IS LES MISERABLES SCIENCE FICTION? (NO, OBVIOUSLY NOT)

What genre is the musical Les Miserables? It’s always reminded me of something, but it was only when I watched the DVD that I realised what that was.

The novel it’s based on is a great example of social realism, a heavy tome written by an old man who, thirty years before, had himself dodged the bullets during the June Rebellion. Victor Hugo painstakingly reconstructs the period, expands on the context. When our hero makes his escape through the Paris sewers towards the end, Hugo is sure to include an eleventy-billion page discussion of the layout and construction of those sewers. Les Miserables is a great novel, but the title does make it sound a lot more fun than it actually is.

You could not mistake the musical for social realism, of course. You could easily mistake it, in fact, for bombastic nonsense. Built into the fabric of the musical version, there’s a mismatch of the medium and the source (whether you count the source as the book or the events that inspired it), and also between where the play’s set and how it’s staged. This leads to some issues when we try to categorise it, or find something else even a bit like it.

Les Miserables is not like other musicals. You can, of course, sing catchy songs about misery, personal heartbreak and social injustice. You can even do it in musical theatre. West Side Story is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that’s about teen gangs murdering each other, Chicago’s about a women’s prison full of murderers, Cabaret’s about the rise of the Nazis. I’m no expert, but I’m always surprised how darn dark the genre is.

Even something as apparently cheerful as The Music Man has a story where, in its own terms, the bad guy wins. A travelling salesman persuades a small Midwestern town to put on a wholesome marching band show. But Harold Hill, the salesman, is not wholesome. He scares the townsfolk into giving him their money to solve a problem he’s created. He gets the girl, but only after mistaking her for a fallen woman, like all the others he’s bagged over the years. (‘I smile / I grin / When the gal with a touch of sin walks in / I hope / and I pray / for a Hester to win just one more A’). It’s an astonishingly sly, cynical narrative in which a wolf devours an entire flock of lambs and gets the lambs to pay for the meal. I love The Music Man.

What musicals tend to do is create a bubble, and then follow a small group of people. This is surely, function dictating form – you want to keep the cast and number of sets as small and stagey as possible. Musicals like Cabaret and The Phantom of the Opera take that so literally that they’re are set within theatres. The historical setting is backdrop, or catalyst, and the end result tends to be oddly unanchored in time. They’re not typically ‘timeless’, they’re set in an imagined period in the hinterland between when they’re set and when they’re first staged. The Music Man could almost take place at any point in the first half of the twentieth century. Cabaret exists at some checkpoint on the border between the mid 1930s and the early 1970s.

Les Miserables is different: it encourages us to extrapolate and expand out. It’s not merely spectacular, its unique selling point is that it crowds the stage, that it’s absurdly lavish and opulent, that the huge and overpopulated set also moves and transforms. The movie, of course, only scales this up, so that it’s Hollywood movie stars doing it all, with great panning shots and crowd scenes.

Thematically, Les Miserables is trying to make universal archetypes out of really rather specific characters. It takes one of  many popular uprisings Paris saw in the nineteenth century, a sequence of events that lasted a few days and which barely registers in the history books. Jean Valjean is a man with superhuman strength who spent nineteen years in prison for crimes he did commit, has a religious conversion and opens a Rosary bead factory. That is not a generally applicable stock musical type like ‘small town boy’, ‘lovesick teen’ or even ‘wannabe singer’. The story asks us to identify with, say, Fantine – Crib sheet: Anne Hathaway’s character – and her specific circumstances, and at first that’s relatively easy: she’s a single mother who earns slightly less than she needs to support her young daughter. But she zooms from there to the worst case scenario within a few verses, and has prostituted herself (in a coffin!), sold her teeth and died of TB before the end of the first act.

The structure of Les Miserables goes like this: someone sings about how awful their life is, no, really it’s even worse than it was until recently, seriously it’s no fun at all, wish it was different. At this point, the character might actually drop dead – all but four of them do before the end. Then reset, change cast member and repeat. It’s basically round after round of ‘can anything get any worse … oh, yes, turns out it can’, set in a world so wretched it makes a Dickensian workhouse look like a Culture Orbital.

Yet, somehow, they ramp up the aggrometer to the point where it kind of overwhelms your emotional barricades and you find yourself identifying with Fantine because, hell yeah, you spent an hour on the phone to Comcast this morning, so you know hardship, too. No bread? It’s true, they were out of poppy seed bagels this morning at Panera. Yeah, I’m drowning in the churning waters of modern life, too, because I really need to clear out my email inbox. The system’s broken, man, we should be out on the streets. Les Miserables is really rather stirring, does make you switch off the old thinky whatchermacallit and just sweep you away.

If you’re in the right frame of mind.

If you think about it for even a second, it’s ridiculous. When you watch it critically, there is much meat for a cynical person. The plotting relies entirely on coincidence. Javert’s ‘pursuit’ of Valjean involves bumping into him at random every eight years. The whole thing is a crass product of one of the most indulgent artistic sectors of the loadsamoney decade. The makers could achieve broadly the same effect, only with slightly more nuance, if they just tear gassed their audience.

Watching it, it’s not hard to work out when Les Miserables was written, and it’s a perfect test subject for a critique of the eighties mindset. American Psycho, a novel exploring that very topic, is soaked in references to the musical. At one point, a character literally stomps on a homeless man to get past him to buy a $200 limited edition T-shirt bearing the image of the homeless. American Psycho draws attention to the fact that the audience is complicit in the disconnect between what the story’s about and the form it takes. This is never more obvious than when you remember how much it’s cost you to watch the show. Every song is about life being about scraping together the coins you need to eat that day. The price of one ticket would feed a family for several weeks. And normally, y’know, that’s not a problem because you go to the West End or Broadway to watch escapist fantasy nonsense about things with no connection to the real world, like talking cats, Spider-Man or Mormons. Les Miserables is actually about poverty, that’s the theme.

It’s tempting to see this as the height of hypocrisy. Anne Hathaway’s Oscar acceptance speech saw a woman who is paid millions to be in movies, wearing a Prada dress declaring that poverty is bad.

While.

Clutching.

A.

Gold.

Statue.

But the thing is … that’s basically what the musical is like, from start to finish. It is an inescapable fact. Anne Hathaway, by all accounts one of the smarter actresses out there, clearly gets it.

But ‘it’ here is a huge disconnect between what we’re seeing and what we’re told.

Watching Les Miserables, the thing that strikes me is that it shares a characteristic of science fiction and fantasy: while all art demands a suspension of disbelief and acceptance of conventions and necessities of the form, SF tends to raise the price of buying in. The relationship between ‘science fiction’ and ‘reality’ is a surprisingly complex boundary. Most science fiction seeks to make a point about the real world by, essentially, a process of heightening and exaggerating. Frank Herbert was inspired to write Dune, a story set tens of thousands of years in the future on a giant desert planet that’s one of innumerable worlds of a theocratic galactic empire, because he was concerned about beach erosion. It’s not the only science fiction that, at heart, goes ‘yeah, imagine a planet where it’s all like that, all the time’.

Despite the presence of Wolverine, Catwoman and Jor-El, not even the movie version of Les Miserables is science fiction. But it’s clearly not attempting something literal, either. It’s not made by idiots, they understand exactly what they’re doing. And, at some level, yes, it gets relatively rich people to empathise with the poor, and blimey, there isn’t exactly much art even trying to do that, let alone that’s packed them in for thirty years.

Les Miserables has always reminded me of something, though, and it was only when I was watching the DVD that I worked out what:

Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C

Les Miserables is in the same genre as TV commercials for pet adoption charities.

It’s actively odd, in fact, that there aren’t songs in Les Miserables called Am I Going to Die Today? or We’ve Been Caged Together Too Long. You can hear the chorus chanting For Hundreds of Others Rescue Came Too Late or She Could Be Saved For A Few Coins A Day.

Stirring music, naked emotion, and above all they’re calculated and precisely formulated to get you to throw your money at them.

(As a final note, I think it’s only right that I note that I’m not making light of animal cruelty or equating Hugh Jackman playing a man with a sad face with the thousands of real dying kittens out there. I have a rescue dog, adopted from the Philadelphia SPCA, and if you feel moved to, please donate a little to them, here.)

 

Wonder Woman – Parodies and Travesties

Here are two pictures of live action versions of Wonder Woman. One is from the recent TV pilot, one is from a new pornographic parody:

 

The top one is the official version, the one below it is the porn parody.

Dear DC: if the porn parody version looks classier, more true to the original and better-made, just generally less like a low budget porno than your official version, there’s a good chance you’re doing something wrong.

I’ve explained why I think Wonder Woman is a great character here. Yes, it’s problematic to have a powerful feminist icon who runs around in a swimsuit. So … say something interesting about that problem. The current Wonder Woman comic is, after ten years of failed relaunches, actually really rather good, one of the best comics DC are currently putting out. The version of the character in DC’s flagship Justice League title, read by five or six times as many people, is …

… yeah. So which version do the IP farmers run with? Guess.

There’s much talk that both Marvel and DC are ‘IP farms’ these days. The analogy is a good one: farms these days tend to be corporate-owned, massively subsidised, poorly-managed and run with no consideration for long term planning or the quality of the finished product. They want to get a lot of highly-processed product into supermarkets.

But the other thing to note: the makers of the porn version managed to get their product out there. The Wonder Woman pilot did not go to series. The IP farm just has a run of failed harvests.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dying Days notes, Chapter Two

Chapter 2 –  Foreign Soil

Lex Christian is the first character who’s an homage to an existing one. This time, it’s Dan Dare, who hopefully British readers will have heard of. For the others, Dan was the hero of The Eagle, the 50s (and 80s!) comic, a square-jawed, stiff upper-lipped space pilot, and absolutely one of the forerunners of Doctor Who – the influence it had, particularly on Terry Nation’s stuff, was immense. The reason he’s in The Dying Days is a vaguely obscure one – the first Dan Dare story in The Eagle is set in 1996 and 1997, so it ‘took place’ at the same time as the book. Reality had caught up with fiction. The irony now, of course, in this age of digital cameras, mobile phones and cloned sheep is that we’re beyond Dan Dare technology – except they have better space travel. The name was Dan Dare’s original name when the strip was being developed.

Everyone reading knew the ‘real’ reason this was the last Virgin book, and all the way through, I play with that. One of the themes of the book is the interplay between ‘real life’ stuff and fiction. I hesitate to say this, but the book has two levels – the narrative, about the Doctor and Benny fighting monsters and also a knowing commentary on the situation. One of the more blatant examples is the Who Killed Kennedy sequence, where a fictional reason is given for Virgin losing their licence.

Veronica Halliwell first appeared (and died) in the Missing Adventure System Shock.

Staines is an idiot. Anyone who’d actually read Who Killed Kennedy couldn’t possibly think it was called I Killed Kennedy. The title is not a question.

Benny, an expert on Mars, finally gets to use her knowledge. She’d visited Mars in Transit, but been possessed at the time. Legacy had Ice Warriors, but was set on Peladon, and she left the Doctor the book before he visited Mars again in GodEngine.

Patrick Moore, a real astronomer, and Bernard Quatermass, from the 50s serials (or, more correctly, the John Mills version from the last serial – the one set around 1997) argue about Martians. In our universe, Patrick Moore would be right. But this is the Who universe, and Bernard’s fears are proved correct.

 

[Chapter One notes]

Truth, Inconvenient Truth and Statistics

Oh good grief. OK. I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not a statistician. I don’t really want to enter into a wider debate about climate change. I haven’t verified who drew this graph or when, or whether the information on it is correct. I just want to point out that this graph, which appears in the Mail on Sunday today, which is purported to ‘finally show’ that scientists are wrong about global warming, taken on its own terms, makes the following prediction: ’5% of the time, the black line will fall outside the pink area’. The black line is consistently in the pink area. 100% of the time. The graph says the exact opposite of what the story says it does.

A quick google of the ‘Global Warming Policy Foundation’ quoted in this story suggests – if the forum, headline and general tone of the article didn’t – that this isn’t simply a case of innocent idiocy.

Here’s the point, though. You can generally prove anything you want with statistics – just add some data or take away some context, or spin the result with some emotional language. Did you know that over 99% of immigrants to the UK have a higher than average number of feet? That’s true. Yesterday, the Nike Air Jordan 13 Retro sold out after just a few hours of release. The headline ‘Are Immigrants Leading to a Shoe Shortage Crisis?’ practically writes itself, doesn’t it?
That graph is meant to be ‘irrefutable’. That’s the best shot. That’s the proton torpedo they think will zoom down the reactor shaft and blow up the whole climate change edifice. It’s an argument presented entirely in their own terms, using only data they presented, framed in language of their choosing. It’s been spun and distorted and shaped as much as they possibly can to get the result they want to get and it still says that the scientists who have consistently and accurately predicted that the world is warming were right. That’s their best shot? It’s rubbish.

The Dying Days notes, Chapter One

OK … so following a request on Gallifrey Base, I’m going to reprint my author’s notes from the ebook version of my Doctor Who novel The Dying Days. These originally appeared alongside the BBCi version of the book, and I’ll put them up over the next few days, a chapter at a time. 

 

Chapter 1 – What We Saw From the Ruined House

Benny. The Dying Days wasn’t just the first eighth Doctor book, it marked the point where Benny spun off into her own series (technically, she stayed where she was, in the New Adventures, and the Doctor spun off, but you know what I mean). Bernice Summerfield had been introduced in Love and War, by Paul Cornell, and her adventures continue to this day in Big Finish audios. She was hugely popular, both with the writers and the readers. Up until this point, she’d been the sarky human counterpoint to a rather dark and distant seventh Doctor. She was the voice of his conscience, as well as being the sort of person he was making the galaxy safe for.

While she quickly developed a life of her own, Paul originally based her, in part, on Emma Thompson’s character in the film The Tall Guy, and that’s still the best place to look if you want to see Benny Summerfield walking and talking right there on your telly. I mention this now only because there’s an in-joke in chapter three which no-one will get otherwise.

The Doctor’s house was introduced by Andrew Cartmel in his novel Warhead and his DWM comic strip Fellow Travellers. Over the course of the books, the Doctor popped back to it from time to time. This is the first time we saw it in the ‘present day’.

I never got round to explaining how Benny got the letter, by the way. The book originally ended with her dropping it off for herself. But I came up with a much better ending than that…

The book contains a number of New Adventures cliches, most of them put there deliberately, some by force of habit. The first of these is the gratuitous nudity. At the time, we’d heard that the BBC Books were going to cut down on the ‘adult’ stuff (laughable as that seems, now that recent EDAs have featured tantric sex and a man in a romantic relationship with a poodle). So Benny gets her kit off here, for no reason whatsoever. Anime fans call this ‘fifteening’.

The Doctor. It was very weird writing for a character who was exactly the same but completely different. All the time, I was very conscious that everyone reading would be directly comparing my version with the one in the TV Movie. I cheated, really – we see the Doctor’s early scenes from Benny’s point of view, and she spends her time going ‘gosh, he’s exactly the same but completely different’. But that’s exactly what the audience do with a new Doctor. The Doctor refers back to Love and War, his first meeting with Benny. Again, it’s a dual purpose – reminding people that this was a book with a heritage, but making something new out of that.

As Benny notes in chapter one, I couldn’t pin down the name of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister, because there was going to be an election in both countries between me finishing the book and its publication. The Tories should have bribed me to say the PM was Tony Blair, simply because sod’s law would almost certainly have guaranteed a landslide for John Major. But they didn’t, and the rest is history. One of the amusing things, though, was that Staines could comfortably be either a Conservative or a New Labour Home Secretary.

[Chapter Two notes]

STAR WARS 2

There is a great deal of material about the creation of the first sequel to Star Wars. You can not possibly do better than JW Rinzler’s book The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, one of the best ‘making of’ books I’ve ever read, and there’s not a word of supporting evidence in there for the theory I have. So it’s probably best to see what I’m about to say as a thought experiment, rather than some amazing intuition of an actual thing.

Nowadays, sequels are often a way to go bigger. A film was a surprise success, so a follow up is greenlit with a bigger budget, more spectacle, it widens out the mythology. Think about Terminator, The Matrix, even things like The Hangover. Back in the day, though, the sequels to Jaws, Dracula or Planet of the Apes were the exact opposite. They were a cheap option, a way to reuse props or trade on the goodwill of the audience, and they were subject to diminishing returns, both artistically and commercially. The industry rule of thumb was that they would make a little under half of the previous entry in the series.

So, a ‘traditional’ sequel to Star Wars would have reused a lot of props, it would be cheap to make and quite limited in scale. And so I was wondered if there was, at some point, a cheap option for a Star Wars sequel. The first spin off novel, 1978’s The Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, has been presented as such a ‘cheap sequel’, but it’s unclear how seriously it was considered. It would certainly have been cheap to film – the story was mainly confined to one planet, there were no space battles or armies of aliens. The sense I get is that it was written with one eye on the possibility it could be adapted, rather than ever seriously developed as a movie.

I realised that there’s a version of The Empire Strikes Back that would work as this hypothetical ‘cheap sequel’. More often than not, the changes are actually relatively small ones. The main differences are that it starts straight after the first film, and it never leaves the Yavin system. So, here goes, as illustrated by Ralph McQuarrie concept art:

It’s the day after the Death Star was destroyed. The Empire now know the Rebels are based on a Moon of the gas giant Yavin, and the Alliance is preparing to evacuate. Han and Luke are on patrol when they see something come down in the jungle.

Luke is attacked by a jungle creature before he can reach it.

Han and Chewie investigate and see a dark shape … Darth Vader. They shoot at the Sith Lord, but it’s clear Vader has found the exact location of the Rebel base and will be able to call in the fleet.

A fleet of Star Destroyers arrive, the ground invasion begins, with Imperial tanks crashing through the jungle terrain.

The Rebels begin a frantic retreat. Han and Chewie end up evacuating Leia in the Falcon. R2D2 runs off to find Luke.

Luke escapes from the jungle creature, but is wounded. He is tended to by a small gnomelike creature. When R2 finds him, and tells Luke of the Imperial attack, Luke is impatient to return. It becomes clear that this is Yoda, the Jedi Master. Yoda is reluctant to train Luke.

The Falcon escapes the Star Destroyers with a daring escape through the vast field of shrapnel and wreckage that was once the Death Star, but the hyperdrive is damaged so they can’t make a clean getaway.

Luke faces a test from Yoda – he enters a mysterious tree, and confronts Darth Vader … but Vader is a phantom, and when Luke defeats him, he sees his own face under Vader’s helmet.

Han realises that his old friend Lando is based in Cloud City, a mining colony in the atmosphere of Yavin. He waits until the Imperials have passed by, and heads for Yavin … followed by the real DarthVader.

Lando saw the Death Star and saw the Imperial fleet. He genuinely had no idea the Rebels were based here. To demonstrate good faith, he hands Han, Leia and Chewie over to Vader. Vader demands to know the rendezvous point of the Rebel Fleet.

Yoda begins Luke’s training, but Luke realises that his friends are in danger. He gets back to the ruined rebel base and finds an X-wing that he and R2 can repair quickly. Yoda warns Luke that his training is not complete.

Luke flies to Cloud City, and frees his friends. As they run to the Falcon, there’s a virtual replay of the escape from the Death Star, only this time it’s Luke duelling Vader, not Ben. At the end, Vader falls to his doom down a vast shaft.

The heroes make a triumphant rendezvous with the Rebel Fleet.

As I was thinking this through, I realised there are a couple of bits straight out of The Phantom Menace. The attack at the beginning would be far less spectacular – no AT-ATs or big battle scene. It would actually be more like the invasion of Naboo at the start of Episode I – a few big machines crashing through the trees. The Luke / Vader fight at the end would end up very like the Obi Wan / Darth Maul one. Star Wars, of course, is one of those narratives that often rhymes with itself.

This cheap version actually solves some of the problems with the plotting of The Empire Strikes Back. The timing of the movie is weird – there are two plots running: the Luke and Yoda one and the Han and Leia one. The Han and Leia one takes place over two days. They leave Hoth, but get to Bespin in time for bed. (And Han and Leia consummate their relationship that night in Cloud City. After wearing nothing but white up to that point, she never wears white again. Just saying). Each time we cut back to Han and Leia, it’s not that long since we saw them last. Each time we cut to Luke, he’s halfway through some new training ordeal. There’s something of a mismatch.

In the movie, we know that Darth Vader isn’t hiding in a tree on Dagobah, it has to be a dream sequence. In the cheap version, it could be the real Vader because he was last seen in the same jungle. And speaking of Vader, in this version, he’s last seen falling down a shaft, so it’s very possible he could reappear in any Star Wars 3.

There’s no revelation that he’s Luke’s father here. Well, that’s another discussion. My feeling is that Vader as Luke’s dad was a relatively late decision, and I’ll just note that Lucasfilm were happy to authorise this artwork from Star Wars Annual 1 showing Luke’s father at the time they were drawing up plans for the sequel:

The Rinzler book, and other sources, make it clear that the Star Wars sequel was no sure thing. More American Graffiti made $8M, after the original had made $140M. In the end, Star Wars 2 got an unprecedented vote of confidence: so many cinemas booked it so far in advance that it was the very first movie to have gone into profit before principal photography was completed.

Like I say, I’m not claiming psychic insight, but for a long time it’s struck me as a little odd that we leave the first movie with our heroes in a rebel base in a jungle overlooked by a gas giant, then The Empire Strikes Back takes half the movie to get from a completely different Rebel base to Luke in a jungle and the Falcon to a gas giant. The expensive model sequences, the AT-AT attack and the asteroid field escape, are not all that essential to the plot. I think there’s some circumstantial evidence that The Empire Strikes Back started out as a cheaper movie, or that it was designed in a way that would allow expensive sequences to be cut out if money became a problem.

MARLINGESQUE

I’ve recently caught up with a lot of movies I didn’t get to see at the cinema last year, thanks to a number of free evenings and combo coupons from Redbox. I always used to think that when people said movies were made for the ‘18-39 demographic’, that was a simplification, but … no, once I fell off the end of that particular range, I discovered that I’ve become a grumpy old gifford who moans about how loud the music is, how everyone’s mumbling so you can’t hear what they’re saying, the action sequences are all so fast you can’t even tell what’s going on and Batman had fewer plotholes back in my day. Movies are not made for my kind.

I really enjoyed a couple of things I saw, though. The one I enjoyed most was The Sound of My Voice, a low budget film co-written and starring Brit Marling. Her latest, The East, is getting so much buzz that I feel almost like I’m jumping on a Marling bandwagon, rather than pointing out a hot new act. Marling is rather beautiful …

 

… and this, of course, translates in Hollywood to being offered a string of ‘sexy blonde victim #3’ roles. But Marling is also smart, and so she began making movies more to her taste. Her taste runs to high concept science fiction stories which act as a showcase for her acting range and screen presence. These movies are very low budget, but have strong casts, scripts and directors able to pull everything together.

A couple of years ago, Another Earth saw Marling play a promising young astronomy student who causes a fatal car accident the night that a duplicate Earth suddenly appears where the Moon used to be. It’s a great meditation on what might have been, on the role of accident in our lives, and how selfish the quest for redemption – a key narrative strain of most modern fiction, of course – can be.

The Sound of My Voice is a movie where to spell out the premise is a spoiler. It really is the sort of story you want to come to completely fresh, to let it wash over you and draw you into its circle. Which, of course, makes it very difficult to promote or talk about. The official site includes the first twelve minutes of the movie.

 

http://www.soundofmyvoicemovie.com/index2.html

 

I really, really hope Marling works out a way to make the transition to creating the sort of movies she makes now, but for wider audiences, rather than following the dark path of providing well compensated maternity cover for Olivia Wilde in Tron III: Tron Harder or Mo’ Cowboys, Mo’ Aliens. She’s probably not the sort of person Disney wants anywhere near Episode VII-IX, but I think she’s exactly the sort of film-maker George Lucas (peace be upon him) was when he made THX1138 and American Graffitti, and when he started out making his weird, grimy documentary-style mid-budget homage to Flash Gordon. Some studio, soon, is going to give Brit Marling a seven figure sum to make a movie, and she’s going to return that investment a hundredfold and redefine science fiction cinema. Trust me, I’ve seen the future.