Jun. 18th, 2012

drownbynumbers: John Luther and Alice Morgan from BBC's Luther. ([fangirl] hold me thrill me)
I seem to be wanting to rewatch Profit.

I am definitely okay with this.

It's one of my favorite little television oddities, really; one of those things that next to no one saw when it was aired, but has refused to quite go away. According to various DVD featurettes, iirc, it's never been out of favor with people who write for TV, which I entirely believe. (I would very much like to know if Matt Weiner was ever a fan, because if Don Draper and Peggy Olsen don't share a few narrative DNA codons with Jim Profit and Gail Koner, it's a very big coincidence. Although Mad Men is actually far more optimistic about human nature.)

I mean, on the surface level, Profit is obviously the product of a televisual culture than which we are a little more advanced these days (I'm sorry, that's an awful sentence). The pacing runs a bit sluggish by 2012 standards; the plot contrivances are occasionally -- uh -- well, nothing we're watching these days is going to look any more plausible in sixteen years; and, with the exception of the titular character (and I might be biased, because Adrian Pasdar could look both sexass and dignified in a potato sack), everyone looks like they got dressed in a bad second-hand shop in the dark.

We'll say nothing about the computer graphics. I find them charming, anyway.

But at the same time it's probably one of the smarter pieces of television I've ever seen, and the single most pitch-black satire I've ever encountered in any media. I do not think anyone has ever been more vicious about ripping shreds off the concept of the American Family (The Manchurian Candidate wants to be -- and I mean the book; the first movie waters it down and the second is going after different targets -- but it bogs down in 1950s gender ideals) and as for the American Corporation, and Profit's glorious skewering of the tendency of the two to be conflated...

So yes, I think I'm going to watch it again. I have thoughts. And it'll be a nice warm-up for reducing the Upstairs Downstairs reboot to lawn mulch*.


* Lawn mulch, furthermore, which I have sworn will not contain a single instance of "this isn't how I would have done this" thinking; it won't need to. There's material for a dissertation in the way that no one, possibly excepting the cast, had a damned clue about how they were doing it; I'm going to be mulching it primarily for the purpose of giving myself a way to articulate my thoughts about knowing what goddamned story you're telling. Because it's a textbook example of what happens when you don't; also, it's obscure in this country and not sf/f/h, so no one reading this is likely to have any serious emotional attachment to it. But I digress.
drownbynumbers: A Victorian photo of a small girl. ([project] memorial)
When Jobs Collide: dropping an armload of vacuum cleaner attachments (really!) in the realization that I get to make one of my characters a Spiritualist. I've always wanted to do that.

In other news, Laura and Esme's family showed up today, with attendant dysfunction. ([personal profile] petra and [personal profile] ceebee_eebee, when I tell you one of them insists on being played by Stephen Campbell Moore...) Now to find a freeware genealogy program I don't totally hate; this one came top on a lot of recs lists, but the interface makes me want to cry.

Parts of this story are actually cohering at surprising speed, comparatively speaking. Now I just need to find a name and a personality for whatsisfuck, and name some Staff, and start reading up on country houses. (For about thirty seconds, I thought I could get away with making the house new construction, because you can find books on the Bauhaus movement. But that's completely wrong, of course. And while there are a lot of things I'm willing to be derivative of, The House Next Door is not among them.)

There's probably something to be said here about how female-centric this book is looking, at its core; part of it is just the nature of the beast, I think, but honestly I have a terrible time generating male characters. I can get my head around other people's, but everyone I invent seems to be female. This is probably interesting somehow, but I'm not sure how.
drownbynumbers: A Victorian photo of a small girl. ([project] memorial)
I'm doing something right. When I was washing the Windex smell out of my hair last night, Laura gave me an inciting incident and one of the manifestations of the Thing in the House. Of course, it's not her manifestation, it's Esme's. I wish Esme would come and narrate this book instead, because I know what her damage is; I think Laura is one of those narrators who wants you to think she was just standing there minding her own business when all of a sudden... And she's so busily not noticing what's wrong with everyone else that this entire book is going to be descriptions of wallpaper with someone quietly having a nervous breakdown at the edge of the frame. Which, fortunately, is the kind of tone I like for a ghost story. I just hope I can pull it off.

(On the basis of that last paragraph, it's also looking like it might be one of those books where the narrator and the protagonist are entirely different characters. Which, questionably fortunately, is something I have really mixed feelings about; but of course if I'm riffing off the Radlett books it has to be. Bah. I really wonder why I lock into the things I lock into, you know. Mysteries of the ASD brain!)

And I'm making "not sure if want" faces at the biography I just started (The Sisters, Mary S. Lovell), sad to say. It may be one of those biographies where the writer is a little too charmed by her subjects, and I have a nasty suspicion it's the kind of charmed that may tip over into apologism once I get a few chapters further in. (Well, no. It's already doing that, but currently it's dealing with the parents.) I'm going to keep pushing on, but I've started mentally picking it up at arm's length.

[personal profile] ceebee_eebee is fully entitled to mock me for this, but I maintain that... you need to be able to empathize with someone to understand them in their context, or you get lousy flat two-dimensional mental images. Which is dangerous. But letting that empathy drag you into accepting someone's stories about themselves at face value? Not much less dangerous. And I'm not sure this book isn't on the verge of going that way.

Basically, I would trust it a hell of a lot more if the introduction had talked about meeting the ninety-year-old Diana Mitford Mosley and being freaked out at being charmed by her, put it that way.

And now I finish a Fucking Essay and decide what I want to watch and report back on tonight. La. (I'm feeling sort of weirdly drawn towards Cracker, but I can't think of an actual episode to watch that won't make me either embarrassment-squicked or angry.)

ETA: Despite a remark made last entry about a certain someone's insistence about being played by Stephen Campbell Moore, I don't invariably cast my books. Even if you resort to British actors, the facial pool is pretty small. (He may end up looking less like S.C.M. in the end, too; what I had in mind with the casting is the kind of self-effacing surface charm plastered together over a deep pit of inadequacy and creepiness that he played beautifully in Ashes to Ashes. And the voice.)

That said, this is Esme. Even the hair's pretty close.

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