"Watchmen" Credits Sequence

Despite the best efforts of two decades' worth of talented filmmakers and screenwriters, the plot of the "Watchmen" film adaptation does not seem to indicate any cohesive attempt to corral the episodic narrative of the epoch-defining comic book series into one single movie-length through line. Lots of people call "Watchmen" a graphic novel, but in its original form, it was a series of 12 issues, published over the course of one year. The bliss - the reason why lots of people who should know still call it The Greatest - is that every "episode" feels complete in itself - even when issues end at cliffhangers, some essential finale has been reached. Alan Moore weaves a story spell, so that each issue feels like a tiny circle concentric within the larger narrative cycle; an aesthetic matched by Dave Gibbons' brilliant artwork, which establishes a tiny series of recurring motifs in every issue and larger motifs (happy faces, clocks, ink blots, lovers) that carry over throughout.

"Watchmen" is often described as a mystery - Who Killed the Comedian? - but truthfully, that plot is practically forgotten, or at least set far in the background, after the first couple issues, and although the series is tightly plotted, there's the sense, starting with issue 3 and hitting stride with issue 4, that Moore is doing what he does best - riffing on a concept, like a jazz pianist inflecting an old Beethoven with a modern sensibility, or a rapper moved to rhyme over an old Clash bassline. Issue 4 and issue 6 are pristinely-focused explorations of individual characters - first Dr. Manhattan, then Rorschach - and in their own divergent way, both issues play like "Citizen Kane" fully translated into comic book form.

Both issues have zilch to do with any plot and everything to do with Moore's fascination with digging beneath the surface. If Hemingway saw great literature as the 1/8 of the iceberg that peeks over the surface, it's Moore's lifelong quest to excavate the missing 7/8 - or, more often, to create that missing 7/8, to uncover ideas and notions no one, not even the creators, thought existed. Each of these issues only make sense as individual episodes - Rorschach's story is actually told from the perspective of his psychiatrist, first introduced in issue 6, who only appears once more in the series. Yet both of these issues are dramatically important to understanding "Watchmen."

Zack Snyder understands - really and truly gets and grasps- "Watchmen," probably more than most people, certainly more than anyone could have expected. The fact that he transposes these episodes into the movie is admirable; but the fact that they still function purely as episodes is a disappointment. Dr. Manhattan's Mars reverie plays beautifully onscreen - a fine, if redacted, adaptation of Watchmen #4, with Billy Crudup's haunting, mournful, monotone narration, and the images moving only a little bit more than they did on the page (Zack Snyder loves his slow motion, but in "Watchmen" and "300" it feels less like a tic than a genuine style - he wants you to explore his slow-motion shots from every angle, to freeze time until what you're seeing looks transcendent and silly both at once.) But the sequence is so fascinating, so propulsive, that it sticks out painfully from everything around it - it feels more like a tangent than an essential link in a chain.

Dr. Manhattan's absence after his flashback didn't seem so lengthy in the comics - the issues that followed were about different things. His ensuing absence from the film, though, makes the middle section feel imbalanced. The same is true, in fact, of The Comedian - Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Eddie Blake so memorably, so perfectly, and so constantly in the first half hour that casual moviegoers would be forgiven if they thought he was the main character in the film... and yet, but for another flashback or two, the Comedian never appears again.

This may just be an indication that "Watchmen" was always meant to be a TV miniseries more than a movie, but Snyder gets so much right that could only be cinematic - Dr. Manhattan's floating city on Mars, and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's epic airborne sex (hot like something out of an old Sharon Stone movie, that scene also gives both characters depth sorely lacking in the rest of the film), and, most of all, the opening credits sequence. I don't think I've enjoyed anything in a movie as much as I enjoyed the credits sequence - certainly, it's the first time since the ending sequence for "There Will Be Blood" that an American film has so completely captured that feeling of exquisite madness.

Set to Bob Dylan's greatest and most hilariously ambiguous anthem - Times are changing? Jesus Fuck, they've NEVER done THAT before! - the sequence cuts through five decades of bizarro-world history, dramatizing certain segments that Moore had just imagined (a cape caught in revolving doors, a man dressed like a moth being packed into a car by men dressed all in white, JFK shot by someone who's definitely not Lee Harvey Oswald), suggesting that a world with superheroes would be alot like the world without superheroes. Andy Warhol illustrated Nite Owl and Silk Spectre instead of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but the thesis of his art - the glorification and denigration of glorious denigrated modernity - was no different. There's so much going on in every single shot of the sequence - in my favorite, you see the streets of New York celebrating the end of World War II, and one heroine, Silhouette, takes a nurse in her arms and kisses her, while a sailer looks on, mighty confused.

Every shot in the sequence is like that - fantastically over-aestheticized (like the whole movie), but also hilariously darkly funny (like only parts of the movie.) It brings you into a big joke (it makes me sad when, twice in the first half hour, one character will say, with all the subtlety of Moses on Mount Sinai, "It's all a big joke.") This credits sequence is, really, one of the few places that "Watchmen" FEELS like a movie, and not just a dress-up re-enactment of scenes from a comic book.

I'm tempted to say that Zack Snyder should have done more of this sort of thing. The changes he made to the Evil Plot of the movie are fascinating - less about the plot itself than a few key details of its intentions - and it actually unifies the endgame much more coherently than the Evil Plot of the comic book. Then again, the addition of massive levels of ultraviolence is occasionally quite silly, and even kind of a crutch - Snyder might film violence more fetishistically than any other commercial filmmaker, so it's strange that his action sequences are so boring. Supposedly, another hour of film awaits us with the DVD. I'm hopeful that hour rescues lots of tiny bits, but I imagine that "Watchmen" the movie will remain as it is - a wandering movie, tonally-perfect but narratively invertebrate, a fascinating curio filled with errant musings and glorious colors and great acting and miserable acting. Put it next to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and ponder what wondrous mediocrities the major studios, in the salad days of the mid '00s, were suddenly willing to bankroll.

My Bookshelf

From Left to Right:

Original Screenplay for an Amazing Movie.The Screenplay is one of the most amazing things I have ever read - so good that the writer had originally planned to extend it into a novel, though part of the fun of reading it is how expertly they play with the normal lame screenplay form to create a bizarro hybrid - but it has never been officially released to the public. I had an opportunity to get a copy once. I got three. This is one of them.

Moby-Dick: A Pop-up Book. Awesomely ornate kid version of one of my favorite books (although it's more accurate to say that it's a favorite experience - I was bouncing from Belgrade to Switzerland to Amsterdam reading the real live text version, a long time ago.) Gift from a co-worker, who probably got it as random swag.

Walt and Skeezix. Compilation of an old, old, old-timey newspaper cartoon, with a beautiful foldout newspaper-style cover. Never once actually cracked this open after I found it somewhere, but still love having it. Whoever wrote the copy on the front and rear flaps deserves a medal.

FUCK this book. Joke-art high-concept book. Back in Fall 2007 I went to a social function hosted by the publisher, Chronicle. Witnessed a coworker demolish a pinata at the party. The publisher had a whole bunch of their books and calendars out for taking. I made the joke that all of my Christmas shopping was done, but actually I just took four books and three calendars and never did anything with them.

Popgun, volume 1. One day, an awesome dude from Image stopped by the office to drop off some comics for a coworker (same guy who passed "Moby Dick" onto me.) Graham and I got to talking to him, and he gave us this sick anthology of different stories from young and old comics people. Favorite story: a meditation on unicorns by one of my geek idols, Richard Starkings, the genius font designer behind ComicCraft.

Lit, No. 14, Spring '08. I have no idea what this is. Inside, there's a note inscribed to one of my coworkers. Did I steal this?

Super Picsou Geant. I found this in the bargain bin outside of Dog Eared Books (one of three bookstores on my block) and had to have it. It's a series of French Uncle Scrooge comics (Picsou means "miser" or "penny-pincher.") My mom tried to get me interested in French during my first trip to Europe by using a copy of this very same comic. I still can't read French, even after four years of it in high school.

Y: The Last Man, Volume 8: Paper Dolls. My brother got me this for Christmas. This was the most amazing graphic novel series I've read in forever. My mind is still reeling. Volume 8 a breezy read - there's a quick series about the gang going to Australia, followed by a few memorable standalone issues. A great breath of air inwards, awaiting the climactic events in Volume 9 and 10.

Chip Kidd. A book about cover designer Chip Kidd, another geek hero. A coworker stole this book for a few weeks once. I think I'll give it to him before I leave.

Notes On Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair. The Moby Dick coworker again. An advance reading copy - swag getting passed down the line. No idea how this is, but there's a blurb from Judi dench on the cover.

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. An old book Graham and I found for our project. I don't think either of us ever cracked this one.

The Comics Journal, issue 289. That same coworker (Moby Dick and Notes on Directing) would always pass along issues of Comics Journal whenever it came in. I always want to like the Comics Journal, and they've had a few articles that totally blow my mind (including an issue-length roundtable on a biography of Charles Schultz.) But this is an insider's insider magazine, often very snooty, resolutely anti the more comic-booky (and popular) side of comic books. Sometimes that's a good thing. This issue features the best review I could find of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier."

The Believer, issue 60. The most recent issue. Features an interview with Mary Gaitskill, a writer Graham said would be perfect for our project eons ago (we never contacted her, alas.)

The Believer, issue 52. I had a couple things in this issue. So did Geek Hero #3, Chuck Klosterman. For research on an article, I watched a lot of road movies. "Vanishing Point" was awesome, "Two-Lane Blacktop" was lame, and "Gerry" was pretty sweet on fast-forward.

An Empty Envelope. From a customer. To be continued.

Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hits. Won during a family game of White Elephant Gift Exchange, Christmas '08.

Wholphin, issue 6. Features one of my favorite documentaries ever, about a class in China learning about democracy. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories about elections. I was just reading the chapter in "The Path to Power" about Lyndon Johnson's first Congressional election. There's something about elections that reminds me of making a movie - you're acting like a better version of yourself, and pouring lots of money into selling yourself, and the whole thing is this massive production that has nothing and yet everything to do with real life. "Campaign" is a word that describes elections and wars. Maybe it could also be used to describe making a movie. Peter Jackson didn't direct "Lord of the Rings," he was the chief commander of the "Lord of the Rings" campaign. Steve Spielberg and George Lucas didn't "make" Indiana Jones 4, they led a years-long electoral campaign to make Indiana Jones 4 into a popular movie.

Maps and Legends. An advance copy.

The Player of Games. The second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series. I purchased this several months ago, when I was briefly switching between Culture novels and novels by Walker Percy. The LBJ book totally torpedoed that schedule. Player of Games is a great book - it's all about an genius game player who gets sent to a distant galactic kingdom. Said kingdom is organized around a game, and the championships of that game form the majority of the book. Amazingly, this book manages to work, even though Banks never really reveals exactly how the game is played. That's pretty much the definition of a solid B+ story - a story which knows it's missing something.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. Picked this up at the Barnes and Noble down the peninsula one day with Candice. Walking through a bookstore with C is pretty much my favorite thing ever. We always find each other books. For her, we found a book that she hate-loved - "The Man of My Dreams," by Curtis Sittenfeld. I started reading this on break from LBJ. Will finish it someday. Tragically beautiful writing.

Channel-Surfing the Apocalypse. I was drawn in by a back-cover description that made this book sound like some weird mangle bit of DFW-steez criticism mixed with a memoir mixed with a novel. Found it in the Feminist Issues section of Dog Eared, at a time when I had read three post-apocalyptic male-centric stories in a row - "The Road," "Y: The Last Man," and something else I'm forgetting, and figured I desperately needed some female perspective. It was this or Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." Should've picked Woolf.

Hooked. Collection of Pauline Kael's reviews from the 80s. Got me through many long tough days. This woman wrote like she meant every word. Her prose undresses you.

The Price of Water in Finistere. I met the author of this book through my drudgery called a job. She ended up sending me a copy of her book (along with a letter inside that empty envelope.). A wondrous little read that provided a calming image of the seashore and of distant lands during many dead December days.

Kongesagaer. Graham got this book for our project. A collection of old Icelandic sagas, published centuries ago.

I Love You More Than You Know. My friend JD got me this book back in 2007, when I had just moved to San Francisco. Those were my salad days, indeed. Jonathan Ames writes hilariously and honestly about the most terrible things you never like to admit have happened to you.

Love is a Four Letter Word. Some kind of collection, gotten out of the Free Book bin, never opened.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find. A collection by Flannery O'Connor. Bought off of a friend's recommendation. The first story, the title story, is pretty much the most amazing short story I've ever read. There's something about Catholic Southern writers that fascinates me - Walker Percy is another one, hell, so's Anne Rice. It's like a double shot of decadence and glory and guilt and tradition and notions of eternal punishment and some missing reward.

The Art of Fiction. Picked this up randomly, I think in Washington, DC, but maybe somewhere else. It was definitely last fall, when for about a week I had enough time away from work to think about writing fiction again. The great experiment failed. I'm not sure I even want to write fiction anymore, or if I can, or ever could.

The Invention of Morel. I ordered this from the Science Fiction bookstore across the street: "Borderlands." It had been referenced on "Lost," but there was something in its wikipedia entry that made me want it especially - it may have been the fact that it was so short, or that Borges liked it. A strange little book which becomes, in its closing pages, when you get the joke, one of the most amazing reads of your life. It haunts me still.

Awful Homesick. A disgustingly awesome book of artwork. Graham gave this to me. I'm not sure if it was a loan or a gift. I really need to clear that up.

Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Collection of Nick Hornby essays from the Believer. I definitely thought this bookshelf had more personal reads than company swag. Boy was I wrong. This post gets an F plus.

A Wizard of Earthsea. I'd never read any Ursula K. Le Guin, and I was in the mood for fantasy that wasn't remotely contemporary - by which I mean, I didn't want something like the Culture series, which works fastidiously at creating a sense of verisimilitude and realism inside of insane surroundings; or something like "Y: the Last Man," which sets a plot out of HG Wells in the contemporary world with characters who are hyper-aware, Tarantino-style, of every other book and movie and comic that their own story seems to touch upon; or even the new "Battlestar Galactica," which works resolutely to correct all the ridiculous things with its progenitor. I wanted Fantasy that was just Fantasy, as if from the dawn of an age, when rules didn't need to be broken because they hadn't been set yet. This book is a real wonder - a tiny story, really, but filled with incredible depth, and it doubles as a travelogue of a world that's strange and abstract and filled with casual amazement. Also features the greatest Dragon standoff ever, and that's not even the climax, not even close.

The Customer is Always Wrong. The guy who taught me the ropes sent me this book from his new job, a compendium of retail horror stories. Hilarious stuff, and more comfort reading during the dark retail days.

War Without Death. Besides having the greatest title ever, this book had a plotline that seemed tasty - an examination of one year in the NFC east, focusing as much on the dealmaking and the boardroom as it does the games and the players. I never finished it, but I want to someday. Sports writing has become a new running fascination for me - I just read books about Sonny Liston, Dutch Soccer, and the Freedarko NBA book. I also just read the next book over.

Forty Million Dollar Slaves. A history of the African American athlete which makes a pretty daunting argument - that contemporary African American athletes, despite supposed notions of racial equality and ever expanding paychecks, are still essentially on the plantation, because they don't have any real executive power. The writer, William C. Rhoden, makes a number of salient points - there are almost no African American managers, only one black owner. He brings up the touchy but important subject that the new concept of a "Post-racist" society is inaccurate at best, dangerous at worst. I don't agree with all of Rhoden's points - at times, he sounds more than a little bit nostalgic for the days of the Civil Rights movement, and seems frustrated with contemporary athletes like Kobe Bryant because they don't hold up the banner the way that Muhammed Ali did. It's a bit like Jesse Jackson during the Presidential Campaign, threatening to cut off Obama's gents - one generation doesn't like the next generation, the oldest story in the book. Rhoden's race-centric analysis obscures, I think, the real point he is trying to make. By arguing that athletes don't have enough control over themselves - that their executive overlords use them as cheap labor and then dispose of them - his arguments have less in common with the teachings of the Civil Rights movement and more in common with the teachings of Karl Marx. Nothing wrong with being a Marxist, but by not owning up to that fact, Rhoden occasionally just appears angry that, in basketball, "Eastern European" is the new "African American." They took our jobs!

Orfina. Got this manga out of a free comic book bin brought over by our corporate siblings across the street. No idea what the hell this is.

I Hate You More Than Anyone. See Orfina.

The War That Time Forgot. A monochromatic DC showcase. WWII soldiers fight dinosaurs. Mostly fun to just open it up to a random page. Free Comic Book Bin.

Army@Love, volume 2. The Exterminators, volume 4. Countdown Presents: Lord Havok and the Extremists. Suicide Squad: From the Ashes. All from the Free Comic Book Bin.

JLA Presents: Aztek: The Ultimate Man. A curio from the Golden Age of Grant Morrison at DC. A riff on superheroes and superherodom that also wants to be a mythic superhero story. A mysterious loner with a magic helmet comes to a city called Vanity, on some kind of quest to save the world. The art is no fun, but that may be the point - in a cool background plot that never has time to come forward before the series' cancellation, you learn that the city of Vanity was specifically designed to make people inside of it feel strange and just a little bit... off. (I think this is also true of San Francisco.)

Found, issue 6. The editor in chief was in the office for a few days and passed around some copies.

Awesome.

"Lost" Last Night

I've been critical of "Lost" this season, but last night's episode was a series best - right up there with "Walkabout" and "Flashes Before Your Eyes" for pure breadth and depth of feelings (despair, excitement, shock, awe) squeezed into one hour with commercials. At the end of last season, nothing seemed more obvious than the need to get the Oceanic Six back to the island. Am I the only one who, last night, thought that that was maybe the worst idea ever? How did Jack, who is supposed to be a hero, end up sitting on a plane with dozens of innocent people, praying for a crash? How did his whole purpose change so radically, from getting his friends off the island to getting them back on the island? How did he allow John Locke to so completely take the place of his father - for that matter, how did he convince himself that he needed another father, at all? None of his fellow island escapees can even stand to look at him anymore - except maybe Sun, who's putting her trust in the same bad people. It fell to a random passerby to offer him any kind of comfort. "Sorry about your friend," said Kind-Eyed Passenger #1, and Jack could just stutter a response, perhaps realizing that the Kindness of Strangers is all he has left in the world.

Maybe we'll find out that that guy is one of Ben's people. Maybe not. The actor's name is, suggestively, Saïd Taghmaoui. He is roughly more Middle Eastern than the fictional Sayid (who is played by an Indian, though both actors were born in a different Western European Globalized Metropolis.) Taghmaoui practically hasn't aged a day since his supporting role in "Three Kings," where he played an Iraqi torturer (Lindelof/Cuse must've geekgasmed) who taunted Mark Wahlberg about American hypocrisy. His scenes added gravitas to a film that could've been a Mel Brooks comedy, and "Three Kings" remains the only film besides maybe "Salvador" to portray history effectively as a violent hilarious tragic farce (shudder over "1941," and pray for "Inglourious Basterds.")

Taghmaoui, born of parents from Morocco, has spent the last decade playing variations on Islamic terrorism. On "The West Wing," he was the Ambassador from Qumar, a Middle Eastern Ruritania which was Aaron Sorkin's post-9/11 personification of American anxieties regarding the Islamic world (see Robert Baer's description of Syriana). He played a Symbolic Historical Arab in "O, Jerusalem," unseen in America, which appears to have been the "Gone with the Wind" for the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. (His character's name in that film was Saïd.) He was in Showtime's miniseries "Splinter Cell." He was in "Vantage Point," a movielength distillation of a season of "24," in which Taghmaoui's character leads a terrorist group which plots and subplots so extensively that they actually manage to execute the President of the Unites States and then, later, kidnap him, which is the terrorist version of having your cake and eating it, too. He was an arms dealer in "Traitor." Lest we miss the point, he was on HBO recently as Barzan Ibrahim, half brother of Saddam Hussein and leader of the Republican Guard.

This list is a travesty of topical typecasting, considering that Taghmaoui has a hard-soft concrete burn in his eyes that make him look like Montgomery Clift or like Jean-Paul Belmondo, another French actor. I'm tempted to say that his casting on "Lost" is almost a conscious mea culpa by the writers - I have at least one Iraqi friend who never quite got over the fact that Sayid, probably the most famous Iraqi character in American TV history, was played by an Indian (more dispiriting, I think, was the fact that so few Americans could even notice the difference.)

Yet even more interesting is that the character Taghmaoui was playing was actually the only character sitting in first class who didn't think that the plane was going to crash. "Lost" has always traded, very subtly, in post-9/11 themes and visual reference points - plane wreckage and torture, sure, but also the weird clash of tribalist primitivism and high-tech modernism which makes all Westerners freak their shit, like nomads on camels holding machine guns, or old dirty nukes controlled by people who live in tents.

Last night, we saw a few conspirators board a plane and sit in First Class, all of them pretending not to know each other, all suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, most of them onboard because some power that may as well be divine had informed them that the plane would be their last journey ever, that it would take them to a much better place than this. "Stop asking why it's so ridiculous, and start asking if it's going to work!" Mrs. Hawking screamed. And Christ Alive if Jack didn't buy that totally utterly, learning maybe the wrong lesson from the old Sunday School tale of Doubting Thomas, (you have to admire Thomas just a little bit for holding on to a basic belief in reality, at least until Christ presented his zombie scars.)

All of Jack's guilty looks around the airport lobby at the other people boarding the plane - did anyone else think of the terrorists in "United 93," briefly considering the people around them as real living breathing entities and not just as extras on the outskirts of one's own divine journey? How guilty did everyone look - Hurley purchased several dozen tickets, and still looked uncomfortable (here's someone who seeks nothing in life but personal connection - not even money matters to him - and who feels most comfortable in a padded room talking to ghosts.) The Lost creators have always been admirably multicultural, even if the primary narrative thrust of the series centers on three fatherless white men, but the reverse racial profiling last night was a thing to behold: the Terrorist Guy was the kindly bystander, and our heroes, our gang, couldn't wait for the plane to crash.

The Colors of "Breaking Bad"

"Breaking Bad" is the scuzzy little suburban black comedy with lame commercials that bugged the hell out of you last summer if you couldn't wait to watch "Mad Men" online. The last time I spent so much time watching AMC, it was the late 90s, there were barely any commercials, and practically everything was a three-hour western. "Breaking Bad" looked like a one-note premise with a talented actor seeking career rehab - "Malcolm in the Middle" Dad does cable drug dramedy, a slightly higher-brow version of Bob Saget talking nonstop over fucking and shitting and doing all the above in empty eye sockets in "The Aristocrats."

Jesus, though, was I wrong. "Breaking Bad" is good TV. I'm not quite done with the first season, but one thing that pops out at me is just how clever and classically stylish the show's cinematography is. Although "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" are very different shows, they share a certain formal aesthetic (kind of like how Showtime series feature lots of flashy wide-angle shots, or how all the colors on the USA network look bright neon.)

Take, as an example, a wordless little pre-cred scene from the BB's fifth episode. The show's second banana, Jesse, has just come out of an unsuccessful job interview - he thought he was applying for a sales job, but actually they wanted him to work sidewalk marketing as one of those way-too-joy-juiced sign-spinners. He walks out, and runs into an old friend and fellow drug aficionado, currently working as a sign-spinner. They share a quick smoke in an alleyway. The friend asks Jesse for some crystal meth. Jesse says he doesn't cook anymore. The friend says he could help Jesse out, if he's looking for a partner. The friend walks off, leaving Jesse behind. Watch what happens:

Jesse is left behind to ponder the possibility of getting back into the criminal trade. His shirt is dark red, and the tie he holds in his hands is yellow - bright colors, which are matched in the strange graffiti on the wall behind him. Note all of the parallel lines up and down - the gate on the left, Jesse's slightly tilted stance, the blue lines and the red totem. Those lines are criss-crossed by perpendicular lines that run across the building.

There's a quick cut to the interior of Jesse's car - the sound of the door opening actually begins milliseconds before the cut. Note the red dice on the side of the car, poking out of the total jet black of the car interior, just like Jesse's shirt pokes out of his black suit. (I should note that it's a bit surreal seeing Jesse so well put together - up to this point, he's favored baggy clothes and weed beanies.)

The camera lowers just a little bit as he enters the car (it's hard to capture this subtle movement in still frames, but if you watch the dice, you can get a rough idea.)

Something catches his eye.

We cut to his POV - it's his friend, the stoner sign-spinner. Note the sharp red of the sign (the arrow says "This Way To Savings.") Note, also, the preponderance of parallel lines - besides all the light posts and street signs, you have several buildings and the sidewalk all going towards an offscreen vanishing point. "Breaking Bad" is set in New Mexico, and one of the most unsettling things about the show is how the desert landscape seems to show through even in city scenes like this - it's something in the angle, how you can see both the ground and the sky, which gives everything a slightly more trapped feeling.

We're back to Jesse in the car, and yet a third red element is introduced: he's been circling jobs on the classified page. The red-pen circle completes a visual triangle - the red dice on the left, Jesse's red shirt, the red ink.

Now, the showstopper - the shot which, to me, lifts this whole sequence into something totally unexpected, something Hitchcockian. We've established the two separate plains of action - Jesse in the car, his friend out on the street. Now, we get those two planes unified. We're still looking at Jesse, but we're also looking with Jesse at his friend, and looking with him at the Classified page.
In classical filmspeak, the right side of the screen is positive and the left side is negative. Roughly speaking, on the right side of the screen lie all of Jesse's various possibilities. Does he try another shitty job, at a company so awful as to actually purchase Classified ads? Does he work with his failout friend on the creation of lucrative illegal drugs? Or does he bite the bullet and become a sign-spinner?
This shot is so clever, but it takes a second to notice some of its charm - like how there's a big red arrow strongly recommending that Jesse keep at the job search. The fact that so much of this shot is in darkness, right in the middle of a sunny New Mexico day, speaks volumes about the noirish nature of BB.

Now, watch what happens:








Jesse, exhausted just by thinking about everything, leans back against his seat, and again the camera just barely moves following him - it's almost like the camera is breathing with him, sighing with him, we're in so close. He looks offscreen, takes a breath, and then makes a hasty move forward, upsetting the red dice as he slams the paper down on his dashboard (notice how the string holding them form two straight lines suddenly jostled back and forth across the screen.) The camera leaves Jesse behind and moves down to the newspaper - the bright red taunting him, and us.





We cut from the disorder of the previous shot to the most straight-ahead shot in the whole sequence - literally poised on the x-y axis of a building, staring directly out of a car window from a clearly non-human POV.

So what's going on here, with all the red and the visual geometry? Earlier on I mentioned how the show can create a trapped feeling, but I don't think the show's metaphor is as simple as saying, "These characters are trapped by their existence." That's the sort of easy answer that results in a work like "American Beauty" or the newspaper plotline in season 5 of "The Wire." I'm not so sure that the Red is meant to stand for anything in particular, but the show's color palette is so marvelously subtle, yet striking - it pulls you in like a luscious hidden melodrama. The more you watch "Breaking Bad," the more everything seems to build up. This is a work of sustained fascination and genius. At its best, in a scene likes this, it feels like something Orson Welles would have done, if he'd been born one decade later into the TV age instead of making his name in radio.

BSG vs Lost: Pace

Bizarrely for a show in its fifth season, "Lost" came on strong and fast at the start of this season, as if all of last season's acclaim led to a desperate yearning for instant love, rather than hoped-for narrative confidence (which the show will desperately need in these final hours). The first few episodes moved quick but scattershot, with a couple of key fumbles in the first hour. Little things were off (how many times did Sawyer say "Frogurt?"), and big things were messy (the time travel mechanism was two steps from good but felt desperately off, more like a clip show you watch the characters watch.) The cumulative effect felt like cocaine masturbation - it feels good, but pretty soon you're tired and alone and you've got a nosebleed. Just like the time travel sickness.

On a deeper level, I'm beginning to suspect that Lindelof/Cuse et al aren't being nearly as fearless - with their storytelling and with their characters - as they should be. Vengeful Sun isn't a big enough plotline to hide how ossified the characters' relationships feel at this point. Death isn't necessarily the answer, but it couldn't hurt. The Death Twist has been employed judiciously by "Lost" in the past - it simultaneously adds energy to lagging plotlines, while also trimming the fat out of a show that always has at least two characters too many. First there was Boone, whose death crystallized the Locke/Jack antagonism and pushed the Hatch plotline towards its inevitable conclusion. Then, Ana Lucia and Libby's double sacrifice bunt rescued season 2 and gave the show what remains (for me, at least) its most darkly hilarious image - Michael, shaking after his first murder, with fear and shock and excitement.

What I'm saying is that someone needs to die, or something needs to change, because things are getting far to comfortable. On the island, the characters are more of a stereotypical TV "gang" than ever before - all essentially united in a common goal, jumping through time in a story that resembles nothing so much as Jerry O'Connell's fondly-remembered-when-not-watched "Sliders." Off the island, what could have been a dark riff on getting the band together turned into a quick jaunt around Los Angeles that made you pine for the city of mystery and suspense and tragic farce in vintage "24" (the show that pioneered the Death Twist and kickstarted its best season by cutting its supporting cast in half.) Oh look, Sayid's in LA! Oh look, Sun's in LA! Oh look, Desmond's coming to LA right now!

The little details were nice - the gas prices were period-accurate, and suggested a whole world in 2008 that our characters seem resolutely incapable of interacting with. The show's little details are always a saving grace in difficult TV hours - bulletholes in a canoe paddle, mysterious wreckage with French writing, the moment before mines explode. Nothing else on broadcast TV comes close to this show's aesthetic sensibility.

But the story is a mess right now. The choice to lose the focal-character structure must have seemed like a no-brainer – some of the show's finest hours have departed from the one-character flash-episode, to great effect. But this new structure just feels like a mess. Things happen on the island, and things happen off the island. That feeling you used to get at the end of the episode, of a minor triumph or a terrible moral failure, is gone now. I suppose that the last few episodes have had a kind of thesis: "Hurley Feels Bad About Lying," "Kate Really Feels Kinship With Aaron." We could have guessed that already! There's too much overexplanation in the Oceanic Six, and not nearly enough focus on the mindfucking business back on the island.

The last episode crystallized the feeling of this mini-saga; you get the sense that the writers are trying to answer as many random questions from the past as possible, and that they felt like it would be more exciting to have their characters interact with the past. It's worked out okay maybe a quarter of the time. The creators aren't giving themselves enough credit. Part of the thrill of, say, Ben's flashback episode was how immersive the flashbacks felt - you were being thrown into a whole strange culture, and you had to tease answers out of the atmosphere. With time travel, you just have awkward conversations between our people and Past People. It feels like a conversation between the Lost writers and their secret confidantes, and not in a good way.

I maybe wouldn't be ragging on "Lost" so hard if "BSG" weren't so on point this season - if, in these last four episodes, it's delivered on all the promise of a ponderous '08 half season and delivered some deep thrills. Somehow, BSG has managed to thread the needle - it has all the gravitas you expect of a great TV show in its final days, but it still has all the excitement of youth, the willingness to shake up everything combined with the wisdom that knows exactly how far things can shake. This past two-parter, a genuine Revolution, had all the energy of recent "Lost," but it never forgot the exact particulars of how its characters should interact.

Hell, some of the best moments in the episode came from the disgraced Captain Kelly, a face in the crowd for four seasons now (he was the somber officer walking past corpses in the miniseries, and the XO during Adama's recuperation, and a terrorist bomber during Baltar's trial.) I'm not even sure that we've ever seen Kelly and the Chief interact before, but their one scene together had all the improvisation of old friends on the job, combined with the real danger that one of those old friends might shoot the other one.

How many of those moments are there on "Lost" lately? That show now feels simultaneously too written and not written enough. Rarely have we the viewers been so conscious of the actors as chess pieces that must be moved to a proper place; even rarer has the game seemed more like checkers. The Revolution on BSG was a massive fuck-up by everyone onscreen, but it felt alive and sure-footed to watch it. Tiny details accumulated - an itchy amputee stump, the way Richard Hatch's grin shifts ever so slightly between knowing he's victorious and knowing he's fucked, how the makeup and hair artists somehow make every Six look just a little bit different. "BSG" is setting its own pace; "Lost" is trying to match ours, and the writers', and the characters'. Maybe things will get better when they find the island. Maybe not.

The Only Oscar Nomination Worth Noticing

Usually, you can at least count on the screenwriters to know what the hell they're doing. When "Titanic" won 11 Oscars, "LA Confidential" won Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2005, when the Oscars were split down the middle between Clint Eastwood (doing solid work with "Million Dollar Baby") and Martin Scorcese (in the last gasp of his Miramax DiCaprio decadent period with "The Aviator"), the writing Oscars went to Charlie Kaufman for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the Payne/Taylor two-headed beast behind "Sideways." Almost without fail, the screenwriting Oscars are years ahead of everything else.

This year's a half fail. The Adapted Screenplay nominations are a flat-out abortion of history. Two of the nominees, "Frost/Nixon" and "Doubt," are playhouse retreads that didn't feel half as vivid onscreen. "The Reader" is the kind of Holocaust Oscar gloss we thought died years ago. "Slumdog Millionare" is awesome and will win, but one out of 5 sucks.

But thank god for the Original Screenplay nominations, and specifically, the nomination for "In Bruges," a film so dark and tiny and weird and malformed that it practically disappeared before it opened. "In Bruges" is such a thrilling old-fashioned character movie - good actors playing well-written roles in intriguing surroundings. It's got twists and turns, and funny sadness, and more swears than a season of "Deadwood." The decades-long journey from box office flop to cinema classic begins now.

BSG vs. Lost vs. 24

The new TV season is finally upon us again! Entertainment Weekly recently announced the end of the second Golden Age of Television - a good thing, since television abhors pomp the way nature abhors a vacuum. Every Golden Age is followed by a dark and weird unsettled deconstructive phase - think of Romanticism following the Enlightenment, or Modernism following Victoriana, or Godard following Hitchcock. Tonight's season premiere episode of "Battlestar Galactica" was maybe the most magnificent ode to existential despair to ever air in the fourth season of a television show. Certainly, it contains a few of the most memorable images yet captured on digi-film - the Chief's shadow merging with a nuclear silhouette on an ancient wall (the production design on the scorched earth suggests a more rugged, gritty revision of "Battle of the Planet of the Apes," another 70s compelling camp-sci failout deserving a more convincing redo), and Lee and Dualla reconnecting in a facing profile silhouette, and the grin on a face two milliseconds before messy death.

I wasn't a huge fan of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica - it seemed to have lost all its old allegorical swagger, in service to a newly propulsive plot that seemed to be running in circles. The first few minutes of this premiere - all bleached monochrome and tight wide angles and eternal sadness - seemed to justify all of that. In my head, BSG is in constant conflict with Lost for the title of Great 21st Century Fantastical Television Quest Global Mystery Theater Masterpiece. They play out like yin and yang; the popular big-budget Technicolor broadcast channel show, shot on location in Hawaii (which stands in for the whole world past and present); and the barely-seen micro-budget underlit basic cable show, shot on sets in Vancouver (whose exurb landscape stands in occasionally for uninhabitable radiation-heavy planet spheres.)

Both feature multi-ethnic casts of underrated TV actors, playing characters trapped together by disastrous happenstance, both searching for a way home and ultimately doomed to find it. Both shows have pushed the accepted boundaries of television - flashforwards, megatwists, characters who turn homicidal, heroes becoming villains. There was a time when having these two shows both on TV made it seems like it was easy. Then "Heroes" came along, and made them both look slow. Then "Heroes" had a second season, "Invasion" and "Threshold" and "Surface" and "The 4400" and how many other god awful pretenders flamed out, and "BSG" and "Lost" looked like the wily elder statesman, biding their time until the youth group implosion.

The pretenders have disappeared. The dust is settled, awaiting battle. The real TV season is beginning - the January-June rush, when HBO and the cablers bring back all their non-summer shows (Mad Men waits in July, pondering a reality without Matthew Weiner as its benevolent tyrant god.) BSG is entering its final season - nine episodes to go, now, until immortality. Lost is entering its penultimate season, and must prove that its resurrected fourth season was a sign of things to come, and not a rehash of Season 1 (excitement, new beginnings) followed by a new season 2 (sedation, ossification, delayed action.) In the dark horse lane is "24," once the very definition of the new TV, now a symbol of everything that can go wrong with serialized television (one nuclear-sized misstep is all it takes.)

They couldn't be further apart in most obvious ways - it's almost as if the Jordan Bulls, the Bryant-Shaq Lakers, and the Bird Celtics were all in the game at once. Will they raise each other's game?

Patrick McGoohan Is Dead

Patrick McGoohan was "The Prisoner." He played the title role on that show, a 60s BBC spy-fi head-trip allegory that's half swinging-London, half bargain-Bunuel. He wrote and directed some of the show's finest episodes; one was practically without dialogue, one featured two men locked alone in a room driving each other insane, and one was the ambiguous finale to the whole series, which answers few questions and suggests that eternal loneliness and frustration and mystery are the only rewards granted to the Great. McGoohan created the show out of spite: he'd played the lead role on a show called "Danger Man," a James Bond rip-off, and he was tired of the unrewarding work. Or maybe he was morally opposed to the ethics of a spy thriller; McGoohan was a devout Catholic (who almost became a Priest). Or maybe he was a narcissist, and wanted to be his own boss; one of the co-creators of the show, George Markstein, would depart "The Prisoner" midway through production, and spent the rest of his life decrying McGoohan the egomaniac, McGoohan the Emperor with No Clothes, McGoohan the prisoner.

Whatever the reason, McGoohan told his bosses that he'd had enough of "Danger Man," and the result was "The Prisoner." Coincidentally, the character he plays on "The Prisoner," whose name is never revealed, begins the series loudly, obnoxiously, and forcefully quitting his job (lightning strikes several times on the soundtrack during the resignation - the scene is replayed in the credits sequence every episode.) He goes home, followed by a hearse. While McGoohan is packing things into a suitcase, a man gets out of the hearse and sprays knockout gas into his apartment. McGoohan falls over, fast asleep.

When he wakes up, he's in The Village, where everyone has a number (We'll know him as Number Six, a name he refuses) and where everyone he meets is after the same thing: Information. Why did he quit? Why does it matter? Why does anything matter?

Patrick McGoohan was the Prisoner, and his prison was "The Prisoner." He worked constantly for the rest of his life, but never found anything that remotely hinted at the mad depths of the final hours of "The Prisoner," which resemble nothing else in television, film, or narrative history (except perhaps the Satyricon and parts of the Socratic Dialogues - but they didn't have machine guns.) He was in two "Columbo" films, and "Escape from Alcatraz," and the father of the Phantom in "The Phantom," and he was the wily old King in "Braveheart." Anyone who knew who he was knew him because of "The Prisoner."

The precise themes of the series are difficult to pin down, and change radically from episode to episode. Maybe "The Prisoner" is about the triumph of the individual over the system, of morality over amorality, of humanity over the onrushing reign of technology, of privacy against a world of surveillance (in The Village, they can watch you everywhere; in modern-day London, there are cameras watching you on every block.) It is often ridiculous and occasionally sublime. McGoohan may have been a mad genius; he certainly was a fine actor; he never got a better chance than the one he got on British TV in the late 1960s; he was 80 years old when he died today.

"Kingdom Hearts 2"

Kingdom Hearts 2 has to be the goofiest slice of steampunk kiddie meta mysticism to ever sell a million copies of itself in less than a month. If you've heard the setup, then you're already confused. Disney characters – that's icons Donald, Goofy, Mickey, and Pluto, mixing it up with the casts and visual aesthetics of random movies from the back catalogue like The Lion King to The Nightmare Before Christmas and Cinderella and shit-you-not Tron – walk around with characters from the Final Fantasy games - the hallmark fantasy cycle of the videogame era, a series that began with 2-D graphics and now creates three new dimensions every sequel. Every Final Fantasy game follows a different cast of characters on a different world, but they all encompass the same strange assortment of moods - epic cheese, adolescent picaresque, romantic sacrifice, Emersonian environmentalism, high-tech magic, characters who look like three misshapen legos enacting Freudian psychodramas using swords that fire energy bullets. None of those moods has anything to do with Disney, unless your whole experience of Disney was watching The Black Cauldron and Treasure Planet on repeat on acid.

For a number of reasons, though, the original Kingdom Hearts was a mind-warping slice of fun and bittersweet sorrow. You played as Sora, a kid so bland Haley Joel Osmont voiced him, yet so secretly awesome that his pubescent potential galpal was voiced by a way-pre-fame Hayden Panettiere. At the beginning of the game, you were living on a quiet, bright, shiny island. You played a few minigames to learn the basic controls - a common start tactic for RPGs. You ran around the island and met a few other kids - recognizable from Final Fantasy IX or X, (not to me, though - ceding four months of my freshman high school life to VII was enough for me.)

Your island had a beach, and a lush hillside, and a tree house, and only the barest hint of life - no parents, not even any sign of civilization. There was an obstacle course, and a palm tree, from which you could pick fruit. There was some indication that there was more to the world than just this island, but not much - and so, here at the beginning of the game, you had the impression that you had just awoken from a dream of your real life (or perhaps, just been freshly born) and lived here on this children's paradise your whole existence.

If you walked around long enough, you found a cave hidden behind a waterfall, and if you followed that cave back to its end, you found a few strange chalk drawings on the wall, and since this was a video game, you knew that they were important. There was also a door, and since this was a video game, you knew that eventually it would open.

After a short time, night falls, and strange black creatures attack, kidnapping your friends, tearing open the sky, not so much destroying your island as vacuuming it into nothingness. The door opens, and you follow it through, and that's the end of the prologue. The time you spent on this island was maybe about 1 half percent of the total gameplay - the vast majority of both iterations of Kingdom Hearts is spent running around levels modeled after old Disney movies. But the thrust of both games is about getting back to this tiny island, and about finding your friends to bring them with you. There's certain qualities of Campbell's Hero's Journey, and The Wizard of Oz, and of road movies and coming-of-age novels, not to mention other recursive mega-metamixes like Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Zelazny's A Night in Lonesome October.

Half the charm of Kingdom Hearts comes from the Disney characters. The characters from Final Fantasy are another story. From Cloud Strike to Squall Lionhart to Yuna the heterochromatic summoner, the FF characters you see in KH are little more than waxwork imitations of their original personae - they stop in for a cutesy dialogue, make a veiled allusion to the game they originally came from, and, if you're lucky, fight you for a couple seconds, but when you compare their minute game time here to the literal hundreds of game hours and storylines you find in an FF game, their appearances are kind of sad. At best, these cameos play like Falstaff's hello-I'm-dead scene in Henry V; at worst, they come off like characters on a TV show that stopped being good three seasons ago, like Grey's Anatomy or Nip/Tuck.

But the Disney characters. Oddly, it's not jarring at all to see Donald and Goofy battling Scar alongside Simba, or swimming through the water with Ariel, or riding a magic carpet with Aladdin. This may be because, via Disneyland and Disney on Ice and every Disney special since ever, we're used to thinking of every Disney character as co-existing along the same time-space continuum. It may also be because Disney plots tend toward the simple and uncomplicated, so it's not jarring at all that every "level" of the game basically re-enacts a whole Disney movie in about half an hour or less.

The other half of the charm of Kingdom Hearts requires a bit of explanation, and may not be charming at all. For a game which features a skateboarding mini-game and a tiny talking anthropomorphized duck wearing a wizard's outfit, the plotline for the Kingdom Hearts duology is surprisingly brainfucked. By which I mean, characters regularly turn into other characters, and in so doing, they create still more characters, and the reasons for these metamorphoses would be only a little bit convoluted if all the transmogrified people didn't keep imitating still other people and occasionally falling in love with other's people's alter egos. Whole universes are being created and destroyed at various parts of the game, often right in front of your eyes. And, while you fly from world to world in KH2, you slowly see a massive world beneath your universe grow brighter in the space-temporal mist.

There is also incredibly oversized machinery with higher functions so world-bending they may as well be demi-gods and emotional abstractions; strange men in black cowls whose goals and methods and powers are shrouded in mystery (they function kind of like the Others on Lost, except with more telekinesis and the ability to fire different-colored energy out of their hands); and wormholes, and doorways through time. Throughout the game, you're picking up pages from the journal of a mad scientist, but you pick them up out of order, so a Memento-like game of puzzle-narrative ensues. (You're also picking up lost Dalmatians - guess how many?)

Lost is similarly confusing, but that TV show, like most great hyper-complex genre fiction out of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson, usually manages to refocus the sci-fi histrionics through understandable emotional turmoil. Desmond's brain is skipping through time due to the radiation poisoning he suffered when the hatch's electromagnetic radiation matrix imploded upon the island's centrifugal centripetal whatever, but that just means he needs to find the love of his life. Kingdom Hearts focuses on Sora's search for his two friends, one of them the aforementioned Panettiere-voiced girl name Kairi, the other a dark-grinning silver-banged weirdo named Riku. (Sora means "Sky," Kairi means "Sea," and Riku means "Land." GET IT?)

But, like all relationships in Square games, Sora's friendship with both people regularly skips between obsession and utter disinterest. By which I mean, he spends two games (probably a hundred hours, if you're a player player) chasing these people, but when he finds them, they don't seem to be particularly friendly. Him and Kairi seem to be in love, but they're too young in 1 and awkwardly teenaged in 2 to do anything about it. In fact, in both games, Kairi the girl is found first, but with Riku the guy still missing, Sora becomes even more fervent in his search. It's not so much gay as it is Gatsby - Sora's whole purpose for being is to recreate the happy island life from the prologue of 1, and he's not satisfied until he knows that nothing will ever happen to disturb that life again.

I realize I'm generously/confusingly flipping back and forth between pronouns here - are "you" Sora, or is "he" you, or are "you" and "me" both "him" when we play the game? I'm doing this half out of laziness and half with purpose, because a running undercurrent in both games - it seems unintentional, and may just be due to bad translating - is a constant confusion over identity. At the beginning of "Kingdom Hearts 2, there's a lengthy prologue section, which serves a similar purpose to the island in the first game, except that it's longer, more involved, relocated to a multi-tiered urban cityscape, and makes you play as a character named Roxas who almost looks like Sora, who has dreams of a boy named Sora, and who, after a couple hours of gametime, goes to a mansion in the woods and appears to transmogrify INTO Sora. This aspect of the game is incredibly confusing and totally unremarked upon in the advertising. It's even more confusing when Sora spends the rest of the game trying to figure out who the hell is this Roxas kid who keeps appearing to him in nightmares.

So, when the game begins, you're playing as a character who thinks he's the character that you thought you were going to be, and then he becomes that character but the character spends the rest of the story trying to figure out who the character he isn't is. This is why video games are perpetually two steps away from discovering their inner Bergman and Beckett and Borges and Burroughs.