The Ladies of Louie
There is a show—some of you may know of it—called Louie. It’s a show about a 40-something divorced man with two daughters. He’s not a very attractive man. He goes on dates with attractive women. This is strange.
There is a show—some of you may know of it—called Louie. It’s a show about a 40-something divorced man with two daughters. He’s not a very attractive man. He goes on dates with attractive women. This is strange.
Charlie Brooker, malcontent extraordinaire, in 2011 produced a miniseries called Black Mirror that considers society’s relationship with technology. In the first episode, “The National Anthem,” someone kidnaps a royal socialite and demands as ransom that the prime minister fuck a pig on public television. They play it completely straight. The second, “15 Million Merits,” takes place in a world in which people peddle on stationary bikes all day to earn an imaginary currency called “merits” while they scroll through an endless array of inane shows, games, and virtual accessories. The last episode, “The Entire History of You,” features an implant that records your every audial/visual experience, allowing you to replay everything that’s ever happened to you.
I’m going to talk for a bit about “15 Million Merits,” and there will be spoilers.
I’d like to talk about a pair of characters (doctors) and the concept of evil. Starting in 2007, Phineas and Ferb introduced Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz and his company Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated, and in 2008, Joss Whedon produced Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, chronicling Dr. Horrible’s attempts to get into the “Evil League of Evil.” In both works, the doctor is explicitly labeled as “evil,” but each character is so thoroughly fleshed out that you start to wonder whether he really is evil or start to doubt what “evil” really means.
People have been pushing Moby Dick as an allegorical text for almost a century now, and the weird thing is that they can usually support themselves pretty well. No matter what contemporary American culture is like, someone fits nearly wholesale into Ahab and something gets inscribed on the white whale.
For today’s allegorizing, I’m going to start with the American government as Ahab. It stands at the head of the country proselytizing about one of many obsessions, pushing the country seemingly without regard for the desires of the populace. Its white whale is a smörgåsbord of perceived evils—abortion, terrorism, illegal immigration, online piracy, take your pick. This Ahab drives the country across an ideological sea with its mad agenda on its mind. Sure, it does its job to an extent: it passes a bill every so often, ties it to the side of the ship and harvests what it can, but these smaller whales are never anything but tangential. The real journey is the hunt for that one great cause, the monstrous white whale.
Ishmael here would be the student who graduates from college into the American Pequod. He has little power on the ship aside from empathy, though after the ship is (inevitably, cyclically) destroyed, he achieves the status of writer, giving him a greater power than Ahab ever had. Ishmael is the one who gets to vilify or heroize his leaders for the future readers of history. For now, he can only sit back and watch as his Ahab crashes his ship (both Ishmael’s and Ahab’s, really) against a Moby Dick, but when Ahab’s ship sinks and the sea keep rolling, Ishmael returns home to tell the story and begin the whaling anew, next time with a different captain.
Take a step back and think for a moment, we aren’t leaving for Narnia or Wonderland, we haven’t traveled to Middle Earth for a tale of hobbits and wizards. Fantasy is happening in our world now, from Harry Potter to Twilight to American Gods. Last year a Norwegian film called Trollhunter came out (it’s on Netflix Instant Watch, by the way, and you should check it out if you haven’t already).
Joseph Campbell proposed a universal description of the hero’s journey: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Dan Harmon adapted this description to the world of television: “(1) A character is in a zone of comfort (2) but they want something. (3) They enter into an unfamiliar situation, (4) adapt to it, (5) get what they wanted, (6) pay a heavy price for it, (7) then return to their familiar situation (8) having changed.” In both formulations of this purportedly universal narrative arc, the journey begins with leaving the home and ends with a return. For the superhero, however, there can be no return.
A warning for those of you who haven’t seen Lucky Number Slevin, this post contains spoilers.
Most of the negative reactions to Slevin include phrases like “style over substance” and “emotionally hollow.” I agree with these phrases, but I wouldn’t construe them as ways in which the movie fails: the major point of Slevin is precisely that its style is all it has. Lucky Number Slevin is a gangster movie without gangsters, a revenge plot without closure, a Kansas City Shuffle.
I’ll start off this one by saying I probably won’t sound as academicky in this post, since I’m just going to outline my latest crackpot theory.
So I was watching Empire the other night, and I realized: the empire doesn’t lose the war because Luke Skywalker is awesome, it loses because Darth Vader is an awful tactician. When he invades Hoth, for instance, he sends a bunch of walking machines trekking across a huge flat expanse. Has anyone ever introduced him to the wheel? The fact that ATATs have legs means they can be taken down with nothing more than a skiff and a cable. If the rebels had set up a few tripwires, they would’ve had all the time in the world to evacuate. And then there’s the Death Star. This thing couldn’t have been cheap to build; it probably represents more resources than the entire rebel fleet combined. And when the rebels send their entire fleet at it in Return of the Jedi, it only blows up a few ships before the rebels exploit its pretty glaring flaws. Vader’s too caught up in chasing after his son and force choking anybody who disagrees with his plan to actually form coherent military strategies.
All of which, incidentally, makes Star Wars an even better WWII allegory. Hitler was a fantastic politician, as I’m sure Palpatine and Vader were, but he was an awful military commander. Anyone who decides it’s a good idea to invade Russia with ground troops probably shouldn’t be in charge of any troops in the first place. The most famous blunder a man can make, after all, is getting involved in a land war in Asia.
Tvtropes.org lists a character type called the “only sane man.” Most characters take the absurdity of the story world as normal and accept it without question, but the sane man sees all the weirdness around him. The site lists a bunch of examples that I have problems with, so I’ll list just a few to give you an idea: Frank Grimes in The Simpsons, Alice in Alice in Wonderland, Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove. TV Tropes also says that the “only sane man” usually goes through three stages of emotion: first shock and anger, then bargaining and denial, and finally acceptance. Obviously, this doesn’t happen every time, as Frank Grimes only gets to the first stage before he’s driven (ironically) insane, and Alice never quite gets the swing of things in Wonderland.
The last episode of Community, “Competitive Ecology,” used this trope in both the main study group plot and in the backup Chang plot.
