torsdag 26 januari 2017

Vampire ambivalence

I blame Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian - at least in part - for there not having been a book-themed blog post for a while. It took me ages to finish, and now I've finally done so I don't have that much to say about it. Simply put, it was too long. At first, I was engrossed, and the premise was intriguing. The story has several strands, the common theme being the search for the tomb of the real, historical Dracula - who in this book happens to actually be a vampire.

The narrator, while a young girl, stumbles upon a mysterious book and some papers, and coaxes her reluctant father to tell the story behind them. When he was a young historian, the narrator's father Paul one day found a book with only a dragon symbol and the word "Drakulya" printed inside it among his possessions. When he showed the book to his mentor, Professor Rossi, it turned out Rossi once came upon a book with an identical dragon print in it, which made him curious about the Dracula legend - after a series of unfortunate events, though, he gave up his research on the matter. Shortly after revealing this to Paul, Rossi vanished, and Paul went in pursuit both of him and the elusive Dracula together with Rossi's unacknowledged, embittered daughter Helen. We follow Rossi's travels before he gave up on the vampire trail, Paul's and Helen's adventures while trying to find Rossi, and finally what happens to the narrator when she tries to find her father, who mysteriously ups and leaves "to find her mother" whom she believed dead. Now and again, the protagonists come upon others who have also been given a dragon book, and a pattern emerges: the book owners first become obsessed about finding the truth about Dracula, and then bad things happen to them.

I liked the intricate plot lines and the dragon book mystery, and Paul in particular is a likeable character - as Kostova also showed in The Swan Thieves, she knows how to handle slightly gauche male protagonists who nevertheless attract the interest of strong women, and don't run a mile when they do so. Also, she deserves kudos for managing to link the historical Dracula - a brutal Wallachian ruler heavily into impaling, but with few points in common with the black-clad cape-wearer of legend - to a vampire plot without it seeming ridiculous. However, the plot goes on and on without us seeming to come nearer to Dracula's lair, until I was heartily sick both of atmospheric Central European scenes of little relevance to the story and the faux-scholarly document chase. When Dracula finally appears, he's actually not a bad undead villain at all - he has grace and dignity. But we first properly meet him after 600 pages, and by that time I'd lost interest. When the plot finally picks up pace, it was - for me, at least - too late.

Still, my problems with this vampire story were not connected to the vampire, and that is worth something. I feel strangely torn about vampires (and am also shockingly ill-informed about the legends attached to them - I've seen one film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but have never even come close to reading it). On the one hand, they are my favourites among the classic horror story monsters out there. Pale, spare men in swirling black capes, maybe (if one is lucky) looking like Christopher Lee and sensibly going for their primarily female victims' necks - what's not to like? Plus, you could call vampires the thinking woman's monster. When I read that in various teenage yarns vampires are said to have enormous strength I considered it something of a betrayal. Surely, Dracula and his ilk aren't about brawn, they're about brains - or, well, sort of - about looking brainy, at any rate.

On the other hand, I'm just not into the horror genre, and a favourite horror story monster is still a horror story monster. I'm not even sure if a creature whose main function is to scare the living daylights out of heroes, heorines and readers/watchers can be called a villain at all. Interesting villains have a story which tells you something about the human condition: they experience love, desire, ambition, resentment, bitterness and other emotions which we can relate to, even if we would perhaps handle them differently. Even unemotional villains show an aspect of what it means to be human, namely what happens when you allow yourself to be ruled entirely by reason. Also, they make us curious about what froze their feelings in the first place. A vampire's motivation, on the other hand, is just too alien for us to engage with, and the actual gore and practicalities involved in sucking blood tend to be off-putting. Pale, cape-clad gentleman bending over one's neck: fine. Pale, cape-clad gentleman actually biting it until he draws blood, then slurping up the blood while he gets an unpleasant red sheen in his eyes - eugh.

Now emotional vampirism, on the other hand, is another thing altogether. A sinister figure who seems to gather strength by draining his or her often unsuspecting victims of their zest for life in suitably subtle ways - that's a villain scenario with a great deal of promise (though still with a fairly high too-scary-for-cuteness factor). After all, when a baddie is called a "blood-sucker", it's usually good news from a villain-lover's perspective. The best kind of blood-sucking, then, I would argue, is the metaphorical kind.              

onsdag 18 januari 2017

Should this be Sherlock's final problem?

I've been a huge fan of the BBC series Sherlock since the start and was pleasantly surprised when the episodes of series four premiered on Netflix merely a day after they were aired in the UK. (A bit tough on those who don't have Netflix, but there you go.) At the same time, I was a bit apprehensive. The Christmas special The Abominable Bride from approximately a year ago wasn't much to write home about in my view - it over-used the dream-within-a-dream conceit to a ridiculous extent and was at the same time faintly preachy about Victorians and their views on women. So had Sherlock ended up being just a little bit too much in love with itself?

Well, hard to say. Series four was better that The Abominable Bride, but a certain smugness does seem to have crept into the franchise. Of course, in a way, it was always there. The previous episodes have had plenty of tricksiness-for-its-own-sake scenes, and sometimes when Sherlock was behaving badly and getting away with it, you felt that there was an element of wish-fulfilment about it on the part of the script-writers. But you were prepared to overlook it and embrace the clever-clever style, because at the heart of the story was the touching friendship between Sherlock and Watson which made the show into something more than a series of mind games. The side characters were engaging, too, and the acting was always top notch.

The side characters are still good (though Lestrade and Molly get a little short-changed this time around) and the acting's still marvellous. But the main problem for me with series four is that suddenly I stopped caring about the Sherlock-Watson friendship. I thought the series makers dealt well with the potential hurdle of Watson's marriage in series three by making his wife, Mary, an extraordinarily clever and unpredictable woman who unexpectedly really liked Sherlock. It appeared the transformation from dynamic duo to dynamic trio had been successfully negotiated: however, in series four, the strain starts to show. The focus changes from Sherlock's and Watson's relationship to each other to their relationship to Mary, and when they find themselves down to two again, some of the old warmth has been lost along the way.

Because this vital part of the setup didn't work, the show's weaknesses appeared more clearly. Sherlock's flippiness and Watson's staidness started to grate in a way they hadn't done before. Then there was the smugness. The Six Thatchers wasn't quite the anti-Thatcherite tract which some reviewers claimed - as in the story it was inspired by, The Six Napoleons, six busts of the titular statesman/woman are smashed to pieces, but the identity of the smashee doesn't prove to be important - but still there was a sneering undercurrent in Sherlock's comments about the first bust-owner's collection of Thatcher memorabilia which ill accorded with his character. One must remember that Sherlock, though played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is not in fact Benedict Cumberbatch, but a detective obsessed with solving puzzles and with little time to spare for having fashionable opinions about current affairs. This wrong note was made worse by the fact that the said bust-owner, a Tory MP, had just lost his son in a heartbreaking mini-mystery-within-a-mystery incident which was easily the most affecting part of the episode. Sherlock was rude to the grieving parents, as could have been expected, and more intent on the minor but intriguing problem of the missing bust than on explaining their son's death, which I can also buy. But preening luvviedom on top of that? Please.

Nor was this the last time Sherlock got my goat in this episode. At the end of it, he made a belittling speech about the main culprit's supposedly humdrum life, a speech which proves to have dire consequences - but the life in question didn't sound so bad to me. In fact, it sounded a bit like my life. What kind of rarefied air do these people breathe if they think a perfectly decent nine-to-five job (and in London, for heaven's sake) must needs make someone embittered and jealous? I don't begrudge anyone the thrill of working on a labour of love as Sherlock and getting paid for it too, but they needn't be patronising prats about it.

The following two episodes dialled down the smugness, and episode two - The Lying Detective - was probably the best in my view, not least because of a stellar performance from Toby Jones as Culverton Smith, a rich and respected businessman and philanthropist who also happens to be a serial killer. Here's the thing, though: at least the nine-to-five villain was sane. In both episode two and three, Sherlock once again goes with the "barmy villain" plot.

I've accepted that Sherlock baddies will usually not float my boat - neither Jim Moriarty nor Charles Augustus Magnussen was designed to make even my villain-loving heart flutter - but two psychotic villains in a row does seem like a cop-out. After having been pampered with the careful villain-character-building of Once Upon A Time, it was especially hard for me to accept as the only rationale of an antagonist's behaviour that he/she was loopy. Then again, Once is more villain-orientated than Sherlock (in fact more villain-orientated than most shows, bless it). In Sherlock, the villain's main function is to prove an intellectual challenge worthy of the ultra-smart detective: psychological credibility is optional. When you're starting to become a little disenchanted with said detective, though, the crackpot-genius enemy storyline doesn't feel strong enough to fully engage you. The plot of episode three, The Final Problem, reminded me of an Avengers episode going extra dark (that is, The Avengers as in John Steed plus feisty female sidekick, not as in superheroes). Nothing wrong with that, but you expect a bit more emotional heft from Sherlock.

The Final Problem needn't, in fact, be the final problem of Sherlock. Do I think it should be? Well, not really: I still enjoy the show too much not to want to watch more of it. I liked seeing so much of Mycroft, and the running joke in episode three about him once having played Lady Bracknell in a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest was both sweet and funny. (The series could in fact have benefited from more fun and sweetness in the same vein.) If Sherlock series five comes along, I'll not be complaining. But they need to watch their step.     

lördag 7 januari 2017

Rogue One: Whatever's the matter with Orson Krennic?

Geeks are usually well attuned to villain matters, which is one reason why I tend to indulge my geeky side when I need cheering up (and not only then, to tell the truth). After watching Rogue One in the local cinema, I watched two Youtube reviews of it where the reviewers (two per piece) went into a happy trance over a scene where Darth Vader kicked serious rebel ass without even breaking into a sweat. These are moments in life when I feel like saying: "Chewie, we're home." Classic 19th-century fiction and costume dramas are full of great villains, but you'll be hard pressed to meet soulmates among your fellow readers/viewers who feel like you do about them. Youtube isn't exactly awash with videos of people enthusing: "Wow, didn't Carker completely own Dombey in Chapter 45 of Dombey and Son? He must be one of the greatest villains ever." But geeks get the whole bad guy thing. Which makes it strange that so far, there hasn't been more talk about how underwhelming the main antagonist of Rogue One is.

It's a pity, because the actor playing Orson Krennic, the imperial Death Star project leader (or something), looks the part, and I don't think he's really bad either. Maybe the directing is at fault? Or should we blame that style-cramping white cape? I thought a white outfit for an imperial officer (matching the stormtrooper theme) was a neat idea in theory: it could be used as a signal that all the Empire's stooges may not see themselves as bad guys, and thus may not feel the need to don a black villain ensemble. But sadly, in practice, that white cape looked like a sheet and was really distracting. Krennic's biggest problem, though, is that he's bested and outsmarted at every turn. Governor Tarkin, heavily CGId to look like the late Peter Cushing who played him in the original, walks all over him. Losing out to the original Tarkin wouldn't have been any great shame, and losing out to a new version of Tarkin played by villain pro Guy Henry shouldn't be shaming either, but the eerie CGI which tries to recreate Cushing's handsome, vulturish features (no, that's not a contradiction in terms) makes the Tarkin-Krennic scenes feel like Krennic is fighting with a hologram - and losing.

But that's not the end of his humiliations. He sees Vader in order to complain about being usurped by Tarkin, and is basically told to stop whining. He is completely taken in by the basic distraction strategy of the Rogue One crew, which makes it possible for a select few of them to break into a high-security archive full of important strategic Empire stuff and transmit the Death Star plans out into space, while the stormtroopers are fighting the rest of the rebels on the beaches (!). Even his one apparent triumph - kidnapping the scientific genius Galen Erso and forcing him to work on developing the imperial Death Star - turns out to be a mistake as Galen secretly builds in a weakness in the Death Star which the rebels can then exploit. Does Krennic notice? Does he heck.

The few scenes where Krennic could have been allowed to shine don't work either. The very first, where he banters with Galen and his wife who are both in full goodness-will-prevail mode, should be the perfect starting point for a villain, but it falls flat. Here, I think the directing must be to blame, or the actor was having an off day. The exchange "You confuse peace with tyranny" "You have to start somewhere" is a quite passable villain quip and should have zinged or generated some kind of this-man-has-no-conscience-menace, but it doesn't. In a later scene, Krennic extracts a confession from Galen about being in touch with the rebels by threatening to gun down his whole scientific team as a group punishment. I wish I could say that you can't guess what happens next, but you can. Yes, it's the old villain-shoots-them-all-anyway cliché, and it's not even clever: where is the Empire going to dig up a new top scientific team at such short notice?

It's hard to define a villain's job description, but what he must do at least 99% of the time is pose some kind of threat to one or several of the main characters - because he has a grievance against them, or because they're simply in his way and the easiest way from A to B is to crush them underfoot. (There are some villains like Bulstrode in Middlemarch who don't quite fit this template - but that's a discussion for another day.) But Krennic, I'm sorry to say, is too stupid to be threatening. He also suffers from the same problem as the rest of the characters in this film: there's no back-story or explanation of his motivation. The thing about Rogue One is we are never going to see any of the protagonists again, and because they don't have a future somewhere the decision was made not to give them much of a past either. The ragtag rebels-within-the-rebellion group led by the disillusioned seasoned killer Cassian and Galen's daughter Jyn Erso are likeable, but with the exception of Jyn we have no idea where they're coming from. Why did the imperial pilot defect? Why is he so devoted to Galen? We don't know, nor will we ever know: the man's cannon-fodder.

Still, Rogue One is a good adventure flick, though definitely not one for the kids - the death toll is astronomic. One thing it succeeded in was to throw some mud on the supposedly heroic rebellion, which I found interesting. Cassian tells Jyn that he has committed no end of atrocities in the name of the rebellion, and the suicide mission to get the Death Star plans is a way for him to redeem himself. We can see that the rebel leaders are trigger-happy: the original plan (not known to Jyn) is to kill Galen rather than extract him from the Empire's grasp. We also have Jyn's old mentor who is an "extremist", which leaves us wondering what he's done (apart from torturing innocent pilots by means of a squid alien) which would make even the not-too-squeamish-seeming rebel leaders balk at having anything to do with him. One scene takes place in an Empire-occupied city, and we see a few stormtroopers kicking about in a goofy-cocky way. Later the city is used for Death Star target practice, which sort of answers the question why a rebellion is needed, but at the time the scene takes place I remember thinking: "What, that's the only way the Empire makes its tyrannous presence felt? I'd rather have some goofy stormtroopers trudging about the streets than put my faith in informant-killers and torturers-by-squid obsessed with a Cause." In this general way, rather than in the characterisation, the black-and-white Star Wars universe does get a tiny bit more nuanced. You can see why someone would actually go for the imperial peace and tyranny option rather than join the unreliable rebels.

Oh, and the droid's really funny.