Ben Siler – Page 4 – Memphis Flyer

Television continues to be the narrative televisual storytelling medium par excellence. It allows you to identify traits with human faces over a longer period of time, instead of for two hours, and thereby more easily dupes you into believing fictional people exist.

Game Of Thrones

This year Game of Thrones continued to get better and better at being subtly modern, showing us a world in which major problems are ignored for short-term politics. It was nowhere near The Wire, but still unique in using the medium to create a complex, multilayered world, more than any large scale cinematic shared universe. The show’s problems continue to be its backwards treatment of women and women’s bodies. Women are naked in traditional male gaze fashion, while penises are mostly off limits. Elsewhere, the show added a sexual assault to the adapted storyline and seemed to be confused about whether there actually was one and why it was there. The director and showrunners gave different answers in interviews, and the character in question blithely pursued his heroic arc.

True Detective

True Detective also had problems writing its female characters, but was distinguished by a beautiful opening credits sequence and fun Matthew McConaughey monologues set in a generically miserable Louisiana. McConaughey’s philosophy wasn’t anything you couldn’t find on the atheist section of Reddit, but it was operatic, poetic and accurate. Almost everyone else around him was cardboard. The series undercut this exciting pessimism by ending with action scenes and hope, not horror, with all the resounding tonal shift of a wet fart.

Orange Is The New Black

The show that was best at humanizing even its most minor characters was Orange Is The New Black. Although it may not be the most accurate depiction of the prison industrial complex, wherein we throw everyone possible in prison and make money off it, it certainly stressed the dehumanization of our system and treated the prison population with empathy. Despite all the stand-up routine style jokes, that made it a political show. Those politics were a rarity even as mainstream attention to the way police and prisons can treat civilians (murderously or corruptly) came to the forefront of newscycles this year. Television is a landscape of cops eternally breaking rules to throw criminals away. As public discourse changes, media companies sometimes allow politics that actually concern us to appear on our screens, and this is an example.

Probably my favorite cringeworthy horrible show of our modern era, 24, a show that actively and aggressively tried to act as an apologia for torture and once cast Janeane Garofalo so that its main character could yell at her, returned this year, as stupid as ever. The few episodes I watched seemed slightly more tasteful and less likely to suggest that torturing the hell out of someone is a superheroic act, but it had also lost its campy, 80’s action movie vibe.

Agents Of Shield

A lot of shows are mostly concerned with cross promotion —for example, Gotham which was mainly meaningless call-forwards to Batman characters. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had the 24 aspect of praising rule-breaking government agents with no oversight, but when it tried to be morally gray it just came off creepy. It got better this year, but was still most clear about its goals when advertising other products or films.

A procedural I did like was Happy Valley, a Netflix British import, because of the strength of its acting and writing, with only a little War on Drugs paranoia thrown in.

Attack On Titan

Other standouts included the anime Attack on Titan, widely available in the U.S. this year. The actual writing was horrible but whenever its overtly psychological monsters appeared it was wonderful. Hannibal’s Grand Guignol improved its procedural, and Transparent took Jeffery Tambor’s crossdressing from Arrested Development and remixed it humanely into the story of a transgender woman coming out to her family.

Black Mirror

Another import, Black Mirror, was accessible previously in the U.S., but just became available to most U.S. consumers via Netflix less than a month ago. Its scant six episodes are nice modern Twilight Zone parables, none better than the science fiction worldbuilding in “Fifteen Million Merits,” which dramatizes how the emptiness in working towards buying meaningless things does not go away when consumers recognize it. A consumerist system persists because it is easy to co-opt rebellion against it as a critique. Here, that means a dystopian society composed of people looking at computer screens from elliptical bikes get no catharsis when they watch an America’s Got Talent show. Their attempts to disrupt it only upgrade its edginess.
In terms of direct politics, one half of Comedy Central’s continuous critique of mainstream news, Stephen Colbert, abdicated for CBS. Given how David Letterman lost most of his verve upon decamping there, it is not a good sign. Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin’s humorless but passionate retelling of news from a few years ago, The Newsroom, finally died. From what I’ve seen of the show it seemed to be so mired in Sorkin’s voice that its political opponents were strawmen.

Finally, one of America’s most beloved television dads was revealed to be a serial rapist. This was a fact long ago: we’re just learning it. It is better to know, and for a corrupt, powerful person to be shamed if they cannot be prosecuted. His downfall was brought about in part because his handlers did not understand how new media works. For as long as it takes them to learn it, the world will change.

Young-Adult (YA) fiction is intended to appeal to the all-important demographic of teenagers. That’s why the big budget motion picture adaptations of YA books, which satisfy the MPAA ratings board, are popular in Hollywood. James Dashner’s novel The Maze Runner has all of these qualities, and that is why it is appearing now in your multiplex.

The plot concerns beautiful, young male amnesiacs who wake up in a green valley in the center of an artificial maze patrolled by digital monsters. They must work together to find out why they have been put there. Our hero Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up and remembers nothing except being vaguely medically experimented on. He finds himself in a Lord of the Flies/Lost/Cube pastiche beneath giant walls that move every night, shifted by clockwork gears. The first 30 minutes of the movie involve characters with nice cheekbones and form-fitting monochromatic Polo shirts lightly layered with a patina of dirt explaining the world to Thomas in short, declarative sentences. There are numerous terms such as Gladers/Grievers/Greenies to learn, but the exposition never coalesces into characters beyond a standard hero and hero enablers. The parade of young men either adds to the continual exposition (“No one’s ever survived a night in the maze.” “No one’s ever killed a Griever before.”) or assist Thomas’ ascension to group leader. The bully Gally (Will Poulter), with only a few extras at his back, presents a very weak argument for conformity to the rules set up by the camp.

The monsters are spiders with mechanical legs and green Rancor faces. The action setpieces mostly consist of digital walls or creatures moving and a loud score telegraphing foreboding or fright. Since most of the PG-13-friendly violence is just a character being pulled off into the dark while screaming, this works.

A good thing about one of this film’s science fiction forebears, the 2000 adaptation of Battle Royale, was the sense of a random assortment of teenagers being killed off in a variety of ways, which mimicked the randomness of violence and group behavior. I thought The Hunger Games was too bland and PG-13 for a movie about the young dying horribly, but The Maze Runner is much more so.

My memory of teenagers is that they can be rude, cliquish, and severe. But this group’s nicknames for everything are portentous and vague (i.e., the Changing, the Glade) where they should be rudely scatological so as to better rob frightening things of their power. It rings true when they ostracize sick members, but otherwise the screen version of the novel, which I have not read, never does more than move itself forward. Exposition about the Glade gives way to exposition about the Maze, which gives way to unsatisfying exposition delivered by Patricia Clarkson in a lab coat in what passes for an ending. Then the short declarative sentences switch to being about the sequel, which I must admit looks somewhat intriguing. But you don’t go on a rollercoaster to learn why the rollercoaster was made.

If the film is about anything, it is about how tough it is for Thomas to exhibit intellectual curiosity about the group’s environment, and overcome socialized stagnation to lead it out of the maze. But Thomas is a Mary Sue, an audience (or at least a writer) surrogate instead of a character. Most everything comes easy for him, so that the audience identifies with and cheers him on as he overcomes each obstacle. But this works to undermine the film’s theme. When I fail to be curious about my immediate surroundings, it’s not because I’m a bully obsessed with rules. When I am curious and learn about the world, it’s not because I’m the chosen one. The pressures of appealing to millions of people remove the detail from this work, which may have been present in the book; all that remains is a dutiful labyrinth. What would be surprising and honest would be for the hero to never remove himself from it.