Inessentials

Thematic spoilers for The Hurt Locker

I was talking with my father-in-law recently about The Hurt Locker, a film that my wife and I had recommended to him. Turns out, he hated it. He hated it because he thought it was glorifying character traits that he thought were destructive, dangerous, and repulsive. He’s not the sort of man to use the word “asshole” but that’s a fair way to describe the central character in The Hurt Locker, whose machismo jeopardizes the lives of his fellow soldiers. Whereas he saw the film glorifying this character, my wife and I had seen it as an indictment – an indictment of the military that both requires people to act the way this character acts but destroys the person and his relationships in the process. Whereas he saw the film praising a man who couldn’t live a “normal” life, we saw it as explaining how the psychological barriers he constructed to do his job prevented him from entering into well-adjusted familial relationships. Whereas he saw glorification of war, we saw an explanation of its devastating effects on soldiers.

Why did we view this film so differently?

When my wife and I watched the film, we were sitting in our local art house theater in a Northeastern college town, with a hushed, reverent audience. When he watched the film, he was sitting in his living room in a rural Red State with people whooping and hollering at the explosions and complaining that the soldiers didn’t just “shoot all the Muslims.” It’s as though we watched two different films: one a sensitive exploration of the difficulties of war and the effects on the soldiers, the other a propaganda film like those shown for the National Guard or Air Force in a theater before the movie starts. The audience made all the difference.

So were there really two films? Two equally good readings?

No. Despite the differences, I think there is really only one film here. And frankly, there is only one “correct” reading of the film, which is the one my wife and I had. Some readings of a film are closed off, and I think the one my father-in-law had is the wrong one. It is understandable why he had it. The whooping and hollering of the audience overwhelmed the comparatively subtle notes that the film uses to make its point. He got that the lead character is a prick and was willing to see that this was caused or exacerbated by his position as a bomb-diffuser, but he held this view coming into the film, and missed that the film was trying to show this.

Is the film a failure if people can misread it so badly?

If my father-in-law’s friends could misread the film so badly, and see it as a work unreservedly praising the brave soldiers who are defending the country from those evil Arabs/Muslims/terrorists, does this mean that the film is a failure? Surely sometimes a film fails to achieve what it sets out to do. A film could try and fail to do what I think The Hurt Locker does successfully. But it doesn’t follow from this that everyone will understand it. Understanding a film (or “reading” it) is a skill that takes practice. We don’t think about it much because most of us have grown up absorbing the clues subliminally, and we don’t often reflect on how a film uses certain elements to tell its story or convey its elements. Most of us don’t know the 180 rule, couldn’t tell one lens from another, and could only guess at what an “establishing shot” is. But we might still suspect when the conventions surrounding these things are broken, even if we are not sure what the convention is or why it is being broken. And some of us spend time learning these elements because we want to become better readers of film, more engaged viewers, more reflective critics. It’s no more the film’s fault if people can’t read it than it is Shakespeare’s fault that a high school English student doesn’t get it. Like diffusing a bomb, “getting it” takes time, patience, and training.

Mild spoilers for How I Met Your Mother 5.15, “Rabbit or Duck” (February 8) and The Bible, Genesis 1:1

On Sunday, a football game was televised on CBS. More Americans watched it live than have watched any other television show in history. CBS ran a clever spot for How I Met Your Mother that just showed the show’s break-out character, sex-obsessed Barney Stinson, holding up a poster with his telephone number on it. (A friend I was with called immediately and got to a voicemailbox message by Neil Patrick Harris, in character.) This fed nicely into the next day’s show, in which Barney receives call after call from women interested in him because they saw him on TV.

Barney, sadly, runs into a problem. No matter how attractive the woman sitting across from him is, each time the phone rings he thinks that the next girl might be a little bit hotter. So he abandons whichever woman he is with to pursue the next one. And this slowly drives him crazy.

The show does a nice job of pointing out the problem faced by having too many choices. There’s a vast literature in psychology on this point, which has been summarized in an easy-to-understand book by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice. The basic point is that more choices can lead to less happiness.

But there is a different problem suggested by Barney’s particular struggle, and it is a problem that many philosophers and theologians have suggested might be one faced by God. God’s problem is this.

God decides to create a world, because that’s what a good God does. But being God, not just any world will do. God must choose the best possible world to create; anything less would be un-godlike. But there is no best possible world. There are infinitely many possible worlds that God could choose to create, and if we lined them all up from worst to best, the line would go on forever. So for each world that God could create, there would always be a better one. If this is the case, then it seems like God would not create any world.

So that leaves you with three choices. (1) There is no God, and this is just another reason why. (2) There is a best possible world, which we know because God created one (spoiler: it’s this one), so it is not true that for each possible world, there is a better one that God could have created. (4) God does not have to create the best possible world, just one that is good enough. This problem has been noticed for hundreds of years, so each of these has been defended by someone.

Barney’s situation is disanalogous to God’s in a lot of ways. For one, Barney doesn’t know if the next girl is hotter than the last, but God presumably knows if there is a better world. For another, God’s motivation seems a lot, well, healthier, than Barney’s.

But they both reveal the same problem. When presented with many choices, a reasonable maxim for acting (sleep with the hottest woman, create the best possible world) can lead one to not acting, which is worse than any (or many) of the alternatives. If one could be a satisficer (pick one that is just good enough) instead of a maximizer (pick the best one), one might be able to lead a much happier life.

Spoiler-free discussion of Lost, The X-Files, Fringe, and Dollhouse

The only reason I am looking forward to the final season of Lost, which begins tomorrow, is that it will finally be over.

Lost is a show with an expiration date printed on the label. Fortunately, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse understand that and have said for some time that the show should only go about 100 episodes. This season’s 16 episodes will put that total at about 121, roughly 50 more than was really necessary.

Lost works according to the Reverse X-Files Principle. The X-Files was a wonderful show about a skeptic and a believer (much like Jack and Locke on Lost) who were assigned cases that typical FBI agents couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. The show was very, very good at giving them a fascinating case to solve each week, and its loyal fans loved it to death on internet message boards by piecing together clues concerning long-running plots about aliens and government cover-ups (sounding familiar?). However, when the show tried to tackle long-arc topics, like the abduction of Fox Mulder’s abducted sister, the episodes were often duds. (Not always, but often.) The later seasons became too enamored with the mythology of the show and tried to make well over half of the late seasons’ episodes about dark forces moving against our beloved FBI agents. Thus begat The X-Files Principle: monster-of-the-week episodes that were light on the mythology are superior to the grind-it-out, mythology-heavy episodes.

Lost, though, acts according to The Reverse X-Files Principle. In the case of Lost, the most interesting episodes were those that advanced the mythology, and stand-alone, character-driven episodes were the least compelling. That is why the first season is so hit-or-miss. After a spectacular pilot, and spot-on blending of character, plotting, and mythology-building in episodes like “Walkabout,” too many of the episodes took us into the lives of characters that, frankly, weren’t all that interesting. Sun and Jin had an interesting dynamic on the island, and it was helpful to find out about their pasts, but episodes that simply follow them through their lives in Korea dragged on too long. The very worst were flashbacks involving Jack, easily the most one-dimensional character at the center of any critically adored drama. Terry O’Quinn as Locke was the only actor capable of turning any material into a work of art, while episodes focused on Kate, Hurley, Claire, Michael, and Charlie were at the whims of their episodes’ writing and mythologizing.

Since it has been five and one-half years since Lost began, we’ve had to suffer through lengthy stretches between seasons and sometimes just as interminable lapses in plot movement while Lost was on the air. And that was simply too long for a show so uneven as Lost. I know it has its devoted followers, and many critics consider it one of the golden jewels of television in the 2000s (on broadcast TV, no less!), I think it is so exasperating in its uneveness, that the density of the mythology makes it uninteresting to me (and, I’m sure, many others). I’d like to watch this final season of Lost as it airs to take part in this exciting moment in television history (which I do think it is), but I won’t be watching along. I’m still dreading my choice between watching the whole of the first five seasons again (ugh.) or trying to pick up in season four or five (huh?).

And that is why Lost is just too damned long. Too many non-mythology episodes to slough through. Too many episodes total for a show with such a dense mythology. Combine those two and you have television to dread, television as assignment rather than television as enjoyment. (I mean “enjoyment” in the full, critically aware sense, not in the watching Real Housewives sense.)

I could forgive Lost if I thought that it was better at correcting problems as it went on. But my viewing of later seasons (I made it half way into season five) never confirmed that those corrections were made. And that’s one of the reasons that I think both Fringe and Dollhouse were better television. Neither hit the highest highs of Lost, but both shows recognized problems with their first seasons (reining in William Gibson on Fringe, heavier mythology and less Eliza Dushku on Dollhouse). They found a smart balance of mythology, pushed the limits of dramatic storytelling’s adherence to the laws of physics, created memorable characters, and generally were smart and entertaining serials.

One question that this leaves us with is this: Is it better to love a show with higher highs and lower lows, or to love a show that is steadier but never reaches the same heights? Let us not confuse this with a show’s ambition. Fringe dares you accept things just as ludicrous as Lost does, and Dollhouse dares you to believe that its science is really possible and soon. And while neither invites inviting friends over for “event television” to the same level as Lost, I’m pretty sure I’ll find them more satisfying viewing on an episode-to-episode basis.

So I congratulate Abrams, Lindelof, and Cuse on their success on Lost, scattered though they are. They made a difference in television, changed its course in interesting ways. I hope those sitting down for the final season watch it with open minds for wherever (or whenever) they take it.