>JM: Dreiser was a lousy "writer", one of the worse prose stylists
who ever wrote a novel.
Brian wrote: I disagree. I think he was one of the greatest writers America ever produced.
JM: Brian, I am not sure if you are just baiting me here! Or perhaps, maybe you have a tin-ear for the poetics of prose, in the way some of the people on this list have a yellow eye for the geometry of visual movement. I mean no insult here, but I dare you to find a paragraph in Dreiser that is actually written with lightness and compelling rhythm. And yet he is a great writer. (By the way I am not the only one who thinks this about Dreiser, both Wilson and Nabokov agreed on this little point.)
I just opened up "Sister Carrie" (a novel I think is great and which I've read three times) at random.... The prose is flaccid, inept, plodding, full of bad metaphors, and analogies. I quote from the random paragraph.
"For his part, the manager was loaded with the care of this new argument until he reached his office and started started from their to meet Carrie. Then the other complications of love, desire, and opposition possessed him. His thoughts fled on before him upon eagles' wings. He could hardly wait until he should meet Carrie face to face. What was the night, after all, without her -- what the day? She must and should be his."
Look at that "For his part" as if he did not know how to start the paragraph, and look at the manager "loaded" with care but some how his thoughts "fled on before him" and where in the hell did those "eagles' wings" come from. Look at the attempt at a Blake-ian rhythm "What was the night.... what the day?" destroyed by the interior monologue of "after all". What is that word "opposition" doing next to "possessed and preceeded by "love" and "desire." And look at that sentence _"He could hardly wait until he should meet Carrie face to face."_ God! What James Joyce or Alfred Doblin (in German, as long as we are talking about Alexanderplatz) or Nabokov or even Gore Vidal would do to that paragraph!
Then he goes on to write a succeeding paragraph that switches to Carries p.o.v. that begins "For her part..." that is equally as inept. And this goes on paragraph after paragraph without relief. Literally, I could continue to open Dreiser at random, and come up on every page examples of this really dreadful prose-style.
In the same way you could take any random scene of _The Sopranos_ and show how it is really dreadfully set up and edited.
But somehow the whole of Dreiser's novel is like some rolling machine, cranking down to an inevitable end, that is beyond plot or prosody, but is still great story-making.
And, in a smaller way, the same can be said for relation between visual style and story telling in the Sopranos
> Brian: Additionally, if most of his viewers never
> experienced the show as visually incompetent, what was his purpose in
> fucking with the visuals?
I don't think the visual "house-style" began on purpose. It was more a matter of Chase making a strength of his weaknesses combined with his desire not to give up artistic control, even when he had people who could make the kind of visual show that you seem to watch. The show you want would not have been as strong, as repulsive, as compulsive.
Engage in a though experiement with me. Imagine if Michael Mann made this show but with Chase's scripts and writing team. Set up the experiment in such a way that Mann could not have changed the scripts.
If Michael Mann made this show it would be a lot prettier, a lot more like a great video, with a great sense of color, and great montages. But the show wouldn't have been as good. For example, jokes would have all been set up and played for the (sometimes gross) punch line, and most of the humor would have been lost, in the perfection. As Pauline Kael used to say you can have too much perfection. (Ang Lee is my example. He is always so damn precious. I'm thinking of "Sense and Sensibility, which I recently saw and liked, except for the preciousness.) Try making a different ("better") visual experience out of the Sopranos and you are going to take away from its excruciating humor... and the observation of grotesqueness in middle class life.
> > JM: Telling and making a story is not the same as the plot.
>
> Brian: But the problem with THE SOPRANOS is that the story was
> not told often enough through visual means. A viewer
> found out "what happened" by following plot rather than
> by looking at images.
JM: Here I disagree. I did not watch the Sopranos to find out what happened next, because in that respect I didn't find it very surprising. But here, precisely here, I have to say "d e gustibus no est disputandum." My point is that the show was visually inept from the beginning. I could analyze any scene and agree with you, and yet point out that still the story had an impact here, and it was funny. That visual ineptness became a house style, and probably out of necessity, because Chase wanted to keep control of the show, and he was born with the eye that he had. The crudity was directly like Dreiser's dreadful prose. Chase got the job done, but unlike Dreiser with a gross sense of humor and a poke in the eye.
> Brian: But if you choose to tell a story through a visual medium,
> why ignore the tools you yourself have selected?
JM: The tools weren't ignored, just not used in the way that you liked. Chase weakness was precisely the cinematic style that you like. A good artist makes a strength of his weakness... not necessarily on purpose, but out of necessity. The Sopranos would have been a different show with the visual style that you might prefer, or I might prefer in "Firefly" or "Berlin, Alexanderplatz." But it is just possible it would _not_ have been as good of a story.
> When I
> experience Don Carlo I listen to the music since Verdi is
> telling his story through the music. I think it would be
> odd to hear that a peson goes to the opera for the story
> and not the music.
I have to tell you, that is not how my Italian great-grandfather listened to Verdi. He listened for the story as well, and insisted on telling me the stories while I listened to the music. He also loved to talk about the "parade" of the Opera, as he used to call it. (He meant the "pageant", I think.) He would tell me that an opera with good music and a story you couldn't "feel" was only half an opera. Again, here I think we come upon our aesthetic difference. He also told me that Puccini wrote very sickly-sweet music, ("honey with sugar added," he said) but that the operas told great story that you wanted to feel over and over again.
Or take Wagner. I simply hate his stories but love his music... so I only listen to excerpts. This is listening to music but not seeing the opera.
> Why watch movies/television if not for
> the possibility of visual pleasure?
Good stories, made compellingly, that in the case of "The Sopranos" "jar" me with humor.
> > you further reduce the "plastic elements" to your own
> particular visual aesthetics
>
> If you are referring to my demand for visual competence, then
> yes. HUSTLE by Robert Aldrich is all fragmented images,
> decentered bodies, fractured narrative -- not at all the nice,
> neat exploration of space you find in Classical Hollywood. But
> Aldrich's visuals are not incompetent the way Chase's visuals are.
> Aldrich's images are designed in a way Chase's mostly aren't.
Agreed! I think where we agree highlights weirdly where we disagree.
> > Chase is simply not good (in fact he is lousy) at the
> kind of visual aesthetics that you prefer.
>
> You make it seem like expecting competence is an act of insanity.
Well, I wouldn't call it incompetence. He was just bad at the kind of visual aesthetics that would make for a smooth ride. It's amaziing how many unintended jump-cuts and missed eye-line matches their were in his show. And it seems to me all of this was done while putting the show together, after initial filming. And it didn't matter if he employed a good director (again compare Timothy Van Patten's work in the Sopranos with his work in Deadwood) it became a house style, and was somehow, (I doubt Chase was conscious of this), was integrated into the humor of the writing or the violence of the action, in each scene.
>
> >JM: I was fascinated with the show because I thought Chase was actually
> _writing_ against the grain
>
> But how can one distinguish with certainty (any degree - from mild to
> dead on) between the artist who is incompetent from the artist who is
> writing/filming/painting/composing_against_the_grain?
JM: Notice I said "writing" against the grain. I think the visual style was an accident, but it was a lucky accident that emphasized the shock of the writing. In other words it told the story.
But I begin to suspect that we are really arguing about whether the story was worth the candle.... ?
>
> > JM: But I do think that it is an accurate reflection of a certain kind of
> American culture.
>
> Brian: But does whether or not this statement is true have any bearing on the
> aesthetic value of the show?
JM: I think so. Though I don't rest my judgment on the fact that it does. I think, for instance, that their is something about the aesthetic values of the show that are quite reactionary. My own judgment from "repulsive" recognition of how the story-making worked, to disgust me with the characters, is an aesthetic judgment about the ugliness of a certain way of thinking in society.
Or put it this way. Flaubert created a representation of a very banal, middle class young woman in Emma. Much of the beautiful prose actually showed these banal thoughts and day dreams. Sometimes there is the art of boredom in this pretty prose. It is impossible to disintegrate the beautiful prose from Emma's banal thoughts and fantasies and the resulting art of boredom from the representation of middle class life. (This argument is not mine: Sartre makes this argument somewhere in "Idiot of the Family", or at least this is how I remember the argument.)
There are similar issues at work in "The Sopranos". It is impossible to separate the rather "repulsive" story of upper middle class suburban family life from the rather funny "bad" jokes that continually occur and reoccur in relation to violence and bad "manners." Look at the visual style as a kind of "bad manners", that perfectly fit the story being told. I would argue that most people don't even notice the "jarring" editing, and the lack of spatial orientation. But that these became more and more entwined with the bad jokes of the show and the bad manners of the middle class characters and psychopaths.
> > The real impact of the show for me was in how alienating and sickening it
> was supposed to be.
>
> But I never felt alienated or sickened (or at least not in the way I think
> you were).
>
> > If you don't go away from this show repelled and sickened, then you are
> the kind of person that Chase so obviously despises.
>
> Does being sickened by visual incompetency count?
Well, maybe.... I'm (kinda) joking....
> > JM: I insist upon the "narrative's" hatred of its audience, because I think
> that is one of the most fascinating and great aspects of the show.
>
> Brian: But if Chase is expressing his hatred of his audience, why did he do it
> solely through his imagery? Shouldn't that hatred have extended to the
> writing/performances as well?
I think it did. I mean you don't watch two guys put another guy through a meat grinder in what you can imagine as your favorite "pork" store... there is one down the block from me... without thinking "gross"...... You don't look at Tony killing someone as the highlight of a college hunting trip with his daughter without thinking, this guy is a sociopath, that you should really despise... and Chase seems to despise him, put him in bad light as if pushing his audience's "love" of the "anti-hero." My belief is that if you at all "admire" Tony Soprano, you are simply admiring your own wish to be a sociopathic scumbag.... and the whole show is set up like this. And it is a bad joke on everybody that does wish to be this kind of narcissistic sociopathic scumbag that Chase and company cons so many people into identifying with him. Is all middle class culture full of sociopathic scumbags who wish they can get away with what Tony gets away. Is it full of wily and smart, and yet willfully stupid and deeply racist and snobbish, women like Carmella Soprano who so many people seem to sympathize with. I tell you, you should watch the show from beginning to end. The show does everything to show you that it is disgusted with those who identify with these people.... and Chase kept on trying to show you that people who identify with this way of life, are somehow missing something in their characters. But ultimately I think this reverts to self-hatred on Chase's part..... If we don't agree on this, all I can say is that maybe I'm wrong or maybe we see things differently or maybe you only wish to see the "art" of it all.
> > JM: Reducing the narrative art of the stage (the making of stories in drama)
> to blank verse is equivalent to reducing the narrative art of moving visual
> pictures, to your sense of space and time.
>
> Brian: But you do not need narrative to have a stagework or a movie. What about
> Richard Foreman? Ernie Gehr?
JM: I have only seen "Transparency" and "Serene Velocity" and a very long time ago so I can't comment. I do agree that films don't need to be narrative. Another example is Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Ballance... for example. But the art of the comic books is a narrative art, that can be broken. Still those I know that read comic books don't only talk about good pictures but good stories. We were specifically discussing a narrative genre, which is why I put so much emphasis on story-making. The media can bear non-narrative, just like all kinds of genres can be put into book form.
My response was specifically to your raising the issue of Shakespeare's poetry. I don't think that his stage poetry would have been as memorable if he also didn't make good stories out of it all. Stage work can be non-narrative also, but even good non-narrative stage work usually refers to narrative. But more importantly the relationship between stage-narrative and poetry is not at all clear, and some, good stage narratives don't necessarily have to be poetic.
Listen, I think our differences are here. Story-telling isn't plot. I knew the plot to Oedipus Rex, and so did the Athenians, long before I read and saw it on stage. But in my view Sophocles made a great story and that is something that transcends the poetry, and even the specific staging of the play. Below you say that "narrative" is a formal element. I don't quite agree. I am not sure that Sophocles or Euripides could choose to discard "narrative". But Euripides could break all the formal rules of narrative and still make a great story.
By the way the complaints against Euripides at the time were that he wrote ineptly for the stage, that his plays didn't stage well, that they did not fit into essential art of the stage, etc., etc. He made great stories though. All of this sound like how you pre-define film and television as needing to certain formal aspects in order to make a story. If Chase was trying to make something like Koyaanisqatsi, I would agree with you, but he is making a story here, and the story is powerful, _sometimes_ in spite of his visual yellow eye, but mostly and strangely because of it. In the end all that I can say is that it is simply a well made story, compulsively repulsive, that you don't have a taste for.
> Stan Brakhage? Stagework and film can be
> narrative, but that is a matter of choice on the part of the artist.
> Narrative is just another formal element that an artist can either employ or
> discard.
>
> > JM: There are hundreds of ways of making good and strong stories for the stage,
> and not all of them are Shakespeare's way or Sophocles's way or Brecht's way.
>
> Brian: Agreed, but the method chosen should be executed with competence shouldn't it?
> And there is also the yet-to-be-tackled question of what defines a "good and
> strong" story?
JM: Unfortunately, your last question is, I think, unanswerable. I believe that the answer can only be "shadowed" in the negative or guessed at. I think we are biologically incapable of answering the question in any sure or clear way. (I'm not kidding here. I think this question is a "mystery" in Chomsky's definition of the difference between mystery's and problems.) "What is a good and strong story?" is a question where we are reduced to groping in the dark with semi-rational argument and shared experience. The argument and shared experience can take place, but "progress" will not be made.
I think the basic reason we can't answer the question, of what defines "good and strong" stories is because to some extent all narratives are "thought experiments" on "fate" and "choice". In all of these areas -- (1) "fate", (2) "choice", and (3) the ontological/epistemological standing of "thought experiments" -- we reach the limits of human knowledge and must rely on "experiential" pre-rational understanding, combined with (inconclusive) rational argument. Quite specifically I think that the "thought experiment" or "divine game playing" (Nabokov's definition) of narrative are "experiential" at their core and can be "understood" through experience but not "defined" or "known". Or to put it as a rhetorical question: We have no idea what "fate" and "choice" and "imaginative game playing" could possibly be, so how are we to know what there representation and combination are supposed to be "like" in narrative and stories?
>
> > JM: If you can be patient for 20 years then you should watch all 6 seasons again
> and see if I am right about how much the show despised its audience for loving
> Tony Soprano.
>
> I should rather go to hell in a paper dress.
>
> Brian
>
>
>
JM: But Brian, all art necessitates patience as well as participation.
And you should indulge yourself in "The Sopranos" if only because this would be something interesting for you to hate.
Jerry Monaco