Inessentials

Nearly spoiler-free discussion of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Lost

Critical consensus is that The Wire is the best television show of the decade, and probably the best show in the history of television. Perhaps despite being the best, though, the show is not particularly influential. Media scholar Jason Mittell recently wrote that The Wire, like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, is immediately recognized by informed viewers/listeners as a great work of art, but also recognized as completely inimitable. You admire it, you are in awe of it, but you don’t attempt to do what it does. Perhaps partly, you are intimidated, but more importantly it seems like something that it would be impossible to try and copy. So not only do you not try to examine why it is successful and then copy it, you don’t even try to draw any lessons from what makes that show great. Its greatness is unique and its uniqueness is inimitable.

In comparison, I’d like to add that despite being vastly inferior to The Wire, The Sopranos may be the most influential television show since Friends. (Possible exception for Survivor.) And while I felt the show was consistently over-rated and I lost interest in the show after two seasons, I do think The Sopranos had a much bigger impact on television than The Wire. The variety of its influences is as notable as the intensity of its influence.

1. It convinced Hollywood actors that there were great roles for them in television. Dennis Leary, Glenn Close, and more came to TV in large part because they watched The Sopranos and found the stories so powerful and the acting so superb that they thought they could do better there than in Hollywood. The standard for dramatic acting was upped.
2. In what would become one of the most annoying trends on television in the 2000s, The Sopranos used therapy as a contrivance to give actors an opportunity to go mono a mono in scenes that seemed designed for an actors’ workshop. You could determine a show’s pretensions by how often its characters went to therapy (except for Monk, which used the trope for comic effect). By the time Gregory House, M.D., got around to it, he had to be fully committed to an asylum for there to be any plausibility in what was by 2009 a hackneyed plot device.
3. Want to get arty? Try a dream episode! We’ll have nearly silent scenes played out on a boardwalk, and everyone will want to get in on the game. Sure, Buffy also did it with “Restless,” but it was David Chase who codified the idea that inner turmoil over a tough decision should be visually represented in a dream episode or dream sequence. Protege Matthew Weiner would add a twist by making Don Draper’s dreams into daydreams and memories, but the basic model still holds.
4. Great television happens on cable. Drama found its home on cable, with each channel that wanted to make a name for itself finding a flagship drama that would define its ambitions (AMC’s Mad Men, SciFi/SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, FX’s The Shield, Showtime’s Dexter). Each of these was an attempt to build a brand through HBO’s success with The Sopranos (and to a much lesser extent, Sex and The City and Six Feet Under).
5. Catholics get all the good stories. If you want religious characters on television, two rules apply: they’ve gotta be Christian, and they’ve gotta be nondescript or Catholic. Evangelical? Charismatic? Mennonite? And, God forbid, Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist? Good luck! The Sopranos reinforced the notion that guilt is what makes religion interesting, and Catholics hold the reigns on dramatic guilt. (The idea of Jewish guilt, with its siblings harping and nagging, get manifested in comedic roles, and we’re talking drama here.) Obviously, Big Love stands as an exception, but we all recognize how exceptional that sympathetic and unflinching portrayal of religion is. If you don’t want to play up the guilt, go the Reverend Lovejoy route and make the character nondescript and mainline, and then use that for a funny episode of how your sit-com family is conflicted over whether to take the kids to church.

I could go on and on about how The Sopranos either created or reinforced various ideas about television drama in its storytelling and in its prominence, but let’s get back to The Wire. What is The Wire‘s legacy?

Its legacy is not the complex, long-developing storylines. Attempts at that style of storytelling wore their Lost comparisons openly, or were soapy WB/UPN/CW teeny-bopper shows. No episode of The Wire (including the pilot) makes sense by itself, any more than a chapter of a novel could stand on its own. Lost built its mythology as it went and used mysterious clues to keep the viewer guessing, but The Wire presumes that you would understand each character had a backstory in the way that a newspaper article about the Great Recession assumes you lived through the financial crisis of 2008. It simply picks up mid-way through a story and lets the viewer fill in the rest. It does it without the wink to the viewer that Lost is always giving (there’s a polar bear on a tropical island, but we’re not telling you why!). It is played with a completely straight face, with a seriousness appropriate to a newspaper story.

Its legacy is not the quality of the acting, which was uniformly superb. The acting on The Wire is not showy the way it is on The Sopranos or even Mad Men. Who would you give an Emmy to in any given year? Obviously The Wire had some of the most memorable characters in the history of television, but even when the actors were doing their best work, there was no guarantee that they would get an Emmy-ready episode written for them. Just as each character is beaten down by the system, each performance is subsumed to the story of the city of an American city. (Maybe Baltimore should have won an Emmy?) And while other television shows openly stole actors from the stable developed by the superb East Coast casting, no one is giving Michael K. Williams roles like James Gandolfini is offered.

If there is any legacy for The Wire, it will be the way it elevated the possibility of television as an art form. People who don’t care about TV can find that they care about The Wire, just as someone with no art background can find the joy in a Christo and Jeanne-Claude. You tell your friends about The Wire the way that Mittell tells his friends about Astral Weeks. Referring to a remarkable run of films in the ’50s and ’60s, Mike D’Angelo recently wrote that Jean-Luc Godard was a game-changer who didn’t change the game at all. And that may be exactly what happened with The Wire. It was so great, so special, so revered, that no one really knows how to do more than name-check it.

On Friday night I had the pleasure of watching a 35mm print of 1969′s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In attendance were William Goldman, the screenwriter, and Robert Crawford, who directed The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which invented the making-of documentary that is now an expected part of every DVD release. At the time, no one had ever thought to film what was happening behind the scenes on a film. George Roy Hill, who directed Butch Cassidy, wanted to know what exactly it was that he did as a director, and he thought it would be helpful to students of film studies (then a burgeoning topic of study) at his alma mater Yale University. (You can watch the entire documentary for free here. Some NSFW language.) Crawford had interesting things to say about the production and its stars, but the highlight of the evening was listening to 78 year-old William Goldman discuss screenwriting and the production of Butch Cassidy in particular.

While there were plenty of revealing elements about the casting of the film (originally Paul Newman wanted to play the Sundance Kid with Jack Lemmon in the Butch Cassidy role; Marlon Brando wanted in; Warren Beatty wanted in; Robert Redford was a virtual unknown at the time), it was Goldman discussing the writing process that was so interesting. He had plenty of advice to give. For starters, don’t be a playwright. (In part because critics are people who have failed at everything else in life and are thus very nasty, a view I thought had died away years ago.) Second, quoting himself in what has become a classic line about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” Why did his script sell for a record $400,000 after a bidding war when two weeks before every studio but one rejected it? Because in Hollywood, everyone is guessing. Nobody knows why (to use his examples) The Hangover was a massive hit and the Bruce Willis vehicle Surrogates flopped. But one thing you can be sure of is that the wrong person will be blamed. When Hill was searching for a cinematographer for Butch Cassidy, he chose Conrad L. Hall. But Warner Brothers blamed Hall for Morituri (1965), a flop addled by production problems, problems that Goldman attributed to its notoriously difficult stars, Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner. Hill provided an ultimatum to the studio over Hall, the studio caved, and the result is one of the most luscious soft-focus westerns ever made.

That soft-focus style (over-exposed, back-lit) has gone out of fashion (hastened in part by the shift from film to digital over the last decade, I would speculate), but watching the light play off Newman, Redford, Katherine Ross, and those Utah and Wyoming landscapes off a well-preserved film strip is something staggering to behold. I’m a firm believer in watching a movie in a manner as close to its recording style (digital projection for digital video, film projection for film strips) and this further confirms my commitment to that principle.

Goldman, who also wrote the scripts for The Princess Bride (based on his book), The Stepford Wives (1965), All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, Misery, and Absolute Power, is a film legend. But as he expressed, the only two films he was involved with that he thinks worked out okay are Butch Cassidy and The Princess Bride.

He admitted that this is only the second time in the last forty years that he has watched Butch Cassidy, and he said he was pleased by how well it helped up. He attributed that success to the performances of Newman and Redford, the direction of Hill, and the cinematography of Hall, but it doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein to figure out that the screenwriter gave the film many of its most poignant and influential elements: the Jules and Jim-style interplay of the three leads, the meditations on the death of the Wild West and all that was lost and gained by it, the immensely influential dialogue filled with playful banter and light-hearted irony, the twist on the no-backing-down attitude of John Wayne westerns, and the fully formed male leads that most film historians agree invented the buddy-film genre. Hill may have been devastated that people laughed at his tragedy (to the point of cutting out many of the scenes that got the biggest laughs), but the blend of comedy and tragedy created a tone hardly matched in American film.

Thank you, Mr. Goldman.

Spoilers for The Proposal (but nothing you couldn’t figure out from the trailer)

The problem with romantic comedies today is that they are neither romantic nor comedic.

That’s the attention grabber, the obvious joke, the easy jab. But it’s not quite true.

Of course there are truly unromantic films with no chemistry between the leads that pass as romantic comedies. And of course there are truly unfunny films with stale jokes and unwatchable delivery. After all, Jessica Alba and Dane Cook still find work.

But let me suggest that the single largest problem with the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy is not lack of charisma (Clive Owen, George Clooney, Paul Rudd, and apparently Bradley Cooper; Julia Roberts, Amy Adams, and, given the opportunity, Anna Faris). It’s not that the romantic comedy has been supplanted by the man-as-boy comedy (the Judd Apatow and Adam McKay/Will Ferrell films) or the bromance (I Love You, Man, The Hangover), although that has taken its toll. The biggest problem with the romantic comedy is that it has become mired in a genre convention that it surely doesn’t need: the humorless resolution.

Watching the passable exercise that is The Proposal earlier this summer, I was struck by how few jokes arrived in the final 45 minutes of the film. The first 45 minutes gave us Sandra Bullock (who I find immensely cold and irritating, so her role as a cold and irritating boss was welcome) and Ryan Reynolds (carving out a nice niche for himself with above-expectation rom-coms) getting engaged so she doesn’t get deported. (Don’t worry, she’s Canadian! = Not a terrorist!) Predictably, they have to sell this to Reynolds’ family, who had higher hopes for him. Hilarity (or a passable, low-fat alternative) ensues. With sexy results.

I’m not giving much away to say they end up falling in love (but how will they ever admit it to each other … and themselves?). What was surprising was that the film managed to have a light tone, some funny even though predictable bits, and a not terrible laugh-to-sigh ratio. So why did I leave the film with a sour taste in my mouth? There was absolutely nothing funny about the last 30 minutes, in which we are supposed to be carried along by nothing more than our desire to see these two can’t-admit-it-but-they’re-love-birds make it. We don’t care. We are given no reason to care. But even if we were, why do the jokes have to stop? Where is it written that the comedy has to stop when the romance starts? William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles didn’t need to stop the jokes when they moved to the bedroom. That’s where the best stuff happens. Cary Grant, Carole Lombard … name your favorite classic Hollywood comedian who could play a romantic lead and every one of their successes was built upon their continuing the jokes even after they realize they’re in love. When Cary Grant is convincing His Girl Friday that she is still in love with him and not her fiance, the film is just beginning, not ending.

Romantic comedies have too fine a pedigree for us to allow these current incarnations to continue telling us that romance begins when the joking stops. Romantic comedies work when there is romancing through comedy, not romance usurping comedy.