Simon T. Kaye

Speaking of my occasional writing at Prospect Magazine’s online presence (see previous post), I was surprised and gratified to discover one of my articles on their end-of-year online content roundup.

I’m officially no.9 on their top ten list of online-only articles! See!

It’s important to bear a few things in mind here: first of all, while it says that the list is in “no particular order”, my splurge about the end of Lost and its important online following is still probably one place too high.

Secondly, this DOES mean that I made the list and Brian Eno did not. Brian Eno. I am not worthy.

My third piece for First Drafts, the blog of Prospect Magazine UK. I’m quite pleased with this one.

I offer a few critical thoughts about how the show was wrapped up. I think most sensible folk agree that it was unsatisfying. But I also argue that the fun was always in the magnitude and cleverness of Lost’s web following.

I’ve got a bit of form talking about Lost on this blog – take a look through the ‘TV’ category if you don’t believe me. I think I’ll miss it.

My Prospect post is here, and here is a little extract:

Perhaps Lost’s creators shelved whatever overarching explanation they had originally concocted when they realised that it could never compare to the intricate, crowd-sourced theories of their viewers.

Oh, and beware the spoilers.

Don't worry, this isn't the Enterprise

 My dad introduced me to Star Trek. As a child, my brain was quickly filled up with the incredible idealism, aspiration and earnest good-nature at the heart of the show. I loved it. I loved the original series best of all, but the others were just great, too. I memorised the technical manual. I subscribed to the ‘Fact Files’ for years (though they contained very few ‘facts’).

Voyager was the beginning of the end for this love-affair. Maybe it was just a matter of timing – maybe I started to see how often the plots were being recycled, got to that stage in adolescence where cynicism overpowers optimism. The films took a turn for the worse, as well. Enterprise… well, Enterprise just had an appalling theme tune. I’ve been secretly trying to chew my way through the supposedly less-awful third season for a while now, and it’s tough going.

To cut to the chase, I lost interest. Th0ugh whole sectors of my brain remain dedicated to the layout of Deck 17′s Jeffrey’s Tubes and the middle name of Picard’s brother’s wife’s Tribble, I felt alienated from the show and the films. It seemed stolid, unrealistic, badly written and lazy. And to think that I could have learnt a language instead (no, I don’t count Klingon).

So just as it’s impossible to explain fully what a Star Trek obsession meant to this bullied little boy, it’s very hard to outline quite what put me off, either. But my dad? He was there before me, and he stuck around after I moved on as well. So it was clearly paramount (phnarr) that he and I see this latest entry together.

Let me try to put this in context: dad wore a T-shirt to the screening. On this T-shirt: a massive front-and-back image of Quark the Ferengi’s snaggle-toothed face, and a bit of text outlining some of the Rules of Acquisition. My dad can put most geeks to shame. He’s been doing it for a lot longer, to be fair.

A curious fact: out of all Star Trek, the original series has aged the least. It’s design ethic and budget are so clearly from a different age of television that the clunk and quirk that seem inexcusable in the more recent series are instantly forgiven. The writing is fantastic in places, some of the science fiction ideas are real classics, and the central triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (the holy trinity; the warrior, the mage and the cleric; the ego, the superego and the id) still sparkles on today.

It’s these mechanics that the new film had to live up to, really: the emotional and science-fiction heart of Trek that has kept the first series fresh for decades. Or so I thought. (I’m actually moving into a review now, honest).

This film has no ‘science fiction’ in it. It’s purest fantasy. There’s no exploration of philosophy, future politics, moral dilemmas or the like. And it doesn’t spend a hell of a lot of time developing characters, either. This is not the film of the original series. This is, in fact, the film that would be made from the original series if there had never been any films or spin-offs.

Draw a line right after the last episode of Season 3 of Kirk’s adventures. Or perhaps after Spock’s death in the Wrath of Khan. (Or, okay, just after the end of the third film). Now build a movie.

What’s the upshot? It makes Star Trek magical again. I’m not going to witter on about how it relates to the post-Obama optimism of a new era or helps us forget our credit-crunched woes. It’s a good film because it has surprising reverence for the mythology that gives Trekkers wet-dreams  – and successfully translates the stylistic and historical essence of Trek into a modern, self-aware cinematic language.

For the record, I’m wondering if this is the first in-universe reboot in the history of cinema. We are tied to the timeline we remember, and all deviations from it are excused, in one elegant sweep of J.J.Abrams’ pen. It’s the best possible utilisation and acceptance of everything that’s come before: this is the timeline that we want. It’s the utopia, Dr Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds. Our understanding of all other Star Trek forms the emotional weight for this reboot.

This is just as well, because the film could use another ten minutes of character moments and dialogue. Who thought that anyone would ever write that about a Star Trek film?

Any other problems? Well, the Macguffins arguably fly a little too thick and too fast. There are few attempts to make plausible the ‘magical’ parts of the plot. What the hell is this ‘red matter’? I understand the appeal of just being shown what it can do, and the urgent need to minimise on technobabble. But… it’s unsatisfying. Similarly, our Romulan baddie, while overall very competently played by Eric Bana, seems to have minimal motivation for chasing Spock through time and blowing up whole worlds, Death-Star style (by the way, I love that his ship is just some miner in the future and it can totally outgun everything in Kirk’s era. I also love the idea of destroying a planet by making a big hole in it and planting a black hole). Yes, Romulus was destroyed. But Spock tried to save it. It’s not enough to say that you’ve spent a couple of decades “forgetting normal life”.

I have every expectation that this sort of problem is solved by the accompanying prequel comic-books, but the film ought to sort out motivations properly, at least.

Spock is more emotional in this film than in his previous incarnations. The attempt to explain this seems to be based on his fundamental decision to go to Starfleet instead of try for the Kohlinar, the ceremony that’s supposed to eradicate emotion altogether. But it’s still a departure. In fact, of all the new actors approaches to the classic roles, I think I find Zachary Quinto’s the most difficult to swallow.

But I’m nitpicking really. This is a great film, and it’s clearly being positioned to replace Star Wars and fill that yawning gap for big budget sci-fi adventures. It’s charming and funny.

I love that Kirk’s cheat on the Kobayashi-Maru is finally shown to us. I love that the new Enterprise is gorgeous. I love the way the film starts with a bang, and ends with an awesome version of the original theme tune (thanks, mr. Giacchino). I look forward to the rest of the trilogy (please please please).

Last word: my dad, more suspicious of this ‘rebooting’ nonsense than I, said that he loved it. Let’s just trust him on that.

… to the UK, and how. The first season ended on such a high; a sequence of episodes which included the high political maneuverings of Caesar, the omens of his destruction, the single most gory arena battle ever committed to celluloid, the rending of a family by infidelity, the incestuous seduction of a future emperor…

 It’s wonderful, really. Rome is interesting because it decides to be absolutely as historically accurate as it possibly can in the most weird places- setting and period detail, backdrops and sets, cultural taboos and sexual mores, while paying very little attention to the actual accepted narrative of the era it portrays. And it really does work; it feels authentic enough for us to suspend our disbelief even as it re-renders an ancient story to fit its medium.

And this is nothing new; when Shakespeare was writing his great Roman plays, he certainly only paid cursory attention to actual alliances and facts as they were then understood. When Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius- in every sense Rome’s precursor- He put his audience ahead of some bookish obsession with absolute historical accuracy. See also the new Thermopylae film, 300.

It shows an acceptance of several important points: firstly, the greatness of these original stories, these narrative inheritances, is in their themes, not their facts. The stories of Troy and Alexander, Persia, Greece and Rome are the templates upon which a narrative tradition was founded. They are blueprints, their earlier incarnations (when history was not so clearly delineated from story) as subjective as the more recent attempts to turn the past into art and entertainment (hopefully a bit of both at the same time).

Implicitly, this kind of production displays a snippet of real wisdom: that any attempt at a historical drama is immediately and automatically divorced from the literal facts of its historical context. And this does not need to be a bad thing. Historians themselves are only ever working with second-hand, subjective material. There is no ‘primary source’ which was never itself secondary Not even the buried stones of an ancient culture are immune from the fact that they were crafted.

So let’s enjoy a bit of modern, artistically driven historical truth; the kind of truth that resides in Rome’s hilariously undiluted attitude to sex (“I’m not leaving this bed until I’ve fucked something.” “Fine! Go and fetch that German slut from the kitchen…”), or in Rome’s playful references to the still-popular version of events propagated by Shakespeare (“It wasn’t a bad speech, Brutus… maybe a bit cerebral for that crowd…”).

And, best of all, it’s beautifully written, passionately performed, seductively filmed and has absolutely glorious production values.

Rome Season 2 Episode 1 repeats on the BBC tonight a little before midnight. Watch it.

The five-part BBC documentary, closely associated with the similarly themed, titled and authored book, ended last night. And, by all that is holy, it’s the first documentary in some years not mainly involving whales that I’ve felt driven to watch every last minute of.

In attempting to tackle a broad-brush history of the years since the war in a primarily political way, the most obvious comparison is with fellow ex-journo Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, a slightly older book. The bearing is similar, even if Marr’s work is more ostensibly a popular history than Hennessy’s. Even the political alignment is identically portrayed (in that it is hardly portrayed at all- good to see), both histories littered with semi-personal anecdotes (Hennessy’s constant references to events that simply must have been disclosed to him in some shady curry-house just off parliament square, tie still loose from the struggles of the lobby; Marr’s mentioning last night of his own immediate- and flawed- reaction to the swift “victory” in Iraq).

But Marr’s vision is clearer, if more vague; his hypothesis more interesting, and his presentation more charismatic. Based upon the documentary along, Andrew Marr’s is the better history.

I like Andrew Marr. I think many people do. He has a gift for images, for easily relatable metaphors which somehow always stop short of being patronising- comparing the British-Scottish union to a pizza being pulled apart, but still connected by molten cheese, or describing the heady, commercial ‘loadsamoney!’ days of the 80s as ‘like being properly drunk for the first time’.

And of course, Marr has a pretty interesting perspective on the last fifty years or so. He has served as a newsroom hack, a lobby correspondent, the editor of a broadsheet (back when the Independent was a broadsheet), the BBC’s political editor, and now a roving, quasi-historian with a penchant for accessibly intellectual radio and television programming and friendly interviews with VIPS on sunday mornings. His Scottish origins and very English current existence come into play as well; with the Scottish Nationalists in power and talk of a referendum on Union membership, Andrew Marr speaks of cheese stretched between two slices of pizza with a degree of personal certainty. Andrew Marr, you see, is the Mozzarella.

This documentary was also an attempt at mythologisation; at crafting a popular, unitary narrative from the thousands of strands of an increasingly complex national history. Marr sticks his fingers into all sorts of pies, discussing the fortunes of British cinema as if it has a real, causal bearing on the flow of the story of the British People. And usually- usually- he pulls it off.

There is the feeling that Andrew Marr desperately wants to understand the changes this country’s been through for himself; the way that the economy was changed, the opening of the gates to globalisation, even the threat of the greenhouse effect. This is a journalist’s personal attempt to come up with some sort of unified field theory for his own recent history.

The transition from career journalist to historian is frequently attempted, if commonly failed. Someone once wrote that the newspapers are the first draft of history; to Marr, as to so many others, it must seem the most natural thing in the world to have a crack at the second draft, as well. Or even the third. Marr chose wisely in writing first about himself, and then the history of his own profession in My Trade, which is excellent reading for anyone.

Complaints? The series was too short. Covering six decades of history in a total of five hours is a tall order for anyone. That’s about one year of history for every five minutes of screen-time; clearly inadequate. The problem with this approach is that the emphasis has to become about what is ommitted rather than what is included. For example, the last programme was full of implicit criticism of Blair’s foreign record, but it never once mentioned Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, or Bosnia. Picking the quote that matches the story is a journalistic, rather than historical, practice.

Nevertheless, this was some of the most compelling documentary work that I’ve seen for some time. Not enough is done to catalogue the years following World War 2- especially given the hours upon hours of documentaries devoted to that conflict. Andrew Marr’s excellent new series was a good first step in addressing this deficiency.

Well, I needed a few days to think things through- not just about that epic final double-bill, but the way the whole season now stands in the light of its events.  And of course, the real challenge will be in doing this without any spoilers. Hummm.

Season 3 was incredibly disjointed, in some ways. It really was. The six-episode mini season thing at the beginning only sort of worked, let’s be honest. The truly memorably stand-out from those was of course The Cost of Living, which simply rang every bell that the best of Season 1 had, though staying with the somewhat unsatisfactory season 2 pattern of saying absolutely nothing of any interest for four episodes and then stuffing half a season’s worth of revelation into 45 minutes.

I was absolutely terrified for the show’s future at that point, I can remember. The emphasis seemed to have shifted to the power-plays between various groups on the island rather than the central mysteries. Moreover, they were using silly ways of addressing big stuff left hanging from the Season 2 finale. Again, the word has to feel disjointed. Disjointed, disjointed.

The writing was, with a few notable exceptions, failing to reach the Season 1 highs. The trend had been set in Season 2- instead of showing, Lost was telling.  The elegance and the naturalism of the writing and the dialogue was somewhere being lost, the subtlety sacrificed to exposition of the clunkiest kind. The writers clearly wished to be able to appeal to a new audience, since the viewing figures were descending and ABC was messing with screening times.

But I can’t say how reassuring, how impactful and intriguing and exciting the last four or five (or even six or seven) episodes have been. It’s high time for all you folks who lost the faith to suck it and see again. The particular, structural alteration revealed at the very end of the Season 3 finale I think is a masterstroke; I can only hope that the mechanism is used with similar skill in future. Those of you who have seen it know exactly what I’m talking about. Also, the return of a perennial mysterious character as double-act with Locke is exceedingly welcome.

The fact is, the show had to change. Deep down, we all knew it did. Season 1 was where the fun was easy and the gains immediate: introduction, surprise, random and strange things, self-contained episodes, big themes, boys-own adventures. But it couldn’t last forever. Thematically, the show had to progress the very second a few answers- or the keys to answers- were given away. Season 2 saw many of those growing pains. And the second half of the third season is where the payoff began.

I suggest that everyone catches up immediately.

There. No spoilers. It can be done.

Dear Lost,

Well, here we are again. Looks like you even listened to me, tried to make a few changes after my last letter. Of course I was on the rebound from the West Wing then, I made some demands. I’m glad you listened despite how pushy I sounded.

People are losing interest in you. Oh, I know what you say, that all the people who loved you… years ago now, when you first turned up and there was just nothing in the world quite like you… All those people are still there. Just you work to a different timetable now, and they’ve stopped making the room in their lives. But, Lost, if they really loved you- loved you like I do- they’d work to be with you. Just to be with you.

But the fact is that you’ve changed. Some people just won’t be able to handle that. I didn’t think I could, for a while. But I pulled through. You had to adapt to survive. And some people would never have been happy. You couldn’t just keep piling questions upon questions, could you? But solve a mystery and you’ll always disappoint. We could always conjure up a better theory than the reality.

So it’s the bed you’ve made, Lost. And I just wanted to say that… well… I still love you. Despite being in a place where I can’t reach you now. I find a way. And everyone who appreciates the mystery, and even enjoys some of your solutions, will keep on finding a way.

But. There’s a But here. You can’t keep trying to cater to the newbies. You can’t keep telling instead of showing. Your script used to be SO GOOD. It’s not bad now… compared to the rest of the shows… but those heights of writing haven’t been reached since the end of season 1. Why does that have to be the way? Don’t you see it’s too late to attract a new audience? Aim to be the art you were, not the trademark you turned into. Remember your roots.

Faith pulls Reason back over the cliff-edge. Marvelous.

Think that way. Work that way. I’ll even be able to forgive the occasional, inevitable plot holes if you do.

Because I love you; your strong acting, your massive production values, your unreasonably high quantity of attractive female castaways, your clever, referential soundtrack, your quasi-spiritual ruminations. It was good to see a show where everybody had an agenda, and it still is. I love your monsters, your technologies and your fantasies, your conspiracy theories, your name-dropping of philosophers, your constant backstory cons, your commentary on political orientations. I love your “No! No! Oh God!” moments.

Fact is, you never needed J.J.Abrams. He used you then cast you aside like a whore.

All you need is me.

Lots of love,

Every Lost fan ever.