(no subject)

[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]

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.