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Sunday 19 April 2020

Recapturing the Feeling

Coming back to live in the town where I grew up carries some odd associations with it. I drive by certain spots, and my thoughts turn to the music I was listening to or the comics or books I was reading. I think I've mentioned this in the past few years, since moving back from London, but it's been thrown into sharper relief in the past six weeks, as I've switched from working out at the gym to running or walking in my old neighborhood.

I passed through different parts of the old neighborhood on two occasions today. The first was this morning, when I went on my run that took me past my old house and my old elementary school. The second was on a big walk after lunch, when I passed the elementary school again and walked around the houses of friends from those years.

As I thought about afternoons spent playing Star Tropics at one friend's house, it struck me (as it frequently does) how much replaying games or re-experiencing certain media is more an attempt to recapture the feeling of experiencing those things for the first time.

Not only that, but this nostalgia affects what I write. I'm aware of tics and idiosyncrasies that come straight from the comics and science fiction novels I was reading in high school, and I'd say the past few years have been a never-ending attempt to purge these tics from the way I tell my stories.

Or maybe I shouldn't be so quick to completely purge them - part of what informs a person's personality is the conversation they have as adults with the lessons they drew from media they experienced as kids. As a teenager I wanted more space battles and more questioning of Gene Roddenberry's vision from Star Trek; as a man in middle age I get tired of the bombast of shows like Discovery and want to get back to stories about how smart and well-intentioned people tackle problems like adults.

At the same time, it feels odd to write that I'm "a man in middle age", because the teenager (or child), as I was then, never feels so far from the surface. Part of it is dismay at the passage of time, and the thought that I get ever closer to decay and irrelevance and oblivion, but part is also cognitive dissonance that the "I" encompasses such a different person now compared with back then.

Paradoxically I might not feel this disconnect so clearly if I'd stayed in Palo Alto the entire time, or if I'd come straight back after college. My suspicion is that the disconnect is more marked, and appears in such specific places, because I'm confronted with triggers to these memories for the first time since I formed them. And in the case of spots I pass more frequently, it's become my habit to think about how those places reminded me of the video game or book or comic, which brings up memories of the thing again.

It's a reminder of how the brain forms grooves and your thoughts fit along those grooves quite easily, whether you like it or not. What's funny is that it also happens with new stuff I experience now - certain things remind me of working out in or wandering around London, despite there not being any explicit link. These memories then trigger thoughts of specific things I used to do or friends I used to hang out with, and as I return to the piece of media (for example a YouTube video) I'm reminded of the place or person I was thinking of the last time I watched it.

Brains are weird.

At any rate, it's a funny phenomenon that I think back to the Legion of Superheroes whenever I pass by the first condo complex my dad lived in after he and my mom split up, or that I think of the Quick Man level from Megaman 2 whenever I walk by the community center where I used to play kids' league basketball. I suppose you could call them both traumatic experiences, in their own way (basketball gave me nightmares for years afterwards), but it's interesting how the brain creates full snapshots of memories, and the weirdest triggers bring them back.

Proust, of course, wrote about this at length in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but we can only imagine what he'd have had to say about a reboot of his favorite comic series or the feeling of finally beating one of Megaman 2's toughest bosses. In the absence of his thoughts on these topics, I can only say that it's not always bitter to get back to that child-mind, or to see the continuity of my own sense of self between then and now. The question is whether I'll feel the same about the shows and books and whatever that I'm experiencing now, when I revisit them in twenty years' time.

Or maybe I'll just still be thinking of Megaman 2?

Sunday 12 April 2020

The Start of the Story: John Le Carre's The Night Manager

One of the best distractions from the terrors of my own to-read shelf is the bookshelves in the living room that contain my dad's books. There are obscure trashy fantasy novels alongside ponderous histories of Venice and the Silk Road, and there are Italian literary masterpieces alongside British mystery novels from the early twentieth century.

And then there are all the John Le Carré novels my dad has collected over the decades. Last year, on a whim, I picked up the Night Manager, because I'd seen the first episode (or two, I can't remember now) of the TV show when it came out in 2015 or so. I remembered the mood and the visuals, and how menacingly well-cast Hugh Laurie was as Richard Roper, the worst man in the world.

And now that I've gone back and watched the show, I wanted to look at the start of the novel and see if there were any lessons to take away from it - overall it's not my favorite of his books, but that initial section covers a lot of sins. And the story is probably more relevant now than when he published it, back in 1993, since we're a lot more conscious of the Faustian bargains governments make with the super-rich of various countries.

Where the show starts in Cairo, taking good advantage of the atmosphere of the Arab Spring to set the table for the meeting between Roper and Jonathan Pine in Switzerland years later, the book starts on that night in Switzerland. And where the show demonstrates what a consummate professional Jonathan is by having him calmly tell a guest during gunfire that the drinks in the hotel bar are free, the opening scene in Switzerland demonstrates that by describing how he's turned out in ways designed to appeal to the richer clients.

Coming back to my last post on "world-building", way back in 2015 when I had just re-read Hyperion by Dan Simmons, then I marveled at how Simmons packed all his themes into the first paragraph, and then played them out over the course of four books. Here Le Carré presents a different trick, of drawing in great detail the world that Jonathan lives in at the start of the story.

Meister's Hotel in Zurich is a world unto itself, after the fashion of the great old establishments of Europe. It's populated by the eccentrics that always populate Le Carré's books, such as Herr Kaspar, the concierge whose toupee was his stand of dignity against an overbearing client; or Frau Loring, who "had been Herr Meister's nanny, and as rumor had it, Herr Meister's father's mistress". It's also a building with its own stories to tell, like the grill room that Herr Meister has got it into his head to build, surpassing the understanding of the rest of the staff.

Because Jonathan is the night manager, per the title, the prose reflects the silence of his life at Meister's, and that in turn reflects the sense of a man hiding from life. To underscore the point, one of the letters he reads while waiting for Roper's party to arrive is from a guest with whom he had some form of potentially romantic relationship, but to whom he was emotionally distant. And to underscore that silence, and that feeling of being cut off, Roper arrives during the middle of a snowstorm, an apparition materializing from the outside world wreathed in quiet white.

And then Roper enters, and the story begins. The story, in this case, being the arrogance of the moneyed classes, the way they live a life apart from everyone else and the way that nothing - not bad weather, nor being out of the lobster salad - impinges on them getting what they want. Not even laws against selling arms to terrorists and mercenaries.

In a way the show is more successful than the book at depicting this. That might be because the flavor of rich bastard is more recognizable (Roper is first seen giving what looks like a TED or Davos talk on Youtube), and because the show takes place against the backdrop of Tahrir Square. And also it's the advantage that visual media have over prose, which has to spend a lot of words explaining and describing and suggesting all of the things that TV just shows you in a single frame.

That's not to say the book is bad. It suffers from a hundred-page stretch that the show dispenses with in about 15 minutes, but both do a good job of showing the corrupting influence of money, and how in the post-Soviet world capitalism became amoral. We live in a world where, instead of having to burnish your reputation the way the robber barons of the 1800s did, just the act of having money makes you Someone. This is down to the official bodyguards and the artfully ruffled but still upper-class younger girlfriend.

And it's not even about a clash between old money and nouveau riche, though Roper himself is proud of having come from humbler circumstances. Rather, his entry at Meister's shows the unthinking disruption that Roper's class inflicts - doesn't matter if we arrive in a snowstorm, the chasseurs will still be there to roll out the red carpet, because the old guard has lost its money and power, and can't exclude people like Roper anymore.

The book addresses Jonathan's past in Cairo much more openly than the show. In the show, he leaves his time in Cairo out of his CV, which makes him better able to disguise who he is. In the book, he tells Roper straight away that his previous job was in Cairo, but in the end it doesn't matter, because Roper's not the sort to remember the night manager in a hotel where he had a woman murdered for sharing out his arms deals.

Again, The Night Manager doesn't pack all its themes into its first paragraph the way Hyperion does. There's a reference to the Gulf War, which had just started, and the repercussions it has on both the stock market and the bookings at Meister's could signal the shockwaves that Roper's arrival has on Jonathan's somnolent life in Switzerland. But I see the section at Meister's more as Le Carré setting the table, showing us the rules of the world Jonathan has lived in as an employee of the better hotels, before plunging him, and us, into the far murkier world of arms deals and illicit sanction given thereto by governments in the name of catching "bigger fish".

You could argue that the fall of the USSR deprived thriller writers like John Le Carré of their subject matter. James Bond, for one, was never the same after 1991. The Night Manager was his first novel after that, and it's fair to say that it was the first sign of the direction he would take for the next few books, more enraged at the misdeeds of the moneyed classes than worked up by the Cold War.

What makes it impressive, if disheartening, is the way that message resonates even louder today than it did then, when the West was still basking in the glory of its victory over communism.

Sunday 5 April 2020

Make It So: Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Star Trek Picard

So what would it take to get me to subscribe to CBS All Access, you ask? It turns out a global pandemic did the trick.

I took advantage of their offer of a free month, and in about a week managed to binge the whole ten episodes. When I saw the first few trailers, I was worried that it would be a Star Trek-flavored retread of Logan, in which Patrick Stewart reappears with a brain illness, helps a mysterious girl to safety, and dies in the attempt.

So...

Look, there's no way around it, those things all happen in Picard. But I'm happy to report that unlike Logan, this is his story, so his death is decidedly not very permanent and doesn't occur midway through. I'm less happy to report that this impermanence is foreshadowed pretty quickly.

Overall, I'd call it a good show. Not a great one, necessarily, but it seems to have avoided some of the key pitfalls that made season 2 of Discovery so infuriating. It does suffer from the same problems of gratuitous violence and swearing that make it come off less grown-up than juvenile, and it retreads some of the same conflicts as Disco, such as the corruption at the heart of the Federation and the conflict between organic and synthetic life.

Taking that first point about the corrupt Federation, I considered doing a whole blog about it, but I'll try and knock it out here. What occurred to me while watching this is that every era of Trek has approached the inviolability of the Federation according to the age it's in. For all that we consider the 60s to be a time of counter-culture, TOS was a very conservative and straight-laced show (racial and gender inclusion notwithstanding). If we take the Federation as America, you can look at the Federation in the 60s as either the idealized America, or an acknowledgement of what America could be if it solved its problems.

TNG started when the Cold War was in its final years, and the USSR collapsed during the show's run, so that when DS9 and Voyager came along the US was the sole remaining superpower. This is reflected both in the fact that the Auld Enemy, the Klingons, are now the allies of the Federation, and in the portrayal of the Federation way as the "best" way. Voyager sticks to this narrative a lot more, while DS9 questions it by introducing Section 31, the "dirty tricks" division of Starfleet.

Discovery and Picard arrive at a time when America's faith in itself is at perhaps its lowest ever, and I think that's reflected in the increased role that Section 31 has, especially in Season 2. For Picard it manifests in the widespread infiltration of Starfleet by the Romulans, and by the acknowledgement that the universe is a scary place so they have to take actions inconsistent with their ethos to preserve their citizens' living standards.

Notably, though, this topicality also means Picard examines income inequality on Earth in the 25th century, by having him live in a French chateau while his ally Raffi lives in a trailer in Vasquez Rocks, California. It's not explored much further, but the fact that the two characters are shown living so differently is noteworthy, since up to now Trek has always just waved some of those economic questions away (most infamously for me, by having Ensign Harry Kim from Voyager living in downtown San Francisco - as if).

Picard also examines the effect of his personality on the people around him, such as how his quest to save the Romulans put him at odds with Starfleet, while trying to root out Romulan infiltration caused Raffi to lose her family in a haze of substance abuse. We're used to seeing him as the undisputed moral beacon of TNG, a role he played well, so it was interesting to see that role questioned.

On the negative side, Picard suffers from the same predictability that dogged Disco. Once an element is introduced, you can see immediately how it will play out. The most egregious example is the synthetic body that's just lying there when Picard and co arrive on Coppelius. Once you hear that it's awaiting a brain transfer, you know that's where he's going to end up - and of course, that's exactly what happens.

It's hard to call the writers lazy or out of touch with Star Trek, but it's also hard to escape the feeling that maybe their reach exceeds their grasp here - or at least, you suspect they might be able to tell a more nuanced story if they weren't also trying to stuff in explosions and action scenes every episode or two. On the other hand, I have to appreciate that they avoided the big climactic ship battle that Disco went for, by having Picard deliver one of his usual speeches and saving the day.

So overall, Picard works, even if it doesn't quite hit the heights of DS9 or of TNG at its best. It gives us time with the characters, to catch up with them after decades away (and wash away the bitter taste of Nemesis), and it gives them moments of joy - like the episode where Picard and Soji take refuge with Riker and Troi on their idyllic planet. Most importantly, the plot fits much better with the main character, in contrast to Disco, which was saddled with an uninteresting main character (Michael Burnham) and compounded the problem by trying to tie every plot point back to her.

So I'll be looking forward to what they do with Season 2. It'd be nice to see him catch up with other characters, like Geordie, Worf, Dr Crusher and even Wesley. I do hope that we can move on from the organic vs synthetic life plot line, of course.

I still think I'll cancel my subscription to All Access by 23 April, though. I've found very little I want to watch on it beyond Trek...