This Thing of Ours.

This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, 2002, edited by David Lavery.

1. This book pretty much marked the point I realized that there were people out there, respectable  and educated people, who geeked out about film and television WAAAAAAAAY more than I ever knew was possible. One of my favorite professors dug this out when I met with her to discuss the senior paper I was planning to do; I went home and immediately ordered my own copy.

2. David Lavery is my favorite television author/editor. In addition to this volume, he's also put out similar studies and essays on Twin Peaks (Full of Secrets) and Lost (Lost's Buried Treasures) among other programs----it's safe to say that if I was an academic I'd want his job.

What we have here is a collection of critical essays on The Sopranos, intellectual as hell. Some, with their Marxism, post-modern obsession and Orwellian comparisons, really made my head hurt, even now. And yes, some of the essays irritated me with their refusal to just see the show for what it was---A NARRATIVE, someone's story, someone's vision---and not an ideological set of regulations to be paraded as absolute philosophy (I want to scream, HEY! At no point is David Chase or anyone else involved with the show suggesting that all women must writhe around the pole at the Bing or be kept under lock and key in the kitchen baking endless pans of lasagna . . . )

Topics covered: Italian-American defamation, feminism, television as a unique media, the show's roots to cinema, the gangster genre itself, geography, music, food, and the downward trend of Mafia culture (1970s to 2000) together with its relevance to society. And that this show can be dissected a million different ways. Lavery, in his prologue, compares the show to an elephant in the dark, "whose nature reveals itself in entirely different ways depending on which part of its complex being is currently being examined."

Kind of crafty. My favorite article, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Tony Soprano," by Steven Hayward and Andrew Biro, did a great job of examining the show's complexities in several different contexts, (capitalism, Napoleon, Marxism, I'M NOT KIDDING, The Godfather, and the Mafia code of silence)

"Don Corleone might have inhabited a world in which certain things (honor, community, and so on) had a value in and of themselves, but Tony Soprano is forced to inhabit a world in which dollar values are the only values that matter. While Tony's nephew Christopher wants nothing more than to become a "made" man -- to become a fully-fledged member of the Mafia community, bound by the omerta (code of silence) -- this desire does not prevent him from writing a screenplay based on his own experiences and the tales he has heard. It is a similar kind of contradiction that structures the series as a whole: Tony is a gangster undergoing psychotherapy (or, as Freud called it, "the talking cure"): a mob boss who has to talk to maintain his position."

It's fun. There was only one article I honestly couldn't get behind even a little, not really because of the subject matter but because of the choppy, unprofessional prose (mostly epitaphs) and the fact that the two authors accused Livia of being OVERWRITTEN. Please. The coming of feminism (first, second, third wave or beyond) does not change the fact that there are some seriously unpleasant women out there. Get over it.

Getting Lost, I am Legend.

Finished up the June Books a few days late.

1. Getting Lost by Orson Scott Card. Part of the Smart Pop book series, first published in 2006, this collection is made up of fifteen essays and an encyclopedia that cover the first two season of the show. Some essays are very good (Oceanic Tales; Have You Been Framed? and Cosmic Vertigo on the Isle of Lost) some are marginal, I won't name names. There is a reading list, of course, probably because you can't talk about Lost without talking about books and stories too, but David Lavery's (Lost's Buried Treasures) is much more in-depth. There are some cool suggestions made; one essay author totally called what ended up happening with Hurley, another posits deep meaning while analyzing Jack's tattoos. Bottom line? It's fine. Did not blow my skirt up, though.

DICK MATHESON, HOWEVER, IS A HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR.

2. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, a collection of short stories, many of them first published during the 50s. I snagged this from the Book Nook (that I co-created) at Starbucks, how glad I am that I did! First off, I AM LEGEND? I doubt there was ever a better book title, anywhere. This entire collection was right up my proverbial alley, all the way. Many of the stories had connections to Twilight Zone episodes, I'm sure many of them became Twilight Zone or Night Gallery episodes (The Near Departed, Prey, Dress of White Silk, Mad House, From Shadowed Places). I also could tell that these must have influenced Stephen King, too, because some of the prose seemed very similar, but more housebroken than King, calmer, grandfatherly, if that makes sense. I very much enjoyed all of them. I haven't seen the film yet, it's next on my netflix, but really I cannot wait. And while I Am Legend was probably the most engaging, the weightiest story in the collection, it was Mad House (a writer is full of rage because he cannot write? um. . . ) that packed the biggest punch for me. I hope I never become an angry writer, I'd hate to have my bathroom, you know, KILL ME. Also, I would leave this in the bathroom after my bath and every time I did, my daughter would carry it out, refuse to look at the cover, and bury it somewhere. It is rather creepy, I suppose.

All these DID blow my skirt up. It's still up, actually. If you like crafty, scary little stories, read these now.

Theory on Twin Peaks, season 1

Jonathan Rosenbaum says about Lynch:

". . . .he is perceived and celebrated in some quarters not as an integral part of this country's ideological mainstream but as a serious artist subverting the American soil from within. . . "

"It could be argued, morever, that Lynch's increasing visibility and popularity is largely a function of the fresh contexts in which his work has appeared. Compared to ERASERHEAD, BLUE VELVET is like a TV soap opera, and compared to BLUE VELVET, TWIN PEAKS seems formally unadventurous and fairly tame in terms of subject matter; but compared with other TV serials, TWIN PEAKS looked like a bolt from the blue. . . ."

**maybe. But cinema and television are completely different as mass media. You cannot make ERASERHEAD television, not back at that time, anyway. No one would have watched it or gotten it except for Lynch fans.
(I think all this was taken from the collection FULL OF SECRETS edited by David Lavery, who also edited a collection together on The Sopranos called THIS THING OF OURS. This guy is seriously my intellectual media-idol)


"In my opinion, the first problem---the important problem in our world--is the problem of dissemination, and it's the conception of this dissemination that may lead to catastrophe. The way it's used now, the influence of the masses leads to nothing but the scattering of material. For example, think of a liter of wine: it's certainly sufficient when shared by three or four people. But if we want this same liter of wine to be shared by one thousand people, we have to put water in it, and then it's useless. We have to wonder whether something like this doesn't happen in the process of dissemination."
---Jean Renoir.

Renoir made political films. Poetic realism, French cinema after the first world war. Was of course an artist but always dealt with societal issues, rich/poor, government, etc. This is not what Lynch does, but Lynch is still an artist making comments on society. Whereas Renoir had weightier issues on his agenda, American directors (generally, and even more today) tackle issues using a bubble gum approach by showing us ridiculous situations we think are important but are really just trivial. No one is say, starving to death usually, even in a very serious film. No one is sitting in a back alley somewhere without water to drink or without clothing to keep them warm. American audiences are not usually accustomed to seeing children or babies die. These things happen the world over, but in cinema, as in life, we close our eyes to them.