Golden Age or Silver Age?
by jamesenge on Oct.23, 2009, under James Enge and Matthew Sturges
Hey Matt: I agree about the explosion in pop culture at the moment, and it is a blast. I worry that it might be more of a Silver Age than a Golden Age, though–that it might be more allusive (and re-use-ive) than creative.
I felt that way a few years ago when all of a sudden sf/f seemed to be one of the genres acceptable on prime time TV—-but almost everything networks were putting on were remakes, retakes and pastiches. Remember when NBC (a network with notoriously poor judgement) thought the world needed a remake of The Bionic Woman (but darker! edgier! more somber!). Even something like Heroes, though not explicitly a remake, was openly borrowing from generations of comic books. Not that this was bad; it was one of the good things about the show… until they lost their way around the middle of the first season and apparently never found it again. (I stopped watching years ago, so maybe the show is golden now. But I guess I’ll never know.)
There was a burst of shows like this on US TV a few years ago, which have mostly dribbled out. The biggest successes have been remakes (Battlestar Galactica) and sequels (e.g. the Stargate series–now on its third title, I think)–and, of course, the British shows. Which are mostly remakes and sequels (e.g. Dr. Who and its spinoffs).
I could never bring myself to watch Battlestar; the original show wasn’t one of the happy memories of my childhood. I’ve seen a couple episodes of Stargate, Who and Torchwood and generally liked them. But I’m missing the newness that used to be the hallmark of genre—-or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place.
_____
I’m feeling the same way about the movies I’ve seen this year. There was Watchmen, of course, which I liked better on rewatching the other day than when I first saw it in the theater. (The DVD version seemed to be a slightly different cut than the theatrical one, but that may just be my bad memory talking.) And the Star Trek reboot was a lot of fun, against very long odds. In a way both of these are backward-looking films, but Abrams’ recklessness with canon was actually bracing, and the fact that Watchmen got made at all (without being a League-of-Extraordinary-Gentlemen-style trainwreck) is remarkable.
In terms of things I’d like to see: maybe more adaptations of independent comic books. Maybe more far future shows (TV or movies) that don’t necessarily involve people in uniforms. Firefly was great, and on Fox, so naturally it had the mark of doom on it. But it seems like this is a time when moviemakers could be telling tales of the future that don’t involve saluting.
It’s probably time or past time for an epic-fantasy or sword-and-sorcery type series. I know they’re doing A Song of Ice and Fire for HBO, which is promising, and Disney is doing John Carter of Mars which could be really good or really bad. But I’d like to see something more episodic and fastmoving—-and maybe something that’s not an adaptation, a story told to suit the medium of the screen.
So that’s my bottle of whine. I love the imaginative outburst we’re seeing in popular culture these days, but I’m a little worried that the resources and the potential audience will be frittered away on nostalgic remakes, and that, in a few years, when a genre project comes up, the guys who extend or withhold the green light may say, “Sf? Hell no. That’s so 2009! How about a remake of Have Gun Will Travel?”
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October 23rd, 2009 on 4:00 am
For what my tuppence is worth, I think until there is another star wars, or even another 2001, that just blows everything away, there simply won’t be the money made available for “risky”, “complicated” SF or Fantasy Films. So the natural course is to turn to stories that have already been done. I went to the cinema to watch Transformers, the first one (the original acrtoon feature film is in my top 5 films ever by the way) they had 7 trailers……all remakes or sequels.
At the moment, with cash being what it is in the film world, a good idea isn’t worth as much as a proven one.
October 23rd, 2009 on 9:07 am
Great post! Some stray reactions:
SciFi is coming on, but I’m not sure it is there yet if the network named after it feels the need to change its name to SyFy. (Siffy? Sounds like somebody with a venereal disease.)
There might be some creative work still being done, but I think the vast expansion in outlet channels has created a content vacuum that is more quickly filled with stuff that worked at some point in the past. Which in at least one case is good, becuase…
Just like you, I was NOT a fan of the original Battlestar, and I avoided the new one like the plague. Then a friend I respected was gushing about the show last December, and when I bought a new laptop, I decided to download the pilot episodes, and was blown away. Light, dark, funny, depressing, complicated, cool, sad; it is the best extended science fiction I’ve seen on any screen. (The fact that Dirk Benedict hates it is just an extra stamp of approval for me!)
October 23rd, 2009 on 9:43 am
The future may lie outside Hollywood, whether in independent projects like Iron Sky and Mercury Men (though both have the retro-vibe you speak of) to outsider projects getting done on the cheap or as shorts that then get financing from a sympathetic insider, like Moon, District 9, and 9.
October 23rd, 2009 on 10:18 am
My view: There is no static division of ages. We are in a continuous Golden Age constantly sliding into the future with us, because we are getting better, doing more, telling new great stories (right along with the not-so-great, pretty good, not bad, so so, and crap). And here’s the best part, that makes the current age always the golden one: we don’t lose the old stuff. We can keep the best of the older ages with us. We always have more than we did before. And we are perfectly entitled to keep adding the new best to the old best and let the rest go. The bad doesn’t negate the good, has no power over it in fact.
What we have now will eventually become the Silver Age and then Bronze, and so on, not through any devaluing, but just in relation to the new Golden Ages ahead of us.
In general, we always get better, yes, by standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, but that counts.
October 23rd, 2009 on 10:22 am
Well said!
October 23rd, 2009 on 10:58 am
I don’t generally think looking towards TV as a hallmark or a reflection of the genre is really the most realistic depiction. TV and even movies (to a greater or lesser extent, I can’t tell) are all just Playing It Safe. They don’t -want- to try anything new, because they don’t want to risk the money it takes to make a potentially original movie (by common production standards, at least), because they don’t know how the public will react.
There have been some pretty good efforts though. Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine” was damned solid hard sf in the first half (but collapsed into a decent, if uninspired, slasher-flick at the end), and last year’s “Moon” with Sam Rockwell was absolutely fantastic, and I mentioned this on another comment, but “Let the Right One In” is one of the best vampire movies I’ve ever seen (not that there’s too much competition in that respect). And Hayao Myazaki consistently puts out incredible mythological fantasy films - sure they’re not exactly “mainstream”, but you can’t argue with their quality.
There are people who complain about how there’s no good music anymore, but only listen to what’s on the radio. I think it’s almost the same deal here - you can’t watch NBC or Fox and expect to find SF/F originality, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there somewhere.
October 23rd, 2009 on 11:02 am
I am sorry to hear that Disney is making John Carter. Aren’t you convinced after their treatment of Herakles that Disney suffers from a rather less symbolic strain of the disorder of Midas? I only wish I could do for Disney what Medea did for Jason.
Could you talk more about this ‘imaginative outburst?’ Even in this post, almost everything you mentioned was with disapproval. You were so-so about the Watchmen and enthusiastic about something called Firefly. But how would you compare it to other ‘imaginative outbursts’? such as the ones that had Sophokles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in the same generation? or later Catullus and Horace (I never did like Vergil much). There are others. But we are very far fallen away form anything like that.
October 23rd, 2009 on 11:02 am
I can’t believe I forgot to mention District 9. District 9!
It was awesome.
October 23rd, 2009 on 11:02 am
Again, well said. When someone (as frequently happens) says to me, “You like SF? You must have seen Transformers” I usually blow their minds by saying that my favorite SF film of recent years is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
October 24th, 2009 on 1:03 am
These are some great comments. It’s true I focused more on the negative than the positive–I do like lots of this retro stuff (like the Star Trek reboot), I just worry that I hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped. But District 9 was indeed great, and I did really like Eternal Sunshine… from several years ago. Anything from the group I think of as “those guys” is of interest. “Those guys” being Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze (who worked with Kaufman on Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) and Michael Gondry (who I see has been tapped to direct The Green Hornet).
But I think that popular culture should thrive in a popular medium, so I don’t think it’s crazy to look for signs of life on the broadcast channels (if we can still call them that).
Helena: I certainly wouldn’t compare our age to the glory days of Athenian theater… even though we don’t have most of the evidence from those guys. (Sturgeon’s Law probably applies even to Attic poetry.) But in the past several years there have been some really good movies based on comic books–Marvel has produced some good movies (if we politely look askance from the FF films), A History of Violence and The Dark Knight were very good work and (though it may seem like blasphemy for I classicist to say this), I liked 300. I even liked the Disney Hercules movie. (As a retelling of the Hercules legend it’s a waste of time, clearly, but it’s at least a good cartoon movie, which is more than can be said for the Lou Ferrigno Hercules, or Hercules in New York or Hercules Against the Moon Men or a host of other awful myth-related movies I’ve sat through.)
A thought: this era of pop culture may be something like the high Roman Empire, when there was a flowering of prose fiction in Greek and Latin, e.g. Lucian and Apuleius. These guys too were working our genres: Lucian writing about a trip to the moon and Apuleius writing about witches and whatnot.
October 26th, 2009 on 10:56 am
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