Acculturation, n. The process by which a human being acquires the culture of a particular society from infancy. All things are in dialogue with culture. Jon D takes that notion twelve steps too far. Spoilers abound.
As fans, sometimes we need to remember that the things we like don’t define our worth as people. So there’s no need to defend them from every single criticism or pretend they are perfect. Really loving something means seeing it as it really is, not as you wish it were. You can still be a good fan while acknowledging the problematic elements of the things you love. In fact, that’s the only way to be a good fan of problematic things.
How to be a fan of problematic things (via shelloiljunior)
In lieu of a full discussion (I haven't the time nor the soberness to accurately approach the Pilot), here are a few brief things that stuck with me after the pilot of Agents. Spoilers, obviously.
Lola might as well be a gun placed in the middle of an otherwise blank stage. It's too expensive a concept to use every episode (given the CGI costs), but it's a clear arc-object, and there will be a moment this season where it figures in heavily (whether as a plot point - the more unlikely option - or as a deus ex machina of sorts). It's also a likely a Chekov's Red Herring to my next point...
Coulson isn't necessarily back for good. The typical set-up is the Five Man Band, and the pilot did a remarkable amount of work to establish Skye as a potential successor. She's an audience surrogate, which is typically the show focal point - not the team leader - but she's also far from the typical surrogate. She's the only member of the team not specialised in the operations side of things, just like Coulson - who, of course, is, but rather represents a Jack of All Trades who defaults into leadership by sheer command of the moment. There's almost too much emphasis on Skye's general command of intelligence gathering and operations ability - subtle, but consistent from the moment she meets Mike - that makes it clear that this version of the show wants to parallel them. Given the mystery around Coulson's return, and his earlier death, it's likely that even if he isn't killed off, Coulson will step back from his leadership role once the show finds its footing. I'd be willing to say Season Four of the show would have only a guest appearance or three from him. Time will tell. As characters settle and move into standard television patterns, this will change. It always does. So I repeat: this version of the show will not be about a team headed by Coulson forever. The version of the show in episode 22 will likely be a different beast altogether.
Extremis was smart. It does three great bits of heavy lifting - establishing the same universe, dating the show (concurrent to the films, rather than between them, thereby indicating that the show can and will crossover to varying degrees), and set the scope of potential stories. Extremis is big, don't ignore that fact. A show with lesser ambitions would have avoided the films in its first outing, a sign that it was too concerned about finding a separate footing from the wider scope of the franchise. By meddling intimately in the world of Iron Man 3, Agents made something very important clear:
The pilot is not the first episode. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s pilot is arguably the second episode. The gang's already together, for the most part, and the heavy lifting is done. The pilot is about moving into the characters themselves and working on the mechanics of the team. Compare it to Angel 1x02 and Torchwood 1x02: both episodes ended with the team coming together. In the Agents pilot only Skye is the missing link, and she's on board very, very quickly, poking the outer limits of being an agent. Coulson's final question to her is a formality of the genre, The Avengers did all the world building that the show needed from its first outing.
Furthermore to the "This show is playing with the Five Man Band" thing above, the gender lines are skewed equally, and it's fairly clear that the show is pairing them off. Coulson/Skye, Fitz/Simmons, May/Ward. The last two aren't done quite to the extent of the others, but it clearly pings their pairing as the show's heavy bruisers.
Fitzsimmons' accents are great. The NYT didn't like them, which is entirely the point. The American procedural is a strictly insular affair, and 1/2 of the team are pushing at the boundaries of that. Two are not American, one is Asian American. British People =/= representation, obviously, but it's an interesting push to make where a large chunk of a show billed as "appealing to everybody" are precisely the kinds of characters that certain... elements of American culture like to other unnecessarily. It has the wonderful effect of completely bypassing the presence of Ming Na Wen, who can do her own thing without being the intruder. It's a great case of the representation bait-and-switch, as Fitzsimmons will mellow and become much more ingratiated to the clear American-ness of Agents, while Melinda May will always be Melinda May.
Mike makes one hell of a good point, and it's a clear continuation of the stuff that Zack Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen brought to Dollhouse. This is a show about superheroes whose first episode clearly demarcates that the show is interested in using it as a lense to tell stories about those actually on the fringe. This isn't to say that S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to become The Wire, but it's encouraging to see a silly superhero show actually willing to admit that people on the borderline are actually vulnerable and not just props for the case of the week.
The following is a very spoiler-filled reaction-discussion.I just finished Gone Home and man, did it set me a-thinkin'. Those that haven't played the game are hereby told to go away, shoo, nothing to see here, go play it first. It's worth your money. (No, really, it'll change your entire experience if you read this first so go play it now).
Fiction is, primarily, about the intersection of narrative and some perceived reality. We can’t really have unreal fiction. We can move further and further away from reality, but we pass over alienation to total exclusion. There’s a difference between an experience that isn’t yours and an experience that isn’t anything. Eventually, we come back to the walls, ceiling and floor. Surfaces. Sounds. Stuff of the real has to make up any experiential thing. Even Game of Thrones, the big fantasy-thing of the current era, has a first book that never actually brings up the supernatural except for the very start and finish. The issue around reality and fiction is that language is a bad translator. It can never truly convey an experience, not with 100% accuracy, and not across every possible variation. No endless volumes of books can ever account for the way that autumn hits the senses, or the way that you feel when you finish a damn good book, or the way a first kiss feels like something so total, yet so trivial.
All of this is a preamble to me saying that Gone Home is a masterpiece.
It’s quite easy to knock Gone Home down a few points on any individual scale of ‘quality’, sure. The gameplay is thin. The graphics resemble those strange tie-ins for book franchises that were popular in the early 2000s. The ambience is a bit samey. The protagonist doesn’t get developed well. The tension never really pays off in the way you expect it to. These are all the edges of the things that make up Gone Home. They’re criticisms of varying validity, sure, but they’re ultimately akin to complaining that Breaking Bad doesn’t develop Skyler well, or that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’wasn’t the right song to start Nevermind with. Gone Home does more character work through stolen moments in a two-hour game than a lot of high profile narratives, and it’s a fantastic experience. It’s also a difficult game to discuss without changing perceptions. It plays so many meta-games with its audience that the experience is incredibly adaptive. That’s right, not immersive, as is so often touted as the future of games, but adaptive.
That work starts with Katie, the mostly silent protagonist. Gone Home gets all of the basic work of establishing who she is out of the way quickly. Her thoughts occasionally influence found objects (and this is definitely a story about found items), but hers is a thin character. Quite rightly, too. The moments where Katie is experienced by the player are few and far between, contrasts rather than concepts, and they slowly build to identify others. Generally, an undeveloped protagonist is a flaw, but Gone Home plays a specific game with this. The hard first-person focus, the slight presence of her personality, the fact that she’s been absent from the lives of those she’s suddenly rediscovering? It all proves quickly adaptive to the act of distance that is first-person narrative. Gone Home isn’t negotiating Katie’s existence. She’s just the lens of the camera. The character work of Gone Home is how you adapt to change. New things have happened while Katie was away. The player walks in as blank as she does. The narrative builds to almost entirely mimic her perception – the first major revelation comes after planting a couple of obvious seeds. It’s only when Sam finally says – and I paraphrase – “You always knew, right?” that the game of Katie’s blankness opens up. She isn’t the blank slate – the player is, and the story rolls out so naturally as to impact personal assumptions, somewhat bypassing the general artifice built into the knowledge that you’re playing a video game. All of this, of course, is assuming the player is working through it the way the game expects. A player who skips all the vital information will have only meager scraps to piece together the tale of lovelorn riot grrl white cis lesbians in 90s Boone County America. The revelation is as blunt as the undertones of Sam’s statement that “You always knew”. It’s a wonderfully loaded question – it isn’t “We talked about it that one summer”, it instead has an answer that builds up the player as Katie in one moment. How much did they know about her? How much did they care? That the game unfolds simultaneously so subtly and so quickly is a marvel. It’s a testament to the narrative itself that a silent, undeveloped protagonist goes so far beyond being a simple audience surrogate.
It’s also why so much of the game feels tense. It’s hard not to be worried when the house is dark, the lights are flickering and there’s no sign of life anywhere. Much of the narrative stuff of Gone Home suggests a specific mystery that pulls the rug out from under the player quite quickly. The true pleasure in this meta-game, however, is the way that Gone Home constructs itself as more than a simple exploration game without ever claiming to be that. The title screen is eerily evocative, worthy of an iconic status that the indie nature of the title will unfortunately never give it. It’s a common trope – an imposing house, the dark of night, a single lit window. Gone Home markets itself in the cloak of a horror game, wrapping a ghostly narrative alongside Sam’s story to sweeten the deal. It’s easy to find the game tense and, admittedly, unnerving in this regard. A moment early on when I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye gave me as visceral a reaction as any I’ve had in a darkened room. This early fear for the player’s own body fades neatly into a different fear, however, as Gone Home appears to be aware of its own limits in a way that many games aren’t. The fear for the player’s flesh becomes a fear of what’s happened to Sam. In reality, the writing has been on the wall from the start. There’s a narrative device – that is, the literal narration of Gone Home, that foreshadows exactly how the game ends. The whole thing is past-tense, effectively a memory as Katie reads her sister’s words, but that’s a minor trick of the ludonarrative that only serves to heighten the act of searching. The ending is as tense as anything. There’s plenty of wounds in the Greenbriar house, from the more-than-subtly-hinted abuse to the stark appearance of red splotches in the bathtub.
The tension that the player might be in danger gives way to the harshness of the real world. There are no monsters. Sam hasn’t been abducted by a cult. It’s all just real. That realness is what makes Gone Home’s ghostly narrative a wonderful ploy and gives the story so much punch. Until that final moment, until everything ends well, it’s easy to worry. It’s easy to predict that Sam won’t survive to the end. The game has a happy ending. Its damn well earned. It’s easy to see coming, and yet up until that final moment there’s a genuine fear that there’s something to be discovered in the attic. There is – up in the attic is the possibility of a queer kid finding happiness. It’s a social comment as much as it is a play on the trappings of the horror narrative. Gone Home draws its tensest moment from the grim realities of queer lives, of shame and fear, and the stark contrast that reality has with the experiential reality of queerness. Sam is floored by her parents’ reaction. She’s as equally floored by the first time her lips touch Lonnie’s. She knows Riot Grrl world she finds herself in is at odds with her day-to-day schoolyard existence. There are so many narratives that end with a scene of horror in the attic. When all that awaits Katie is the knowledge that her sister is happy, it feels damn near revolutionary, like the first time a queer kid ever got a happy ending. It isn’t, and it won’t be the last, but Gone Home could easily have been about a thousand other stories. It’s about Sam, and Lonnie, and the system that built itself up around them. They’re just kids, sure, kicking down patriarchy, but damn if it isn’t satisfying. That’s the glory of Gone Home, in a way. It constructs an artifice of tension, transfers it to a character in the story, and then pulls back the curtain. There are a lot of words that could be devoted to the impulse to expect the worst in a queer narrative, but Gone Home resists those impulses. It doesn’t go for the complex version – Sam is a well-to-do cis able white girl. It plays on every impulse you might expect, it delivers a teen coming out story that’s about as predictable as any other, but Gone Home isn’t just smart about exactly how it all plays out.
Gone Home is a goddamn high-water mark in ludonarrative storytelling masquerading as a ghost story. That’s more than enough.
Great stories don't have anything to do with hitting the best plot points. You don't need monomyth or some grand hero saving the day. You don't need Arthur fighting to his dying breath or Blackadder admitting that there's nothing to do but face the enemy. Great stories are just whatever happens to resonate with you. They're the ones that you love when you encounter them, that mean something to you, and that you're genuinely sad to see end. It doesn't matter if what resonates with you is something you know nothing about.
It isn't about seeing something of yourself. It's about having something you enjoy so fully, so completely, that any mirror it might hold up to you shows nothing at all, that there is just more of the story, and the impact is far deeper and more meaningful than anyone stumbling out of a heart-string-tugging documentary would ever feel. You get that from the strangest of places. You just know that you're watching something special, that you're reading a really great book... that it's just a great story. It doesn't matter if you're a different person ten years from that point and you don't get that feeling anymore.
Once upon a time, you felt something. Words on a page, sounds and pictures, they took the nightmarishly complex creature of history and context that you are and had a real, genuine impact. It might not change your life, it might not fix a broken heart, but you felt something. Everything changes, you change, and time moves on. Looking back, it won't mean what it meant, but once upon a time? Yeah, it meant something. That's good. That's great.
That's a great story. That's all it needs to do. The greatest stories are those that started out as little more than words on a page and became, not forever but for more than long enough, a part of you.
Under the cut I talk about a game I finally got around to playing, Alan Wake, the way that it deals with narrative theory and spend far too much time talking about Hannibal on the way there. As with so much, this was a series of tweets that I've expanded out.
So, I've been playing Alan Wake, an American Survival Horror game about a writer who gets sucked into a nightmarish situation out in a very David Lynch-ian setting. The thing that's bugging me about Alan Wake is how easy it is to see the edges - not in a literal, graphic sense, but in terms of narrative. Alan Wake is cobbled together from American Fiction. The titular writer is a Stephen King-type caught in a nightmarish story about himself. It all sounds very familiar, because it is all very familiar. From what I've heard, it strays into even more familiar AmHorror territory. That, in itself, isn't bad. In fact, seeing the edges ain't bad at all. It's something we quite often call bad, though.
There is, truly, madly, deeply, nothing new under the sun. Everything is an assemblage of something else. Tables are bits of wood rearranged. Books are paper, ink and language systems. Alan Wake is AmHorror Literature and Survival Horror. The big thing nowadays, what people call 'deft' and other nice words, is generally how you disguise the edges. The edges are where multiple things touch. Genres, formats, discourses, cultures, whatever. They always touch. That's cultural produce. We take things, mash them up into new styles and formats, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When we say "This show doesn't really work", 9/10 times we're saying "I could see the edges of what they were doing, and that bothered me". Hannibal, for example, is a nice spheroid show, it has minimised edges. It takes things and reworks them to create something new and exciting. Having said that, Hannibal doesn't excite me in an academic sense. I love to look at it, but it's art. It's clear culture, a discourse that requires active penetration to dissect and find where the cultural product that makes these things up begin and end.
Take, on the other hand, my favourite show for making people concerned about my health: Glee. Lots of edges, all of them visible. Sure, it has those wonderfully sublime moments like Rumour Has It / Someone Like You where you just sort of get overwhelmed by the edge-less-ness of it all, but for the most part, it's a big ol' ball of edges. Glee excites me in an academic sense because the edges are there, but are much less transparent than say, the edges of Alan Wake. Alan Wake screams "I'm combining these things, and that's my whole deal". Those things are interesting in themselves! Stephen King, Twin Peaks, Japanese Survival Horror Games, Discourses about the Writer vs. the Written, etc etc, all of it interesting in themselves.
What's bothering me, and so often what's bothering people when they talk about a thing being 'bad', is that the edges are big flashlights. I understand Alan Wake at first glance, because I see all the sources and I get most of it even from cursory pop culture knowledge - hell, Alan even invokes Nicholson in The Shining, in case you missed it. I don't understand Hannibal and don't need to. Sure, the books and movies Fuller et al are drawing on would help elucidate a few things, but there's so much going on in any given shot even before you get to the acting that the edges fold in, wrap over, and hide themselves in a dense, rich cultural product. I understand Glee at first glance but don't get why, because Ryan Murphy et al are doing something interesting in that writer's room, even if it isn't always translated onto screen. Playing Alan Wake, much praised as it has been to me, is sort of exemplifying that easily mistaken 'badness' that is visible edges. I grew up on visible edges in my media. That's how I learned to write, mostly. Nobody learns to write from the Godfather, no matter how many times they swear they did. Over time, you pick up what's out there in culture, what make up those things, where their edges lie, and how to copy, combine and transform those things into new and exciting final products. The game of producing narrative, nowadays at least, is hiding your edges, or making them deliberately visible to mask other things you're doing, and that brings me back to poor Alan Wake, who I'm being so hard on, which doesn't do the work of hiding its edges. Sometimes even a great acting performance can hide edges. I know Hannibal Lecter's base bits, but Mads Mikkelsen does a fine job sanding them over. But, and it's a big but: Alan Wake has none of the things it could have to mask its edges, and nothing (at least so far) that it's using them to distract from. Maybe I'll get to the end of this game and discover that I've been sucked into some amazing ultra-narrative strategy and be blown away. More than likely, I'll have just checked a bunch of things of a list titled "What's in this thing". That isn't bad, but it's difficult to ignore.
I had someone ask me if I had a twitter, so I've gone and tossed a link in the sidebar.
Feel free to tweet at me any comments/concerns/questions, but I'd appreciate #theorypop in your q's when possible so I know whether to be afraid of the shouting or not.
All Or Nothing: The Serialised Narrative of Glee's Fourth Season.
Internet, I've seen the way you've been talking about the cliffhangers in 'All or Nothing', and we need to talk...
Saying goodbye is hard. Attachments form easily, and with those attachments come the inevitability that time must move on. Things must change. There is no status quo, there is only the notion that what came before is somehow better, because it's the thing you fell in love with. We've all experienced it. I left high school thinking they were the best years of my life, and that I would go back and teach. Five and a half years on, I revile the notion of my high school years and reject the idea that I had anything resembling a good time there. The thing that I grew attached to has changed. I see the flaws. I see the warps. I see that the thing I liked doesn't really exist, and there's nothing to return to. We form attachments to a lot of things in the exact same way. Nothing is ever as good as the first time you really enjoyed a cup of coffee, the first time a drunken night with friends was memorable, the first time you sat down and watched an episode of TV and felt truly, emotionally connected to it. Finally, you've seen something that you get. That moment becomes a perfect little crystal distillation of why you loved that show. Two, four, even six years later, it's unlikely you have the same relationship with it.1 Internet fandoms are among the worst place to experience this because it's a fact of life that everyone will slowly turn on the things they love. They were always better in the past. Look at Supernatural. Look at Community. Look at Glee.
For the record, I still very much enjoy Glee. I also very much enjoyed Glee's fourth season finale, All or Nothing, an episode that confirmed what I pretty much knew about the show's fourth outing: it wasn't done yet. Cliffhangers are always going to be a tricky business. Any piece of media can end with a cliffhanger as an explicit cue that the narrative will continue this thread. Resolution/closure is only delayed, generally to give it better time to develop. This is more common in shows that have early pick-ups or multi-book/movie deals.2 The cliffhanger is generally an explicit acknowledgement of a storyline that cannot be finished in its current structure but would be completely fucking stupid to ignore it until the next segment of that narrative (be it a TV episode, season, full-length movie, book, whatever). Cliffhangers are often seen as a marker of time to be waited, but they're conceptually a marker of time needed. Supernatural has had its fair share of these. They needed to write Jeffrey Dean Morgan out of the show, but wanted him to go out with a bang. Therefore, the first season ended with a car crash and the second opened with an episode all about his character. The show was about the brothers. They couldn't have given him a fair send-off in a finale about the brothers. Instead, they used a cliffhanger, and everyone knew the season two opener would deal with those consequences. So it did.
That's what cliffhangers do. They remind everyone exactly what's at stake for the season opener. Some shows are more deft with this than others. Community ended its second season with Pierce leaving the study group forever. The story it was telling was about Jeff, and his place in the group, and the unsettling similarities he shares with him. It knew it needed to address these issues in the coming season, so it created an entirely shallow and false cliffhanger that was resolved in the first five minutes of the next season. Why? Because the story wasn't the story it claimed to be. Pierce was Jeff's potential future. He had to deal with that reality. That's what much of the third season came to be about – Jeff keeping himself away from becoming a bitter old man who turns on those who reluctantly accept him. All of this was set up by a cliffhanger.
The reason why I'm devoting so many words to cliffhangers here is because they're a point of contention in the current Glee fandom. They have been for a while. 'Goodbye' was a great episode of television, but it ended with Kurt Hummel not having a plan for his future. The internet told me this was a betrayal. How dare they? He's earned more. Truth be told, he hasn't. He's a fictional character in an ongoing narrative. We will always admire characters more for their attempts than their successes.3 Kurt Hummel tried, he failed, and the third season finale laid that out clearly: he's going to have to deal with this. There's no simple band-aid. But why couldn't he have gotten into NYADA? Because that was a simple band-aid. He did an imitation of Hugh Jackman playing stage-gay in his audition to be 'daring'. Carmen Tibideaux even called him out on it passive aggressively, saying that he was great – and then name dropping Hugh Jackman so that he knew she knew where he'd taken the entire routine from. A savvy viewer already knew that he wasn't going to get it. Then? He didn't, the internet exploded in anger, and Glee set itself up to deliver Kurt's best storyline since the second season: Kurt Hummel got happy. Sure, there were bumps along the way (including a big one that I'll get to in a second), but he got his internship at Vogue.com, he moved in with his best friend, and with what he learned he blew the socks off a room full of people at the drop of a hat. Why? Because Kurt's always performed better in the moment - 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' was a clear example of this.
Some parts of the fandom will inevitably point to season one in this discussion, so why not mention that he threw 'Defying Gravity'? He prepared, he could have won, but the preparation and the context scuppered him. It always does. That's what NYADA should be teaching him to fix. That's why he's there. He didn't 'prepare' 'Not the Boy Next Door' the way he did 'Music of the Night', and took to it in a reactive moment. Strong performance, terrible way to portray yourself as an actor looking to break into an industry that requires the same thing eight times a week. Kurt needs to learn to conduct himself professionally as an actor because he makes too many decisions in the moment, and as strong as they may be, they're rarely right. 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' proved to be not a possible farewell, but him coming to grips with his own fears. Throwing 'Defying Gravity' turned out to be the first in a long line of Rachel Berry getting things she didn't deserve. Refusing to listen to Blaine's point of view in 'Dance with Somebody' undoubtedly lead to 'Makeover'/'The Break-Up'. He's a sucker for emotional reactions.
Don't kid yourself that Rachel's in anything but the same position – Cassandra July lays out fully that she's being cruel to be kind. 'Uptight (Everything's Alright)' shows that yes, she sees Rachel for exactly what she is – an arrogant performer who expects things to be handed to her just as they were in high school - and is fully committed to smacking her down a peg before it kills her career. Feud's competition scene is a wonderful example of this – Kurt wins because Rachel is coasting. Kurt builds her up because it's not her fault that high school failed pandered to her and failed to prepare her for a world in which everyone's as talented as she is. That's why Lights Out's 'Don't Stop Believing' works – Cassandra July and Kurt Hummel have worked consistently as two sides of a coin, supporting and breaking down the bullshit she's adjusted to. She doesn't flashback to Nationals, when she was literally on top. She flashed back to the time before she became the girl that Tina sees her as in props (“You have to do a solo or we'll lose!”) and as clunky as her auditioner's “What did you see?” question might have been, it's putting that back in Rachel's face. So, where is she now? She's in another cliffhanger that waits all episode. Why? Because that story isn't done. Not by any standard of completeness. The inter-season break now becomes the awful wait that comes from any audition, interview, whatever. It's a pretty effective use of a hiatus. Come season five, only a month-ish will have passed in-universe, but to the viewers it will have been much more, and that's exactly how it feels to have to wait for any news at all when you're that passionate about something. Life just happens, and it never happens neatly.4
But we have to come back to Kurt, whose story doesn't seem like one that has to wait. Yet, it does. We're following in the footsteps of another storyline here: Blaine isn't the new Rachel, not by a mile. Marley is. Blaine's the new Finn, the alpha-male head of the Glee Club who's doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous Glee Clubbers. The fourth season has been very much about a narrative of return – return to basics, to an eager group of people in a room who seem to have the odds against them. This isn't hacky writing by any measure, but a deliberate action. McKinley High hasn't stopped now that Rachel Berry's moved on. There's a new female lead singing the songs she would have gotten to sing. Status quo has remained. It's not the same, of course. On a meta level, anyone who dislikes the New Breed of students is feeding into the wistful nostalgia of the scene in 'The New Rachel' where Rachel watches Jacob Ben-Israel's video about the hole she's left. Departure doesn't mean the end, it means that there's some clear rearranging to do. 'The New Rachel' had two jobs: deal with the gap left by Rachel Berry and deal with Kurt's future. It did both splendidly, establishing the member of the senior class who would ostensibly lead things while introducing a female character to take her place a little more literally. It's a return-to-the-past that the show literalises more than once, and never more so than in the time-bending fantasy that is the closing number of 'Glease'.5
The characters fall into exact positions that the internet hasn't quite gotten right: Blaine and Sam are Finn and Puck, Marley is Rachel, Kitty is Santana, Unique is Mercedes, Jake and Ryder are Mike and Sam (respectively), Sugar is Brittany, Joe is the Defence Against the Dark Arts Teacher person who floats around the edges (just as Matt, Season 2 Sam and Rory all did), Brittany has (somewhat oddly) become a Quinn-type with her college aspirations, Tina's still and Schue is forever Schue. There's a deliberate return to the set-up of previous seasons. Why? Well, the show's future is a big place to start unpacking that. It seems more than likely that Lima is going to be phased out according to the way Ryan Murphy's been talking about the show.6 The season's set-up supports this hypothesis: New York doesn't need to follow a school year. In 'Swan Song', the competition that Rachel was in was an almost arbitrary counterpoint. It was an in-road for Kurt, and Kurt alone. It's also a good marker of what the show could become – sure, there could be competitions, but ultimately it doesn't need to be confined by the school year anywhere as tightly as previous seasons have been. Whether the back-half of season five becomes the first half of season six or an entire year in itself would be irrelevant. New York is the cheaper, neater alternative. Those cliffhangers in 'All or Nothing' all back it up: Kurt and Blaine in New York. Rachel on Broadway. Everything else is small, contained. Will and Emma get married, at last. Ryder's story with Unique sets up a change in New Direction dynamics for the lead-up to Nationals. It's a pretty common trope: a group has seeds of trouble only for them to rally together for the last big push. This isn't the end of that. If it ends with Ryder and Unique giving it a go, I'd be pleasantly surprised. So, the Lima content returns. It's not giving us new, it's giving us a sombre reminder to offset Rachel's New York adventures - she isn't needed. It's a narrative exercise in the same lesson Cassie July teaches: it isn't all about you. You have to be good, because there's always someone to replace you, whether you're Marley taking Rachel's place or Blaine taking Finn's.
This brings me back to my mission statement here: internet fandom's latest meltdown about Glee rubs me the wrong way. It's been rubbing me the wrong way for a while now. Clearly the show as it stands now is not the show that much of the fandom got on board with. Even if this show was Breaking Bad, it'd be a different show. It's a much more serialised thing than the second season was. Episodes lead into each other. Storylines last for more than an episode (no, really. Look at the second season compared to the fourth. All that criss-crossed over the second was relationships). The things people want from it are far-flung from what the writers are trying to do now. 'All or Nothing' sets up a very specific situation. It outlines the dynamics of New Direction in the lead up to nationals – betrayal! A missing member! Graduations and colleges! - and provides an argument for longer storylines – Broadway! Gay weddings! Brittany and Santana! - in a way that 'New York' (the episode) failed to do. Sure. It was a fun episode, but boy did it leave nothing to the imagination. 'Goodbye' was a wildly successful episode for this reason, and the 'Goodbye'/'The New Rachel' double-feature will be a favourite pairing of mine for years.
Look, I'm not immune to the ravages of time and the effect it has on liking things. Far from it. I'm pretty sure no one is. Things will come, things will go, and TV will never be exactly the same as it ever was. Especially not a Ryan Murphy show. However, and I have a big however here: If you think Glee is worse for not wrapping up every episode neatly in a bow, you're missing the point. You're missing the point of narrative, you're missing the point of TV, you're missing the point of everything good. There's a shitton of potential in Glee's coming seasons. 'All or Nothing' isn't as strong as 'Goodbye', but if the way 'The New Rachel' dealt with that was anything to go by, I'm excited for season five.
Maybe that's just me.
Footnotes because I'm a terrible academic:
1 Todd van der Werff said this much better in his excellent write-up of Community's fourth season opener: http://www.avclub.com/articles/history-101,91985/
2 cf. Harry Potter, some of the Marvel movies, Peter Jackson’s Tolkien film adaptations, Supernatural, Parks and Rec, Sherlock, Doctor Who, that one season of Nip/Tuck where the dude got stabbed, etc etc
3 So sayeth everyone's favourite, Pixar: http://io9.com/5916970/the-22-rules-of-storytelling-according-to-pixar
4 For the record, I want Rachel to be smacked down one more time before she becomes 'successful'. There's a very interesting story to be told by putting her in the ensemble chorus of Funny Girl. The scene where she's forced to congratulate a Sutton Foster-type writes itself!
5 The AV Club's Brandon Nowalk provides the greatest description of this ever, and I shall therefore link it without comment: http://www.avclub.com/articles/grease,88614/
This was originally a comment on the internet but it was super long so I decided it would be better suited to this space. I try to avoid voicing opinion over analysis, but I'm only human.
You know, I let a lot slide because I generally have enough goodwill towards TV as a whole, and let's face it, I'm one of those people who liked Shooting Star (to clarify: liked individual parts, didn't think they worked as a whole), but the Ryder/Kitty thing didn't sit with me. Now, let me say this loud and proud because I'm not one of the kneejerk reactors that I've seen plenty of since it aired: it was solid, and I actually liked Sam and Artie's responses (they were terrible, because that's how this shit gets treated when it's a guy, and I get the choice to have that happen, if only because I'm always the first to shout about narrative not having to conform to an ideal world), but I feel like it was just off on the scale of emotional issues. Everyone else was off having future-crises. The question of the hour was "how do these things move ahead?". Ryder and Kitty both weren't quite 'over' their respective issues, but they weren't going anywhere with them. Their particular plot was about a certain kind of stagnation, putting oneself out there only to retreat backward. Minor movement, but of a very different kind to, say, Santana, or even (oddly enough) Isabelle, who both used the lesser parts of their life to advance those around them. And there's Artie and Sam, who used their combined powers of abs and synth-backing to try something that (in the show's microuniverse) was new to them. Even Sue was bluntly moving on. These were all small-scale things, though. Minor matters. "OK, I'm here, I should move forward".
A lot of my goodwill to Glee comes from general thematic consistency. Even when it's all over the place, it tends to bind because of the goofy background theme that overpowers everything, and I groove away to a musical hour of undergraduate-level 'themes'. The episodes that really don't work for me are the ones that even miss that. If everyone else is taking the time to look at where they're at and move ahead, you have to as well (whether it's large scale spinning-your-wheels-to-make-ends-meet, even if Santana is undoubtedly working her ass off, or admitting that actually you might be happier outside of a particular system, or small-scale "Hey we're kinda stuck in a rut). It feels exceptionally sloppy when, in THAT episode, a character tries to move forward in a big way and proceeds to use it as an excuse to spin his wheels (Ryder has a big confession! He returns to being insular and allows himself to be knowingly catfished), and when it's the 'gravitas' bit of the episode, it just doesn't work. It sort of acts as a counterbalance to the good-forward, but at the same time the combination of heavy-subject and limited-screentime left me feeling uncomforable. Maybe that was the point. Maybe I'm meant to find this subject uncomfortable. Let's face it, I should find molestation uncomfortable, but it's not because I'm empathising that I'm squirming in my seat. It's the same issue I found in Shooting Star. The content was fine, but it didn't sit with what was around it.
Spoilers of an internet sort past this point:
It makes me happy, in a way, that RMurphs seems to have more-than-hinted that New York will eventually be all of the show by Season 5's midpoint. It's not that Lima is out of ideas, I think there's still plenty that they could do, but it's feeling the weight of that inevitability. The stories seem long because they're pointed towards their end in a way the show has never really done. Glee has never really been a "the end is in sight" show, so while I'm excited as hell for the Bushwick Loft show, I can feel the weight of that straining the need to tease out more depth to the characters it'll be forced to leave behind.
Also, I'll eat my hat if Katie isn't Marley because although all of the internet apparently wants her to be Unique, InternetKatie and RealLifeMarley both say things like "That's their truth" which is one heck of a tell when it's a weirdass thing to say and they're both the only ones to say it.
Rationale: Game of Thrones - "Walk of Punishment" (3x03).
Minor observations about GoT 3x03 below the cut. Minor spoilers for the rest of A Storm of Swords (marked as (spoilers)).
Flaws are the thing we judge character by, because they establish the outer limits of a character and reveal more than their victories. Take Edmure firing the arrows - he fails consistently, and doesn't attempt to adjust his aim. After Edmure establishes the failure, Bryden shows how to be a model archer. This otherwise comic-relief showing sets the tone for the next scene - Edmure is impulsive and prone to mistakes. Bryden is strong and bound by ceremony, but willing to step forward when necessary. This is, functionally, a mini-parody of knightly duties in Westeros, and in being so shows us the essential approaches of the two men to those duties.
Unusual moment when the show's closing line reflects on the previous hour ("You're nothing without your daddy, and your daddy ain't here"). It's a full-circle moment, but establishes the hand-cutting as a contemplative moment rather than the WHAM! it's meant to be. Reliance on authority that isn't your own causes loss - something that (spoilers) Catelyn will learn soon enough.
Dany offers water to a dying man, who rejects her. In this universe, refused arrangements are almost certainly fatal. Ned was not the first to learn this, and he's not the last by far.
Barristan and Jorah are the same person at different times in their lives, and a strange analogue to Edmure and Bryden. One is duty-bound but speaks his mind. The other continues down the same path, regardless of cost.
Still no Freys. Strange.
Hot Pie bakes Arya a wolf. Has more of a bearish appearance by my eye, connecting her directly to The Bear and the Maiden Fair. The Maiden eats the Bear. The Bear takes from the Maiden what he needs, and afterwards they walk off as compatriots. My impulse is to link it to (spoilers) The Hound, but it's a situation that applies to many. A female figure protests, their protest is for nothing, and they (however reluctantly) accompany the 'bear' figure. Cf. Brienne and Jamie, Sansa and Sandor, Arya and Sandor. Ironically, it doesn't translate to (spoilers) Jorah and Dany, given that one is a Bear (by house) and the other is notably 'fair'.
Cultural Literacy moment: the small council scene literally configures the power structure change since Blackwater. Tyrion has gone from head to bottom, but remains in direct opposition to his father, and our understanding of positioning tropes communicates this in another (briefly comic-relief based) moment.
Primer: Productive Vs. Unproductive Cultural Criticism And You
As with many of my entirely unsolicited posts, this is a series of cross-posted tweets about a fairly irksome thing about internet fandom.
A series of casual reminders:
Narrative DOES NOT have to conform to your expections. Your disagreement or disapproval does not make it 'bad'
Television is a long form narrative format and you cannot accurately judge any thematic content by two mins.
Character Actions do not equal Active Endorsement by writers or staff, even if that character is a 'good guy' (etc).
TV is longform, and a character is not robbed of agency by not being part of scenes relevant to them. They are 'robbed of agency' when their entire function is to have others do things on their behalf.
Agency in narrative only pertains to whether or not someone is actually in the room.
A character is required to interact with a new environment that they enter, and that is good plotting.
There is no such thing as "Out of Character" in fictional narrative. Even Fourth Wall breaks are IC.
Readers/viewers are the interpretive object, not the media itself. You determine a scene's meaning. If something you read or see makes you feel gross, then that's what it is doing. You can talk about WHY. If your discussion of WHY becomes WHY DID YOU DO THIS, you are saying "this scene gave me an emotional response and I don't like that this was allowed to happen". Unless the showrunner/writer/whatever is actively stating their intention, it's not possible to interpret the actual why of its creation, because you really, truly, honestly can't. It's fruitless, it can't be done, and it's bad criticism. You can ask for someone to provide the why, sure, but you can't assume to know it. Your experience of culture is entirely built on your ability to interpret input, produce output.You are your own interpreting machine. Productive cultural criticism will always be the dissection of why a scene makes you feel icky, not accusing the creator of assholery. Please crit responsibly.You can make people have a better understanding of their media. You can make them feel shit about consuming it.
If you do the former, you're being helpful. If you're doing the latter, if you're probably picking and choosing what parts of a problematic culture you're criticising.
Basically: Don't shake your head at the show. Shake your head at the people who have bad responses and help them understand it properly.
That's the job of a cultural critic, whether you have a tiny, occasionally read blog on the internet or a twelve-book deal: Understanding.
I'm working my way through Tomb Raider. These are my stray thoughts so far. Spoilers follow.
Game Literacy is whether or not you're able to pick up cues within a game to respond appropriately. When playing an FPS with a gun aimed forward, we know we can fire. The game's opening sequence - where Lara climbs through a collapsing cavern - uses this to its advantage. Having been presented with a single cue for the F-key trigger, we are presented with it again in a fast-paced moment in which a quicktime event (which is also something we recognise because of game literacy) requires that it be pressed. It's a strange moment - the trigger circle range is definitely something you have to know from other games - that can easily lead to the game's first scripted death. Tomb Raider literally requires that you adapt or perish within minutes.
The opening sequence is incredibly brief, again to its favor. The opening playable sequence is meant to be disorienting, and it's only boosted by the brief context. When it unfolds in a flashback later on, as Lara takes her first breather, it's a great example of narrative fitting game mechanics.
There are some great steps taken towards pushing against the unnecessarily sexualised presentation of early Croft, but her primary outfit seems to emphasise her breasts at unusual times. She's falling to what could easily be her death, is a cleavage shot strictly necessary?
The Aviatrix outfit is delightful, although the name is a little unnecessarily gendered given that the word is considered archaic in most cultural lexicons.
Another game literacy moment: It's impossible to think Mathias is anything but evil, given the context. We know the island's inhabitants are not-good, and he's not from the boat. Simple syllogism, really. Not-Boat are bad, and Mathias is not-boat, therefore...
There are really four broad categories for games nowadays. Sandbox (Skyrim etc), Pick-And-Choose (Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc), Open-But-Directed (Many, many RPGs, especially Pre-XIII Final Fantasy) and Full Directed (Final Fantasy XIII etc). A stray salvage box before you get the prying axe and the location of the DLC Tomb pretty clearly signal that Tomb Raider is in the Open-But-Directed box.
So, obviously time is required to produce genuinely substantial pieces when you're a hobbyist. Chugging along smoothly with stuff, but in the meantime, I'll be bridging gaps with Rationale posts. That's my fancy name for stray thoughts and observations on pop culture things that I'm currently consuming. There'll be one up shortly. Looking to get my essay on choice in gaming up by next weekend.
The Science of Illusion: Commerce, Genre and Intertextuality in the Novels of Richard Castle. (Part Five of Five)
As part of my MA, I wrote a dissertation on the unusual cultural phenomenon that is the Tie-In novel, using the Castle / Nikki Heat series as a case study. Instead of letting it disappear from existence, I intend to post it here in five parts. This is part five. All of it can be found here. This final part includes the Works Cited.
It cannot be argued that tie-in fiction is not considered a ‘lesser’ form of writing than that which might be given any variant of the term ‘literature’ – even the International Association of Tie-In Writers’ website states unequivocally that “Respect from one’s peers is important... tie-in writers haven't even been able to enjoy that”.1 I have suggested already that there is a sense of cultural illegitimacy to texts that are adapted, rather than generated by the increasingly mythologised ‘writer’, but Heat Wave and its sequels make a deliberate effort to establish themselves away from that stigma. The success of this effort is debatable, but the effort nonetheless has been exerted.
The covers of the Castle novels represent the delicate balance between commerce, genre and intertextuality that the texts themselves are intended to be. The generic elements of the novels’ construction – silhouettes, New York skylines, dark and sinister colours – work not only in terms of Genette’s paratextuality, but also in terms of commerce. They represent, to a potential buyer, the fact that the novel in front of them is a part of a genre that they, in the best-case scenario, are inclined to buy. Merely appearing to be a crime novel is a part of this triple-pronged intertextual, commercial and generic construction, and is emblematic of the way that the novels have been constructed. When Heat Wave presents broad, tropaic genre elements, the novel’s author is attempting to convince a reader that the text is, at the very least, presenting the required aspects of genre for the reader to experience enjoyment, and in turn be inclined to buy the novels’ sequels. A reader’s understanding of those genre elements is intertextual, as Richard Castle’s novels draw on common tropes that, ideally, the average reader would be familiar with, such as ostensibly place-based writing, and the hard-boiled detective. For a publisher, familiar texts are commercially attractive. Profits for publishing tend to be lower than those achieved by other forms of media; publishing easily accessible texts into a well-established market helps to maximise the publisher’s financial return.2
When genre fails as an enticement to purchase, Heat Wave and its sequels have their transtextual relationship to fall back on. The consistent dialogue between Castle and its Tie-Ins means that an engaged viewer – that is to say, anyone with more than a passing interest in the series – will have an interest in the novels. Whether the impulse to purchase is fandom- and/or collection-based, related to enjoyment, or simply a by-product of curiosity, Castle’s viewership represents approximately ten million domestic customers for Disney-ABC. While established authors have a variant of that market – those who consider themselves fans of their own work – tie-in media has a distinct advantage insofar as its consumer base does not need to be regular or consistent readers. By appealing to a non-literary market, the novels do not need to meet the standards established by crime fiction in its attempts to become a viable part of the fiction market. Heat Wave and its sequels present elements of the noir genre, but they tend to be the most cinematic moments, those which have the most in common, and therefore would easily translate back, to their original filmed versions. Castle’s own construction works with the same generic moments, and both the series and novels construct themselves as attractively familiar, rather than risking the alienation of viewers or readers through moving too far away from those viewers might expect. In this context, it seems fair to say that both Castle and Heat Wave are not just literally, but functionally popular.
Functional popularity manifests in many ways throughout the Heat novels, but perhaps strangest of all is their lack of publication data. They don’t need the standard imprint information on the title page’s verso side, as they occupy the same role that any of the DVD sets or T-Shirts sold through ABC’s online store do. As a marker of the text’s primarily commercial status, the data provided is minimal: each subsequent text provides a different amount of information with regards to Library of Congress catalogue data, Hyperion Publishing’s imprint and reservation of rights, and so on, but none matches the fairly comprehensive information provided in most standard texts. For a moment, it could be possible for a reader who is familiar with publication data to suggest the Heat novels are less than books, although still something very similar. Yet all texts are sold, all texts engage on some level with notions of genre, and all texts are impacted by the publishing and sale process.
What makes Heat Wave and its sequels special is not their engagement with commerce, intertext and genre as such, but the specific manifestation of those textual features. The commerce is merchandise-based, the intertext is primarily transtextual and the genre is broad and easily definable, and in turn the books reflect those concerns. For Heat Wave to contain minimal publication data is bound up in the commercial and transtextual aspects of its provenance; reducing the information reduces the exposure of the falsehood that is Richard Castle, ‘best selling author’. Only Heat Rises betrays its origin by citing that the novel is “fictitiously attributed to Richard Castle, a character on the ABC television show Castle”, the others only make a minimal reference to the series for trademark purposes.3 The inclusion of Library of Congress data in Heat Rises, and the statement that cataloguing has been applied for in Frozen Heat, situates the novels within an American context. From a New Zealand reader’s perspective, there is no reference to other cataloguing systems, such as the British Library CIP record, as many texts published outside America tend to have. Richard Castle’s novels are primarily a product of America, and the American mainstream that his genre engagement reflects is the same one that motivates the texts’ commercial production. In these respects, Richard Castle stands for the intersection of commerce, genre and intertextuality in the Heat novels.
Richard Castle is the Heat novels’ primary illusion, an illusion whose success is based in the use, and strategic lack of use, of intertextuality, genre and their own commercial origins. As far as Castle’s merchandise literature is concerned, he is the transtextual event that simultaneously masks the novels’ origin and communicates to a reader something other than Disney-ABC. Tie-ins, as a format, don’t typically present a fictional author. While merchandise literature as I have delineated it, those Tie-Ins which represent an artefact from a fictional universe, often does – Bad Twin, a novel tied to a deceased character from the series Lost is an example – most tie-ins acknowledge their real-world writer.4 The Star Wars wiki, for example, has biographies of forty nine writers who have contributed novels to the series’ expanded universe, and the Doctor Who equivalent holds similar information for forty one authors whose only contribution are direct novelizations.5 Yet the Castle novels deliberately obfuscate their writer’s identity – even the recently released graphic novels based on Richard Castle’s ‘Derrick Storm’ texts feel free to cite their creative staff, given that they are theoretically ‘adaptations’, even if their source texts never existed.6 They are an adaptational works, whose primary point of difference from Tie-Ins is their deliberate masking of their origin.7 When the International Association of Tie-In Writers itself feels that tie-ins are unfairly treated within the cultural hierarchy, we can read examples of merchandise fiction, like the Richard Castle novels, as texts designed to try and sidestep that treatment. It might be difficult – the Castle novels still have the show’s fans as their primary consumers – but the Nikki Heat texts are at the very least attempting to create a tie-in novel that is somehow distanced from that reputation.
Heat Wave and its sequels, in their attempts to distinguish themselves from the cultural perception of tie-in novels, are using the science of illusion. Richard Castle’s novels use a broad, generic construction to make themselves viable commercial entities; trading as much on the knowledge a reader has of their parent series as they do on a reader’s understanding of the familiar genre beats the texts aim to replicate. The relative simplicity of these moves does not make the novels inherently good or, but it does signal their ultimate purpose. Like the author they claim to have been written by, the Heat novels are a piece of boundary-crossing fiction. They are artefacts of a media franchise, and their construction reflects this flexible reality. Richard Castle, “best selling author”, and his alleged literary output represent the minimum requirements for commercial literary success, but they are still tie-ins, adaptations of something larger than themselves, and carry with them the commercial, generic and intertextual concerns bound up in that fact. Tie-in novels might not be high on the list of timeless, culturally revered texts, but Heat Wave is just one example of why they are not as simple as they might appear.
References
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2 John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. 26-7.
3 Heat Rises, Imprint.
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7 The publishing of The Angel’s Kiss: A Melody Malone Novel by the BBC seems to represent the missing link between standard tie-in fiction and the specific kind of merchandise literature that has been fictitiously attributed to Richard Castle. It proudly displays the Doctor Who brand in a font larger than its own title, replicating the somewhat standard form of the Star Wars novels, but the novel itself is presented in the style of Richard Castle’s texts. There is no attributed author, other than the fictional character River Song, who the recent Doctor Who episode ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ claims is its author. Unlike the Castle novels, however, it is presented as entirely built for fans - It exists only in eBook format, through the BBC’s merchandise store.
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Schuessler, Jennifer. "Print & E-Books". The New York Times Online. Accessed 20/07/12. http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-10-09/hardcover-fiction/list.html
Schwartz, Richard. Nice and Noir. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Siedman, Robert. "Monday Broadcast Final Ratings: Two and a Half Men, 2 Broke Girls, DWTS Adjusted Up; Castle Adjusted Down". TV by the Numbers. September 20, 2011. Accessed August 15, 2012. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/12/07/monday-final-ratings-hawaii-five-0-90210-adjusted-up-skating-with-the-stars-castle-2-5-men-down/74654/
--------. "Monday Broadcast Final Ratings: Two and a Half Men, 2 Broke Girls, DWTS Adjusted Up; Castle Adjusted Down". TV by the Numbers. September 20, 2011. Accessed August 15, 2012. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/12/07/monday-final-ratings-hawaii-five-0-90210-adjusted-up-skating-with-the-stars-castle-2-5-men-down/74654/
--------. “Monday Cable Ratings: "All-Star" Softball Edges Out Pawn Stars, Home Run Derby + Closer, Rizzoli,Alphas, Eureka & More". TV by the Numbers. July 12, 2011. Accessed August 15, 2012. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2011/07/12/monday-cable-ratings-all-star-softball-edges-out-pawn-stars-home-run-derby-closer-rizzoli-alphas-eureka-more/97860/
Song, River. The Angel's Kiss: A Melody Malone Mystery. London: BBC Online, 2012.
Storey, John. Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. New York: OUP, 1999.
Thomas, Bronwen. “What is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things About It?”. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3, 2011. 1-24.
Thompson, John B. Books in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
Travers, P. L. Mary Poppins. London: Harper-Collins, 1934.
Troup, Gary. Bad Twin. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
Turchiano, Danielle. “'Frozen Heat’ offers an international conspiracy parallel to ‘Castle’s own story”. The Examiner. 11/09/12. Accessed 4/11/12. http://www.examiner.com/review/frozen-heat-offers-an-international-conspiracy-parallel-to-castle-s-own-story
Wilkerson, David B. "Disney to Acquire Marvel Entertainment for $4B". MarketWatch.com. August 31, 2009. Archived from the original on June 8, 2011. Retrieved October 4, 2011
Whelehan, Imelda. ‘Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas’. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. Edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
The Science of Illusion: Commerce, Genre and Intertextuality in the Novels of Richard Castle. (Part Four of Five)
As part of my MA, I wrote a dissertation on the unusual cultural phenomenon that is the Tie-In novel, using the Castle / Nikki Heat series as a case study. Instead of letting it disappear from existence, I intend to post it here in five parts. This is part four. All of it can be found here.
Richard Castle’s literary output falls neatly within the noir section of the crime genre. As tales of a hard-boiled investigator solving complex crimes, the Heat series owes its existence in part to the established traditions of American crime writing. In her study of the development of crime fiction, Lee Horsley establishes a series of notable tropes within the ‘hard boiled’, or ‘noir’ genre – it must be realistic, it must feature a male lead who is self-consciously ‘tough’ and aggressive, and it must address social issues – typically crime and corruption – explicitly.1 Although Horsley herself is working in broad terms, her three privileged areas manifest in the Richard Castle novels quite clearly.
Heat Wave’s style is built upon realism, with visceral, literally depicted action scenes set alongside reaction-focussed description, and the text wastes no time in setting up an oppressive, constricting setting.2 In the open world that is New York City, the titular heat wave creates a situation that the novel’s opening passage turns into a moment of cultural resonance – Richard Schwartz in Nice and Noir refers to this as sustained ethos. For Schwartz, to mention a setting is to not only evoke in a reader’s mind other versions of that setting that she or he has encountered – an intertextual moment addressed here earlier – but to build upon the variations of location that a reader has encountered in texts that are conceptually linked by genre, style or even format. A noir text like Heat Wave, for example, brings to mind hard-boiled detectives of earlier texts and eras, conspiracies that go ‘straight to the top’ of civic and other institutional hierarchies, and imposing architecture that seems to symbolically trap its citizens within a sprawling urban landscape. The legacy of noir fiction, in many ways, is its transformation of the urban landscape, and that is almost any urban landscape, into one that must be viewed with suspicion for the lack of legal, personal and political transparency that its scenes convey through their dark, ominous atmospheric setting. Heat Wave opens its second short paragraph with the following description of Nikki Heat leaving her car: “The wallop of one hundred degrees almost shoved her back in the car. New York was a furnace, and the soft pavement on West 77th gave under her feet like she was walking on wet sand.”3 From the outset of the novel, New York City has become associated not only with violence, but also the notion of a shifting ‘underneath’ that has connotations of corruption, which is in and of itself a common through-thread to noir narratives. The idea that a detective’s standing is challengeable, whether literally, morally or legally is evoked within Richard Castle’s novels through something as simple as stepping on hot pavement.
Place and location are markers of realism, with their thin, but functional use in Heat Wave signifying those elements of the location that are essential to ongoing action. Statements such as “Rook sat down on the toile Chippendale wing chair” is the first detail beyond the room being in a “French style”, and is emblematic of the way that readers are often introduced to the specifics of any location,.4 In Places for Dead Bodies, Gary Hausladen refers to crime-genre texts which revolve around or, most commonly, take place entirely in a specific location as ‘place-based procedurals’. However, despite numerous references to New York in Heat Wave, the kinds of novels that Hausladen refers to in his text are ones that Richard Castle’s is not – although New York and its heat wave are constantly mentioned, Detective Heat moves within it with relative freedom, and the crime she investigates has a city-wide scope.5 For Hausladen, ‘place-based’ stories, such as the common mysteries built around the locked rooms of many Sherlock Holmes stories, require their setting on a plot or narrative level, and could not be easily transposed onto another location.6 Although the first Heat novel persistently refers back to heat wave-stricken New York City, the consistency of the reminders given elevates them beyond simple location-setting.7 An attempt is made at making Heat Wave a ‘place-based’ text, but there is too much movement on the part of Detective Heat between a large number of locations. Although Heat Wave might read like one of the single location-set texts that Hausladen describes, New York is simply present in the background in comparison to the examples he provides. Heat Wave is a novel about crimes that simply happen to take place in the ‘big city’, but the constant references to that big city make it seem as though the story could not occur anywhere else. It is no coincidence that the start of Raymond Chandler’s novels The Big Sleep, The Lady of the Lake and The Little Sister all establish location through small, location-based details around which the novels quickly themselves build outwards, the same construction that Heat Wave uses by beginning with the a direct description of the pavement that quickly turns into a crime-scene.8 In order for Richard Castle’s novels to stake their claim to genre through location setting, they seem to wrap themselves in the broadest possible tropes, and the use of place is just one example of this.
Every strong hero in noir needs a tortured past, and Nikki Heat is no exception. Her past is unsettlingly similar to that of Kate Beckett, her Castle source. Both characters have experienced the loss of their mothers at the hands of a far-reaching conspiracy. Both deal with their mothers’ murders in various ways, although Nikki Heat (as of the start of Castle’s fifth season) is the only one to solve the mystery. In noir, a hero’s tortured past tends to give rise to a vengeance narrative, and it is no coincidence that much of both the Heat novels and Castle is devoted to elaboration upon, and pursuit of, the hero’s crime-struck past and the perceived need for revenge. Frozen Heat’s conclusion is built around the revelation that a former CIA agent killed Detective Heat’s mother; ‘After the Storm’ revolves around the identification of Senator William Bracken, who similarly had Beckett’s mother murdered.9 A vengeance narrative can manifest in many ways, but Frozen Heat relies on a specific variation, one that Richard Schwartz refers to as the ‘avenging angel’ type, configuring this type as that which involves a near-invincible angel who can “defeat the rebel angels and only use half his strength in the process”.10 Schwartz is speaking in metaphor, but the basic structure holds true for Frozen Heat’s titular detective. These ‘rebel angels’ are former CIA men, configured by the narrative as law-men who have turned away from their obligations, set against Detective Heat’s own, increasingly blind, adherence to justice. Her encounter with the men comes at the end of an investigation, and the use of only ‘half of her strength’ comes with an attempt by the narrative at generating a reader’s sympathies. Worn out, exhausted and, by this point, kidnapped, she must summon up what remains of her strength, rather than, as Schwartz outlines it, achieving victory easily. The vengeance narrative’s use within Frozen Heat, as Schwartz outlines it at least, is loose, but despite Heat Wave and its sequels using genre as a method of conveying their legitimacy as members of the crime genre, they still have to tell the story that Castle has laid out for them.
The narrative requirements cause what is perhaps the only true deviation from Heat’s genre - the inclusion of Jameson Rook, the swarthy writer whose presence is not itself necessarily consistent with noir fiction. Although a detective may have companions, they are traditionally not as consistently present as Rook becomes in the Heat novels. This is a hold-over from Castle, wherein the semi-antagonistic working relationship between detective and writer is the show’s essential element, which the books in turn cannot escape. Rook seems to be connected more to the desire to replicate the Castle formula than to create a character, and as a result the genre work the novels do tends to happen around him as if he was not present. When Detective Heat enters a morgue with him, he has no right to be there, and any reasonable Medical Examiner would force him out. Because, however, the crime genre is being applied to what is functionally a narrative adapted from screen to page, it largely ignores the issues raised by his presence. The construction of Heat Wave and its sequels as members of the ‘noir’ or ‘hard-boiled’ style takes precedence over the Heat novels’ own narrative, and in turn the moments where they seem to break from that style become problematic. When Rook is given free entrance to multiple crime scenes, he is enacting the narrative equivalent of drawing a straight line between two points, making sure that he is present whenever possible. If the reader is paying attention, Rook’s presence has the potential to conflict with the genre work of Heat Wave that is going on around him in such a way as to render visible specific parts of that work. Take, for example, the following passage from Heat Wave, in which Rook first visits the morgue, where he, Heat and the Medical Examiner inspect the body:
Heat and Rook leaned in at the same time and she drew away to avoid a repeat of the balcony perfume ad. He stepped back and gestured a be-my-guest. “Very distinct bruising,” said the detective. “I can make out knuckles, and what’s this hexagonal shape from, a ring?” She stepped out to let Rook in and said, “Lauren, I’d like to get a photo of that one.”11
Although Rook actively conflicts with Heat’s work, his unusual presence is treated as if it is commonplace within the context of a criminal investigation. The fact that Heat lets Rook lean closer to inspect the body himself, effectively giving him free reign, after having already been symbolically granted permission herself, by him, is bizarre, but stranger still is that this happens within the course of Heat’s own investigation. Her tone is professional and by-the-numbers, working through the specifics of what she sees, following the basic outline of a thousand crime novel morgue scenes: the Detective enters the room, inspects the body, identifies something potentially important and signifies that she acknowledges its potential to be so. That it is so deliberate and professional is a marker of the genre – even with the unusual, if not incongruous, addition of Rook to the novels’ murder scenes, the establishment of identifiable generic tropes appears to be more important than maintaining the logic of the scene. The inherent ludicrousness of Rook’s symbolic gesture of permission to Heat – the bystander effectively allowing the detective to inspect her victim – is glossed over in favour of making sure the scene’s familiar plot beats are hit.
Nikki Heat is inescapably a woman, and as such provides the series’ second major deviation from tradition: one of the most common tropes within noir is that of the male detective who, more often than not, comes into conflict with a female figure – a femme fatale. Within Heat’s specific brand of crime fiction, the female investigator is a fairly new phenomenon, which puts the novels within a modern context in which women visibly occupy many, if not most, professional fields, but it is by no means alone in its portrayal of this. For a woman to act as a hard drinking, fiercely independent noir detective was a somewhat radical concept when it emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s in American fiction, given that most of those qualities specifically were often ascribed of the femme fatale.12 Gill Plain, in her study of gender and sexuality in crime fiction, makes the claim that “A female protagonist effectively explodes the homosocial environment of the private detective”, however this claim does not necessarily hold true for Heat Wave and its sequels.13 Men outnumber women in Richard Castle’s novels enormously, and even though Detective Heat and medical examiner Lauren Parry are women in positions of power, Heat herself is constantly surrounded by men. Functionally, the Heat texts are homosocial crime novels. Nikki Heat enters male spaces and, rather than causing them to ‘explode’ as Plain suggests, she is rendered without gender, except for small instances that reaffirm her femininity. This in and of itself is not new, and in fact can manifest as something that needs actively rectifying – in the Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell, for example, the medical examiner, who conceptually replaces the investigator, is required to actively justify that her abilities are as valid as any of her male peers.14
The Heat novels, however, are not interested in telling a complex tale about women surviving in a male environment. Heat’s engagement with gender comes only through sexuality, and involves monogamous relationships, non-monogamous relationships that fall apart and sexuality that is considered ‘deviant’ being met with violence. With regards to monogamy, Heat and Rook couple quickly and, for the most part, permanently, putting a complete stop on a casual relationship over which Heat herself expresses discomfort over. As for violence meeting deviance, although the most vivid account is possibly Heat considering an affair with an ex-boyfriend in Frozen Heat, only for him to be shot dead in front of her, the most significant example of violence in the narrative is when a priest is found murdered in the bondage club. Heat Rises’ narrative presents the scene with talk about STDs and an unsubtle euphemistic comment about “working vice”, layering a general sense of neither approval nor disapproval over the entire sequence, attempting not to push any ‘boundaries’, but rather settling into portrayal that a middle class American readership would find comfortable.15 When Rook and Heat first sleep together in Heat Wave, there is deliberate mention of her post-coital movements – “Nikki settled herself back against his chest and thighs and liked the fit.”16 The language is cooperative, evoking interlocking, but it configures itself in such a way that Heat nonetheless becomes the passive partner. She fits into Rook’s position – the description of his breath on her neck is one-sided. His body is placing itself not only against, but also onto, hers. She is facing away, and she finds that acceptable. Heat’s status as a detective relies on sight and seeing – detection is her ‘normal science,’ as Plain puts it, and with a masculine sexual power literally holding her from behind, outside of her view, the moment is configured in terms of the detective’s passivity. By the time that Frozen Heat takes place, Detective Heat and Rook have been together for two years, but Heat attempts to have sex with an ex-boyfriend. Her attempt at cheating is once again configured in terms of sight – before anything can occur, an unseen assailant shoots through the door and kills Don, her intended partner.17 Three books later, Heat’s sight is still linked to her sexual activity, and her indiscretion takes a life. Her attempt at asserting female sexual authority is literally shot to pieces, and although this is a particularly negative reading of the moment, the point underlying it is that when sexual activity occurs in Heat Wave and its sequels, that activity is configured as a culturally comfortable, non-controversial sexuality, or it ends badly.
The main point of contact for the Heat novels’ sexuality is Jameson Rook, whose presence on a broad level is a threat to the authority of Nikki Heat – he forces himself into her place(s) of work in order to, theoretically, improve his own career. Heat’s reservations about having a journalist shadow her are overlooked.18 Her constant criticisms of him are accompanied, very quickly, by feelings of attraction.19 Strictly speaking, both of these things mark a break from the noir genre as well as a reaffirmation of it. Rook is, fundamentally, a love interest for Heat, and that in and of itself is not uncommon in detective fiction. Although there is a tradition of lesbian pulp crime fiction, the expected relationship for a coupled detective of either gender is based on the standard active male / passive female dynamic that runs through the history of crime fiction. Although Rook and Heat do not start a family, the functionally stronger female is still presented in moments of unusual passivity compared to the less active male.20 Consider the moment in Frozen Heat when, after attempting to shadow the detective to keep her safe, Rook is struck in the face by Nikki Heat.21 It’s an ironic, humorous moment, in which Heat proves herself to be physically capable of protecting herself. She brings Rook back to her apartment to help him clean his wounds, and as if reacting to the gender imbalance, the language shifts to discussions of wounded masculinity. Once Rook has made enough posturing statements about his injury making him more “ruggedly handsome”, he asks detective Heat a piercing question about her emotional wellbeing and she ‘erupts’ into tears and falls into his arms.22 Rook is “cradling her”, and it thus becomes apparent that the novel could not allow the display of female strength to go unmatched. The Heat novels seem to establish equity of gender presentation, in which moments of resistance to typical gender constructions, such as Heat’s self-sufficiency, is matched by reinforcement: her unexpected breakdown.23
The broadness of the gender politics in the Heat novels signals their use as a trope loosely tying the texts to the noir genre. The Heat novels must be accessible to as broad an audience as possible, and the internal logic of that accessibility appears to manifest in the traditional presentation of Nikki Heat as an investigator whose gender is inconsequential in her workplace, allowing her to perform traditionally masculine feats. However, her personal life sees her gender resistance matched by gender reaffirmation. Heat’s gender issues can be set alongside those of the traditional hard-boiled male detective, whose personality traits are divided between both Heat and Rook: the former retains the strength, intelligence and tortured past of the ‘hard-boiled’ detective, but the latter is given the noir protagonist’s confident and commanding approach to women: Rook’s introduction even involves him being chased by a female fan.24 He is the one that the dangerous female characters inevitably appear to fall for, even if Rook and Heat’s dynamic situation casts the latter in that role as the figure Rook follows into danger – perhaps most notably, following Detective Heat is the reason why he, in Heat Rises, is non-fatally shot. Broadly speaking, Detective Heat walks into Rook’s life and puts him in danger. Elisabeth Bronfen argues that femme fatales “force the noir hero to acknowledge the consequences of his transgressive desire”, and Rook’s desire is indeed transgressive insofar as it leads him to interfere with a criminal investigation for the advancement both of his career and the potential to act on his attraction to Nikki Heat, the consequence of which is his repeated facing of danger.25 Yet Rook is not the protagonist of the novels, Nikki Heat is, and the novels are instead bowing to the conflict between the generic construction of traditional ‘hard-boiled’ fiction, characterised by assertiveness, action, and typically masculine attributes, and the emergence of the female investigator as claimant to those same traits.
For the Heat novels to privilege the noir genre over its own narratives, be it through Heat and Rook’s gender presentation or even the logic of including the latter character in most scenes, is a gesture towards their origins as adaptations, insofar as they are functionally, merchandise, and as such are constructed narratives that are comfortable to the average reader. The Richard Castle novels replicate familiar tropes of location, gender presentation, vengeance and sexuality within hard-boiled detective narratives in order to justify their as a part of the noir genre. The use of broad generic tropes is a functional illusion, and represents a Tie-in text attempting to sidestep its own treatment as a commercially motivated adaptation. For whatever variant of airport fiction the Heat series might appear to be, the emphasis is on making sure that it cannot be mistaken for anything but a member of the crime genre attempts to distract readers from its origin.
REFERENCES
1 Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. (New York: OUP, 2005). 66-9.
2 Heat Wave, 8.
3 Heat Wave, 8-9.
4 Heat Wave,15-6.
5 Gary Hausladen, Places for Dead Bodies. (Austin: University of Texas, 2000). 4-5.
6 Holmes’ locked rooms come in multiple forms, but the most explicitly place-based narrative is that of The Valley of Fear, which involves a murder in a fortified, sealed-off castle.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear. (London: George H Doran Company, 1915).
7 Explicit, non-conversational references to New York’s architecture alone are made on pages 8, 31, 34, 50, 108, 137, 220 and 281, at least half of which are tied to the heat wave.
8 The Big Sleep refers to narrator’s view of the ‘foothills’, The Lady of the Lake describes the appearance of the ‘Treloar Building’, and The Little Sister begins with the detective’s office door, establishing a central location without ever stepping inside.
Raymond Chandler, The Chandler Collection. (New York: Picador Books, 1983). 9, 197, 385
9 Richard Castle, Frozen Heat. (New York: Hyperion, 2012). 276-7.
Castle: Season Five, “After The Storm”.
10 Richard Schwartz, Nice and Noir (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). 57.
11 Heat Wave, 32.
12 Margaret Kinsman, "Feminist crime fiction." The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.)
13 Gill Plain. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 92
14 Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem (New York: Pocket Books, 1990).
15 Richard Castle, Heat Rises (New York: Hyperion, 2011).5
16 Heat Wave, 154
17 Frozen Heat. 96-7.
18 Heat Wave, 16.
19 Heat Wave, 151.
20 Malcah Effron. Millenial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and Television 1990-2010 (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2011). 164-5.
21 Frozen Heat, 122.
22 Frozen Heat, 124-5.
23 Also note, as previously mentioned, her attempt at ‘cheating’, which ends more than disastrously.
24 Heat Wave, 11-12.
25 For just some of Rook’s dices with death, see:
Heat Wave, 206, 254.
Naked Heat, 270-5.
Heat Rises, 95, 270-3.
Frozen Heat, 122, 270.
Elisabeth Bronfen, “Femme Fatale and the dark side of modernity“. Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty, eds., Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (London: Continuum, 2010).
As those of you who've read Glee, Society and the (Narrow) Boundaries of Social Control are aware, I'm very much interested in the fact that, thematically speaking, Glee spends a lot of time dealing with people who push against fairly arbitrary boundaries. Hence why there was one hell of a scene in tonight's glee where Sue talks about how throwing the bouquet is an outdated ritual, and proceeds to do it anyway.
That's what I'm talking about.
Sue knows it's ridiculous, but she's an authority figure. In the Glee universe (and, truth be told, our own) the expectation of an event outweighs its irrelevance. There's no need for the bouquet to be thrown, but people expect it. There's no need for competitions to keep the Glee club together, but the minute those are in doubt it's make-or-break. There's no need for Quinn to go a second round with Santana, but both girls have a history of bad sexual decision making, and it's surprising it's taken this long to get that perfect storm together (while we're there, see also 2x22, where Quinn says she's not into it, her phrasing inadvertently suggesting she's open to it, but doesn't enjoy it).
Then Rachel catches the bouquet, and we get a slightly over-written but otherwise fine scene where Finn once again tells Rachel what she wants. He is the man. He's expected to assert his dominance. She's the woman who caught the bouquet. That tradition overrides her 'The Break Up' statement about making her own decisions. Yet, she's still pushing that boundary, because she's in an unconventional relationship (with the person behind my favourite new cutaway joke that will feature in probably every script I write from here on out, Rentboy!Brody). It's fun. It's casual. It's sex-positive. It's free, no labels, all those fun things... except, Glee is a show about arbitrary limitations and how outsiders contort to match it. That ending, the one that can only reasonably lead to abortion or Berry-dads raising a second child (both of which I'd be perfectly happy with)? Rachel's (possibly) pregnant as a punishment. She's from the land of arbitrary restriction. She rejects the arbitrary 'boyfriend/girlfriend' label and transgresses. She is punished.
To round off the other plots, Jake transgresses by not doing his own groundwork, and is punished by Ryder kissing Marley (the ghost of which will appear soon). Will is punished for his multitude of sins, among them his 'The Break Up' transgression of leaving his wife alone while he pursues a dream (see also: long-game karma for A Little Less Conversation), and Emma's punished for her Finn-gression. Kurt and Blaine transgressed, and undoubtedly their punishment is coming (unlikely to be jealous Adam, I'm leaning towards guilt and a Come What May-based dream sequence which causes a personal guilt crisis). Betty and Artie technically transgressed, but I'm unsure about how to approach that one. I'm expecting something bad re: relationships/sex/women etc to happen to him by season's end, but for the most part it can be read as offset by the expectation of a male taming an aggressive female. Quinn and Santana's tryst will find its way into the public, but that's a subject for another time.
Yet it's the Rachel bit that interests me the most. It's such a wild swing from tradition to punishment. Whether the show capitalises on this in any meaningful way is irrelevant, for this episode and Rachel's arc as it stands, New Rachel has pushed out her boundaries and asserted herself. The narrow boundaries of acceptable womanhood she pressed against are snapping back, and that's what I love to see in a show like this. It's not pretty, it's not happy, but it's damn fine thematic consistency.
This is mostly a cross-posting of a series of tweets, cleaned up and edited for posting. I love Bunheads. It's probably my favourite show of 2012. It's also very concerning when it comes to looking at how the show can possibly move forward.
At some point I'm going to write about Amy Sherman-Palladino shows and it'll be called "What To Do When Your Characters Were Designed By The Brady Bunch". I love Bunheads, I love Gilmore Girls. What I'm growing tired of is that the outermost boundary of these social worlds that Amy Sherman-Palladino creates are inhabited by women who are competent. Where are the gays that aren't talked about off-screen? Where are the people of color who talk? Where are the men who aren't traditionally masculine, even in a 1950s sense (I'm looking at you, Carl, whose potential unconventionality is completely disarmed by his association with Fred Astaire)? Where are the masculine women who aren't annoying or shrewish? Where are the broken homes that aren't just divorces? Where's life?
I'm not asking for every box in the world to be checked. What I am asking for is that the black dancer speak more than two lines. And once she's done that, why can't Sasha's dad appear on-screen after he comes out of the closet? Why is the coded gay figure shown to be a smug, self-righteous asshole (and, point the second, why is he coded)? Why are the characters on Bunheads by-and-large replications of those from the early days of Gilmore Girls? How did it get to the stage where a character doing Roller Derby made me actually vocalise the word "finally" with a sigh?
It isn't difficult to move past. There were seven seasons of the show about these kinds of women, and Gilmore Girls has a proud place in many people's heart for that reason. But - when it comes to moving on, it's now or never. I love Bunheads. It's a great show, but it's stuck in Picket Fence limbo. Until the show even takes someone like Cozette remotely seriously, it may as well be a dancing I Love Lucy. Michelle's the only character who has truly earned her status as a character because she exists as a figure in the unfamiliar. When the rebellious teen girl's story is "she gets a house and a boyfriend after her parents divorce", you're literally in the 1950s. The show has fantastic writing, and an incredible cast, but the commitment to doing anything new is entirely in the performances and Michelle.
Eventually Michelle will no longer be a figure of terrifying intra-temporal existential crisis and settle into her role. Eventually the performances will just be live-performed variations on numbers that Glee already did. That's the point where you have to seriously take stock and move forward. You can have a great show with four Rory Gilmores looking up to a surrogate Lorelai, but that's only the start. You certainly don't need to hit every minority base. What Bunheads needs to do moving forward is seriously consider the fact that if Frankie, Cosette and Roman are it's outsiders, it's in trouble, because every last one of them has been mainstreamed since Stars Hollow's troubadour first sang on a street corner. There's no inherent narrative fault in a whitebread cast, but there is in trafficking in a pre-1980s idea of what constitutes the other. When you do that, and you try to set up a narrative analogy between the insiders and the outsiders, you're going to hit major, major issues along the way.
Your insiders have to have elements of outsidership. Your outsiders can't be what you originally said your insiders were. Having said all of that, "There's Nothing Worse Than A Pantsuit" was a damn fine episode of television, and one I'll rewatch many times. It just happens to revolve around what are increasingly looking to be the show's flaws.
