On Tue, 15 May 2001, Jenny Kaye wrote:
Iain Coleman wrote:
Alison Page wrote:
Where is
truth held?
In the text.
What does 'truth' mean when we are talking about a work of
fiction?
In the text.
This seems terribly naive. (c.f. 'The UNIT Dating Problem' in Dr Who.)
Bollocks to the unit dating problem. B7 series one was written by and scriptedited by the same two people. The UNIT dating problem came about because Super Fan Ian Levine, who was acting as unofficial historian at the time for Dr Who, didn't know his arse from his elbow.
It is the most glaring example of the kind of problems that inevitably arise in this context.
Actually, there are three main problems:
1) Self-consistency. With the best will in the world, it is near-impossible to create an entirely self-consistent TV drama series. Even in what might seem the ideal case, where one guy is in charge of the entire production, problems crop up. These can be due to constraints of time and budget, the contributions of directors, actors, and FX designers, or simply the writer deciding to change the direction of the show after it has begun. Even 'Babylon 5' has elements which are extremely difficult to reconcile -- why should it be surprising that the same is true of the less intensively-planned, more hastily-written 'Blake's 7'?
2) The nature of performed text. Even if we manage an entirely unproblematic text, what the audience has access to is the _performed_ text. All performance of a text is an act of textual interpretation (Hornby, 'Text into Performance'). It would be extremely strange to assume that all directors and all actors are going to come up with the same interpretations. Inevitably, inconsistencies will arise between episodes, either because different directors and actors are involved, or because their interpretations change as the series goes on.
3) Multiple valid interpretations. As a rule of thumb, the better the text, the more valid interpretations it can sustain. The history of SHakespeare in performance is an excellent illustration of this point. To pick an example which I was discussing with Rob of this very list:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Now, this piece can be performed infinitely many ways, with radically different interpretations. No one is definitive, all illuminate some aspect of the central, inexpressible human truth that Shakespeare has placed at the crisis point of his play.
None of these problems mean we must simply throw up our hands and admit defeat. Some interpretations are better than others, and the best interpretations have an 'aha!' quailty that comes from pulling previously disconnected elements together into a coherent whole. However, there is still room for honest and good-natured disagreement about interpretations. Consider, for example, the vast literature on the motivation of Iago -- all of it noticeably civilised in tone.
You're the guy who pointed out that "the death of Anna" scene in ROD could have been done a lot more realistically, aren't you? You're a smart guy, but you've missed something. The reason it was done that way, was because the story was going out before the nine o'clock watershed. If you are going to have a story which ends with a man brutally gunning down his ex- girlfriend in that timeslot, then you are going to have to tone it down somewhat, or risk Mary Whitehouse blocking the switchboards again.
I think you are quite radically misunderstanding my point. It was shit acting, simple as that. (I could discuss the technical problem with the performance more deeply, but I'm sure I've done so in previous posts). The emotional realism so lacking in that scene is present in other scenes in 'Blake's 7', and even in 'Dr Who': the timeslot is not the problem.
Iain