AU where the odyssey takes place entirely in ikea
Odysseus spends like an hour in the bed section being aggressively cuddled by some strange drunk woman who fell on top of him while he was testing out mattresses and has too strong a grip for him to pull free
Meanwhile Penelope is sitting behind the checkout with the bed they bought eating ice cream with Telemachus and trying to ignore the pack of dudebro frat boys trying to hit on her
:D :D So glad to spread JOY FROM WHICH THERE IS NO RECOURSE
And doubly glad over THESE THOUGHTS, which are themselves right up my alley! I veerrry agree that Wes Anderson, whose work I definitely think is being homaged at various points in Legion (that opening montage!!), achieves far more of a Brechtian distancing than these TV shows (although I can’t speak to Mr. Robot) (yet?).
My off-the-cuff take right now is that Wes Anderson is deliberately staging and composing his works to create the feeling of something….staged and composed. Like, he wants you to feel like you’re watching tiny actors acting out their tragicomedies in a diorama theatre. It’s tilt-shift without tilt-shift. So that’s what his scene-setting is doing — Bryan Fuller and Noah Hawley, to my eyes, are doing something different. They’re setting scenes to tell you “Once upon a time…” In fact, occasionally someone literally says that. So if Anderson is theatre, maybe Hawley and Fuller are storybook? Both those things often have distinct stylistic viewpoints and fourth-wall-breaking frameworks, but I think they engage an audience in different ways, possibly to different ends.
“Once the choice is made, it’s a meaningful choice. That’s why the discussion in art is that the moment Duchamp signed that urinal, he declared it a work of art because his gaze made it art. He said, if I look at it the right way, this is art. Which in a different, pop way is Andy Warhol transforming the Campbell’s soup can by making it a work of art, or Lichtenstein blowing up comic book panels. Because I think that the moment you look at it as art, and you treat it as art, it is art. There’s a willingness, there’s a faith, there’s a very, very magical alchemy that happens when somebody looks at something with enormous love and enormous passion—and it doesn’t matter what that material is. It can be a comic book page, it can be a silly story, and you don’t change it, but the way you look at it transforms it. Which is a very different exercise than postmodernism. Postmodernism or kitsch is me winking at you, saying ‘I know it’s silly, but I’m being ironic. I’m above the material.’ And for me, the transformative power of art is you are not above the material.”
—Guillermo del Toro (Read the full interview in our latest issue)
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
I have sung over so many abysses,
And lived in so many mirrors.
Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
Somehow it only just came together for me that I could listen to Bryan Fuller talk to Ben Blacker about writing television for an hour and a half, and I could not believe I hadn’t done that yet. Have you done this yet? Because let me tell ya, it is hilarious and illuminating from top to bottom. If you are interested in any of Fuller’s shows, or TV production in general, or just working as a creative, or working with creatives, or simply fascinated by the personal history of Bryan Fuller, A Brilliant Candid Weirdo — you should super get in here.
Also, as a conversation recorded back in January of 2014, it’s remarkably… prescient? It almost reads like a three-part primer on the current state of Hannibal, with some on-point speculation about the presidential election to boot.
Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.
whorological replied to your post: TOS, aka OG Star Trek: The Experience
‘that the faker the production, the more real something else becomes?{…} suddenly the emotions they are feeling becomes the realest thing in the scene’-omg you’ve pinpointed the EXACT THING I felt deeply but couldn’t articulate as a child: when you take out all the set dressing, only the character interactions remain. It’s the diff b/w watching a stage play v a distractingly soulless bigbudget blockbuster
Stage plays are so INTERESTING, in that I’ve gathered there can be this divide sometimes between whether it’s more powerful to tell your story through “realism” or through “theatricality.” For me, I actually do think the more blatantly This Is A Play! shows I’ve seen are the ones that affect me the deepest. When I was still working in professional theater, my company put up one of the runs of Mary Zimmerman’s Candide, and it embraced ~stagecraftiness~ with a wholeheartedness that was unlike anything I’d seen. Actors would swoop fake seabirds overhead on long poles to indicate that they were on the water; shivery blue taffeta was ceremoniously draped over a red sheep and so we knew she had been drenched; for one long introspective conversation on a ship, the actors all sat downstage while one of the company veerrryy slowly crossed upstage pulling a beautiful perfect model of the ship behind her on a golden rope. Everything was all joyously, inventively FABRICATED, nothing under those lights resembling anything we might find in our own world.
And every single time I watched it, I wept my heart out. It was like watching a group of people in a big bright toy box, using cloth and boards and bubbles to tell the most truly felt story they could. On this stagiest of stages, their pure human expression shone.
And in a way, I wonder if deep down this is what we’re always trying to do when we make television and movies set in space: set off the near & vibrant humanness of our stories against the far dark reaches of outer space. Candide wasn’t about the gold, so clearly paint, and Star Trek isn’t about the galaxy, so clearly a screen — they are both about us. Perhaps, after these 50 years, this is why it’s still The Original Series, so visibly held together with just glue and hope, that has endured beyond anyone’s dreams.
