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[calimac]

John Scalzi eats Star Wars alive for breakfast.

Upon reading his screed, I realized that I've been waiting nearly thirty years for someone to say this. (I've seen other criticisms. They were not so much to the point.)

The fact is I've never really understood the enthusiasm for Star Wars. I wasn't even planning to see the original film, way back when. The descriptions made it sound like the biggest, flashiest, most elaborate space opera of all time, and my SF tastes had never run towards space opera, so I was intending to ignore it.

Just before the premiere, a feature article in Time, or one of them, gave a different perspective, saying it wasn't a serious film but a fun romp. This turned out to be a bit misleading, but it was enough to convince me to join sturgeonslawyer and another college friend who actually had a car, on an expedition down to the big theatre, the one where I'd seen 2001 and would, years later, see Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

And we went in and we saw it and we came out and someone asked, "What did you think?", and I said "Not bad."

This has remained my settled opinion. In a world of calimacs, mentioning Star Wars today would generate a briefly wrinkled brow and the reply, "Star Wars? Oh yeah, I remember that. Wasn't bad."

The sequel wasn't bad either, though I didn't believe the Big Revelation at the end for a minute, and the third film had that villain with the terrible makeup job and those obnoxiously cute critters, and after a long break the fourth one was the most tedious film I'd ever seen, telling of a futile, pointless expedition to the Planet of the Bureaucrats and back again, with a pit stop at the Planet of the Boring Auto Races.

After that I refused to see any more.

But wait. Scalzi says that Lucas's problem lies in his attempt to create a mythology. Didn't Tolkien also create a mythology? Why isn't he just as bad, or is he?

The first answer has to be that there's no idea inherently so bad, or so good, that a sufficiently good or bad author can't make it otherwise. The second answer is that conscientious Tolkien scholars refer to his creation as his legendarium rather than his mythology. His purposes were different. Despite the presence of a creation myth, God, angels, legendarily-mighty heroes, and teleology, Tolkien wasn't creating a watered-down religion. Lucas puts his stories at the service of his thesis; Tolkien's best work keeps the mythological aspect as scenic background, and lets the stories get on with being the stories.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

By "modern myths" I meant myths with more obvious direct, modern relevance like in religions. I wasn't focusing on the technical, chronological age of the myths. But you are differentiating between myths in living religions and dead ones, and that's what snags me.

There's a distinctly at-second-hand quality about riffing off a scholar instead of inventing it for yourself.

What was Lucas supposed to do, deliberately avoid knowing about past work so as to establish the "purity" of his creation? A new creation criticized without more basis than influence by previous works of scholars is tantamount in effect to the scholar being granted intellectual property in the themes he studies. If a scholar, for example, wrote a seminal work on the various depictions over millenia of the Annunciation, and an artist read it and created a new depiction clearly influenced by the new perspectives contained in that work, would that be "at-second-hand"?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't see where the snag lies in differentiating between living myths and dead ones. "Dead" not in an absolute sense, of course - we can still use myths about Thor as sources for new stories - but there is a basic difference between discussing Thor and his hammer and discussing Jesus and his sermon (or, say, Superman, if you want something clearly fictional and unconnected to a living religion) that seems to me too obvious to be easily explainable.

You've got totally the wrong end of the stick in your last paragraph. My comment isn't about scholarly property rights; it isn't even about whether the mythmaker has read the scholar or not. It's about what I said it's about, the difference between riffing off (not ripping off, riffing off) a scholar and inventing it for yourself.

Why does Tolkien's use of myth live and breathe, while that of so many of his would-be followers lies flat and dead on the ground? Because Tolkien knew his sources and inspirations intimately and deeply. They were part of his soul. The imitators only know the latter-day writings and the scholars.

If two authors of equal talent write a novel about, say, a particular foreign country, the one who spent years living there is probably going to write a far more realistic and believable portrait than the one who knows it only from books, be the latter's reading ever so extensive. Same kind of difference. And an intelligent reader will detect the second-hand quality of the latter's work. (One argument proferred in favor of the Earl of Oxford having written Shakespeare's plays is that many of them are set in Italy, which Oxford had visited but Will S. had not. But it seems to me that the plays themselves suggest that their author had been no nearer Italy than a map, and not a very good one.)

Thus the same difference between an author with an intuitive and deep understanding of archetypes - whether he's read Campbell or not, whether he found Campbell's ideas useful or not - and an author who picks it up second-hand from Campbell.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I did a spot of research to find the bio of Campbell that Lucas is quoted in, and came up with a scholarly website (http://www.fccps.k12.va.us/gm/faculty/english/archcrit.htm) containing these facts, which I (and perhaps Scalzi, too) didn't know: Lucas and Campbell were good friends. Lucas showed Campbell the movies, and Campbell remarked "I thought real art stopped with Picasso, Joyce and Mann. Now I know it hasn't."

I'm not certain how you're certain how much the quality of Lucas's or Tolkien's work derives from knowing "his sources and inspirations intimately and deeply" and how much from plain intelligence and life experience. I strongly suspect Tolkien was smarter than Lucas. But it's also difficult to compare books an amateur took the better part of two decades to write, without the need to make a living by it, with Star Wars, in which a pro had a year, or whatever, to use one ten-thousandth of Tolkien's words (or whatever the fraction would actually be) to tell a compelling story.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain. I didn't say I was certain. No statement of this kind can ever be certain. Inductive reasoning is never certain.

But a long lifetime of observing which sub-creations have life and depth to them and which don't, and which creative artists really know their material and which wing it from the seat of their pants and a little scholarly boning-up, have led to conclusions that have continued to stand up on further testing.

Joseph Campbell as an individual is free to endorse Star Wars as much as he wants. But may I observe that Campbell was a scholar of mythology and not a film critic. And that this infamous over-the-top endorsement of SW directly preceded, and in the opinion of many caused, the loss of most of his name's previous ubiquity and a good deal of its luster.

Your last argument is irrelevant. My understanding is that Lucas had worked on the original SW script as a labor of love for some years before being engaged to put it on screen. But whether that's so or not (Lucas has been known to exaggerate the amount of effort he put into writing SW), it is quite certain that, after completing the original trilogy, he had unlimited amounts of time (with no external deadline) and no need whatever to earn a living, to write the prequel trilogy. An ideal personal circumstance in which to create great art, if the artist is capable of it.

But even were Lucas a hack with a tight deadline, to attempt to excuse inferior art on the grounds of constraints or handicaps on the artist is - I'm sorry, there's no other word for this - contemptible. I doubt any creator of superior art would accept such an excuse. I know offhand that Ursula K. Le Guin and Patrick Nielsen Hayden are both on record rejecting such arguments. And I've heard this specific version of it before: I put it to Tim Powers on a panel once, and his reply was excoriating.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Well, now, it sounds as though your temper is heating up. I didn't mean to be sharp, and perhaps "certain" was the wrong word to use, since I wasn't trying to pin you down. I do apologize about that. I've just been enjoying a reasonable debate with you.

Campbell was a scholar of mythology and not a film critic. And that this infamous over-the-top endorsement of SW directly preceded, and in the opinion of many caused, the loss of most of his name's previous ubiquity and a good deal of its luster.

That's an interesting fork, to use a chess term. These people are saying, we were wrong about the guy before. Whether they were wrong before and right now, or right before and wrong now, it doesn't say much for their judgment. I'd expect them to be more humble.

to attempt to excuse inferior art on the grounds of constraints or handicaps on the artist is - I'm sorry, there's no other word for this - contemptible

I'm not offended, mainly because that wasn't what I was doing. Saying you shouldn't be so quick to judge, which is what I was doing, isn't the same as saying you were wrong. I actually do agree with you and Scalzi about Episodes I-III-- they're nothing better than painful, and it's mysterious how Lucas seems not to have known what he did right the first time-- but didn't and don't agree with Scalzi about Episode IV. I was, therefore, not thinking it required apology of any kind. And, to use your own argument, each of the people you mention is a fiction writer-- not a film critic. I wish I had the opinion on this subject of someone like Pulitzer Prize author Richard Russo, who writes both novels and screenplays.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

These people are saying, we were wrong about the guy before.

Come on, this isn't an either/or thing. It just proved that Campbell was fallible, and not the scholarly god in human form that Bill Moyers made him out to be. Have you never had the experience of finding that someone you admired (either for their work or their person) wasn't quite so great after all, or for that matter that someone you did not admire had some value after all?

that wasn't what I was doing

Uh, yes you were. You said it was "difficult to compare" works written under these differing circumstances. The idea that art written under a deadline by a person needing to earn a living should be judged by different standards - and since it must be lower standards, this amounts to giving it a handicap (to use a golf term) - this is what is contemptible. There is no difficulty in comparison at all. Art is art, and art working towards compatible aesthetic goals should be judged by the same standards. The circumstances of its creation are immaterial to its value as art.

each of the people you mention is a fiction writer-- not a film critic.

Again, come on. None of these people were specifically criticizing SW. They were addressing the principle of the artist's responsibility to not use cheezy excuses for bad art - a point on which, as two authors and an editor, they are eminently qualified to speak.

At least one of them, by the way, Le Guin, is an equally well qualified critic. Have you read her articles on Tolkien? They are marvels of perception and insight.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

It just proved that Campbell was fallible, and not the scholarly god in human form that Bill Moyers made him out to be. Have you never had the experience of finding that someone you admired (either for their work or their person) wasn't quite so great after all, or for that matter that someone you did not admire had some value after all?

Sure, but that assumes that he was in fact wrong. Numbers of people saying he was wrong don't make it so, nor famous people saying it, either. I think a lot of SW's enduring popularity (that is, the first film) is precisely because the hero's journey is a theme or story so close to the human heart-- which was Campbell's point. You might say that Lucas made a bad movie saved by a great theme, but I think the theme too much obscures things to be able to judge how good the entertainment is. Again, what I'm saying is not that you're wrong, but that what you're basing it on would not be good enough for me to say one way or another.

The idea that art written under a deadline by a person needing to earn a living should be judged by different standards - and since it must be lower standards, this amounts to giving it a handicap (to use a golf term) - this is what is contemptible. There is no difficulty in comparison at all. Art is art, and art working towards compatible aesthetic goals should be judged by the same standards. The circumstances of its creation are immaterial to its value as art.

I don't buy it. The idea underlying "art is art" is that life and art came first and money is some later, minor consideration which is artificial, inferior and really not worth thinking about. And certainly with no valid application to art. It's like criticizing the cave drawings for not being as good as they could have been if the artists hadn't spent most of their time hunting for food. It's idealism to an unhealthy degree. We need to keep our feet on the ground and stay off our high horses.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Somehow I missed the preceding comment until now.

1) Yes, I am assuming Campbell was in fact wrong. But it is not because a vote made him wrong, it is because this is all within the context of discussing the reaction to Campbell's endorsement of SW by people who thought he was being over-the-top about it. To the sentence, "It just proved that Campbell was fallible," add the clause "in the eyes of those who thought he'd jumped the shark" if that makes you feel better.

Also, touching on a mythic theme by itself is not enough to make the story good. It has to be told well also.

2) In fact, yes. If the cave paintings are poorer paintings because the artists had to spend most of their time hunting for food, we should say so. What we should not do is blame the artists for this. That would be unfair. But the art has to be judged as art. Your presumption is absolutely right: money is some later, minor consideration that has nothing to do with it. Except perhaps to explain the circumstances under which the art was created. But that's an explanation, not an excuse.

If I choose to attend a concert given by amateurs, which I often do, I won't blame them for being below professional standards, because I knew that going in. But I won't pretend they're as good as professionals. By the same standards, I won't dump on professionals because they're not as much better than the amateurs as I was led to expect.

Strange you should bring up the cavemen hunting for food, though, because in fact I expect their paintings were not poorer for that reason, but better. For one thing it gave them a subject matter. For another it gave them something else to do. In real life in the here and now, writers who don't do it for a living are often better than those who do, because they're not compelled to turn out reams of crap to make enough to live on.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

1. Touching on mythic themes isn't enough by itself, I'd agree, but it can save bad or mediocre storytelling far more than great storytelling can save a poor theme. What does "jumped the shark" mean? I've never heard the expression before.

2. I don't think music criticism is a good comparison to books, paintings or movies, because mistakes in the former, because it's performance art, can't simply be spotted and corrected on the next day's cup of coffee. Music is also more codified than, for example, paintings. It's true than human talent and skill and the growth of character and the way they work are involved in each, but there are several levels of translation you'd need to compare those things and the way they work in each, and in each of those levels there's room for error. As Alberti said, "Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model," and I'm talking about errors of the art critic.

Which brings me to my other point. Art critics make plenty of mistakes. I don't blame them for that; they're human like we all are. But it's enough to make me skeptical of claims to universality for what is and isn't good art.

Finally, I also can't agree that amateur writers are often better than professional ones. We can't separate out the likes of Tolkien and Elizabeth Kostova from the legions of writers of fanfic without redefining the subset in question as "successful amateur writers," and that ruins the comparison.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

1. The mythic themes are what made Star Wars as good as it was, but it still teetered on the edge, as shown by the response that only the first two films are any good. (And yes, that's people's opinions, but if I can't use people's opinions to evaluate art, what can I use?)

I won't attempt a statistical survey, but I've often seen great storytelling save a poor theme, and since it takes really great storytelling to do it, I often prefer the result to a mediocre telling of a great theme. The film "Shakespeare in Love" has a premise I would otherwise find utterly banal and obnoxious, but it is so stylish and witty it is one of my favorite films.

"Jumping the shark" is the moment when something formerly good wears out its welcome and goes bad. It tends to imply a deliberate, desperate attempt to retain attention, which would not be a fair charge to Campbell; I could have said "the moment when his potato salad went rancid in the refrigerator."

2. Jesus, you are picayune, aren't you? Correcting for the fact that in live performance, there is no second draft, the comparison is valid.

I have no idea what you mean by saying "Music is also more codified than, for example, paintings." There are standard canons of masterpieces and of technique in both arts, and those canons are challenged by upstarts and rule-breakers in both arts.

Errors of critics accumulate? Does this mean to accumulate the way that errors magnify themselves in complex or iterative mathematical computations? I can see it happening in Alberti's example, but not in the work of individual critics with mistaken ideas, who merely repeat it. A critical idea can become a meme and be taken up by subsequent critics with some degree of mindlessness, but to some degree this is self-correcting. (For instance, the adulation of abstruse modernism and the denigration of anything with demotic appeal, though still adhered to in some circles, has run its course as a universal operating procedure.)

Doubt of "claims to universality for what is and isn't good art" usually refers to cultural differences, as in: what would a New Guinea tribesman think of our Western art? But that's apparently not what you mean. What you do appear to mean is nihilistic. If we don't have confidence in our own judgments, how can we be so arrogant as to express them? (As anything other than a meaningless "I like this," to which no dialectic reply is possible.) If we can't turn to a critical consensus about what's good or bad, how can we evaluate anything beyond our own judgments? You're the one who brought up Campbell's endorsement of Star Wars - I'd forgotten all about it until you reminded me - if you didn't think his point had some validity, why cite him? I'm the one who made what you are now saying is your point, by saying that Campbell made a mistake.

Last paragraph: Jeez, there you go again. I deliberately avoided the word "amateurs" because it brings in images of fanfic and the slushpile. I was referring to within the class of professionally-published authors, and thought that was obvious. Even if you do include anyone who sets down a word of fiction anywhere, I did say "often" and not "usually". I'm not running a statistical survey here. Criminy.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Jesus, you are picayune, aren't you? Correcting for the fact that in live performance, there is no second draft, the comparison is valid.

Picayune? That begs the question of what's important and what isn't. It's precisely my position that one cannot correct for the fact that in live performance there is no second draft. That that fact will always skew the comparison of performance art to other kinds of art, past hope of confidence in one's conclusion.

Errors of critics accumulate? Does this mean to accumulate the way that errors magnify themselves in complex or iterative mathematical computations? I can see it happening in Alberti's example, but not in the work of individual critics with mistaken ideas, who merely repeat it.

I'm not talking about a "whisper down the lane" effect with many people, in which one person builds a worse house because they failed to see the shakyness of some other critic's foundation, but that effect inside one person, be they artist or critic or neither. If there are errors in a person's education and assumptions, which there always are (I am not, I might add, circumspectly referring to you, but to everyone) they compound when that person tries to reach conclusions. Which is not to suggest that people shouldn't try to reach conclusions, but that they should in general be more humble about them, and in particular about those the validity of which can't be tested.

You're the one who brought up Campbell's endorsement of Star Wars - I'd forgotten all about it until you reminded me - if you didn't think his point had some validity, why cite him?

I was not saying he was right or he was wrong, but that it's pretty breezy to praise his seminal work and damn his own conclusion about its relationship to Star Wars in the same breath. What I've been questioning all along is the basis for the level of self-certainty about these things that you appeared to me to have.

I was referring to within the class of professionally-published authors, and thought that was obvious.

I suppose I was misled by "In real life in the here and now," which I saw as pretty sweeping modifiers. Anyway, you continue: "writers who don't do it for a living are often better than those who do, because they're not compelled to turn out reams of crap to make enough to live on."

Except that fanfic writers are similarly not compelled to turn out reams of crap to make enough to live on. They do so anyway, which suggests that a lack of compulsion isn't the reason why the people you're talking about did wind up getting published. I would agree, however, that that compulsion probably often prevents professional writers from being as good as they could be.

Anyway, we've gone 'round and 'round on this a good deal and have managed mainly to establish that we're each starting from assumptions and values the other doesn't share and will never adopt, which suggests to me that this won't end productively. My compliments on your mind and my thanks to you for a civil argument.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You may be done, but I have some more to say.

Most generally, you misread my self-certainty. I've given some thought to these matters, I think I'm right, I can cite other people who've also given thought to these matters and agree with me. I may be wrong, but until I change my mind or am proved wrong I will continue to have faith in my thought processes, because a person cannot think about anything or reach any conclusions about anything at all if he does not have such faith.

There are many matters about which my conclusions are much more tentative. These are matters about which I've thought less, know less, or simply have reached no conclusion. But you won't read me saying much about these things because, by that very token, I have less to say. If I choose to make an LJ post about such things, it will usually be to ask a question or to present very tentative findings to gather others' ideas. See my recent post on pop music, for instance. It's in a quite different tone from my post about Star Wars. I've been thinking, if not constantly, about Star Wars and what makes mythic fiction and why bad movies are bad for thirty years, and I have definite ideas, and I'm going to present them in definite statements.

I'm not trying to correct for the fact that performances are live. You're right, one can't do that in judging an individual performance. I'm trying to make a general analogy using musical performance as the analogized part. For something on that level of generalization, the comparison is valid.

I can see how erroneous ideas lead to erroneous conclusions. What I don't see is how they compound themselves.

Re Campbell: on the contrary, what I would consider pretty breezy would be to assume that, because he is great on his home ground, that he must continue to be great when he leaves it and says something patently ridiculous.

No. Neither crappy fanfic writers, nor good writers with day jobs or independent incomes, are compelled to turn out anything, not in the sense that professional writers are. Professional writers have to write whether they feel like it or not. Sometimes they don't, or don't feel like writing what they're financially compelled to write (e.g. novels instead of short stories), and sometimes the fiction suffers. Fanfic writers who write endless reams, crappy or otherwise, write it because they want to. Good writers with day jobs etc. also write because they want to. Many of them spend a lot of time on it, but they produce less copy, because they don't have to. They therefore have more time to spend on making it good. Whether they succeed depends on talent, an independent factor apart from the minimum required to become a professionally published author at all.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's a misleading point in the previous, because I misremembered how I phrased myself earlier. (A hazard of the software of LJ posting is that if you come to Reply directly from e-mail you can't read the earlier posts.)

This refers to "correcting for the fact that music is live performances." It's not possible to write a review that way. But it is possible to have a theoretical discussion of the difference between professionals and amateurs and bring in performing as well as non-performing arts to make the comparison.

What actually happens in real life that's different in performing arts is that one makes allowances for mistakes in the performing arts. I made another comment pointing to a post in which I discussed this very fact. But there is nevertheless a huge difference between a professional making a glitch and an amateur who doesn't achieve professional standards in the first place. I could play you some recordings and describe the difference. It's not hard for those who know music to hear, and I know people who can hear it more clearly than I can.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I wrote, "Correcting for the fact that in live performance, there is no second draft, the comparison is valid."

In fact, I wrote about this very correction not long ago.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Somehow I missed the last phrase of the last paragraph. No, it doesn't ruin the comparison, and I don't see how it could. I'm not selecting for amateurs who are greater than professionals, which would have made the statement tautological.

I'm talking about all fiction writers who pass the threshold of professional publication. I'm saying that, of these, the best are often those who don't have to do it for a living, because they're free to write as they please instead of being obliged to produce material whether they're inspired or not.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Hope the above doesn't offend you, by the way. As I say, I enjoy a good argument, but I don't always know how my words may seem to others. I'm sometimes caught off-guard by the inferences people draw, due to differing perspectives.