I try, I try, I try, oh how I try. Oh how much better would be my life be if I were cool enough to be nerdy, but I just don't get it. Please pity me all ye nerds for I have striven to be as you all for so very very long, and have failed nearly as spectacularly with you as I ever did with the cool kids. For thirty years, the nerds and I have eyed each other across a lunch table of outcasts with mutual suspicion and recrimination; but so much as I always wanted to be but one of you, I have never finished a science fiction or fantasy book and said to myself at the end, "I'm so glad I read that." Mostly because I couldn't finish it.
I have never looked at a cosplay and said to myself "You absolutely don't look like someone who would fashion design for Hitler." I could not understand what was great about graphic novels until I found Will Eisner and realized they could touch on universal emotions in addition to whiz-bang action. It took me years of listening to whichever hard/thrash/grind/crust/metal/industrial/death/sludge-core music friends would play for me before I could hear anything likeable in these bands who 'just don't care what we think.' I have sat patiently in rooms with friends watching anime and manga for decades and 90% of the time received no pleasure from the experience.
I have sat patiently with books of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlen, Octavia Butler, Terry Pratchett, Phillip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, George RR Martin, and have failed to finish a single one. So many of these books were a thousand pages long and yet action felt as though it whizzed by me at light speed. I had no idea to whom anything was happening. Sometimes I felt these stories so unremittingly grim and violent and humorless that who could possibly want to spend time in their company? Other times I felt as though I was being subjected to Ayn Rand-like lectures about the utopian possibilities of the human race, still others I felt I was enduring yet another Marxist lecture on how the world is so magnificent for some at the expense of others. But in every case of science fiction and fantasy I've ever read, including JRR Tolkein, including Stephen King, including Rowling and CS Lewis and Shirley Jackson and Vonnegut, is that I felt like I was reading a movie, and then I wondered why I wasn't watching one.
Maybe the problem is me, no doubt hundreds of people who know me would heartily agree that it's not the worst of my problems. But even with all the evidence to the contrary, I still can't believe my perception of reality is so entirely screwed up that I'm missing what millions of people see, and that the problem is entirely me.
Sci-fi/fantasy movies? They're great, they're what movies were meant to do. I have no problem sitting through any alternate world setting, any non-human characters, any outlandish situation or scientific jargonspeak. So long as it has a rudimentary sense of fun (so no Blade Runner or 2001... no Tarkovsky either...), it's absolutely what movies were made for best, and it takes you so far past your imaginings that you can only feel grateful to be alive. Whether it's completely goofy like Back to the Future and WALL-E, or cthonianly magnificent like Dark City and Arrival, or whether it's any of the thousand flavors in between, so long as it has even the slightest awareness that the world is not the way it posits, I will watch it in awe. And Pan's Labyrinth is, simply, the best movie I've seen in.... ever? Unlike some fellow snobs, I enjoy the hell out of Marvel movies (that's another essay...), and I look with astonishment at everything from Children of Men to AI. I defy anybody to look at landmarks from the earliest eras of movies and not gaze open mouthed at the beautiful things on screen, whether they're well-known like Metropolis, or little known like La Jetee, or from the earliest days of cinema like From the Earth to the Moon by Georges Melies. This kind of wonder is exactly what movies are built to do.
TV? Depends on the show of course but I love it in a completely different way. On the one hand, I find Battlestar Galactica entirely grim and humorless, just a deeply unpleasant experience, and Westworld almost a carbon copy of BSG in tone and delivery. I always thought while watching Joss Whedon that I was watching someone market a pandering product to a base of smart women who felt misunderstood, and it seems finally as though the women agree with me. I sat through the entirety of Game of Thrones, and I liked it, but every time I've tried to rewatch it's been a miserable experience. But I will watch Star Trek with delight when Captain Picard quotes Melville (incorrectly) and Data plays Brahms, and I will watch Star Trek with even greater delight when Dr. Crusher has an affair with a lamp and Abe Lincoln gets into fistfights with aliens. I will watch The Twilight Zone every day for the rest of my life happily (some days I think I live it...). Black Mirror is one of the very greatest shows ever made. And even if it doesn't really count as sci-fi... I recently started watching Mystery Science Theater, and I'm already convinced it's a treasure of the world that belongs on a UNESCO list of (alternate) world historic sites. And of course, you now know, dear reader, of my love of Stranger Things.
No, nay, the problem is not when all that fantastic fantasy and sciency science is on the screen. The problem is when it hits my mind, when it hits your mind, when it's just words on the page and we're supposed to interlocute what these words mean. What, in god's name, is in these books that make books books and not just movies on a page? Maybe I'm just not that visual a person and can't imagine the beautiful worlds they convey without a good production designer, but in these books, everything I value in books goes missing. Everything I hope other people value goes missing too, and it is a very depressing thing to perceive that you're the only person in the world for whom any of that seems to matter.
What I value in art, is the sense they give me, on the one hand, that they understand that life is and will always be a terribly miserable thing, full of humiliations and horrors; and on the other, that life is still beautiful and full of love and light and always worth living. You certainly don't have to use human beings as the focal point of a book to make points which touch on that dual premise, but I have to imagine that it's far far easier when you do.
So when I see so many people respond to things I don't, and not respond to things I do, I wonder... I can't help it... do they not see how horrible life gets? Do they not see how beautiful it gets either? Humans are, to a stunningly large extent, trapped within their own experiences. So even when you're creating something other than what you already know, you're creating something within the tropes and markers of what you already do. And this, not Harold Bloom, is why so many genre fiction writers are wildly popular when first released, and then nearly forgotten fifty years later. To understand Ray Bradbury (assuming I do...), you have to understand the optimism of the American 1950s. To understand Jules Verne, you have to understand 19th century optimism about the future of science. To understand JK Rowling and the values that animated her books, you may have had to have had to live in the world and values of New Labour. In 50-100 years, some people will still read Rowling just as they read Bradbury and Verne, but there will always be new great writers of popular fiction (and many of them are, objectively speaking, great writers), and part of living within any generation is experiencing that electricity which accompanies every new scrap they release. But then the kids wonder what the big deal was, and they have their own stuff that speaks much more precisely to their own worldview.
Most art dates very quickly because most opinions about the world date very quickly. Most books are a testament to how people saw the world in one particular time and one particular place, and that is their value. But some books last from age to age, not because FR Leavis says they did, but because the new era finds entirely new meanings within it, and the books speak to the concerns of the next era in a manner completely different from the way the book was read by the last one.
So when I read a lot of this (and clearly not read it deeply enough), I do wonder... Do the leftists who love Vonnegut and Butler not see that exploitation is the permanent state of the world? And will future generations not realize that they only tell a quarter of the story? Do the people who so love Bradbury and Heinlen not see that they too are only telling another quarter, and that amazing future they promise will be pretty bad too? And how long will it take the people who love Douglas Adams to realize that HE'S NOT FUNNY!!!!???
I don't doubt it's terrible arrogance to doubt other people's capacity to appreciate the world, but none of us can help the thoughts that bubble through our heads even if we control responses to them. No doubt it's wiser to keep these thoughts to ourselves. But there has never been a better time to be a 'nerd' than right now (or at least a few years ago...). The nerds are now the cool table while the jocks spend their lunchtime canvassing for Trump. But just as it was for the cool kids, there is a very prescriptive way to be a nerd from which deviation is absolutely unacceptable.
So I will keep trying to like this stuff, and I don't doubt I'll keep failing, but as the cool kids long since proved, life is oh so much easier when we all like the same things.
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