So, a bit ago I posted a rather intense blathering about how I thought a Spider-man comic was the epitome of packaging up suffering for consumption, and how this was a bad thing. I tried very hard not to go over the top, treat it as funny, and the post took quite a bit of time, since I actually kept rewriting to get rid of any glibness.
This is not that.
See, that right there is glib.
Yup.
Anyway, since then, I've had two experiences which have provided me with alternate examples of what to do with suffering. The Spider-man comic packaged it up as entertainment, gave a cynical manipulation into convincing readers it was "dark" and "worthwhile" storytelling, and then ritually murdered a young girl in a skintight uniform. That's option one: cynical manipulation. And that's the one I think is worst, because it's subtle and will worm its way into mainstream storytelling.
Option two is Mark Millar. Who wrote something I actually swore about while talking to a stranger in the bookstore. Still not sure about that action. Anyway. Millar wrote two things I've read which exemplify option two: shameless glorification. His "graphic novels" "Kick-Ass" and "Nemesis" gleefully make the "heroes" kill in the most brutal, profane, and disgusting manner hundreds or thousands of innocents. There is no manipulation, there is no justification. There is just sheer, bloody gore.
Sickening, and dangerous (since these things keep getting made into movies, and people think it's cool and edgy when really, everything has been done in ancient Rome...oh, wait, we have TV shows glorifying that too...), but shameless and open about it.
The last option, and the only one I find acceptable, is what I found while rereading John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, an intellectual descendant of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (quite consciously so, as the characters in the books read those works and talk about it). I've often described Scalzi's work as the equivalent of McDonalds (which I just ate for lunch, so don't think I'm dissing him or them) - quick, cheap, extremely competent, and disposable. He knows exactly where to put his words, his plot events, his emotional beats, everything - and the fact that I keep buying him (at least this series, though I find his other work much less interesting) despite the fact that at every moment I can say "Oh, that's how this bit functions here" says a lot. In other words, I see the skeleton of his books, but I think it's a mighty nice skeleton.
Scalzi's series is philosophical action military scifi. Good stuff. In the course of his books, soldiers (male and female) are violently killed, children are butchered and eaten, and all manner of aliens wreak havoc and have havoc wreaked upon them. Stuff much worse than the above two examples happens. And yet, I feel like it's justified because instead of cynically manipulating one into thinking it's dark storytelling or glorying in the gore, Scalzi lets us feel sickened, outraged, and horrified, without using extreme descriptions to package the suffering for consumption. Evil happens - but it's seen as evil, not tiltillating or cool.
And that, I think, is how it should be done.
(Note: for some of my readers, er, that is, about three of the four of you - and I love you all dearly - the Old Man's War series has military-fiction style dialogue, so lots of swearing, and a rather free-wheeling approach to sex. Just to get that out there, so I don't push readers towards it without proper warning.)
No comments:
Post a Comment