The ghost in the machine

Note: Spoilers follow for the season finale of Westworld.

When you’re being told a story, you want to believe that the characters have free will. Deep down, you know that they’ve been manipulated by a higher power that can make them do whatever it likes, and occasionally, it can even be fun to see the wires. For the most part, though, our enjoyment of narrative art is predicated on postponing that realization for as long as possible. The longer the work continues, the harder this becomes, and it can amount to a real problem for a heavily serialized television series, which can start to seem strained and artificial as the hours of plot developments accumulate. These tensions have a way of becoming the most visible in the protagonist, whose basic purpose is to keep the action clocking along. As I’ve noted here before, there’s a reason why the main character is often the least interesting person in sight. The show’s lead 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. Every action exists to fulfill some larger purpose, which often results in leads who are boringly singleminded, with no room for the tangents that can bring supporting players to life. The characters at the center have to constantly triangulate between action, motivation, and relatability, which can drain them of all surprise. And if the story ever relaxes its hold, they burst, like sea creatures brought up from a crevasse to the surface.

This is true of most shows that rely heavily on plot twists and momentum—it became a huge problem for The Vampire Diaries—but it’s even more of an issue when a series is also trying to play tricks with structure and time. Westworld has done more than any other television drama that I can remember to push against the constraints of chronology, and the results are often ingenious. Yet they come at a price. (As the screenwriter Robert Towne put it in a slightly different content: “You end up paying for it with an almost mathematical certainty.”) And the victim, not surprisingly, has been the ostensible lead. Over a year and a half ago, when the first season was still unfolding, I wrote that Dolores, for all her problems, was the engine that drove the story, and that her gradual movement toward awareness was what gave the series its narrative thrust. I continued:

This is why I’m wary of the popular fan theory, which has been exhaustively discussed online, that the show is taking place in different timelines…Dolores’s story is the heart of the series, and placing her scenes with William three decades earlier makes nonsense of the show’s central conceit: that Dolores is slowly edging her way toward greater self-awareness because she’s been growing all this time. The flashback theory implies that she was already experiencing flashes of deeper consciousness almost from the beginning, which requires us to throw out most of what we know about her so far…It has the advantage of turning William, who has been kind of a bore, into a vastly more interesting figure, but only at the cost of making Dolores considerably less interesting—a puppet of the plot, rather than a character who can drive the narrative forward in her own right.

As it turned out, of course, that theory was totally on the mark, and I felt a little foolish for having doubted it for so long. But on a deeper level, I have to give myself credit for anticipating the effect that it would have on the series as a whole. At the time, I concluded: “Dolores is such a load-bearing character that I’m worried that the show would lose more than it gained by the reveal…The multiple timeline theory, as described, would remove the Dolores we know from the story forever. It would be a fantastic twist. But I’m not sure the show could survive it.” And that’s pretty much what happened, although it took another season to clarify the extent of the damage. On paper, Dolores was still the most important character, and Evan Rachel Wood deservedly came first in the credits. But in order to preserve yet another surprise, the show had to be maddeningly coy about what exactly she was doing, even as she humorlessly pursued her undefined mission. Every line was a cryptic hint about what was coming, and the payoff was reasonably satisfying. But I don’t know if it was worth it. Offhand, I can’t recall another series in which an initially engaging protagonist was reduced so abruptly to a plot device, and it’s hard not to blame the show’s conceptual and structural pretensions, which used Dolores as a valve for the pressure that was occurring everywhere else but at its center. It’s frankly impossible for me to imagine what Dolores would even look like if she were relaxing or joking around or doing literally anything except persisting grimly in her roaring rampage of revenge. Because of the nature of its ambitions, Westworld can’t give her—or any of its characters—the freedom to act outside the demands of the story. It’s willing to let its hosts be reprogrammed in any way that the plot requires. Which you’ve got to admit is kind of ironic.

None of this would really matter if the payoffs were there, and there’s no question that last night’s big reveal about Charlotte is an effective one. (Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of Tessa Thompson, who, like Wood, has seemed wasted throughout the entire season for reasons that have become evident only now.) But the more I think about it, the more I feel that this approach might be inherently unsuited for a season of television that runs close to twelve hours. When a conventional movie surprises us with a twist at the end, part of the pleasure is mentally rewinding the film to see how it plays in light of the closing revelation—and much of the genius of Memento, which was based on Jonathan Nolan’s original story, was that it allowed us to do this every ten minutes. Yet as Westworld itself repeatedly points out, there’s only so much information or complexity that the human mind can handle. I’m a reasonably attentive viewer, but I often struggled to recall what happened seven episodes ago, and the volume of data that the show presents makes it difficult to check up on any one point. Now that the series is over, I’m sure that if I revisited the earlier episodes, many scenes would take on an additional meaning, but I just don’t have the time. And twelve hours may be too long to make viewers wait for the missing piece that will lock the rest into place, especially when it comes at the expense of narrative interest in the meantime, and when anything truly definitive will need to be withheld for the sake of later seasons. It’s to the credit of Westworld and its creators that there’s little doubt that they have a master plan. They aren’t making it up as they go along. But this also makes it hard for the characters to make anything of themselves. None of us, the show implies, is truly in control of our actions, which may well be the case. But a work of art, like life itself, doesn’t seem worth the trouble if it can’t convince us otherwise.

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.

Don’t stay out of Riverdale

In the opening seconds of the series premiere of Riverdale, a young man speaks quietly in voiceover, his words playing over idyllic shots of American life:

Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world. Safe. Decent. Innocent. Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.

Much later, we realize that the speaker is Jughead of Archie Comics fame, played by former Disney child star Cole Sprouse, which might seem peculiar enough in itself. But what I noticed first about this monologue is that it basically summarizes the prologue of Blue Velvet, which begins with images of roses and picket fences and then dives into the grass, revealing the insects ravening like feral animals in the darkness. It’s one of the greatest declarations of intent in all of cinema, and initially, there’s something a little disappointing in the way that Riverdale feels obliged to blandly state what Lynch put into a series of unforgettable images. Yet I have the feeling that series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who says that Blue Velvet is one of his favorite movies, knows exactly what he’s doing. And the result promises to be more interesting than even he can anticipate.

Riverdale has been described as The O.C. meets Twin Peaks, which is how it first came to my attention. But it’s also a series on the CW, with all the good, the bad, and the lack of ugly that this implies. This the network that produced The Vampire Diaries, the first three seasons of which unexpectedly generated some of my favorite television from the last few years, and it takes its genre shows very seriously. There’s a fascinating pattern at work within systems that produce such narratives on a regular basis, whether in pulp magazines or comic books or exploitation pictures: as long as you hit all the obligatory notes and come in under budget, you’re granted a surprising amount of freedom. The CW, like its predecessors, has become an unlikely haven for auteurs, and it’s the sort of place where a showrunner like Aguirre-Sacasa—who has an intriguing background in playwriting, comics, and television—can explore a sandbox like this for years. Yet it also requires certain heavy, obvious beats, like structural supports, to prop up the rest of the edifice. A lot of the first episode of Riverdale, like most pilots, is devoted to setting up its premise and characters for even the most distracted viewers, and it can be almost insultingly on the nose. It’s why it feels obliged to spell out its theme of dark shadows beneath its sunlit surfaces, which isn’t exactly hard to grasp. As Roger Ebert wrote decades ago in his notoriously indignant review of Blue Velvet: “What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.”

As a result, if you want to watch Riverdale at all, you need to get used to being treated occasionally as if you were twelve years old. But Aguirre-Sacasa seems determined to have it both ways. Like Glee before it, it feels as if it’s being pulled in three different directions even before it begins, but in this case, it comes off less as an unwanted side effect than as a strategy. It’s worth noting that not only did Aguirre-Sacasa write for Glee itself, but he’s also the guy who stepped in rewrite Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which means that he knows something about wrangling intractable material for a mass audience under enormous scrutiny. (He’s also the chief creative officer of Archie Comics, which feels like a dream job in the best sort of way: one of his projects at the Yale School of Drama was a play about Archie encountering the murderers Leopold and Loeb, and he later received a cease and desist order from his future employer over Archie’s Weird Fantasy, which depicted its lead character as coming out of the closet.) Riverdale often plays like the work of a prodigiously talented writer trying to put his ideas into a form that could plausibly air on Thursdays after Supernatural. Like most shows at this stage, it’s also openly trying to decide what it’s supposed to be about. And I want to believe, on the basis of almost zero evidence, that Aguirre-Sacasa is deliberately attempting something almost unworkable, in hopes that he’ll be able to stick with it long enough—on a network that seems fairly indulgent of shows on the margins—to make it something special.

Most great television results from this sort of evolutionary process, and I’ve noted before—most explicitly in my Salon piece on The X-Files—that the best genre shows emerge when a jumble of inconsistent elements is given the chance to find its ideal form, usually because it lucks into a position where it can play under the radar for years. The pressures of weekly airings, fan response, critical reviews, and ratings, along with the unpredictable inputs of the cast and writing staff, lead to far more rewarding results than even the most visionary showrunner could produce in isolation. Writers of serialized narratives like comic books know this intuitively, and consciously or not, Aguirre-Sacasa seems to be trying something similar on television. It’s not an approach that would make sense for a series like Westworld, which was produced for so much money and with such high expectations that its creators had no choice but to start with a plan. But it might just work on the CW. I’m hopeful that Aguirre-Sacasa and his collaborators will use the mystery at the heart of the series much as Twin Peaks did, as a kind of clothesline on which they can hang a lot of wild experiments, only a certain percentage of which can be expected to work. Twin Peaks itself provides a measure of this method’s limitations: it mutated into something extraordinary, but it didn’t survive the departure of its original creative team. Riverdale feels like an attempt to recreate those conditions, and if it utilizes the Archie characters as its available raw material, well, why not? If Lynch had been able to get the rights, he might have used them, too.

Quantico and the pilot problem

Note: Spoilers follow for Quantico.

Halfway through the series premiere of Quantico, the new drama being sold to viewers as Homeland meets Gray’s Anatomy, it occurred to me that they had filmed the pitch for the show without bothering to write an actual episode. A second later, I realized that this is exactly what a network pilot is supposed to be. If democracy, as Churchill is supposed to have said, is the worst form of government except for all the others, the process by which shows are picked up on the basis of standalone pilots is the worst possible way to get good television, except that nobody has managed to come up with anything better. A pilot is less the proper opening for an ongoing series than a commercial for what the show could become, and if the industry were smart about it, it would treat those two objectives as totally separate: the network could be sold on the premise with a highlight reel alone, or, maybe better, with an extended trailer followed by the real thing. Instead, we’ve somehow come to the conclusion that these two functions are really the same, which means that nearly every series starts off with an overstuffed, vaguely desperate advertisement for itself. And in a television environment in which the pilot may be all a show ever gets, it’s no wonder that so many series—especially dramas—burn themselves out within the first couple of installments.

It’s too early to write off Quantico entirely, but the omens aren’t particularly promising, as much as I enjoyed a lot of what aired on Sunday. The series certainly has a nice, juicy premise: it’s a soapy look at a class at the FBI Academy, intercut with a flashforward that reveals that one of the trainees—we don’t know which one—is a sleeper agent who will later be responsible for a devastating terrorist attack at Grand Central Station. We can set aside, for now, the issue of how blithely the show trades on images of terrorism in New York mostly as an engine to drive a show in which pretty people sleep with one another: viewers, including me, are ready to forgive almost anything if the result is slick and entertaining. But the show hits all of its beats with such robotic precision that it’s almost unsettling. It isn’t particularly curious about what it would actually be like to be an FBI trainee, or really about anything except how to keep its own plot in motion: within a few minutes, it’s clear that the vision it presents of the academy itself doesn’t have much to do with reality. This isn’t to say that the result can’t be watchable on its own terms, and there’s plenty to like here, particularly in the primary cast. In the leading role of Alex Parrish, Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra more than lives up to the hype. I was pleased to see more of Johanna Braddy, who made such a strong impression on UnREAL. And it might be a lot of fun to see these characters collide.

What’s less fun is how impatient the show feels: it wants to do everything at once, rather than let the story unfold at its own pace. Every network drama these days starts out with a series bible, a document that outlines the premise and characters in enough detail that the writers can draw on a consistent body of material. One of the unwritten rules of these bibles is that every important character has a secret that will only be exposed later on. Quantico, hilariously, discloses all those secrets in the pilot in the most guileless way imaginable: the trainees are told to investigate one another to find out their secrets, which are then laid out for us in a series of mock interrogation scenes. This isn’t to say that there aren’t more surprises coming, or that the ones we see here won’t reveal additional wrinkles later on—at least one of the trainees, after all, is allegedly a terrorist. But having the characters essentially deliver their secrets to the camera is such a blatant narrative shortcut that it almost starts to feel inspired. I’m not even mad; I’m just impressed. Still, it gets old pretty quickly. At one point, there’s a conversation between two supporting players in which one all but says to the other: “Hey, remember how we used to date?” That kind of bald exposition is standard for any pilot, and we’ve learned to accept it. But nearly every scene serves the same kind of double duty. It’s like a briefing on the show that we could be watching, but aren’t.

That said, the pilot is full of punchy moments—a trainee who commits suicide out of fear that his past will be exposed, the reveal that one of the characters is actually a pair of identical twins—that have an undeniable impact. But they’d be much more interesting if we’d spent more than ten minutes with these characters beforehand. The showrunner, Joshua Safran, is clearly an intelligent guy, and he presumably knows that a character’s death is more powerful if we’ve gotten to know him over the course of a few episodes, or that it’s more fun to produce a set of twins if the series has managed to mislead us for most of the season. But he doesn’t have the time to do it properly, or he’s afraid that he won’t get it. Quantico is like a shaggy dog story that repeatedly tells us the punchline before the joke is even finished, out of fear that we’ll stop listening before it’s over. It shows us a twist as if describing the episode to somebody who hadn’t seen it, and then invites us to admire how great it would have been if it had been allowed to unfold for real. It’s possible that it has more up its sleeve, but precedents here aren’t encouraging: shows that make a point of burning through ideas rarely have enough to sustain a whole season, let alone an extended run. (Even The Vampire Diaries started to run out of steam after its third year.) But it’s exactly the kind of show the pilot system was designed to create. And until somebody comes up with a better way, it’s the best we can expect.

A brand apart

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 topic: “What individual instances of product placement in movies and television have you found most effective?”

One of the small but consistently troublesome issues that every writer faces is what to do about brand names. We’re surrounded by brands wherever we look, and we casually think and talk about them all the time. In fiction, though, the mention of a specific brand often causes a slight blip in the narrative: we find ourself asking if the character in question would really be using that product, or why the author introduced it at all, and if it isn’t handled well, it can take us out of the story. Which isn’t to say that such references don’t have their uses. John Gardner puts it well in The Art of Fiction:

The writer, if it suits him, should also know and occasionally use brand names, since they help to characterize. The people who drive Toyotas are not the same people who drive BMWs, and people who brush with Crest are different from those who use Pepsodent or, on the other hand, one of the health-food brands made of eggplant. (In super-realist fiction, brand names are more important than the characters they describe.)

And sometimes the clever deployment of brands can be another weapon in the writer’s arsenal, although it usually only works when the author already possesses a formidable descriptive vocabulary. Nicholson Baker is a master of this, and it doesn’t get any better than Updike in Rabbit is Rich:

In the bathroom Harry sees that Ronnie uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that’s eating up the ozone so our children will fry. And that new kind of razor with the narrow single-edge blade that snaps in and out with a click on the television commercials. Harry can’t see the point, it’s just more waste, he still uses a rusty old two-edge safety razor he bought for $1.99 about seven years ago, and lathers himself with an old imitation badger-bristle on whatever bar of soap is handy…

For the rest of us, though, I’d say that brand names are one of those places where fiction has to retreat slightly from reality in order to preserve the illusion. Just as dialogue in fiction tends to be more direct and concise than it would be in real life, characters should probably refer to specific brands a little less often than they really would. (This is particularly true when it comes to rapidly changing technology, which can date a story immediately.)

In movies and television, a prominently featured brand sets off a different train of thought: we stop paying attention to the story and wonder if we’re looking at deliberate product placement—if there’s even any question at all. Even a show as densely packed as The Vampire Diaries regularly takes a minute to serve up a commercial for the likes of AT&T MiFi, and shows like Community have turned paid brand integration into entire self-mocking subplots, while still accepting the sponsor’s money, which feels like a textbook example of having it both ways. Tony Pace of Subway explains their strategy in simple terms: “We are kind of looking to be an invited guest with a speaking role.” Which is exactly what happened on Community—and since it was reasonably funny, and it allowed the show to skate along for another couple of episodes, I didn’t really care. When it’s handled poorly, though, this ironic, winking form of product placement can be even more grating than the conventional kind. It flatters us into thinking that we’re all in on the joke, although it isn’t hard to imagine cases where corporate sponsorship, embedded so deeply into a show’s fabric, wouldn’t be so cute and innocuous. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s a fake version of irreverence, done on a company’s terms. And if there’s a joke here, it’s probably on us.

Paid or not, product placement works, at least on me, although often in peculiar forms. I drank Heineken for years because of Blue Velvet, and looking around my house, I see all kinds of products or items that I bought to recapture a moment from pop culture, whether it’s the Pantone mug that reminds me of a Magnetic Fields song or the Spyderco knife that carries the Hannibal seal of approval. (I’ve complained elsewhere about the use of snobbish brand names in Thomas Harris, but it’s a beautiful little object, even if I don’t expect to use it exactly as Lecter does.) If it’s kept within bounds, it’s a mostly harmless way of establishing a connection between us and something we love, but it always ends up feeling a little empty. Which may be why brand names sit so uncomfortably in fiction. Brands or corporations use many of the same strategies as art to generate an emotional response, except the former is constantly on message, unambiguous, and designed to further a specific end. It’s no accident that there are so many affinities between advertising and propaganda. A good work of art, by contrast, is ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations, and asks nothing of us aside from an investment of time—which is the opposite of what a brand wants. Fiction and brands are always going to live together, either because they’ve been paid to do so or because it’s an accurate reflection of our world. But we’re more than just consumers. And art, at its best, should remind us of this.

How to say goodbye

Note: Spoilers follow for Mad Men, The Vampire Diaries, and Game of Thrones.

Earlier this month, in the span of less than a week, I said goodbye to three television shows that had been part of my life for a long time. One farewell, to Mad Men, was an involuntary one, forced by its series finale; the others, to The Vampire Diaries and Game of Thrones, were a matter of choice. And while my decision to bail on the latter two might seem to have clear reasons—namely a major cast change and a repellent scene of sexual violence—it was really more gradual and complicated. When we fall out of love with a show, it’s often like the end of any relationship, where it can be hard to pinpoint the moment when it all went wrong. In many cases, as with Glee, I can barely remember when or why I stopped watching. And even a more obvious trigger might only catalyze a growing sense of disillusionment. At first glance, it might seem that I gave up on The Vampire Diaries because Nina Dobrev, its ostensible lead, was leaving, or that I’m abandoning Game of Thrones because of what it did to Sansa Stark and how it did it. Really, though, I’m bowing out because of a calculation, reluctant in one case and decisive in the other, that neither show is the best use of my limited time. An isolated scene or cast departure isn’t likely to send viewers packing if a series remains rewarding in other ways. But in both cases, sadly, the shows made my choice an easy one.

This becomes all the more clear when we compare it to a show that I loved and savored until the very end. The last scene of Mad Men is fiendishly clever, almost a little too clever, but the more I think about it, the more impressed I am at how perfectly it encapsulates everything the series, and particularly the character of Don Draper, has been building toward for years. Matthew Weiner hit on the one perfect image that both tied a bow on the story and raised countless questions of its own, and it works because of how deeply he understood and identified with Don himself. And it looks even better next to The Vampire Diaries, which muddled through Elena Gilbert’s endgame precisely because it never quite figured out who she was. Elena, at her best, was a compelling, resourceful heroine, but after season after season of personality changes, possessions, and memory wipes—and the inexplicable choices she made just because the story demanded it—we were left with an empty shell. (It’s no accident that Elena is sidelined for most of her own last episode, asleep in a magical coma while the real action unfolds everywhere else.) And if I’m bidding farewell to a show I once really liked, it isn’t because I’ll miss Elena so much, but because a series that can’t decide what to do with its protagonist doesn’t seem likely to make smart choices once she’s gone.

Any series that runs for an extended length of time will experience a few bumpy transitions, and the real issue is less about any one development than about whether the show can be trusted thereafter to pay back our investment. This is what makes the case of Game of Thrones so interesting, and ultimately so sad. What many of its defenders fail to recognize is that the issue isn’t a rape scene in itself, but its presentation, its context, and what it says about the narrative strategy—or lack thereof—of the series as a whole. For its first two seasons, this was an uneven but masterfully paced show that burned quickly through plots and knew how to balance subversion with payoffs. Later, perhaps as the showrunners realized that they were coming too rapidly to the end of the material in the books, it began, for lack of a better word, to stall: long stretches of inaction or reversions to the same few beats were punctuated by the “Oh, shit” moments that were the only way it knew to hold our attention. Even a year ago, this pattern was becoming grindingly obvious, and using Sansa’s rape as an episode’s punchline only confirmed how mechanical, even lazy, the approach had grown. In particular, the fact that the show’s writers thought that it was a good idea to capitalize on it, after a similar scene had aroused such outrage the previous season, implies that they’re either clueless or don’t care. And neither possibility fills me with much hope that this show will continue to be worth watching.

It all boils down, as I said before, to a question of trust. A show with any narrative ambition asks for some degree of patience from its viewers: when we don’t know where a story is going, we can only hope that we’re in good hands. Game of Thrones has slowly been squandering that goodwill for a long time, and last week’s episode eliminated what little remained. It’s a show that no longer seems to remember that a subversion of the viewer’s expectations can only be justified if the payoff is greater than if it had been played straight, and for too long, this series has been all subversion and stasis without any reward. (Even if Sansa’s arc is “going somewhere,” as I’m sure the writers would insist, it’s a basic mistake to put the scene of her wedding night at the end of an episode, without any sense of what comes next, which leaves us with nothing to anticipate except whether our time would be better spent catching up with old episodes of Deadwood.) I honestly don’t know how I might have reacted to the scene if this season of Game of Thrones had been consistently fantastic, any more than I know if I’d still be watching The Vampire Diaries in Elena Gilbert’s absence if the show had maintained its quality from its height. Both had a good run, but in the end, they lost the narrative trust that Mad Men maintained up to its final minute. And it’s why I watched one show to the very end, and I’m saying goodbye to the others now.

“This, above all else, had saved his life…”

Note: This post is the fifty-fourth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 53. You can read the earlier installments here. 

I’ve noted elsewhere that I have mixed feelings about the increasing willingness among television shows to abruptly kill off their characters. On the one hand, it discourages audience complacency and raises the stakes if we feel that anyone could die at any moment; on the other, it encourages a kind of all or nothing approach to writing stories, and even a sort of laziness. Ninety percent of the time, a show can coast along on fairly conventional storytelling—as Game of Thrones sometimes does—before somebody gets beheaded or shoved in front of a subway train. But it would have been better, or at least more interesting, to create tension and suspense while those characters were sill alive. Major deaths should be honestly earned, not just a way to keep the audience awake. At least Game of Thrones knows how to milk such moments for all they’re worth; with a show like The Vampire Diaries, diminishing returns quickly set in when characters are dispatched in every other episode. It cheapens the value of life and personality, and it starts to feel questionable on both narrative and ethical levels.

Of course, I’ve been guilty of this myself, and the way certain character deaths have been incorporated into my novels testify both to how effective and to how arbitrary this kind of device can be. Ethan’s death in The Icon Thief gets a pass: it’s a striking scene that propels the last third of the story forward, and although it works in terms of momentary shock value, its repercussions continue to define the series until the final book. (The fact that it was a late addition to the story—indeed, it was one of the last things I wrote—hasn’t kept it from feeling inevitable now.) The corresponding scene in City of Exiles, which echoes its predecessor in a lot of ways, is a little harder to defend. It’s a nice, tricky chapter, and I’m still proud of the reversal it pulls, but it feels a bit more like a gimmick, especially because its consequences don’t fully play out until the following novel. From a structural point of view, it works, and it provides a necessary jolt of energy to the story at the right place, but it’s not that far removed from the way a show like 24 will throw in a surprise betrayal when the audience’s attention starts to wander.

Looking back, I have a feeling that my own uneasiness over this moment—as well as the high body count of the novel as a whole—may have led me to spare another character’s life. Toward the end of the process, there was a lot of talk about whether I should kill off Powell. After reading the first draft, my agent was openly in favor of it, and it’s true that things don’t look particularly good for Powell at this point: realistically speaking, it’s hard to imagine that anyone on that airplane could have survived. Much earlier, I’d even toyed with the idea of killing Powell at the end of Part I, which would have made Wolfe’s journey all the more urgent. Between these two possibilities, the latter seemed much more preferable. A death at the conclusion of the novel wouldn’t have advanced the narrative in any particular fashion; we’re only a few pages from the end anyway, and if the stakes aren’t clear by now, there’s no point in trying to heighten them in retrospect. Killing him earlier would have served a clearer dramatic purpose, but I also would have lost his far more wrenching scene on the plane, which I don’t think would have been nearly as strong without him at its center.

In the end, I let him live, though badly hurt, for a number of different reasons. At the time, I thought that I wanted to preserve the duo of Powell and Wolfe for a potential third novel, although as it turned out, they don’t spend a lot of time together in Eternal Empire, and his role could conceivably have been filled by somebody else. Powell also benefited from my impulse to pull back on the death toll of plane crash: I didn’t want to kill off Chigorin, mostly because he was transparently based on a real person whose imagined demise I didn’t much feel like exploiting, so most of the other passengers ended up being protected by his character shield. Most of all, I thought that keeping Powell alive would restore a necessary degree of balance to the ending. City of Exiles concludes on something of a down note: Ilya is still in prison, Karvonen’s handler is still at large, and Wolfe still doesn’t know—although the reader does—that the traitor in her organization is someone close to her own heart. Killing off Powell would have left the situation feeling even more hopeless, so I spared him. If this all sounds a little cold and calculated, well, maybe it was. Powell might not have made it, but he escaped thanks to luck, impersonal considerations, and a moment of mercy from the universe. And that’s true of all of us at times…

“The greatest and most terrible sight…”

Note: This post is the forty-sixth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 45. You can read the earlier installments here. 

One of the dangers of writing any kind of fiction, literary or mainstream, is how quickly the story can start to exist within a closed circle of assumptions. The rules of a genre aren’t a bad thing: as I’ve noted elsewhere, they’re essentially a collection of best practices, tricks and techniques that have accumulated over time through the efforts of countless writers. A trick that survives is one that has repeatedly proven itself, and much of the pleasure of reading comes from watching as the author honors, subverts, or pushes against the constraints that the narrative imposes. The trouble is when a story moves so far from the real world that its characters cease to exhibit recognizable human behavior, as its internal rules become ever more strict and artificial. A show like The Vampire Diaries, for instance, takes a surprisingly casual approach to murder, with the average episode boasting a body count in the high single digits, and the reaction to each additional death amounts to a shrug and a search for a shovel. Within the confines of the show, it works, but the second we start to measure it against any kind of reality, it comes precariously close to collapsing.

That’s true of literary fiction as well. Even great authors operate within limits when it comes to the kinds of situations and characters they can comfortably depict. In Genius and Lust, Norman Mailer draws a memorable comparison between the tonal ranges of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller:

The cruelest criticism ever delivered of Henry James is that he had a style so hermetic his pen would have been paralyzed if one of his characters had ever entered a town house, removed his hat, and found crap on his head (a matter, parenthetically, of small moment to Tolstoy let us say, or Dostoyevsky or Stendhal). Hemingway would have been bothered more than he liked. Miller would have loved it.

The more closely we read certain writers or genres, the more we see how much they stick to their particular circles. Sometimes that circle is determined by what the author can talk about through firsthand experience; sometimes it’s the result of a genre enforcing an unstated decorum, a set of rules about what can and can’t be said.

When it comes to suspense and mystery fiction, these rules can lead to a suspension of emotion, at least of certain kinds. A murder mystery never shows much regret over the fate of the departed; it’s too busy moving on to a trail of clues to waste any time in mourning. Suspense works along similar lines. Sometimes a pivotal death will serve to motivate an ensuing course of action, but along the way, the bodies tend to pile up without much in the way of consequence. I wouldn’t say that my own novels take this as far as The Vampire Diaries, but when I look back on The Icon Thief and its sequels, there are times when I get a little uneasy with the way in which the plot advances on moments of casual violence. (On a much higher level, you can hear some of the same ambivalence in Francis Coppola’s voice when he talks about The Godfather, and by the time he gets to The Godfather Part III, he seems outright weary at having to supply the hits and kills that the audience has come to expect.) There’s a mechanical pleasure to be had in seeing a story run fluently through those conventions, but when you step briefly outside, you start to see how limited a picture of the world it really presents.

That’s why I’m particularly proud of Chapter 45 of City of Exiles. It’s a short chapter, as short, in fact, as I could make it, and my agent even suggested that it be cut. I’m glad I kept it, though, because it represents one of the few points in the entire series when we pull away from the primary characters and depict an event from an outside perspective. In it, I introduce a character named Ivan, fishing on the ice with his dog, who happens to witness the crash of Chigorin’s private plane. In some ways, my decision to cut away here was a pragmatic one: none of the passengers is in any condition to directly experience what happens, and there’s a world of difference, in any case, between describing a plane crash from the inside and showing how it appears on the ground. On a more subtle level, I wanted to depart from the closed circle of the novel to reinforce the horror of the moment, even if it’s described as clinically as everything else. Objectively speaking, City of Exiles is a violent book, and there are times when the faces of the victims start to blur together. Here, for once, I wanted to suggest how it would feel to a man who didn’t know he was part of the story. Ivan won’t be coming back again, but it was important, if only for a moment, to see through his eyes…

The crowded circle of television

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’s your favorite TV show of the year so far?”

There are times when watching television can start to feel like a second job—a pleasurable one, to be sure, but one that demands a lot of work nevertheless. Over the last year, I’ve followed more shows than ever, including Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, Hannibal, Community, Parks and Recreation, House of Cards, The Vampire Diaries, and True Detective. For the most part, they’ve all had strong runs, and I’d have trouble picking a favorite. (If pressed, I’d probably go with Mad Men, if only for old times’ sake, with Hannibal as a very close second.) They’re all strikingly different in emphasis, tone, and setting, but they also have a lot in common. With one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment, these are dense shows with large casts and intricate storylines. Many seem devoted to pushing the limits of how much complexity can be accommodated within the constraints of the television format, which may be why the majority run for just ten to thirteen episodes: it’s hard to imagine that level of energy sustained over twenty or more installments.

And while I’m thrilled by the level of ambition visible here, it comes at a price. There’s a sort of arms race taking place between media of all kinds, as they compete to stand out in an increasingly crowded space with so much competing for our attention. Books, even literary novels, are expected to be page-turners; movies offer up massive spectacle to the point where miraculous visual effects are taken for granted; and television has taken to packing every minute of narrative time to the bursting point. (This isn’t true of all shows, of course—a lot of television series are still designed to play comfortably in the background of a hotel room—but it’s generally the case with prestige shows that end up on critics’ lists and honored at award ceremonies.) This trend toward complexity arises from a confluence of factors I’ve tried to unpack here before: just as The Simpsons was the first freeze-frame sitcom, modern television takes advantage of our streaming and binge-watching habits to deliver storytelling that rewards, and even demands, close attention.

For the most part, this is a positive development. Yet there’s also a case to be made that television, which is so good at managing extended narratives and enormous casts of characters, is also uniquely suited for the opposite: silence, emptiness, and contemplation. In a film, time is a precious commodity, and when you’re introducing characters while also setting in motion the machinery of a complicated story, there often isn’t time to pause. Television, in theory, should be able to stretch out a little, interspersing relentless forward momentum with moments of quiet, which are often necessary for viewers to consolidate and process what they’ve seen. Twin Peaks was as crowded and plotty as any show on the air today, but it also found time for stretches of weird, inexplicable inaction, and it’s those scenes that I remember best. Even in the series finale, with so many threads to address and only forty minutes to cover them all, it devotes endless minutes to Cooper’s hallucinatory—and almost entirely static—ordeal in the Black Lodge, and even to a gag involving a decrepit bank manager rising from his desk and crossing the floor of his branch very, very slowly.

So while there’s a lot of fun to be had with shows that constantly accelerate the narrative pace, it can also be a limitation, especially when it’s handled less than fluently. (For every show, like Orange is the New Black, that manages to cut expertly between subplots, there’s another, like Game of Thrones, that can’t quite seem to handle its enormous scope, and even The Vampire Diaries is showing signs of strain.) Both Hannibal and Mad Men know when to linger on an image or revelation—roughly half of Hannibal is devoted to contemplating its other half—and True Detective, in particular, seemed to consist almost entirely of such pauses. We remember such high points as the final chase with the killer or the raid in “Who Goes There,” but what made the show special were the scenes in which nothing much seemed to be happening. It was aided in this by its limited cast and its tight focus on its two leads, so it’s possible that what shows really need to slow things down are a couple of movie stars to hold the eye. But it’s a step in the right direction. If time is a flat circle, as Rust says, so is television, and it’s good to see it coming back around.

The Long Game

Note: Spoilers follow for the most recent episode of Game of Thrones.

Last week, while writing about the season finale of Hannibal, I laid out a pet theory about television shows that have a tendency to kill off their lead characters:

When it comes to predicting who lives and who dies, I’d like to think that [Bryan] Fuller will follow Lecter’s own rule: “The world is more interesting with you in it.” I feel the same way about Game of Thrones, which isn’t shy about killing off its leads, but only if the dramatic weight gained by one bloody incident offsets the loss from the character’s absence. If you’re fun to watch, you’re more likely to make it.

In other words, when someone dies, there’s always a tradeoff involved, and a smart show will only eliminate a protagonist if the short-term benefit outweighs the long-term cost of no longer having that character around. This rule doesn’t really work for a show like The Vampire Diaries, which finds myriad ways of resurrecting its key players, but until recently, it did a decent job of explaining events on Game of Thrones. The characters who died tended to be either figureheads who were more interesting in what they represented than in their actions within the story; initially compelling players who had been increasingly sidelined; or ostensible leads who weren’t all that engaging in the first place. And I felt confident that if a character—or actor—was actively enriching the show by his or her presence, the series wouldn’t lightly throw it away.

Well, so much for that theory. (In financial terms, the model worked fine when tested against past data, but fell apart outside my historical sample.) If last night’s episode was especially shocking, even for a show that seems designed to regularly break its viewers’ hearts, it’s partially because of the ways in which the series has diverged unexpectedly from the books. To hear readers tell it, Oberyn doesn’t seem to have been a particularly memorable character on the page, but Pedro Pascal’s performance has been one of the small delights of an often meandering season, and his departure feels like a real loss in a way that previous fatalities have not. Another series, after seeing what it had on the screen, might have revised the storyline accordingly—it wouldn’t be the first time that a character was granted a stay of execution because of the charisma a performer brought to the part—but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been cruelly faithful to Martin’s overall vision. There really wasn’t any way to keep Oberyn around, and it’s in the collision between what the show was slowly discovering on its own and the brutal necessities of its source material that makes the outcome so painful.

I’m not really complaining here: it’s that very tension between the unpredictable nature of television and the demands of the text that makes this show special. Still, Oberyn’s death bothered me beyond any reasonable measure, and I don’t think it’s entirely because I’d grown so attached to the character—or because his demise was so graphic. (You know when a show has set a new standard for violence when I start to long nostalgically for Hannibal‘s more aestheticized form of bloodshed.) Game of Thrones is a good show that I’m glad to have the chance to watch, but there’s also a sense in which it uses its virtuoso moments of gore and reversal to cover up the lack of momentum elsewhere. A lot of the fourth season has felt like it was stalling for time: events at Castle Black and across the Narrow Sea have been stuck in a holding pattern, with much talk and declamation leaving the characters more or less exactly where they were before, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that they’re playing for time. For all her power, Daenerys can’t go anywhere or do much of anything yet because we still have four more books of material to cover, and the result has turned one of my favorite characters from the early days of the series into something dangerously resembling a bore.

In retrospect, I think it may have been a mistake to divide the third novel across two seasons: it buys Martin more time to finish the books, but it leads to a lot of thumbs twiddling between the squishing of heads. To its credit, Game of Thrones has always nailed the big moments, and I’m eagerly looking forward to next week’s episode, which, if the pattern from previous seasons is any indication, should be a real barnburner. Over the long term, though, the show needs to find a more sustainable rhythm if episodes like “The Mountain and the Viper” are going to play like the dramatic culminations they are, rather than another instance of Martin and company jerking the audience around. This may require even more radical departures from the structure the books have imposed, and even a willingness to drop certain plot threads altogether—while building up the rest—until the time comes to integrate them again into the main story. This isn’t a radical notion; serialized television drops and picks up characters all the time, and the space it gains allows the show to develop its heart more fully. Game of Thrones spends an inordinate amount of time, even now, reminding us that certain characters exist, when that space might have been better spent showing characters like Oberyn simply existing, if only until they depart from the stage for good.

Food for plot

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 fictional restaurant would you most like to patronize?”

Movies are founded on sight and sound—to the extent that the best magazine ever devoted to the field took that as its name—and they can’t effectively draw on the senses of touch, smell, or taste. At first glance, then, it’s surprising that films have so often turned to food as a subject. Looking at the fabulous meals in movies like Big Night or Babette’s Feast, you feel a little like you’re watching an extended episode of Top Chef: as attractive as those dishes might be, when it comes to the actual dining experience, you have to take the word of the people onscreen. Of course, it helps that the look of food is a large part of its appeal. Given how easily food wilts under studio lights, it’s fair to say that in reality, whatever is being shown on camera isn’t nearly as appetizing as it looks, and any familiarity with the tricks of food photographers is enough to diminish one’s appetite. Still, it’s a beautiful illusion, and it’s only a convenient illustration of the ways in which movies enhance and counterfeit reality. A castle wall is made of polystyrene and cardboard, and an actress’s lovely face is the work of an army of stylists, so there’s no reason to complain that the food on the table has been treated with hairspray and baby oil.

In addition to its sensual appeal, food is often used to dramatize larger themes within the story. Among other things, it’s perhaps the best way around of depicting the creative process on film. You can’t convincingly show a character writing a novel or composing a symphony without falling back into the standard clichés about artistic inspiration, but preparing a meal is another matter. It’s no accident that the most luminous movie made about creativity in the last decade is Ratatouille: if there’s one thing animators know, it’s how to combine different ingredients and processes into a satisfying whole. On a narrative level, food also furnishes a metaphor for the characters’ emotional lives in movies as different as Tom Jones and Mildred Pierce. And it provides actors with excellent bits of business. One of my favorite introductions to a character in recent television history is the first appearance on Game of Thrones of Tywin Lannister, whom we first see casually butchering a stag while dressing down his son. (But I’ll admit that I was slightly distracted by the thought of how many different takes the scene must have required, and whether Charles Dance had to take any lessons in butchery—which probably informed his character in other ways.)

A restaurant is also a perfect setting for a movie or television show. You have your staff, your regulars, and a constantly renewed stream of new faces, not to mention all the possibilities for drama inherent in running a small business. Even for stories that aren’t explicitly set around food, a restaurant provides a convenient location for a meeting or conversation, even if one of the two parties involved inevitably gets up just as the food arrives. It’s also a good place for disconnected characters to bump into one another—after all, regardless of age, occupation, or social standing, we all have to eat sometime—which is why so many shows have a restaurant as one of their only standing sets. (In some cases, as with the Mystic Grill on The Vampire Diaries, half the town’s social life seems to take place in the same dive.) But while a television series set in a restaurant can build up a large supporting cast of familiar faces, in a movie, there’s something a little melancholy about eating out. A restaurant is a kind of temporary home, a place where you rent a couple of chairs for an hour or two, and when you’re done, you pack up and leave. Which only makes it an allegory for the act of going to the movies itself.

That’s why, if I could eat at any fictional restaurant, I’d go with the lunch stand in Chungking Express. The food there looks pretty good, and we’re given a chance to see much of the menu, if only by implication: Tony Leung’s cop orders a chef salad every day for his girlfriend, and it’s only after the owner suggests that he give her a choice of salad or pizza that he realizes that she never liked chef salad at all. Shortly thereafter, she leaves him, causing him to observe wistfully: “If you have a choice in food, why not in men?” Leung spends so much time at the lunch stand, in fact, that his girlfriend leaves a Dear John letter there, along with the keys to his apartment, which sets the rest of the movie’s delicate plot in motion. In the end, Leung realizes that the happiness he needs has been in plain sight all along, in the form of Faye Wong, and he even goes so far as to buy the lunch stand from Faye’s uncle: “He’s a good businessman. First he sells me chef salad, then the entire restaurant.” It’s a modest place, but it’s also a point of stability in a city that never seems to slow down, and the men and women who cross paths there influence one another’s lives in surprising ways. And I’d like to drop by, just for a minute, if only for a chance to see Leung and Wong together at last behind the counter.

The fifty-minute hour

Watching the premiere of Mad Men last night, I was struck by how nice it is to follow a series where there isn’t any danger of anyone being disemboweled. Don’t get me wrong: I love Hannibal and Game of Thrones, and violence, properly used, is just another tool in the storyteller’s arsenal. In retrospect, though, I’ve realized that much of my television diet over the last year has consisted of shows that gain much of their narrative power from bloodshed or sex. The Vampire Diaries, which probably has the highest body count of them all, likes to treat a broken neck or a beheading as a punchline, and even shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, where violence is doled out more sparingly, lean heavily on other kinds of graphic imagery. These are all good shows—well, maybe not House of Cards—and I’ve enjoyed watching them all. But it makes me all the more grateful for a show like Mad Men, which exists within the limitations of basic cable and often dials down the intensity even further, to the point where its drama consists of a lingering glance, a chance encounter, or a charged silence. As it happens, this Sunday’s premiere was its lowest-rated in five seasons, which may be a reflection of how much the television landscape has changed: set against its peers, Man Men can start to seem sedate, almost somnolescent.

Still, this kind of slow-drip pacing can be intoxicating in itself, but only if it’s given enough room to breathe, which is part of the reason why I found this season premiere less satisfying than usual. As many of you probably know, AMC has divided the final season into two segments, with the first seven episodes airing this year and the back half held until 2015. The decision makes good economic sense—with Breaking Bad gone, the network doesn’t want to lose both of its flagship shows in succession—but it’s frustrating to viewers, as well as problematic for the show’s narrative. For the past few seasons, Mad Men has premiered with a double episode, which gives it ninety full minutes to immerse us again in its world, mood, and enormous cast. Given the shortened run, the decision was evidently made to keep the latest premiere to the standard length, allowing the season to be parceled out over seven weeks. Unfortunately, it leaves us with an episode that feels like half a loaf. I have a feeling it will hold up better in retrospect than it does on first viewing; Mad Men has long been about cumulative energy, with countless small moments that need time and reflection to pay off. All the same, it was always nice to get an extra helping at the beginning of a season, which allowed scenes and arcs to cohere a little more on their way to the deep dive. And I miss it.

Which raises the issue of how length subconsciously influences our perceptions of television shows, both in its orderly format and in its deviations from the norm. A few months ago, Scott Meslow of The Week argued that Netflix wasn’t fully exploiting the possibilities of the streaming format, which in theory allows shows to be arbitrarily any length at all:

Someone could create a show where one episode is 75 minutes long, and the next episode is 15 minutes long. Someone could decide to release one episode every week, or every month, or every holiday—or at random, turning every new installment into a welcome surprise. Someone could release every episode of a series but the finale, then hold that finale back for six months—turning its premiere into a buzzy event that will be simultaneously shared by all its viewers.

Up to a point, that’s an intriguing suggestion, and I’d be excited to see a series that found a logical, organic reason for telling a story in such unconventional ways. For most shows, though, the episodic format provides a useful set of constraints that go far beyond the logistics of packaging and international markets. It’s a force for selection, compression, and external structure, all of which a series discards at its own peril. As it stands, I’d argue that Netflix is a little too flexible in this regard: nearly every episode of the fourth season of Arrested Development ran long, and I’m not alone in feeling that the result would have been better if Mitch Hurwitz had cut it to fit within twenty-five minutes.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t room for departures, but that the exceptions have more impact when they build on a baseline. Episodes in a television series, like chapters in a novel, are structural conventions that originated to fill a practical need, then evolved over time in the hands of artists to provide a means of delivering narrative information. As I’ve pointed out before, there’s no real reason why novels need to be divided into chapters, but the shape provided by section breaks, areas of white space, and the rhythm of titles and epigraphs is a tool that clever writers know how to exploit. The same applies to episode lengths. We know approximately how long a given installment of a particular television show will last, which affects how we watch it, especially near the end of an episode. When a show pushes against those expectations, it can be great, but a narrow range of variation is all we need: Game of Thrones, for instance, does just fine with a window between fifty minutes and an hour. And the best unit of narrative is still the episode, which can be used as a building block to create surprising shapes, like the uniform tatami mats in Japanese houses. I wish Mad Men had followed its own precedent and given us two such pieces side by side for the premiere, but I’m still glad to know that each episode that follows will look more or less the same on the outside, with endless variations within.

The killing joke

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 television trope aggravates you the most?”

Clichés exist for a reason. As I pointed out in my post on the cinematic baguette, whenever a trope becomes exhausted to the point of parody, it’s because it was once incredibly useful. Most of the conventions that wind up advertising a story’s unreality, like the fact that the first bill the hero pulls from his wallet is always the exact amount he needs to pay for his cab, or that people in movies rarely say “Hello” or “Goodbye” on the phone, are about saving time or conveying information to the audience. Two of my wife’s least favorite tropes fall in this category: Hollywood Gift Wrap, in which a present is wrapped so that the character can open it simply by lifting off the lid, and They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich, in which one character meets another for lunch, orders, then leaves as soon as the food arrives. In both cases, there’s a pragmatic rationale—it’s a pain to rewrap a present between takes, and it’s equally hard to maintain continuity with food—but it also makes good narrative sense. The point isn’t to watch the character unwrapping the present, but to see what’s inside the box, and even if we’re annoyed by the transparent artifice of that lid with its separate ribbon, we’d probably be even more irritated if the show spent thirty seconds showing the character fumbling with the gift paper.

Television has its own set of tropes that the nature of the medium enforces, although whenever you notice a convention for the first time, you’ll also find a show that can’t wait to break it. For decades, sitcoms and procedural dramas tended to hit the reset button at the end of every episode: no matter what happened, you’d find the characters in the same familiar situations and relationships the following week. This was largely a consequence of syndication, which routinely aired episodes out of order, and the rise in serialized storytelling fueled by alternative viewing options has allowed shows of every genre to show characters evolving over time. Similarly, the concept of the character shield originates in the logistics of actors’ contracts: when the lead actors are slated to appear at least through the rest of the season, there’s little suspense over whether Mulder or Scully will survive their latest brush with the paranormal. More recently, however, shows have begun to play with the audience’s expectations on how invulnerable major characters can be. Joss Whedon is notorious for killing off fan favorites, and Game of Thrones has raised the bar for showing us the unexpected deaths of lead characters—and not once but twice.

On the surface, this seems like a positive development, since it discourages audience complacency and forces the viewer to fully commit to the drama of each episode. With occasional exceptions, the show’s lead character is still relatively safe, barring the occasional contract dispute, but when it comes to the supporting cast, we’ve been taught that no one is immune. Yet I’ve begun to feel that this idea has become a cliché in itself, and at its worst, the storytelling it inspires can be equally lazy. One unexpected character death can be shocking; when a show piles them up over and over again, as The Vampire Diaries does, it isn’t long before we start to see diminishing returns. (It doesn’t help that nobody on The Vampire Diaries seems to stay dead forever.) Even on shows that parcel out their casualties out more scrupulously, there’s a sense that this trope is becoming exhausted. When an important character was suddenly dispatched at the beginning of the second season of House of Cards, it was shocking in the moment—although I found myself more distracted by the inexplicability of it all—but the show seemed eager to dance away from confronting the consequences. These days, it’s just business as usual.

And the worst thing about the casual killing of characters is that it encourages a sort of all or nothing approach to writing stories. Ninety percent of the time, a show goes through the motions, but every few episodes, somebody is shoved in front of a bus—when it might be more interesting, and more difficult, to create tension and suspense while those characters were sill alive. Major deaths should be honestly earned, not just a way to keep the audience awake. Of course, it’s easier to shock than to engage, and the sudden death of a character has become television’s equivalent of a jump scare, an effect that can pulled off the shelf without thinking. I hate to keep coming back to Breaking Bad as a reference point, just because it’s what everyone else does, but I can’t help it. Few viewers had any doubt that Walt, and probably Jesse, would make it to the final episode, so the writers became agonizingly inventive at finding ways of testing them and their loved ones in the meantime, to the point where death itself seemed like a blessing. At this point, I’m no longer surprised or impressed when a character dies, but I’m actively grateful when a show puts us through the wringer in other ways. There’s an enormous spectrum of experience between life and death. And it’s far better to keep these characters alive, if you can make me care about what happens to them next.

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.

How I learned to love The Vampire Diaries

Last night, I finished the third season of The Vampire Diaries, a series that has rather unexpectedly turned into one of my favorite shows on television. I got into it at the beginning of this year, as a way to fill time between baby feedings while my wife was home from maternity leave. We were looking for a show that was fast, addictive, and conducive to binge viewing, and Carrie Raisler’s ecstatic recommendation on The A.V. Club was enough to sign me up. At first, the show more or less met my expectations: it was watchable and fun but little else, and it showed only occasional signs of the narrative momentum I’d been told to anticipate. Bit by bit—or bite by bite—it began to figure out its own potential, and by the end of the first season, it was one of the fastest, shrewdest, and most inventive genre shows I’d ever seen. (I’d still recommend that newcomers start with the pilot, then skip all the way to the last three or four episodes of the first season, filling in the rest as necessary online. Once you hit that first season finale, there’s no going back.)

In short, a guilty pleasure had been transformed into something much more: a pleasure that I can recommend without any trace of guilt or condescension. The Vampire Diaries is a stellar example of Roger Ebert’s dictum that a work of art “isn’t about what it’s about, but about how it’s about it”: it’s still ultimately a show about a bunch of teenage vampires and witches and ghosts and werewolves, but instead of getting stranded in its ridiculous mythology, it uses it as a launching pad for some delightfully twisty and surprising storytelling. As the series piles up the complications and cliffhangers, you can sense the writers taking pride in their own ingenuity, and if the first two seasons were often characterized by a winking self-awareness, it’s since been supplemented by a startling degree of feeling. In just three years, it’s built up more narrative memory than most series that run twice as long, but instead of losing its emotions in the machinery of the plot, it uses the history the show has established to confront its characters with one impossible choice after another.

And this sort of thing is really hard to do well. When we talk about narratives in which character is inseparable from plot, we tend to think first of stories in which the events are driven solely by the characters’ organic needs and objectives. To put it mildly, this isn’t always the case with The Vampire Diaries, in which story arcs have a way of being shaped by forces outside anyone’s control: a curse, a revelation from the past, a vengeful ghost, a seemingly endless series of MacGuffins. Roughly half of any given episode consists of the characters explaining the plot to one another, with the other half devoted to the usual stakings, decapitations, and high school dances, and I’d be lying if I said that the result didn’t often come off as artificial or contrived. (If the real hero of Mad Men is Matthew Weiner, as Todd VanDerWerff has suggested, then much of the drama of The Vampire Diaries seems to take place in the writers’ room.) Through it all, however, the major players have remained remarkably consistent—at least when they aren’t possessed or supernaturally compelled—and much of the show’s interest comes less from the vampiric dilemma of the week than from how a character like Damon Salvatore will react to it.

In other words, a show that could have gotten lost in its own excesses—as wonderful as those excesses can be in their own right—has used them, instead, to deepen a cast of characters who derive their complexity from the absurd, externally imposed situations in which they find themselves. (I should also note that the show’s actors, especially Nina Dobrev, Ian Somerhalder, and Candice Accola, have consistently risen to the occasion.) An episode like “The Departed,” the third season finale, depends entirely on our knowledge, or at least our vague memory, of the rules and assumptions the show has laid down, and its final moments gain their power from how fluently they draw upon the rich store of material that the series has accumulated in record time. There’s still an entire season for me to watch—and I’m waiting impatiently for it to show up on Netflix—and it’s unclear if it’s managed to live up to the high standards that have been set so far. That’s why I’m setting down my thoughts here now, with the high of those first three seasons still intact. If you’d told me a year ago that The Vampire Diaries would become one of my favorite shows, I wouldn’t have believed you. But if there’s one thing this series has taught me to value, it’s suspension of disbelief.

Starbucks and the narrative third place

Some of you are probably reading this post at Starbucks. Maybe you didn’t really need a coffee, but wanted to relax and catch up on your email in a pleasant, convenient environment where you could rent a comfortable chair for the price of a beverage. What you wanted, in short, was a third place—a location that wasn’t your home or office, but where you could unwind for half an hour among a few other regulars. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg describes the third place as a free or inexpensive location, ideally serving food and drink, where people can meet, have conversations, or sit quietly on their own. Starbucks is well aware of the power of the third place—founder Howard Schultz mentions it repeatedly in his book—and has taken pains to turn itself into a destination where people like to spend time even if they don’t particularly need to be caffeinated. Coffeehouses, as it happens, have often played such a role: the insurance company Lloyd’s of London began as a coffeehouse where sailors, ship owners, and merchants could talk shop. And third places are an essential part of building communities and social relationships.

That’s true of fiction, too. Recently, my wife and I have been watching a lot of The Vampire Diaries, and we’re endlessly amused by the fact that all the main characters spend most of their free time at the Mystic Grill. (At least when they aren’t attending yet another picnic, clam bake, or sock hop at the mayor’s mansion.) At times, the fact that everyone in Mystic Falls seems to end up at the Grill, regardless of age, social status, or supernatural orientation, verges on the surreal—among other things, it seems to be an obligatory stop for any visiting vampire or werewolf passing through town. Yet nearly every television show has its own equivalent of the Grill, a local hangout where the characters can interact and run into one another outside their homes and workplaces. Friends had Central Perk; Beverly Hills 90210 had The Peach Pit; Seinfeld had its famous diner; and Cheers had, well, Cheers. From a budgetary perspective, it makes sense: a single standing set can serve as a backdrop for scenes that don’t require any particular location, and a restaurant or bar offers plenty of convenient business for the actors and director.

But it also serves a more subtle narrative purpose. The screenwriter Terry Rossio says somewhere on his excellent Wordplay blog—I can’t find the specific post—that it can be a good idea for a movie’s characters to return periodically to the same familiar spot, a narrative home base that grounds the story and allows it to develop a sense of place, rather than jumping from one new location to another. From a storytelling perspective, this saves a lot of time: instead of having to introduce a setting the viewer hasn’t seen before, you can sit the characters at their usual table and get down to the business at hand. Done properly, a third place becomes invisible. This is why it works best when the story focuses on the same handful of characters, who might naturally have a favorite place to meet, rather than the Vampire Diaries approach, in which so many different characters drift through the Grill at one point or another that it seems like the only restaurant in town. And at its best, the third place becomes a place we’d like to visit, perhaps out of the hope that we’ll see our favorite characters seated in the corner.

And at its heart, the usefulness of the third place expresses a crucial point about fiction. It’s important to vary the story’s setting, and a series of chapters set in the same office or police station are bound to start feeling a little repetitive. But if the scenes we stage there have interest and truth, the magic of the location starts to build: each scene in Hannibal Lecter’s cell, or at the lunch counter in Chungking Express, trembles with the resonance of the scenes we’ve seen there before, and this only happens if the location recurs. A third place in fiction, like a coffeehouse in real life, gains meaning from the interactions that unfold there, and a place described in just a few lines can start to seem more real than the houses in which we’ve lived. (The great example here is 221B Baker Street, which doesn’t quite qualify as a third place, but which has prompted fans to build detailed reconstructions based on a handful of tantalizing paragraphs.) So if you’re writing a story and there isn’t a third place for the characters to interact and dream, you might want to think about adding one. After all, there’s a reason that Starbucks is everywhere.

Let’s twist again, like we did last summer

Let’s face it: surprises are no longer very surprising. These days, with every thriller and horror movie and serialized drama required to deliver a mandatory plot twist or two, it’s hard to react to any but the most unexpected developments with more than a yawn—or, at best, a mental ranking of how the twist stacks up against the best of its predecessors. Twists aren’t necessarily bad in themselves: it can be fun to watch a show like The Vampire Diaries pile up one implausible plot development after another, and very occasionally, you still see a twist with real impact. (This usually happens in a genre when you aren’t expecting it, which partially explains why the most pleasing twist I saw all year was in Wreck-It Ralph.) But it’s no wonder that audiences have become jaded. We’ve all seen television shows bump off major characters in the middle of the season, or movies that reveal that the victim was the killer the entire time, and by now, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. Once surprises become obligatory, they start to feel like mechanical impositions from the outside, when the finest twists arise organically from the material, or at least should seem like they do.

At first, it might seem that the best way to surprise the audience is for the author to surprise himself, by a development that arises unexpectedly in a work already in progress. If the writer doesn’t see a plot twist coming, the logic goes, the reader isn’t likely to anticipate it either. There’s some merit to this argument, and in fact, each of my own novels contains a major plot point that I didn’t foresee until I was halfway through the first draft. In The Icon Thief, this involves the murder of a major character who was originally going to die in any case, but whose ultimate fate ended up not only affecting the novel’s ending, but the rest of the series. City of Exiles surprised me in a somewhat different way: I’d written the first half of the book on the assumption that one of the characters had an important secret. When the time came to actually write it, however, I found that I couldn’t make it work. Consequently, I had no choice but to dig through the cast of characters I’d already developed to see if someone else was available to play this particular role. The result surprised me a lot, and because the first half of the novel remains largely as it was originally written, I’d like to think that it surprises readers as well.

But there are limits to this kind of surprise, which is why, in Eternal Empire, I’ve taken pains to weave the twists more securely into the fabric of the story itself. A twist that occurs to the author partway through the story has the advantage of being unexpected, but it can also seem arbitrary, or like an afterthought. The very best surprises, by contrast, are implicit in the premise of the narrative itself. By now, the ending of The Sixth Sense has become a cliché, but we shouldn’t allow this to undermine our appreciation of what remains the most elegant of all modern twist endings. It’s an ending that forces us to reevaluate much of what we’ve seen before, casting previous scenes in a new light, and it more or less demands a second viewing of the movie to fully appreciate. This isn’t the kind of thing that you can make up on the fly. Love it or hate it, it’s compelling in a way that few such twists ever are, because it isn’t just the ending that surprises us: we’ve been set up for it throughout the entire movie. (And as much as M. Night Shyamalan seems to have fallen short of his own early standard, that’s more than I can say for J.J. Abrams, who seems to think that a surprise is something you create by pretending it’s there in the marketing materials.)

In short, as Lermontov says in The Red Shoes, “Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat.” Good writing is based on paradoxes of craft, and just as an unpolished prose style is generally the result of painstaking work, and an apparently unstructured plot requires more planning than any other, a good surprise demands methodical work in advance. Like any form of sleight of hand, it hinges on making the result of careful preparation seem casual, even miraculous. And that sad part is that it’s unlikely to be rewarded. The best kind of surprise is one that makes us realize that we aren’t being told the story that we thought we were, which strikes a lot of people as something slightly unpleasant: as I noted in my review of The Cabin in the Woods, most viewers only like to be surprised when they’re told so in advance, not when a work of art deliberately frustrates their assumptions. A mechanical plot twist may feel like a surprise, but it’s really just fulfilling our expectations for the genre. This isn’t necessarily bad; I’ve been guilty of it myself. But it’s no substitute for the real thing.

Don’t look in the mirror

One of the incidental pleasures of having a newborn baby in the house is the chance to catch up on junk television. You invariably find yourself sitting for hours on the couch, either because the baby is feeding or because she refuses to sleep unless she’s being held at four in the morning, and you’re rarely in the mood for a show like Mad Men or Breaking Bad that demands sustained attention. Far better to go with something like The Vampire Diaries, which I’ve wanted to watch ever since reading an ecstatic writeup on The A.V. Club. My wife and I are currently burning through the first season on Netflix, and it more than lives up to its reputation as a teen soap with relentless pacing and insane plot twists. Part of the fun is how transparent it is about its sources: it’s a blatant knockoff of Twilight, but much more inventive, and it strikes a nice balance between earnestness and open acknowledgement of how ridiculous it all is. And it really won my heart in the second episode, which cheerfully indulges in not one, but two shamelessly contrived mirror scares.

You know what a mirror scare is. It’s that moment in countless scary movies and television shows when a character, alone in the bathroom, opens a medicine cabinet, then closes it to reveal someone standing right behind her in the mirror, inevitably accompanied by a scare chord on the soundtrack. It’s one of the hoariest of all horror movie tropes, to the point where the setup alone evokes a knowing grin from most viewers, yet it’s still as popular as ever, as this glorious YouTube compilation makes wonderfully clear. And you see it everywhere, in movies of all levels of quality. It’s a staple of the slasher genre, of course, but you also find it in marginally more canny entertainments, like The Mummy, or in the very clever Shaun of the Dead. Even Ang Lee, a director of tremendous technical resources, wasn’t above using it for an easy shock in Lust, Caution. And it’s worth asking why this simple effect has proven so enduring, and why it’s so hard for directors of all kinds to resist.

Because the great thing about the mirror scare is that it works. The visual vocabulary of horror movies isn’t large, which is why such films tend to return to the same handful of trick effects: the jump scare, the foreground or background surprise, the ominous empty hallway. As I pointed out in my post on the cinematic baguette, once a filmmaker stumbles across an effect that works on a consistent basis, it’s copied at once, because such tricks are priceless. The mirror scare is especially delicious because it’s so blatantly artificial: not only does it require a certain fixed camera angle, but it depends on the premise that characters are able to sneak up on one another in complete silence. There are other ways of suddenly revealing a character in the frame, as when, in the movies of Brian De Palma, a woman in the foreground steps aside or bends over to reveal a figure standing silently behind her. But there’s something about the use of a mirror that gives the moment an additional zing: it feels like a clever bit of sleight of hand, even if it’s been copied so many times as to lose all meaning.

And as a writer, I envy it. Cinematic horror has a bag of tricks that simply aren’t available to those of us who are forced to work on the printed page, and there are times when I wish I could draw upon something as simple and reliable. Novels and short stories can’t really startle us: you can’t just throw a cat at the reader and expect the effect to work. There’s no equivalent to the mirror scare in fiction, and when a writer tries to do something similar, usually with what John Gardner calls “superdramatic one-sentence paragraphs…of the kind favored by porno and thriller writers,” it comes off as hysterical or worse, when the mirror scare, even at its most gratuitous, has a nice kind of visual clarity. Literary horror is more about implication, anticipation, and dread, and even if its effects are more lasting, they’re much harder to achieve. It’s a reminder, as if we needed one, of how literary and cinematic horror are two very different beasts, and why the studios can crank out one horror movie after another, when truly terrifying novels remain so rare. They do it with mirrors.