Watch this space

For all of you six people out there who read my blog, I just want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, thank you. It's something not said often enough in this culture. I'm not sober enough to truly form a rational blog at this particular point in time, but I will be producing more content soon. Expect more juicy, cynical, biting sociao-cultural commentary soon.

Dangit...why is it that key milestones in life are always marked by such disquieting self-examination? That's so inconvenient....

The Waste Land

Two of my favorite works I read as a teenager are being made into films. Alan Moore's Watchmen, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, are both scheduled to hit the silver screen in 2009. This does, on a certain level, fill me with anticipation and excitement.

These two works went a long way to shaping my perceptions and attitudes as a young adult. They took a nerdy kid from the suburbs and blew his mind wide open. I originally read Gibson's magnum opus in high school and it, more than anything assigned as part of a class, introduced me to the power and beauty of the novel format. I wrote a paper on Neuromancer for a college class in 1989 where I explored modernist versus postmodernist themes in the novel (and got an A from the professor, by the way). I still read Gibson's works, and I find it both ironic and utterly appropriate that he has become a cliche, an icon of the past; he now writes about occurrences in recent history with the same veracity and immediacy of his early novels.

Watchmen disturbed me in ways no slasher flick ever could. Apocalyptic visions, concepts of utilitarianism and determinism, and the deconstruction of the hero-myth, in a graphic novel? How could something in a nine-panel format evoke such feelings of intrigue and despair in me? To say I devoued the book would be both a cliche and an understatement.

And now they are both receiving the Hollywood treatment. There has been a near-univeral howl of disapproval on the Internet for these projects, declaring that they are too grand, too cereberal, too mind-blowing to ever be properly captured in a motion picture while still doing the source material justice. And, judging by Hollywood's previous abysmal attempt at a William Gibson work, I would say the naysayers have some strong evidence in their favor. The fact that the director tapped to helm the Neuromancer film only directed music videos and the execrable Torque, only lends credence to this theory. But I would call upon these people to pause and consider another project in which a deep, rich novel's film adapatation was handed to a wild-card director. This project, in violation of all my (and most peoples') expectations, turned out to be a sublime work of genius.

However, let us consider the direction of the movie industry. Over and over we see the breeding ground for directors to be music videos. That has become the Horatio Alger story of the twenty-first century. Scrappy, artsy young man makes a reputation directing music videos. Eventually, he is recognized by the film establishment, and goes on to produce award-winning movies.

I fear that the themes that are signature elements of the music-video format will find their way to dominate the cinema as well. Music videos represent the triumph of style over substance; they are an amalgamation of powerful yet dissonant imagery without any structure. In fact, most videos are very aggressive about not having the classic story-based elements of plot, climax, and resolution; to include those things would be considered "cheap" or "hackneyed." This may originally have been a rebellious rejection of cultural bindings and an honest attempt at post-modernistic or even dada-ist inventiveness. Or, I could be giving music video directors too much credit. Either way, however, the current conventions of the music-video format represent the classic subversion of rebellion by incorporating elements of rebelliousness into the power structure. By now, however, there is nothing anti-confirmist about the lack of plot in music videos. Watching them leave me with a distinct empty feeling, as though they have much unrealized potential.

This is not to say that cinema does not need someone talented with imagery and artifice; indeed, a gifted hand with the camera does improve the quality of the film tremendously. But such an individual should be an art director, or a director of cinematography first; then, if proving himself to be as capable with plot and dialogue as with imagery and cinematography, then he could move up to the overall directorial helm.

So, I wait with bated breath to see how these two projects play out. In the meantime, however, I will endeavor to try something before the Neuromancer film is released: I will write my own version of the script as a tribute to the original work, then compare how closely the movie adheres to my vision.

An interviewer once asked Neil Gaiman what his favorite computer game was. He said the original Zork series, because they "had the best graphics." I know how he feels.