eye_of_a_cat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2009-06-20 02:07 pm
eye_of_a_cat) wrote2009-06-20 02:07 pm
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'.
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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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.
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Farscape So many colours. Okay, not Chiana, but everyone else, colours. I watched the first series in a haze of 'ooo shiny.'
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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