Loose Ends...
Aug. 12th, 2004 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatWell, got my first two paychecks this week - just need to deposit them. Picked up the second one this afternoon, had to leave work a little early to do it, but ate lunch at desk, and may stay a little later tomorrow to make up for it. That's one month's rent taken care of at least. Was going to do laundry tonight but wimped out. Laundry requires lugging the bag and cart down three flights of steps, three blocks, to the laundramat, plus two hours sitting there waiting for it to get done, then folding the clothes. Didn't have the energy.
Work is...paying my rent at the moment. And providing me with an opportunity to learn and hone skills in Lotus Notes and Excel. Also I apparently haven't forgotten Contract law, still can analyze a contract quickly and efficiently regardless of what it is for. This is a good thing, I suppose. Not sure where this will take me, except that it's incredibly ironic since my least favorite courses in law school were Contracts.
In other news, attempting to get myself to write creatively again, but self-conscious. I'm wondering if this conversational writing style I've adopted for online writing has hurt me somewhat? Also maybe I'm reading/scanning one too many writer's blogs? While I've learned a lot, they can be a tad intimidating. One starts wondering if one has the chops.
Lately, I've been struggling to remember what I know on POV writing. I normally just write what comes naturally, which is third person close - and I don't think too much about it. Now I'm wondering if I should?
Have a couple of ideas, just struggling with fleshing them out.
One is a sci-fi fantasy. One real world. Probably should stick with the real world one, but the fantasy one actually has stuff written on it. And it's easier to work on a work in progress, than something entirely new. Decisions. Decisions.
Riskiest TV show is hands down Nip/Tuck. IF you saw it this week you know why. The show actually did something that I haven't seen many other TV shows attempt. An edgy no-holds-barred adult show, Nip/Tuck continues to push the envelope.
In this week's episode, the lead character, Dr. Scean McNamara, who has up until this point had things fairly easy - a successful plastic surgery practice with his best friend, a family, a lovely wife, and the ability to help others with surgery, had the rug pulled out from under him. A man of logic, Dr. McNamara does not believe in God nor does he embrace any religion. He believes religion is false and provides false promises. He lives very well thank you without it. He trusts his practice, his friend,
his family, his world - he has faith in that, he does not need to have faith in something he can't see, hear or taste. That isn't logical.
What he doesn't know is that his wife and best friend slept together 17 years ago, still harbor feelings for each other but have never acted on them again, and that his 17 year old son is actually his best friend's. Nor does he know that the secret is slowly unhinging his wife, who has an outbreak of shingles this week. (She'd only discovered the secret the year before, up until that point she assumed the boy was Scean's). Yes it sounds like a bad soap opera, but the way the writers handle the reveal is anything but. They combine the serial expertly with the stand-a-lone/issue of the week, this week's patient is a young woman who appears to be suffering from the stigmata. The writers examine through her stigmata the ways we physically torture ourselves out of guilt or desire for control and the whole issue of faith. Why we need to believe in something outside ourselves. One of the characters, an anestheiologist who is in her late 40s and homosexual, desperately wants to get pregnant and does finally, through artificial insemination, with the help of Scean's best friend, the beautiful but somewhat self-centered bad boy, Dr. Christian Troy. Then she discovers she has a child with Down's Syndrom and tries desperately to have faith it will be okay, even asks the stigmata girl to bless her. But when push comes to shove, she doesn't have faith, and confesses to Troy that she aborted it for the same reason she asked him to contribute sperm, having always considered herself an ugly freakish woman, she desperately needed her child to be beautiful. (This was keeping with the character who tells Dr. Troy in an earlier episode that she had waited until her father died, because he used to say "at least you're unlikely to have kids".) Troy meanwhile is heartbroken, he would have loved the child no matter what and can't believe she only saw him as a pretty face or thinks that's all he cares about. Then we have the girl, the nun, the Priest, and the Catholic Church - which needs the girl's miraculous condition to get funding and attract parishioners. Plus all the people who need to believe in the girl. When Dr. McNamara condemns the Church for using the girl as a sort of symbol to keep their Church alive, requesting they stop the parishioners from turning his practice into a shrine, the Priest tells him that sooner or later he will hit a point in his life where he desperately needs to believe in something. Plus, he points out - the patient he just operated on would never have found him without the girl being there.
That faith sometimes is the only thing that keeps people going and if this girl can help them - even if the stigmata is not real - where's the harm?
In odd turn of events: The girl appears to actually have the stigmata, the blood in the oddly shaped wounds in her feet isn't hers. Perplexed by this McNamara goes home to his family, and his guilt-ridden wife unable to contain herself much longer, tells him the truth about his son. McNamara's world shifts. He tells her to leave his house. He goes after Christian and when he finally does violently confront Christian, Christian has just been told by the anestheiologist that she aborted his child. The last scene of the piece takes place in Church. McNamara has finally gone to religion. He has decided for the first time in his life to believe in something illogical. And here is where the show surprised me.
If you expected to see Touched by An Angel or the Amends episode from BTVS? You would have been sorely disappointed. This may be one of the few times I've seen a TV show not go for the comforting ending. The girl admits to McNamara that she is a fraud. Informs him that the Nun, Sister Agatha, planned the whole thing - created the girl's wounds, put her own blood in them. They did it to ensure the girl wouldn't go to the County Hospital and that Sister Agatha's Home would get funding. God doesn't exist, the girl tells Scean. He can't find any comfort here.
So McNamara stares into space, lost.
Wow.
The show doesn't tell us God exists or doesn't exist, it just
says the world is the way it is. Risky thing to do in these troubled times.
The other show that surprised me was The 4400
which remained smartly ambiguous until the very end.
The twist in that show, took it a step above every alien abuduction storyline I've seen. Surprisingly innovative, yet conventional at the same time. If you get the chance to check out this gem, do so. Like Nip/Tuck it does something I'm not sure Angel The Series ever accomplished successfully, which is the combo stand-a-lone/serial format. A couple of episodes introduced guest characters that existed only for the space of those episodes, they were well drawn, you cared about them, and you were sorry to see them go. It was sort of like watching an anthology within the serial format. The principal characters were also complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. No clear good guys or bad guys here. It's not a perfect series. A couple of the characters felt a tad forced in places. There's a baby storyline that veers closely towards cliche and convention. Outside of that? The series held my interest. It also pushed forward the somewhat existentialist view of a random universe, except with pattern, suggesting if we could only see the pattern, maybe we could change it and make things better.
Last of the group is Rescue Me which is not as good as the first two. Dennis Leary is wonderful.
The acting in general is quite good. And this week's episode distracted me because the church they were filming in looked alarmingly like the Church I used to go to in Brooklyn. I spent a good portion of the episode trying to figure out if it was the same church. Doubt it. But you never know. The problem with Rescue Me is it does fall into convention too much and seems far too interested in shocking me with sexual hijinks (this week S&M and three-somes) and foul language, then story. When it's good, it's focusing on Leary - his family relationships, and his relationships with the ghosts, his psychological trauma. And there's a nifty bit on a man whose dealing with post-traumatic stress through poetry. But the story on gay-bashing, sexual hijinks, and the fear of being seen as a homosexual have been done to death by now. It felt slow in places and fairly predictable, I kept waiting for things to happen. On the other hand, I enjoy the dark cynical edge, Leary's world-weary Fireman who is equal parts hero and anti-hero, struggling to just make it in this life, while being haunted by his cousin - reminds me in some respects of Angel being haunted by Spike. In fact Leary's character reminds me a great deal of a real-world version of Angel. It's not quite as good as Leary's last venture in my opinion, the darkly humorous The Job which I missed most of because it was opposite Angel. But it's worth a look.
Okay bed calls. Must mosey off.
Work is...paying my rent at the moment. And providing me with an opportunity to learn and hone skills in Lotus Notes and Excel. Also I apparently haven't forgotten Contract law, still can analyze a contract quickly and efficiently regardless of what it is for. This is a good thing, I suppose. Not sure where this will take me, except that it's incredibly ironic since my least favorite courses in law school were Contracts.
In other news, attempting to get myself to write creatively again, but self-conscious. I'm wondering if this conversational writing style I've adopted for online writing has hurt me somewhat? Also maybe I'm reading/scanning one too many writer's blogs? While I've learned a lot, they can be a tad intimidating. One starts wondering if one has the chops.
Lately, I've been struggling to remember what I know on POV writing. I normally just write what comes naturally, which is third person close - and I don't think too much about it. Now I'm wondering if I should?
Have a couple of ideas, just struggling with fleshing them out.
One is a sci-fi fantasy. One real world. Probably should stick with the real world one, but the fantasy one actually has stuff written on it. And it's easier to work on a work in progress, than something entirely new. Decisions. Decisions.
Riskiest TV show is hands down Nip/Tuck. IF you saw it this week you know why. The show actually did something that I haven't seen many other TV shows attempt. An edgy no-holds-barred adult show, Nip/Tuck continues to push the envelope.
In this week's episode, the lead character, Dr. Scean McNamara, who has up until this point had things fairly easy - a successful plastic surgery practice with his best friend, a family, a lovely wife, and the ability to help others with surgery, had the rug pulled out from under him. A man of logic, Dr. McNamara does not believe in God nor does he embrace any religion. He believes religion is false and provides false promises. He lives very well thank you without it. He trusts his practice, his friend,
his family, his world - he has faith in that, he does not need to have faith in something he can't see, hear or taste. That isn't logical.
What he doesn't know is that his wife and best friend slept together 17 years ago, still harbor feelings for each other but have never acted on them again, and that his 17 year old son is actually his best friend's. Nor does he know that the secret is slowly unhinging his wife, who has an outbreak of shingles this week. (She'd only discovered the secret the year before, up until that point she assumed the boy was Scean's). Yes it sounds like a bad soap opera, but the way the writers handle the reveal is anything but. They combine the serial expertly with the stand-a-lone/issue of the week, this week's patient is a young woman who appears to be suffering from the stigmata. The writers examine through her stigmata the ways we physically torture ourselves out of guilt or desire for control and the whole issue of faith. Why we need to believe in something outside ourselves. One of the characters, an anestheiologist who is in her late 40s and homosexual, desperately wants to get pregnant and does finally, through artificial insemination, with the help of Scean's best friend, the beautiful but somewhat self-centered bad boy, Dr. Christian Troy. Then she discovers she has a child with Down's Syndrom and tries desperately to have faith it will be okay, even asks the stigmata girl to bless her. But when push comes to shove, she doesn't have faith, and confesses to Troy that she aborted it for the same reason she asked him to contribute sperm, having always considered herself an ugly freakish woman, she desperately needed her child to be beautiful. (This was keeping with the character who tells Dr. Troy in an earlier episode that she had waited until her father died, because he used to say "at least you're unlikely to have kids".) Troy meanwhile is heartbroken, he would have loved the child no matter what and can't believe she only saw him as a pretty face or thinks that's all he cares about. Then we have the girl, the nun, the Priest, and the Catholic Church - which needs the girl's miraculous condition to get funding and attract parishioners. Plus all the people who need to believe in the girl. When Dr. McNamara condemns the Church for using the girl as a sort of symbol to keep their Church alive, requesting they stop the parishioners from turning his practice into a shrine, the Priest tells him that sooner or later he will hit a point in his life where he desperately needs to believe in something. Plus, he points out - the patient he just operated on would never have found him without the girl being there.
That faith sometimes is the only thing that keeps people going and if this girl can help them - even if the stigmata is not real - where's the harm?
In odd turn of events: The girl appears to actually have the stigmata, the blood in the oddly shaped wounds in her feet isn't hers. Perplexed by this McNamara goes home to his family, and his guilt-ridden wife unable to contain herself much longer, tells him the truth about his son. McNamara's world shifts. He tells her to leave his house. He goes after Christian and when he finally does violently confront Christian, Christian has just been told by the anestheiologist that she aborted his child. The last scene of the piece takes place in Church. McNamara has finally gone to religion. He has decided for the first time in his life to believe in something illogical. And here is where the show surprised me.
If you expected to see Touched by An Angel or the Amends episode from BTVS? You would have been sorely disappointed. This may be one of the few times I've seen a TV show not go for the comforting ending. The girl admits to McNamara that she is a fraud. Informs him that the Nun, Sister Agatha, planned the whole thing - created the girl's wounds, put her own blood in them. They did it to ensure the girl wouldn't go to the County Hospital and that Sister Agatha's Home would get funding. God doesn't exist, the girl tells Scean. He can't find any comfort here.
So McNamara stares into space, lost.
Wow.
The show doesn't tell us God exists or doesn't exist, it just
says the world is the way it is. Risky thing to do in these troubled times.
The other show that surprised me was The 4400
which remained smartly ambiguous until the very end.
The twist in that show, took it a step above every alien abuduction storyline I've seen. Surprisingly innovative, yet conventional at the same time. If you get the chance to check out this gem, do so. Like Nip/Tuck it does something I'm not sure Angel The Series ever accomplished successfully, which is the combo stand-a-lone/serial format. A couple of episodes introduced guest characters that existed only for the space of those episodes, they were well drawn, you cared about them, and you were sorry to see them go. It was sort of like watching an anthology within the serial format. The principal characters were also complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. No clear good guys or bad guys here. It's not a perfect series. A couple of the characters felt a tad forced in places. There's a baby storyline that veers closely towards cliche and convention. Outside of that? The series held my interest. It also pushed forward the somewhat existentialist view of a random universe, except with pattern, suggesting if we could only see the pattern, maybe we could change it and make things better.
Last of the group is Rescue Me which is not as good as the first two. Dennis Leary is wonderful.
The acting in general is quite good. And this week's episode distracted me because the church they were filming in looked alarmingly like the Church I used to go to in Brooklyn. I spent a good portion of the episode trying to figure out if it was the same church. Doubt it. But you never know. The problem with Rescue Me is it does fall into convention too much and seems far too interested in shocking me with sexual hijinks (this week S&M and three-somes) and foul language, then story. When it's good, it's focusing on Leary - his family relationships, and his relationships with the ghosts, his psychological trauma. And there's a nifty bit on a man whose dealing with post-traumatic stress through poetry. But the story on gay-bashing, sexual hijinks, and the fear of being seen as a homosexual have been done to death by now. It felt slow in places and fairly predictable, I kept waiting for things to happen. On the other hand, I enjoy the dark cynical edge, Leary's world-weary Fireman who is equal parts hero and anti-hero, struggling to just make it in this life, while being haunted by his cousin - reminds me in some respects of Angel being haunted by Spike. In fact Leary's character reminds me a great deal of a real-world version of Angel. It's not quite as good as Leary's last venture in my opinion, the darkly humorous The Job which I missed most of because it was opposite Angel. But it's worth a look.
Okay bed calls. Must mosey off.
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Re: Nip/Tuck
Date: 2004-08-12 09:33 pm (UTC)The whole story arc was one of the boldest things I'd ever seen on televison, particularly in how unflinchingly and unapologetically it dealt with such a controversial subject, and so firmly held its grounds in its beliefs, while still treating the pregnant woman's experience with the proper amount of gravity. It was not depicted as an easy decision, either before or after the procedure.
Please pardon the double negative!
Date: 2004-08-12 09:37 pm (UTC)Replace that "haven't" with "Having..." and that whole sentence will make a lot more sense. ;-)
interesting juxtaposition
Date: 2004-08-12 10:30 pm (UTC)Some of the discussions of the Angel storyline on Darla's pregnancy, like those in the previous thread, have gotten me thinking about whether ME's writers intended any comment on when the soul enters the body. The fact that Connor's soul affects Darla is a powerful statement, one that, as many have commented, led to an equally powerful moment when Darla willingly gives up her life to ensure her baby's survival. I think the story walked a fine line on the question of when Connor's soul was 1st present. Certainly we have nothing to go on for the early stages of the pregnancy, since we don't know about it till she's visibly close to term. But from then on...does Darla seek children's blood because she's soulless, or because she's fighting the effects of the soul? Is the soul there when she goes to "visit Daddy," or not until the rooftop scene when she tells Angel she loves her unborn child? Opinions may vary, as always, but I don't think we can know for sure. What we do know, unequivocally, is that the soul is present before birth...in the Buffyverse. Interesting choice, & probably one that doesn't reflect the political views of the writers but makes the story a compelling one.
I gotta ask, Rob, since I don't get the high-end (or even the middle!) cable stations--when Nip/Tuck showed the baby in heaven, did it visibly have Down's syndrome, w/the folds in the eyelids? And s'kat, my 1st reaction to reading about the anesthesiologist's feelings about her looks, & the earlier character who waited to have children because of her father's putdowns, was somewhat horrified at how bad these women felt about their looks. But in the context of a show about plastic surgeons, it fits all too well. I wonder if any of this will lead the main characters to have 2nd thoughts about what they do for a living.
Re: interesting juxtaxposition
Date: 2004-08-12 10:42 pm (UTC)Oh, the baby in heaven I was talking about was on Six Feet Under, and didn't have Downs syndrome. The character chose to not have the baby, because she was only 18, single, and not ready for it, not because of a possible health problem the baby might have. I didn't see the Nip/Tuck episode yet.
Re: interesting juxtaxposition--oops
Date: 2004-08-14 10:58 pm (UTC)Sorry, Rob, I must have been rushed &/or up too late when I wrote that. Yep, sure enough, that's what you said, quite clearly. I'll have to read more carefully.
But at least I seem to be typing carefully enough. Don't know how it happened, but when "Re:" was added to the subject line, so was an extra "x" in "juxta[x]position." I looked at the notice in my inbox & thought, "How'd I do that? I must've been rushed &/or up too late!" But when I came back to s'kat's LJ to reply, it was spelled right in my message! I fixed it in my modified subject line for this message. OK, now I've probably jinxed my spelling...I'll have to check extra carefully for a while.
Re: Nip/Tuck
Date: 2004-08-13 07:28 am (UTC)Re: Nip/Tuck
Date: 2004-08-13 07:56 am (UTC)What I thought was interesting about the way Six Feet Under handled it is that it was emotionally devestating for the character until she had that dream, which set her mind at ease. There was no agonizing debate beforehand, though. She found out she was pregnant and there was no question in her mind from the start that she was not going to have the baby. Her sadness afterwards was real and could probably be qualified as "emotionally devestating," but it was clearly explained also that a great deal of this was due to hormones.
But Nip/Tuck surprised me, as it did several times that episode, by not doing the usual thing, there was no agonizing debate beforehand, we just see the character get the procedure and then deal with the fallout. And the fallout turns out to be less about how the characters feel about abortion but about how they feel about themselves, so it was pretty interesting.
Although I can't say for sure, since I didn't see it, the situations do sound relatively similar...not the reasons behind the abortions, but how they were handled non-moralistically and focused more on character than on issue. I am looking forward to seeing this Nip/Tuck ep, though. I started watching the first season on DVD recently and am still very early on, but the show is so addictive, it shouldn't take me too long to get through the episodes and up to this one!
Re: Nip/Tuck
Date: 2004-08-13 06:38 pm (UTC)Me too. I haven't seen anything past the first two seasons when I traded Showtime and HBO for the much cheaper DTV box sans PRemium Channels. (ie. I have the next to cheapest version of cable).
Nip/Tuck is on F/X and available on Standard cable as well as DTV.
But Nip/Tuck surprised me, as it did several times that episode, by not doing the usual thing, there was no agonizing debate beforehand, we just see the character get the procedure and then deal with the fallout. And the fallout turns out to be less about how the characters feel about abortion but about how they feel about themselves, so it was pretty interesting.
That is what surprised me as well. Instead of preaching to the audience, the writers dug deeper and asked what these events meant to their characters. They "showed" instead of "told". A rarity now days on television.
The twists - Christian's betrayal hurt Scean more than Julia's. The abortion - the character chose it out of fear of having an ugly child, not a disabled child so much as an ugly one. This was the one character in the series that up to this point, we believed was above such things, except for the little hints here and there all along. And of course the stigmata storyline - it isn't true after all.
Agree it does get a tad melodramatic at times. But the characters are so complex and the use of the plastic surgery cases as metaphors for the characters problems is delicious. In some respects it reminds me of what Whedon may have wanted to create in the later seasons of BTVS but wasn't quite able to manage, possibly because he couldn't find the appropriate metaphor for adult issues? Nip/Tuck meanwhile has nailed one.