Category: About Films

The Matrix vs. Lost – how not to end a story well

It’s not news that I am a huge sci-fi-fantasy-comic-book-alternate-universe story freak. I was watching The Matrix (for possibly the 30th time) the other day when I had a narrative epiphany. Or maybe an epiphany about narratives. Speculative fiction video narratives, to be exact.

Stories have to end sooner or later, in some kind of satisfactory manner – or else the things that excited it us (What do the machines want? Are those people dead? What is the Matrix? What is the Island?) will just start piling up and pissing us off.  So. How do you end it? How do you tell interesting stories – in worlds that must be explained – without either burying the viewers with WAY too much technical information, or else short-changing them?

Different story tellers make different choices. Those who are truly successful balance the world building, character exposition and plot perfectly – so we get most of our questions answered, and give a shit about the characters they happened to. I believe this is more difficult in a story in which one must convince the viewer that the world itself exists, in addition to believable characters and a plot that is both interesting and surprising (but not too).

The Matrix Trilogy vs. Lost

Both were very successful out of the gate. Both were very ambitious. Both asked all kinds of interesting questions and answered a few of them in the beginning. Both had a huge following.

And both of them had a huge portion of their followers HATE the way they ended.

In the Matrix story (I’m sticking to just the three films, here. I know there’s a lot more info in Animatrix and the games and whatnot, but the major thread is contained in the films), the writers/directors chose to explain everything they could: the Oracle, the Core, the Architect, Zion, the machines… on and on and on. An entire cosmology and ideology and history and everything. They knew this world inside and out and they shared it with us. And a lot of people (not me) thought it was boring and lame and too complicated. Like you had to take notes just to understand what was going on. And the characters are not terribly complicated. Good guys and girls, bad guys and girls. Boy loves girl, gets girl. Sketched in histories, lots of emotion but not too much depth.  In the choice between plot and character, the Wachowski  Brothers chose plot. It works well in the first flick, and by the third flick it’s clear that plot is what must sustain us.  For many, it was not enough. Or maybe too much – plot, that is, and not enough character. Time restrictions play a factor here – how long can the film be? (IMHO, their worst mistake – horrible recast of the Oracle. I know the original actress died, but they did a crappy job of choosing her replacement. Ack!)

In Lost, the TV series, Abrams and Lindelhof et.al., chose character over plot. We get histories, alternate futures, heavy interactions and lots of ambiguity. Sawyer: good guy or bad guy? Kate: bad girl or good girl? Who are the Others? And the other Others? They built a compelling but barely explicated cosmology that sacrificed detail for emotional impact. And some people HATED it. How did the smoke monster work, exactly? Were they dead the whole time? Why wasn’t Mr. Eko in the church at the end? For those who cared more about character, the ending was great (at that point, all I cared about was Sawyer and Juliet being reunited). I don’t need to know why pulling that strange stone plug out of a pool underground made the smoke monster mortal. It did, that’s what mattered. For those who wanted to KNOW, they had more questions at the end than ever.

So:
End of Matrix – finally! Who cares if it was the machines or the Architect or whatever. The humans lived. Good. Moving on.

End of Lost – What?! So were they dead? Were they dreaming? So was the island real? Did they die in the first plane crash? What about the smoke monster? Have you ever hated anyone as much as Benjamin Linus?

If you don’t get the balance just right, you will leave half your fan base angry and unsatisfied.

Many successful science fiction movies are set in the future – far enough away that you should expect for things not to make sense to your poor, feeble 21-century brain. With something like the Matrix, you have to explain why the world looks like ours but isn’t, and how it’s going to end, but it’s already ended 5 times before, but this time it’s different. Lost had six years and two timelines of strange happenings, and chooses not to give many details on most of them. But we know A LOT about Jack, and Kate, and Sawyer and Hurley and Mr. Eko and Sayid and Juliet and Ben and Locke and everyone else.

Comic books (and regular book series as well) have the luxury of drawing out the universe, painting it and describing it and making it real and believable and understandable, for years and years and pages and pages, without the obligation to tie all the loose ends or finish every sub plot at the end of each book/year/story arc/what-have-you.  It can create a place, pose 10 questions, answer 3 of them, and then continue on, asking more questions and answering a few here and there.  This freedom from deadline (at least in theory) is part of the reason it is hard to quit reading them.  One story may end, but the universe is still there, having other stories being told all over it.

Okay, so I don’t know exactly what it all means. But it seemed interesting. To me, at least. I wouldn’t presume to speak for all of you.

Bonus epiphany: theme of both Lost & Matrix = Love conquers all. Okay, so it’s a common theme. So what? It just occurred to me, so that makes it a super-amazing realization. And probably the reason I liked both of them. Well, that and cute boys.

His Roots and my roots

I just finished watching the two TV mini-series based on the books of Alex Haley, Roots and Roots the Next Generations.

When I was 7 or 8, I remember seeing parts of the first one from my attic bedroom with my sister, peeking down the staircase after we were supposed to be in bed (and I remember getting caught, after which they moved the TV and made it harder, but we could still watch it).  Turns out my memory wasn’t that good, but it was enough for me to (finally) get the DVDs from the library and watch both of them (28 hours, I think?) over the last few weeks (no, I do not have a life, thanks for asking).

Some of it could have used some editing. Some of it was obviously cleaned up for a mainstream television audience (and in the 70s, when they were stricter than they are now). But – wow. Most of the acting is incredible. Some if it – even cleaned up, and cut away at the last second, and condensed  –  is so painful to watch, and listen to.  I can build up a head of righteous indignation for the unfairness of someone cutting in line at the grocery store, so watching human beings treated like cattle, and pets, and half-wits, and contagious diseases for fully half of all the scenes they showed… well, that was hard to take. My chest would fill up and I’d be choking on all the things that no one was saying. But I have to say… I’m so jealous of Alex Haley.

The effort that his family put in to making sure that they stayed together, and knew where they came from, who they were.  Seven generations – from a man stolen from everything he knew and taken half-way around the world. Brought to a place where no one spoke his language and they beat him for believing he was fully human. But his four-greats-grandson was able to find the village he had been stolen from, and cousins who still lived there. I can’t even go back three generations and have names for everyone. I know a few tiny facts about that generation, and nothing from before that. Neither of my parents seemed to give a hoot about any of it. And then they moved away from their entire family, on both sides, and put as many miles and silences between us as they could and still be in the same country. So I sit out here, like a rock thrown into the ocean. And I wonder which mountain I fell off of, because I didn’t grow here. I came from something else, somewhere else. And I wish I was on bedrock, not this sandy soil. Alex Haley’s family was bought and sold and beaten and cheated and raped and cheated again – but they always had each other, and they even had a name and a few words from Africa.

What I read in April

The River Where Blood is Born by Sandra Jackson-Opoku – this is a multi-generational book, complete with gods and tricksters looking on. Much like some of my favorite Alice Walker (yes, this one starts in Africa as well). This will get a full review soon.

Best European Ficition 2010, which I reviewed for BookBrowse.com (I did like it, despite my avoidance maneuvers).

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon– this book was recently returned to me from a friend who had borrowed it. A novella of Sherlock Holmes’s final investigation. Chabon never disappoints, and I don’t even like Sherlock Holmes.

Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean – the story of a woman who survived some of WWII by living (with the rest of the employees & their families) in a museum in the USSR. The story bounces back and forth between her current life in the U.S. Pacific NW – while she is suffering from Alzheimer’s – and her memories of that war-torn winter in… Leningrad, naturally. Lots of interesting questions about memory and what is real, and the power of the human spirit to survive just about anything, and the way myth and art assist in that survival.

My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme– I read this because I loved the Julia Child portions of the Julie & Julia film, and this book did not disappoint. The film clearly captured her exuberance and passion for food, France and her husband that shines through this book. Takes us from their arrival in France through the second edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and the creation of her television show. Co-written by Child and her grand-nephew.

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong– which I reviewed here.

A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman. This is the story of an Indian girl…. that I didn’t finish. I got through maybe two chapters, and it just wasn’t working for me. I don’t entirely blame the book – the character was mildly interesting up to the point where I stopped reading. But it was not capturing my interests enough to hang onto it (this was about the time I started reading Neil Gaiman’s blog, so I blame him at least partially for my distraction).  It was a library book, so I returned it without finishing it.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman.  This is the book I read instead of A Disobedient Girl. Neil was blogging about the audio book or something, so I had to go re-read my copy. Pratchett is a witty, fantastically funny author, and I’ve already told you how much I adore Gaiman. I remember finding this book and being thrilled – I’d only read Neverwhere by Gaiman at that point, but I’d read at least half dozen Pratchett Discworld books (Small Gods was my favorite at that point, and still in the top three) and was excited to see the two of them together. My only complaint in this otherwise hilarious comic romp through the apocalypse is the rather anticlimactic ending. Funny, funny, funny book. I can remember feeling compelled to read parts of it to friends because I needed them to know that I wasn’t imagining things, it really was that crazy.

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Looks like I only finished seven books in April.  Seems like a slow month (especially since I’ve already read eight in May, and it’s only the 19th). What was I doing? Oh right, I was avoiding Best European Fiction 2010. Also, I read a year’s worth of Neil Gaiman’s blog. I’m not proud of it, but it does indicate how much free time I had on my hands.

A book & a film by a Frenchman

I don’t remember where I heard about Brodeck by Philippe Claudel.  It might have been BookBrowse.com, but could have been Powell’s.  I do remember that I was broke and out of books to read, so I hit the library after work (I also remember that it was raining, and I was rushing to get there before they closed, but you probably don’t need to know that, right?). I had the name of the book in my head, and it happened to be on the New Book shelf at the Hillsdale branch, so I brought it home (with several others, I’ve never gotten out of a library with only one item. Ever.).  It got great reviews, and when I went looking around the interwebs, I discovered he writes screenplays and directs films as well.

Brodeck was one of those books I really should have written about when it was still fresh in my mind. I’m sure I read this book in 2009, so it’s been several months. I remember it being really good, and melancholy without being sad, exactly. I remember being impressed with his first-person narrative (a difficult style to do well, in my opinion) and how strongly the emotional character of Brodeck was portrayed. But all of the other terribly learned and intelligent things I’m sure I meant to say about it completely escape me at this point. I know that I voted for it as ‘best book of the year’ on some poll, based on the fact that it was the best of the books on the list they had (that I had read).

The story is set in post-WWII Europe (somewhere around the Poland/Germany border, the story is deliberately vague on this point). A stranger comes to town and is so curious and strange and inquisitive and happy, that this beaten-down little hamlet is completely defensive and immediately suspicious of him. They end up killing him out of fear and guilt.  It is a great story about how guilt can eat you alive, and how painful it can be to face your own conscience. It’s also a great story about ‘the truth’ and how hard it can be to tell it, or recognize it.

The book is supposed to be a ‘report’ the town leaders have asked Brodeck to write to explain what they did to some nebulous government authority in the distance, in case there are any questions.  But of course, writing this is dangerous – look what happened to the last guy! – and so Brodeck ends up writing two versions, one for the town elders and one for himself – and us. The layers of story and viewpoint are impressive and well-executed.

I picked up a film at the video store a few weeks ago (was in the foreign film $1 section, had Kristin Scott Thomas on it) and it was one of his (at this point, having totally forgotten that he did films), so I rented it (I’ve Loved You So Long) and it was great as well. Also sad, about how loss can make you do crazy things, and how love really can heal you, even if it can also destroy you.

So there ya go – a book and a movie recommendation.  Next time you’re looking for pathos and enlightenment, Philippe Claudel is your guy. Tell him you heard it here first.

(only one more book on the ugly list – yay!)