Farewell to Mystic Falls

Note: Spoilers follow for the series finale of The Vampire Diaries.

On Friday, I said goodbye to The Vampire Diaries, a series that I once thought was one of the best genre shows on television, only to stop watching it for its last two seasons. Despite its flaws, it occupies a special place in my memory, in part because its strengths were inseparable from the reasons that I finally abandoned it. Like Glee, The Vampire Diaries responded to its obvious debt to an earlier franchise—High School Musical for the former, Twilight for the latter—both by subverting its predecessor and by burning through ideas as relentlessly as it could. It’s as if both shows decided to refute any accusations of unoriginality by proving that they could be more ingenious than their inspirations, and amazingly, it sort of worked, at least for a while. There’s a limit to how long any series can repeatedly break down and reassemble itself, however, and both started to lose steam after about three years. In the case of The Vampire Diaries, its problems crystallized around its ostensible lead, Elena Gilbert, as portrayed by the game and talented Nina Dobrev, who left the show two seasons ago before returning for an encore in the finale. Elena spent most of her first sendoff asleep, and she isn’t given much more to do here. There’s a lot about the episode that I liked, and it provides satisfying moments of closure for many of its characters, but Elena isn’t among them. In the end, when she awakens from the magical coma in which she has been slumbering, it’s so anticlimactic that it reminds me of what Pauline Kael wrote of Han’s revival in Return of the Jedi: “It’s as if Han Solo had locked himself in the garage, tapped on the door, and been let out.”

And what happened to Elena provides a striking case study of why the story’s hero is often fated to become the least interesting person in sight. The main character of a serialized drama is under such pressure to advance the plot that he or she becomes reduced to the diagram of a pattern of forces, like one of the fish in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, in which the animal’s physical shape is determined by the outside stresses to which it has been subjected. Instead of making her own decisions, Elena was obliged to become whatever the series needed her to be. Every protagonist serves as a kind of motor for the story, which is frequently a thankless role, but it was particularly problematic on a show that defined itself by its willingness to burn through a year of potential storylines each month. Every episode felt like a season finale, and characters were freely killed, resurrected, and brainwashed to keep the wheels turning. It was hardest on Elena, who, at her best, was a compelling, resourceful heroine. After six seasons of personality changes, possessions, memory wipes, and the inexplicable choices that she made just because the story demanded it, she became an empty shell. If you were designing a show in a laboratory to see what would happen if its protagonist was forced to live through plot twists at an accelerated rate, like the stress tests that engineers use to put a component through a lifetime’s worth of wear in a short period of time, you couldn’t do much better than The Vampire Diaries. And while it might have been theoretically interesting to see what happened to the series after that one piece was removed, I didn’t think it was worth sitting through another two seasons of increasingly frustrating television.

After the finale was shot, series creators Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec made the rounds of interviews to discuss the ending, and they shared one particular detail that fascinates me. If you haven’t watched The Vampire Diaries, all you need to know is that its early seasons revolved around a love triangle between Elena and the vampire brothers Stefan and Damon, a nod to Twilight that quickly became one of the show’s least interesting aspects. Elena seemed fated to end up with Stefan, but she spent the back half of the series with Damon, and it ended with the two of them reunited. In a conversation with Deadline, Williamson revealed that this wasn’t always the plan:

Well, I always thought it would be Stefan and Elena. They were sort of the anchor of the show, but because we lost Elena in season six, we couldn’t go back. You know Nina could only come back for one episode—maybe if she had came back for the whole season, we could even have warped back towards that, but you can’t just do it in forty-two minutes.

Dobrev’s departure, in other words, froze that part of the story in place, even as the show around it continued its usual frantic developments, and when she returned, there wasn’t time to do anything but keep Elena and Damon where they had left off. There’s a limit to how much ground you can cover in the course of a single episode, so it seemed easier for the producers to stick with what they had and figure out a way to make it seem inevitable.

The fact that it works at all is a tribute to the skill of the writers and cast, as well as to the fact that the whole love triangle was basically arbitrary in the first place. As James Joyce said in a very different context, it was a bridge across which the characters could walk, and once they were safely on the other side, it could be blown to smithereens. The real challenge was how to make the finale seem like a definitive ending, after the show had killed off and resurrected so many characters that not even death itself felt like a conclusion. It resorted to much the same solution that Lost did when faced with a similar problem: it shut off all possibility of future narrative by reuniting its characters in heaven. This partially a form of wish fulfillment, as we’ve seen with so many other television series, but it also puts a full stop on the story by leaving us in an afterlife, where, by definition, nothing can ever change. It’s hilariously unlike the various versions of the world to come that the series has presented over the years, from which characters can always be yanked back to life when necessary, but it’s also oddly moving and effective. Watching it, I began to appreciate how the show’s biggest narrative liability—a cast that just can’t be killed—also became its greatest asset. The defining image of The Vampire Diaries was that of a character who has his neck snapped, and then just shakes it off. Williamson and Plec must have realized, consciously or otherwise, that it was a reset button that would allow them to go through more ideas than would be possible than a show on which a broken neck was permanent. Every denizen of Mystic Falls got a great death scene, often multiple times per season, and the show exploited that freedom until it exhausted itself. It only really worked for three years out of eight, but it was a great run while it lasted. And now, after life’s fitful fever, the characters can sleep well, as they sail off into the mystic.

The completist’s dilemma

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “What pop culture that you once loved became a chore?”

At some point, almost without knowing it, we all became completists. Twenty or even ten years ago, the idea that you couldn’t dip into a show like, say, The Vampire Diaries without first working chronologically through the four previous seasons would have seemed vaguely ridiculous. When I was growing up, I thought nothing of checking in occasionally with the likes of Star Trek: The Next Generation without any notion of trying to see every episode. That’s the beauty of the medium—we’re all naturally good at figuring out stories in progress, so it’s possible to to start watching midway through an unfamiliar show and catch up fairly quickly with the narrative. (David Mamet, who advises writers to throw out the first ten minutes of every script, notes: “When you walk into a bar and see a drama on the television, you’ve missed the exposition. Do you have any trouble whatsoever understanding what’s going on?”) Yet between Netflix, various other streaming options, and the rise in intensely serialized storytelling, many of us have gotten to the point where we feel like we need to watch an entire series to watch it at all, so that committing to a new show implicitly means investing dozens or hundreds of hours of our lives.

This hasn’t been a bad thing for the medium as a whole, and it’s hard to imagine a show like Mad Men thriving in a world of casual viewers. Yet there’s also a loss here on a number of levels. It makes it harder to get into a new show that has been on the air for a few seasons: as much as we’d like to start watching Person of Interest or Elementary, there’s the nagging sense that we need to put in hours of remedial work before we can start tuning in each week. It’s hard on the creators of shows that don’t lend themselves to this kind of immersive viewing, many of which find themselves trying to split the difference. (In a recent discussion of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club referred to this problem as “how to tell a 22-episode story in a 13-episode world.”) At worst, it can turn even the shows we love into a chore. When you’re catching up on three or more seasons—keeping an eye out for spoilers the entire time—a show as great as Breaking Bad can start to feel like homework. And when you’re staking so much onto a single series, it’s easier to get burned out on the whole thing than if you were sampling it whenever you caught it on the air.

This isn’t always fair to the shows themselves. My wife and I may have been less forgiving toward Lost and Battlestar Galactica, both of which we started on Netflix and abandoned halfway through, because the effort required seemed greater than either show’s immediate rewards. (It didn’t help that we had only begun to build some momentum when word trickled out about what were widely regarded as their unsatisfying finales. It’s hard to give a show your all when you suspect that the destination may not be worth it.) Yet this experience was only a highly compressed version of what happens to many of us once our favorite shows start to lose their appeal. There came an indefinable point when it no longer seemed worth the effort for me to keep up with Glee or 24, but it wasn’t exactly a burnout—more of a slow, steady fade, to the point where I don’t even remember where I gave up. Saddest of all are the cases of arguably my two favorite shows of all time, The Simpsons and The X-Files, neither of which I managed to watch—or, in the case of The Simpsons, continue to watch—to the end. Part of this was due to a drop in quality, part to changes in my own life, but it seems likely that I’m never going to be a true completist when it comes to the shows that have mattered to me the most.

But then again, maybe that’s how it should be. The trouble with being a completist is that once you’re finished, there isn’t much more to discover, while the best television shows seem to go on and on—often because there’s so much there we haven’t experienced. David Thomson, speaking about the work of Japanese director Mikio Naruse, whose films he once claimed to have never seen, has written: “There is nothing like knowing that one has still to see a body of great work. And no gamble as interesting as pushing the desire to its limit.” That’s how I feel about many of my own favorite shows. As much as I look forward to squeezing every last drop out of Mad Men, I’m also oddly reassured by the fact that there are still excellent episodes of The X-Files, Star Trek, and even The Simpsons that I’ve never seen, and possibly never will. They’ll always be out there, tantalizingly unexplored, and the worlds they encompass remain open and unbounded. And it’s possible that this is a healthier, more natural way to think about television, or any work of art that lends itself to elaborate, obsessive fandoms. Being a completist has rewards of its own, but there’s also something to be said for the promise of the incomplete.

Super 8 and the problem of secrecy

A few years ago, Robert Zemeckis created a bit of a stir when he defended the trailers of Cast Away and What Lies Beneath, both of which revealed crucial plot points, by saying that audiences really want to be told everything that happens in a movie. Moviegoers, he said, don’t like to be surprised; before they buy a ticket, they want to know exactly what to expect. And as depressing as it sounds, he was probably right. The fact is that trailers have always given away too much information—like the classic trailer for Casablanca, for instance, which shows Bogart shooting Major Strasser. It’s refreshing, then, when a director like J.J. Abrams refuses to disclose basic information about a movie like Super 8, out of a desire to protect its secrets. But it’s also a little disappointing to see Super 8 at last, only to discover that Abrams really had no secrets to protect.

I should preface all this by acknowledging that Super 8 is a film of considerable merits. It’s beautifully directed and photographed. The score by Michael Giacchino, who is rapidly becoming the most versatile composer in Hollywood, hits all the right notes. The cast, especially of younger kids, is uniformly appealing, and the script deserves a lot of credit for grounding the story in a detailed suburban canvas, even if most of the characters are affable stereotypes. For most of the movie, Abrams is emulating Spielberg in all the right ways—not simply his visual style and tone, but his interest in children and the lives of small towns. It isn’t clear how much of this reflects Abrams’s own sensibility and how much is just a skilled pastiche, but either way, it results in a movie that feels a lot more textured and humane than your average summer blockbuster. As a result, for most of its length, it’s a pleasure to watch, and it’s obviously the product of a lot of thoughtfulness and care.

Which is why it’s all the more underwhelming, at the end, to realize that all that atmosphere and ingenuity and mastery of tone was in service of a story that, frankly, could have been predicted in detail by anyone who had seen the marketing materials. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this—there can be something quite satisfying about seeing a familiar story cleverly told—but it makes the hype about the movie’s “secrets” seem more than a little silly. And after Cloverfield, which was infinitely more interesting as a trailer than as a movie, and Lost, which essentially abdicated its responsibility to resolve most of its mysteries, it raises serious questions about Abrams’s seriousness as a storyteller. Abrams has emerged as one of the most likable popular directors in a long time, but it’s hard to shake the sense, as I’ve said before, that his approach remains that of a gifted television writer and producer—and, I hate to say it, a shrewd marketer.

It might seem shortsighted to judge Super 8 by the standards of its marketing campaign. Ten years from now, I expect that it will still be watched and enjoyed—especially by kids—long after its teaser trailer has been forgotten. But the emphasis on secrecy has implications for Abrams’s future as a director that can’t be easily dismissed. Much as some researchers have recently argued that reason evolved, not as a means to the truth, but as a way to win arguments, it’s become increasingly clear that Abrams regards mystery, not as a means of protecting genuine secrets, but as a marketing strategy—which implies that he doesn’t understand how powerful a movie’s real secrets can be. A great director, like Spielberg, can tell us very clearly, before we’ve even entered the theater, what kind of movie we’re about to see, and then proceed to surprise us with revelations of plot and character. Abrams, for all his talents, hasn’t managed to do that yet. One day, perhaps, he will. But only if he gets past secrecy for its own sake.