Apocalypse—Why Now?

Why the recent spate of pop apocalypses?  I understood, after 9/11, why Americans wanted more Left Behind novels and Terminator films, but a decade later, we evidently face the same unmet desire.  Do the soft economy and ongoing wars really look that bleak?  And even if they do, does that excuse haphazard storytelling—or worse?

Darcy Pern shares a bed with her mother Sarah in a one-room flat on the title island in Anna North’s America Pacifica, an attempt to recreate American culture after the glaciers cover North America.  The money doesn’t always cover food, and they can seldom afford new shoes.  Sure, it’s squalid, but Sarah’s devotion makes it the only home Darcy knows.  So when Sarah doesn’t come home one evening, Darcy chucks everything to find her mother.

But first she finds decay and corruption so severe that her flat looks palatial.  While the island’s first families eat steak and rule the roost, those who reached the island on the last few rafts build shanties and cook seaweed on hibachis.  And, to Darcy’s alarm, it looks like Sarah took part in founding the island’s corrupt system.  That makes her a tempting ally when a last-boat survivor organizes a rebellion.

This book’s most frustrating trait is how good it almost appears.  Its promising premise and urgent conflict read like the first draft of something auspicious.  But North dedicates pages and pages to rococo science and narrative angst.  Our heroine feels like someone auditioning to play an emo girl.  And once North reaches a fitting climax, instead of pitching a rewarding denouement, she starts a whole new story thread, thirty pages from the end.

Perhaps, for a fulfilling apocalypse, we should ask people who actually believe in the Apocalypse.  People like theologian Leonard Sweet and teacher Lori Wagner, authors of The Seraph Seal.  Surely Christians could end the world with a bang.  Yet this attempt at liberal/progressive radical inclusivity feels, if anything, even less satisfying.  It seems strange to say about a book running over 500 pages, but this reads like an outline.

President Matthew Serafino and historian Paul Binder share a birthday, and a final destiny.  When a British philologist invites Binder to investigate a rare early Christian manuscript, Binder discovers his place in ancient prophecy, and reclaims his ageless Christian heritage.  But Serafino uses global power politics to his advantage, amassing a new kind of power that means more as the sky turns blood red and the seas turn swampy black.

Lutheran theologian Barbara Rossing demonstrates how LaHaye and Jenkins use gripping storytelling to slip shoddy theology under our noses.  Sweet and Wagner presumably want the same for their postmodern exegesis.  But not only do they display laissez-faire spirituality, they don’t tell much of a story.  It’s sweeping and synoptic, dependent on far more coincidences than readers would accept if God weren’t involved.

Eschatology looms in human myth.  When societies stopped believing God would end humanity, we created weapons and diseases to take God’s place.  Clear back in 1943, George Orwell claimed that Christianity was diminishing because fewer people felt we could really live forever.  If anything, that makes end-times literature more important, not less, and writers must show greater respect.

That’s why I like China Miéville’s Embassytown.  Unlike these others, this book knows what “world” means, and what “end” means.  It doesn’t mean destruction, blood, and abstract vindication—although it can mean these things.  But Miéville knows worlds end when our assumptions prove mistaken.  Worlds end when we change how we see them, and how we see ourselves.

On the edge of Immerser Space, humans establish an embassy to the Ariekei, a species that thinks like nothing we've encountered before.  Professional space traveller Avice Benner Cho returns to her homeworld among the Ariekei in time to see them fall before a human scheme that renders them defenseless.  But when the Ariekei won’t admit defeat, Avice realizes she's witnessing the end of her world.  The time comes to choose sides.

Despite a slow start, this novel proves most adept at demonstrating what happens when everything we hold inviolable collapses.  Its characters confront profound frustration, nihilistic gloom, and chaos before emerging renewed across the chasm.  Despite his secular inclinations, Miéville has crafted an essentially religious narrative, proven by his frequent theological terminology: prelapsarian, diaspora, teleology.  The Fall.

Perhaps Miéville alone understands that the world doesn’t stop when it ends.  And neither do we.  That makes his secular scripture uniquely satisfying among publishers’ recent tedious apocalypses.

The Big Bang Theory Theory (Part Two)

The Penny Polarization

Kaley Cuoco as Penny

If Sheldon and Leonard drive The Big Bang Theory, they are likewise driven by their relationships with women, especially Penny, the pretty neighbor whose appearance in the pilot episode initiates everything following.  Theater teacher Keith Johnstone claims that drama occurs when something upsets somebody’s accepted world, and for these nerds, Penny certainly does that.  She not only puts Leonard and Sheldon’s natural drives at odds, but she seemingly transforms every man she meets.

Superficially, Penny draws Leonard from his cocoon of boyish activities, an effect she initially has on Sheldon too.  (The pilot hints that Sheldon is a compulsive masturbator, and he originally shows insights into human relationships, though this vanishes after the first half-dozen episodes.)  She also defines the other principal men, highlighting Howard’s theatrical libido and Raj’s pathological sheepishness.  Though the boys remain largely interchangeable in each other’s company, a woman’s presence upends everything.

However, Penny resists analysis because she exists largely as she is.  She has no surname, no significant recurrent relationships, and little narrative purpose except to define the boys.  Not that she doesn’t exist as such: she loves Nebraska football, for instance, and as noted last week, Leonard tries in vain to watch the game with Penny’s friends.  But Penny significantly speaks only to Leonard at this party.  Even this personal trait exists only to define Leonard; Penny’s “friends” are Leonard’s props.

In 2007, film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a female stereotype who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”  Penny possesses Manic Pixie Dream Girl (hereinafter MPDG) traits, but the open-ended series format doesn’t let her remain vacant of inner life as cinematic MPDGs do.  The MPDG only exists intact in small doses, because life has a way of revealing real people’s less pretty aspects.

Unlike movie MPDGs, Penny has a history: she describes growing up in Nebraska, and on occasion, her troubled relationship with her father scrambles her happiness.  She bewails her meaningless job, and makes stabs at relationships with men.  But these traits primarily reflect the men’s needs: she complains about her job when she needs to contrast with Sheldon and Leonard’s professional satisfaction.  Her father issues emerge primarily when Leonard gets his dreaded visits from his mother.

Notably, each male lead is defined by some deep maternal conflict.  Sheldon’s mother affects religiosity that defies his own empiricism, while Leonard’s mother displays starchy detachment against his need for acceptance.  Similarly, Howard’s mother infantilizes the son who considers himself quite the Romeo, while Raj’s domineering mother probably influences his muteness around women his own age.

Of the four men, only Raj has a present father: Sheldon’s father died, probably before the pilot, while Howard mentions that his father left the family, and Leonard’s mother casually drops the bombshell that she has divorced Leonard’s father (who never appears onscreen).  Though Raj’s father appears with his mother on their online video chats, he seems cowed by her outsized personality, and frequently shrinks under her harsh glare.  Women in this world are either empowering or emasculating.

Between those two, Penny is clearly empowering.  She has a perky vivacity that Leonard finds infectious.  But on consideration, she’s not happy about anything.  She disparages her work, her family, her dates, and the kitchen sink.  As complaints mount, we realize that, in classic MPDG fashion, she’s happy because she’s happy.  Which is unfair, considering she can afford a one-bedroom Pasadena apartment to herself on waitressing wages, and has CalTech’s smartest men fighting over her.

Penny seems outwardly normal, and perhaps that’s why Leonard likes her: she’s pretty, but that may matter less than his desire for approval.  And on Planet Sitcom, she certainly is normal, with hip cynicism about her job and socially approved idiosyncrasies—as Sheldon notes in Season One, Episode 14, “The Nerdvana Annihilation,” women may collect stuffed animals, but men shouldn’t keep collecting toys.  So she’s normal because her eccentricities have social approval that the boys’ don’t.

But Penny seems most congenial when she tempers her desire to change Leonard with a willingness to be changed.  This shows in the Season Three finale, when she admits, after dumping Leonard, that she can’t date dumb guys anymore.  She’s more discerning, and though she alienates the meathead demographic, she’s more human to us.  Hence, Penny brings the MPDG down to earth.  Despite her limitations, this makes her an engaging character in an interesting story.

Part One: The Leonard/Sheldon Disjunction
Part Three: The Raj/Howard Continuum

What Makes WordBasket Scream?

Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to present a new review this week. Until next week, enjoy this 2009 classic from the archives of my newspaper days.

An open letter to youth fantasy publishers.

Dear Editors:
With deep regret I write begging you to resist the artistic bankruptcy of copying successful formulas. I recognize the temptation, when a form attracts huge audiences, to pluck that fruit while the market is ripe.

Please don’t.

This plea arose when some books crossed my transom showing notable lack of insight on your part. I’m staggered that you’d publish these books with straight faces.  Staggered and appalled. Marlene Perez’s Dead Is a State of Mind and Beth Fantaskey’s Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side court Stephanie Meyer’s market. But they do so in a low-calorie, eat-your-spinach way, mixing lukewarm romance with unscary horror.

Both feature high school girls confronting a world of magic and marvels.  With layers of secrets and generation-spanning conflicts, these books owe glaring debts to Meyer’s Twilight novels.  But Twilight succeeds by externalizing the psychological dread of adolescent love.  These novels fail by blunting such emotions, rendering them trivial.

Both feature entirely predictable romantic arcs.  That’s no problem.  For romance readers, the trip counts more than the destination.  My problem turns on how they handle the supernatural elements.  Or how they don’t handle them.

In Dead is a State of Mind, California girl Daisy Giordano inherits a heritage of psychic wonder.  Her mom helps the police investigate murders.  Ghosts, werewolves, and other bugaboos comprise her city’s council.  These scares supposedly are a closely guarded secret.  But nearly everybody is such a beast, or knows about them.  If a girl takes a ghost to her prom, and watches him dematerialize on the dance floor, that’s not playing it close to the chest.

For author Perez, one tumultuous school year is an afterthought.  She presents nearly seventy pages of knuckle cracking before we get the real conflict.  Then she drops clues so thick and furious that the characters must be truly dim not to realize who is guilty of what well before Spring Break.

No, this author is more interested in her characters.  But she’s not that interested.

In effective teen horror, shocks and terrors usually symbolize the turmoil of adolescence.  Perez takes that turmoil as written.  Her characters only change when the plot demands it.  One girl goes from “kind of” our protagonist’s friend to her “best” friend with no visible change in their relationship.  Likewise, Daisy’s boyfriend grows distant because the author needs him to.  Not what the story needs, mind you, since their relationship is a distracting subplot.

We want emotions!  Emotions like fear and joy!  Give us emotions!  Instead, Perez spends pages lovingly detailing effluvia like Daisy’s steps making dinner.  Pages she could spend on character and plot.  Beth Fantaskey, in Jessica’s Guide, offers copious emotions.  Big heaping piles of raw, jangling emotions.  Just none that use the horror potential persuasively.

Pennsylvania farm girl Jessica just wants to take her hunky neighbor to prom and survive finals.  Unfortunately a dashing Romanian vampire insists she’s a fellow bloodsucker heiress and they’re pledged to marry when she turns eighteen.  Wow, what a great concept.  Imagine the delicious directions such a novel could go.  Go on, imagine.  Are you imagining?

Good job: you’ve tried harder than Fantaskey.

There is absolutely no reason for a vampire in this novel.  No displays of supernatural prowess, no bone-chilling hunt, no blood drinking as family-friendly sexual euphemism.  Oh wait: there is a reason.  Because we’re courting Stephanie Meyer’s market.  Silly me.

The vampire is that romantic ideal, a bad boy with a heart of gold.  Jessica tames his wild side and unhitches his hidebound past.  But those traditions could be anything.  Our inamorato could be a Hell’s Angel, trust fund brat, or Mafia prince without changing the story one bit.  Fantaskey’s cross-genre audience likes horror to open doors for a wide range of emotions.  Completely ignoring that door for bog-standard emotions we could get in real life leaves me feeling ripped off.

Fantaskey and Perez should study Shaun Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia.  Though it proffers no bogeymen, this book taps emotions other authors vainly strive after.  These short urban fantasy yarns tingle with tension between deceptively timid prose and stunning illustrations.  That tension creates disquiet more powerful than any BOO a mere vampire could deliver.

And what illustrations!  A neighborhood sparkles with brightly painted tactical nuclear missiles.  A Raphael vision of the Peaceable Kingdom hides behind hanging laundry.  A young couple flees rampaging packs of carnivorous televisions.  My favorite shows two brothers hunting the edge of the map.  They solemnly cross an almost nuclear landscape of chicken shacks, gas stations, discount stores, and mini malls.  Suburbia as a Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell.

This collection perfectly captures transition and inconstancy which the other authors miss.  This subtlety, so difficult yet so captivating, is what publishers should seek in youth fantasy.

Come on, editors, you want it as much as we do.  Don’t follow formula; hold out for the real thing.  We who love to read are counting on you.

The Big Bang Theory Theory (Part One)

The Leonard/Sheldon Disjunction

Johnny Galecki (left) as Dr. Leonard Hofstadter;
Jim Parsons (right) as Dr. Sheldon Cooper

The success of CBS’s sitcom The Big Bang Theory, part of Chuck Lorre’s goofy pantheon, rests on its lead nerds.  Theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper is so supremely dedicated to his work that he has stopped trying to fit in with humanity or understand its complex and frustrating motivations.  Applied physicist Leonard Hofstadter would rather be liked, have relationships with women, and not be defined exclusively by his work and his idiosyncrasies.  It’s easy to regard Sheldon and Leonard as absurd comic stereotypes who “just don’t get it,” but their interactions reveal subtler drives.

I contend they represent not two conflicting dweeb types, but outward expressions of conflicting desires shared by anyone who has ever cared deeply enough about anything to let it separate themselves from others.  If audiences like Leonard because he embodies the part of us that yearns for freedom and normalcy, it follows that Sheldon embodies the part that would swear off distractions and vanish into whatever we most cherish.  Neither character represents science exclusively; anyone who has ever loved doing anything—rebuilding car engines, Italian cooking, raising our families—has felt these same conflicting desires.

Thus, we like Sheldon for the same reason we enjoy characters like Dr. House: we envy his liberty to disdain what others think, because we know we never can.  Though Jim Parsons plays Sheldon as plagued with excessive tics and tremors, his exaggerated manner only highlights the inner character.  Everyone struggles between wanting to fit in and be liked, and wanting to do what really animates us.  We know we’d dislike being at the receiving end of that arc.  Nevertheless, who wouldn’t rather throw off the pressure to fit in, be attractive, and let others impose themselves on is, in favor of painting, acting, gardening, or whatever we love?

Leonard understands why Sheldon is awful, and even occasionally comments on it.  Unlike Sheldon, Leonard seeks freedom to join other people, not ignore them: he wants the influences that bind others.  But that traps him.  He can never reject Sheldon because he needs Sheldon to like him, too.  That scientific immersion is part of him, too, which he must embrace, because he can’t be liked by others if he can’t simultaneously like himself.  Thus he continues to feed Sheldon’s superhero fantasies and play university politics when, at least sometimes, he’d rather abandon both and live free.

What, then, is freedom?  Leonard wants freedom to be liked by others.  But when he achieves that, he finds it unsatisfying.  In Season 3, Episode 6, “The Cornhusker Vortex,” Leonard tries to join his sweetheart Penny in watching football.  But he finds it ultimately frustrating and flees to join his friends.  Unfortunately, Leonard doesn’t just want others to like him, he wants others to like him as he is.  He cannot stop being Leonard, but he wants to be liked as Leonard, which proves not only frustrating, but the opposite of liberating.

During his courtship of Penny, Leonard’s inability to compromise causes conflict.  In Season 1, Episode 14, “The Nerdvana Annihilation,” the newest addition to Leonard’s science fiction memorabilia collection causes Penny to miss a day’s work, leading to confrontation.  The question arises: are Leonard’s toys part of him, or an attempt to flee the larger world?  Must he relinquish his simple joys in order to “put away childish things”?  Though the episode offers pat resolution, further consideration reveals that Leonard became a physicist for the simple joy of discovering how the world works.  His toys are part of that simple joyousness.

But in discovering how “the world” works, he’s isolated himself from daily living.  Quarks and mesons seem straightforward compared to the complexity of daily living.  Leonard can’t simultaneously observe the world and join it: he must make a choice.  In that way, Sheldon is freer than Leonard, because without the impulse to join, he has the liberty to stand outside and watch.  When the two halves of Leonard’s life come into inevitable conflict, Sheldon’s freedom from choosing must seem downright pleasurable.

Sheldon has freedom to disregard convention and follow whatever whims pull him.  Just because others don’t like or approve means little to him, because he’s forgotten more than most people ever know.  Indeed, others’ scorn gives him ammunition to delve further into himself.  Reality is a tedious imposition.

Thus Sheldon represents a part of anybody, not just smart people.  And Leonard exists because we need to resist.  We need other people to feel complete in ourselves.  We just—if we’re honest—would rather not.

Part Two: The Penny Polarization
Part Three: The Raj/Howard Continuum

Death to Passive Business: Long Live the Active Mind

Of the myriad explanations why the world economy has surged while America idles, my favorite is complacence.  Countries like India and China take an active hand pioneering technology, courting new manufacturing techniques, and cultivating a diverse workforce.  Meanwhile America maintains a post-WWII mindset that, if we make more stuff and manage our numbers, everything will flourish.  The last thirty years prove that doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did.

Business innovator Jack Trytten addresses that attitude in The G Point.  While corporate CEOs generally emerge from engineering or finance, these fields no longer have an unlimited hand in business.  To sell today, you can’t just make great stuff and wait passively for people to arrive.  The difference between success and failure lies in awareness, loyalty, and trust.  That is, today’s successful businesses run on marketing.

Customers are barraged by choices, many with little distinguishing them from one another.  If producers want to sell products, they need to woo customers, build rapport, and persuade customers to trust one company over another.  Trytten promises to turn businesses into “Growth Machines” if they nurture customer relationships, work to recognize customers’ values, and embrace change as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Growth through marketing, to Trytten, may mean sales.  But it more likely means service.  Products usually matter little to customers; instead, they buy something your product offers, like ease, prestige, or value.  As producer, you must know your customers and offer what they really want.  Whether by making superior product, demonstrating excellent customer service, or remaining loyal, you must actively offer what customers want

So it’s not enough to simply work to get rich.  Alan Sakowitz, author of Miles Away... Worlds Apart, warns against passively chasing after wealth.  After all, Sakowitz blew the lid off Florida’s biggest fraud case, Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.  When Sakowitz realized that Rothstein’s house of cards was worth billions, he had to step in, even though Rothstein had the governor, police chief, and half of Florida deep in his pocket.

But Sakowitz doesn’t just condemn a man who promised bottomless passive wealth.  People want to get rich; that’s hardly news.  Instead, Sakowitz contrasts Rothstein’s Fort Lauderdale corruption with his close-knit Jewish community in North Miami Beach.  This culture rewards people who take an active hand, do for each other, and act responsibly.  Sakowitz derives important lessons from his community on responsible business and ethical leadership.

Rothstein offered people passive opportunities to inflate themselves and get rich on paper.  Sakowitz’s community improves the world by putting others first and following the goals G-d offers.  Maybe people think they want the reward of wealth and prestige, but Sakowitz found that promise ultimately hollow.  His community works hard and makes do, especially in a down economy, but they have something worth working for.

Phil Cooke’s desires are less specific than Trytten or Sakowitz, but in Jolt!, he urges readers to take a similar active hand.  In a society where change has become commonplace, Cooke says you cannot stand pat.  But, like Sakowitz, he also rejects arrogance and greed.  Because of that, his standards sometimes seem contradictory: you’re responsible for your professional advancement, but you must also look out for others.  You need to follow your bottom line, but you also need to chase spiritual goals that leave a positive legacy.

But that very contradictory nature emphasizes Cooke’s point.  We can’t just accept his advice like placid puppies when life demands we take control.  Cooke says we need to think, take responsibility, and show ourselves active.  Cooke—a committed Christian, but also a self-made man and media tycoon—says we need to captain our own ships.

Importantly, Cooke doesn’t make lofty promises that effort makes us rich.  Leave that for the passive Rothsteins of the world.  Instead, Cooke says an active life gives us meaning.  I wish more executives focused on business as an active, ethical calling that offers purposeful life.  The epidemic passivity that crashed our economy three years ago hasn’t just speared our retirement funds; it’s stripped modern life of meaning.

I blame MBA programs.  I’ve written about this before, but schools reward people who memorize lists of solutions and regurgitate them for tests.  This provides solutions to problems millions of people have already faced, but renders us powerless before new and uncharted situations.  I’d like to think this isn’t deliberate, but I’ve taught too long not to see patterns.  We need to shirk this cultural passivity if we want to face the wild complexity of modern, active life.