Category: Culture

Man, I was in a frustrated mood yesterday. Sorry about that. Lemme see if I can wean myself off politics for a bit with a contemplative bit on a TV show that strikes some interesting political chords.

Last year, Salon told us in no uncertain terms that The Shield was a right-wing love fest. Yeah, sure, Murdoch media empire, conservative arm of the media — sounded plausible. Still, a little while ago, the first season was released on DVD. The price was low, so I took a chance on it.

You know what? It’s easy to read The Shield as cheerful approval of order-at-any-price tactics, with a blithe wink at police corruption. There are undoubtedly going to be people on the right wing who say “Yeah! Finally Hollywood understands why you need to break the rules!” in an inadvertenant echo of Salon’s article. That’s a pity, but sometimes if you’re creating a smart piece of entertainment you’re going to leave the slackjawed (on either side of the political spectrum, no less) in the dust.

The show reminds me a lot of early Oz, in that the protagonists have very clear political and moral views but neither show is a vehicle for those views. In Oz, Tim McManus’ liberal approach to prison management is just as often a recipe for disaster as it is a wholehearted success. Same goes for Vic Mackey, crooked cop.

And that’s fair. Look, if you throw the weight of an elite strike team behind one faction of drug dealers, you’re going to cut down on other crime. You’ve got a containment strategy there. Denying it would be foolhardy, and The Shield doesn’t even try. What the writers and actors do is show the costs of that strategy. Mackey takes it in the teeth as often as he succeeds, and by the end of the first season he’s paid a pretty heavy price for the things he does. So has the community he’s policing.

Meanwhile, the conflicted Detective Wagenbach succeeds a lot more than Salon gives him credit for. Detective Wyms is a straight-shooter who is clearly the most competent and the most together person in the station. Captain Acevedo is tempted by political success, and compromises his beliefs to get there. And yeah. Sometimes Mackey’s tactics work.

Listening to the commentary (each episode on the DVD has a commentary; how did they get this out for $55 again?), it becomes even clearer that Shawn Ryan and the rest of the creative team isn’t coming at this with an agenda. They wanted to tell some stories about both clean and crooked cops. It’s easy to tell a story about how corruption inevitably leads to dramatic, quick, and complete failure. But what does that prove, other than that we can congratulate ourselves for living in a morally clear world?

I shouldn’t neglect the acting, either. This is some of the best stuff I’ve seen on television — well, since the early seasons of Oz. Michael Chiklis took the role of Mackey partially because he wanted to break the lovable teddy bear image and man, he got his teeth deep into it. Jay Karnes is the other standout, but CCH Pounder and Benito Martinez aren’t far behind.

Solid stuff. Not reassuring in any way, shape, or form. If you want phatic validation, go elsewhere.

Things I learned from watching Mister Sterling tonight:

Being a Senator gets you laid by the hot actress, plus if you’re noble and honest the sly fellow Senator from Nevada will still be interested in you for your mind. In a carnal way.

Also, if you look agonized and persevere, you can write the letters. Even if you’re so poorly paid you have to live in a group house.

Finally, Strom Thurmond is a Democrat from North Dakota.

More next week, I’m sure.

I’ve sort of been putting off writing about Battle Royale on account of “Damn, I have no idea what to make of that.” But faint heart never won Oscar, or some such, so let’s see if we can make some sense out of the uber-controversial high school Series 7.

First off, the brief summary: a class of Japanese high school students are brought to an island, given random weapons, and they don’t get to leave till only one is left alive. If they don’t get to that point within a few days, they all die. This is theoretically part of a program to deal with juvenile delinquency. Carnage ensues.

It’s a tremendously bloody movie. I wouldn’t call it gory, but I would certainly call it violent. No worse than your average R-rated horror flick — which is kind of interesting, because those usually contain a hefty slice of violence directed at teenagers, but they don’t provoke the same kind of reaction as Battle Royale. It’s OK when it’s the monsters doing the slicing.

Taking a step back from the subject matter, and thinking of it purely as an action movie, it’s not bad. The tension is good, the acting is good, and the plot is decent. It’s not the be all and end all of action flicks, but it’s solid. Not too surprising, considering the director, Kinji Fukasaku, had been making movies for 40 years. But that’s the easy part of the analysis.

When I get closer to the subject matter, I just hit a wall. Series 7 is a satire and commentary on reality shows. This ain’t that; there’s no hint of the game show to it, although it’s clear the survivor will become a national hero. However, the event isn’t televised. So what can I make of it? What is Fukasaku getting at here?

The 1998 White Paper on Crime may be a relevant reference point. It’s particularly concerned with juvenile delinquency, which is covered beginning here. The crime rate among Japanese youth was up severely in 1998, and the nature of the crimes committed seems to have been fairly disturbing: “The survey results on juvenile offenders also indicated that in bodily injury cases, the number of those with motivations of ‘Passion’ has shown a remarkably higher percentage than ‘Grudge or Revenge’, while the results of the survey on characteristics of juveniles admitted to juvenile classification homes (hereinafter the ‘survey results on juveniles in juvenile classification homes’) showed that the motivation of ‘on the spur of the moment’ has been the highest in homicide cases.”

The White Paper seems to have been fairly prophetic, given this BBC report on the subject. Be sure to read the sidebar titled Japan Teen Attacks, and see also this article. I notice, in particular, that the kids are attacking not just each other but adults — which, understandably, is a matter of some concern. In contrast, the media-driven frenzy in the US focuses on self-directed violence in the form of school shootings.

(This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I think no US teens commit violence against adults, or that all Japanese teen violence is directed towards adults. I’m doing culture analysis here, so I’m interested in how teen violence is depicted.)

I’m thinking that Battle Royale has to be interpreted in the context of both Japanese concerns about juvenile delinquency and the generation gap (a la Speed Tribes). In that light, it’s an expression of angst and fear. It is, perhaps, a horror movie after all, but the monster is the generation gap.

Compare and contrast: Peshawar Lancers and Shanghai Knights.

We’ll do the movie first so you have time to skip it in the theaters. OK, that’s a little harsh, but it was really pretty uninspired. Good martial arts from Jackie, good comedy from Owen Wilson, rather lackluster script. I’m a sucker for Victorian pulp adventure, but this was really by the numbers without anything to distinguish it conceptually. I think moving the setting was a mistake. Leave the duo in the Old West where they’re working against our Western tropes, don’t move them to London and run them through the same dull paces every pair of Victorian pulp adventurers goes through.

Peshawar Lancers is decidedly more interesting, albeit still a failure. There are two sizable problems with the book. First, and most fatal, the plot really makes no sense. The entire book revolves around the need to foil an evil plot, and not surprisingly the plot is foiled, but it’s not foiled conclusively. There’s nothing at all stopping the baddies from making another run at the brass ring. The ending, as a result, was anti-climatic since I couldn’t really read it as anything other than a temporary triumph.

The second problem is that the alternate history is pretty flawed. Concept in a nutshell: a comet hits the earth in 1878, causing a second ice age. England survives by moving wholescale to India and points south. Japan builds itself up as a major power, as do the Ottoman Empire and a France that’s moved to Northern Africa. So far so good.

Russia survives by embracing a cannibalistic religious frenzy. Uh? Cannibalism isn’t going to provide enough food for a country to survive the ice age depicted; it’s just not a varied diet. There aren’t any plants growing in Russia. Where’d the vitamins come from, huh?

So what makes the novel interesting? It’d make a really rambunctious pulp setting, once you embrace the improbability of the evil Russians. (Hard to do that with the novel, since there are five appendixes given over to outlining the probability of the alternate history.) Huge swashbuckling fun, and you wouldn’t have to contend with a hobbled plot. If Peshawar Lancers had been an RPG sourcebook, I’d be recommending it.