House and The Irony of Preachiness

These are the dog-days when I correct papers and then correct more paper and then correct more papers. I'm home much of the time and in the interests of being fair (to the students and to myself), I take breaks and watch shows.

Lately, I watched the first season of House. I noticed a few things that interested me. One of the main things I noticed was how thoroughly fleshed out the show was right from day one. I've formed the conclusion that when a producer/director has a vision--a particular way he/she desires a show to unwind--it has a tremendous impact on the quality of the show.

If, on the other hand, the show is like the technology/consulting firm I worked at which couldn't make up its mind WHY it had merged, then all you've got is a bunch of characters, a cool set, and a few ideas.

The next thing I noticed was that Wilson lies A LOT. I didn't realize this the first season because, gosh darn it, Wilson is so nice. But in his gosh-shucks way, he lies all the time. And yet House puts up with him, and I think House puts up with him because Wilson lying makes life interesting and because Wilson isn't wrong or stupid with his lies. House tends to associate himself with people who will expose him, and Wilson does that. He just does it by lying.

The third thing I noticed was that Chase is actually very, very funny. There's a scene where House decides to actually visit a patient. Foreman and Cameron are all "Wow, he's going to see a patient!" But Chase says, "I don't know who I am anymore" in this dead-pan way. It is very funny. He is also more amused by House than the others. I think this was smart writing. On the one hand, it made Chase less sycophantic than House sometimes paints him. On the first hand, it makes Chase's betrayal of House that much more awful. And yet comprehensible. And House takes it (and gives Chase grief for the rest of his life).

Moving on, I must mention Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes which I have also watched recently. It's Christmas time (not Holiday time--this is my blog; it's Christmas time), and every Christmas, I watch, "The Blue Carbuncle" from the Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett.

And I appreciated all over again how wonderful that series is. The thing that makes it so incredibly wonderful is that the directors allow the culture to exist without making big, "DID YOU NOTICE HOW CHAUVINIST THEY ARE? DID YOU NOTICE HOW IMPERIALIST THEY ARE?" comments.

In the episode following "The Blue Carbuncle," "The Copper Beeches" a young governess is offered a position by an extremely odd man. She is offered the position through an agency, and the woman who runs the agency pressures her into accepting what is clearly a bizarre/predatorial situation. The woman really should protect the young governess, but she doesn't. You feel the load of being an independent female employee in the early 20th century. But yet--and this is important--nobody comments on it. The director doesn't make a huge point of it. Sherlock Holmes and Watson never mentioned it. They take the assumptions of the culture for granted.

And yet the scene's treatment is too marked to be accidental. You feel that the director cared enough to be honest without being made preachy or nervous by Conan Doyle's material.

I feel the same way about the 1980s Miss Marple movies versus the recent Miss Marple movies, which I loathe. The 1980s versions present Christie's world intact, honestly. The recent versions put their own agenda and badly written scripts before Agatha Christie's vision.

In the novel turned movie A Murder Is Announced, for example, two older women live together. They are friends. Agatha Christie never comments on the relationship. It wasn't unusual in that day and age. It didn't come hung about with possible labels and possible inferences.

In fact, it didn't necessarily mean anything sexual at all. And it didn't necessarily not. It was an age when people were allowed a great deal more freedom with their sexual orientation than they are now. Really! (The very lack of speculation meant that Cary Grant, for instance, didn't have to declare himself. Thank goodness because I don't think Cary Grant would have known how to declare himself. He would have gone to therapy instead, and thereby, destroyed the very sexual ambiguity that made him such a fantastic actor in the first place.)

But in the recent Murder Is Announced, the two women aren't "friends" or roommates. They are lovers, and Miss Marple gets to make some very sanctimonious, very modern speeches about being true to oneself.

Now, get this: in the book and in the movies, one of the women is killed. In the 1980s version, the devastation and anger of the survivor is superb. It strikes you right to your heart's core. It's REAL.

But in the recent version, ho hum, another bad day for lesbians everywhere.

Ironic, huh?

To bring this back to House, I think Shore is trying to do the "no judgment, just showing people and life" thing. Not completely--hey, it is an American show--but to an extent. Which is rather unusual. More power to him!

TELEVISION

Modred versus Launcelot

I became interested in Camelot sometime in my early teens. I read the play about a thousand times. I don't know why it enthralled me. I don't particularly like the actual musical; I never cared much for T.H. White's The Once and Future King; I didn't like the Walt Disney movie. And I never read Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I have read parts of Malory.

But for some reason, the possible reality of the Arthurian legend fascinated me. I don't mean the feminist-druid stuff which I think is stupid; I mean, the real Dark Ages stuff with that wacky monk, Gildas proclaiming doom all over the place only nobody is listening, and there's all these Saxons moving in and, really, there probably weren't any major wars, just a few skirmishes, and it's very possible that the skirmishes were the Celts fighting each other, NOT fighting the Saxons. Because the Romans have left by this point, so the Saxons basically have free-loader rights to that "green and scepter'd isle." And boy, I just love that stuff.

(Now that I think about it, it's books which use parts of the Arthurian myth to create a separate fantasy that I like--like Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series. And C.S. Lewis.)

Then, as an undergraduate, I developed a real liking for the other (older) Arthurian legends: Gawain and the Green Knight and Gawain and the Loathly Lady (Wife of Bath stuff).

But of course, if you read anything about King Arthur (or Artos) or the Round Table, you are going to run into Galahad and Monty Python and the grail and Launcelot.

I developed a distaste for Launcelot early on. It isn't just that he has an affair with Guinevere; it's that he whines about it. The whole Lady of Shalott fiasco is Launcelot feeling sorry for himself all over the place. He forgets who he is and falls in love with this other chick (the Lady) and then remembers who he is and decides to go back to the (married) woman, Guinevere, and then the Lady kills herself and instead of Launcelot saying, "Them's the breaks" or "Boy, I was a jerk," he gets all mopey and goes off to try to redeem himself and really, it is exactly like Leonardo on the Titanic and you, the audience, wishing desperately that Billy Zane would shoot him.

I much prefer Mordred. And interestingly enough, I'm not alone. A lot of YA books have been written in favor of Mordred or from Mordred's point of view: the Book of Mordred by Vivian Vande Velde; The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein, for example.

I think there are two reasons Mordred fascinates us Mordredites:

(1) Mordred is much more ambiguous than any of the other Camelot/Arthurian legend characters. And he is placed, plot-wise, in the position of being the character who outs the well-liked but corrupt "good" guys.

Basically, Mordred is Spike.

And ambiguity is interesting. I think it is no error of human nature that the most popular Star Trek characters are those characters who are struggling to define themselves: Data, Seven of Nine, the Doctor. (House from House.) We are more interested in people who haven't figure themselves out completely yet than people who have because most of us fall into category one rather than category two.

(2) If you root for Mordred, you inevitably don't root (that much) for Launcelot, and Launcelot is such a great guy to hate. Launcelot is the quintessential spoiled kid who goes off to college or prep school or wherever and gets into trouble with some other spoiled kids. He may even be the ringleader, but it will never be clear; he will never own responsibility. And then they all get into trouble, and the other kids may even get expelled, but Launcelot goes and cries and says how SORRY he is and how he never meant it to get out of hand and isn't it too awful and it wouldn't have gone so badly if it hadn't been for that other guy (who told on them).

I've written two Mordred stories myself. In both, he is not dissimilar to Vivian Vande Velde's portrayal of Mordred as extremely tight-lipped. (My Mordred is less heroic.) If I remember correctly, Wein's Mordred is seriously dysfunctional and kidnaps his half-brother. But he is still the protagonist.

So reason #3 for being a Mordredite must be: he supplies so much great material!

BOOKS

The Non Either/Or of C.S. Lewis

Recently, Philip Pullman made a series of negative statements (or someone said he made a series of negative statements), about Christians and C.S. Lewis, and people have been forming camps.

I'm not going to talk about that.

However, you can read my brother Eugene's insightful analysis of the issue on his blog.

Since C.S. Lewis' name has been bandied about during this kerfuffle (not really a kerfluffle, but I like the word), I decided to post about C.S. Lewis.

Based on the plethora of books I have read by Lewis and about Lewis, you might imagine me a no-holds-barred Lewis aficionado. And, well, yeah, I kind of am. But over the years, I've also formed the conclusion that Lewis was not someone I would enjoy having over for lunch. For that matter, I don't think Lewis would have enjoyed coming over to lunch at my place. As Eugene says on his blog, "I also have the feeling that the eccentric Lewis was in person--like Einstein--a less agreeable person than his hagiographies make him out to be."

And I can't say that I even agree with all of what Lewis wrote. In fact, if you parse it out, you might discover that I disagree with over 1/3 of what the guy actually said.

So why IS he one of my favorite writers?

I've decided that even though I'm not as pessimistic or as Anglican or as wacky Edwardian as Lewis, underneath all that stuff, we share a fundamental viewpoint. It is a viewpoint missing from academic discourse. And occasionally religious discourse. And well, just about everywhere, if I'm honest. The best summary of this viewpoint comes from (yet another) book I'm reading about Lewis:

Everything he desired was an object of imagination; everything he believed was an object of reason. (Cunningham, 68).*

Lewis was both a logical Englishman and a dreamy, romantic Celt (his own generalizations, not mine.) And he reached a point in his life where he allowed both facets of his personality to exist simultaneously.

To me, this kind of approach is like finding a safe harbor. I sit in classes, I tutor online, I go to church, and I feel like I'm surrounded by people saying, "You must be one or the other!"

"You must accept jargon and touchy-feelingness as evidence or you must be an advocate of dead-white patriarchal males." "You must advocate rules and structure, or you must advocate creative, out-of-the-box thinking." "You must be an hoity-toity intellectual, or you must be spiritual."

I can always find people in these environments willing to give up the either/or. (And I personally believe that Mormons, whether they want it or not, find themselves at the smack-dab center of these either/or tensions. Stick grace, works, agency, democratic ideals, a heirarchal church and final judgement, continual progression, Joseph Smith, salvation of the dead, the temple, and, hey, the Protestant work/education ethic into one mix and viable either/ors just don't last that long.)

Nevertheless, there seems to be a strong human proclivity towards either/ors, or maybe it is just easier to discuss human behavior in those terms. I don't know. But I do know that Lewis is a huge comfort to me. Behind everything that he writes, no matter how daft, is this mind that won't reduce everything to logic or to gushy feelings or to jargon and politics or to relative experiences. He just won't give it all up to one side or the other. It's such a relief!

I also admire Lewis as a writer, which is kind of a different issue. I have this fall-down-on-my-face-oops-not-suppose-to-worship-idols response to writers who can communicate as easily as Lewis. I find Lewis' writing superhumanly fresh. I know he can be didactic, but I never notice because, golly, the writing just flows. I think a lot of us desperate writers start with ideas and images in our heads, and we then struggle to get them out in ways that sound right. Although Lewis states that he started his Narnia books with images, I think the man thought in words. Language wasn't a tool for him; it was the way his synapses worked.

He also had an uncanny ability to understand human fallibility. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he creates and explains Edmund's betrayal in a way that underscores the humanness of Edmund's betrayal (and he does it so easily, you hardly notice). Edmund isn't being evil or wicked or demonic or beyond the pale. He is being human and petty and prideful and self-protective (the part where he lies about being in Narnia with Lucy is heart-stabbing and yet, and yet, it goes on every day in your average Junior High). Edmund's petty, spiteful, self-absorbed behaviors have horrendous consequences. Maybe, they wouldn't have quite the degree of horrendous consequence in the material world (instead Edmund would grow up and turn into a horrible, self-serving manager whose co-workers detested him), but in the world of myth, a hero's behaviors must have horrendous consequences, and Lewis believed (as I do) that the end game of earthly religion is myth come alive.

*The book is C.S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith by Richard B. Cunningham. It is about C.S. Lewis as an apologist. Don't be mislead by the title. It is not about Lewis' contributions to Christianity. Instead, it is a fearfully academic book about apologetics--I get through about three pages every Sunday.

BOOKS

Near Miss

I'm always fascinated by near misses, movies that almost become huge artistic or cultural successes but don't. I consider The Illusionist to be a near miss, and I've been trying to figure out why. It has all the right ingredients: a love story, a mystery, adequate acting on the part of Norton and Biel and very good acting indeed by Giamatti. Wonderful atmosphere. Great effects. So why did it leave me cold? And why, although people tend to prefer it to the Prestige, did it not take off in a big way?

WARNING: SPOILERS:

I think the main reason is that the movie asks us to sympathize with the lovers (Norton and Biel). I think this was a huge mistake. If the story had remained Giamatti's completely (as I think the short story must be), the film might have been artistically, if not popularly, acclaimed. Most of the story is Giamatti's but the powers-that-be couldn't stop themselves from giving us the lovers' point of view and hoping we would commiserate.

Well, I didn't. I'm sorry; I don't care how horrible the prince was supposed to be (and I never got any real proof of his horribleness), setting up a guy to take the blame for something he didn't do is still, well, setting up a guy to take the blame for something he didn't do. It was, in fact, a murder plot worthy of Agatha Christie since if the prince didn't kill himself, his father or the people would.

Yuck. I couldn't feel any sympathy for the lovers. I didn't care. I hoped she would die of consumption within a year--take that, you mindless, self-indulgent, murdering jerks.

BUT if the story had remained Giamatti's entirely--if the whole object had been the chief inspector's reaction to the illusion; if, that is, the audience had not been asked to care whether the lovers got away or not but only if the chief inspector came through with his dignity, I think the movie would have been far more creatively satisfying.

This approach could have worked since Giamatti and Sewell (the prince) played very well off each other. (And with the new approach, the chief inspector and the prince would have become the core of the story.) Sewell is one of those scene-chewing actors, and Giamatti handled the scene-chewing with aplomb. In fact, the final scene between them before Sewell kills himself was so awesome, I sat there going, "Why couldn't we get more of this? It isn't Sewell's fault he can outact everyone in sight!" (Although, in fairness, I think the acting, Giamatti apart, was fairly even; Biel may be the weakest link, but she's lovely enough that it doesn't matter, and Norton isn't so outrageously talented that he looks odd next to her. I realized, after the movie started, that I'd gotten Norton confused with Jeremy Northam, who probably would have outacted Biel. I don't require great acting in my movies, but I do require balance.)

Lady in the Water had its own near-miss problems, but at least Shyamalan let Giamatti carry the story. Point of view really is everything.

MOVIES

One of the Dumber Arguments I've Heard

At the risk of being radically misunderstood, I must comment on an argument that I have run across many times regarding homosexuality.

The radically misunderstood part is that my comments have nothing to do with homosexuality itself. I don't intend to address homosexuality per se at all on this blog. If you want to witness people calling each other names go to some political pundit's blog.

But I am an English teacher, and I get tired--oh, so tired--of illogical arguments. And I consider this particular argument to be illogical.

So, here we go: I recently picked up Neal Boortz's book Somebody's Gotta Say It. He's a libertarian. I'm a libertarian. Why not? I became rapidly disenchanted. There's a few too many assumptions floating about the book, which is probably why I don't read books by pundits in the first place.

This particular assumption goes something like this: Homosexuality is not a choice (this is the claim part of the argument; it can be refuted or supported) because no one would choose to be ostracized by society (this is the silly part of the argument).

No one would choose to be ostracized by society.

Really?

Oh, yeah?

This is not the first time I have encountered this argument; it always astonishes me. Even when I was in my 20's and supposedly more naive than I am now, I never could give credence to this argument or take seriously the people who proposed it.

My first thought is always, Uh, what about the history of, I don't know, the human race?

The fact is people have been making choices that ostracize them from their societies, families, cultures, and planet earth since, well, since the first scientist made a claim that annoyed his government and the first hippie went over the proverbial wall and the first artist sat around going, "I'm not going to hunt bison. I'm going to paint them."

The Impressionists ostracized themselves from the powers that be in the arts--until they singlehandedly created the picture postcard industry. (Okay, not really.) Thomas Hardy ostracized himself from British society when he published Jude the Obscure (although it could have just been Hardy's personality; he ostracized himself from his wife as well). Tons of religious leaders (including Joseph Smith) ostracized themselves from 19th century American society with their unique sexual practices. And then there's all those people who have changed their political parties or their religious affiliations or, gosh, their dietary habits and ostracized themselves from their families/friends/societies.

According to the "No one chooses to be ostracized" argument, the chick from My Big Fat Greek Wedding would never have even contemplated marrying a non-Greek since the moment she did WHAM! possible ostracisim.

Now, you could argue that the chick from My Big Fat Greek Wedding didn't suffer very long from her decision but what's the rule here? If people don't suffer long, it must be choice, but if they do suffer long, it isn't?

The second possible refutation would be, "But, Kate, most of your examples are edgy, culture-changing personalities. What about ordinary people who just wish to live within the status quo?"

Well, I believe that even ordinary people who want to live within the status quo are desirous of an identity. You don't have to be a teenager or Picasso to define yourself by what you are not or by what will meet your desires.

Again, I am not going to argue here whether homosexuality is right/wrong, choice/non-choice. I simply don't believe that since people don't like negatives, every negative effect in their lives is therefore not the result of a personal choice. I realize that many people don't anticipate negative effects. But there are still many, many people in this world who anticipate the negative and still make the choice.(For several years after breaking with the Catholic Church, Martin Luther suffered intense psychological depression; he believed he was hounded by the devil--how's that for a negative effect?)

To go to the furthest extreme of this argument, let's take drug or gambling addicts. They ruin their healths, go into debt, lose their jobs, disappoint their families, and, possibly, undermine the fabric of society, yadda, yadda, yadda, and what, you think they did it because they didn't get a buzz? It just kind of happened to them?

Here's my stance: I think discussions about human nature would go a lot better (meaning, from my perspective, make more sense) if all arguments would start from the proposition that culture is not the final determinant for how a human being will behave: destructively or not.

FARES, FESTIVALS & OTHER FROLICS

Getting Snarky About Television and Anti-Television Silliness

I'm rereading Kathleen Rooney's Reading With Oprah, a book that I read about the time I wrote my thesis and which I found enormously helpful. Rooney creates a scholarly and surprisingly objective response to the OBC phenomenon and its fall-out. In general, the book is an attempt to understand the patterns of high and low culture in America or, rather, the perception of high and low culture in America (I think the latter is more probable than the former, personally, since my experience is that most people read/watch whatever they want. Unfortunately, I think Rooney may have been influenced in her writing by the academic tendency to define problems into being and then be shocked--shocked!--that such problems exist).

In general, the book makes some valid points, and I recommend it; however, half-way through, Rooney finds it necessary to explain to the reader why she thinks OBC failed in its objectives (before Oprah herself cancelled the televised version of the club). It is here that Rooney's argument falls to pieces, and it falls to pieces because Rooney doesn't understand television.

Rooney claims that the problem with OBC (which in general, she is very generous towards) was the format--i.e., no matter how good the books, the format of television would have produced a flattening effect whereby interesting/well-rounded novels were reduced to a few applicable labels.

I read that and thought, Has Rooney never attended a graduate-level class? Or a non-televised bookclub, for that matter? Girl, I hate to mention it, but that's par for the humanities course. (Interestingly enough, the bookclub I now attend, which is composed mainly of ladies from my church, is far less reductive [to borrow Rooney's term] than most bookclubs, which just proves that reading and analyzing scriptures all your life has its payoffs).

Now, granted, Rooney has a point. I've never been a fan of the packaged-this-is-your-life approach to literature but my dislike of this approach extends beyond Oprah. I have argued many times--in my thesis and elsewhere--that if you want an in-depth, passionate discussion about a piece of art, go to the fans (book and television). However, in order to bolster her argument, Rooney proceeds to make the extremely reductive argument that television is, by its very nature, stulifying and simplistic.

"[A]t this point," she writes, "one must do more than announce that TV flattens the complexity of things (which you'd have to be a fool to deny that it does) and leave it at that" (my emphasis).

Well, I guess I'm a fool, but I'm a fool who knows a lot more about television than Rooney does. (She goes on to produce several run-of-the-mill arguments: television is aimed at the lowest common denominator; it infantilizes viewers; it destroys the imagination: all this because of its commercial nature . . . Since up till this point in her book, Rooney displays a passing appreciation for the commercial nature of publishing houses, her sudden dislike of commercialized art sounds a little, uh, choosy.)

In any case, for someone who tries very, very hard throughout the beginning portions of her book to be a non-snob (although her dislike of genre fiction kind of gives her away), this "television is simplistic" argument kicks Rooney way off her egalitarian pedestal.

And it is impossibly stupid. The issue is not "Is television complex?" or "How can television be complex if it makes money!?" the issue is "TELEVISION ISN'T BOOKS!"

The latter statement would have given Rooney enough ammunition. If she had said, "The two mediums are incompatible: the kind of well-roundedness achieved by literature is not the well-roundedness aimed for by television," that is perfectly sane and defendable. There was no need for her to decide that television in its entirety is simplistic, etc. etc.

Such arguments are easy to refute: books flatten reality all the time. Reproduced dialog and in-depth descriptions as well as plots encapsulated in 500 pages are all contrivances and not how things occur in real life. At least with television, you have a constant stream of sensory perception (sight, sound) while with books, all you have is words on the page which don't make your imagination work at all . . . .

And on and on and on.

Since I like both books and television, I won't bother. The point is, however, that if the standards of one medium are held against the other, both will appear flat, overly stylized, and fake. It is frankly stupid to look at television as a failed reproduction of what literature (the true art!) is attempting to do, just as it is pointless to look at novels as a failed reproduction of something that television is attempting to do. (And while we are at it, why not bring poetry into the mix? Wheelbarrows in the rain: how reductionist is that! Oh, wait, maybe poetry shouldn't be held to this particular standard . . .)

And can we please get over the whole "television speaks to the lowest common denominator" argument? Seriously, has Rooney EVER watched the Simpsons?

I've been rewatching CSI: Season I and have been amazed, all over again, at how well-written the first few seasons are. I'm always impressed by seamlessness (one reason Tolkien impresses me): people who write well enough to make it look easy. (I think good art always looks easy from the outside. Bad art appears clunky and mannered and "look at me"!) I'm not just referring to the repartee on CSI but to the ordering of the scenes, the use of external, visual clues to move the plot forward, and the strong characterization of minor characters like Hodges, Ecklie, the coroners, and Greg.

Not to mention the acting, the editing, the directing, and a myriad other choices made by the producers.

"Ah, yes, Kate," my peers in college used to say, "but you are searching for those things; you are intellectually trained to look for them."

Sure, and I'm also intellectually trained to look for nuances in War & Peace, which doesn't alter the fact that is possible to read War & Peace purely for the plot and come away with no particularly in-depth reaction than, hey, a bunch of people died and a bunch of people got married.

The first point being that the things I notice in CSI are there to be noticed, which means that the writers are as smart as me (and much, much better at streamlining texts). In fact, if you watch a lot of television, you begin to realize how well-grounded the writers are in their culture. Television writers insert popular culture, film, and show-based references throughout their scripts on a constant basis. It's a little unnerving after a while. (All these writers holding private conversations with each other through their scripts!)

If the people who dislike television are incapable of seeing those things, well, hmmm, could it be that from television's point of view, they are untrained and uneducated? Well, well, that sure does change the stakes, doesn't it?

The second point: If a thing is made with intelligence, one can find intelligence there, and television is very, very, very intelligent.

Take, for example, my favorite episode of House, the second to last episode of season 1. In one episode, you have three plot lines running simultaneously plus an overarcing plot line, which is House's issue with his ex-girlfriend. On top of that, you have the introduction of several temporary characters (the students in the class) who, for the purposes of the story, must make an instantaneous impression on the viewer. There are a number of backflashes, not to mention the editing (which is always excellent with House), the acting, the lighting, the dialog, and the camera shots. Not to forget the music.

And all of it is seamless and self-contained; the set-up is paid-off (at several levels). The episode never jars; it never comes across as clunky. Television can. This episode doesn't. It is truly artistic. Again, one definition of good art could be art-that-makes-you-notice-all-the-hard-work-the-writer-did-and-instead-of-letting-you-enjoy-the-creation-calls-attention-to-itself-on-a-constant-basis. That would not be my definition, but then I don't read the same kinds of books that Rooney does. (In all fairness, Rooney might agree with me, although she does prefer books that "put [readers] through the paces of moral awareness, affiliation, and disaffiliation . . . they encourage us . .. to grapple with ideas and situations different from our own," all of which I find frankly tiresome. I don't, by the way, consider myself to be a lowest common denominator.)

To return to House: this intelligent, sophisticated, multi-layered episode is simplistic? Based on the lowest common denominator? According to whom? By what standard? Because it prevents people from (to quote one of Rooney's experts) "being able to imagine any social order different from the established one"? Does any novel do this? Does any good novel do this? Does any oevure beyond the purileness of Ayn Rand attempt to do this?

Again, the complexity is there. That doesn't mean people go looking for it (although a lot of fans do). By the same token, people don't necessarily go looking for complexity in Jane Eyre, Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye, or Moby Dick.

When Rooney claims "[Its pervasiveness] is what makes TV's anti-imagination effect so frightening: no one is safe," she means the absence of the kind of imagination she and her experts utilize and applaud. Television provides plenty of imagination, just not the same kind of imagination as one gets from books. But I suppose that concept is just a tad too complex for book-readers to understand.

Bourne Ultimatum

I've been a big fan of Bourne since the first movie. I went with zero expectations and came out going, "Holy cow!" Both the first two movies have held up very well in subsequent rewatches. So I was excited for Bourne Ultimatum but also wary. Third movies tend to awful (witness Return of the Jedi and the third Spiderman).

Well, it wasn't awful. But it wasn't great either. After much pondering, I reached the conclusion that the reason wasn't the plot or the action sequences or Matt Damon. The problem was the lack of a strong antagonist and a strong alter-ego.

In both the first and second movies, Bourne has both a strong antagonist and a strong alter-ego. The antagonist is the mastermind behind the current movie's CIA operation. The alter-ego is what or who Bourne would be if he hadn't woken up/broken his training.

In the first movie, the antagonist is Chris Cooper, one of my favorite actors, and a guy with effortless charisma. He has a number of factors in his favor, including his grim resolve, his investment in Treadstone, his disgust towards his superiors, and his lack of fear (he doesn't fear Bourne, for one thing). Bourne's alter-ego is Clive Owen, who also bubbles over with charisma. His scene in the field outside the farmhouse with Bourne is powerful. His characterization as the "hit man" that Bourne used to be is vital to this and the later movies, especially since the Professor (Owen) is willing to give Bourne information.

In the second movie, the antagonists are the cool Joan Allen and self-protective Brian Cox. Together they create a tense-filled opposition to Bourne's endeavors. His alter-ego is the utterly talented Karl Urban. Karl Urban as Bourne's alter-ego is interesting. He is what Bourne would be without the drug enhancements and extra special military training. He is as smart as Bourne and as quick-witted. Bourne's decision at the end to not finish Kirill (Urban) off in the car is his acknowledgement that Kirill is as much a professional as Bourne was supposed to be (although I have to admit, I don't really understand "good" guys who have car chases where an unbelievable number of people might get hurt). Karl Urban is also charismatic.

But the third movie has neither a strong protagonist or a strong alter-ego. Joan Allen has been reduced to playing Bourne's second. David Stratharin does a masterly job as a self-contained, nasty character, but Bourne really needs an antagonist who can chew up the scenery, not live inside his part. The two actors who actually could chew up the scenery--Finney and Glenn--are given very minor scenes.("Why?" one asks. "Why? Why? Why?")

And there is no one alter-ego, just a number of possibles.

The movie proves that unless you've got a decent bad guy, you are reduced to a lot of cool action scenes and some good dialog. The good guy can't carry the movie alone, no matter how hard he tries. It isn't that the bad guy and good guy must be in constant communication (a la Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman), just that the bad guy must be out there making life difficult for the hero. Joan Allen never meets Bourne in Supremacy, but her cool intellect is there, searching for him. The hero must matter to the villain. Otherwise, the hero ceases to matter to us.

MOVIES