2. To appease Viewing Public, Producers commit to set timetable for resolution of show, up pace.

3. In order to facilitate (2) above, Producers start resolving the most thematically important subplots, more or less abandon the rest.

4. Show ends. Viewing Public complains about subplots not being resolved.

***

Years later, the Dessert-Eating Public becomes enraged at their inability to both have and eat cake. A global spate of bakery-directed arson ensues. Cuse and Lindelof appear to call for sanity. JJ Abrams appears to fling the idea for Super Clovereightfield II at someone and collect a fat paycheck. Colm eats a Mr Freeze, maintains that it is both “delicious” and “refreshing”. Paul Daniels is pronounced World President, resolves to crack down on pastry vandalism. Everyone is confused. It was all a dream. Or was it? No. But you could be forgiven for thinking so.

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

(Incidentally I think I’ve worked out this fiendish scheme. Studios take a vast slice of the profits for the first couple of weeks a film is screened. Say it’s 75% – an adult ticket costs a tenner, therefore €7.50 goes to the studio, while tickets bought with the card are rung up as a sale of €3.30, so only €2.48 goes off into the nether². Meanwhile the cinema is still collecting a steady €20 per month from everyone who has a card. Economics!)

Anyway, more or less the reason I mention this is because I happened to notice that Billy Chainsaw (that’s Bizarre’s Billy Chainsaw to you) has an enthusiastic endorsement on the poster for some yoke called The Broken. Now this strikes me as a pretty efficient use of real estate, because if a man called Billy Chainsaw likes a film then I reckon you should be able to figure out straight away what your feelings on it are going to be. Frankly all pen names should be chosen on this basis. Benjamin Black? Iain M Banks? THEY TELL ME NOTHING.

The rest of the reason I mentioned it is because while I was waiting for people to turn up I amused myself by imagining that Underworld: Rise of the Lycans was actually called Underwear: Rise of the Lycra. Readers, I have never had a more enjoyable two minutes.

1. I can’t off the top of my head think of a film I’ve actually regretted going to. Except Blade Trinity, obviously. You could put all my possessions in a cargo crate full of elephant dung and drop it in the middle of the Atlantic and I wouldn’t be as angry as I was after sitting through that. Go on, throw in my closest friends – wave that DVD at me and you’ll get away scot free.
2. In the time it took me to switch back to this window from the calculator, I forgot what the number’s supposed to be. €2.48 is three quarters of €3.30, yeah?

Now, as anyone will tell you, full-on schoolination can only take place in a deathmatch. I mean, that’s understood. Team games are like, you can hand out leaflets to noobs for correspondence courses or whatever, but if you’re going to really give the personal touch and school the motherfucker, it has to be a free for all.

I haven’t played a proper deathmatch in ages, but was I rusty? Was I fuck. There was this one guy, I swear to god, I schooled the bastard to hard he came out with a PhD. I mean, I’m the god damn Gordon Ramsay of schoolin’ a noob here. Crossbow. Rocket. Crowbar. Done. Wait, where’s your arse gone? Oh that’s right, I schooled it right off your body.

I done messed up Burt Bacharach and all.

In other night-wasting developments, I watched the pilot episode of Fringe. The main character is a feisty female FBI agent, the kind of feisty you needed to be back in the 50s when you had to prove yourself to a load of smug men who gave you dismissive nicknames like honey and sweetheart and sugardonkey and so on, which for some reason people also do in this show even though it’s not the 50s anymore. I would speculate that it’s a feeble attempt to get us to root for her, because she’s terribly, terribly uninteresting in every other respect.

So Fringe: not so good. On the other hand it does feature that guy from The Wire and some dudes with transparent skin, and both of those are some pretty cool things. So who knows, it just might pick up.

As seen on the delightful Monscooch.

I’m thinking give it 30 years or so, then get this kid and Old Man Bale and lash out The Dark Knight Returns. Magic.

Oh god… in getting that TDKR link, I found out that Frank Miller is writing a prequel called Holy Terror, Batman!

The plot revolves around Batman defending Gotham City from an attack by Al-Qaeda. According to Miller, the comic is a “piece of propaganda” in which Batman “kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. It was bad enough when the Joker was hired by Ayatollah Khomeini.

The plan tonight is to break open a few bottles and watch Batman Begins and Gotham Knight. There are a few reasons for this – firstly, any excuse to watch Batman Begins, secondly none of us have seen Gotham Knight. Thirdly, and most importantly, we’re preparing for tomorrow afternoon, when 12 of us will be toddling along to Cineworld to see The Dark Knight.

I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. I can safely say I’ve never been so excited about a film in my life. I’ve always loved Batman, been properly fascinated with the character and the world, and the first time I saw the ending of Batman Begins (“Take this guy…”) I broke into a cold sweat. This is a big, big deal for me.

The reason I didn’t go see it on Wednesday (and again on Thursday, and again at lunchtime today) is because we decided we should make an event of it. This entailed getting the old crew together, from various parts of the country, and the only way that was going to happen is if we waited til the weekend*. It is nice to go on a Saturday, though, because that means we have an entire night to drink and analyse and recover, and in some perverse way the extra few days of self-imposed waiting is adding to the whole experience.

I was going to write a bit more about the hot tub/pool table/Mario Kart/barbecue party on Sunday, but can it really compete with Batman? Nothing can compete with Batman. So I shall leave it there. Have a good weekend everybody.

*Has anyone ever noticed how badly tenses get mangled in Hiberno-English?

In particular, and by way of neatly segueing away from the film this post is supposedly about halfway through my first sentence, I was reminded of a great scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in which the inmates are seated at a discussion group and talking amongst themselves while the camera remains focussed on McMurphy. There’s some great acting from Nicholson as he watches each person talk and reacts to what they’re saying – you can see the cogs turning in his head as he figures out the dynamics of the relationships and as the reality of the situation becomes clear to him. It’s brilliantly done.

Of course it would be wrong to say that there’s no restraint in modern filmmaking, but this particular technique – closely following a character’s expression even while there are other, more conventionally interesting things going on – is not something you see often. The temptation, overtly or otherwise, is to pander to the audience, so it’s always nice to see someone really take hold of a narrative and do their own thing.

The post title implies that I’m going to link to at least two trailers so… here, go watch Heath Ledger being cool again.

Firstly: good podcast on Friday. Nordies!

Secondly: the new Dark Knight trailer was put up yesterday. There are some things in it that I maybe didn’t strictly speaking want to know, so you might want to avoid it. It occurred to me after watching it that I had decided, more than a year ago when the first teaser came out, that I didn’t want to find out too much, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. In my defence, they are throwing down a pretty relentless campaign.

Thirdly: a new Nine Inch Nails album was released today as a free download. The first few tracks are not necessarily anything special (I’m undecided) but it gets very good. Includes spiffy post-apocalyptic triptych.

Coming soon: original material!

It occurred to me yesterday that Iron Man is essentially the Marvel Batman: no superpowers to speak of, but he gets by on his ingenuity, determination and fabulous wealth. I can imagine Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne being drinking buddies. Or at least, I can imagine Robery Downey Jr and Christian Bale being drinking buddies. That is a cocktail party I would gladly attend.

Anyway… my point is, Iron Man is a hero I can get behind.

As everyone assumably knows by now, RDJ makes a perfect Tony Stark. Some people, myself included, worried that the eventual transformation into Iron Man and the attendant action extravaganziaaa would take away from the charming brilliance of the character as seen in the trailer. This is not remotely the case. If you’re sceptical… well, just wait until you see the amazing comedy double act that is Robert Downey Jr and a fire extinguisher.

Where it succeeds most of all is in its subtlety. The Spiderman and X-Men films beat you over the head with spectacle and hammy emotion, but this is much more finely tuned. There’s just the right amount of (very well shot and choreographed) action and just the right amount of character development. The film is aware of the wider Iron Man/Marvel mythology, but it brings it in gradually and realistically rather than just throwing in some nudge-wink moments. And in a supremely tasteful move, it puts the insert sequel here moment at least twenty minutes from the end.

Finally: watch out for the Stan Lee cameo. It’s a good one.