A cinematic adaptation of On The Road has been in the works almost since the day it was published. In late 1957, a matter of weeks after the novel’s appearance, Warner Brothers offered $110,000 for the motion-picture rights. At the news that Paramount and actor Marlon Brando were similarly interested, Kerouac’s agent attempted to incite a bidding war, and Kerouac himself wrote a letter to Brando imploring him to purchase the rights and co-star in it with him: “I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak…You play Dean and I’ll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I’ll show you how Dean acts in real life.”

Nothing came of Kerouac’s request, with Brando supposedly believing On The Road to be too “loose” for a Hollywood makeover. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers refused to meet the agent’s asking price of $150,000. A year later, a screenplay consultation with Twentieth-Century Fox was arranged, during which producer Jerry Wald insisted on the idea of Dean Moriarty perishing in a violent climax at the close of the movie. A somewhat cynical way of cashing in on the recent real life death of James Dean, this proposed ending was unacceptable to Kerouac, who terminated the consultation.

In 1958, Kerouac agreed to sell On The Road’s film rights to a small film studio for just $25,000, but not long later the studio went bankrupt. By 1960, the American media machine had grown tired with On The Road’s slow progress towards the screen, and in October of that year, CBS began airing a new television series called Route 66. The show was a not-so-thinly-veiled capitalisation on Kerouac’s hugely popular novel, featuring a pair of young American males (“Todd” and “Buzz”) roaming the interstate in search of adventure: In one episode, a dreamy ‘Buzz’ declared “…you live it the way you feel it. When it moves, you go with it…I been looking ever since I can remember.” After it aired, Kerouac tried to sue the producers of Route 66 for plagiarism, but was advised by lawyers that such a lawsuit was destined to fail.

Towards the end of the ’60s, the film rights to On The Road fell into the hands of independent film-maker D. A. Pennebaker, who had just found fame with his groundbreaking Bob Dylan documentary, Dont Look Back. However, Pennebaker quickly decided that — beyond an opening scene featuring the various characters sitting in a parking lot — he had no idea how to make the film. In 1969, following a long descent into isolation and alcoholism, Kerouac passed away. Interest in an On The Road adaptation waned.

It wasn’t until 1979, when the film rights were purchased by Francis Ford Coppola, that On The Road looked set for the screen again. However, what followed was 30 more years of frustration, confusion, and discarded scripts. Coppola’s struggle to turn the novel into a workable screenplay — involving aborted collaborations with around a dozen separate writers, as well as a brief flirtation with the idea of shooting the whole thing on black-and-white 16mm film — is well-documented. Even Coppola himself had a try: “I tried to write a script,” he said in 2007, “but I never knew how to do it.”

Fast-forward to 2012 then, and, finally, a cinematic adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road has been written, shot, edited, and packaged, and is set for release towards the end of May. A trailer has even been released, and the film itself selected to compete for the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

The team who have finally pulled off this once-seemingly-impossible artistic feat is an interesting one: Walter Salles, the director, was hired by Coppola after he saw Salles’ 2004 Che Guevara biopic, The Motorcycle Diaries — Salles, incidentally, calls On The Road “a book that’s had a very deep impact on my life.” Meanwhile, screenwriter Jose Rivera — who collaborated with Salles on The Motorcycle Diaries, receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in the process — started out as a playwright, and has studied under Gabriel García Márquez.

So, after such a long and difficult journey to the big screen, what are the main existential challenges faced by Salles’ film, its possible pitfalls? And, conversely, what opportunities can this adaptation grasp; what absences might it fill? Can On The Road still mean anything in 2012? If so, what? And how?

1. Pitfalls

From Language To Image?
A large part of On The Road’s powerful and ongoing appeal undoubtedly stems from the lyricism of its language — as opposed to its linearity, or even narrative coherence. Translating this to the screen could quite simply be impossible. Indeed, one suspects it is the reason that, up till now, so many screenwriters have failed in turning Kerouac’s text into visual form. Influential film critic Robert Stam might lament the fact that many adaptations are judged strictly against the “fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of [their] literary source[s],” but that is undoubtedly the way of things. And as seen in other adaptations of challenging texts, such as Mrs. Dalloway (1997) or Ulysses (1967), even when an idiosyncratic style is converted to the screen with great care and attention, the success is rarely total. To quote Regina Weinreich, in her essay “Can On The Road Go On The Screen?” (from What’s Your Road, Man?):

…many critiques of the novel cite its episodic structure as a failing. In terms of a film, the key scenes on the road in a moving American landscape, in a jazz club, at Old Bull Lee’s, would have to be made visual in an extended narrative…The novel resolved those aesthetic issues in its language, in its use of repetition, of key phrases triggering verbal riffs, in Kerouac’s expansion of language as a storytelling medium…Can the medium of film be stretched in the manner in which On The Road expanded narrative possibilities for literary fiction?

Dead As History?
It might seem like an odd point to make — considering plenty of films set hundreds if not thousands of years ago are made every year — but it is possible that, as far as cinema is concerned, On The Road is (uniquely) out of date. The novel made a splash in 1957 because it tapped into a generation’s growing sense of restlessness and existential yearning — not to mention because it rebelled against the stuffy, conformist atmosphere of the post-war era. Now, 55 years on, while the novel might still succeed on other levels, there’s no denying that its content seems far less transgressive. As Kerouac scholar John Leland states in Why Kerouac Matters, “We’re no longer shocked by the sex and drugs. The slang is passé and at times corny.”

Is there a risk, then, that On The Road’s reference points (not to mention mise-en-scène) will render its adaptation a dispatch from a cultural milieu long since past? Kerouac’s text is intimately involved with its highly tangible present; its power lies in its immediacy, its urgency. But this is 55 years later, and half of America’s 20-somethings have done a coast-to-coast road trip. On The Road is about the “now in this exact minute” — but that now is now very much then. On the other hand, to utilise an atmosphere of glossy mid-century nostalgia — such as that so effectively deployed by  ABC’s Mad Men — would be highly disingenuous towards the text. Is a retrospective telling, therefore, perhaps destined to be a diminished one?

2. Opportunities

Plot Found
While On The Road is undoubtedly a frenetic, challenging story — Kerouac himself assured Brando, in that 1957 letter, that he “[knew] to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give a perfectly acceptable movie-type structure” — Salles and Rivera appear to have struck on what might be a way to tell it. Rivera says he has based the screenplay on the novel’s multi-layered theme of “finding a father.” While a departure from the novel, this at least sounds like something which might convert into a story arc, and give it some cinematic shape. It also ties into (one of) the true heart(s) of the novel, and would suggest, thankfully, that we are to receive a film that is about more than sex, drugs, and driving. Furthermore, Rivera has based much of the script on material collected by director Salles during his meticulous retracing of Kerouac’s route across America, and his interviewing of Beat figures including Carolyn Cassidy, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Diane di Prima. Both men, in other words, have done their research.

Salles, meanwhile, is encouragingly bullish about the notion that the film is in any way out of date:

This is the journey of a group of young men…who confronted a society that was very impermeable at the time…Those were the McCarthy years — the Beats collided against a social and political reality that was defined by the culture of fear. It’s not very different from what we live in now. At that time, you’d hear: “Don’t do this! Don’t do that! The Reds are coming. The Atomic bomb!” Now we hear, “The terrorists are coming. Don’t do this! Don’t do that!” It’s the same state of terror. So the theme of On the Road is more contemporary today than it was 10 years ago. It gives you the possibility to understand today’s America by jumping 50 years in the past.

Cinema Loves a Road Movie
An obvious one, but it’s true. Cinema might not have a great record when it comes to adapting Kerouac movies for the screen — witness not just On The Road‘s crooked journey, but the travesty that was The Subterraneans (1960) — but it does have a great history of producing good road movies. Films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) are hardwired into the psyche of cinema. The ideal of The Road — with its connotations of exploration, pioneership, and personal freedom — is such a generally appealing one that the term “road trip” is part of common usage. And while Kerouac’s winding and delirious prose might be a challenge for the camera, sweeping shots of gleaming convertibles beneath a Midwest sunset aren’t. Nor — and it was one of the reasons Kerouac himself was so fond of cinema — is the depiction of live music, including jazz. Indeed, images such as “Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety — leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world,” seem almost made for the screen.

Kerouac wanted it to be a film
This might seem like something of a maudlin justification, but the fact is that Kerouac wanted On The Road made. Badly. Kerouac was a great lover of cinema — his personal letters are filled with praise for various films — and some of his writing spills over fully into cinematic-like writing. For example, in the “Joan Rawshanks In The Fog” section of his novel Visions of Cody (1972), the narrative focus explicitly takes on the role of a camera, and its rhythm that of a screenplay. Indeed, even in 1959, while his agent was wrangling over the rights to On The Road, Kerouac was adapting and providing a voiceover for the bizarre but surprisingly popular Beat film Pull My Daisy (1959). 

And in chapter 13 of On The Road, Sal and Dean actually go to Hollywood — where Sal declares “Everybody had come to make the movies, even me.” Ultimately, some Kerouac fans might feel that — even 55 years later, and despite the author’s lifelong sensitivity regarding the nature of the adaptation — On The Road is due for the screen.

The Beat Renaissance
You could debate whether this is a blessing or a curse, but 2012′s On The Road adaptation would seem to tap into a recent (and ongoing) renaissance of Beat material. In 2007, the novel’s 50th anniversary, Viking published the “original version” of the novel, as typed by Kerouac on a 120-foot-long scroll. Over the next two years, the scroll itself went on a lengthily intentional tour. Meanwhile, in 2010, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl — the other chief text of the Beat generation — received an interesting and experimental cinematic makeover, with James Franco making an excellent Ginsberg. Further still, as you read this, an adaptation of Kerouac’s last (and desperately sad) novel, Big Sur, is in the final stages of post-production. It won’t ultimately affect the quality of the film — and even the casual cynic could see this timing as less serendipity, and more hard-headed commercialism of the sort that Kerouac diehards detest — but at least Salles’ On The Road is appearing at a fitting moment, when it would appear it has a wave to ride, and some wider interest to tap into. After all, if On The Road is to continue to have a cultural legacy, then what it needs more than anything is exposure.

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Of course nowhere is Hollywood’s literary addiction more apparent than the Adapted Screenplay category. This year’s crop of adaptations includes four movies adapted from books and one adapted from a play (The Ides of March). Since I haven’t seen live theater since I went to my friend’s improv show a year or two ago, I can’t comment on how faithful The Ides of March is to its source material. I can state with near certainty, though, that the guys who played the two leads on stage were not as good looking as Ryan Gosling and George Clooney. Call it a hunch.

This year’s crop of book-to-movie adaptations is a varied bunch. Moneyball (about which I’ve written before) delivered on some of the promise of Michael Lewis’ book, while managing to dramatize a business strategy. Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, famous for writing Schindler’s List and The West Wing, respectively, may have turned A’s assistant GM Paul DePodesta into loveably portly stat-geek Peter Brand, but in doing so, they gave a bit of humanity to the cold, hard pursuit of truth.

I will admit to wondering whether another of the Adapted Screenplay nominees was even necessary. With its 1979 miniseries, the BBC so thoroughly and completely brought to life John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the cinematic adaptation felt superfluous. Could anyone possibly be George Smiley but Alec Guinness? But I have to admit I was entertained and enthralled as the two-and-a-half-hour spy drama played out on the big screen. Some of this was the stellar cast (I particularly enjoyed Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr), but the writers deserve kudos, as well. Packing a work as dense and detailed as Tinker Tailor into a mere two hours-plus is no small feat, and yet screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan not only accomplished it, they did so with style. In their Tinker Tailor, Control is revealed to be an alcoholic old coot while erstwhile ladykiller Peter Guillam is cleverly reimagined as a homosexual. The most faithful adaption of the year it isn’t, but it might be the best executed.

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, adapted from Brian Selznick’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is likely to win the Best Picture this year. I say this not because it was the best movie of the year, but rather because the Academy loves nothing more than patting itself on the back. What could be more congratulatory than celebrating a movie about the history of movies (especially French ones!). It’s down to this and The Artist, another movie about making movies, and I bet that most of the Academy voters spent the first few minutes of The Artist screeners messing with the settings on their TV to make sure the audio wasn’t screwed up. So the smart money is on Scorsese.

And finally there’s The Descendants. Much like Sideways, Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel was not widely read before Alexander Payne and his crew decided to adapt it for the screen. Also like Sideways, The Descendants is a story whose location plays as big a role as its protagonist. I’m starting to think that Payne picks his movies based on where he’d like to shoot. I imagine he and his wife in bed. She finishes a book and he asks “How was it?”

“Eh, not bad. I’ve read better.”

“Where’s it take place?” Alexander Payne asks.

“The South of France.”

Payne sits up and takes off his glasses. “Tell me more.”

I think this is the clear runner-up in the race, despite being a satisfying story with a fun cast. As for the book, I can’t say, as I’m not one of the few pre-Payne readers to have tried the novel.

So there you have it. This year’s best adapted screenplay nominations are again dominated by the literary world. That may change in the near future, though. In a sign that the movies don’t intend to get caught looking should the Random House building become a 30-story erotic massage parlor, they’ve already begun exploring another source for material, the board game industry. Battleship premieres this spring.

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In America, I’ve lately come to feel, this latter is the love that dare not speak its name. We’re a nation whose hereditary upper class keeps insisting there’s no such thing (see gubernatorial scion and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tweets from Carl’s Jr.), and where even the concept of “class” is dismissed as taboo (see the suggestion, ibid., that income inequality is something best talked about “in quiet rooms”). But Masterpiece, safely couched in the past, and usually overseas, remains one of the public venues where the upper crust, albeit fictional, can exercise their privilege without scruple, and where the rest of us can go to gawk. Those houses! Those costumes! Those accents! (In this light, The Forsyte Saga, which launched the series 41 years ago, appears almost proto-Kardashian.)

The current Masterpiece feature, Downton Abbey, mashes both class buttons hard. In the economic sense, it centers on the Earl of Grantham and his fabulously wealthy family, and on the eighty-eleven-dozen servants who attend to their every whim. On the cultural front, it offers a whiz-bang pastiche of three centuries of English literature. Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess is a venerable type: part Trollope’s Mrs. Proudie, part Thackeray’s Miss Crawley, part Dickens’, Aunt Betsey Trotwood (likewise played by Smith in a Masterpiece adaptation)…maybe with a touch of Professor McGonagall thrown in to keep things lively. Carson the Butler surely owes some of his imperturbability to Wodehouse’s Reginald Jeeves. The central romance, between the earl’s eldest daughter and her cousin Matthew, hews closely to the Jane Austen playbook (though, two episodes into Season 2, it’s still not clear who’s Elizabeth and who’s Mr. Darcy). And Downton Abbey, the titular estate, is like a mash-up of Brideshead and Wuthering Heights.

I doubt any of this is accidental. Downton Abbey‘s creator, Julian Fellowes, has adapted Twain and Thackeray for screens large and small, and has gone so far as to nick the Crawley surname for his own aristocrats. Nor is his erudition limited to English-language literature; this is the kind of show where, when a Turkish character appears, his name is an amalgam of two of the greatest living Turkish novelists: Kemal Pamuk. (I’m still waiting for the American character named Melville von Updike.)

Needless to say, Downton Abbey is also serious fun; it’s become a surprise successor to Friday Night Lights and Mad Men as TV’s current “must-watch” show. But when, in the dead days between finishing Season 1 on DVD and waiting for the premiere of Season 2, I rummaged through my Brit-Lit shelf looking for some upstairs-downstairs action to sustain me, I was shocked by how little of the actual aristocracy I found.

It turns out that my sense of the “classiness” of the English novel is like my sense of the monolithic “classiness” of English elocution — that I suffer from a kind of cognitive foreshortening, wherein important distinctions disappear. In fact, what the English novel is overwhelmingly about, in class terms, is not the hereditary nobility but the middle classes: the downwardly mobile landowners, the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.

Granted, the English class terminology is hopelessly confusing (sort of the way over there “public school” means private school.) But consider the seminal novels of the 1700s. Richardson’s Clarissa may moon around a swell house, but she hails from a family of arrivistes. And though Fielding’s Tom Jones lives with Squire Allworthy — a member of the landed gentry, if I’ve got my terminology correct — he does so as “a foundling.”

Then there’s the 19th century. Mr. Darcy, with his £10,000 income, could probably give Allworthy a literal run for his money, but his Pemberley estate is more the Maguffin in Pride & Prejudice than its setting; Jane Austen’s eye keeps returning to the raffish Bennets. Or take the Bröntes. We experience the grandeur of Rochester’s Thornfield Hall only through the eyes of Jane Eyre, the governess. Class roles are more fluid in Wuthering Heights, but between Heathcliff and Catherine, one is always on the way up and the other on the way down. Even Thackeray’s Crawleys, with their titles, are really supporting characters. The main attractions in Vanity Fair are the upper-middle-class Amelia Sedley and the scheming Becky Sharp. And perhaps the very greatest of the 19th-century English novels, Middlemarch, declares its allegiances right there in the title.

It’s possible to account for the English canon’s emphasis on the middle purely as a matter of dramatic interest. Unlike earls and princes and duchesses, the gentry and the striving bourgeoisie are people with places to go, with something to gain…and to lose. Still, compare the English novel of this period with the Russian — all those counts! — or with Proust’s elaborate explication of the Guermantes line, and you remember that aristocrats have plenty to lose, too, starting with reputation. (Indeed, questions of reputation animate some of Downton Abbey‘s key plotlines.) And surely readerly interest in lifestyles of the rich and fabulous isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, I suspect that the overlay of aristocratic intrigue in a novel like Vanity Fair is an attempt to satisfy it.

But the rise of the English novel parallels historically the rise of the middle classes; these are the classes from which most of the great novelists hailed, and to whose upper reaches their profession would have limited them. Dickens, one of Karl Marx’s favorite writers, offers the archetype of Victorian social cartography. Sure, you’ve got your Lord and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, but more often the aristocrats resemble the generic Oodle and Boodle and Noodle, who in Little Dorrit form a kind of choral backdrop to a foreground of slums and inventors’ workshops and banks and debtors’ prisons.

To really get your fill of the aristocracy in between visits to Downton, you might look to the second tier of the 19th-century canon. There’s Eliot’s brilliant but flawed Daniel Deronda; there are Trollope’s Palliser novels and some of the Barsetshire ones. (There are also glimmerings of nobility throughout the top-shelf corpus of that American interloper, Henry James.)

Or, interestingly, you could just move on to the 20th century, in whose early years Downton Abbey is set. For here and only here, with the aristocracy in decline, does it move to the center of the English novel. (I guess you don’t really miss something until it’s gone.) Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End are palpably influences on Downton Abbey. In each, a sense of nostalgia for the days of real privilege hang heavy; in each the shifting sands under the aristocracy’s castles are viewed through the prism of war. Portions of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music Of Time likewise concern the titled classes. I’ve not read At Lady Molly’s, but I might well be forced to turn to it a couple of months from now, when I’m once again going through Downton Withdrawal. Perhaps the single most Downton-y book I know of — I’d be shocked if Mr. Fellowes (er…Sir Julian) hadn’t read it — is Henry Green’s miraculous short novel Loving, from 1945. Green’s beautifully impacted idiom is short on exposition, and when I picked up Loving a few weeks ago, I found it enriched by the hours I’d spent in Fellowes’ world. That is, I suddenly understood the difference between a head housemaid and a lady’s maid.

The two most astute novelists of class currently working in England, I think, are Edward St. Aubyn and Alan Hollinghurst. St. Aubyn hails from the social stratosphere himself, and the terrific first three novels in his Patrick Melrose cycle – Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope – detail what’s happened to the Granthams of the world three or four generations on from Downton. Spoiler alert: the titles and the dough still linger, but the culture has moved on, leaving in its wake terrible boredom and worse behavior. Hollinghurst’s finest novel, The Line of Beauty, can’t properly be said to center on the aristocracy, but retains some of Waugh’s nostalgia (and much of the flavor of mid-to-late period James). Who has replaced the hereditary nobility, at the top of Margaret Thatcher’s England? Callow politicians and oil millionaires. Still, like a title and a castle, parliamentary clout and petro-pounds are not available to everyone, and so our protagonist, Nick Guest, occupies a familiar position: nose pressed to the glass.

In the end, this is the secret to Downton Abbey’s success, as well. The glamour of the earldom draws us in, but it’s the vividly realized characters who surround it — especially the servants below-stairs — that hold it in perspective, and so give it life. We live now in the Age of Austerity, and as a sometime practitioner of what Romney has called “the bitter politics of envy,” I feel a little weird being enthralled with this show. But then I look at what else my poor TV has to offer, and I find myself murmuring, Burgundy-style, “Stay classy, Downton!”

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I don’t recall actually seeing Mary Poppins as a child, but I was aware of the film somehow because for a period of time (perhaps as short as a few concurrent nights, grown through the expansive memory of childhood into years) I suffered a recurring nightmare featuring that nanny extraordinaire. It always began as an ordinary dream, about baseball or swimming or driving the General Lee or whatever it was I dreamed of in those days. But at some point Mary Poppins would fly overhead on her umbrella, look toward the “camera” of the dream to deliver a cackle, then fly off, turning whatever pleasant fantasy I’d been having into terrifying chaos. Everything in the dreamworld became darker; trees died, I got lost and left behind in a grim landscape, and I fell victim to all sorts of other horrible things I’ve managed, thankfully, not to remember so clearly.

I regularly told this story to my students on the first day of a cultural studies seminar on monsters I taught for several years, because beyond the instant class bonding that came, at my expense, from laughing at such a peculiar neurosis, my history with Mary Poppins illustrates something about the power of monsters. We are all familiar with the bogey man in our closets and the clawed creatures under our beds, waiting for us to set a bare foot on the floor or to fall asleep without a night light left on for protection. My somnambulant rendition of Mary Poppins creeps from the same fissures in supposedly shared meaning that make Santa Claus terrifying to some children while beloved by others, or allows the clown to be both a figure of fun and of fright. There is, I suppose, no reliable way of predicting the things that will scare us. It was just my dumb luck that a kind-hearted and magical nanny, of all possible monsters, was the one to work her way up through the cracks in my childhood mind.

Imagine my surprise and horror, then, upon viewing for the first time Chris Rule’s “Scary Mary Poppins” mashup.

The video features an eerie, horror movie-style soundtrack with scenes from Mary Poppins recombined to create a trailer for the story of a creepy, wicked woman flying around London on an umbrella, emerging from a dark and gloomy skyline to terrorize small children. In other words, it’s my own childhood fear made larger than life, first in the diminutive window of YouTube’s viewer and later on the classroom screens where I showed it. It’s the secrets of my psyche uncovered and shown to the world in all their absurdity, turning my personal and previously private misinterpretation of a children’s film into a public spectacle, as if Rule had reached into my mind and pulled his video out. It’s easy to see how such a hybrid, piratical medium as the mashup insists on the “death of the author,” but in this case it also risked the death of the viewer from fright.

The intent of Rule’s video may not be to actually frighten instead of amuse, or to do more than demonstrate how recutting footage — like interrupting a dream — can alter its meaning or mood. To turn a cheerful children’s classic into horror is comically ironic, and for those already familiar with both the tropes of movie trailers and the story of Mary Poppins (likely a majority of American moviegoers), it probably is more funny than frightening. Even for me, reminded as I was of genuine childhood terrors long ago left behind, that comic irony wasn’t lost. What makes my nanny-fear so hilarious and humiliating is its absurdity, because I know Mary Poppins should be comforting, not frightening. I used it as an example in class for that reason, to demonstrate that monsters come from many places: from high and low culture, from shared cultural anxieties, from racial, sexual, and economic constructions of the Other, and — in my case — from some unidentifiable and ridiculous corner of the mind that perhaps, as Ebenezer Scrooge explains his own unwelcome ghosts, has eaten a bad jot of mustard.

Rule’s mashup is more than ironic humor, however, and it is more than the coincidental depiction of personal fears that gives power to this relatively new — at least in its ease of production — form of expression. After seeing King Kong in 1934, Jean Levy recalled his childhood fears of ape-men appearing at his windows, a fear he and I shared, though for me it came in the form of King Kong lifting Darth Vader to my third floor window so the evil Jedi (this was early in the series, before we knew Darth Vader’s depths) could come in and “get me.” Of his own pithecophobia Levy writes,

I saw again trait by trait a remarkable detail of my familiar nightmares, with the anguish and the atrocious malaise which accompanies it. A spectator, not very reassured, would like to leave, but one makes him ashamed of his pusillanimity and he sits down again. This spectator, it’s myself; one hundred times, in my dream.

Levy’s “familiar nightmare” was born in the subconscious social, sexual, and racial anxieties that made the giant ape Kong so potent and so sublimely terrifying, which is to say the film succeeded because it showed its audience something they were, all of them, simultaneously terrified of in a graspable, metaphorical, menacing form. It’s telling that we have a word for “fear of apes” — pithecophobia — but no word for “fear of nannies.”

The collective unconscious, or at least our shared fears and fantasies, has always been the lifeblood of cinema: audiences need to share a reaction to make the film and the experience of seeing it work. And, more pragmatically, to make such an expensive undertaking as film worth financing and troubling over at all. “Scary Mary Poppins” is something different, a low-budget, low-stakes (and likely low-profit) exercise in new media. Distributed online, produced with affordable, accessible software and tools, the mashup does not need to make its appeal as universal as a blockbuster does. In this short, public embodiment of my childhood nightmare lies all the possibility of the Web for transformative, responsive, and reflexive creative work: the potential for every viewer to be frightened in his or her own private way even if each must cut their own version of every film.

Certainly cinema (and literature, and visual art, and so on) have always been subject to individual responses and interpretations. And authors of fan fiction have long made characters and stories their own, writing in the interstices and silences, whether to critical acclaim like that found by John Gardner’s Grendel and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or to local accolades only in the archives of fanfiction.net. But there is something in the monster story, all monster stories, that makes it particularly appropriate and, in fact, vital for such reimaginings to occur again and again. They are intended to frighten, and require flexibility if they are to retain their power to do so across temporal and cultural difference, so monster stories, cinematic and otherwise, are ripe for remakes upon remakes, for an apparently endless stream of classics reproduced every year as dozens of new renditions of familiar archetypes appear on screens large and small, and on pages where Elizabeth Bennet battles the undead after centuries not troubling herself about zombies.

As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes in the essay (from Monster Theory) that was the first assigned reading of my seminar,

No monster tastes of death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns. And so the monster’s body is both corporal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift.

The monsters are always among us, because no matter how tightly we shore up the windows and nail shut the doors, we always create some new cracks through which they can come. And sometimes those cracks are the wires and Wi-Fi waves of the Web.

Image: Canon in 2D/Flickr

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By the time of the film’s release, I had overcome enough of my anxiety to be firmly in the excited camp. No matter how bad the movie was, at least I’d get to laugh at idiots like Joe Morgan for two hours, right? Before the screening, when my wife and I were standing in the concessions line, she asked me what kind of candy I wanted. “Are you kidding?” I said. “We’re about to watch a movie about advanced statistical analysis in baseball. Get whatever you want.”

We weren’t, of course, about to watch a movie about sabrmetrics — the use of advanced statistical analysis to evaluate baseball players and teams — and how the cash-strapped Oakland A’s used it to remain competitive with free-spending teams like the New York Yankees. A part of me knew that going in; such a movie would bore 99.9 percent of the audience and probably infuriate the remaining tenth of a percent. No, the filmmakers had to do something to make a more cinematic story of Lewis’s 2003 book. The question was not would the movie differ from the book, but how.

Moneyball is the story of an idea. The thesis of the book is that major league baseball teams had long ignored valuable statistical information about their players, relying instead on eye-witness evaluation by seasoned scouts. These scouts used observation and intuition to identify the best players (For example, one scout in the film claims a player is no good because his girlfriend isn’t attractive enough. “He’s got an ugly girlfriend. An ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”). As one might expect from such an unscientific method, it produced variable results. One of the players traditional scouting misidentified as a future star was none other than Billy Beane, who fizzled out after a mediocre major league career. All of this led to an inefficient market in baseball talent. Some players were radically undervalued, while others earned much more money than they deserved. Operating from a position of financial weakness, Billy Beane and his Oakland A’s bucked traditional scouting methods and employed deep statistical analysis to find the undervalued players they could afford.

To build a movie out of a book about an idea, the filmmakers made several important compromises. First, they decided to narrow the scope of their film to Billy Beane. Interlacing Beane’s backstory with the primary narrative of building a team from the scrap heap of unwanted players was a brilliant choice, as it provided a psychological motivation for his skepticism of traditional baseball scouting. From the very beginning, we see Beane’s doubt come to the fore. “If he’s such a good hitter, how come he doesn’t hit good?” he asks his scouts. “You keep giving me the same ‘good face’ nonsense like we’re selling jeans here.” He challenges Peter Brand (the stand-in for A’s Assistant GM Paul DePodesta, who refused to allow his name to be used in the film): “Would you have drafted me in the first round?” It’s obvious what answer Beane’s hoping for, and when he gets it, an odd couple is created — the athletic Beane (played by demigod Brad Pitt) and the, well, not-so-athletic Brand (a not-yet-thin Jonah Hill). Beane plays Galileo — the lone voice of rationality in a world that worships superstition– and Hill is, I don’t know…Galileo’s assistant?

The pairing works because it plays to each actor’s strengths — Pitt’s arrogance is tempered by his sense of humor and creates a fairly convincing portrait of a man obsessed with being right. Hill, for his part, stammers and blinks his way through awkward scene after awkward scene, his comedic timing stealing many of them. Good casting also helps the film eke every ounce of goodness out of the story of Scott Hatteberg, the one-time catcher whose career appears to be over after a freak nerve injury. Hatteberg, played by loveable oaf Chris Pratt (of Parks and Recreation), sees his career resurrected by Beane and Brand, who value his innate ability to do the single most important thing in baseball — get on base. Pratt isn’t given much screen-time to work with, but he makes the most of it, giving soul to a character who might have easily been overlooked.

The other major compromise the filmmakers settled on is significantly less successful. A major reason for Oakland’s success in the early 2000s was their dominant starting pitching. Blessed with “The Big Three” – Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito – three of the best pitchers in the game, Oakland was able to count on a solid performance from its starting pitching three out of every five games. For instance, during the 2002 season depicted in the film, the A’s got roughly 685 innings of all star-caliber pitching from The Big Three alone, including 230 innings from Cy Young-winner and singer-songwriter Barry Zito (The late Cory Lidle was no slouch himself, contributing nearly 200 above-average innings, as well). Without these contributions, no number of walks would’ve mattered. Leaving these players out of the film is a bit like filming the New Testament and never mentioning that Jesus fellow.

And yet, the words “Hudson,” “Mulder,” and “Zito” are never uttered in the film. The only pitchers given any screen-time are relievers Chad Bradford and Ricardo Rincon. Bradford, whose bizarre throwing motion was so off-putting it disguised his extraordinary abilities as a relief pitcher, is a central part of Lewis’s book. In the film, he gets a 10 second mention early in the film, and then a condescending scene that plays his religiosity for laughs. It seems that the filmmakers feared the audience might not be able to handle more stats, and so they chose simply to focus on the offensive side of things, and hammer home the mantra of “get on base.” This might very well have been necessary for storytelling’s sake, but it means providing a skewed version of events. Scott Hatteberg had a fine year, especially when judged against his salary, but his 136 games of 116 OPS+ play was hardly the reason Oakland challenged for the pennant in 2002. Ironically, Moneyball may have succumbed to the casual baseball fan’s long-standing bias in favor of offense and position players.

More troubling, in my opinion, is the lack of depth with which the film explores the various “moneyball” principles that Beane employs. It’s all well and good to talk about getting on base, but why? Why is it important to get on base? Sure, you score more runs, and yes, you burn out the other team’s pitching staff, but the real reason is that you simply aren’t making outs. As Beane says at one point, “Why bother attacking? There’s no clock in this game.” Outs are the clock in baseball, and if you don’t make them, you can live forever. Likewise, if your pitchers get people out, you don’t much care whether they are throwing 100 miles per hour or using a herky-jerky delivery to do so. The reason Chad Bradford, with his funky underhanded pitching motion, got batters out was because he made the batter hit the ball on the ground. It’s very difficult to hit the ball over the fence when you’re hitting it on the ground (In fact, it’s impossible). But you’d never know that from watching the movie. Moneyball gets at the why of Oakland’s success without ever really examining the how.

Of course, from the average moviegoer’s perspective, I don’t think it makes much of a difference. The basic tenets of the sabrmetric philosophy are clearly presented in the film, and while it’s sometimes a bit broad, the movie does a remarkable job of dramatizing the concepts. The sins of the film – such as giving Beane too much credit for his strategy (Other GMs, including Sandy Alderson and even Branch Rickey, the legendary GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals, studied statistics as part of their evaluation methods) –are often those of the book, as well (and I would argue that Pitt’s performance does more to show Beane’s arrogance than Lewis’s somewhat rose-colored portrait does). The major argument against Moneyball has always been that Beane failed to win the World Series (or any other post-season series, for that matter). This is where the film truly shines, in my opinion, as the drama is not so much whether the A’s will win the World Series, but whether Beane and Brand’s crazy idea will work.

The idea does work, as demonstrated in the chapter of the book called “The Speed of the Idea.” This chapter produced my favorite scene in the film. Beane, after a remarkable season, is summoned to Boston to meet with the new owner of the Red Sox, billionaire hedge fund manager John Henry. Henry is enamored with Beane’s strategies and wants to hire him. Oakland has offered Beane a new contract, though, one Beane would be happy to accept. Henry asks Beane why he even bothered to come to the meeting then. “Because you hired Bill James, for one thing,” he replies. James, the patron saint of statistical baseball study, had never had a job in the game before Henry decided to give him one; he was too hated. This gives Henry an excuse to explain to Beane that whenever a new idea threatens the status quo — whether that’s in government, business, or sports — those in power fight it tooth and nail. What choice do they have? Their livelihoods are at stake. “Anybody not out there right now remaking their team with your principles is done. They’re dinosaurs,” Henry says.

Watching this scene in the theater, I found myself thinking not of baseball, but of another spectacularly inefficient industry that’s close to my heart — the publishing business. For the past two centuries, publishers have relied primarily on that most ephemeral and unscientific of qualities, editors’ taste, to decide which books to spend their money on and which books to decline. Their results are not much better than the scouts Beane summarily dismisses in Moneyball (Though, presumably, with less chewing tobacco). In a recent Vanity Fair article about the publishing industry, Keith Gessen writes: “If it is the writer’s first book, and she has no sales track, you can come up with similar-seeming books (“comp titles”) and see how many copies those sold. But this is precision masquerading as insight. No two books are the same book, and no two authors are the same author. The fact is: no one has any idea how many copies of a book will sell.” With that in mind, how long will it be before the Billy Beane of the publishing world finds a better way? After all, “We’re not selling jeans here.”

Selling jeans or not, if you pay to see a sports movie you expect to see some sweat. It’s telling that the most physical exertion we see is not on the field but in the weight room, as Billy Beane prefers to pump iron in the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum rather than watch his team play. I found myself wondering at one point whether this was much of a sports movie at all. In the end, I decided it must be, since it looked a lot like Friday Night Lights — tortured close-ups, jittery hand-held camerawork, sports talk radio overlays, silenced crowd shots, and Explosions in the Sky-esque soundtrack. If Hoosiers were remade today (Note to Hollywood: Don’t get any funny ideas.), it would look a lot like this.

In the end, Moneyball isn’t Syriana. In fact, it has more in common with another adaptation of recent years – The Social Network. Both are compelling dramas about recent history that are probably better considered fiction than nonfiction. Still, I must admit that I felt something special while watching Moneyball. True, it didn’t cover everything I wanted it to (There wasn’t, for instance, any mention of Beane’s Ahab-like quest to acquire Mexican on-base machine Erubiel Durazo, and there was apparently no time to work in a vignette about the great challenge trade of Billy Koch for Keith Foulke), but it was still a rare thrill to watch a movie about a subject I cared about and to see it rendered with love and humor. We should all be so lucky.

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“They did a fabulous job,” Rockefeller crowed to Nixon hours after the four-day uprising was snuffed by a rain of bullets that left 39 people dead. “It really was a beautiful operation.”

At the time, the truth was not yet out – that 10 white guards were among the dead, and that the dead inmates and hostages had all been shot by police sharpshooters, not, as was originally believed, by the rioting inmates. Another truth was that negotiators had been close to a settlement with the leaders of the uprising, who were willing to free all hostages unharmed in return for amnesty from prosecution. But Rockefeller refused to go to Attica to talk directly with the inmates, fearing he would appear to be capitulating, and he adamantly refused their demand of amnesty. Instead he ordered a bloodbath.

The decision won Nixon’s hearty approval. “The courage you showed and the judgment in not granting amnesty, it was right, and I don’t care what the hell the papers or anybody else says,” Nixon told Rockefeller during their first phone call on Sept. 13, 1971. “If you would have granted amnesty in this case, it would have meant that you would have had prisons in an uproar all over this country.”

In a follow-up call to Nixon the next day, after the truth had begun to come out, Rockefeller was a bit more subdued but far from repentant. “Well, you know, this is one of those things,” he said. “You can’t have sharpshooters picking off the prisoners when the hostages are there with them, at a distance with tear gas, without maybe a few accidents.”

“Well,” Nixon replied, “you saved a lot of guards and that was worth it. You stand firm there and don’t give an inch. Because in the country, you see, the example you set may stiffen the backs of a few other governors that may have a problem.”

And then the other shoe dropped. “Tell me,” Nixon said, “are these [prisoners] primarily blacks that you’re dealing with?”

“Oh yes,” Rockefeller replied, “the whole thing was led by blacks.”

Later that day, Nixon, the master of spin, asked his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, if reports from the prison included the fact that the uprising was “basically a black thing.” Then Nixon fretted that Rockefeller’s “beautiful operation” might backfire: “That’s going to turn people off awful damn fast, that the guards were white.”

A state commission later reported that the riot was driven by black inmates unwilling to submit to the “petty humiliations and racism that characterize prison life.”

2.
The footage that makes up The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, including footage of the Attica uprising, was shot by Swedish television crews and shown on various Swedish TV programs in the ’60s and ’70s, then consigned to a basement archive for some 40 years. It was recently discovered there by a documentary filmmaker named Göran Hugo Olsson, who stitched the footage together and added contemporary interviews with some of the people onscreen and others whose lives they influenced, including Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, the poet Sonia Sanchez, and the musicians Erykah Badu and Questlove. The result is an impressionistic portrait of how racism gave birth to the pacifist civil rights movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., how that then morphed into the more militant Black Power movement, and how the U.S. government managed to tear it apart through acts like the Attica raid, spying on militants, aggressive prosecutions, and even, according to some activists, the introduction of heroin into Northern ghettos. It’s a sobering, inspiring, and ultimately sad picture, and it shows, in black-and-white and in grainy color, how far this country has come and how far it still has to go. Barack Obama may be a huge improvement over Richard Nixon, but Rick Perry is waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, according to a new U.S. Census report, poor and middle-class blacks continue to sink even farther and faster than their white counterparts.

There are many unforgettable sequences in this documentary, which won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is now playing in New York. (There is an accompanying exhibition of still photos, artifacts, and a video at Third Streaming gallery in SoHo, and next spring Haymarket Books will publish transcripts of the interviews Olsson conducted for the film.) In one sequence, a Swedish TV crew is trying to interview Stokely Carmichael’s mother Mabel in her living room in 1967 while her famous son sits quietly on the floor nearby. She’s reticent, obviously uncomfortable about being interviewed. Frustrated by what he’s hearing, Stokely, who by then had graduated from the pacifist Freedom Rides and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to a far more militant stance, grabs the microphone from the reporter and sits on the sofa beside his mother. Speaking softly, Stokely gets her to open up and explain that the family was poor because her husband, a carpenter, was frequently laid off jobs. Why, Stokely persists, why was he laid off so often? Finally he coaxes it out of her. “It was because he was colored,” she says, adding, almost apologetically, “In those days we didn’t say Negro.” This last remark lends the interview its proper sepia tone, establishing it as a relic from a long-gone era. And it emphasizes just how far the young man with the microphone had to travel before he could dare to coin the electrifying slogan “Black Power.”

Another memorable sequence is a 1972 interview with Angela Davis, the former student of Herbert Marcuse who, at the urging of California Gov. Ronald Reagan, had been fired from her job teaching philosophy at UCLA because of her affiliation with the Communist party. The interview took place in the jail cell where Davis was awaiting trial on trumped-up charges that she was the owner of a gun that was used in a courthouse shootout. (President Nixon applauded the FBI for capturing this “dangerous terrorist” after she fled California. She was later acquitted.) When the jailhouse interviewer asks Davis how she responds to charges that the Black Power movement is violent, she bristles. In a stinging, sometimes shrill voice, she delivers a thumbnail sketch of what it was like to grow up black in Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Ala., what it was like to have friends die in church bombings, what it was like to live in constant fear of vigilante violence. “And you ask me about violence?!” she cries indignantly at the Swedish reporter.

These two segments put a personal and very human face on the roots of a movement that has, over time, come to be remembered largely for its rhetoric, its slogans, and its icons, including the raised clenched fist, the Afro, the black panther, the gun-toting men in berets, shades, and leather jackets. This humanizing is a great service. In addition to Carmichael and Davis, we see Harry Belafonte chatting with Dr. King in Stockholm, we see the articulate Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party, being interviewed in Stockholm, and we see a frayed and chain-smoking Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria in 1969. The Black Panther Party’s communications secretary looks haunted, hunted. Without saying so outright, the movie implies that such a look comes with the territory when you’re married to a man who was on the run from an attempted murder charge, a man capable of writing a book as incendiary as Soul On Ice.

3.
There is, mercifully, a bit of dark humor here too. The movie reminded me of something I had forgotten – that when Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme likened the U.S.’s 1972 bombing of Hanoi to Nazi war crimes, the U.S. froze diplomatic relations with Sweden. Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” was, obviously, capacious enough to accommodate entire nations. Sweden comes in for more heat in the documentary when the editor of TV Guide is shown slamming Swedish journalists for their “hostile” coverage of American news. The documentary then points out, dryly, that TV Guide was published by Nixon’s wealthy crony Walter Annenberg, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.

The charge against the Swedish journalists is not only fatuous and self-serving, it’s simply wrong. As The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 demonstrates, these journalists approached their interview subjects with great openness and compassion, which is more than can be said of many American journalists in that era. The result is three-dimensional portraits of people who were responding to 400 years of repression in the only ways they knew how – sometimes through prayer, sometimes through passive resistance, sometimes through fiery slogans, sometimes through political organizing, and sometimes through violence. As the divisions of class and race continue to harden and widen in this country, I say we could use more leaders like Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, with their beautiful, hard-earned fury. The time for the Nelson Rockefellers, Ronald Reagans, and Richard Nixons and their “beautiful” operations is gone. Now, with the poor of all races getting poorer and with the middle class sinking fast, it’s time to dust off an old question and an old slogan. The question: Where is the outrage? The slogan: All Power to the People.

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Complications ensue, and as is generally the case with Powell and Loy, the movie glides along on a draft of high-toned pleasure. Though its running time is roughly an hour and a half, it felt like forty minutes. And as the credits rolled, my wife and I asked what we always ask when such comedies — not just those of Powell and Loy, but of Grant, Stewart, Katherine Hepburn and the rest — come to an end: Why don’t they make movies like that anymore?

The question isn’t rhetorical, but neither do we need it answered; the reason seems fairly clear. Films like I Love You Again, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story aren’t made anymore because they’re simply out of style, like short ties or fedoras or Chicken à la King.

This explanation, though, does not satisfy. Unlike adventure movies or “issue films” of similar vintage — the Oscar-winning but now-excruciating Gentleman’s Agreement comes to mind — those old comedies haven’t aged. Both Holiday and Judy Holliday remain sharp and smart; decades later, they still do what they were meant to do — extract our laughter — as efficiently as anything made today. To watch a Cukor or Thin Man film is to take a Packard for a spin and find, to your shock, that it outdrives current models.

So why don’t they make such Packards anymore? A recent New York Times Magazine essay, “‘The Hangover’ and the Age of The Jokeless Comedy,” touched on an answer as it outlined the movement from joke-a-minute comedies to The Hangover, Part II — which it called a “Saw-style torture-porn movie with a laugh track.” But the piece, for all its passion, didn’t say much about a possible root cause for the change: modern audiences’ overall sophistication, which has paradoxically rendered comedy less sophisticated.

There was a time when sci-fi directors could hang planets from strings and Dr. Zaius could speak through laughably stiff ape-lips. Audiences understood that effects had limitations, and could tolerate hand-painted backgrounds and monsters in rubber suits. But in 1977, Star Wars slashed a light saber through that tolerance. George Lucas’ exacting visual sense, aided by his own technology, instantly made his antecedents look baldly ludicrous. Godzilla was trounced by a nerd with a pompadour.

As he and Steven Spielberg bulldozed through the ‘80s, audiences came to expect no visual seams at all — and in the process, lost the willingness to do some of the work themselves. This expectation — that movies, whether set in space or in a Temple of Doom, should be effortless to watch — bled into comedy. The genre, dependent on setup and dialogue rather than effects, did more of the work by becoming more believable. The biggest comedies of the pre-Star Wars ‘60s and ‘70s — A Shot in the Dark, What’s Up, Doc?, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, M*A*S*H — felt no need to put us at narrative ease. Much like their screwball forerunners, they burst from the gate at a sprint and didn’t slow for stragglers.

Through the ‘80s and into the ‘90s, however — as film technology advanced, culminating with Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park — comedy grounded itself, its setups and settings becoming fully mundane: two Illinois losers do public-access TV and sing along to Queen. Texas teenagers get high and drive around. Clerks crack wise at work. Even hits of the era that in retrospect seem outlandish — Mrs. Doubtfire, Liar Liar, The Santa Clause — took ample time to explain their premises lest audiences squirm. Tim Allen couldn’t just be Santa Claus; we had to have the details — as well as a side-story about divorce, insanity, and visitation rights.

In recent years Judd Apatow and friends, with their hyper-familiar brand of hairy-assed humor, have issued a crushing blow to the suspension of disbelief — and made the gap between old comedy and new unbridgeable: William Powell’s amnesiac con man is now Bradley Cooper’s rohypnoled best man. My Favorite Wife was set into motion when Irene Dunne returned from a desert island; Forgetting Sarah Marshall begins when Jason Segel gets dumped and flies to Hawaii to sulk. The comedies of today must make us feel as if these things could happen to us: events like getting drunk, dumped, and knocked up are, rather than minor elements, now the meat of the thing. Seth Rogen, rumpled and unshaven, doesn’t look like a movie star, and that’s exactly the point. We’ve become unable to laugh along with anyone but ourselves.

All this has turned comedy — once a genre of experimentation — into cinema’s narrowest style. 1976 saw the release of the following comedies: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Love and Death, The Sunshine Boys, Shampoo, Smile, The Return of the Pink Panther, Let’s Do It Again, Cooley High, and The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. There is no clear through-line here; it was a year of satire, farce, screwball, and silliness. By contrast, this year’s comedies have been The Hangover Part II, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, Hall Pass, Take Me Home Tonight, and No Strings Attached — all featuring People Sort Of Like Us doing Naughty Things. Even The Change-Up dulled its body-switch setup with crap joke after crap joke. Individually, these may be funny movies; as a whole, the effect is smothering.

So this is not a heady time for fans of an older, less common comedy; Powell and Loy, breezing through nonsense plots, have never seemed more distant. Yet even now, there is hope from an unlikely source (and it’s not Johnny Depp, driver of a dreaded Thin Man remake). Woody Allen, once a specialist of just-go-with-it comedy — Bananas, Sleeper, Stardust Memories — has a legitimate hit with his Midnight in Paris. In it, Owen Wilson’s Gil Pender time-travels to the Paris of the past, getting his novel reviewed by Gertrude Stein and hanging with Dalí. He falls for a beautiful girl even though she might not exist. The film’s time-travel mechanics are never explained; Gil just hops into a limousine and gets out in the ‘20s. As vague and irrational as the device is, it works because it allows us to fill the blank spaces ourselves. Midnight in Paris proves that a sense of familiarity is an unnecessary cinematic crutch. One might say that they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

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You might think that Real Steel 2 is an exception. You might think that, even by the standards of Hollywood conservatism gone mad, work on Real Steel 2 is a damning, individual act of hubris. But it’s far from the only example. On numerous occasions (that we know of), studios have started work on sequels to films that haven’t even been released, and in some cases aren’t even finished. And we’re not just talking about three-part stories like the Lord of the Rings or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

It used to work like this: if a film was a hit and a follow-up was appropriate, then, and only then, would we see a sequel. So we saw second chapters to The Godfather, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but not to Cabaret, Network, or (sadly) Young Frankenstein.

Then, sometime around the 80s and 90s, it became a case of making sequels to films (usually surprise hits) that didn’t really feel like they needed one. Hence, Father of the Bride Part II, Teen Wolf Too, and Grease 2. Thankfully they drew the line before Large Man Tate and Beaches: The Revenge.

Surprise hits put studios in an awkward position; the dilemma isn’t whether to desecrate the original with a shoddy follow-up (they will), but what to do with a film that has no sequel-friendly ending. The solution is as ingenious as it is crass: now studios don’t bankroll individual films – they green-light franchises.

As well as Real Steel 2, follow-ups were planned for The Hangover, for Sherlock Holmes, for The Hunger Games and The Amazing Spiderman, as well as for Green Lantern before part-one was released. What’s more – even the mediocre reviews and disappointing box office didn’t change plans for Green Lantern 2. Like the eponymous robot in The Terminator, these sequels seem to be unwelcome, unstoppable machines with no “off” switch.

It seems once a studio decides on a franchise, nothing can stop it – not bad reviews (Cars), disappointing numbers (Superman Returns), or bad reviews combined with disappointing numbers (Hulk). A possible, and deeply cynical, explanation is that the studios don’t want to waste all that money that they spent on creating brand awareness; they’ve splurged a fortune telling us what a Green Lantern is, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to spend it all over again on a whole new character. Not only is this insulting to you, the filmgoer (“you’ll eat what we feed you”), but also to the filmmakers themselves (“your film is not a stand-alone product”).

So what can be done? It used to be the case that you could vote with your feet – don’t see a film and they won’t make a sequel. But now it’s too late for that. All we can ask you to do is avoid any films that might have a franchise in mind, and eventually, with a hive mind, nudge the trend back to character-driven, stand alone films. Good luck with that.

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His fictional work over the years marks him as one of the most eccentrically provocative visionaries of the past half-century. Part of his eccentricity has to do with something classically cinematic: the suspension of disbelief. You don’t have to question Herzog’s honesty in watching his films, though you might start to question his sanity. During the filming of the enigmatic, annihilating 1972 masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, Herzog and his mercurial leading man Klaus Kinski (equal parts collaborator, muse, and mortal enemy) were occasionally known to hold each other at gunpoint. 1982’s Fitzcarraldo isn’t just a film about a wild-eyed rubber baron building an opera house within a giant imported steamship in the mountains of the jungles of Peru, it’s about how the titular character’s inspiration and mad fixity echoes the filmmaker’s own. CGI need not apply: Herzog and his crew actually hauled the entire ship across the mountain themselves. Of course, a documentary was made, and the film Burden Of Dreams is the fascinating (and occasionally hilarious) result.

Not content to make dramatic fiction his only pursuit, Herzog has consistently and rewardingly made feature-length documentary films about the world’s marginalized, poetic, and just plain odd phenomena. Whether the subject is Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas for Wheel Of Time, exploring the minutia of Antarctica in the Oscar-nominated Encounters At The End Of The World, or tracking Timothy Treadwell’s fatal obsession with wild bears in Grizzly Man, he has made a distinctive, unique mark on documentary style, as well. There is also his personal film school, a seminar really, which promises not to offer anything technical about the aspects of filmmaking unless you include instruction on picking locks, forging shooting permits in foreign countries, neutralizing bureaucracy, and “self reliance”. The reading list includes Virgil’s Eclogues, Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber,” and, of course, The Warren Commission.

One of his recent statements (from the book Herzog on Herzog) has been on virtual reality’s seductive power in today’s world and how “all these tools now at our disposal, these things which are part of this explosive evolution of the means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal – be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever – human solitude will increase in direct proportion.” For Herzog, it is the filmmaker’s (and, by extension, the artist’s) responsibility to try to break through the blare of the virtual and to instead attempt to create or document something which is truer, rawer, more alive, and duly more strange.

Luckily, the French Ministry of Culture gave Herzog the opportunity to film inside the Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc with unprecedented if limited access. There probably couldn’t be a better opportunity to shrug off the babble of modernity than to spelunk among ancient traces of prehistoric imagination, and Herzog does this with sympathy, gravitas, and an eye for the absurd.

The cave was discovered in 1994 and within two years a twelve-person team of researchers was nominated to document and analyze the fossils, artwork, and human traces left behind. The team can only work at half capacity, for two weeks at a time, due to the fragility of the cave’s internal equilibrium. Herzog was limited to shooting by himself, with only a couple of cameramen, using heat-reduced lighting. His crew was limited to a two-foot-wide walkway, wearing special suits and shoes. Shooting was restricted to only a few days for several hours at a time due to the near-toxicity of the environment. It adds to the precariousness of the experience as a viewer – one gets the teetering feeling of witnessing something very precious and very delicate, as the camera eye glides across the surfaces.

The effect is evocative, to say the least. Lambent lights flicker across the etchings, looming ochre walls blur and focus, until you start to realize you’re looking at dozens of ancient painted handprints. Some are smaller, suggesting a woman or an adolescent, others are larger, varying in digit size and solidity. There are streaks of black chalk-thick outlines of horses, lions, and bison. In one panel, two rhinoceroses are butting heads across a wall. What’s amazing is that the researchers can surmise how the forms were scrawled into life. In some cases the artists used the texture of the wall itself, etching with wood charcoal and rubbing fingertips covered in clay across the outline. All of this takes place at eye and helmet level with the filmmakers and scientists themselves, amazedly peering into the glowing darkness along with us. At one point the soundtrack is stopped and we listen to the silence of a lost place.

Herzog’s voiceover narration, often a delightfully strange component of whatever he films, is the guide. His crisp articulation and Germanic depth adds gravitas to the wonder. At one point, Herzog suggests that certain pictures of animals sequenced in different stages of motion might even be a prefigured form of cinema, especially when seen by torchlight. It’s kind of a Herzogian thing to suggest, but it’s not entirely far-fetched. Spreading across a stalactite we see what appears to be a composite outline of a bison and the pubic radius of a woman. Some things never change.

Of course, a film like this wouldn’t be complete without some face time with the researchers and enthusiasts themselves. They’re a pretty interesting bunch. One of them, an affable French scientist who used to be a circus performer, disarmingly remarks that after first seeing the etchings of lions he dreamed about real ones for days afterward. He further explains that he found the presence of all the drawings so overwhelming he had to remove himself from the research for a while to take it all in as a human being. We come across a strange perfumer who attempts to sniff out the scent emanating from the cracks of lost caves. There is also a prehistoric enthusiast fully decked out in wolf hide who dances a merry jig while playing The Star Spangled Banner on a carved bone flute. The short, editorialized coda at the end of the film is noteworthy but disturbingly odd, as only a meditation on civilization involving mutant albino crocodiles could be.

Herzog has written repeatedly about the desire to capture what he calls “ecstatic truth.” The example he is fond of using, as he did for a recent appearance on The Colbert Report, is that of the Manhattan phone book.  Sure, anyone can grab one and read off all the exact names, numbers, and addresses of all the residents listed inside, but what you can’t know is if Mr. Jonathan Smith of 125 East St. cries alone on his pillow at night. Or why, for that matter. Facts alone won’t do the trick. What Cave Of Forgotten Dreams offers is the ability to experience a kind of ecstatic truth, ironically found in the facts of the Chauvet cave as we learn them, unveiled from within the subterranean scenery of the cave itself. Witnessing on celluloid (and, if you’re lucky, 3D glasses) the etchings of early human beings, scrawled for whatever reason thousands of years ago, is to observe something ancient and mysterious with your very own eyes. Art, even documentary art, can’t surpass the immediacy of reality; I can’t tell from merely attending a movie what it feels like to be in the cave, or to duck under looming stalactites with bison shapes running down their sides. Nor do I truly know what they mean. But I can say I’ve seen them. That truth alone is ecstatic enough.

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It never quite panned out. There was an inauspicious 76 on a geometry test: I had been too busy studying quarterback signals to learn the defining characteristics of an isosceles triangle. This is a woeful mishap for the son of a mathematics teacher. The day before a game against either Windsor Locks or Enfield, I was pulled by my father from the team. Later, I participated in the far less demanding sport of volleyball, my infrequent spikes resounding in a gymnasium that had never known much glory.

That’s all just to say that I wanted very badly to fall in love with Friday Night Lights, the football drama that recently concluded a five-season run on NBC. I was primed for its cavalcade of disappointments, because I had known those disappointments myself.

In addition, both my wife and I came of age in that golden age of the artistic television drama. We are both in our thirties, and remember when TV was impossibly crude (Married…with Children), low-brow (Walker, Texas Ranger), and utterly untroubled by reality (Saved by the Bell).

With the advent of NYPD: Blue in 1993, that started to change. TV, all of a sudden, could be serious and real. You didn’t need Don Johnson anymore, and you didn’t need a laugh track. And with The Sopranos and later The Wire, even with Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm, TV could be something even greater than that. “Television had always been a pleasure, a mass entertainment…But in the aughts, the best TV-makers displayed the entitlement of the artist,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in a 2009 New York magazine article entitled “When TV Became Art.”

And we had arrived with it. Freshly minted graduates of liberal arts institutions, we were primed to treat the new TV drama like an object worthy of our Catholic, overripe intellects. We could do a Derridian reading of Breaking Bad. We could watch Mad Men with Foucault.

For many people, Friday Night Lights, which first appeared in 2006, represents the pinnacle of the new TV drama. It is less polished than Mad Men and less dour than The Wire, and somehow more relatable than both, as far as its numberless fans are concerned.

I am not one of those fans, despite having watched all five seasons. In fact, my distaste for Friday Night Lights only increased as the seasons went on, so that I was taken with launching lengthy diatribes at the television. I am fortunate to still be married.

Now, there is still plenty of bad television around, and I am content to render Dancing With the Stars unto those who want to watch it. But Friday Night Lights has somehow became a cause célèbre among the sort of crowd that would much rather spend its Sunday afternoons brunching in Brooklyn than watching a Houston Texans game. They have elevated the show to high art, with appreciations of resident hunk Tim Riggins in the same Paris Review where Norman Mailer once roamed and, on ever-so-sober NPR, “A Late-Blooming Love Letter to NBC’s ‘Friday Night Lights.‘”

“Heartbreakingly good,” says Entertainment Weekly; “an exquisite bit of anthropology,” opines the New York Times. Bullshit, I say to all of them.  Friday Night Lights is bad television. And if it is art, then it is art that is purposefully misleading, which is art of the worst kind.

Forget the amateurish acting, which vacillates between maudlin enthusiasm and shrill discord. Forget, too, the recycled plotlines that always have the hometown fans of Dillon pinning their hopes on fourth and long. Something is truly rotten in the state of Texas.

It begins with the whole “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” mantra, which coach Eric Taylor, the show’s protagonist, delivers with all the growling gusto of Churchill before the Battle of Britain. Now, every sports team – and every sports show – is entitled to its inspirational bromides. But on Friday Night Lights, “clear eyes, full hearts” is elevated to a central tenet to which the characters subscribe as if it were religious truth.

There’s nothing wrong with optimism, not even with optimism that crosses over into delusion – that’s the kernel of nearly every Raymond Carver story. That unmoored optimism we reference when we call something “Ahabic” or “Quixotic.” But in a Carver story, the careful use of irony allows the reader to make an independent judgment of the characters. Each one of Carver’s down-and-outers thinks his break is right around the corner, even though the narrator subtly broadcasts to us that it isn’t. This is the situational irony that Aristotle found in Oedipus – the arrogant king is looking for the transgressor who has cursed Thebes, unaware that it is himself.

Mad Men has its Oedipus in Don Draper, an outwardly successful man living a life as transparent as tissue paper. Baltimore is the Oedipus of The Wire, a sick city that nobody is capable of healing. In watching Don sink deeper into alcoholism and drift farther from his family, in witnessing the failure of every institution in “Body More” except for the drug trade, we feel pity and fear – the two emotions that, for Aristotle, give great art its pathos. Three thousand years after he wrote the Poetics, all is as should be.

But Friday Night Lights has no Oedipus of its own, no fallen king – and it has no irony, either. Nobody here is ever in danger of ever really losing. Characters do not so much overcome their troubles as they are saved from them providentially – every pass in FNL is a Hail Mary caught by a diving, flailing wide receiver for a last-second, game-winning touchdown. As such, all that overcoming is superficial and rushed.

Tyra Collette, a rebel with no interest in her studies, suddenly becomes inspired and crams for the SAT. Presto, she’s into the University of Texas’s flagship Austin campus. Matt Saracen, a middling athlete if there ever was one (and I should know), becomes a Manning brother overnight and wins the state championship. His friend Landry Clarke walks onto the Varsity squad of a championship team, though he appears to have minimal knowledge of and enthusiasm for football. More troublingly, he kills his girlfriend’s assailant, but they get over the body-dumping in the span of a couple of episodes. Because what’s the law when love is on your side?

Then there’s queen bee Lyla Garrity, who leaves paralyzed quarterback Jason Street for the aforementioned Riggins. Then she leaves Riggins for Jesus and ends up having a dalliance with a youth leader at her megachurch. Then she comes back to Riggins. Then she leaves Riggins and goes to Vanderbilt.

I don’t dislike Lyla nearly as much as I dislike what Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg and his writers did to her – or failed to do with her, rather. Is she tortured like Anna Karenina? Is she yearning for freedom like Emma Bovary? She can’t just smile through every scene in her cheerleading outfit. It can’t always be all-good, all the time. If it could be, I would have long ago moved to East Texas.

The Season 2 case of Santiago is especially infuriating. He is a young criminal with apparently boundless athletic potential, and Buddy Garrity takes him into his own home so that he can qualify to play for the Dillon Panthers. He does, but just as he starts to excel on the field, and just as his old criminal friends start to intrude on his new life, he is gone from the show without even the most peremptory explanation. This isn’t Stalinist Russia; you don’t just disappear a character like that.

And the treatment of race is just absurd. Is this not the same Texas where James Byrd was killed in 1998 by three white men who dragged him behind their truck until his head came off? Apparently not, since every social event is a Rainbow Coalition of well-dressed, happy families. There is no color line, no class divide, only the love of football.

This robs Friday Night Lights of any pathos and makes it instead an unwitting champion of the bathetic, which Alexander Pope called a work of art’s fall “from the sublime to the ridiculous.” You can be sure that if Oedipus were on Friday Night Lights, he would soothe the pain of his sin by joining the football team. His mother Jocasta would cheer from the stands, and he would wear a patch on his jersey with his dead father’s image.

I don’t care if art is realistic, but I want it to be true. This is what Aristotle demanded in the Poetics and it is what we should demand today, whether from our novelists or our television producers.

To be realistic, art has only to have fidelity to material reality, which is easy enough and not that important anyway. Beowulf and The Odyssey are not real, but that doesn’t diminish them in the slightest. It doesn’t diminish Harry Potter, either.

Truth is much harder. What Keats said about beauty and truth hasn’t changed in the 127 years since he wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” – the two are still one and the same.

This is where Friday Night Lights fails – there is nothing true about it. It ignores hard battles in favor of superficial ones. I know enough about the world, and you surely do as well, to know that Vince Howard’s mother could not turn, in the span of two episodes, from a drug addict to a spry middle-aged mother. It would be pretty to think so, as Hemingway once wrote, but all experiential evidence is against it. This kind of ease with fate may be uplifting in the space of forty-five minutes, but it makes for a hollow show. It’s not that I want Matt Saracen to fail; I just want him to struggle the way real people do, the way that Oedipus struggled against his fate. That will make his victory more meaningful in the end.

There is one great scene in Friday Night Lights. Julie Taylor, the coach’s daughter, does not want to return to college in the middle of Season 5 because she has had a disastrous affair with a teaching assistant. Her father is furious and insists that she go back to school and face the consequences of her romance, but when he tries to drag her out of the house, she resists in a paroxysm of tears. The scene is unexpected but inevitable, as Aristotle said great drama should be. It is real, it is true, and you don’t know where it’s heading. The show needed more of that – much, much more.

What bothered me most, though, was Tim Riggins’s hair. It is always unfairly perfect, a surfer’s locks falling over his face. It is perfect when he is playing football, it is perfect when he is drinking beer in the afternoon, it is perfect when he drops out of college, it is perfect when he goes to jail, and it is perfect when he schemes to buy an enormous plot of land without, seemingly, enough in his bank account to pay for a round of drinks.

My wife told me to stop screaming at the television, but I couldn’t. Nobody has hair that perfect. It isn’t real, it isn’t true, and it certainly isn’t art. You don’t need Aristotle to tell you that.

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