An Episodic Life 9

[This is the ninth installment of Marc's semi-regular column "An Episodic Life." To read more, go here. -Ed.]

John wants a column, and since I’m not ready to write the column I was planning just yet, I think I’ll just talk about what I read today.

For the record: On Sunday, February 14, 2010, I finished David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Seven; read David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp; ploughed through 120 pages of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr’s The Max; and read Suicide Squad #38 and #39.

First up, Nineteen Seventy-Seven. It’s the second book in Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, a series of novels set in Yorkshire dealing with, among other things, police corruption and the Yorkshire Ripper murders that plagued the county from about 1975 to 1980, I believe. It’s really a remarkable work. The first novel, Nineteen Seventy-Four, is a really solid piece of crime fiction that follows a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post as he delves into the seemingly related murders of three young girls. It doesn’t end on the most upbeat note.

Nineteen Seventy-Seven, on the other hand, takes everything its predecessor did and cranks it up to eleven. Peace is weaving an incredibly elaborate tapestry of conspiracies and cover-ups, to the point that the reader is really left unsure of who did what to whom and why. While Seventy-Four had a strange type of parlor scene at its climax, with young Eddie Dunford confronting those he thinks responsible with a shotgun, we never really find out just why some of the guilty parties do what did what they did, nor are we even certain of just how guilty they truly are.

Seventy-Seven completely eschews anything even remotely resembling a parlor scene. The closest one gets to it, I suppose, is the novel’s final chapter, in which one of the novel’s two protagonists becomes the subject of an exorcism. And apparently exorcism’s involved a minister hammering a screwdriver into the base of your skull. Was this ever a real thing? I don’t even want to know.

What follow is a more than three page long, italicized paragraph consisting of one very-fucking-rambly sentence, in which Peace employs echoes of phrases he’s previously repeated throughout the rest of the text--“blood on my hands, blood on her face, blood on my lips, blood in her mouth, blood in my eyes, blood in her hair, blood in my tears, blood in hers…he’s coming, ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, he’s coming, fuck you--then you sleep/kiss you--then you wake, and he’s here and there is no hell but this one, Lucky Cow, up to five now they say four but remember Preston ’75, come my load up that one, Dirty Cow”--and on and on.

While there’s a level of coherence to Jack Whitehead’s exorcism-induced revelations, a lot of it doesn’t make sense. The Yorkshire Ripper remains unknown, uncaught. Hell, it’s strongly suggested that Whitehead and the novel’s other protagonist, Bob Fraser, know that at least two of the of the murders attributed to the Ripper were not committed by him, but rather someone else--a policeman, most likely. Though which policeman, we’re never sure; and why he would want these women dead, we’re not really sure either, other than it might have something to do with a porno magazine and some corruption in the vice squad; maybe. Oh yeah, and the murders in Seventy-Seven have at least one, strange, random link to the murders of Seventy-Four that hints at a much larger conspiracy; potentially. Or, y’know, it could all be coincidence.

I also quoted those two fragments above to give you some idea of Peace’s style, which is somewhat wholly represented in those final three pages. At first, his prose looks and sounds like a somewhat calmer version of James Ellroy’s style in American Tabloid or Cold Six Thousand--“word jazz” prose, as I’ve heard some call it. Calmer not, I suppose, in terms of its subject matter, but rather in the rhythm of the sentences. With Ellroy, you feel as if you’re being bludgeoned to death. With Peace, his prose constantly serves to upend what you think you know about the world he’s creating. He shifts back and forth between different syntacitical structures, peppering sentence fragments amongst dialogues, fragments meant to represent brief flashes of memories the reader is never given whole access to.

While there appears to be a strong narrative structure to his novels, with Character A setting out to find a murderer or murderers, things become much more confused once you get down to the level of individual paragraphs within the text.

Here, Fraser--a detective in the Yorkshire police--is sitting in on the interrogation of a suspect in the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and interrogation conducted by himself and his partners, Rudkin and Ellis.

He’s on his knees, on the floor, in the corner, hands up, nose bloody.

My body weak.

‘Come on,’ shouts Rudkin. ‘Where the fuck were you?’

I was battering down doors, battering down people, kicking in doors, kicking in people.

‘Working,’ he screams.

Ellis, fists into the wall, ‘Liar!’

I was raping whores, fucking them up the arse.

‘I was.’

‘You murdering bastard. You tell me now!’

I was breaking into houses, stealing cars, beating up cunts like Eric Hall.

‘I was working.’

‘The Fucking truth!’

I was searching for a whore.

‘Working, I was fucking working.’

Rudkin picks him up off the floor, rights the chair and sits him in it, nodding at the door.

‘You fucking sit here and you think about where the fuck you were at two o’clock this morning and what you were bloody doing?’

I was on the floor of the Redbeck, in tears.

All the italicized statements are Fraser’s own admissions. The “whore” he was searching for was his lover, Janice, a prostitute he first met when he arrested her. The most obvious effect of this style is that Fraser, a policeman, falls into the place of the criminal, with his italicized statements serving as a response to the questions his partners are posing, albeit to a different party. Peace breaks down the distinction between detective and murderer to the point that, later on, the reader has to seriously consider the idea that their seemingly reliable narrator, Bob Fraser, has indeed murdered his prostitute girlfriend without telling us about it.

(for the record, I’m pretty sure he didn’t, but there’s still a little bit of ambiguity in the text that keeps me from delivering too definitive a sentence on his character.)

Peace’s world becomes so bleak because of this, that it really doesn’t matter who’s been murdering prostitutes and young girls in Yorkshire. Might be the police, might be a lone psychopath, might be both working independent of one another but still grouped together by someone desperately trying to impose some pattern, some way of making meaning out of these senseless deaths.

The novel closes on perhaps one of the bleakest notes I’ve ever read in a story:

“...and I stand at the door and knock, the keys to death and hell and the mystery of the woman, knowing this is why people die, this is why people, in 1977 this is why I see--

He brought the hammer down.

--No future.”

(I mean, christ, what do I do with that? The book ends with its main character having a fucking screwdriver hammered into his head! And reading those final pages to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s “‘Piphany Rambler” was a really disturbing experience. I love when your world’s soundtrack matches up with what you’re reading in these weird little moments of kismet.)

Whitehead’s got the keys to the mystery there at the end, but he’s unable to open the door. In fact, it’s because he has those keys that he sees “no future.” Solving the central mysteries of the novel’s plot wouldn’t change a thing. The women are still dead for the same reasons they were killed in the first place, regardless of whether or not we the reader know what those reasons were. The novel’s ending would have been just as depressing either way, yet it would have given us some false sense of justice where there really was none to be found.

Anyway. I was hoping to just spend half the time on Nineteen Seventy-Seven and the other half on Asterios Polyp, but that’s already more than 1,300 words. Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow, but if not, I doubt the internet will be shedding too many tears for lack of my cutting and faux-tentious analysis of a book that most critics have placed as one of the best of the previous decade.

Now I’m going to go pop some pills and hit the bed, and I suggest you do the same.

But first, a musical interlude from Silver Mt. Zion: Listen to “God Bless Our Dead Marines.”

An Episodic Life 8

[This is the eight installment of Marc's semi-regular column "An Episodic Life. To read more, go here. -Ed.]

Yesterday I watched the Dollhouse finale, and as much as I loved the show, I’m not terribly sad to see it go.

Maybe I should qualify that statement. Would I have loved to see another three years of the show? Yes. After all, any Joss Whedon on television is always good. Was the second season amazing-beyond-words? Absolutely. But there are two primary reasons I’m still not sad to see it go.

The first is that, as amazing as the second season was, I can’t help but feel that what made it so great was the fact that Whedon was fairly confident almost from the beginning of this season that he would not be getting a third. Ratings were not great, and when the second season premiere aired, I remember reading something about how Whedon was currently in production of the fifth or so episode. So the writing was on the wall.

Now, let’s look at the show beginning with the fifth or sixth episode. That’s when Whedon began really pulling out the stops, telling all the stories the show had the potential for in the long run because, let’s face it, there wasn’t going to be a long run. You want to see the Attic? We’ll take you to the Attic. Who’s behind Rossum? We’ll show you who. What’s the larger agenda of the Dollhouse and the tech behind it? Here you go. All in all, the second season had a sense of urgency that was lacking in the first, and that urgency only came about because the show wasn’t going to make it past this year.

Season one of Dollhouse was great as set-up, but the meat of the show was really in the back half of that second season. And that half probably would’ve looked a hell of a lot different if Whedon was guaranteed another year or three.

But here’s the other reason I’m not sad to see it go. We got two great seasons of television, which is always a good thing. And, if a series is particularly well done, it shouldn’t matter if it was cut down in its prime or when the creators decided to terminate it.

As I’ve said before, the television series is the form that is most capable of mimicking our lives. As such, a television series effectively becomes a somewhat arbitrary snapshot of a period of its characters lives. This point is most accentuated by The Sopranos, a series you all know I love and cherish. In terms of dramatic structure, that series reached its “climax” well before its finale—perhaps when Carmela asked Tony to leave the house, perhaps in the second series when Tony seemed to have been learning from all his past mistakes, or perhaps it was as early as the second season finale and the death of Big Pussy.

Whenever it happened, however, one point is evident: the sixth season of The Sopranos was the season that happened after the story had ended. Hell, it even begins with Tony’s symbolic death: Uncle Junior, due to his dementia, shoots Tony, sending him into a two-episode long coma where he experiences what his life would have been like if he had escaped his family’s business. The third episode of the season centers around the rest of the cast moving on as if Tony has died—Silvio has taken over as interim head of the family, business goes on as usual. In that episode, we get a glimpse of life after Tony Soprano has “died.”

Of course, the sixth season did bring a type of resolution to Tony Soprano’s story, but it’s a resolution that paradoxically proves my point that it shouldn’t matter when or how a series ends. There’s a great deal of thematic resolution in the course of the season as it really hammers home the entropic arc of the series as a whole. But as for the actual plotlines themselves, there isn’t much there. Tony is looking at several indictments in the near future. Silvio’s still in a coma. The final, seemingly arbitrary cut-to-black reveals the true nature of open-ended, longform, episodic narrative.

The Sopranos simply followed its characters around as they lived their lives. The only true ending to the series would have been everyone dying. Anything less really was an arbitrarily-chosen endpoint.

(of course, some would argue that the final cut-to-black is meant to indicate Tony’s death, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with that interpretation, I feel that the question of whether Tony lives or dies at the end of the series is, ultimately, inconsequential for a number of reasons that I will probably enumerate in some future column; because I’m sure what you really, really want is to listen to me blabber on about The Sopranos some more)

Back when Deadwood, another series near and dear to my heart, was canceled after its third season, I remember there was an outcry from the fanbase looking for some type of resolution to the story, prompting series creator David Milch to devise a plan to create two Deadwood films that never materialized. Nonetheless, I say it doesn’t matter that we didn’t get “resolution” to the story, whatever that might mean. Deadwood had no overarching plot the way a show like Lost does, so that certainly wasn’t what any one meant. Yes, there were a number of sub-plots dangling at the end, but there were a number of subplots dangling at the beginning as well—just as some stories in a pilot are begun in media res, so should some stories be left at the end.

We got three fantastic fucking years of television from David Milch with Deadwood. The fact that he didn’t get to write a “proper” ending to the series in no way alters that series’ greatness. You can still watch it and study it and tear it apart all you like. The show was about a camp of people living their everyday lives in a frontier town, a point accentuated by the fact that each episode of the series took place over the course of one day. There wasn’t meant to be a “resolution” to those stories.

And just to drive home the point, I read in an interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, that he wrote the fourth season finale unsure of whether or not there would be a fifth year to the series. As such, he planned that finale as a series finale. Ditto with the fifth season finale. You see, most TV shows—and here I’m exempting heavily-serialized shows such as Lost—are not novels, a point that we sometimes forget. They do not have a beginning, middle, and end as we commonly understand them. In fact, I’d argue that we need a somewhat different language to describe the dramatic structure of a TV series. What that language is, I’m not sure, but I’ll probably spend another column talking incessantly until I figure out what it is.

And that, my friends, is why I wasn’t sad to see Dollhouse go. Bet you thought I’d completely lost track of my original point, didn’t you?

For today’s musical interlude: go here and listen to the Sleigh Bells’ “Crown on the Ground.” It’s like a revelation.

An Episodic Life 7

[This is the seventh installment of Marc's more or less regular column "An Episodic Life." Want more?]

I should preface this by saying I promised John a column on Dollhouse, and am instead handing him one about John O’Hara. Joke’s on him, I guess.

Regardless, I picked a shabby O’Hara paperback--Sermons and Soda-Water, to be exact--off my shelf the other day. You see, I have a great many books and DVDs and comics lying around my shelves that I haven’t read yet, so every now and then I decide it’s time to take one of them, dust it off, and crack it open. Leafing through this particularly-ragged paperback (that, evidently, I purchased for fifty cents at some point in time I’ve since forgotten), I liked the synopsis for the second story it contained, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” quite a bit.

THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG MAN WHO DISCOVERED SEX BELATEDLY, AND THE HISTORY OF THE GIRL WHO MARRIED HIM ON THE REBOUND. OF LUST AND LOVE, OF ECSTASY AND TRAGEDY AND TEDIUM… BUT ALWAYS WITH AN EYE FOR THE TRUTH

declares the pull-quote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (And yes, the quote really is in all caps, which I found amusing.) Now, who wouldn’t love to read that story?

I’ve been working on a screenplay that examines a number of broken relationships--a preoccupation of mine that’s been recently energized by my parents’ impending divorce--and though, hell, this sounds just the thing to keep me in the right head space to continue writing what I’m writing.

Then a funny thing happened halfway through the sixty-page story, and “Imagine Kissing Pete” went from simply being fuel for my own creative fires to the subject of an "Episodic Life" column. I’ve only ever read one other thing by O’Hara, his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. It’s about a man in a small town, marriage on the rocks (are we sensing a pattern here?), who ends up killing himself.

I don’t remember much about the book, except for some detail about him getting a drink splashed in his face or throwing a drink at someone else at a big country club party, and that he chooses to kill himself by leaving the car running in the garage. And the fact that the novel, ostensibly about this man--Julian English--doesn’t end with his suicide.

“Our story never ends,” O’Hara writes at the beginning of the tenth and final chapter, immediately following Julian’s suicide.

You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded. That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated. It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents. It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others. Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot. Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or in a rabbit’s foot. Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him....

I loved that passage when I first read it back in--oh, I don’t know, it must have been the summer of ’04--and I love it even more now. It’s an incredibly statement for a novel, a discrete, wholly contained unit of narrative, to make. O’Hara wrote this back in ’34, and here he’s drawing attention to the ways in which the actions of his protagonist ripple out to effect every other character we’ve met in the book. I can’t really think of many novels from that far back that are so aware of this fact. Of course, you can also read the metaphorical grenade up above as Julian’s suicide or as the novel itself, being lobbed into your own life, and when you take that reading on… well, O’Hara had an understanding of literature that was ahead of his time, especially considering the dominant New Critical paradigm at that moment.

But hey, what the fuck does this have to do with “Imagine Kissing Pete?” Well, the story takes place in a small town called Gibbsville, for one. And halfway through, its narrator, Jim Malloy, attends a large party at a country club. And afterwards, a friend of Malloy’s tries to tell him a story about a mutual acquaintance of theirs getting a drink splashed in his face. And none of this was really ringing any bells--like I say, it had been close to six years since I read Appointment, and my memory’s for shit in the best of circumstances--but then this paragraph cleared all the cobwebs off my addled brain:

I had to go back to New York on the morning train and the events of the next few days, so far as they concerned Joe and Phyllis Whipple and Frank and Mary Lander, were obscured by the suicide, a day or two later, of Julian English, the man who had thrown a drink at Harry Reilly. The domestic crisis of the Whipples and the Landers and even the McCreas seemed very unimportant. And yet when I heard about English, who had not been getting along with his wife, I wondered about my own friends, people my own age but not so very much younger than Julian and Caroline English.... He had not been a friend of mine, only an acquaintance with whom I had had many drinks and played some golf; but friends of mine, my closest friends in the world, boys-now-men like myself, were at the beginning of the same kind of life and doing the same kind of thing that for Julian English ended in a sealed-up garage with a motor running. I hated what I thought those next few days and weeks. There is nothing young about killing oneself, no matter when it happens, and I hated this being deprived of the sweetness of youth. And that was what it was, that was what was happening to us. I, and I think the others, had looked upon our squabbles as unpleasant incidents but belonging to our youth. Now they were plainly recognizable as symptoms of life without youth, without youth’s excuses or youth’s recoverability.

O’Hara wrote “Pete” in 1960 for the New Yorker. Twenty-six years after Julian’s suicide in Appointment, we’re still seeing the reverberations of that grenade. O’Hara weaves the suicide into the very fabric of Jim Malloy’s story, making it an integral part of the story. In “Pete,” we get to follow a set of characters from roughly the time-period in which Julian killed himself through the subsequent decades. In Appointment, O’Hara is able to follow up on the direct effects of Julian’s suicide, but “Pete” allows him to blow the scope out even further.

What O’Hara does here is offer us up something more than the simple narrative in which we understand that people are understood differently by different people, that a person’s actions can mean one thing to someone and another to someone else. It’s also about Julian’s role in a fictional sense. The character is not only seen differently in other people’s perspectives, he’s seen in different lights on a textual level. In Appointment, he’s a character; in “Pete,” he’s a symbolic figure. Each text perceives him in a different way.

And now for your musical interlude: Go here and listen to Solid Gold’s cover of Danger Zone. It’s kind of amazing. Especially if, like me, you spent a good chunk of your adolescence listening to the Top Gun soundtrack on repeat.

An Episodic Life 5

[In the spirit of Oberliner returning to its regularly scheduled broadcasting, Marc's column (of which this is the fifth installment) will be returning to its regularly scheduled slot on Friday mornings. In the meantime, enjoy this column, which was timely when it was sent to me several weeks ago. Sorry Marc.]

A little to my surprise, I enjoyed the pilot to Men of a Certain Age quite a bit. I always planned on watching it at least for the first few episodes, if for no other reason than to see Andre Braugher working again (the dude is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated actors out there today).

But here’s why I liked it: It wasn’t exactly your typical pilot. The rule for pilots, for the most part, is that you introduce your characters, throw them through some life-changing experience, and end with them in an all-new status quo that, in turn, will be the status quo of your show moving forward.

Men, on the other hand, starts in media res on almost every count. Joe (Ray Romano) and his wife have recently made their separation final. Terry (Scott Bakula) gets a date with a barista at the end, but he didn’t meet her for the first time in the pilot—rather, it’s established that they already have a rapport when he notes that she’s been gone for a week.

Owen (Braugher)’s plotline is the closest to matching up with the traditional pilot structure, I suppose, as he receives a kick in the pants over the course of the episode that forces him to approach his job as a car salesman at the dealership his father owns with renewed vigor.

Of course, each character begins and ends at slightly different places by pilot’s end, but if we were to re-imagine it in a more traditional framework, it would look something like this:

-In the first scene, Joe’s wife tells him she wants a separation, and by episode’s end he’s moved out of the house and begun to face the reality of living on his own again in a hotel room.

-Terry, down in the dumps, miraculously meets this hot, young barista who gives him the jump start he so needs at just the rightest, most convenientest moment possible. Thank god for random first meetings with strangers that change your life!

-Owen... well, again, in the course of the pilot, Owen is shamed by his father, has a diabetic seizure and winds up returning to work with new purpose. Can’t really think of how you’d tweak that.

But Owen is a supporting character. Thus, the A-plot of the series--Romano’s storyline--avoids that traditional structure, and in so doing prevents the pilot itself from retaining it.

Now here’s why this is good. The problem with pilots that feature a major change in its main character presents the beginning of a story. It provides a TV series with a Point A. Logically, then, the series will progress from there to B and C and D, and reach Point Z in its finale.

That’s traditional story structure. That’s the structure we apply to novels and film. And, yes, it is the structure we apply to some longform, serialized storytelling, such as The Wire or Lost. But those two shows aren’t open ended. They had planned conclusions that the showrunners mapped out in at least some detail from very early on.

Open-ended series such as this, however, need a looser, more organic structure for the most part. They’re meant to mimic real life, with their arbitrary endings and overlapping plotlines.

Of course, there are exceptions to this. The Shield, for instance, had a pilot that ended with a major game changer, as Vic and Shane killed a fellow cop. But Shawn Ryan, through his brilliance, was able to pull that element all the way through to the end of the series. Very few runners understand organic storytelling the way Ryan does, and that’s in large part what allowed him to pull off his little feat.

Alternatively, if you are going to begin the series with a game-changer, it shouldn’t be the only one to occur in its lifetime. Buffy began with the titular vampire slayer becoming accustomed to her new digs in Sunnydale High. Three years later, the show completely transformed itself as she graduated from high school and moved onto college, effectively giving the Season 4 premiere a somewhat pilot-like structure.

But anyway. I don’t know if all of that makes sense, and there are probably so many exceptions to what I’ve stated above so as to make any type of “rule” or “theory” I could extrapolate here meaningless, but it was refreshing to see a pilot in Men of a Certain Age that so subtly tweaked the form, and in so doing provided a great deal of potential for the show to capitalize on as it moves forward.

And hell, even if it falls flat on its face in the writing as the series progresses, it still co-stars Andre Braugher, which is more than any other show can say right now.

Press Clippings VII

Well, it seems that Marc, whom you all know from his excellent column, "An Episodic Life," has gotten some buzz. Kieron Gillen, the writer of PHONOGRAM, linked to Marc's review from twitter and his blog:

Other news? This is a particularly good article on The Singles Club generally, and well worth reading.

Y'all stick with Oberliner, cuz it's goin' places.

An Episodic Life 4

[This is the fourth installment of Marc's more or less regular column "An Episodic Life." Want more?]

We need more comics like PHONOGRAM or CASANOVA. We need more comics that hold up under scrutiny, but still get in your blood and make it fucking move.

I read Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB #5 a couple weeks ago, and, as usual, it made me incredibly depressed that more comics weren’t this good. The seven-issue series takes place entirely on the same night and in the same club, with each issue a discrete story showing a different character’s perspective on the events.

Each issue also focuses on the individual character’s relationships with music, and this one featured a character who would quote Long Blondes lyrics ad nauseum. What, don’t know who the Long Blondes are? Yeah, neither did I until this issue. Luckily, Gillen packs each issue with a ton of extra content, including a glossary of all the musical references the characters make over the course of each issue.

“My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps... Well, perhaps one day it may be,” says Laura Heaven, the fifth issue’s protagonist. And that’s precisely the point of PHONOGRAM: It explores the ways in which music shapes our lives, the ways in which we live inside music, process it, and parse that out in our everyday interactions.

“The second thing this issue is about is art as a proxy or prop for personality,” writes Gillen in his end-of-issue essay

The idea of art as a gateway. By becoming the record or comic or whatever, you become closer to something else ... . [Then] there’s people who take it further. You end up with people like Laura, who have the quotation marks closing in on them like a bad supervillain death trap. It’s a transitional state, which is about trying to create the new you by imitation of what’s most desirable to you. You pretend to be it and eventually you come out the other side as some kind of alloy. You internalize it. You metabolize it.

PHONOGRAM, for its part, has fundamentally changed the way I experience music. Lately, I’ve begun looking at it in different ways, taking it apart by new methods, devouring everything I can. Which, y’know, leads to me writing a ton of notes for a screenplay under the influence of the Long Blondes’s “You Could Have Both” or emailing barely-coherent odes on the wondrous nature of Lady Gaga to a friend of mine whose name rhymes with Shmariel Shmnutson.

The layered structure of THE SINGLES CLUB has also made for a narrative that is far more emotionally messy than anything I’ve read in recent years. It’s about people clashing together, sometimes at the most awkward and inopportune moments, and the result of those collisions. There aren’t any bad guys in the series, but there are people acting like cocks. However, Gillen presents them in such a well-rounded manner, that we come to understand their actions better. He doesn’t let any of his characters off the hook, mind you, but at the same time he offers up some type of justification or explanation for their actions, and shows that if Penny B. had just walked up to Marc five minutes before or after, maybe he wouldn’t have been such a dick and shattered her world.

And in Laura Heaven, Gillen gives us a character who finds herself perpetually jealous of her best friend, constantly plotting to both help her while hoping she’ll fail and Laura can pick up the pieces, the type of toxic friendship you don’t often see in comics or film or anything because it’s just so damn uncomfortable and complicated, and complicated really doesn’t make for good drama. Well, unless you’re Diablo Cody, then you can spin it into movie gold, as seen in Jennifer’s Body. (Yes, I did fucking love that movie, anyone who didn’t is ignorant, so says I.) [Sadly, Marc, it is not the case that so say we all. I mean, "movie gold?" Really?]

Of course, now my listening experience with the Long Blondes is inextricably linked to this funny book. Certain lyrics bring particular panels to mind, while at the same time, I can re-read the issue now knowing the songs Laura references and parse out all new meanings to what’s going on. These new meanings in turn cause different readings of the songs, and…well, you can see where this is going. And this is precisely what I mean by experiential literature. Which isn’t to say that experiential literature necessitates references to texts outside itself, but it’s certainly one way of achieving the effect. The comic shapes the way I read the lyrics, the lyrics shape the way I read the comic, and the way I read the comic shapes the way I see the world and my own interactions with it, which in turn shape the way I read the lyrics.

Or something.

All right, that’s enough for now. This column was way over due. Sorry, John. But for now, I’m going to leave you with some music. Enjoy. “Once and Never Again.” A song about a woman comforting a younger girl whose boyfriend has treated her like shit. And by the end of the song, you figure out that the reason she’s comforting the girl is because she wants in her pants. That’s the Long Blondes for ya.

An Episodic Life 3

[This is the third installment of Marc's more or less regular column "An Episodic Life." Want more?]

All right, so I’ve got this theory I like to call "The Rule of Four." And while I know a 'theory' can’t be a 'rule,' just roll with me here.

Put simply, The Rule of Four is that a show needs to have some type of seismic shift at the end of its third season/beginning of its fourth in order to remain creatively interesting. As a consequence of this, the fourth season of many great TV shows can be a little weak. Or, as in the case of Buffy and Sopranos, just downright fucking atrocious.

So far, I’ve found that this rule applies mostly to open-ended, longform TV series, and more specifically one-hour dramas with a shifting continuity. This would discount shows like Law & Order, which is comprised of almost entirely discrete episodic units, but would include something like Weeds given its highly serialized structure.

The reason this works is because it allows the show, after establishing itself over the course of the first three shows, to grow and, frequently, become something other than what it started as. It allows the writers to come up with dramatically different scenarios for their characters and keeps the stories from becoming repetitive or stale. Now, I figured to best illustrate my idea, I’m going to run down a number of shows and talk about how The Rule of Four applies, and why many shows’ fourth seasons are just so terribly, terribly dreadful.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: This is the show that made me extrapolate The Rule of Four. The first three years of Buffy are built around literalizing one very simple metaphor: High school is Hell. Which is great, except that Buffy and the rest of the Scoobies hit their senior year in season three and would have to move on to college. So all of a sudden, the show has to morph into something else. Its central metaphor has become completely irrelevant.

So what did Buffy creator/showrunner Joss Whedon do? He got rid of Angel, Buffy’s on-again-off-again love interest up to that point, moved the kids to college, and began laying the groundwork for the second half of the series. While the first three years were very much a story of Buffy coming into her own, asserting her independence from her mother—in essence, being a teenager—the second half was all about her transformation into adulthood. The show was no longer about adolescence and high school, it was about the real world as Buffy was forced to make sense of it and become an adult. Hell, he even turned her into a mother-figure in the seventh season, mentoring all the other potential Slayers.

As for that terrible fourth season of Buffy…I really love this show, but I will be the first to admit that much of season four is unwatchable. But that was its transition period. You can’t just switch gears like that and not expect any growing pains. Just as everybody’s freshman year at college is that awkward, gangly year when you just start to get a glimmer of who you’d be and what you’d be like as a real adult-type-person, Buffy, as a show and as a character, goes through the same process. Yeah, it’s painful and awkward to watch, but it’s also incredibly important for everything that comes after it—and everything that comes after it is pretty fucking great.

Mad Men: I just watched the third season finale to this series last Sunday, and it’s what prompted me to write this now. Of course, we haven’t seen any of the fourth season yet, but showrunner Matt Weiner certainly gave the show a couple of seismic shifts, with Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Burt Cooper and the rest of the crew having to start out on their own, clearly lower on the totem pole than they had been in the preceding years. Couple that with Don’s impending divorce, and you have a recipe for a dramatically different show. While the first three years were about Don thriving, Don already having accomplished the American Dream with his nuclear family unit and high prestige job, we’re now going to see a very different Don Draper, one who once again has to work to get what he wants and to get to where he wants to be.

The Wire: This show’s third season shift was actually very similar to Mad Men’s. The third season of the Wire ended with Stringer Bell’s death and the arrests and indictments of most of the Barksdale crew. For the first three years, fans saw a drug crew that had already established itself. Runner David Simon laid the groundwork for the fourth season with the introduction of Marlo Stanfield in the third, but Marlo’s arc really took off the following year. That’s when fans got to see the flipside of the Barksdale story—not a drug crew in its prime, but one in the middle of its ascent. Again, it’s a very different dynamic and leads to very, very different types of stories.

The Sopranos: This is actually a series I’ve thought a lot about in relation to The Rule of Four. For a long while, I was convinced it was an exception. There is no real seismic shift at the end of the third season, nor at the beginning of the fourth. The closest I could come to thinking of any major change that occurred in this time period of the show was Carmela throwing Tony out of the house and asking for a divorce at the end of season four. But since Tony and Carm get back together again halfway through season five, I figured that couldn’t really count as a major shift.

But it is, and here’s why:

The overall arc of the Sopranos is parabolic. Most character arcs, in television and, hell, fiction in general, are not. Most arcs begin at point A and end at point Z. Now, here’s an interesting exercise. Watch the first episode of the Sopranos, then fast forward and watch the final episode of the series. Not a single character has made any dramatic change between the two episodes. Now, go back and watch the first episode of season one and the last episode of season one. Tony’s in a very different place between those two episodes. He’s acknowledged the toxic effect his mother’s had on his life. He’s talking about how important family was, whereas at the beginning of the season he’s more distant from them. Look at the beginning of season one and the end of season four. Tony and Carmela’s relationship is very different. She begins by ignoring his criminal and adulterous behavior, and ends by denying him to live in the house his blood money has paid for.

But the end of season four is when the character arcs start to boomerang. By the end of season five, all the characters have begun to regress, and over the course of its sixth and final season the show brings each of its characters snugly back to the exact place where we found them at the beginning of the series.

Clearly, there’s more I could write about the Sopranos, and that’s probably a column in and of itself, but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ve already blathered on for more than 1,000 words, and John keeps on tapping his watch telling me to wrap it up. Thanks for listening, you lone, crazy rascal you, and I promise to be back next Friday. I’m like a bowel movement in that way: Usually regular, except when I’m not.

An Episodic Life 2

"An Episodic Life" is an ongoing column written by Marc Strom.

Ever since Pam and Jim got together at the end of the third season of The Office, I’ve heard the same complaint from many people I’ve talked to: It’s gotten boring. Some people think that the Jim/Pam arc shouldn’t have been resolved until the series finale; some think that the show’s lost its humor now that Jim and Pam’s dynamic has changed so dramatically. But no one really seems to like them together, or think that it adds much to the show.

But here’s the thing: The writers really didn’t have a choice. A friend of mine compared Jim and Pam together to the period in Friends when Ross and Rachel were dating, saying it was boring as well. Okay, but then Ross and Rachel broke up, and the writers proceeded to spend seven full years contriving new and increasingly complicated and frustrating reasons for keeping the two apart, so much so that by the time they reunited in the series finale, it couldn’t help but feel forced. I don’t give a shit if they’re soulmates, after all the drama they went through, there is no plausible way I could see those two staying together or even wanting to be together any more.

The Office clearly decided to take a very different direction. Instead of dragging the “will-they-or-won’t-they” aspect of their story on for an absurdly long time, the writers allowed the characters to unite once their story had naturally, organically reached that point. In the three years prior to that, they had established the characters’ bond as being incredibly strong, so much so that rending them apart after they had finally come together would have rung false.

And so, they let the story move on to its next, inevitable stage: Pam and Jim got married. And people lost interest.

Now that their relationship has reached this point, the writers have limited the number and type of stories they can tell with the characters. The solution to this would be to do what David Simon did in the fourth season of The Wire. For the first three years of that show, Jimmy McNulty acted as a de-facto protagonist for the series to revolve around.

When McNulty reached a natural resting place at the end of season three, however—he’d quit drinking and got together with Amy Ryan’s character—Simon put the character in the background. During season four, you could go episodes on end without seeing McNulty once, and when he finally did show up it would be for a brief second as you see him arresting some dealer Herc wants to talk to.

Of course, Simon brought McNulty back in a big way in the fifth season, but by that point enough time had passed that he could convincingly change McNulty’s status quo from the more domestic, stale position he was in for most of the fourth season.

The writers of The Office, on the other hand, allowed the central dynamics of their show to shift in organic and meaningful ways, but then they continued to follow the same characters and the same interactions. The A plots of the last 100 episodes have all focused on Michael Scott, and most of the B plots have centered around Jim and Pam.

Once they’ve locked themselves into this structure, they’re unable to move Jim and Pam out of the spotlight. They haven’t allowed the structure of the show to change as the characters and their dynamics have changed. By allowing other characters to take up the A and B plots, they could spice the show up and give Jim and Pam a break while their relationship has time to grow into a more interesting place.1

As it stands, unless something really drastic happens to the show and they decide to bump some of their more secondary characters up to a more prominent position, we’re in for two or three more painful, dull seasons of The Office before it eventually dies a belated death.

An Episodic Life 1

[Ed. Note: I've invited my good friend (and better writer) Marc to guest post here at Oberliner. He's responsible for this column : "An Episodic Life." You get ready to read.

Hello. I’m Marc. You don’t know me, but I really fucking love longform, serialized, episodic storytelling. So John’s asked me to blather on about said topic for some unknown reason.

I’ve been reading comics regularly since the age of five. I tivo twelve-to-fourteen hours of television a week. Almost every novel I read is part of a series. These things move me in ways that self-contained units of storytelling can not.

I become very deeply involved in these stories in ways I simply can’t with a single novel, or with any movie not made by Billy Wilder or the Coen brothers. And here’s why: Episodic and serialized storytelling is experiential. You watch an hour of television, check in on who Don Draper’s boinking this week, then you go out and live your life for a week. At the end of that time, you check in once again.

And in that week in between episodes, both you and the characters have changed. The characters and stories grow and develop as you grow and develop. When you’re watching a film, you’re simply sitting in a theater for two hours. The characters on the screen have developed, have changed, have had life-altering things happen to them, but you’ve just been sitting on your ass in a dark room with a bunch of strangers in that same time period.

Here are two examples of what I’m talking about: Y: THE LAST MAN and Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s PLANETARY. Now, both I and my esteemed host, J. West, have read both works in their entirety. But my experience reading those works radically differs from his.

I read both series in their original releases. That means that I read the first issue of PLANETARY when it hit the stands in March of 1999, more than ten years ago. My first introduction to the series was actually in September or October of 1998, when the eight-page preview story appeared as a flipbook with an issue of GEN-13. Which means that I first read PLANETARY a year and a half before the 21st century began. I was twelve at the time and had just begun the sixth grade.

Flash-forward to a few weeks ago, and the final issue, #27, came out five months after I’d graduated from college. Re-reading the series, certain issues bring back very specific memories to me. The first few issues are inextricably linked to memories I have of the house I was living in at the time. Issue #16 was in the stack of comics I showed my first girlfriend to explain to her just what the fuck comics were, exactly.

Similarly, Y: THE LAST MAN is about one man’s odyssey. The series takes place over the course of five years and, not coincidentally, took about five years to come out. As Yorick Brown jet-setted around the world, I was settling into a new house, then another a third of the way through the series; then I went to prom and graduated and eventually started working at Marvel with my first internship. I aged the same amount of time that Yorick did. I got to know him and his supporting cast over the course of five years, whereas most of my friends read the entire series in a month or less.

So, yes, it’s experiential. And to my mind, that’s what really makes art work. These stories become a part of my life, something I am perpetually weaving in and out of. I take each segment of Mad Men and go live in the real world with it resting in the back of my skull, then I come back a week later and get another.

So that’s what I’ll be blogging about. I’ll follow my experiences as I read and watch various works. In a few weeks, I’ll be writing quite a bit about Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. I’ll write a LOT about Rescue Me. I’ll compare Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem to The Hills (trust me, they have more in common than you’d think). I’ll talk about Y and PLANETARY and CASANOVA. I’ll explain why Grant Morrison’s INVISIBLES and Alan Moore and J.H. Williams’ PROMETHEA are two of the most beautiful and meaningful works of art I’ve ever encountered. There might be a comparison between season two of Breaking Bad and season two of Gossip Girl, and how the two shows can teach us about longform, open-ended storytelling.

And when you finally reach the point where you’d like nothing more than for me to shut the fuck up, remember: It was John who unleashed me upon you.