Flow 2010 Conference - Serial TV Narrative Wrap-up

Attending this year's Flow 2010 Conference reminded me of a few things. It reminded me how far I've wandered down the social science path of communication studies. It reminded me of the value of attending round-table conferences where the focus isn't on simply presenting your findings in a concise format, but rather on thinking out loud with many other informed individuals. Social science is often a matter of incremental gains in general knowledge. Where do the significant changes in theory and thinking about a topic come from? I think they come from places like the Flow 2010 Conference (or the blogosphere?).

I presented a brief position paper at one of two panels dedicated to serial TV narrative. My basic point was that a narrative doled out in semi-regular intervals over the span of years feels like the interactions we have with other people in a way that narratives doled out by other means do not. Something about reading a novel or watching a new Harry Potter movie once every 3 years feels inert and lifeless; I think some of that has to do with the evolution of TV stories over time (like our relationships with people evolving over time) and some of it has to do with our lack of total control over the pace and content of the story/relationship.

The discussion in the first panel got me thinking more about these gaps in between story parts. That seems to be a defining characteristic of narratives on TV as they are broadcast. What happens in those gaps? Janet Staiger noted that the gaps allow for extended periods of speculation of hypothesizing as to what is going to happen net in the story. The internet makes this kind of speculation collective, thereby heightening fan community, and I think this collective hypothesizing helps manage some of the anxiety people experience waiting for the next installment. The gaps also create the possibility for the creators of the story to adjust some of the elements in the story to respond to real life events (e.g. the incorporation of anti-terrorism federal agents in The Sopranos and The Wire post 9/11) while retaining a pre-established overall story arc (see Lindlof and Cuse's account of how they wrote Lost).

Its also important to note the regularity or irregularity of the gaps and how that affects the audience's experience of the story. I don't think its the existence of the gaps that makes audiences anxious so much as the existence of irregularity of gaps. Once I come to expect intervals of absences of certain durations at certain times, be it in a story I'm enjoying or a relationship of some sort, then I shape my expectations to conform to this. But if the intervals are of indeterminate length (is the show coming back? when is it coming back), people get antsy, or at the very least, they are somewhat detached in their devotion to the show. I like the idea of looking at Facebook newsfeeds as narratives, ones that evolve with us and are relevant to us. We have choice over when we choose to view them (although the bundling of these feeds together and with other sub-applications like party-planning makes it difficult to say "I want to check out how this one particular person's narrative is progression") but we can't choose when they update and typically people update irregularly. So perhaps we cannot be as devoted to an evolving Facebook feed narrative as a fictional TV narrative.

The second panel (in particular Ryan Lizardi's comments) got me thinking about the ideological potential of serial narratives, what I think Ryan referred to as a "long drip of ideology." There's something about a TV show, something about that frequent reinforcement of an idea over time and the ability to get everyone talking about certain topic in a certain way that has the potential to change people's minds about things. I provided two examples at the panel (The Wire changed how I thought about inner-city blight; The Up Series changed how I thought about success and happiness), but upon further reflection, I watched both of those on DVDs, not as they were broadcast. I suppose I'm not saying that other forms of narrative (TV on DVD, novels, movies) can't alter the way people think, but that TV as it is broadcast has the potential to change the national conversation about a topic (again, the water cooler).

Serial TV narratives may have the power to shift people in a positive direction, to help them consider a topic from a new point of view. But what do we lose when more narratives become increasingly serialized? I think we potentially lose the diversity of sampling different kinds of content (this is the "commitment" issue brought up by Bordwell on his blog on why he doesn't write about TV). If I have to watch 10 hours of a show and then watch it every week to be part of the conversation (which is the case with serial TV narrative), then I can't use that time to try out other content. Hence, there is less overlap in what we watch. This leads to a loss of a type of discourse about TV and, by extension, culture. Readers or DVD viewers can plow through a serial in a few days. Watching a show as it is broadcast requires a kind of protracted, scheduled commitment, and the talk about the show in between episodes is part of that commitment. So, serialization of narratives may be part of the social fragmentation phenomenon that comes with expansion of media options that other social critics have feared.

There is, of course, much more to say about serial TV narrative, but these are just a couple of ideas that I picked up from the panels that I wouldn't mind expanding on.

Last Thoughts on Lost

I never really liked Lost all that much. Every now and then, I would become immersed in it the way anyone can become immersed in a good story, but mostly I enjoyed it as a popular experimental narrative. It is the type of show that makes one reflect on one's own journey, so I struggled to recall when I started watching the show, while I was in Austin, off of bootlegged DVDs my roommate scored in Hong Kong. Since then, I've changed. Maybe I've become less tolerant of sentiment, or at least I look for it in different places (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the music I love give me all the deeply emotional experiences of memory that this show only began to give me). I've become more cerebral, less ashamed to engage in long debates about the possibility of time travel and social science experiments, and there again, I've found other places to scratch that itch (the internet, more school).

If we left behind the goal of loyalty or fidelity to an initial spirit of a show, the flexibility of written-as-they-go narratives could be a strength: they can grow with or grow apart from the audience and the creators. Most shows seem to become victims of their own success, losing the original thread and exploiting the trust of the audience. What Lost added to this was the transparency of the audience reaction to the show as it went along. Everyone could see the reactions to each show. The debate about how good or bad the show was in some way affected by viewers' immediate knowledge of others' opinions. I would think this would hinder a show from growing or changing.

What seems more significant is the ways in which my TV watching and media use habits have changed since I started watching the show, along with everyone else's. When I started watching, the show, like pretty much every other show, wasn't easy to watch online. For the last season, I watched most of the shows online, delaying watching as long as possible, reading synopses when I didn't feel like watching. For the series finale, I watched as a friend skyped with her sister hundreds of miles away, the laptop open, half of our attention focused on the show. In other words, I half-watched the show, something that wasn't possible in the way that its now possible. I did this not because I can't give TV shows my full attention anymore (I gave my full attention to Mad Men and continue to do so next season). I only half-liked Lost, only cared about the philosophy and the scientific experiments and mentally or physically tuned out when things got sappy. The show seems as ripe as any for a re-edit.

Then there are all the strange things happening outside of the show on ABC, the things that reminded me that I was watching television and not sitting in a darkened theater. The emotional ending gave way to a teaser for the local Detroit news: real people, really dead. Then, Jack Shepard walks out on the stage of Jimmy Kimmel's show for some incongruously semi-serious analysis of the show. Kimmel seemed unclear on whether to play things straight or crack wise, as I was while the last show was airing (should I make a snarky comment? Should I cry?).

I suppose what I liked most about the ending was that it ended with a death. That's the only real ending, right? The end of an individual consciousness. And the more I think about it, it really reminded me of Donny Darko: airline related disaster that does/does not kill the protagonist, protagonist engages in what may or may not be a prolonged hallucination about time travel after which he finally comes to terms with his own death and, in a way that is uncharacteristic of most Western narratives about death, dies peacefully, fondly recalling the lives he touched. Both stories tap into some cultural preoccupations: post-9/11 anxiety about flying (DD was made before 9/11 and was oddly prescient; its popularity might have something to do with the cultural resonance of plane crashes after its release), considering the implications of recent developments in philosophy and physics, trying to make sense of death and memory (these are more universal, long-standing preoccupations).

Lost and Time Travel, Resolved

I confess, I still love Lost, not b/c I find it particularly pleasurable to watch (the soapy dialogue is hackneyed, there are too many scenes where characters redundantly talk about how important events are but nothing really happens, the pacing is lousy, and the music is an emotional crutch), but b/c it tries to do a lot of different things. It takes chances in terms of its choice of stories, the way it tells the stories, and melding of genres, and the weaving of subplots. When you take chances like these, you mostly get shit, but it provides the viewer with the feeling that they might experience something genuinely new. I feel as though the show could produce an unfamiliar emotion or thought. Its like watching sports: I feel like anything could happen.

Of course, there have been experimental narratives before, but experimental films are limited in the ways they can muck around w/ viewers' brains b/c they can't be very long. Experimental literature is abundant, but I don't find it as immersing as TV. And yes, there has been plenty of experimental TV shows before (Twin Peaks, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, late-night public access weirdness, Ernie Kovacs, etc, etc), but I like Lost b/c its experimenting on a grand stage in front of millions of viewers. That's what I liked about Twin Peaks, especially the series finale. If that was a movie, a smaller subset of people would've gone to see it and they would've had different expectations. There's something about knowing that other people are having their heads fucked by a really weird TV show at the same time that its happening to you that makes it a richer experience.

At first, I didn't like the time travel idea, but its grown on me. Movies about time travel don't have the time to get into the implications and possibilities of it. Here, there's room to explore. I think they've raised the cheif problems with time travel (can one intervene in past events w/o creating paradoxes) and I have faith that they will offer something more than a simplistic deus ex machina in future episodes to resolve the problems. Or maybe they won't. But, see, this is the cool part of about a serial TV narrative that is written as it goes, why its different from novels or films. I believe that somewhere, the writers are wrestling with these problems, trying to figure them out. At the same time, I'm trying to figure them out. I've been motivated to do so by the interesting story and the characters (considering time travel in the abstract wouldn't be as fun for me). I cannot skip to the end. I can't google the answer, b/c the answer hasn't been written yet. But I can take the information that I have and evaluate the problems again and again, talking about them with others, writing about them.

It is interesting to see two different kinds of reception of this show: the critical reception by the NYTimes (which, in my opinion, is absolutely the wrong approach to the material), and the message board reception. I think the show is more of a game to be played with the audience, not a text on which we might pass judgment. If you don't want to play, don't watch or discuss. But if you don't like it, I feel as though its partly your fault for not playing along more. If you don't have fun playing a game, its not necessarily b/c the game sucks.

So, in the spirit of playing the game, here's my take on things. Is it possible that people could travel back in time, intervene in the past and continue to experience a subjectively continuous, linear reality? Sort of. When the characters in Lost appear to travel back in time, they don't really, literally go back in time. They travel to a facsimile of the past. They can do whatever they want in that past and it will affect the future of that world. They can use whatever knowledge they have about what the future of that world would have been to bring about desirable outcomes in their future but the world they are altering is not prior to the world in which they were before they traveled in time. Its more like a different place that happens to have people and objects that closely resemble the past. They have special knowledge in the new world, but they can't do things that will instantaneously change their physical or existential status. In this scenario, you could "go back in time" and kill Hitler before the Holocaust, thereby preventing the holocaust in that world that you traveled to. The holocaust would've still happened in the other time line that you were a part of before you traveled in time, but would that matter? What does it mean to say that something has happened? Why is it of any consequence? Regardless of whether or not we can travel in time, we have the same moral responsibilities and the same desires for happiness. If I had the knowledge and the ability to prevent a holocaust from happening, I must do that, whether or not it undoes a holocaust that already happened. It makes me think of Daniel Dennett's essay "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise—So What?" The gist, if I remember correctly, is that whether or not there is a god, whether or not we have free will, whether or not you're operating in a contiguous or parallel reality, does not matter as much as you think it might. You still want to be compassionate, you still want to love and be loved, and you still want to avoid displeasure, and you do so based on what you can observe with your senses. Other possible worlds (one in which Hitler wins WWII, one in which he gets accepted to art school and lives happily ever after) are infinite in number but cannot affect your physical/psychological experience of reality, therefore they are of no consequence to you. Even if, in those other worlds, there are real people who are really suffering, if you can't potentially interact with them or even observe them, then they're not worth thinking about. Regarding Schrodinger's cat, when the cat is in the box, it doesn't matter if it is alive, dead, or "both." If this all seems very abstract and philosophical, consider the moral dilemma of the amnesiac murderer.

This puts the time traveler in a bit of a bind. They're morally obligated to visiting every possible world and preventing bad things from happening (a la Quantum Leap). I think the characters from Lost are off the hook b/c the mechanisms used to travel through time are unpredictable, so even if they wanted to visit parallel worlds that are the functional equivalents of their pasts and prevent bad shit from happening, they would have a very tough time doing so.

What if a character went back in time and killed their parents. Would that negate his or her existence? No. It would negate the existence of person who resembles him or her, but he or she is still a person with a personal past. So, my theory is that the characters in Lost can't change their material or psychological experience of reality by changing the past. Their bodies and minds can only move linearly, forward through a single time line, even though they may jump between worlds that resemble past and future points on that single timeline. Problems solved!

Mapping Narratives

I thought I'd post an abridged version of the paper I presented at this year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference here.

Here's what i had in mind: at any given moment in a film, information is being imparted to the viewer. At the same time, the viewer is aware (to varying degrees) of whether or not various characters are privy to this information. If you see a monster sneaking up behind the heroine, you are aware of the mortal threat to the heroine and you are aware of the fact that she is not aware of the monster. Thus, you feel that the heroine is quite vulnerable, more vulnerable than she would have been had she known that the monster was right behind her.

I'm positing that many (if not all) emotions a viewer experiences are dependent on fluctuations in these relative ranges of knowledge of events over the course of a narrative. For this project, I made some rather crude charts to illustrate my proposed mode of analysis. These charts show the course of movie narratives, and points during that narrative at which a key bit of information (an obvious threat to the protagonist or an obvious aid in helping he or she achieve his or her goal). 1=high level of knowledge ; 0=low level of knowledge. Click on slides for detail.



Flaws: as someone was kind enough to point out at my presentation, I have left out so many subtle aspects of narration (information revelation) in this crude model. The slightest bit of music or glance from a character could be considered a bit of information that would affect our emotions and our perception of goals and threats. To this I would say: I'm working on it. As I said, this model is very basic and crude. While watching movies for this paper, I became aware of the almost infinite amount of information that narratives dole out. And yet, it is not truly infinite. Also, it can be categorized, into threats and goals, by character awareness, perhaps by level of ambiguity. With a more sophisticated data visualization tool, I think I could create a chart that incorporates every bit of information in a narrative that could possibly affect viewer emotion. You could zoom in on various sections of the narratives, or highlight certain types of information.

Then there's the question of motivation. This model works well enough when the goals and threats are well defined, and when viewer identification with the protagonist is relatively straight forward. But what about when its not? When you look at them closely, many movies are bound to have moments of ambiguity concerning motivation, or the status of some bit of information vis a vis a given character. To that, I would say: this is one of the reasons why viewers do not have identical experiences of the same movie. Their experience and values will shape their identification and also their interpretation of some information as possibly helping or hindering a character. And yet, I do not think it is infinitely varied.

In any case, there is a way to set about proving the worth of this mode of analysis. I propose hooking a few viewers up to machines that measure their physiological states and comparing the read out yielded from those sessions with some narrative maps. We may not be able to say that a moment on our viewer physiological reaction chart represents "guilt" or "suspense," but I think we would be able to see fluctuations in the viewer's mental and physiological states. If those fluctuations corresponded to fluctuations on the more sophisticated narrative charts I hope to make in the future, in terms of the fluctuation's spacing, their duration, their degree (which I believe they would) then I think we could start to see how the machinery of narrative actually works on our emotions.

I think we already know the basics of this, intuitively. We're all familiar with the tropes of suspense, with dramatic irony, with farce. This is extending (and exacting) that intuition.

Why Screenwriters Get No Respect, and How They Can Get It

Listening to this interview with Akiva Goldsman on The Business rekindled my interest in the status of screenwriters. We all know that screenwriters are treated like shit in Hollywood. They're typically not well known and not well paid. I've always thought of the screenwriters as the primary authors of films. Yes, I know that directors and cinematographers shape the look of the film, that producers' tastes are the only reason the screenplay gets made into a film, and that movie stars bring certain cultural cache that affects the interpretations of the audience and helps films get made. I've come to value all the input of every creative person who works in the industry. I firmly believe that every one of them has some impact on how a film is received, and that if even one of those elements is out of place, a film that could've been great would turn out to be awful. But still, the appeal of Hollywood films is less about lighting, acting, and even subject matter. Its about a well-told story. Its still my contention that everything else can only either augment or detract from the core emotions and ideas that are in the screenplay. As they say: the story's the thing.

Then why aren't writers more well known and paid more $? It has something to do with how many there are of them and how quickly they can be shifted from picture to picture. Goldsman points out that everyone piece of the cinematic division of labor pretty much stays put during production. It would be unthinkable to go through 10 wardrobe people during a film, but completely normal to go through 10 writers.

A less extreme version of the infinite monkey theorum applies here, and while I'm not quite calling screenwriters 'monkeys,' I am saying that they're partially responsible for their low status in Hollywood. Part of the reason that everyone has a screenplay (and not everybody is a budding cinematographer) is b/c the tools of the trade - paper and pen - are pretty damn cheap. As digital production and distribution costs fall, maybe they'll be the kind of glut of talent in other realms of filmmaking, but still, it seems like writing will always have this edge.

How are screenwriters responsible for their lowly status? I think that they have a certain view of writing and are unwilling to depart from it.

My theory is that screenwriters are:

A) too married to their work. So when a producer asks them to change something in the script b/c it doesn't test well or b/c the producer has done many films like this and "knows the audience," the screenwriter refuses, and is summarily replaced. They don't think about the finished screenplay as something that can be radically altered after it has been completed, by them or by anyone else. The economics or production and distribution necessitates that work be seen this way. Producers can't know exactly how a film is going to play from looking at a treatment. Screenplays are like theories, and the process of bringing one to the screen involves various little experiments, each of which either confirm or deny the effectiveness of the film. If its denied, you don't just give up. You retain some elements and introduce new ones. You revise. Sure, the producer is a false proxy for the audience, but still, he's more detached and experienced than most screenwriters.

B) too into the idea that storytelling is an art and not a craft, and that the spirit that moves one to write and the place where the ideas come from cannot be pinned down. Either you got it or you don't. It comes from the soul, and the worst thing you could possibly do is to compare writing to a science (like I just did).

The theory I offer here is a self-serving one (but that doesn't make it wrong). I want to teach visual storytelling, therefore I'd love it if writers looked at screenwriting as more of a teachable craft and less of a "you got it or you don't" kind of art.

Maybe that's true, and maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. But there seems to be some evidence to the contrary. If you look at the most successful screenwriters, a good number of them have read screenplay manuals (which are imperfect for reasons I'll explain), have gone to film school, or generally see writing as (at least partially) a teachable craft. If good writing really "came from the soul" and not the textbook, then wouldn't all successful writers not have read any screenplay manuals or taken one screenwriting class? I'll readily concede that plenty of great writers aren't taught but born, but the amalgam of taught/born writers suggests that there's something about writing you can teach. And I think part of the reason more great writers haven't been taught is b/c they're not teaching in the right way. Manuals provide a hard-and-fast formula, when really its an ever-mutating process that is (like pretty much every phenomena in the world) better known through a combination of ongoing experiments and classic books . So, if Hollywood continues to run this way (at least partially), how long can screenwriters keep preaching the gospel of the gut and scratching their heads at why they can't get any respect?

Also note that writing screenplays in the revisable, experimental mode isn't antithetical to creativity. Someone has to come up with the ideas to try, and the best screenwriters will still be the ones with the deepest wells of creativity, the "biggest guts."

If they did change the way they thought about screenwriting, then maybe the hierarchy would change a bit. Maybe a flexible writer would stay put on a film longer, or collaborate with a producer or studio longer. Its in the best interests of producers to collaborate with known entities. The business isn't out to screw writers. They just want them to be a bit more flexible.

Who Thinks Ambiguity Sucks?

The finale of The Sopranos has sparked familiar discussion over the merits of open-ended narratives, but perhaps on an unprecedented scale. Its the IMDB debate over Mulholland Drive writ large, with familiar defenses (its consistent with the rest of the author's work; though it has no definable narrative meaning, it has allegorical/thematic meaning - that Tony's life will always be full of threats and dread) and derisions (ambiguity and vagueness is a sign of laziness or contempt on the part of the author). Both camps seem intensely aware of one another, thanks to the internet, and assume that divining the intention of the author is akin to knowing the true meaning of the episode. I'm beginning to think that if Last Year at Marienbad were released today, there would be a time-travel theory about it and Robbe-Grillet would be called a self-indulgent asshole.

Oddly, sports guys and morning DJs were analyzing the conclusion as much as media critics were. Debates of this fervor and scale only really happen with texts that attract split audiences: jocks and nerds, melodrama addicts and sci-fi freaks (see Lost). European art film ambiguity doesn't ruffle feathers, but TV, with its relatively broad appeal, cannot help but do so. Michael Wilbon of ESPN's PTI claimed that the ambiguity was Chase's way of not following his vision, of trying to be all things to all people. Scott Tobias of The Onion AV Club thought that the ambiguous ending was evidence that Chase had maintained his unique vision, refusing to bow to audience or studio executive pressure. Even the meaning/worth of discrete attributes of the conclusion are debatable.

Lost in some of the debate over the merit of the final scene are the extensions of thematic concerns of the series in the last episode. Among the small details: TVs in the background of the episode providing an incongruous or enervating distraction (Little Miss Sunshine on TV in Sil's hospital room; AJ watching a politician dance mashup with his model girlfriend; the clip from The Twilight Zone episode entitled "The Hack" in the back of the Bing; the TVs in the loony bin with Junior). This is in keeping with Jeffrey Goldberg's assessment of Chase's motives as "anti-television." Its an argument I'm sympathetic to, especially when it comes to TVs in public places which essentially control public emotion (an effect that the security forces designing and running American airports are surely familiar with). The fact that many viewers think that a guy walking into a bathroom is a sign of impending doom is a sign of how deeply influenced we all are by mob stories, on the big or small screen. AJ's decision (caving to his parents' wills) to go into movies instead of the Army is another way of saying that we use media as an opiate more than catalyst for action.

I also liked how AJ got shamed out of being smart again. Before, it was "Nitch." This time, its "Yeets." Can you really blame him for taking the easy way out - helping to churn out forgettable shitty Hollywood movies - instead of getting smart when people laugh at his attempts to learn? Another knock at a society Chase seems to have stopped hiding his contempt for. The episode, after all, is titled "Made in America."

I made some remark at the conclusion of a class I taught on TV & Post TV about the arbitrariness of endings of serial narratives. The only true end to any story (to paraphrase Jonathan Franzen and countless others, I'm sure) is death. If characters ride off into the sunset, if they get married, there will always be something after that. The last 30 seconds of The Graduate offer a rare authorial acknowledgment of this fact (its rather telling that Hollywood simply couldn't accept this rare instance of brilliant open-endedness, and somehow churned out a semi-sequel 35 years later). There's the "Waiting for Godot" ending, sitting in an unchanging room, waiting forever. I suppose David Chase could've locked up Tony in a prison cell and remained consistent with the plot of the show, but it might've seemed too moral, and certainly too reminiscent of Seinfeld's much-hated conclusion. So, you can either snuff out the lead consciousness of the show, or you can acknowledge the fact that things just keep going, after our view on them ceases to exist. At the conclusion of the British Office, Tim mentions this - after the audience leaves, the characters' lives go on, one failure after another victory until death. The Sopranos gave us both options - death or simply the end of our view on their lives. As I see it, there really aren't any other options.

Lastly, its kinda funny that a sudden cut to black (often mislabled as a fade to black) will, for the time being, be read as a humorous reference to The Sopranos. In fact, any loss of picture due to technical difficulties may cause me to think back to this episode.

The Sopranos Final Moments

Its been said that David Chase didn't want to send a typical mob-story message with the conclusion of The Sopranos. If Tony was triumphant, that would essentially say that crime pays. If Tony died or was thrown in jail, that would say what most Hays code era mob stories said: crime doesn't pay. How, then, can you end The Sopranos (or any story, for that matter) without sending a message?

The Sopranos always distanced us from the main characters to some extent. We sympathized with them, but we also analyzed them and laughed at them. It was never about getting sucked into a narrative where you were more emotionally involved than you were intellectually involved. The immersion in the diegetic world you felt was a secondary pleasure. At most, its a hybrid between family drama and aloof satire. Though its been said that messages aren't David Chase's style, I'd argue that he still likes to use the show to comment (albeit in subtle and often ambiguous ways) on life, rather than as a way to get viewers emotionally involved in the lives of fictional characters. The show was, of course, marketed and talked about like any other show. We were supposed to care whether or not Tony died, and I suppose a lot of viewers did (the ones who are probably extremely pissed off after the conclusion of the series). But personally, I never got that involved in the story. The show was never really about the war between the two families. There weren't that many cliffhangers. So the ending of the show doesn't really piss me off. I'm still not sure that I like it, though.

At the very least, I admired it because it left me with a unique feeling, which is pretty hard to do after several millennia of storytelling. I imagine that a lot of people would write off the ending as lazy ambiguity, ending a show in medias res because he couldn't think of any satisfying way to end it - the ultimate cop out or, worse, a prank. Maybe, but I think that's oversimplifying. In the last scene, there's a very conscious build-up of tension through cross cutting between Tony & Carmela, Meadow (safely?) outside the restaurant, and the shady dude who walked in with AJ. Clearly, we are meant to think that this shady dude will abruptly spoil the familial idyll at the diner table. The family is finally getting along for once, and now it will be shattered. I knew this trope, and yet my heart was still beating a mile a minute at the end.

There's some dramatic irony at the conclusion: the characters think they're fine, but because of what the narration shows us, and because we're well versed in tension building exercises that have littered Hollywood since the days of D.W. Griffith, we're convinced that they're not fine at all. That's the tension at the end: between the lives the characters know and what we know of their world. True ambiguity would've given us and the characters competing cues as to what was about to happen. If it had been a "choose-you-own-adventure" or a "viewer-supplies-the-ending," like many are mistaking it for, it would've presented us with competing cues of at least 2 possible (and equally likely) outcomes. While one could argue that it was equally possible that what Tony was looking at in the final frame was either is killer or Meadow, its telling that one of those possibilities is extremely mundane. If you're 50% sure that a person coming through a door, any door, at any time, is coming to kill you, then that's not the same as when a character is in a temporary state of mortal danger (always the case with choose-your-own-adventures) and he/she may or may not make it out alive.

Instead of wondering whether he'll be fine or whether he'll die, we're nearly certain that he's going to die. The final emotion is one of dread and unrealized fear, not curiousity. The final violent act is unseen, and perhaps is all the more powerful because of that. Then again, maybe he's fucking with us and I'm overanalyzing. I've found that most people err on the side of "the writer is fucking w/ us" simply because they're afraid of being made to look like fools. At the same time, there are those blind acolytes who will find meaning in anything, regardless of whether the author intended it, or whether other people find that meaning. Another possibility that isn't considered by many: maybe he's doing both. Maybe he's telling the closure-junkies raised on serial TV to go fuck themselves, and he's leaving those willing to look deeper with a unique ending that was as unpredictable as the show always was. As with David Lynch films and TV shows, the ambiguity reveals cultural differences, what we find acceptable in our art, or if we believe that TV is a place for art.

Speaking of Lynch, I kept thinking back to the most provocative conclusion of a story I'd ever seen, one that sparked my interest in the possibilities of TV, film, pop culture, and art: Twin Peaks. Its worth noting that David Chase claims to be a big fan of that series, and that Lynch catches plenty of shit for not concluding his stories in a classical, unambiguous manner. The Twin Peaks ending more obviously evoked feelings of dread, but the more I think about the conclusion of The Sopranos, the more I see parallels between the two endings. They're both deeply unsettling, partly because we're aware of some horrible thing that the characters are not aware of.

I think this will come out on subsequent viewings. There was so much build-up, so much general hype and momentum that it was hard, even for the distanced viewer, not to get caught up in expecting what they were about to see. As time passes, perhaps the feeling of being cheated will, too.

Footnote: I actually mis-remembered the last shot. I thought I saw Meadow coming through the door, when in fact I only saw Tony's reaction. There is not shot of Meadow entering. Such is the power of great editing. Also, Bill on Time magazine's article's comments caught a significant bit of editing I noticed but quickly forgot about: we see a shot of Tony glancing into the diner followed by an impossible POV shot of Tony sitting at a table. A witness to his own death?

Is The Sopranos a Unified, Coherent Text?

As The Sopranos concludes next Sunday, I keep wondering whether it could be watched (or taught) in the same way that an epic novel could be read. The amount of time one would need to watch it roughly corresponds to the time it would take to read an epic novel - about a semesters' worth of watching, at a leisurely pace of 6 hours per week.

The most obvious thing working against any TV show aspiring to be be great, lasting art is the fact that they are written as they go along. Everyone loves to point out that Dickens wrote classics in serial format, and that some great works of literature and film were parts of a serial that was written as they went along, but generally, the most read, most cited, most resonant works tend to be conceived of at once, with an overarching plot, OR they have such a structure imposed on them afterwards.

Even if David Chase was more secure than most show runners, virtually guaranteed the right to end the show on his terms, there's still the issue of multiple writers and directors with separate visions. Naturally, these visions must pass muster with the show runner, but still there are more likely to be tangents that don't tie into the whole arc of the story. Of course, these tangents may develop the characters, or be thematically resonant with the rest of the show, but there seems to be the expectation on the part of critics and viewers that each episode and season provide a certain amount of plot points related to a story that carries through from the start of the show to the end.

The critical discourse on Slate often describes ways in which themes and actions that occur in the final season tie into themes and actions that happened in earlier seasons. The mere fact that the show achieved some unity despite being on television (which is assumed to work against authors' efforts to created a unified text) is worthy of praise; so much the better if those themes resonate with the culture and all cultures in general.

But is this kind of unity unlike what Terry Winter laments about network TV: "where everything is wrapped up in neat little bows"? On one end of the spectrum, we have "reality," where there are no conclusions until each of our consciousnesses are snuffed out, where there are infinite vantage points instead of the lone POV of the narration. On the other end, we have the half-hour sitcom, where no actions have lasting consequences, and we're offered a single point of view and many "neat and tidy" conclusions. Somewhere in the middle are the great works of narrative art. But I think that their inner unity or cohesion isn't praiseworthy because its more realistic than sitcoms and such (though that may be true), but more because of a long standing rule of aesthetic judgment: unity = quality.

The last episode didn't quite cohere with the rest of the show to the degree that other episodes in the final season did. It featured a lot of Tony "checking in" with various characters (e.g. Uncle Junior, Janice, Paulie) who were no longer causally connected with the major plotlines that were still in play - will Tony be indicted or murdered by Phil, etc. AJ's multiple reversals were consistent with his confused adolescent character, but still felt a little haphazard. The show did, however, maintain a thematic unity, commenting on American entertainment (particularly TV), depression, and corruption from the very beginning to the very end (though the observations about AJ's depression seemed to run out of steam in the last episode). As for the last scene, I think that it was more consistent with the rest of the show than many are likely to realize.

Of course, unity isn't everything. There are a million reasons why The Sopranos is a great show, or why any story that isn't particularly well unified can be just as affecting as any other.

Why 1.5-3.5 hours?

On the two DVDs I watched last week – Julien Donkey Boy and Playtime – critics and/or writer/directors defend the work in question by saying that they were part of an effort to push motion picture making forward, to change the language of cinema. I appreciated those sentiments, and yet, I can’t say that I enjoyed either film very much, even though I knew before watching them that they were going to be “different.” Why couldn’t I break out of my standard viewing strategy of guessing what will happen to the characters, or guessing what kind of artistic statement either film would be, what specific developments in cinematic language they would bring about?

Part of it has to do with the fact that a movie unfolds over time. If you want to be non-linear, or non-narrative, fine, but you cannot change the fact that certain parts of the whole will be viewed before the whole can be evaluated. Thus, its really hard to banish the thoughts of “what will the whole turn out to be” or “how will the parts fit together” from the viewer’s mind.

With an abstract painting, you get it all at once, therefore there is no wondering what the whole will look like. You can try on different interpretive stances while looking at the painting. There is no penalty for adopting a stance which doesn’t turn out to be fruitful. You can just start over. However, with film (or any mode of expression that unfolds over time), there is a penalty for adopting an “unproductive” stance towards the material. Each passing moment, if you didn’t orient yourself in a certain way towards the film/video, then you’ll have to do the work of revising your initial interpretations after the fact, or you’ll have to watch it again. And many art films, Julien Donkey Boy and Inland Empire among them, flirt with traditional narrative structure within scenes and between scenes to such a degree that its very hard not to keep switching between various stances towards the work, and, in the end, feeling a bit lost.

Another thing that caused me to fall back into that traditional “what happens next” narrative viewing strategy is the fact that these films are almost always between 1.5 and 3.5 hours, roughly the same length as traditional narrative films. Really, the only thing I’m used to watching that is that long is a traditionally structured narrative. If Julien Donkey Boy had been a 9 hour long looped installation at a museum, or a sort of fictitious 9-hour webcam narrative available online, or a 10 minute short, I would've viewed it in a totally different way. Even if I know to try to watch either of these films as “art films,” its really hard to overcome that habit of viewing 2 hour motion pictures in a certain. Filmmakers like Harmony Korine and David Lynch have discovered how liberating digital video can be in terms of the footage shot, and yet they’re still slaves to the time constraints of cinema, for no good reason that I can discern.

My favorite example of an “art film” that I was absolutely devastated by is Clu Galagher’s A Day with the Boys – 10 minutes long. But had this been 1 and a half hours long, I’m almost sure it would’ve had very little impact on me. Really short videos get to you before you have time to wonder if you’re viewing it “the right way,” or if you need to keep track of characters. Really long videos/films (Empire, though I’ve never experienced it, seems to have this effect) wear you down, until you give up trying to interpret it and just let it happen.