourselves with our careers, etc., because those institutions were either not available to us as we moved into adulthood in the 90s and early 00s, or clearly shown to be not as described: companies no longer invest in workers, making a "career" increasingly impossible, so we just moved into "a series of jobs"; idealized versions of marriage and family life were already put to the lie because so many of us are children of divorce and broken homes, so we created new long-term relationship modes ; real estate? please, it was abundantly clear to me by the time I was able to afford a house that it was a sucker's game (especially around 2005); etc.

Most of the ways we used to define "adulthood" simply were and are not available to many of us in our 40s and younger, so much of the cultural behavior that is discussed here is as much reactive as it is proactive. Reading Pegg's very thoughtful response seemed to me like reading a discussion of symptoms rather than causes.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:39 AM on May 19, 2015 [33 favorites]


1975 -- Jaws. Maybe the shark is a symbol of the moral ambiguity of mankind, or the troubling theme is being eaten?

Jaws is all about Chief Brody's inability to force the town government to do what he knows is the right thing to do. He knew that the beach should be closed but didn't push hard enough to force it and a little kid died as a result.
posted by octothorpe at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]


I think the truer point would be that there was a window in the early 70s when things had changed, for the better, and then they changed back to kids/adolescent movies and spectacle being popular.

Spartacus? Have you seen these films?

Yeah, mostly, except for the musicals; I know people differ but to me musicals are just inherently too silly to sit through. Though mostly not in forever. What's dark and troubling and morally ambiguous about Spartacus, except that he inevitably loses because it's a movie about Spartacus?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2015


Also, as a postscript to that: assuming that the cultural behaviors we see among people are a result of the media we consume and enjoy, to my thinking, reverses cause and effect. Hollywood is pumping out that product because it meets pre-existing desires or needs of some kind. Our art and entertainment is an expression or reflection of our internal states much moreso than it creates them.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the truer point would be that there was a window in the early 70s when things had changed, for the better, and then they changed back to kids/adolescent movies and spectacle being popular.

This is my sense, as well. The golden age of 70s cinema was a beautiful, anomalous period.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:44 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


And I'd like the little there is to be balanced. Jamming all of the Oscar bait into December only means that I won't have time to see most of it.

July: See the thrilling conclusion of the second Sky Man pentalogy in Sky Man: Warriors of Yesterday!

December: Watts: The True Story continues America's dialogue on race by asking - "Hey, shouldn't we all just get along?"
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:44 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


Wow. It would be almost impossible for him to be more wrong.

Pegg's not talking about the top-grossing films, he's talking about arthouse cinema- it's right in the quote! Chinatown, The Conversation, The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, Mean Streets, M*A*S*H* Badlands- these are the films he has in mind.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:45 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]


Sorry about dissecting the frog, but: this is a joke, right?

It's badly written, at any rate.
posted by kenko at 9:48 AM on May 19, 2015


If he's not talking about top-grossing or other-metric-of-very-popular movies, he has no basis for talking about social changes or the like. Simple movies for young people have always been popular, as have simple movies with spectacle.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:49 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Relevant
posted by The Whelk at 9:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


Yeah, mostly, except for the musicals; I know people differ but to me musicals are just inherently too silly to sit through.

For the record, this is precisely what everyone used to say about sci-fi/fantasy. Tastes certainly change, but to assume that an entire genre is void of meaning because it features elements you dislike is pretty odd.

West Side Story features explicit discussions of racism, classism, the police as functionaries of racist cultural mores, immigration, a stereotypical "hero" who commits murder, also more murder, murder murder.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [19 favorites]


What's dark and troubling and morally ambiguous about Spartacus,

Well, this isn't really a discussion about Spartacus, but if you've missed the ambiguity in a film by Stanley Kubrick scripted by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo based on a novel by blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, written while Fast was in prison for refusing to name fellow communists, which deliberately parallels the process by which HUAC forced people to name names against their friends and coworkers, I would suggest that you might enjoy digging a little deeper into classic cinema.
posted by maxsparber at 9:51 AM on May 19, 2015 [57 favorites]


Wow. It would be almost impossible for him to be more wrong. Let's look at lists of box office hits, shall we?

He didn't say studios made exclusively such films, or that such films were sure-fire box-office hits. He said that studios did make such films, which is true, and seems to be markedly less true now.
posted by kenko at 9:51 AM on May 19, 2015


(Though if you go back even further you get things like The Awful Truth or the films of Lubitsch!)
posted by kenko at 9:54 AM on May 19, 2015


"West Side Story features explicit discussions of racism, classism, the police as functionaries of racist cultural mores, immigration, a stereotypical "hero" who commits murder, also more murder, murder murder." Not to mention some insanely great and ground breaking music and dancing. It's a pretty colossal work of mid-century art.
posted by jetsetsc at 9:57 AM on May 19, 2015 [13 favorites]


I strongly recommend that people read the "Pegg responds" link, where Pegg agrees that he was being a little one-sidedly trollish in his original comments and provides a much more nuanced account--including pointing out that he both loves Sci-Fi and thinks that many recent Sci-Fi films are excellent.
posted by yoink at 9:59 AM on May 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


if you've missed the ambiguity in a film by Stanley Kubrick scripted by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo based on a novel by blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, written while Fast was in prison for refusing to name fellow communists, which deliberately parallels the process by which HUAC forced people to name names against their friends and coworkers

Portraying a bad thing as bad isn't moral ambiguity. I get that it points a finger back at American society for tolerating or encouraging the blacklists, but that gives it all the moral ambiguity of Avatar or Dances with Wolves.

It would be morally ambiguous if we were at some point credibly intended to identify with and support the people turning on Spartacus, or the Romans seeking to crush him. To my memory, we weren't.

Anyway, I will shut up.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


The blacklist hadn't been broken at the time. Just because we now see the blacklist as a bad thing doesn't mean America as a whole did then -- it still was very much in effect. So the film actually showed something many Americans saw as a good thing as being a bad thing.
posted by maxsparber at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


IIRC, Pegg has a degree in film, and did a thesis on 70s cinema from an angle on Marxism and hegemony. While he may throw out casual things in interviews, he certainly has some academic chops and I would hesitate to go toe to toe with him on film and sociology/politics.
posted by chimaera at 10:20 AM on May 19, 2015 [9 favorites]


Making it about 'moral ambiguity' is just losing focus on the main point. That's just one way a film can be complex. A film can have great moral clarity, while still being complex. Bad Lieutenant isn't morally ambiguous at all -- he's bad after all -- but Keitel's character is very complex.
posted by lodurr at 10:21 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


Basically my argument is that all copies of Save The Cat should be rounded up and burned. Sure, they'll just move on to blindly following Film Crit Hill or whatevs, but then we set fire to him as well.
posted by Artw at 10:26 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


I can't get past the thought that big budget SF/genre franchises are popular amongst studio magic because they come with a built in fandom, have limitless merchandise potential, can pull a global audience, and appeal to typical male studio management.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:30 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


The 70s are widely considered to be THE golden age for serious, artful, ambitious Hollywood cinema. And when we say that, we mean not just highest-grossing, but crucially the films that captured the public imagination and were talked about the most. Clockwork Orange, Raging Bull, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Carrie, you could name 100 movies that would qualify and were actually being talked about. 60s/70s sci fi had serious ambitions and intent too - Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain. Star Wars is widely considered a significant turning point toward big-budget good vs. evil spectacle. Naming such ambitious arty 70s films isn't a contradiction, because they were part of the national conversation. Pegg is comparing that era of mature Hollywood cinema to what's largely being talked about and getting people excited now.
posted by naju at 10:33 AM on May 19, 2015 [22 favorites]


That's absolutely true, ZeusHumms. The people in charge of green-lighting movies are business people, not cinephiles.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:34 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


...big budget SF/genre franchises ... come with a built in fandom, have limitless merchandise potential, can pull a global audience, and appeal to typical male studio management.

That's all true as far as it goes, but it's also true that it's taken a long time for nerd-genre stuff to be taken seriously in the executive suite. Blockbusters through the 90s were predominantly not SF or F, despite that built-in fandom and potential. Which just muddies the issue, of course...
posted by lodurr at 10:35 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


We make a big deal about them being business-people, but they're also people, with their own biases and blind spots. E.g., they persist in being unable to see that they're under-serving 50% of their demographic (not to mention their race-issues).
posted by lodurr at 10:39 AM on May 19, 2015


He's not completely wrong, but there's something else going on here too. Drama has moved to television. Breaking bad is the perfect followup to the morally ambiguous films of the 70s. Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told. There's a lot of reasons, but at least one is that serial one hour shows are way better at telling complex stories than a two hour movie.

Big movies are getting bigger and smart tv is getting smarter.
posted by lumpenprole at 10:40 AM on May 19, 2015 [10 favorites]


...all copies of Save The Cat should be rounded up and burned.

I feel as though I need to read this book, just as a matter of basic cultural literacy, but a) I haven't figured out how to do that without paying for it, and b) I'm afraid I'd wall-test my Nexus, which would probably be bad.
posted by lodurr at 10:41 AM on May 19, 2015


We make a big deal about them being business-people, but they're also people, with their own biases and blind spots. E.g., they persist in being unable to see that they're under-serving 50% of their demographic (not to mention their race-issues).

Ben Trismegistus: I think this is a highly overlooked driver.

The issue is we make the movies so they can be the lowest common denominator of entertainment which is a fine goal. It seems like it used to be that a resounding success would in turn give the studio to make smaller and more ambitious movies because they were "art."

Even the Marvel movies themselves seem afraid of having a voice e.g. Edgar Wright leaving Ant-Man or the fact that the director of Dr. Strange seems to have never made a good movie ever( 38% lifetime on RT). Nevertheless I know I still go see the movies and hope Josh Trank does something Fantastic with his next film.
posted by 27kjmm at 10:50 AM on May 19, 2015


Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told.

Those shows are long over. What has taken their place, Game of Thrones?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:57 AM on May 19, 2015


It hurts me that io9, of all places, is calling someone out for using hyperbole. And honestly I think it's what io9 represents that Pegg is objecting to. They are like sea gulls at a landfill who will gobble up anything with the slightest whiff of sci-fi/fantasy/superheroes, and sing its praises, no matter how rank it might be.
posted by picea at 10:59 AM on May 19, 2015 [17 favorites]


Some of us are in the weird position of being glad that superhero/action movies are getting better in their treatment of women and minorities (in at least some ways, i.e. Fury Road) while also still being really really bored or repelled by superhero/action movies as a genre. Lots of people I follow in social media love these properties and find them meaningful, but I find the conversations around, say, queer representation as evidenced by Steve/Tony slashfic, more interesting than the source material.

And I wonder about that. Hero movies seem to become a sort of fodder for GIFs and fanfic and cosplay that doesn't really require you to watch the actual film in more than a casual way. A jazz approach in which the riffs are more interesting than the source material. What do you call that? No idea. But it's strange and interesting.
posted by emjaybee at 11:02 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


Nerd culture has taken over, and all it took was completely redefining nerds as consumption machines.
posted by ckape at 11:02 AM on May 19, 2015 [20 favorites]


The io9 piece is basically deliberate incitement of kneejerk internet idiocy.
posted by Artw at 11:04 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't think it is childishness, and I don't think it's restrained solely to sci fi movies or 'geek culture'.

I think a better term would be 'brutishness'
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:05 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Steve/Tony slashfic

you know, ashamed to admit this never occurred to me. it seems so blindingly obvious, now you've mentioned it...
posted by lodurr at 11:06 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]




Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told.

Those shows are long over. What has taken their place, Game of Thrones?


The Americans is a pretty good one-stop shop for moral complexity, or at least for interesting experiments in audience sympathy.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 11:08 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


The issue is we make the movies so they can be the lowest common denominator of entertainment which is a fine goal. It seems like it used to be that a resounding success would in turn give the studio to make smaller and more ambitious movies because they were "art."

Even the Marvel movies themselves seem afraid of having a voice e.g. Edgar Wright leaving Ant-Man or the fact that the director of Dr. Strange seems to have never made a good movie ever( 38% lifetime on RT). Nevertheless I know I still go see the movies and hope Josh Trank does something Fantastic with his next film.


I thoroughly agree.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 11:09 AM on May 19, 2015


Better Call Saul is excellent.
posted by maxsparber at 11:09 AM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


It looks to me like 'moral complexity' has in large part become a code word for pandering to people's desire to look at bad things close up. The Sopranos got the ball rolling, Breaking Bad helped it along, and now we have shows that make heroes out of biker drug gangs and psychopathic serial killers.

Is the moral universe of Hannibal 'complex'? Sure. Is the production and writing of high quality? Sure. Do those things mean it's good and healthy that Hannibal is such a hit? ....
posted by lodurr at 11:12 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


YES
posted by maxsparber at 11:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


"I guess what I meant was, the more spectacle becomes the driving creative priority, the less thoughtful or challenging the films can become."

Here's your money quote.

Also, didn't everyone assume this is what he meant. I mean, this is not a surprising opinion, here or in the popular fan press.
posted by clvrmnky at 11:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't disagree, necessarily, with any of the points Pegg makes in his piece about infantile consumerism being a tool of capitalism/the existing power hierarchy/call it what you like. There's more that plays into it than just the regressive fantasies, like the strange tribalism of "personal branding", where you're not just someone who has nerdy interests and does nerdy things but a Nerd, and you have always been at war with the Bros. As far as it goes, he makes some excellent points.

What's missing, I think, is the way in which the condemnation of "adultulescence" just feeds The Beast too, by reaffirming this idea that it's super important to be Very Serious All The Time, that there's something wasteful in enjoyment and pleasure and things that just aren't very productive, whether it's productive for The Glorious Cause Of The Revolution or Your Employer's Bottom Line. One of the most powerful drivers of capitalism as a mindset is that kind of obsessive, underlying assumption that everyone needs to be fully productive all the time, which is impossible, and the way that feeds into anxiety that's impossible to resolve, until of course you break down and buy something or agree with the aggressively marketed idea that you need "You Time" (which is a mindset used to sell products, not a political thought), just this constant relentless idea that the worst possible thing in the world is to goof off. It's what makes everyone so goddamn mad about welfare recipients with flatscreen TVs or people who use food stamps to buy ice cream.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:13 AM on May 19, 2015 [5 favorites]


When you break down the real world into minute by minute decisions, it rarely seems all that morally complex, either, to be honest. The real question is hardly ever, "what is the right thing to do," but, "do I care enough to do the right thing?"
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:14 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told.

Those shows are long over. What has taken their place, Game of Thrones?


I have no idea whether this counts or reveals me as a troglodyte but I'm enjoying the complexity of AMC's Turn.
posted by General Tonic at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2015


The io9 piece is basically deliberate incitement of kneejerk internet idiocy.


Hell, that's most internet sites.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:37 AM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Putting my theory hat on, I'm finding that this phenomenon - the superhero/sci-fi/fantasy movie franchises becoming massive, nerd culture going uber-mainstream, etc. - had two separate major events that each accelerated them into overdrive. The first was 9/11, and the second was the 2008 economic crisis. The first acceleration was tied up in the extreme worry over terrorism and shift toward dystopia/security state, and the second was tied up in socioeconomic distress. That last bit also led to the deference of adulthood that many in the younger generation are experiencing. Cultural obsession with nostalgia also started around 2008 by no accident.

After 2001 we saw a growth in these franchises: X-Men, the Spiderman trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars prequels (sure we hated them, but they did well), Harry Potter. This was part 1, but the "nerd culture" hadn't quite grown into something so dominant and well, malignant. Something changed after the economic crisis, and in 2008 we have The Dark Knight - which took everything to another level - along with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. I'm pretty sure that was the year it amplified and the culture changed. We also started seeing endless remakes and nostalgia-fests, an obsession with the 90s and revival of those old franchises (a more innocent time before war and major economic shifts) and an explosion in "gamer culture" to boot. I'm the sort of person who believes that cultural trends happen because of larger national/global moods and events, and I think none of this is by accident.
posted by naju at 11:50 AM on May 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told.

Those shows are long over. What has taken their place, Game of Thrones?


Well, I was using those as examples because I 1) think it's important that something is done before you judge if fully. I might include Battlestar in that list, but I hate, hate, hate the end of it, so it's tough to include it on my lists. 2) I don't have cable anymore, so I don't always get things on time.

They're just examples. I might proffer Transparent and even True Detective, but that's a fight going on in another thread.
posted by lumpenprole at 12:06 PM on May 19, 2015


Matt Bird's piece on Nightcrawler at Cockeyed Caravan let me see the summer-blockbuster superhero domination through a new lens:
Each movie is its own start-up, with the producers sinking a fortune in development costs out of their own pocket (or the pockets of their investors) in the hope of making that money back with a blockbuster. The studios, using their monopoly on distribution, then swoop in and “partner with” these producers, co-releasing the movies, and taking half of the profits for themselves. This is why every movie now has five “producer cards” up front. ...

Louis B. Mayer (or somebody else, I can't find the quote) once said something like “Don't talk to be about ‘quality pictures’. Every week, 52 times a year, a truck pulls up and expects us to put new film cans in the back, and that truck driver isn’t going to wait to make sure that it’s a ‘quality picture’.” But of course his quote was disingenuous: Such a system was actually ideal for ensuring that each studio could cultivate multiple audiences (old and young, male and female) and even produce a few low-profit “prestige” or “social problem” movies, just to make themselves feel good. But if each independent producer is betting the bank on one picture at a time, the financial disincentives are huge, just as they are for Gyllenhaal’s character.
I don't think that audiences are any more callow or juvenile than they used to be, I don't think the movie monoculture is caused by nerd culture or 30-year-olds with 12-year-old tastes; I think that the financial incentives for making movies that are guaranteed to bring in a couple hundred million dollars are just too powerful. And I have nothing against superhero movies, except that I will never get back the 2 hours of my life I spent watching Thor 2, but it feels like more and more there's no room at the box office, or in the cultural conversation, for any kind of movie that's not pure action spectacle.

(It feels somehow ironic that every time I hear about the movie Nightcrawler, I think for a second that the X-Man of the same name is getting his own movie...)
posted by Jeanne at 12:12 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


It's kind of amazing to me how people dismiss pop culture from an earlier era.

Oh, you think our generation (or since the 70s-- or whatever), was the first to portray "grittiness"?

Cute. Some cave drawings have more grittiness and moral ambiguity than what passes for gritty these days.

Especially anything gritty involving "white people". Really cute.
posted by mysticreferee at 12:15 PM on May 19, 2015


One of the most powerful drivers of capitalism as a mindset is that kind of obsessive, underlying assumption that everyone needs to be fully productive all the time, which is impossible, and the way that feeds into anxiety that's impossible to resolve, until of course you break down and buy something or agree with the aggressively marketed idea that you need "You Time" (which is a mindset used to sell products, not a political thought), just this constant relentless idea that the worst possible thing in the world is to goof off.

Tools of the Trade
Two hundred years ago, there was no such thing as the “workplace” — and the tools of one’s trade were rudimentary by today’s standards. Since then, of course, America has witnessed the Industrial Revolution, the rise of white-collar work and, now, an age of digital devices that allows the workplace to follow us everywhere. So on this episode of BackStory, from utopian visions of the cubicle to video surveillance in law enforcement, the Guys size up some of the stuff Americans have worked with — and, in turn, how that stuff has shaped the lives of American workers.
"Niggled and Timed" (transcribing a bit @16m; all mistakes my own)
BS: ...so I asked him [Nikil Saval on Taylorism (not that one!)] has he ever tried to abolish the stopwatch from his own life.

NS: The funny thing is I don't know if I can give it up because the way it works for me is that I'm taylorizing myself to preserve aspects of my life where I can just daydream and be bored and I like to think that I'm invoking the spirit of Taylor in order to create moments of my life where I don't have to do anything.

BS: Let me just be clear on this: you're getting out the stopwatch in order to have time just to goof off.

NS: Yea.
When you break down the real world into minute by minute decisions, it rarely seems all that morally complex, either, to be honest. The real question is hardly ever, "what is the right thing to do," but, "do I care enough to do the right thing?"

Paying Attention in an Age of Distraction: On Yves Citton's Pour Une Écologie de l'Attention - "Disney's buying of Marvel and Star Wars is nothing other than a kind of primitive accumulation of attention, every superhero is a vast mine of nostalgia; while facebook and Google's attempt to insert themselves as the interface for everything from research an essay to sharing pictures of grandkids can be considered the real subsumption of attention."

Better Call Saul is excellent.

First Time as Tragedy, Second Time as Tragicomedy: On Better Call Saul (having never watched either -- i'm way 'behind' on tv :P -- like that guy in metropolitan)
posted by kliuless at 12:34 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


I didn't see anything he said as being particularly revelatory or novel. It's all very self-evident. Yes, when it comes to genre films, the bar has been so lowered that something like Inception can be hailed as mind-twisting and deep, and Fury Road can be a feminist manifesto. Because while neither of them is bad (and I quite liked Fury Road), the usual dreck they're supplanting is so dire.

Nevertheless, the nerd chorus got outraged because someone told them that maybe they're not as brainy as they like to think they are and maybe they're just a bunch of brainless consumers as they posit non-nerds to be. What's worse, it came from one of their own, who previously had assured them that, unlike all the mundanes and muggles, they were special because they could enjoy things. Naturally, Pegg had to backpedal and once again sing a chorus of Wil Wheaton's "You're A Superior Person Because You Watch Movies With Thors In Them" to bring the audience around again. Thankfully, they were spared from actually having to think about the pap they were consuming and could get back to yelling "FUCK YEAH EPIC AWESOME" and "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" and buying unknown boxes of nerd shit because being a geek is no longer being a fan of something, and it's no longer even being a fan of being a fan of something, it's being a fan of being a geek itself and therefore whatever is placed in front of you and labeled Awesome will do.
posted by Legomancer at 12:43 PM on May 19, 2015 [27 favorites]


Fans are Slans!
posted by Artw at 12:59 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Think of all the amazing novels and screenplays and paintings we've been robbed of as a society by fanfic and fanart and cosplay and whatever other self-rationalizing bullshit people have made up to justify being unpaid, unofficial interns in the marketing department of Marvel/DC/EA/Blizzard.

The amount of mental calories burned debating "who shot first" or "who is the best Who" or which comic storyline is best portrayed by which giant corporation really makes my stomach turn.
posted by lattiboy at 1:00 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


I don't know if I'd say making, but enabling, certainly.

You can basically follow the money on this. Originally, films were marketed toward adults, but beginning in the 1980's, producers realized they had a great audience in teenagers. In 2009, the most frequent movie-goers where in the 18-24 age bracket. That has since started to skew upward, but even in 2013, 42% of tickets sold are to ages 24 and under. If you look at 3D, it's even younger, 60% of the audience for 3D films are in the 12-17 bracket. [Stats.]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:01 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Master and Margarita Mix: One of the most powerful drivers of capitalism as a mindset is that kind of obsessive, underlying assumption that everyone needs to be fully productive all the time...

... and another is the idea that we must consume to drive the economy, and one of the principle ways we drive compliance with that imperative is through the production of desire for stuff we don't need.

Traditionally we've obsessed about how much of that was related to these ideas of productivity and contribution. But increasingly, it's driven by rebellion against those ideas.

These are not incompatible, even though they contradict. Contradiction simply produces more dissonance, which must be resolved by further consumption...

So, sure, yes, we have this neo-calivinist ideal that we aspire to. But increasingly, that neo-calvinist spirit is being applied to the valorization of eternal adolescence and, increasingly, eternal childhood.
posted by lodurr at 1:03 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Fans are Slans!

Yes, the AWESOME attitude is not in principle new, but the "outsider" element is gone.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:03 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


buying unknown boxes of nerd shit

I didn't make it past the 1 minute mark but please tell me he gets punched in the face at the end.
posted by Ratio at 1:06 PM on May 19, 2015


You also have to factor in the skew between movie theater attendance versus movie viewing. If I look at my consumption, I watch roughly 3/4 adult/ quality movies and 1/4 mindless action drivel. But if I look at my theater attendance, i.e., paying premium money directly to watch a particular movie, its probably 90%/10% the other way. The only movies that require the massive screen-massive sound system are the huge action blockbusters - most other movies do quite nicely with my medium large television and surround sound.

I don't think my cable/HBO Netflix subscription dollars are in any way reflected in the money that a movie is considered to earn. The occasional iTunes Amazon $3.00 per household rental may, but that's small potatoes against the box office numbers. So if I am a studio betting millions and trying to fill theater seats. I know exactly which way I go. It's not because there isn't an audience for quality movies, there just isn't an audience for quality movies in theaters.
posted by rtimmel at 1:09 PM on May 19, 2015 [7 favorites]


Think of all the amazing novels and screenplays and paintings we've been robbed of as a society by fanfic and fanart and cosplay and whatever other self-rationalizing bullshit people have made up to justify being unpaid, unofficial interns in the marketing department of Marvel/DC/EA/Blizzard.

This is a misfire. People need fanfic and fanart; they have created it for centuries. Even if a random visit to a Harry Potter AO3 archive page or the splash page of DeviantArt is not going to show you much of interest, there are some valuable and heartrending works out there. And these, along with the terrible stuff mostly emitted by teenagers who are wrestling with developing writing skills and ideas about sexuality, are necessary stepping stones towards the creation of original work. As for cosplay, the costume ball is a tradition hundreds of years old, and early cosplay began in the 1930s -- you know, when our tough, grownup ancestors were making their own entertainment out on the farm.

I don't actually disagree with much of what Pegg says. I just don't think it's worthwhile to mock the creative outlets of hard-working people by claiming they are corporate sheeple.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:19 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


Countess Elena: I think comparing the somewhat fringe and localized fan movement of even 20 years ago to the corporate approved/driven behemoth that exists today is disingenuous. All the cons, the trailer "reviews", the unboxings, all the fucking recaps.

It's just.... unseemly.
posted by lattiboy at 1:31 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


So... no. The era he talks about never existed.

Oh, yes it did. Of course the big spectacles were the top-grossing films, but when I was a teenager all of my contemporaries had seen Five Easy Pieces, the Last Picture Show and Harold and Maude. I don't see a lot of teenagers watching films like that nowadays.
posted by QuietDesperation at 1:42 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


comparing the somewhat fringe and localized fan movement of even 20 years ago to the corporate approved/driven behemoth that exists today is disingenuous.

If that's what you're comparing it to, yes.

Except that 'corporate approved/driven behemoth' is only part of the story. The fact that you don't see the "authentic" fanart doesn't mean it's not there. I don't do it myself, but I know people who do. My manager, at work, for one, is an enthusiastic and prolific Stargate fanfic writer. An old friend is sometime and prolific Sailor Moon fanfic writer. 5 or 6 of the heavily-active folks in the regional NaNo group are fanficcers, as are at least 3 of the people who are heavily involved in a local speculative fiction society on whose board I sit. That's just the writers; at least five of those people I just named are at least occasional cosplayers (one of those is a mid-career paleontologist, not exactly your poster-child for mass-consumption).

"Disingenuous" is not a word I'd apply to any of these people, and none of them are into the mainstream marketing-behemoth fanstuff. They're as authentic as you're gonna find. And that's just the people I know off the top of my head, and even then, just the writers.
posted by lodurr at 2:08 PM on May 19, 2015


Boxtrolls was one of my favorite films from last year

I... I'm not sure I can take movie analysis at face value from someone who thinks this. :-)
posted by smidgen at 2:11 PM on May 19, 2015


I salute all fanfic writers, fanfilm makers, fanart drawers/painters and cosplay creators. Even if 90% of what they are making is execrable crap, that doesn't make it any different from commercial work coming from the professionals, and they could become those professionals someday themselves. If they are happy doing it, they should keep on doing it. Those sectors of fandom are the LEAST objectionable, in my opinion.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:16 PM on May 19, 2015


I mean, I looked at the Matrix trilogy and said, "god, that ending was terrible; I could have done so much better!" But I didn't. Someone out there probably has, though, and that takes...something. Whatever it takes is a pretty ok thing in my book.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:20 PM on May 19, 2015


Most fanfic I've read is the literary equivalent of this.
posted by Ratio at 2:26 PM on May 19, 2015


Hey, I don't disagree, but there are a ton of actual, published novels/produced films that aren't much/any better. You have to start somewhere.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:30 PM on May 19, 2015


I was likely too harsh on fanfic and the like. I do understand that very talented people produce some good stuff.

It's just weird that so much seems to be utterly derivative or directly in service of existing stories. The promise of the internet and making the tools of creating art cheap was an endless abundance of original ideas from a diverse creative pool.

Instead, it seems a lot of work is going into doing "What If" episodes for cartoons and comic book franchises.

It's just disheartening is all...
posted by lattiboy at 2:49 PM on May 19, 2015


Pegg's post in the third link covers so much ground, and there have been so many comments here already, it would take an hour to read everything that's been said. And I have to go do things today, so I'll try to be brief.

Where I come from science fiction is magazines and novels, not so much movies, so the main thrust of Pegg's argument isn't a big concern for me. But there is something to what he says about spectacle crowding out discussion of serious issues in the movie industry, and you can see a similar thing in prose with the rise of young adult novels starting to eat into science fiction sales. (Not to mention the manga they sell right beside SF and fantasy in chain bookstores.) Would it be impossible to sell a novel like The Sheep Look Up today? I don't know, probably not. You could publish it on Amazon yourself if you wanted to. But it might be much harder to get a significant number of people to read your book. There's so much coming out every year, the time a book has to gain some traction with an audience has grown much smaller. Things that are trendy have a better chance of gaining traction, because everyone likes to discuss what they read with others, and the best way to do that is by reading what other people have already read.

I don't think it's a calculated attempt by elites to distract the masses (The elite has already had far more success with systematically dismantling non-government power centers and training the masses to believe they are helpless.), but is more of a searching for common ground kind of thing. Our society has fragmented into all these different interest groups with very little in common, so to be trendy we have to reach back further to find common interests. Sometimes all the way back to childhood.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:49 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's just weird that so much seems to be utterly derivative or directly in service of existing stories. The promise of the internet and making the tools of creating art cheap was an endless abundance of original ideas from a diverse creative pool.

Instead, it seems a lot of work is going into doing "What If" episodes for cartoons and comic book franchises.
To a certain extent creativity has always worked like this. People read or hear stories, like them, then think about them and come up with an improved version. It's why we have things like genres in the first place. The Internet encourages creativity of all types, and it's made it easier for people to share stories they may have only shown to a small group of friends previously.

So I think what I'm saying is that there's always been a lot of fan fic, but it wasn't shared as much before the Internet made that sort of thing easy to do.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:58 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


lumpenprole:
He's not completely wrong, but there's something else going on here too. Drama has moved to television. Breaking bad is the perfect followup to the morally ambiguous films of the 70s. Deadwood, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that's where the important stories are being told. There's a lot of reasons, but at least one is that serial one hour shows are way better at telling complex stories than a two hour movie.

Big movies are getting bigger and smart tv is getting smarter.
The unfortunate thing about this, imo, is there's no "serious" science fiction on cable. (But that might be changing, with literary adaptions like Childhood's End on SyFy and Foundation on HBO.) It sure would be nice if there was an original show as complex as Breaking Bad that just happened to be set on a spaceship...
posted by Kevin Street at 3:10 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


It's just weird that so much seems to be utterly derivative or directly in service of existing stories. The promise of the internet and making the tools of creating art cheap was an endless abundance of original ideas from a diverse creative pool.

I understand and to a certain extent share this disappointment, but despite appearances human beings haven't changed much in the last 50,000 years or so, and as Kevin Street points out, it has worked that way most of the time. Look at myths and folklore, and how things get passed on and built up...it's not at all a dissimilar process.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 3:14 PM on May 19, 2015


an original show as complex as Breaking Bad that just happened to be set on a spaceship

Yes! Something with big ideas, on par with Battlestar Galactica.
posted by Ratio at 3:17 PM on May 19, 2015


It's just weird that so much seems to be utterly derivative or directly in service of existing stories. The promise of the internet and making the tools of creating art cheap was an endless abundance of original ideas from a diverse creative pool.

Instead, it seems a lot of work is going into doing "What If" episodes for cartoons and comic book franchises.


Well, some people are more like me: I like to read/see more about characters I've grown to love, or at least be fascinated by. I like movies, but they're little more than snapshots for me. I like tv shows better, when they have character growth and continuity and something to say. I stick with tv shows for years, because I want to know more about those characters. Same with books; I'll read a standalone book and like it fine, but the books I tend to go back to are the series about characters I love. I want to wallow in their lives, not just skim over a brief moment in them.

So fanfic, fanart, fan-videos, are a completely natural extension of that for me. I don't actually enjoy constant change and variation in my downtime; I want some of that, sure, but also a certain level of comfort and familiarity that I can relax into.

And at that, it's not zero-sum. There is an endless abundance of original ideas from a diverse creative pool. People are self-publishing on Amazon, selling one-of-a-kind art on Etsy, creating comics and making films and recording music and creating games and inventing technology and just doing everything imaginable.

But at the same time, people are also writing fanfic and drawing fanart and making vids/AMVs/machinima. Which honestly, they've always done: how many versions of the King Arthur legend have you read/watched? Robin Hood? Zorro? Hercules? Sherlock Holmes? Superman? Batman?

One crucial thing about the fanfic-et-al-creating side of fandom that can be overlooked sometimes is the community aspect. If I'm writing an original novel, I'm... writing an original novel. That's kind of it. I do it by myself, and maybe I have a few people read it for me first for feedback, but it's mostly just me. Then if I'm really really lucky, I get an agent who sells it to an editor and a year or two (or five, or ten) later it gets published, and I can read some reviews of it, and maybe a handful of people send me fan mail, or if I'm writing in a con-type genre, they tell me at a con that they liked it.

If I'm writing a fanfic novel (which yes, do exist), I'm much more likely to be participating in an active conversation with dozens, hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people. I can get involved in direct, one-to-one conversations with the people who read it, which are sometimes nothing more than "I liked this!" "Thanks!" but are sometimes long, in-depth, fascinating looks at all the underlying bits and pieces that went into making the story, which of my choices worked in which ways, you name it.

Etc etc. Being part of a community with a shared interest and language is a huge, huge part of what drives a lot of fan creative work. It's no different than any other community.
posted by current resident at 3:18 PM on May 19, 2015 [3 favorites]


Would it be impossible to sell a novel like The Sheep Look Up today?

wool/snowpiercer?
posted by kliuless at 3:34 PM on May 19, 2015


I haven't read Wool, but if it's a novel with complex characters that addresses topical concerns through science fiction (like the Brunner book), that initially succeeded through self-publishing - then huzzah! Maybe the market is healthier than we think.

Snowpiercer is an interesting case. Based on a French graphic novel from 1982, financed in South Korea with a cast that includes quite a few Hollywood stars. (And distributed to homes just a couple weeks after being released in theaters.) It's an outlier among modern films in many ways but might be a sign of where the future is heading.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:48 PM on May 19, 2015


I think, as somebody said above, that the issue is really just the sheer volume of nerd stuff. Caramel is awesome. If you eat nothing but caramel, you will die. It's possible, to walk this metaphor around the block, that young people can eat a shitload of caramel and more or less be okay, but the older you get subsisting off mostly caramel will lead to diabetes and bad skin. Maybe when you get to be in your thirties and forties and you realize eating too much caramel is making you sick, you start talking smack about caramel like it hasn't made you incredibly rich and famous and you're meaning it, because it's making you sick, you know? But then you take a step back and say, man, dang, caramel is pretty good actually, you just need to slow your roll and eat a balanced dang meal.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:10 PM on May 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


I can see where Pegg is coming from, though. Arrested adolescence and the point at which someone truly becomes an adult is a pretty strong theme in his work. His characters don't always put the childish things away (so to speak), but there's usually a moment in his movies where their motivations change, and they start doing things for external reasons instead of self gratification.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:33 PM on May 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


I find very little to disagree with in the Pegg responds piece.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:00 PM on May 19, 2015


Simon Pegg always seems to be long on style but lacking substance.
posted by rankfreudlite at 5:45 PM on May 19, 2015


kevin_street: I don't think it's a calculated attempt by elites to distract the masses (The elite has already had far more success with systematically dismantling non-government power centers and training the masses to believe they are helpless.), but is more of a searching for common ground kind of thing.

I think you're giving far too much credit for conscious direction to all of this.

Everything that's happened in film & television markets can be understood in terms of the interaction between market dynamics (where rational short- to medium-term business choices result in an overall trend) and cultural trends. I.e., while the specific details of expression are probably to some degree a result of common-ground-seeking, the overall trend is an expression of dollar-seeking.
posted by lodurr at 3:37 AM on May 20, 2015


It sure would be nice if there was an original show as complex as Breaking Bad that just happened to be set on a spaceship...

Why? Why does it have to be on a spaceship? Nerds are supposed to be the intellectually curious ones, or so they tell me, yet they have a problem with ever venturing out of the nerd house. As a result, so many comics, genre movies, and videogames have stories and characters who are only interesting if you've never encountered anything other than comics, genre movies, and videogames.

A few years ago a graphic novel I won't name got astronomically high praise with a plot that was seventh-xerox-copy of John Updike, with a Creative Writing 101 ending. Right now there's a boardgame getting wows because it adds robots and cyborgs to baseball, yet is still basically baseball. Why the robots and cyborgs? Because otherwise those "open-minded" and "intellectually badass" nerds will just go "lol sportsball" and instead buy yet another game about zombies or elves.

My problem with nerds isn't that they're into nerd stuff. My problem is that they're so often ONLY into nerd stuff.
posted by Legomancer at 5:59 AM on May 20, 2015 [4 favorites]


In fairness, Bloodbowl is great.
posted by Artw at 7:27 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


... a graphic novel I won't name....

You are such a tease.
posted by lodurr at 7:36 AM on May 20, 2015


Scott Pilgrim.
posted by Artw at 7:53 AM on May 20, 2015


My problem with nerds isn't that they're into nerd stuff. My problem is that they're so often ONLY into nerd stuff.

I remember reading an interview with Hideo Kojima, the guy behind the Metal Gear Solid series, in which he said he had a broad range of influences: everything from Die Hard to old kung fu movies.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:57 AM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fury Road can be a feminist manifesto.

Wives, Warlords and Refugees: The People Economy of Mad Max[*]
posted by kliuless at 8:55 AM on May 20, 2015


Right now there's a boardgame getting wows because it adds robots and cyborgs to baseball, yet is still basically baseball. Why the robots and cyborgs? Because otherwise those "open-minded" and "intellectually badass" nerds will just go "lol sportsball" and instead buy yet another game about zombies or elves.

I agree with your whole rant a little bit, but I have the uncomfortable feeling you're one of those people who has been making the "parents' basement" joke for 25 years and still thinks it's a real zinger. The people you describe exist, but from what I read, what you say about this game does not seem true to me. There just haven't been that many good sports themed board games, period.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:56 AM on May 20, 2015


I agree with your whole rant a little bit, but I have the uncomfortable feeling you're one of those people who has been making the "parents' basement" joke for 25 years and still thinks it's a real zinger.

No idea what's making you say this. Because nerds and "sportsball"? I'm not making that up. At any rate, you're 100% wrong about me.

The people you describe exist, but from what I read, what you say about this game does not seem true to me.

What is not true? That they added robots and cyborgs to baseball but only as window dressing? They did. I'm presuming it's because just calling it "Baseball Highlights" would be seen as a non-starter, but from over a decade in the boardgame geek bubble I don't think it's too much of a logical stretch.

Honestly, I don't really have any idea what your point is here.
posted by Legomancer at 9:16 AM on May 20, 2015


Mainly I'm confused at there being a Graphic Novel that comics nerds liked.
posted by Artw at 10:16 AM on May 20, 2015


What is not true? That they added robots and cyborgs to baseball but only as window dressing?

No, that nobody would buy it without the robots and cyborgs.

Honestly, I don't really have any idea what your point is here.

That your more or less valid point is buried and overwhelmed by your snide dismissiveness.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:50 AM on May 20, 2015


Why? Why does it have to be on a spaceship? Nerds are supposed to be the intellectually curious ones, or so they tell me, yet they have a problem with ever venturing out of the nerd house. As a result, so many comics, genre movies, and videogames have stories and characters who are only interesting if you've never encountered anything other than comics, genre movies, and videogames.

Because science fiction is my thing, and it would be nice to have a complex, adult science fiction series on TV.

As for the rest of your post, it's a bit misdirected. I've spent plenty of time outside of the "nerd house," but it would be nice to fix up the old home a bit. Add an Oscar or two to the mantle, restore some of the classic furniture. Can't spent your whole life looking for random thrills on the street.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:01 PM on May 20, 2015


Was in London today and popped into Forbidden Planet and didn't buy anything. I'm cured! (Then again I did nip into the Harry Potter shop at Kings Cross Station and buy a Slytherin pencil... so may be not totally cured)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:12 PM on May 20, 2015


It's unsurprising to me that both del Toro and Miller recently made huge spectacles that ostensibly star a man, but when you watch the film it increasingly becomes obvious that a female supporting character is the real lead of the movie.

Way late to the party here, but doesn't this suggest that the studio folks didn't watch the movie?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:19 PM on May 20, 2015


Was in London today and popped into Forbidden Planet and didn't buy anything. I'm cured! (Then again I did nip into the Harry Potter shop at Kings Cross Station and buy a Slytherin pencil... so may be not totally cured)

Yer' a big nerd, Gary.
posted by Artw at 1:20 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Scott Pilgrim.

I can see that.

FWIW, though, I think this is really just a general corollary of sturgeon's law. The crap in nerddom is what's in front of us today, but litFic is also full of updike knockoffs with Creative Writing 101 endings (and often with bonus personal-disclosure).
posted by lodurr at 1:39 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


ArtW: Ironically that io9 peice is spectacularly dumb.

Aren't they all though?
posted by Catblack at 1:41 PM on May 20, 2015


Way late to the party here, but doesn't this suggest that the studio folks didn't watch the movie?

At risk of missing your satire tags, billing is not typically driven by screen-time or even the quality of lines.
posted by lodurr at 1:43 PM on May 20, 2015


Because science fiction is my thing, and it would be nice to have a complex, adult science fiction series on TV.
Isn't that Pegg's point?
Being a nerd has become mainly about being a nerd.
posted by fullerine at 2:34 PM on May 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


No, that isn't what Pegg was saying at all. I think you're misreading him. He's saying that "nerddom" has become a culture, and people don't care if something is good or bad as long as that story checks off the right cultural boxes. Superheroes, fight scenes, some kind of futuristic technology, excitement... a new hit!

What I'm saying is that it would be nice to have an adult TV series that's set in my favorite genre. Something complex and character based like Breaking Bad that happens to take place in a science fictional setting. Why science fiction? Why the hell not. There are countless adult crime dramas. Westerns had Deadwood, fantasy has Game of Thrones. It's time for an adult SF series.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:15 PM on May 20, 2015 [5 favorites]


I found myself envisionining Ancillary Justice as a series when I was reading it.

Similarly, Lukyanenko's Watch novels could be a great basis for an intricate, interesting series.

There's no shortage of potential material, or shortage of people to write original material if someone had the nerve to produce it. Which I see as a way of agreeing with you -- "nerd lit" is saleable, but it has slot into the right grooves.

And when it comes to that, I see precious little that isn't really commercial at its heart. I could go on and on about how much Breaking Bad or Mad Men or Better Call Saul are engineered to push our comsumptive buttons and trick us into mistaking verisimilitude for realisim. From the PoV of the television-producing organs, really interesting, thoughtful television is almost always an accident that must be remedied for the future.
posted by lodurr at 3:45 PM on May 20, 2015


I'll tell you what, if someone's written a version of Scott Pilgrim in the style of John Updike, I'd love to read it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:43 PM on May 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


As a kid, I really desperately wanted to experience a Joseph Heller version of Peanuts.
posted by lodurr at 3:38 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Not to derail the discussion, because I'm favouriting everything and getting recs for classic films to watch, but for me the best part of Pegg's response was the 2nd footnote:

**No disrespect to cobblers, I merely intended to allude to a profession that would not fill my days with fantasy. Not that cobblers can’t enjoy fantasy, they can. After all, some of them are magic elves who only come out at night to save a poor husband and wife from destitution. Surely a metaphor for the invisible underclass, enabling social mobility among the executive echelons of the pre war working class.

I also read his autobiography and it was mostly dull except for bits like this. I'd happily read his opinions on any type of fiction, and hope to never read about his day-to-day life ever again.
posted by harriet vane at 5:48 AM on May 21, 2015 [3 favorites]


My feeling about Pegg is that he's actually got a life without a lot of drama in it. Which will probably tend to make his actual life rather boring, and thus make him seem uninteresting to people who conflate having a dramatic life with being someone whose opinions matter.
posted by lodurr at 6:51 AM on May 21, 2015


And I think it's great that for all intents and purposes he has a drama-free life. I wasn't looking for salacious details about his working with celebrities in his autobio, but I was looking for the nuts and bolts of movies he has written and been in. I find that incredibly interesting but it was weird he sort of stopped at talking about the making of Shaun of the Dead (which was weirdly devoid of a lot of that info) and then it was just "Oh yes, we had so-and-so make secret cameos in Hot Fuzz but I am not going to describe anything about making that film, or any other films I've written." IIRC, World's End hadn't come out when the book was released, but surely he was in the process of creating it with Edgar Wright at the time, so I should think it would have warranted a mention.
posted by Kitteh at 7:30 AM on May 21, 2015


FWIW, though, I think this is really just a general corollary of sturgeon's law. The crap in nerddom is what's in front of us today, but litFic is also full of updike knockoffs with Creative Writing 101 endings (and often with bonus personal-disclosure).

Argh, Sturgeon's Law is not an excuse.

Also not applicable here. It wasn't just that there was a banal graphic novel (it's not Scott Pilgrim, it was Asterios Polyp) it's that this banal graphic novel was being praised to high heavens. It supposedly WAS Sturgeon's 10%.
posted by Legomancer at 11:00 AM on May 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Aficionados from many genres will savor their sewage in preference to being challenged. Lit Fic is full of that, as are romance and crime. I'm not excusing them for it. I'm just trying to create a little perspective.

Anyway, I kind of think that does apply. If 90% of everything is crap, that means 90% of the critically-praised stuff is at least relative crap -- and since I've learned not to assume that critical praise means the product is good, I lean toward that relative bar being somewhat low. Anyway, if the review is 4 stars, and the content of the review is basically telling me 'this is 4 star sewage,' I'm probably going to save myself the trouble of sampling it.

Exceptions are cases where I want to be able to have conversations about something. So for example I know that there have been years when the combined Nebula and Hugo ballots produced maybe 2 or 3 pieces of short fiction that I thought were worth the time investment of reading, and yet many of the stories I thought were a waste of time were praised to high heaven. But I drank the whole glass because I expected to have to talk about these stories with someone.
posted by lodurr at 12:08 PM on May 21, 2015


Well, yer Fantagraphics crowd loved Asterios Polyp, not quite sure if that's a tiny subset of "nerds" or a tiny circle perched on the edged of it in the Venn diagram.
posted by Artw at 12:10 PM on May 21, 2015


I'll give you an example of the cultural literacy consumption that's more pointed and recent: I decided to watch the whole run of Firefly, to see what the fuss was about and be able to participate in conversations. I gave up about 5 or 6 eps in, when I got tired of overcoming the cognitive dissonance with what people love to say about the show.
posted by lodurr at 12:12 PM on May 21, 2015


I'm not dismissing legomancer's point. comics is full of crap that wins high praise, where lazy, self-serving wankery gets passed off as deep. I feel that way about all the Frank Miller I've ever read.
posted by lodurr at 12:15 PM on May 21, 2015


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