eye_of_a_cat | On sci-fi and grittiness

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On sci-fi and grittiness

(Note - for the purposes of this, I'll be sticking to science fiction in film and TV, rather than books. That's a slightly different conversation.)

I love the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, up to and including the finale. It has its flaws - lagging sense of direction from time to time, weirdly forgetful writing, and a bit too much focus on the furrowed and angst-filled brow of Lee Adama, to name a few - but it's really, really good. And most of that goodness, without a doubt, comes from how beautifully dark and gritty and postapocalyptic it is. Main characters die, horribly and often. Humanity is nearly extinct. The ship that holds the last remnants of the population together is falling apart. This is the future, red in tooth and claw.

Most of the critics, obviously and justifiably, welcomed BSG with open arms. It's science fiction, but it's serious! It's dark! It makes disturbing points about contemporary American foreign policy! (Of course, some critics took all this to mean that it's not 'really' science fiction at all, merely a drama series set in space and therefore it's okay to like it, non-geeks!, but seriously - it's about killer robots who live in space, so give up.) I don't disagree with any of this as well-deserved praise, but I do take objection to the argument which quite often follows: that what's so good about BSG isn't that it does gritty realism very well, but that it does gritty realism at all, and that sci-fi which goes down this route is inherently better than sci-fi which doesn't.

To put it another way, I don't think BSG is superior to Firefly or Wall-E by virtue of being bleaker.

And yet there's a growing tendency, among sci-fi dabblers who don't want to be associated with all that silly stuff and among sci-fi fans who don't want people thinking their hobby is childish, to start thinking along just those lines. Good sci-fi is dark. Good sci-fi isn't suitable for children. Good sci-fi uses futuristic settings as allegories for contemporary issues. Good sci-fi certainly doesn't feature any cute robots, or aliens in ridiculous make-up, prosthetics, and costumes.

Make no mistake, I'm not disputing that Ron Moore did a great job of rebooting BSG. At the same time, I'm really glad that Russell T. Davies didn't go down that route with a dark, gritty, unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who, because that would have sucked. I'm glad J. Michael Straczynski was unapologetic about including weird-looking aliens as main characters. I'm glad Pixar created a cute, huggable robot. I'm glad George Lucas didn't design Star Wars as a thinly-disguised commentary on American politics of the 1970s, and I'm really, really glad he had absolutely no problem at all with escapism, because sci-fi would be a poorer place without someone to decide it needed Wookies, alien jazz bands, and Boba Fett.

Sci-fi is a big, broad genre. It's always had room for all of this, and it would be a shame if we ended up shrinking it out of a desire to make it 'better'.

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You won't believe how often people come into my room, look at my bookcases, register that I am a Serious Reader (note: they don't generally notice the pre-20th century stuff at first, so this is based on just the 20th c fiction), and say in astonishment, "I wouldn't have expected you to have sci-fi!" We're talking about the likes of Ursula Le Guin and Primo Levi here. (I think they'd faint if they realised how many silly audiobooks I listen to, never mind the TV series we watch.) Sometimes you have to point out gently to the poor dears that works like 1984 are sci-fi, too. People have very odd misconceptions about sci-fi. Not to mention the myth that if you enjoy "classic" literature at all, then you must be a puritan who considers herself to be a Higher Being and who would never touch ordinary stuff. I think that's why they're SHOCKED, I tell you, that I like sci-fi.

If I have one complaint about a lot of sci-fi film and TV series, actually, it's that we could do with a bit more "nature red in tooth and claw" and a bit less grey. Either the space ships are grey, or the aliens' skins are grey, or the military uniforms are grey, or everyone's wearing grey because we all know that in the future, the chic colour will be grey. It's terribly boring to look at.

My mother falls into that trap frequently. I think my genre-jumbled bookcases hurt her soul, and I haven't even broken it to her about Amitav Gosh yet.

Farscape So many colours. Okay, not Chiana, but everyone else, colours. I watched the first series in a haze of 'ooo shiny.'

And the ship is beautiful too! (And thankfully eventually stopped being frightened at everything, they must have had trouble thinking "what other responses can a living ship have to this situation?") I am trying to persuade

ghost_of_a_flea to watch it with me, but he has an unreasonable prejudice against muppets/TV series he saw bits of as a teenager or something, and is holding out.

While I'm bitching about grey sci-fi, the other trend that annoys me is dark Macbeths. Yes, we know that it's a dark play, that there's a lot of darkness in the language. Now could you give us something interesting to look at, please, or at the very least, something we can actually see in the murk.

I love it when Pilot and Moya start biting back. They are awesome. Just auch a gorgeously designed show. I can't get my young man to watch it though, he can't get past the Muppets. I suppose if its the least of his faults...

Ooooh, yes. Trevor Nunn, I am looking at you. We watched the McKellan & Dench production for GCSE and Duncan should not be memorable for being the only visible object in the scene, really! It can't be that hard to find someone in the RSC who knows how to operate lights.

Do you know, I acquired the DVD of that production years ago, and still haven't watched it because I remember having seen the odd scene and it was ALL SO DAMN DARK. And that's despite having McKellan and Dench in the leads.

I spent the first episode or two going, MUPPETS? Not to mention the strange waily noise at the end of the credits music. Then I fell for the show, despite its having such strange attributes as a bloke with a thong on his face. It was very odd seeing Browder and Black in Stargate without the sexual chemistry between them!

It was allegedly not that bad seen live, so I give a certain amount of leeway for the difficulties of restaging for film, but whoever decided to shoot it in black and white without any concept of lighting for monochrome deserves to be shot.
If you treat it as a radio play you at least get the benefit of the awesome cast, though. Except Duncan. Duncan remains pretty awful.

I was warned for Muppets, but the musc threw me a loop too. And it does make Stargate very odd! Especially the promo shots. I'm programed to expect them draped round each other now.

It's more that I'm programmed to expect SIZZLING HOT SEXUAL TENSION if they're in the same room as each other, and it just wasn't there. I suppose that's why it's called acting, but it was still odd!

I like stacking Frankenstein with my Sci-fi, not classics. Just to confound people. None of my "classics" are stacked as such. i put them into their respective genres and called it good. And friends are constantly surprised when they scan my stacks XD

I have all my fiction sorted into period, then alphabetically, so Frankenstein is in the 19th c section. There are a few alarming titles in the early modern section, though I can't remember them off the top of my head. Le Guin was at head height until the latest re-arranging, and one of them is bright yellow, so I think it was that they were spotting.

When people notice my edition of Gone with the Wind, one of those books so thick that they got an entire (and lurid) film poster on the spine, I cheerfully shock them by telling them all about the mad lesbian subtext.

Mine's sorted by size (to best fit the bookshelves) and... that's it, pretty much. Work-related stuff tends to be on one side of the fishtank and science fiction is the other, but only in a vague sense. It doesn't help that my mental picture of which book is where fits the layout about three flats ago, either!

Also, Firefly! Not many series where the spaceship pilot wears a Hawaiian shirt.

Yes.

Totally.

This is why I'm in permanent love with Farscape. They did four series worth of hard-core cutie-breaking with Muppets. Jim Henson Creature Shop Muppets and cartoon flashbacks. Gritty would have ruined it.

Absolutely. And it was PERFECT as it was.

It's one fault is that it eats your brain.

I've been mainlining Season Four while reading about 18th century corruption. I think I might have to go back over everything with a fine tooth comb because I don't think my supervisor should be subjected to Crichton flavoured administrative analysis. However entertaining it might be.

Oh, c'mon. Crichton had the best problem solving concepts. "I'm sick of this. Shoot it repeatedly and keep going."

Totally. But he might get Ideas. I don't want him getting Ideas, the department's quite crazy enough.

Hah. I'm nearing the end of my third-and-a-half reading of Clarissa. Crichton would have got it all sorted out in a few pages (shoot the Harlowes and throw the two main characters into their respective confidant's arms?).

It's odd when you watch a few shows back to back where the usual solution to someone being a nuisance is to knock them unconscious. You get alarmingly used to it.

I've only ever seen about four minutes of Farscape, but I've heard very good things. Including 'You'll take a while to get used to it, but after a while those muppets will make you cry' :)

Yes. Yes they will. And you will come back for more.
They're totally shameless about the emotional manipulation.

I'm just generally sick of "Look how dark and gritty we are!" in movies. And equally sick of "Look how indie and 1970's we are!" (Yes, I'm looking at you I-want-to-appeal-to-the-indies-and-hipsters movies).

Real isn't always dark!Good lord, look at Jurassic Park. People dying left and right, serious questions about what we should and shouldn't explore, debating whether or not man is ever fully "in control". But no shakey cam. No unnecessarily faded palette (hell, it was wonderfully resplendent) and dim lighting. I could go without the requisite "OMG I CAN COUNT YOUR PORES PLEASE ZOOM BACK OUT!" moments, but that's kinda a standard.

And I hate Rick Berman. Despise the man. Star Trek is supposed to be about hope and possibility and dealing with the impossible and absurd because hey, that's life. It did not need All Ships Are Grey Now Except Enterprise No Wait Let's Have A Grey Enterprise Too. It didn't need Let's Make Interiors Depressing. It didn't need the friggin' Borg. And it certainly didn't need someone who hates Star Trek running Star Trek. Suddenly everything is black or grey or drab something or other. Ships look like they were designed by over-eager fanboys.

HATE.

And then Abrams... I feel like we're giving him enough rope to hang us all. I think I've read that fanfic (but it was fun and pretty... but it had so many stupid things... but... fun... ARGH!).

And WALLE was cute and managed to do an Eco/self-reliance message without BEATING US IN THE FACE WITH IT LIKE HAPPY FEET DEAR GOD WE GET IT I LIKE PENGUINS TOO PLEASE STOP THIS I WANT TO GET OFF.

...

I should have slept more last night. >_>;;

Short of the long: I agree with you.

(Funny note, the Rifle they use in BSG is the Beretta CX4 Storm with a custom flash-hider–the thingy at the end of the barrel. Beretta, noticing many of it's buyers were also falling for this new show released an OFFICIAL Beretta CX4 flash hider identical to the one on the show. Oh Noes Time Paradox!)

released an OFFICIAL Beretta CX4 flash hider identical to the one on the show. Oh Noes Time Paradox!

Ha! (Speaking of which, one of the few things that did annoy me about BSG was how they introduced the really cool idea about having to use much older technology because the Cylons could interfere with all the new shiny stuff, and then... forgot about it after thirty minutes into the pilot episode of the miniseries. Sigh.)

Ach, I think I stopped expecting consistency from BSG not too far in, although it's a pity as it did raise your hopes fairly high. It's like people who complain about Supernatural mispronouncing Samhain. That boat sailed when they said, "Say God's name in Latin! That's 'Christo', remember!" four episodes into Season 1. After that I settled comfortably into not expecting them to get anything at all right, and therefore could not be disappointed. (Yes, I have succumbed. And it's not so much the mutilated women which are getting to me, although that could be because I'm still on Season 1. It's that practically every episode ends with a beautiful, usually blonde, young women thanking the boys profusely.)

Well said.

I AGREE.

I hate the fallacy that bleaker is somehow better. I got around that by simply acccepting that people are going to think of me as a hack for writing characters who don't spend half their time having traumatic experiences and the other half sitting around brooding about them. Because a steady diet of grits is just unpleasant.

I also figure that anyone who feels that science fiction isn't a "real" genre is simply sabotaging themselves. Poor insecure dopes don't even know what they're missing.

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