From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk
To snip an absolutely magnificent post down to its conclusion:
Aww, Fiona <blush>
It's very true-- I'm reflecting too on what I said about the visual conventions of one culture's films being more or less lost on viewers in another culture.
Which makes me wonder about the conventions (not just the visual ones) of TVSF, and to what extent their acceptance makes series like B7 palatable. A lot of mundanes, if you mention series like B7, will disparage them on the basis of such things as cheap sets, crap SFX, bad acting etc (bad acting? Shurely shome mishtake...), and are hard to convince on the merits of the series that counterbalance these shortcomings. As a fan, I'm not oblivious to these deficiencies, but I'm also hard pressed to pin down the counterbalancing merits. Deep characterisation? Hardly - most of the characters are cyphers, two-dimensional at best (and yes, I am talking about the likes of Blake and Avon here). Scientific accuracy? Don't make me laugh. Social or political realism? No, please, really, *don't* make me laugh. Taut, gripping plots? Credible visions of the future? What has something like B7 got to offer?
Something that struck me the other day while listening to some old punk stuff was the naivety of much of the lyrical content (echoed in what a friend has described as the 'musical naivety' of the music itself). But this was bashed out by streetwise kids who can hardly be said to have lived the lives of sheltered naifs - cheating the dole, whacked out on speed or junk, living lives of casual sex and equally casual violence. Take, say, Chron Gen's 'Mindless Few':
"Somewhere in this riot lies a man so quiet. He has been punched to the ground. They kicked him while he was down. And with one cold flash of an icy blade He has been put into darkness. His skin colour fades. The band stop playing, the fight dies down. A circle round the corpse. There's not a single sound. Goodbye tomorrow, ain't seen enough of today, Thanks to the mindless few. The big boys have struck again."
Poetry it ain't, I'd be the first to admit that. There is a clear - to me, at any rate - disconnection between the event described and genuine emotional experience. It reads - and sounds - like an imagined event, a potential happening. I wouldn't be surprised if no one ever got knifed at a Chron Gen gig (though I may of course be wrong). But the sentiment is clear enough, delivered in a clearly unambiguous manner with a pretence at poetry. Fumbling, stumbling, grasping at possibilities and implications - all the hallmarks of a naif.
It gets even more overt when punk gets political:
"We're all conditioned to think ten tellies are better than one. And to blow the world up ten times is better than to blow it up once. Billions spent on destroying the world while millions starve in the third world. Where did we go wrong? We as one are saying: Feed starving people, fuck your bombs." (Flux of Pink Indians, 'Some Of Us Scream/Some Of Us Shout')
As an analysis of Cold War politics, of the ideological connections between capitalist-driven consumerism and western militarism, and of the workings of an emerging global economy, this is an abject failure. And yet it points to a stark reality, of western affluence and Third World poverty (both exagerrated) and - however naively - asks, Why?
I've previously drawn a comparison between punk and fandom (I think it's on Judith's website), but this is one I overlooked. Not only fandom but the source series itself adopts a position of 'mature naivety', recreating the state of the empty child-mind waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world, *whilst simultaneously* preserving a prior but knowingly incomplete experience of that world. I cite punk sources because punk, like science fiction, measures reality up against potentiality and frequently finds the former lacking. The rejection of reality necessitates the construction of an alter-reality which clearly cannot be directly experienced, only imagined. It is an alter-reality in which the deficiencies of real life are either rectified (through idealism) or exposed (through cynicism), but either way requires the adoption of an essentially childlike mind that asks the fundamental questions: How, Why, Who, What if? And 'what if?' underlies an awful lot of science fiction.
The same questions and the same mindset are also very pertinent to the radical visionary, or the active revolutionary, who can only imagine the kind of world s/he is trying to create (and maybe learn a few hard lessons about realpolitik along the way). Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Blake in fanfic is often depicted as politically naive when he is in fact - or at least should be - the most politically aware member of the crew. Ironic, in a way, that fans should favour Avon, the character who in terms of the context of the series is actually more of a real life mundane.
The boundary between the childlike and the childish can be a narrow one, which might account for why something like B7, both canon and fanfic, can often veer towards the juvenile if not the infantile. If we ask a simple question like 'Why?' we might find ourselves answering with an equally simple answer, like: 'The Jews'. And end up heading down an essentially childish path of uniforms, banners, parades and rallies, assured in the knowledge that no one will laugh at us because no one will dare. But if we can retain our pre-knowledge of the world as it is whilst simultaneously re-envisaging the world afresh, we might not fall into that trap.
Fandom, like SF, like punk, like radical politics, strips reality down to its bare essentials and asks fundamental questions. That, I think, is the root of its appeal. That the answers are not always adequate underlies much of the deficiencies of all four.
Neil