read it and weep
Author John Scalzi explains why Star Wars is not entertainment. Don't freak out too much when you read it, Scalzi delights in tweaking his readers by taking up absurdly inflammatory positions. Actually, when he turns the snark on full force, as he does here, he reminds me why I read his blog in the first place (sometimes he comes off as a bit smug and smarmy, as he himself has on occasion admitted).
At any rate, I mainly take issue on three points - 1) that building mythologies is 'necrophilic storytelling' (a flammable opinion if I ever heard one, and ridiculously absurd to boot - I'm not going to get into it), 2) that the Star Wars prequels are not entertaining (they left me cold but I have lots of friends who genuinely liked them, especially the third) and 3) that whether or not something counts as entertainment is dependent on authorial intent.
This last seems like a lot of splitting hairs over semantics, and anyways I feel that it's wrong. So what if the storyteller has principles that they're adhering too above and beyond "entertainment"? By this argument nothing is ever pure entertainment - no author or scriptwriter or director or storyteller since the world began has ever come to a creative work totally unburdened of their personal values, agendas and interests, interested purely in entertaining some hypothetical audience.
As many of Scalzi's commentors pointed out, J.R.R. Tolkien made no bones about the fact that he was inventing mythology, essentially for himself. He created languages with derivations and relationships between each other, he wrote a massive unpublished backstory, he filled his story with irrelevant details. From the metric of entertainment, does any of this make sense? Yet surely he's very entertaining - he spawned a genre almost singlehandedly (and whether or not you appreciate fantasy books peopled with half-elven warriors is another conversation entirely), sold hundreds of millions of books over fifty years, and the inevitrable films were resounding successes. Tolkien was out mostly to entertain himself, but in doing so he entertained millions.
Most storytellers are out to entertain themselves first, and that's as it should be. When they happen to scratch us where we itch, we call them brilliant. When they fail to connect, we call them self-indulgent.
No self-respecting critic judges something by some objective paragon of entertainment. Well, I hope not. I can just imagine this person watching Scorcese's The Departed and going "Ninjas! Where are the ninjas? It is objectively verifiable that ninjas are entertaining! Also, sex." Rather, they judge the work by what the creator was apparently attempting to achieve. If that was a mythological space-opera, did it work for me as a mythological space-opera? If the aim was for a quiet, family drama, they judge it on those terms. Why? Because who can say what, if anything, will entertain all your readers, or your watchers, or your listeners. The best you can do is come up with something YOU would enjoy, and hope there are people who agree with you. The old adage that you should write what you know is off, but it's close to the truth: write what you love.
I'm afraid that the entertainment value of anything rests solely with the consumer, not the creator. And people are certainly entertained by some very strange things, much of it unintentional. It may be cool to hate Star Wars right now; I can hardly blame anyone who does, it is one of the most over-exposed media properties of the last three decades. At the same time, to chalk up the original trilogy's success to the fact that they came after a decade of dreary, dystopian sci-fi or that their entertainment value was imparted by people besides George Lucas is ridiculous. I'm young enough to have fallen in love with the movies as a kid without seeing all that other dreck and I can tell you that Lucas did, and probably still does, tap into something kids love. In my book, that's entertainment.
At any rate, I mainly take issue on three points - 1) that building mythologies is 'necrophilic storytelling' (a flammable opinion if I ever heard one, and ridiculously absurd to boot - I'm not going to get into it), 2) that the Star Wars prequels are not entertaining (they left me cold but I have lots of friends who genuinely liked them, especially the third) and 3) that whether or not something counts as entertainment is dependent on authorial intent.
This last seems like a lot of splitting hairs over semantics, and anyways I feel that it's wrong. So what if the storyteller has principles that they're adhering too above and beyond "entertainment"? By this argument nothing is ever pure entertainment - no author or scriptwriter or director or storyteller since the world began has ever come to a creative work totally unburdened of their personal values, agendas and interests, interested purely in entertaining some hypothetical audience.
As many of Scalzi's commentors pointed out, J.R.R. Tolkien made no bones about the fact that he was inventing mythology, essentially for himself. He created languages with derivations and relationships between each other, he wrote a massive unpublished backstory, he filled his story with irrelevant details. From the metric of entertainment, does any of this make sense? Yet surely he's very entertaining - he spawned a genre almost singlehandedly (and whether or not you appreciate fantasy books peopled with half-elven warriors is another conversation entirely), sold hundreds of millions of books over fifty years, and the inevitrable films were resounding successes. Tolkien was out mostly to entertain himself, but in doing so he entertained millions.
Most storytellers are out to entertain themselves first, and that's as it should be. When they happen to scratch us where we itch, we call them brilliant. When they fail to connect, we call them self-indulgent.
No self-respecting critic judges something by some objective paragon of entertainment. Well, I hope not. I can just imagine this person watching Scorcese's The Departed and going "Ninjas! Where are the ninjas? It is objectively verifiable that ninjas are entertaining! Also, sex." Rather, they judge the work by what the creator was apparently attempting to achieve. If that was a mythological space-opera, did it work for me as a mythological space-opera? If the aim was for a quiet, family drama, they judge it on those terms. Why? Because who can say what, if anything, will entertain all your readers, or your watchers, or your listeners. The best you can do is come up with something YOU would enjoy, and hope there are people who agree with you. The old adage that you should write what you know is off, but it's close to the truth: write what you love.
I'm afraid that the entertainment value of anything rests solely with the consumer, not the creator. And people are certainly entertained by some very strange things, much of it unintentional. It may be cool to hate Star Wars right now; I can hardly blame anyone who does, it is one of the most over-exposed media properties of the last three decades. At the same time, to chalk up the original trilogy's success to the fact that they came after a decade of dreary, dystopian sci-fi or that their entertainment value was imparted by people besides George Lucas is ridiculous. I'm young enough to have fallen in love with the movies as a kid without seeing all that other dreck and I can tell you that Lucas did, and probably still does, tap into something kids love. In my book, that's entertainment.
posted by braun at 1:40 PM
3 Comments:
Nice essay! While I haven't the time to read the original article right now, it does sound rather inflammatory from what you say.
Thoren Kierkegaard said something similar to "the eyeball cannot see itself." This seems to sum up writers and their products to me. You can't be creative if it doesn't entertain you, and you won't be successful if it isn't entertaining.
Now, if one were to argue that "true" art is that which is not made for a viewer, I'd be more likely to buy the argument. Well, okay, I'd laugh myself sick at such a pretentious statement. But it is more likely.
I saw Star Wars fourteen times in the theatre when it first came out. (Didn't have no fancy-schmancy VCRs back then.) My kids love it, watch all the movies all the time, and I even find myself getting sucked back into them if I stroll by.
It's only recently that I say with pride that I'm a fantasy writer. Fantasy has been around for eons in story telling, and I am telling myself a story first, just like you say.
But I REALLY REALLY REALLY hope other people like them too. :)
Star Wars rocks! I only ever saw Episode IV (as we tend to call it these days) only once in the theater. Sadly, the parental units just weren't into standing in line for 2 hours.
What was really cool was I saw the revised version at the Coronet theater, which was where the original showed in San Francisco back in the 70s. I made up for the childhood neglect, though. I waited in line 2 hours for that show, then we went back a few more times. (g)
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