Matt Cahill's blog
Coming up in November! I’m sooo excited (and nervous!) to be interviewed by CBC Radio One’s Gill Deacon for her program Here and Now Toronto. It’s going to be LIVE on November 1st @ 4:45pm (and it will be archived for future listening). I hope you can tune in!
Regular visitors have probably been frustrated with the lack of updates here. So have I. The truth is that I’ve been swamped with doing the finishing touches on Radioland…and taking care of an ailing parent. I cannot express how exhausting the last while has been, on so many personal levels.
The good news is that, as of Friday, I signed-off on the last of the changes to the manuscript. It is, for all intents and purposes, out of my hands…which is both satisfying and frightening.
I finally have had time to update my website as well as post an update here (and add Radioland to the sidebar links). My next task is to gird myself for publicity, which I’m both excited for…and intimidated af. If there’s one thing I need to work on it’s getting out of my Writer Head and speaking about the book so that someone who isn’t in my head can understand what it’s actually about, which would be easier if I hadn’t written a fairly complex novel. There are worse problems.
Also…
I should mention that Radioland was picked as one of CBC Books fall fiction titles!
Anyhoo, I hope to be here more regularly.
A while back, I read a lovely piece about David Sylvian, vocalist with 80s new wave band Japan and an accomplished solo artist, and was struck by an observation he made, reflecting upon hearing a track by ambient artist Christian Fennesz:
‘What I liked about his work is that there’s a melodicism to it. It wasn’t all sample manipulation. lt really had a heart to it somewhere. I was talking to Ryuichi [Sakamoto] about two years ago and he said, “Do you still listen to music?” I said, “Well, I still tend to buy a lot of music and I listen to a fair amount of it. But I’m not touched by it. I’m not moved by it.” He said, “Yeah, that’s right. It’s just a process of education. It’s a means of finding out what is now possible with this or that technology. You’re no longer listening to music. You’re doing research.” And what I liked about Christian’s work is that there it all was: modern technology, but in the service of the heart. I always come back to the heart.
There are two things that stood out to me in this passage. The first was Sylvian speaking about how his relationship with music had changed. So, first, I suppose it needs to be contextualized that when someone is working in a creative field they should (unsurprisingly) not only be affected by but also actively familiarizing themselves with other artist’s works. The problem is that, after a number of years/decades, it can feel as if everything has been done. Note Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s question; it’s not Have you heard anything good lately. His question is distressing: Do you still listen to music? It raises the spectre of a rupture between an artist and their craft. Sylvian’s answer and Sakamoto’s response, while relieving also point to a sense of being lost. “Yeah,” says Sakamoto, referring to his listening habits, “that’s right. It’s just a process of education. It’s a means of finding out what is now possible with this or that technology. You’re no longer listening to music. You’re doing research.” In other words, the naive curiosity which can be so important for any artist has become dormant. Yes, you are still listening to music, but it’s become reference material; a question of keeping up; who’s doing what with which device.
I have not become anesthetized to music, and the reason for this is most likely because I am not a professional in that industry, and I’m thankful for this. I do relate to this situation with respect to TV and film however. Having gone to school and eked out a career in televised programming followed by long-form motion pictures, it became second nature to watch (and deconstruct) a wide variety of works. And having worked in the sausage factory for 20 years I must admit to feeling a resonant frequency with regards to moving pictures at least, reading Sylvian’s conversation with Sakamoto. Yes, I’m still watching shows and movies, but am I affected by them or am I simply filling in time with reference material? Let’s just say that I am not easily affected these days.
Which brings me to the second thing about this passage: deliverance. In coming across the track from Christian Fennesz, Sylvian seems to rediscover something. Cliché though it may sound, there is the sense of having faith restored. And who could not be struck by something that, while technically accomplished, is “in the service of the heart”? In other words, there is honesty in this work, and depth. Something that is ultimately restorative and worthy of kick-starting another artist’s relationship with their work once more.
I share this because it’s good to share stories of inspiration, and good to admit that sometimes inspiration can be hard to find.
I’ve been wondering whether to respond to an essay that was posted on VICE Magazine a couple of weeks ago, and so this is my meagre attempt. The hesitation you are picking up is based upon the fact that it’s an almost impossible essay for anyone to attempt to write; impossible because its subject matter contains so many perspectives — ground level, professional, clinical; historical, academic, unacknowledged — that one would need to write a thick book in order to begin to encompass just a notion of the territory that is being covered. The fact that I’m blogging about it means it’s stirred up some feelings (some conflicted) that need to be put on paper. Mostly this reflects well on the piece, despite the fact I’m not exactly a fan of VICE in general.
The essay, The Movement Against Psychiatry, by Shayla Love, lays itself out from the beginning with a profile of two people with two very different mental health challenges: one of whom, it’s argued, might have been helped by being institutionalized (even if against her will) in order to prevent her downward spiral; the other sought psychiatric assistance but found herself over-prescribed with various medications, without a sense of there being an overarching logic or consideration for the underlying causes of her situation, or the side effects of what she was prescribed. In this comparison we are presented with an outline of the challenges facing mental health in general and modern psychiatry specifically.
We are then presented with three groups: the psychiatric orthodoxy, those who belong to what is known as the anti-psychiatry movement, and those who belong (or fall into) what is referred as “critical psychiatry.” The first glimpse of the impossibility the author faces — if using those two persons’ examples off the top didn’t do it — is that, if you stop and consider it, there are inevitably going to be many voices within each of these three groups, ranging from the open-minded to the downright neglectful. For my purposes, it is specifically with how those who belong to the last two groups are separated from each other that I think the piece finds its greatest challenge. A key problem is that there are those who are self-declaratively anti-psychiatric — ranging from wanting to abolish psychiatry altogether to those wanting to revolutionize the foundations upon which patients’ conditions are considered — and those whose philosophy might be considered by the establishment as anti-psychiatric, in a pejorative sense, but who for all intents fall into the “critical psychiatry” group.
To her credit, the author touches early upon the detractive nature of the term anti-psychiatric, however my criticism is that the essay misses an opportunity to convey the power those in the psychiatric establishment have who wield this term, compared to those who are not medical doctors (perhaps researchers, perhaps academics, or clinicians) but who nonetheless have pointed questions about the prevailing logic of certain psychiatric interventions (whether it be about overprescription of drugs, or the use of ECT). That term and its connotations, in other words, can be weaponized, whether or not it is used accurately or as an attempt to discredit or dismiss the person in question entirely.
But I want to be fair where fair is relevant: the author also correctly exposes the fact that the waters of the anti-psychiatry movement are muddied by the more than passive involvement of the Church of Scientology. They have a stake, albeit a selfish one, which is fitting for a cult. This does no one any favours in this debate, and only makes it easier (see last paragraph) to punch down from the psychiatric establishment with only the briefest mention that a critic may have ties to Scientology.
And I will admit that there are a host of well-respected voices who, if pressed, I might put in the “critical psychiatry” camp, who do themselves no favours by using only the most self-serving, one-sided Mad in America articles to labour their (otherwise respectable) arguments. I find by contrast that my professional perspective ends up being more nuanced (which gives me pause given my comparative lack of academic credentials). I believe in a biopsychosocial approach to mental health (whereby causation might be one, or a mix of all). I can tell you anecdotally that, yes, there are people who are temporarily helped by medication, who are able to use that stabilization to pursue non-biomedical interventions like talk therapy. It’s good to question the underlying chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression, but if someone achieves stability enough to be able to advocate for themselves (and to make choices such as tapering off said medication) then so be it.
I think what gets lost in the debate, which can often pit two highly qualified individuals speaking in terms that are highly specialized and often theoretical — and again, I think the author does their best to come back to this point — is that, at ground level, regular people who need help are harmed. Harmed, because their GP likens depression to something like diabetes, insisting that their patient will need to be on drugs for the remainder of their life, or puts their patient on a high dosage of a toxic anti-anxiety med like clonazepam without mandating regular check-ups in order to potentially lessen the dosage. Or they are harmed because community organizations are often ill-equipped to provide consistent space for people who suffer from psychotic episodes. Or they are harmed by an untrained psychotherapist who operates in a province or state where the profession is unregulated, thus allowing practically anyone, regardless of credentials, to see clients.
I keep hearing the word “patchwork” when the mental health support system is mentioned. That is what the average person faces: a patchwork of often disconnected resources with no sense of guidance about what is best for them and their situation. Moving closer to a system that has the capability to provide continuity for each individual within a public health system should be the priority. While there is a need for debate, the largely sectarian nature of it only seems to put that possibility further away.
Two years ago, my partner, Ingrid, launched Gladstone Press. The purpose? To reissue classic books (or books that should be considered classics if they aren’t already household names) with modern design and high quality materials. Both the media and the general public have been very receptive to the idea.
Ingrid, if you don’t know, is one of the top book designers around, and so Gladstone Press is a natural fit for her, and I’m always impressed by her dedication and commitment to each title that she selects.
Especially in light of how hard publishing has been hit by COVID, it hasn’t been an easy path lately for publishers or indie bookstores, but I’m happy to see people are still ordering her titles.
If you haven’t figured out your summer reading list yet, check out her site. You can order direct from Ingrid or you can ask your local bookstore to order a copy for you.
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I’m sometimes in the habit of cross-posting from this blog to my professional blog, but this time it’s the other way around. I think it fits.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the human face behind our central idea of how an economy works — something we have long needed reminding of, lest those of us who are able to pay our rents and leases become too comfortable with abstract terms such as “supply chains” and “stakeholders”. We are reminded that we are a society of interdependent people — individuals, families, communities — and it’s overdue that we see our economies the same: people require support when tragedy makes their livelihood untenable.
And just as the pandemic has made us humbly pause to consider the society we have constructed (or, if I am feeling cynical, we have allowed others to manage so long as it doesn’t affect our ability to pay too much for our livelihood), so too has the tragic, preventable deaths of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor in the U.S. and in this country, Regis Korchinski-Paquet and Chantel Moore to name just two from each country in the last two months, forced us (and not without the persistence of the Black Lives Matter movement) to reckon with our society’s implicit racism and how that directly affects the lives (not just livelihoods) of Black and Indigenous individuals in particular.
We are reckoning not with the isolated actions of “a few bad apples” but with the concept of systemic racism, that is, when racist or white supremacist notions are baked into the very structure of certain communities, businesses, and government agencies. This is particularly evident within policing organizations.
I’ve previously written about the idea of social justice, and my own path from a place ignorance. There is a great sense of exhaustion I’ve heard from members of the BIPOC (that is, “Black, Indigenous, [and] People of Colour”) community. The exhaustion of having white friends and colleagues continually approach them to ask for resources to help them understand racism (imagine asking a victim of gun violence to help explain the problems with firearms licensing). The exhaustion that comes with wondering whether this will be yet another blip of media interest in which hopes are raised only to be let down.
A different world is possible, but the time is past due for white folk like myself to do the heavy lifting, to seek out and reference the many (many) resources out there already written by the BIPOC community that will help people like me contextualize and understand how racism is systemic, and — just as importantly — to help others like me better understand this situation. As a therapist and active member of society it’s the least I can do.
For anyone who is curious, here are some resources I have no hesitation recommending:
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (book)
Black on Bay Street, by Hadiya Roderique (Globe and Mail essay)
The New York Times’ 1619 Project
The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King (book)
A last thought for you: there are no slow news days, only barriers to other peoples’ experience.
When I’m working with clients at my day job as a therapist, a lot of questions get asked. These can as often be prompted at the client’s request than from my own professional curiosity. However, at some point in the course of our work, one question will almost always be arrived at, regardless that finding its answer in a general or objective sense would seem intimidating: what’s normal supposed to be?
This question is provoked by the arrival of two large, often incompatible and almost always incongruent masses: our-normal — the nuanced consideration of the innate (though not necessarily immutable) principles and conditionings that define who we are as individuals — and normal-normal — the broader idea of how we should be both as individuals and with others, and our expectations for how society works. In our unprecedented present situation, given widespread self-isolation, a death count that isn’t stopping soon, and worldwide unemployment, to name just a few items, normal-normal seems less normal than it did previously.
I’ll start by saying that I’m pretty sure our-normal, who we are as individuals, isn’t going to change as much as some might fear. Individual change happens slowly, even when its intentional. That said, over the course of our current crisis we may feel different due to a host of serious inconveniences, which — depending upon socio-economic factors — might wreak havoc on our lives, even traumatize; this isn’t even to mention the ever-present tension and the fact most of us don’t know what the the future looks like beyond the next week. This is not a safe time, for anyone, and these sorts of situations don’t happen often on a worldwide scale. In light of this, if we find ourselves suffering anxiety or depression during this unsafe time, even if we haven’t experienced those things before, I don’t generally consider that to be a sign of our-normal changing; I would contend it’s a sign of our-normal reacting within an allowable range, given the present context. If anything we may end up seeing more of ourselves (the good and the meh).
For me, the prime question boils to: when this is all done, what’s normal-normal going to be? What will normal be like with respect to unemployment support and health care services? What’s normal like for travel and public gatherings? When we don’t even know the next time we’ll be allowed to sit in a pub or café — let alone our favourites because they might’ve gone out of business? When we don’t know when we’ll be seeing our next paycheque, what’s normal supposed to look like?
I’m tempted to look at normal like the passage of time from the standpoint of physics. Time doesn’t really pass, it just is. There isn’t really a 2pm — that’s just society trying to sort itself out so that we know when to sleep and when to feed the chickens. Given the unpredictable timeline ahead of us, I think we will need to look at normal-normal similarly. Most of us would readily acknowledge that words such as “normal” are open to subjective bias, even if at the same time we are using them to define objective standards because we have to, because humans. I think we may be less comfortable acknowledging that normal can be something as subject to change as it is to definition.
What’s happening, I feel, is not the suspension of normal-normal, or normal-normal being reprogrammed. Like being part of an engrossing movie only to catch a piece of fake scenery, we are jolted out of the way we have accepted our places in, and the construct of, pre-pandemic society. I see this as an opportunity to question to what degree normal-normal, beyond semantics, truly exists, and who benefits.
I feel it’s important not to get too hung up on restoring whatever our collective version of normal-normal was, like the last backup of a computer. Among other things, there’s a lot of inequality there. When our community, municipal, provincial, and federal representatives inevitably talk about moving forward I would prefer that we not reflexively reach for previous notions without first considering what can be addressed so that there is less inequality. I want to pay attention to the laws and precedents being laid down presently — like taking over a hotel in order to house the homeless, an initiative that was ignored by city council in the past — so that we are able not only to take care of ourselves and our communities today, but to think about the evolving normal-normal we want from this point forward.
As I might venture to share with a client, in answer to that inevitable question I opened with, whatever normal can be, whatever normal can include, we get to have a say.
In November of last year I decided to walk away from Twitter. There were a lot of things about it that were bugging me and, without making a big to-do, I logged off and deleted my browser and app shortcuts. I have not been back. Perhaps I will at some point.
Why did I leave? For a number of reasons that accumulated over time. Here’s an incomplete list, in no particular order:
Okay, so it’s a little more complicated.
A major attraction of social media is the lure of transparency. And there is a ridiculous amount of transparency. You have access to both the minuscule, quotidian drip-drops of individual human life but also world events happening in real time (KOBE BRYANT DEAD alongside 20% OFF SPORT JACKETS). Society has never before had this combination of immediacy and wide signal breadth. The volume of information is incredible, which also makes the proffering of forfeited information or divisive info-blasting all the more possible (and damaging).
In Yevgney Zamyatin’s novel We (which predated Orwell’s 1984), people under a totalitarian regime live in glass-walled apartment buildings, and thus, with their every action on display they (we) monitor and police themselves. The same can be made of Twitter and Instagram, where our thoughts, diatribes, party pics, and ever-present selfies are sent instantly to a potential audience of thousands.
I cannot imagine my 70s childhood under this sort of extreme transparency. What would the assassination of Anwar Sadat, or the Chilean coup d’ètat be like through the intense and unblinking lens of our current media landscape? Sure, we can look back and talk about things like cultural imperialism but how would those events have been exploited and plundered by the scandalously invested corporate media interests we have today? I cannot imagine what the early 80s, when I was entering puberty, would’ve been like, seeing the depressingly real possibility of thermonuclear war overshadowing our lives. I can imagine anxiety and depression on a level beyond what I already experienced. I can imagine suicide.
And then there is the interpersonal angle. As a therapist I often hear clients frustrated by the sight of friends, enemies, siblings, and exes seemingly having the time. of. their. goddamn. lives. Why? Because social media also acts as a combination hall of mirrors / highlight reel for people who may or may not be who they seem, or events that may or may never have happened in the way we see them. We, the viewer, permanently on the outside, can only guess. And if we are feeling less than confident (or worse, if our self-worth is particularly low) then our imaginations might construe in those fleeting, polished glimpses a dreamworld we aren’t invited into. We feel less, as a result. Our ultimate worth as people feels less because when we see ourselves in the real world, unfiltered, unpolished, not surrounded by laughing BFFs, it can feel as if we missed the boat. A lifeboat. A showboat. We end up feeling intrinsically less in every way. Don’t get me wrong, in client work I can invoke whatever expertise I have and tell someone it’s all a highlight reel, that no one is proudly posting selfies of themselves, alone, watching Dharma and Greg reruns with popcorn dust on their face. But when that person is feeling particularly vulnerable there’s no guarantee how they’ll feel when an acquaintance asks Did you see that video of ______ on Instagram?? and once more they are drawn into that alluring bauble-rich world.
Let’s not even get into how much time in our days are wasted scrolling to check user comments or mainlining “breaking” news updates. Let’s not even get into how populist politicians are exploiting the reactive nature of social media networks in order to sow chaos and divisiveness.
There are legitimate reasons we stick with social media platforms. Despite being seemingly abandoned to Moms and Dads, Facebook manages nonetheless to be an efficient way to organize social events with friends through its messaging app, or to share interesting articles. I’ve personally appreciated being able to follow numerous psychology researchers on Twitter, as well as musicians I admire. The problem is that each platform’s defects — the targeted bullying, the bots, the account hackers, the sanctimonious calling-out, as examples — are left for us, the users, to deal with and find solutions for.
I would love nothing more than to share news about my next book or short story being published, and to readily engage with readers (and other writers). I would also like to not see people I may know post things that are racist, or, more mundanely, inappropriate for a shared space. And here we come to another problem with social media: it can just as easily reflect and magnify our darkness, our ignorance, as much as it can broadcast our brilliant ideas about the world. I can’t fault the platform architects for that, though it would be disingenuous to suppose they hadn’t factored that bit of behavioural chaos into the algorithm.
I don’t know what to do with this because I don’t have an answer. For the time being I’ve decided to rotate my attention to whatever is least bothersome which also provides the value of communicating with people I know.
I don’t know how or when I got into ambient music. I can tell you there have been a few seminal contributors: classical music, movie soundtracks, minimalist and so-called world music composers, and the more spacious actors in pop/rock music.
Let’s start with a sort-of definition of ambient music, and I will begin by saying that I have no formal education in this realm. Ambient music is typically experimental and tends toward spaciousness and a lack of traditional (Western) song structure; it has its roots in the likes of 20th century composers such as John Cage, as well, during its development, contributions from traditional music from India and Japan, as well as from jazz. It can be a formless and electronic haze, or it could be all about exacting pattern and repetition using traditional instrumentation. There is also often a sense of the tactile. I will include some examples toward the end of this piece to begin to provide some context. At the end of the day, what is and isn’t strictly termed “ambient” is often more a question of the composer’s intent. You will just as likely see genre labels such as “minimalist,” “drone,” and “experimental” instead, as the term “ambient” can be a sort of kludge.
As a primary influence on me, classical music is a no-brainer, and like a lot of kids who grew up at the time I did, we were treated (or as I like to say, inculcated) to classical music through Bugs Bunny and Disney cartoons. As an adult I love the flourish and bombast of Shostakovich and Borodin, and the aching lyricism of Vivaldi and Bach. However, there is something undeniably mesmerizing about a brief section of Act II of Wagner’s opera Siegfried, where, through gorgeous use of instrumentation and dynamics we are surrounded by the quiet stirrings of nature — it surrounds the listener and one has no choice but to surrender to its formlessness. This formlessness is not something we often associate with something so strictly structured as classical* music.
As a movie buff, it makes perfect sense, given my exposure to classical music as a child, that movie soundtracks would inspire my appreciation of ambient music. Even in an epic space opera such as The Emperor Strikes Back there are many moments — particularly the suspenseful, quiet bits — where John Williams draws from classical roots, but of course, in order to create mood and retain timbre, sections end up as long stretches of almost abstract-sounding composition. Another perfect example would be the use of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey during the monolith scenes. Funny how sci-fi tends toward this direction.
A movie and a soundtrack that shook my foundations as a teenager was Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. While the imagery was both disturbing and inventive, it was my introduction to Philip Glass’ minimalist composition that entranced me. Its mantric dedication to repetition using an orchestral ensemble and use of church organ and choir during its more climactic parts was catnip to this kid. When, a year or so later after seeing this, I discovered that Glass had collaborated on an album with Ravi Shankar (1990’s Passages) I couldn’t resist picking up a copy at a classical/jazz record shop near where I worked as a photolab technician. It was love at first listen; while some might’ve thought that the two were at odds with each other — one an avant-garde composer, the other an Indian classicist — their collaboration (each took turns orchestrating the other’s compositions) was a major influence on me.
To save space here, I will briefly name three other significant musical influences: David Sylvian, Talk Talk, and Miles Davis. Sylvian’s Japan reunion of-sorts, Rain Tree Crow, only put out one album but it was a low-key combination of rock/jazz/experimental soundscapes with African rhythms that has had a lasting influence on how I decided to listen to music. Talk Talk’s last two albums — Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock — are rightly hailed as experimental masterpieces of pop-meets-improv jazz however a single song deserves mention, from their comparatively more formal pop album The Colour of Spring: April 5th. You can see where they were going with only that one song (and the album is wonderful as it is). Lastly, discovering Miles Davis’ album In A Silent Way was another key piece in my ad hoc self-education: the tactile nature of the instrumentation has been hugely influential on composers of all genres since then (and you can hear a motif from this album used on Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer’s Twine).
Over the last seven or more years, I’ve become deeply involved with ambient/experimental works by composers such as Stephan Mathieu (who not only composes but masters others’ work at his studio) , Deupree (who established the influential ambient label 12K), and France Jobin, as well as those, like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz, who dip in and out of the ambient genre.
In an age where we are bombarded with divisive and interruptive dialogs encouraging us to be outraged at every turn (not to mention the very real aspects of society that are worth our outrage, if only we had the time and energy to devote to them while being able to support ourselves financially), experimental ambient music allows me — on a good day — to reset my thoughts and tune into a more free-form sonic world. Ambient is not pablum. Ambient is not “new age music.” If anything ambient has been about transcending the boundaries of “instrument” and “technology”, something all genres of music have attempted at one time or another; hip-hop does this particularly well.
Here are some examples that have been influential for me:
Radioland, by Stephan Mathieu: https://schwebung.bandcamp.com/album/radioland-2
Perpetual, by Ruyuichi Sakamoto / Illuha / Taylor Deupree: https://12kmusic.bandcamp.com/album/perpetual
Duo, by France Jobin + Richard Chartier: https://matterlabel.bandcamp.com/album/duo
~~~, anna roxanne: https://anaroxanne.bandcamp.com/album/-
Arrow, by Richard Youngs: https://preservedsound.bandcamp.com/album/arrow
Tracing Back The Radiance, by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: https://jefrecantu-ledesma.bandcamp.com/album/tracing-back-the-radiance
Allister Thompson hosted a blog, Make Your Own Taste, that contains a lot of ambient artists and contextual information on the genre. You would do well to visit if this is your thing.
*note: I use the term “classical” generically; technically I prefer the Baroque and Romantic periods best, truth be told.
I think I’ve had my fill of TV (streaming or otherwise) and mainstream films.
The first problem is mine, and is one of saturation. I worked in film and TV post-production for 20 years, watching everything from 15-second TV commercials to multi-part TV series, to box office-busting films. And part of working in film and TV is keeping up your fluency so that you can communicate effectively with each other (if a director makes a reference to Picnic at Hanging Rock you better be ready to watch it if you haven’t seen it already). Also, I’ve watched hundreds of films and countless TV shows over the course of my life — the seminal and forgettable, the laughable and the revelatory.
I’ve pretty much seen every storyline at least once. I’ve seen every twist and turn, every “surprise ending.” I’ve seen every plot device, every sort of villain, every sort of (male) anti-hero, every sort of Disneyesque sentimentality and every sort of nihilist purging of the arthouse soul. It’s hard for me to be taken in by a show or movie — either to suspend my disbelief or my anticipation of what the creators are going to do.
The second problem is out of my hands. In this age of streaming services, we are awash with content. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crave, etc. all require things to put on their virtual shelves so that we can be enticed to part with our money in order to explore their goods. I have no problem with this business model — it’s basically turned into (back to?) cable TV. The problem is one of quality. It seems that, in the effort to fill the shelves seasons are lengthened with filler and show renewals are rubber-stamped that end up being samizdat versions of the preceding season. Multiplexes are filled with the faddish (and profitable) notion that (see: Marvel) everything can be part of a franchise. If I hear another producer say “We originally imagined this as a trilogy/series in four-parts” I’m going to scream.
What bugs the shit out of me is how this affects what’s presented as upper tier programming. A good example is Good Omens, the heralded adaptation of Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett’s collaboration. I haven’t read the original book — I have a notion that it’s written in a larger-than-life, Douglas Adams-y style — but the show is painful to watch. It wants to be sly and slick satire and it has strong early moments, but it’s all so buffoonishly overplayed — the actors who aren’t line-reading chew their way through the scenery — to the degree where I had to wonder whether the producers might’ve considered making it for children. The worst is that for a six-part series there’s barely enough story to take up three. I lost count of how many time-sucking flashbacks and side-stories are introduced in order to lead to the telegraphed, overdue finale. Speaking of Gaiman, adaptations, and overdue finales, please see the meandering second season of American Gods (which I abandoned).
For the record, I don’t have a problem with the Marvel Universe franchise. They’re not hiding anything: it’s a stream of big-ass popcorn epics. They aren’t being released as exemplars of anything other than “hey, here’s a well-executed adaptation of a comic book most people haven’t read.” Sure, given the choice I’d rather watch an imperfect Olivier Assayas film over Ant Man, but at least I can watch the latter and know where to keep my expectations dialled.
While I’m bleating, a trend I wish would die, pardon the pun, are films where it’s obvious the protagonist won’t get a scratch despite killing 100 hired assassins (see the three John Wick films, The Equalizer, and Colombiana). Where’s the suspense if you don’t allow the audience to imagine that, no, the protagonist might not make it. This is an inherent problem with films and TV shows that are made in the hope of infinite reboots: no suspense (see: Orphan Black, a prime example of where the producers missed multiple opportunities to draw more attention by killing off one of the clones).
Why can’t we make something, leave it be to stand on its own merits, and move on without exploiting its success with sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots? As good as the original was (and it is), who in god’s name, save for the cast and crew, asked for a second season of Big Little Lies? What part of that story begged for extended development? Note: Liane Moriarty, the author (whom I share a birthday with) whose novel was adapted into the show never wrote a sequel until the HBO adaptation achieved success (she ended up writing a novella by request, not exactly the way any author would like to work, let alone revisit characters, though I don’t blame her).
Anyhow, I sometimes wonder, in the industry’s effort to satisfy its appetite for content, whether we are sacrificing the magic of our relationship with entertainment for the sake of Say’s Law, the (questionable) belief that supply creates its own demand.
