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Dec. 2nd, 2015 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionLooks like Walking Dead has gotten in trouble with critics, and conceivably audiences, by not making what it's doing clear enough. You can kind of see why - in the recent sequence the characters' mistakes are fairly far upstream from their consequences, which helps explain why they're able to keep making them. But for those identifying with the characters, it just seems like everything that could go wrong is going wrong for no reason, or that the characters are obviously making dumb mistakes for no reason, thus risking their identification. But the show's trying hard to show that none of the mistakes are in fact dumb. What's stymying that effort? Maybe the fact that it's doing that with several distinct points of view, so those audience members agreeing with one will find everyone else's actions moronic?
Yeah, something along that line. The show's premise creates its reality, so the audience thinks, "don't try big things, they'll fail; don't turn your back on a possible threat, as it's a certain one." Gimple must be going crazy about being misunderstood, but I guess he's hidden too well? Because he's been using our assumptions about how things have to go in this world so we take the hits the characters, who are doing the same thing, do: a point comes when the world is not the same one, but if you stay the same you'll MAKE it the same one. Simultaneously presenting a new group who refuse to see that the world HAS changed in many ways, what with a zombie apocalypse, muddies the waters too much, when combined with that one-step removal rule applied to consequences of persistent mistakes (with no remove they'd never persist). And PLUS nihilism and pacifism are tossed in, and treated much more seriously than the audience that assumes both are batshit might realize. And they too are treated as non-obvious mistakes with delayed consequences. And in the case of pacifism I'm not yet sure a mistake has been made; Michonne's insistence that things don't reduce to four words reminds one of the conspiracy theory/anti conspiracy theory loggerhead: "You just don't want to believe a single person's madness or stupidity could cause so much damage" vs. "You just don't want to believe that forces greater than a person control us all." There's complexity involved in judging all life precious, but not necessarily contradiction. And if Morgan's wrong he may prove a lot less wrong: his mistakes MAY have killed people who would otherwise have lived, Rick's, Carol's, Deanna's, and it goes without saying the Wolf's very clearly have at this point.
I mean, the mosaic that the show is DOES demand that everything go wrong. But that doesn't any longer mean that any particular sort of decision will make that happen. Doing nothing is also risk. People shouldn't even be attacking Rick's basic plan given the circumstances. Perhaps the show should have revealed the semi's fall was sabotage? I think it doesn't want to give its hand away blatantly. But it's looking like maybe it ought to have.
My worry's that the sense of disconnect will make them stop trying to do the neat things they're doing, which would risk the show falling back into the genre crowd-pleaser that (apparently) everyone assumes it's been trying but failing to be anyway. That Adventure Time problem.
What's the answer? The Martian's point was hard to miss because it made different versions of it relentlessly, and what subtleties existed were about defending that claim from rival ones via clarification. Mad Max more or less did the same, and both did it with a crowd-pleasing arc that Walking Dead's denied by its nature. Even Interstellar got to do that. Yeah, that premise - means it's hard to sustain hero OR antihero arcs, and those are the two sorts people seem to know how to watch. Probably mostly because it seems impossible that anyone would try something else on television.
But Gimple has to, to avoid repetition. And he doesn't have the Game of Thrones out of zapping off absolutely anywhere and having just anything happen - the one group has to be doing more or less the same thing in more or less the same place, and ultimately reacting to the same danger. So it's the reactions that have to carry it. Meaning nearly everyone has to be a little bit wrong (unless the show itself commits to nihilism, which it hasn't, and which would presumably create an unsustainable sort of malaise - a movie can be nihilistic, but probably not an ongoing, complex, expensive, mainstream(ed) enterprise). And if everyone's wrong who do we identify with? We can't know or we get that hero problem, which would become one good person rightly fighting an endless losing battle and would feel repetitive and depressing - and even lend some justice to nihilism about the world depicted.
So the show should obviously go the antihero route, but there's problems with that: 1) three seasons have already gone by with (Gimple's earlier attempts to elbow it out of this groove aside) the hero model, so it's going to need to be convincingly transformed, 2) any slow slide into antiheroism may still be taken as a sort of heroism given the absurdly stepped up threats in the world presented in the first three seasons, where trust really was a bad idea and where extending your sphere of sympathy just meant you'd be burying more friends soon enough - mere endurance could thus seem heroic - hell, SUICIDE could, 3) there's lines you can't cross once a character's in the hero position - even Breaking Bad couldn't - and there's more of them when you don't flag from the start, like Breaking Bad took pains to, that the character has bad in him or is hesding for no good end. First impressions matter, and we won't believe in huge changes in a character - it has to be precedented. The show's worked extra hard to precedent the fuck out of a major shift in Rick and the others, but it eventually has to run out of rope.
And the premise isn't wholly compatible with antiheroics, either. Even once we're bored by zombies they still take up a lot of the villain oxygen in the room, first off. And they're so bad, or anyway what they do and represent is, that it can never be made clear, rather than a provocative possibility, that any person is worse, so it would be hard to have that sort of reveal (and rereveal) that The Sopranos, Breaking Bad etc. specialized in, where the casuistry making the antihero seem enough like a hero to justify the audience's symoathies get suddenly lifted and you realize this person is (at least given what s/he could be, should know to be) perhaps the worst of them all. Both shows walked that back, but that's pretty much what it takes to shake the hero off enough to make a clear point. Walking Dead tries extremely hard with that too, but Rick keeps getting re-heroized just because of the combination of being in a leadership position and leading against a horrible omnipresent danger. Something almost George-Bushish about this audience sympathy problem (well, first term), and while the show exploits that connection too it doesn't mean its hands aren't at last tied.
It's how meaning is created within (and about) these sorts of constraints that's brilliant in the Gimple run. But not all the rules can be obeyed at once: don't repeat, don't reveal your final position, don't be TOO depressing, don't deny short term satisfactions to those we like, don't permit long term satisfactions for those we like. Make everything fall apart but not in a way where we felt it was bound to, make everything come back together but ditto, have it all feel like it means something real, don't quite tell us the real thing it means. Don't make it seem like zombies can reliably be escaped, nor that they can never be. Don't make it seem like people can never be trusted, nor that they can always be. Don't make us feel like metaphors are driving things rather than supplementary (a commandment no tv show has come close to breaking, but a price is still paid to keep it - here, a whole mess of them). Don't make us feel anyone's unkillable, don't kill those in whom we're sufficiently invested.
The character killing thing is very interesting. They had no idea if they could get away with killing a child we'd spent ANY screentime with, so spread out the shock across several episodes, early on. Where we were partly relieved when she proved to be dead - partly resigned. They needed this because not only did we not want her to die but we expected that she couldn't possibly be dead: television rules can't be ignored, so their bending has to be announced. The show wanted to see if it could kill a character we actually liked, and one who appeared at the start so seemed foundational. And had a personality - Andrea never really did, presumably because Darabont thought of her as a female heroic lead, and heroic leads can only have temporary or superficial personalities past competence, to keep identification easy. But no one really liked her so she lost lead protectiom. And there's still the problem of finales - and for this show mid-season ones - where we're used to contracts being up (or whatever) such that people who one wouldn't normally see die might die just this once. Even Six Feet Under (even Game of Thrones) only backed up major exits by one episode, and that was shocking enough. Sort of implied the last episode would be a coda, too - so there was a touch of precedent even there. Even Andrea died in a finale. It was difficult enough for the show to establish the precedent of a midseason finale, too. It's also been playing with beginnings - there was sufficient continuity in the first three episodes to make Glenn's apparent (and mid-episode!) death feel somewhat acceptable - or anyway to help out some brskes on how much more unacceptable it could have been. It came about where the end of a movie might - and where Bob's death had in the similarly movie-like first three episodes of the previous season. And I think th broken ice of Beth's death made them feel like they could kill Tyrese before things sewed back up. They're in waters not even Game of Thrones approaches, so they're all the ice-testing they can. I suspect the Glenn thing, too, was an ice test, and maybe a clever one on Gimple's part, since it may help convince the network that NOT getting to kill major characters on a random interval schedule will hurt the show's ratings in the long run. Given the widespread annoyance, to regain credibility they're going to have to drop an A-lister. Thus they get to! Unless they went too far in their attempt to not go too far. It's unclear if viewership has much relationship to internet ridicule, at least initially. Hopefully the brass at least realizes that ridicule eventually damages, or at last prevents expansion, of a brand.
I dunno. I do admit that the latest episodes weren't non-stop fun, though a lot of the decisions, setups and payoffs of previous setups were facinating and admirable. The ties held them back.
Maybe nonrepetition more than any. Alexandria couldn't be yet another CDC/farm/prison, or even church. You can't end on safety, you can't again end on the same note of despair. So here's a different note of despair, they venture. One that IS the final piece of what Gimple's been building here: the final consequence of the even-worse fusion of the Rick group's mistakes with Alexandria's mistakes. The consequences of those consequences don't actually need to be seen. And I guess the cliffhanger's supposed to keep both hope and despair alive in the right proportions?
Yeah, my fear is the network's going to just stomp all over the show and insist that the good and the bad be plainly labeled, that stories be to a greater extent stand-alone etc. etc. Without understanding how ridiculously tough this balancing act is, and especially how intricately Gimple's come up with SOMETHING answering to all the pressures involved that still can mean.
Yeah, something along that line. The show's premise creates its reality, so the audience thinks, "don't try big things, they'll fail; don't turn your back on a possible threat, as it's a certain one." Gimple must be going crazy about being misunderstood, but I guess he's hidden too well? Because he's been using our assumptions about how things have to go in this world so we take the hits the characters, who are doing the same thing, do: a point comes when the world is not the same one, but if you stay the same you'll MAKE it the same one. Simultaneously presenting a new group who refuse to see that the world HAS changed in many ways, what with a zombie apocalypse, muddies the waters too much, when combined with that one-step removal rule applied to consequences of persistent mistakes (with no remove they'd never persist). And PLUS nihilism and pacifism are tossed in, and treated much more seriously than the audience that assumes both are batshit might realize. And they too are treated as non-obvious mistakes with delayed consequences. And in the case of pacifism I'm not yet sure a mistake has been made; Michonne's insistence that things don't reduce to four words reminds one of the conspiracy theory/anti conspiracy theory loggerhead: "You just don't want to believe a single person's madness or stupidity could cause so much damage" vs. "You just don't want to believe that forces greater than a person control us all." There's complexity involved in judging all life precious, but not necessarily contradiction. And if Morgan's wrong he may prove a lot less wrong: his mistakes MAY have killed people who would otherwise have lived, Rick's, Carol's, Deanna's, and it goes without saying the Wolf's very clearly have at this point.
I mean, the mosaic that the show is DOES demand that everything go wrong. But that doesn't any longer mean that any particular sort of decision will make that happen. Doing nothing is also risk. People shouldn't even be attacking Rick's basic plan given the circumstances. Perhaps the show should have revealed the semi's fall was sabotage? I think it doesn't want to give its hand away blatantly. But it's looking like maybe it ought to have.
My worry's that the sense of disconnect will make them stop trying to do the neat things they're doing, which would risk the show falling back into the genre crowd-pleaser that (apparently) everyone assumes it's been trying but failing to be anyway. That Adventure Time problem.
What's the answer? The Martian's point was hard to miss because it made different versions of it relentlessly, and what subtleties existed were about defending that claim from rival ones via clarification. Mad Max more or less did the same, and both did it with a crowd-pleasing arc that Walking Dead's denied by its nature. Even Interstellar got to do that. Yeah, that premise - means it's hard to sustain hero OR antihero arcs, and those are the two sorts people seem to know how to watch. Probably mostly because it seems impossible that anyone would try something else on television.
But Gimple has to, to avoid repetition. And he doesn't have the Game of Thrones out of zapping off absolutely anywhere and having just anything happen - the one group has to be doing more or less the same thing in more or less the same place, and ultimately reacting to the same danger. So it's the reactions that have to carry it. Meaning nearly everyone has to be a little bit wrong (unless the show itself commits to nihilism, which it hasn't, and which would presumably create an unsustainable sort of malaise - a movie can be nihilistic, but probably not an ongoing, complex, expensive, mainstream(ed) enterprise). And if everyone's wrong who do we identify with? We can't know or we get that hero problem, which would become one good person rightly fighting an endless losing battle and would feel repetitive and depressing - and even lend some justice to nihilism about the world depicted.
So the show should obviously go the antihero route, but there's problems with that: 1) three seasons have already gone by with (Gimple's earlier attempts to elbow it out of this groove aside) the hero model, so it's going to need to be convincingly transformed, 2) any slow slide into antiheroism may still be taken as a sort of heroism given the absurdly stepped up threats in the world presented in the first three seasons, where trust really was a bad idea and where extending your sphere of sympathy just meant you'd be burying more friends soon enough - mere endurance could thus seem heroic - hell, SUICIDE could, 3) there's lines you can't cross once a character's in the hero position - even Breaking Bad couldn't - and there's more of them when you don't flag from the start, like Breaking Bad took pains to, that the character has bad in him or is hesding for no good end. First impressions matter, and we won't believe in huge changes in a character - it has to be precedented. The show's worked extra hard to precedent the fuck out of a major shift in Rick and the others, but it eventually has to run out of rope.
And the premise isn't wholly compatible with antiheroics, either. Even once we're bored by zombies they still take up a lot of the villain oxygen in the room, first off. And they're so bad, or anyway what they do and represent is, that it can never be made clear, rather than a provocative possibility, that any person is worse, so it would be hard to have that sort of reveal (and rereveal) that The Sopranos, Breaking Bad etc. specialized in, where the casuistry making the antihero seem enough like a hero to justify the audience's symoathies get suddenly lifted and you realize this person is (at least given what s/he could be, should know to be) perhaps the worst of them all. Both shows walked that back, but that's pretty much what it takes to shake the hero off enough to make a clear point. Walking Dead tries extremely hard with that too, but Rick keeps getting re-heroized just because of the combination of being in a leadership position and leading against a horrible omnipresent danger. Something almost George-Bushish about this audience sympathy problem (well, first term), and while the show exploits that connection too it doesn't mean its hands aren't at last tied.
It's how meaning is created within (and about) these sorts of constraints that's brilliant in the Gimple run. But not all the rules can be obeyed at once: don't repeat, don't reveal your final position, don't be TOO depressing, don't deny short term satisfactions to those we like, don't permit long term satisfactions for those we like. Make everything fall apart but not in a way where we felt it was bound to, make everything come back together but ditto, have it all feel like it means something real, don't quite tell us the real thing it means. Don't make it seem like zombies can reliably be escaped, nor that they can never be. Don't make it seem like people can never be trusted, nor that they can always be. Don't make us feel like metaphors are driving things rather than supplementary (a commandment no tv show has come close to breaking, but a price is still paid to keep it - here, a whole mess of them). Don't make us feel anyone's unkillable, don't kill those in whom we're sufficiently invested.
The character killing thing is very interesting. They had no idea if they could get away with killing a child we'd spent ANY screentime with, so spread out the shock across several episodes, early on. Where we were partly relieved when she proved to be dead - partly resigned. They needed this because not only did we not want her to die but we expected that she couldn't possibly be dead: television rules can't be ignored, so their bending has to be announced. The show wanted to see if it could kill a character we actually liked, and one who appeared at the start so seemed foundational. And had a personality - Andrea never really did, presumably because Darabont thought of her as a female heroic lead, and heroic leads can only have temporary or superficial personalities past competence, to keep identification easy. But no one really liked her so she lost lead protectiom. And there's still the problem of finales - and for this show mid-season ones - where we're used to contracts being up (or whatever) such that people who one wouldn't normally see die might die just this once. Even Six Feet Under (even Game of Thrones) only backed up major exits by one episode, and that was shocking enough. Sort of implied the last episode would be a coda, too - so there was a touch of precedent even there. Even Andrea died in a finale. It was difficult enough for the show to establish the precedent of a midseason finale, too. It's also been playing with beginnings - there was sufficient continuity in the first three episodes to make Glenn's apparent (and mid-episode!) death feel somewhat acceptable - or anyway to help out some brskes on how much more unacceptable it could have been. It came about where the end of a movie might - and where Bob's death had in the similarly movie-like first three episodes of the previous season. And I think th broken ice of Beth's death made them feel like they could kill Tyrese before things sewed back up. They're in waters not even Game of Thrones approaches, so they're all the ice-testing they can. I suspect the Glenn thing, too, was an ice test, and maybe a clever one on Gimple's part, since it may help convince the network that NOT getting to kill major characters on a random interval schedule will hurt the show's ratings in the long run. Given the widespread annoyance, to regain credibility they're going to have to drop an A-lister. Thus they get to! Unless they went too far in their attempt to not go too far. It's unclear if viewership has much relationship to internet ridicule, at least initially. Hopefully the brass at least realizes that ridicule eventually damages, or at last prevents expansion, of a brand.
I dunno. I do admit that the latest episodes weren't non-stop fun, though a lot of the decisions, setups and payoffs of previous setups were facinating and admirable. The ties held them back.
Maybe nonrepetition more than any. Alexandria couldn't be yet another CDC/farm/prison, or even church. You can't end on safety, you can't again end on the same note of despair. So here's a different note of despair, they venture. One that IS the final piece of what Gimple's been building here: the final consequence of the even-worse fusion of the Rick group's mistakes with Alexandria's mistakes. The consequences of those consequences don't actually need to be seen. And I guess the cliffhanger's supposed to keep both hope and despair alive in the right proportions?
Yeah, my fear is the network's going to just stomp all over the show and insist that the good and the bad be plainly labeled, that stories be to a greater extent stand-alone etc. etc. Without understanding how ridiculously tough this balancing act is, and especially how intricately Gimple's come up with SOMETHING answering to all the pressures involved that still can mean.
