What you have to understand is that this has been an ongoing process for me. I had been in the middle of writing a few hundred words trying to articulate my outrage over the White House’s deplorable behavior over the past few days. The Vice President of the United States had made a simple, genuine, and already sufficiently qualified statement that gay people should be able to marry the person they love. And the Obama camp went into overdrive spin control, treating that sincere statement as a gaffe. Oh, that crazy Joe, is the insultingly vapid storyline they chose to perpetuate about an accomplished senator, You never know what he’s going to say next, always going off-script with his wacky ideas about human dignity! They did everything they could to try and roll it back to the same non-position they’ve had for the past few years, all but closing their eyes tightly and wishing the question away.

It was the perfect example of how disillusioned I’ve gotten with the Obama administration and the Democratic party in general, who seem not just willing but eager to capitulate with an increasingly unhinged opposition.

None of us who voted for Obama (and plan to vote for him again, just to be clear) can claim that it’s a case of bait-and-switch. He made the idea of unity and cooperation the recurring theme of his campaign. But it’s a perfect example of something that sounds great in theory but turns out horrible in practice. It’s not rational to entertain an irrational opinion. It’s not equitable to cater to the fringe’s desire to discriminate against other people. If a man says, “I believe we should start dismantling the past 50 years of progress in women’s rights,” it’s not a good thing to respond, “Hang on everybody, calm down, let’s hear what he has to say.”

But in the middle of writing, I heard that the President had made a historic announcement. It was a landmark moment in the history of gay rights. People were saying that they were moved to tears. I read snippets before I could see the actual transcript, and saw mention of his daughters and their friends with same-sex parents. I’d expected an epiphany, an eloquent and sincere statement about the equality of all Americans.

What I saw was a lengthy reminder of how they totally just repealed of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, followed by this:

At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that– for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that– I think same-sex couples should be able to get married. Now– I have to tell you that part of my hesitation on this has also been I didn’t want to nationalize the issue. There’s a tendency when I weigh in to think suddenly it becomes political and it becomes polarized.

And what you’re seeing is, I think, states working through this issue– in fits and starts, all across the country. Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times. And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what’s recognized as a marriage.

Now, I’m most definitely not an expert on Constitutional Law or history, but wasn’t Loving v. Virginia, historically, a federal issue, specifically about what’s recognized as a marriage? (Almost ten years between the instigating incident and a Supreme Court decision. Is that really what Obama wants to see repeated?)

I’ve got a huge amount of respect for Robin Roberts now, for having the backbone to break with the past decade of journalistic tradition by actually challenging a statement made by her interview subject, instead of letting it stand:

ROBIN ROBERTS: Well, Mr. President, it’s– it’s not being worked out on the state level. We saw that Tuesday in North Carolina, the 30th state to announce its ban on gay marriage.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well– well– well, what I’m saying is is that different states are coming to different conclusions. But this debate is taking place– at a local level. And I think the whole country is evolving and changing. And– you know, one of the things that I’d like to see is– that a conversation continue in a respectful way.

I think it’s important to recognize that– folks– who– feel very strongly that marriage should be defined narrowly as– between a man and a woman– many of them are not coming at it from a mean-spirited perspective. They’re coming at it because they care about families. And– they– they have a different understanding, in terms of– you know, what the word “marriage” should mean. And I– a bunch of ‘em are friends of mine– you know, pastors and– you know, people who– I deeply respect.

And as hard as I try, I absolutely cannot be convinced that a person’s basic right to equality is a topic on which reasonable people can disagree. Even people you respect can have opinions that are simply wrong.

I’ve been trying to explain the objection to calling it a “state’s rights” issue for years, but I couldn’t possibly do a better job of it than Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ did in less than five minutes:

“It’s ridiculous and offensive that we’re still having this debate.”

I’ve seen people claim that Obama’s statement is huge, no matter what the context was for his making it, because it’s the first time the active President of the United States has publicly stated his support for same-sex marriage. “Look how far we’ve come.” Well, this morning, I turned on one of the burners on my stove, and it lit. I didn’t marvel at how amazing an accomplishment it is that we’ve mastered fire. Later, I got in my car and started it up, and I wasn’t moved to tears at the wonder of the internal combustion engine. After that, I went into a store and while talking with the clerk, I mentioned having a boyfriend. And I didn’t drop to my knees and praise the heavens that nobody ejected me from the store, called me a faggot and started beating me up, or had me arrested for sodomy.

We’re human beings. We’re supposed to be advancing as a society because that’s pretty much our thing. The Stonewall riots were 43 years ago, two years before I was born. It took 21 years for the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, and they did it 39 years ago. Harvey Milk took office 35 years ago and was assassinated 34 years ago. For more than my entire lifetime, people have been saying “this is bullshit,” and I’m not a young man. When anyone points out that this is a “process,” and uses the decades-long Civil Rights movement or the decades-long-and-still-ongoing Women’s Rights movement as examples, that’s not reassuring. It’s horrifying. It suggests that we’re incapable of learning from past experience. That we need to go through decades of violence and deliberation every time, before people will be able to differentiate right from wrong.

“Hooray! A stranger in Washington has said that after three and a half years sending gay people to fight for their country and having gay people work for him, he no longer believes that their relationships are inferior!” seems to me like a depressingly low bar to set for celebration.

I’ve seen people claim that Obama’s statement was bold and politically risky (including an implication from Obama himself). I don’t believe it was. First, because so many people already believed that he’d taken a stand in favor of gay rights from the start. As the New York Times Caucus blog was live-reporting reactions to the statement, and they quoted several respondents who were surprised that Obama speaking in favor of same-sex marriage was a new thing. I can’t figure out how to link to individual updates on that blog, but I don’t need to: I’ve been seeing it for years. For whatever reason, people have been talking up Obama as a champion of gay rights ever since he was elected.

The second reason I don’t see it as significantly risky is that the number of people who regard same-sex marriage as the defining issue of a Presidential campaign is vanishingly small. I’m as good an example of that as anyone: same-sex marriage is the only political issue I’ve written about at length. It’s an issue that could affect me directly. It’s an issue that could very well save lives, as more people realize they don’t have to commit suicide out of loneliness or because society treats them as inferior. And most significantly, it’s an issue to which there is absolutely no valid rational objection. And yet, in 2008 I voted for a candidate who explicitly said that he was against same-sex marriage.

Of course there’s no way I’d ever vote for Rick Santorum, and his ridiculously offensive statements on the topic are a big part of that. But if Mitt Romney flip-flopped (as if that were possible) and suddenly announced that he was in favor of it, there’s still no way in Hell I’d vote for him, either. And based on everything I’ve read about it, that’s pretty common: few of the people in support of it would change their vote based on that one issue, and few of the people against it were likely to vote for Obama anyway.

There’s been a good bit of comment, including from Roberts in the ABC interview, about how the black and latino population has traditionally been opposed to same-sex marriage and gay rights in general. I say as long as you’re reducing human beings to demographics, why not just come right out and say it: Obama’s no less black now than he was before he made the announcement. If the story you’re trying to tell is that Obama’s election was ensured by black and latino voters, then you’re saying that race was the most important factor for them. Not marriage equality. And if Obama really is courting pastors of predominantly black churches to influence his electorate, he’s given them ample material to frame the issue, since he’s qualified his statements over and over again, and hasn’t changed his actual practical position one bit.

Obama’s policies on gay rights have been at best an example of “Not My Problem.” Make no mistake: the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was absolutely, unquestionably a great thing. As he said in the interview, it’s unconscionable to expect men and women to sacrifice everything for their country while forcing them to hide or disguise their sexual orientation. It also has to be said, though, that it was a move that was long overdue, and that it already had the support of 70% of people in the service.

Saying that it’s not politically risky doesn’t automatically mean that it was politically advantageous. It’s damage control. It’d become necessary for the Obama campaign to claim that he’d taken a firm stand on the issue, and to claim that it was consistent with what he’d been doing throughout his administration. Otherwise, they’d lose their opportunity to take advantage of the “flip-flop” perception of Romney. (Notice that Obama does exactly that in his ABC interview).

The Obama administration has also been getting praise for the decision to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act. The decision is, of course, a good thing. The praise isn’t. It strikes me as if I took credit for the Grand Canyon because the last time I was in Nevada, I did nothing to stop the Colorado River.

This post on the “Poliglot” blog of MetroWeekly.com says that I’m wrong, and it chastises other blogs for dismissing Obama’s statement as ineffectual. It attempts to explain that leaving the issue to the states to decide isn’t half-assed capitulation, but is actually part of a three-pronged master plan to ensure equality for everyone:

Obama’s position now is three-fold: (1) he personally supports same-sex marriage; (2) he believes as a policy matter that state, and not federal, law should define marriages, as it always has been in this country; and (3) he believes that there are federal constitutional limitations on those state decisions.

The writer fails to mention that (4) He understands that by the time any of these state decisions are challenged by a suit at the state level, appealed, raised to the federal level, appealed, stayed, and then finally advance to the position where those supposed federal constitutional limitations actually take effect, he’ll already have finished his second term, and it will no longer have to be his problem. Remember that Proposition 8 was voted into effect four years ago along with Obama, and it’s still nowhere near making it to the Supreme Court. Maybe if we wait long enough, all the gay people will just naturally die off, and it won’t be an issue anymore!

The best part of that post is the first comment (at the time I’m writing this), from a writer named Darren Hutchinson. “Anyone with a knowledge of US history, however, should know how harmful and dangerous the words ‘states’ rights’ are to civil rights.” Leaving the equality of millions of Americans to the states to decide individually is simply not a “moderate” position. It’s time we started calling it what it is: inaction.

So that’s why, when I say I’m in favor of marriage equality, I’m not going to say “I Stand With Obama.” (And I’m going to continue to be annoyed at those who do). I don’t see how anyone living in California, North Carolina, or any of the other 30 states that have redefined marriage to discriminate against homosexuals, can say that leaving the rights of a minority up to the states to decide is a strong, positive decision.

But while Obama was condescendingly scolding Biden for expressing a genuine sentiment, he made one thing absolutely clear: it’s a personal decision. He doesn’t want to see it politicized, or exploited, and he would’ve preferred to do it “without there being a lot of notice to anybody.”

Of course, his take is better than the alternative. That should go without saying. But here’s the thing: I don’t give a rat’s ass what Romney thinks. I actually care what Obama thinks. Not to decide my vote; of course I’m going to vote for Obama again, just like I did in 2008. And once again it’s not going to matter, since my state has basically already guaranteed all of its electoral votes to the Democratic candidate. My vote is almost completely symbolic, which is convenient because Obama’s campaign was almost completely symbolic. It got us excited about the idea that we’re actually living in a meritocracy — the smartest and most well-spoken candidate could rise above any trivialities like his race, or his unusual name, and become President of the United States simply on the strength of his ideas.

You could say that it’s hypocritical of me to judge Obama for taking so long to come around, when it took me at least 20 years to get comfortable with it. But the difference there is that Obama is a lot smarter than me. That’s why I voted for him. And it just seems like he should’ve known better all along.

So forgetting all the political motivation, campaign-year spin, backpedalling, exploitation, and speculation of what the practical effects will be, what did he actually say?

But– I think it’s important for me– to say to [opponents of same-sex marriage] that as much as I respect ‘em, as much as I understand where they’re coming from– when I meet gay and lesbian couples, when I meet same-sex couples, and I see how caring they are, how much love they have in their hearts, how they’re taking care of their kids. When I hear from them the pain they feel that somehow they are still considered– less than full citizens when it comes to their legal rights– then for me, I think it just has tipped the scales in that direction.
[…]
They’re respectful of religious liberty, that– you know, churches and other faith institutions– are still gonna be able to make determinations about what their sacraments are– what they recognize. But from the perspective of the law and perspective of the state– I think it’s important to say that in this country we’ve always been about fairness. And treating everybody as equals. Or at least that’s been our aspiration.
[…]
It would have been hard for me, knowing– all the friends and family that are gays or lesbians, that for me to say to them, you know, “I voted to oppose you having the same kind of rights and responsibilities that I have.”

And you’d be a fool to argue with any of that.

Biden’s comments seemed genuine to me, and he actually gave credit to Will & Grace for educating Americans on what gay people are really like. I’m not aware of anyone crediting minstrel shows and Amos & Andy for sparking the Civil Rights movement; I’m guessing Biden didn’t watch enough Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to recognize that as a more accurate, positive, portrayal.

But that’s what it eventually comes down to: if I can respect Biden’s statement as genuine even knowing that something so awful helped motivate it, why shouldn’t I be able to ignore political spin and motivation and just accept Obama’s statement as a useful and valid sentiment, delivered to a huge audience, with the weight of the Presidency of the United States? A symbolic message that we’re all equal, from a presidency that derives so much of its strength from symbolism.

If it actually motivates people to evolve enough of a backbone to do something about it, all the better.

And even when the discussion doesn’t fall into the Danielle Steele vs. Madeline L’Engle trap, the people bemoaning the dumbing-down of American society never have to substantiate their claims. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the idea that of course reading anything non-literary is a guilty pleasure at best, that we immediately go on the defensive. We read smart stuff too!

So it was interesting that an entry in the Books & Beer podcast raised the first non-immediately dismissible argument I’ve heard around the topic. One of the podcasters, Greg Brown, makes the claim that books usually labeled “young adult” are primarily plot-driven and use “cinematic” storytelling. But I was disappointed that the claim just lay there and wasn’t taken any further.

On Twitter, Chris Remo expanded on that by saying that cinematic storytelling is focused on delivery: “pushing” content and meaning to the audience, instead of encouraging readers to “pull” it for themselves. He went on to say that it’s unfortunate to see another medium forced into the same stylistic constraints as movies (presumably, as video games, comics, and television already have been). And finally, he said that this style of storytelling actually discourages interpretation; it trains audiences not to analyze the meaning of a work too deeply.

All interesting, reasonable points!

Before I go into how wrong they are, a disclaimer: I’m completely side-stepping the clunky “young adult” label, which invariably spins off into unproductive tangents. There are plenty of shallow books aimed at adults, just as there are plenty of great books that are typically categorized as being for children. Instead of “adult” vs “young adult,” I think it’s a lot more interesting to talk about genre fiction vs. literary fiction, and plot-driven storytelling vs. (for lack of a better word) “introspective” storytelling.

Art Finds a Way

First, I can definitely sympathize with the argument. When I first read Jurassic Park, I absolutely loved it. I read several of Michael Crichton’s books afterwards, and Jurassic Park remains the most successful example — both artistically and commercially successful — of his formula: take a concept rooted in “real” science, and then spin it off into an adventure story that gives a Popular Science-level overview of the concept.

Jurassic Park was my first introduction to chaos theory and the idea of “the butterfly effect.” It was filled with genuine quotes from actual scientists, and had its own wisecracking scientist on hand to explain everything! It was based on a fascinating concept spun off into speculative fiction, but based most of its action on actual facts: there really are species of frogs that change their sex when the population becomes unbalanced. And even though he took extensive liberties with the details, he gave a genuine overview of contemporary knowledge of dinosaurs. The velociraptor and dilophosaurus were actual species, which was a big deal for those of us whose knowledge of dinosaurs began and ended with The Flintstones.

But then I read a quote from Crichton, where he was asked what he was working on while writing Jurassic Park. He (half-jokingly) replied “I’m writing the most expensive movie ever made.”

I felt like I’d been duped! He wasn’t writing a real book, he was just writing some shallow pre-novelization! Just trying to cash in. I’d gone away from the book believing that I’d actually learned something in a clever and entertaining way, but that just made me look as stupid as if I’d said, “Yeah, The Matrix really opened my eyes, taught me a lot about what it means to be human.”

The problem with that type of thinking, of course, is that I did actually learn something. It’s not like Ian Fleming’s claim in You Only Live Twice that sumo wrestlers can suck their testicles into their body; most of the details included in Jurassic Park were based on actual contemporary scientific understanding.

But of course, facts aren’t meaning. And that’s what I thought was most clever about the book (and still do): Crichton used his formula for double duty. One of the concepts — cloning dinosaurs from DNA found inside a parasite — drove the plot, while the other — concepts of chaos theory — drove the theme.

While I’m not going to claim that the book is earth-shatteringly profound, I have grown to have a renewed appreciation for what it says about arrogance and knowledge. Obviously, it’s a contemporary spin on Frankenstein, with the theme of “tampering in God’s domain.” But it’s also an observation of the changing role of science at the end of the 20th century — we’d moved away from the unbridled optimism of the turn of the century, when we had every reason to believe that we could control and understand everything if only given enough time and enough study. We were starting to come to the realization that the universe is made of systems that are almost inconceivably complex. We’re no longer aspiring to become Conquerors of the Unknown; we just want to better understand the unknown, so that we can coexist with it.

And that message is still in the book, no matter what the motivation was for writing it, no matter how many good and bad movies were made from it, and no matter how entertaining, accessible, and “cinematic” it was. Sphere and Congo? Cinematic and also predominantly dumb. Rising Sun? Cinematic and also tedious, pedantic, and just shy of being irredeemably racist. But the material that’s “real” in Jurassic Park isn’t diminished or made any less real or less valuable just by virtue of its being wrapped in an adventure story.

The question remains, though: is my comprehension of that material diminished by the fact that Jurassic Park hands it to me in the form of a wisecracking scientist and a rampaging T. Rex? Can I really say that I “get” it, when I didn’t have to work for it?

Lost in Translation

Before you can talk about that, it’s necessary to figure out exactly what’s meant by “cinematic” writing that’s supposedly common to Young Adult fiction, and the “stylistic conventions” that are infecting real literature.

I’m assuming that it means plot-driven stories with writing that is more descriptive than interpretive. Since The Hunger Games was such a quick and effortless read, and since I read it in the middle of its major motion picture hype, I’d assumed it was a perfect example of that. But it wasn’t until I actually saw the movie adaptation that I appreciated how much the book actually does, thematically and stylistically.

After the movie, I was talking with someone who’d read the books, and she said that for the first several pages of The Hunger Games, she had no idea that the protagonist was female. I didn’t read the book until well after it’d be synopsized all over the place, and until after the movie casting had already been announced, so I knew from page one that it was written from the first-person perspective of a young woman. But going back over it, I saw that it’s deliberately left ambiguous, until she first speaks to another character. That’s a pretty big deal. For a book that adamant about presenting its target audience with a strong, responsible, and flawed but heroic female role model, it’s absolutely crucial that she’s introduced in terms of her thoughts and her capabilities, and not her appearance.

The part of the book that bothered me the most was the over-reliance on a teen love triangle, the “oh dear which cute boy shall I choose?” that’s not only a well-worn staple of stories aimed at teenaged girls, but which seems to undermine the whole notion of an independent female role model. In the movie, it’s every bit as shallow and predictable as you’d expect: teen romance set against Battle Royale. That cinematic adaptation — the switch from a first-person perspective to a third-person one — makes all the difference, and it highlights the novel twist in the book that the movie lacks.

In the book, she’s constantly aware that she’s on camera, and she’s constantly playing to the camera. The line between reality and what’s done for show is so blurred, that she’s never quite aware what she’s really feeling: is she actually falling in love with this guy, or is it just keeping up appearances? And again, for a novel targeted at an already emotionally tumultuous audience dealing with peer pressure and constant exposure to the media, that’s a big deal. It forms the basis of half the novel, but it’s never quite spelled out explicitly.

This Section is About Fevers and Fight Scenes

As for stylistic conventions, I’m going to invite jeers and/or swooning from the literary-minded people in the audience, by comparing The Hunger Games to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Incidentally: I’ve seen The Road dismissed as “genre fiction,” but anyone who doesn’t acknowledge its literary merit is someone I just have no common frame of reference with).

I haven’t read enough young adult fiction to know whether the claim that most of them are written in a “cinematic” style has any merit. Since there’s no way in Hell I’m ever going to read any of the Twilight books, I’ve only got Harry Potter. And those books would definitely apply. They’re told in an absolutely conventional style; every scene and every moment is given roughly the same weight.

But I’d insist that The Hunger Games is pretty impressive, stylistically. It’s not what I’d call “experimental,” but it does have the most remarkable pacing of any book I’ve read in recent memory. The shift between slower, more introspective moments and bursts of action is seamless. What’s most interesting to me is how the actual structure of the writing changes: as the book transitions from the build-up to the games themselves, the paragraphs transform. Sentences crash into each other. Details that would’ve warranted a couple of sentences earlier in the book now only get a passing reference, as if everything is happening at once, glanced out of the corner of the reader’s eye. Later, when Katniss is drugged, the sense of time seems completely elastic, scenes are stretched and compressed, and you’re never quite sure if what you’re reading is real or a hallucination.

The Road establishes mood with its structure, as well. Its characters remain nameless, and its dialogue remains barely offset from the rest of the text, all to give the story the quality of a fable. It repeats words over and over — you’ll be reading a lot about grey ash — and uses long stretches of sentences all with the same rhythm and cadence, all to drive home the feeling of oppressive doom and despair. There are relatively few action sequences, but in those sequences, the rhythm of the sentences transforms. The structure of the sentences conveys as much of the mood as the words themselves: an unexpected word suddenly appears in a long stretch of sameness, just as a threat suddenly appears in a bleak expanse of featureless ash. Later in the book, the main character suffers a fever, and we lose track of what’s real or imagined, and time becomes elastic.

And I’m going to be super-bold and make the claim that on a purely stylistic level, in those scenes, The Hunger Games actually did it better. With one, I never lost the sense that I was reading about a character involved in a life-or-death struggle. In the other, I couldn’t maintain that sense of detachment: I was actually getting tense as Katniss scrambled away from one attack after another, and I felt as if I couldn’t keep up with the action as quickly as it was moving on the page. With one, I was aware that I was reading about a character with a fever; in the other, I was genuinely disoriented, unable to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

Of course, the books are in no way equal in “weight,” in what they’re setting out to accomplish, or in how much of the meaning of the book is conveyed through stylistic choices. The ending of The Hunger Games sets up a sequel. The ending of The Road is completely rapturous, a sense of the inherent beauty of humanity that can be understood only after a prolonged journey through Hell.

But both books demonstrate how the reader’s interpretation of a book isn’t wholly cerebral, but visceral. It’s immersive, exploiting the direct connection between the creator and the audience that’s achieved when the medium disappears. That kind of direct connection would seem to be inherently “cinematic.” But it’s not merely descriptive: it doesn’t tell you that the character is disoriented or afraid, but makes you feel disoriented or afraid.

Common Trash and Horns with Fire

Maybe the best way to highlight the differences between “cinematic” writing and bonafide literature is to look at two books adapted by people who have a perfect understanding of how to translate literature to film: True Grit and No Country for Old Men, both adapted by the Coen Brothers.

I haven’t actually read No Country for Old Men, which makes it more than a little difficult to talk about it in a literary context, to be honest. But I’ve read that the film is an extremely faithful adaptation (and that the book was originally conceived as a screenplay). I can believe that, since it’s the most “literary” film I’ve seen in a long time, possibly since The Remains of the Day. Practically every word out of Tommy Lee Jones’s mouth has a ghostly whisper behind it: This is important. This means something.

It’s a perfectly fine film, and you can’t even make the complaint that it’s too arch, or too distant. There are moments of shocking brutality every bit as stomach-turning as they’re intended to be. You’re genuinely taken through the emotions of fear, despair, and even the perverse fascination with horror, instead of feeling as if you’re watching them from afar. It’s neither artificial nor ponderous, but it’s still self-consciously weighty. It practically begs the audience to interpret it, to acknowledge that there’s a message contained inside.

And although it was interpretive, not descriptive, the end result was the opposite for me. I felt as if I’d just been lectured by the nihilists from The Big Lebowski. It seemed not only that everything the movie had to say had already been said by Fargo, but that Fargo said it more effectively, since it took the form of an undercurrent instead of a full-bore, all-channel assault.

On the other hand, I can authoritatively state that True Grit is an outstanding adaptation of an outstanding book. In fact, the one scene that’s significantly different feels as if it was supposed to be in the story all along, and was just cut from the original novel for time or pacing constraints. Both the book and the film exploit the strengths of their media: the Coens use both amazing vistas you’d expect to see in a Western and “smaller” scenes that are no less striking and memorable, and they combine music and editing and dialogue perfectly because, well, they’re the Coen Brothers. And Charles Portis has such a singular gift for characterization through dialogue that he can even make punctuation funny. (Mattie Ross writes, “…I knew if the rattlers got behind me I would be in a fine ‘pickle.’” and you know just from the quote marks how much it pains her to use something as vulgar as slang). They work in concert so perfectly that they don’t even seem like an original work and an adaptation, so much as two manifestations of the same thing: a plot-driven account of the meeting and adventures of two unforgettable, perfectly real characters.

In terms of descriptive vs. interpretive storytelling, I believe it’s the perfect counterpoint to No Country for Old Men. True Grit is plot driven; it’s a story of revenge. It’s not introspective; Portis takes complete advantage of the fact that the story’s told in first-person, but he achieves all of his characterization through the quality of the language, not by extended passages describing Mattie’s innermost thoughts. (In fact, the strength of the character comes mainly from the fact that she’s so absolutely certain of her convictions; any self-doubt or reconsideration would feel wrong).

And most importantly, any “message” contained in the book is there for you to take or leave. It’s not trying to tell you anything, it just is. The characters aren’t symbols of anything, they just exist. If the claim is that a straightforward account of the actions of a group of well-realized characters can’t be as profound as a more introspective character study, then Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn shoot that theory apart. And while it’s true that it’s shallow to have a character explicitly say, “Men shouldn’t be tampering with things that they don’t fully understand,” it’s not significantly more substantial to have a character tell you about a dream he had about his father and a horn of fire, and then leave it hanging there for the audience to figure out what it means.

The Frosted Mini-Wheats School of Literary Theory

It’s counter-intuitive, but: whenever you bemoan the loss of art that demands the audience have to interpret it, you’re actually undermining the true value of interpretation.

We all have a long-held notion of the clear division between the stuff we read just for entertainment, and the stuff that’s “good for you.” Junk food vs. roughage. But that analogy assumes that all of the “nutritional value” of a work is contained in the work itself, and reading it is simply digestion. It assumes that accessibility is at best the sugar coating that makes the content easier to swallow, and it asserts that most often, it’s just empty calories.

To violently switch analogies mid-thought, it puts the writer in the role of puzzle-master. All the answers are contained within; the savvy reader will be able to figure them out, and the process will be so much more meaningful to him because of the effort. Take that to its extreme, and you end up with Ulysses.

But interpretation is more than just digesting or deciphering; it’s a kind of creation. Even the most insightful piece of writing can only work by triggering connections, correlations, sense memories, and value judgments in the reader. The reader isn’t merely piecing together the concepts laid down by the author, but can form connections the author couldn’t ever have intended. One of the most often-cited examples of that is a sky “the color… of a television tuned to a dead channel”, which to the author was a dull gray but to later readers became a vibrant blue. That implies that even a meaningless string of obscure or archaic allusions and non-sensical stream of consciousness could be interpreted by an insightful reader to have profound meaning. Take that to its extreme, and you end up with Ulysses. (I admit that I don’t understand how Ulysses works).

There are plenty of people who steadfastly insist that interpretation is the sole purpose and value of art; that once a work is made public, it exists as its own entity, completely separate from the artist. The artist becomes just another voice in the conversation, and the artist’s intent is all but irrelevant. There’s no such thing as an invalid interpretation.

I’m definitely not willing to take it that far, since I believe that art is fundamentally communication. But I believe that it’s two-way communication, always, whether the artist intends it to be or not. So a book (or a film, or a video game) is neither a lecture nor a puzzle, but a conversation. An asynchronous and often one-sided conversation, maybe, but still a conversation. In those terms, a work that invites the reader to “pull” meaning from it is no less didactic than one that “pushes” its meaning onto the reader. Neither accounts for the constant back and forth that all audiences engage in with media, even seemingly “passive” media.

It also doesn’t account for the fact that all audiences are always looking for meaning, constantly. Even when they’re not supposed to be looking for it, and even when they’re not particularly interested in finding it.

(Nothing But) Condescension

I do actually believe that there’s art that’s “good for you,” that we as audiences can become better at interpreting works, as we form new connections that build on old ones. As we’re introduced to new concepts, and just as our tastes change, we lose our appreciation for some works and gain new appreciation for others. It’s almost always a gradual, shifting process. But I can tell you exactly when I stopped liking the band Talking Heads.

It was when I saw the video for “(Nothing But) Flowers”. The song itself is fine; it’s essentially an ironic cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” done with David Byrne’s newfound interest in “world music.” And really, whatever: it was the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, and everybody was getting heavy into irony and Ladysmith Black Mambazo back then. But the video (which isn’t easily available online in the US) had everybody singing about the downfall of society while being superimposed with factoids illustrating our slow decline into corruption and apathy: bureaucratic waste, increased gun ownership, depletion of the rain forest. In the midst of all that, one of the factoids stood out: it laments that 29% of Americans have said that they were “moved to tears” by a greeting card.

At the time, it struck me as impossibly pretentious and condescending, but it took me decades before I was able to articulate exactly why. That opportunity came when I was standing in a photography exhibit at the SF Museum of Modern Art, listening to other museum patrons’ conversations about the photographs. A woman was there with a few of her friends or relatives, and she was looking at a picture of San Francisco from the early 1970s and pointing out specific buildings. Here was where she lived with so-and-so before he died, and here was the building where they’d had a really nice dinner before so-and-so’s baby shower.

My gut reaction, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that she was doing it wrong. This wasn’t a series of snapshots, it was an art exhibition. She was supposed to be commenting on the composition of the shots or architecture of the buildings, or at the very least, making note of how socio-political changes in the city’s population have been reflected by, resisted by, and influenced by the layout and architecture of the city as a whole. Even after being familiarized with the notion of soup cans and comic strip panels and even urinals as “art,” and the concepts of Modernism, post-modernism, and form vs. meaning, I was still clinging to this idea that art has a purpose and a value, even if the purpose was to say “this has no purpose,” and even if its value was only in its ability to question its own value. I was still attached to the idea of a “right” way to interact with art, that one-way communication from artist to audience.

But it took that one incident for me to really appreciate all of those artistic movements, ones that until then I’d only understood on an intellectual level. How arrogant is it to assume that the most a member of the audience can get from a work is already predetermined by the artist? The woman in the art gallery had immediate reactions to a photograph, memories from a lifetime of experiences — how is that not more profound than my detached (and more than likely, shallow) appreciation of the way the photograph was composed?

And how is it anything other than extreme arrogance to assume that someone moved to tears by a greeting card is too dim-witted or easily manipulated to comprehend that the sentiment is simplistic, trite, and maudlin? He’s not moved to tears by the writing’s purity of form or its universal statement of the human condition; he’s reacting to a profound summation of experience, one that the card somehow manages to invoke perfectly. I know I’ve yet to read any piece of literature that’s affected me as deeply as the greeting card I got from my father in the hospital.

Siskel & Ebert & About a Billion Other People At the Movies

Every discussion of “genre” fiction vs. literary fiction invariably has at least one example of a statement that’s trivially true, presented as if it held tremendous insight. This one is no different: people shouldn’t be concerned about high art vs. low art, but good art vs. bad art. If people are able to get a profound feeling of emotion from a greeting card, then they’ll be able to find meaning anywhere, whether it’s Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, The Road, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Neuromancer, Harry Potter, or, regrettably, even Twilight and The Fountainhead.

Of course, that’s not saying that each of those books is equivalent in depth, literary merit, or value; if art is a conversation, then the reader’s interpretation will never completely outweigh the author’s intent, or lack of intent. Nothing is ever going to elevate Two and a Half Men and Jack and Jill to the level of valuable contributions to culture.

But the real value in a work lies in its ability to provoke a meaningful interpretation from the audience. (Even if using that overly inclusive definition means that I have to acknowledge that Stephanie Meyers’s and Ayn Rand’s books have “value,” as long as the meaningful interpretation is “the ideas presented in this book are absolutely horrible.”) That leaves one question: does the emphasis on descriptive, plot-driven writing actively discourage this interpretation? Does it “train” readers not to analyze what they’re reading too deeply?

I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that it does, and in fact, you could make a pretty convincing case that the opposite is true.

I can say with confidence (if not actual data) that today there are more people writing about, discussing, and interpreting art than there have been at any time in history. For decades we’ve been living in a culture that’s so media-saturated, critics and commentators have become celebrities. Add in the interactivity promised by the internet, and you end up with a society of people conditioned to believe that their interaction with a creative work isn’t finished until they’ve expressed an analysis of it. For better or worse, we’re living in the age of TV Tropes. (Mostly worse).

For Christmas one year, my family took me to see The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou on opening weekend. It was over my objections, and those objections turned out to be valid — I was sitting in the theater sobbing profusely, while they were mostly bored. That’s not in any way a value judgment; it’s simply not the type of movie that would speak to them. But during the car ride home, they all made it clear that they wanted it to speak to them. “I felt like the movie was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get what it was.”

Whether you believe that’s some inherent quality of art, or it’s a more recent side effect of living in a society of movie blogs, message boards, and book clubs, it’s clear that audiences are constantly evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting everything. Even the people who insist that “you have to turn your brain off” to appreciate Transformers have at least analyzed the movie enough to recognize that there’s nothing worth further analysis.

And I know from my own experience that I enjoy horror movies not because of any inherent love of the genre — I’m easily startled, and I have such a low tolerance for gore that I can’t even watch the Ring video without getting the shudders. I enjoy them because they’re so easy to pick apart and analyze. The Friday the 13th movies and the millennial Castle film remakes are my sudoku. And picking them apart isn’t just a pointless exercise; it makes it easier to recognize when accomplished filmmakers either exploit the same techniques, or subvert them.

One thing the high art vs. low art “debate” doesn’t want to acknowledge is that over the years, popular entertainment has been steadily getting better. (Television and comics without question, but I’d make the same claim for games and movies). Audiences accustomed to analyzing and deconstructing works of art, instead of passively absorbing them, have grown up to make their own works that invite analysis and deconstruction. When The X-Files first aired, it was groundbreaking in introducing (or more accurately, re-introducing) the concept of season-long story arcs and self-referential storytelling to episodic, dramatic television. Now, you can find that in the most unexpected places: Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and Transformers Prime. (Seriously!)

That’s why I put so much emphasis on pop culture and on mash-ups across multiple media, and why I insist that the line between high art and low art — or genre fiction vs. literary fiction, or young adult books vs. real books — has become irrelevant. It doesn’t mean that that there’s no such thing as a completely vapid piece of entertainment — we all know there’s an abundance of those. It simply means that art doesn’t take place in a vacuum. The communication between artist and audience, combined with our overwhelming desire to analyze, interpret, and re-invent, gives rise to a culture in which there’s the potential for “meaning” anywhere and everywhere.

Which is pretty amazing when you stop and think about the billion opportunities it had to go horribly wrong. It should’ve collapsed under the weight of its own hype — this is a movie that hasn’t just been getting buzz since a Comic-Con trailer; it’s been building up across post-credit sequences for years. But while I’ve never been a fan of The Avengers in any incarnation, I have seen and really enjoyed almost all of the lead-up movies (I passed on both attempts to make The Hulk interesting on his own), so I wasn’t able to sufficiently lower my expectations. And still, I loved it. I’m considering myself lucky that I wasn’t a fan of the comics, because I’m not sure how I would’ve handled it otherwise.

It could’ve fallen victim to Spider-Man 3 syndrome, desperately trying to cram so many characters into one summer blockbuster that they all get lost in the noise, and the whole thing falls apart. I was already concerned about that going in, so it was alarming to see them come right out of the gate with Robin Sherbatsky as another character I’m supposed to get semi-attached to. And yet, it’s near-perfectly balanced: it’s not just that characters aren’t overlooked; each character actually gets the chance to steal a scene. The most obvious danger was having the two “underpowered” characters become completely overwhelmed by everything else, but Black Widow and Hawkeye each get multiple opportunities for bad-assery. The movie hits exactly the right tone there: acknowledging that they’re humans fighting alongside super-humans, but not dwelling on it.

At almost two and a half hours, it could’ve very well turned into either tedium or numbing spectacle. But as I was watching it, it seemed like the perfect length. In fact, there were several points during the movie (Black Widow’s initial interrogation scene, and the assembled group arguing on board the S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft carrier) where I found myself wanting it to be an ongoing television series, immediately. “I don’t want to stop watching this. I want it to last at least another 20 hours.”

And of course, it’s written and directed by Joss Whedon, which means that it could’ve easily ended up teetering on the knife’s edge between brilliant and insufferable. The dialogue could’ve been self-consciously clever; instead, the script seems to transition effortlessly between the romantic comedy banter of Iron Man, the ostentatious monologuing of Thor, the naive pulp comic conversations of Captain America, and (what I imagine to be) the tortured-and-haunted-genius dialogue of The Incredible Hulk. Then it seamlessly blends them all together.

It’s even got several of the what-have-now-come-to-be-expected Whedonisms, but they don’t feel like gimmicks or directorial tics. There’s one line of dialogue that sums that up perfectly: “They needed something to avenge.” We never hear the last word, because we don’t need to; we already know how it goes. The line has to be in there, because that’s just how these things work. But finishing it would’ve been too over-the-top. It’s exactly the right level of restraint. In all the breathless reviews and comments I’ve read online, I’ve seen multiple people say, “This is the movie that Joss Whedon’s entire career has been building up to.” I don’t think it’s that much of an exaggeration.

In fact, I think that the aspects of Whedon’s other projects that had me so skeptical — the self-conscious dialogue and the self-satisfied “look how much I just subverted that stereotype” — are what made him perfect for this movie. You can’t build a career out of subverting expectations without first understanding how traditional stories work and how audiences interpret them. When Whedon turns off the irony and lets the earnest Marvel comics fan take over, the result is an innate understanding of how to bring together movie fans, comic book fans, and fans of these characters in particular.

The perfect example of that is the way The Hulk is handled. Everybody in the audience knows the character; there’s nothing to be gained by pretending that it’s a mystery, or that there’s the need for an origin story. Most attempts at handling the character have either been too shallow — he’s just a big, stupid, unstoppable force — or way, way, way too maudlin — a tragic figure desperately looking for a cure for the beast he can’t control and also he’s psychologically damaged by child abuse. Whedon understands that neither of those are going to work, and the most clever bit of all is that he actually winds up getting both.

For the entire first half of the movie, he builds up this aura of foreboding around the Hulk. We see Black Widow, immediately after establishing herself as a bad-ass super spy, react with dread at the thought of having to run up against him. People, including Banner himself, are reluctant to mention him by name. We see brief flashes of his attacks on video screens. He’s established as the one thing powerful enough to tear apart the entire group. The movie doesn’t take it too far — Tony Stark’s there to make it clear that we all know who and what The Hulk is, it’s not like we’re supposed to be genuinely surprised. And then The Hulk’s first appearance turns out to be as horribly destructive as we’d been led to expect; it’s not Hulk as super-hero but Hulk as super-werewolf. But after giving us all of that build-up and the requisite pay-off, then the movie can deliver one final twist on the character: characters have been asking Banner repeatedly how he maintains control, and he’s been reluctant to answer. It’s not just a case of Dr. Jekyll desperately suppressing his Mr. Hyde; it’s not a completely separate personality, but something he has some degree of control over. Hulk as super-werewolf and super-hero.

The nearest I can come to a complaint: there is one gag that’s used repeatedly — one character gets interrupted as another suddenly comes in and knocks him off-screen. And yet somehow, it never stopped working.

Ever since Iron Man took me completely by surprise, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why Marvel’s had so much more success translating super-heroes to film than DC has. Sure, Daredevil and Elektra were abominations, and I’m still waiting for them to make a third X-Men movie (hopefully it’ll come out before they make a sequel to Aliens). But it’s not just that they’ve avoided a string of disasters like Tim Burton’s and Joel Schumacher’s desecration of the Batman franchise. (If you still think that Tim Burton’s first Batman movie wasn’t that bad, then I suggest you haven’t seen it recently enough). They’ve actually managed to produce a string of good-to-outstanding movies. I’ve never been interested in Marvel comics but have loved DC, while with the movies, it’s the opposite. I even liked Thor.

I’ve speculated on why that is, exactly: for one thing, pairing directors with the franchises they’re ideally suited to handle, and letting them put their unique mark on each one. But watching The Avengers finally made it clear. It comes down to the oldest and most obvious observation you can make about the comics: it’s New York City vs. Metropolis and Gotham City. DC’s characters have always been inherently fantastic and larger than life, and their adventures are in fictional cities. Marvel deliberately made its characters human and flawed and placed them in real-world settings, so they’d be more relatable to angst-ridden teens. DC heroes are the ones you aspire to be, Marvel heroes are the ones you identify with.

That’s why Christopher Nolan’s interpretations of Batman are fine as movies but simply don’t work for me as Batman stories, and why The Avengers is the perfect capstone to Marvel’s string of successes. (It’s also why DC works better in animated formats than Marvel tends to). It’s because translating Batman (or Superman) to the real world inevitably drains them of something. Translating Marvel’s characters to film makes them come alive. They’re already designed to be real humans placed into fantastic situations. No matter how bizarre their stories get — and Marvel’s had some of the most bizarre and convoluted continuity imaginable — there’s still something tethering them to the real world. Even Thor’s got family issues and an annoying kid brother.

So you can have a moment like a $10 bet between Nick Fury, one-eyed commander of the paramilitary spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain America, the super soldier who fought Nazis and the Red Skull in WWII before being frozen under the ocean for 70 years, that he’s about to see something he’s never seen before. And it’s a moment that actually works.

Actually, in this case, the old rule about New Yorker cartoons applies even more. “Christ, what an asshole.”

It’s fun for those of us prone to internet rage to get tossed a slow pitch every once in a while. Occasionally a response can knock it out of the park. Instead of having to think about actual issues that really are controversial and require a careful deliberation of the merits of both sides, we can all stand behind the idea that you’re a selfish jackass if you insist on turning on a bright light in a dark room full of people who paid to be there and aren’t cursed with your own irreparably shattered attention span.

In my day, we understood how light works!

Well, most of us can stand behind that, anyway. The only thing that’s worth commenting on at all is the lengths people will go to in order to rationalize bad behavior. Here’s an article about a similar proposal, this time in regards to the legitimate theatertheatre, that tries to pin the blame on the invention of the electric light and then make the claim that being an inconsiderate asshole is a time-honored tradition stretching back to the earliest days of live performance.

I remain disappointed that they didn’t take this to its logical conclusion, and propose that all concessions be replaced with maggot-laden legs of roast mutton.

After all, aren’t we being awfully short-sighted? How can we possibly expect a 17-year-old raised in the age of interactive entertainment to stay focused on the ponderous, Terence Malick-esque existential ramblings of the 21 Jump Street remake? In a world where teens and young adults have constant access to social media, isn’t it just selfish of us in the less-lucrative demographics to just demand that we can escape that for 90 minutes? When people have instant, personalized access to virtually every movie ever made, with the ability to start and stop it at will, while simultaneously updating IM, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, doesn’t it just make good financial sense for theaters to remove the only remaining aspect of their experience that makes them unique?

We’ve already learned that in the brave new world of digital distribution, the whole notion of “being paid enough money to keep producing content that people want to watch” is laughably outdated. As soon as all of us old farts still clinging to 20th century notions of propriety will die off already, the old concepts of “stealing” and “not behaving like an over-entitled shit stain” and “showing a basic level of respect for your fellow humans” will be revealed as the anachronistic, imaginary fantasies that they are. The one surviving multi-national media conglomerate will show $500 million productions free of charge, and audiences of the New Generation will talk to each other and send text messages to people not in the theater as a beautiful display of communal engagement and interactivity. And it will be glorious.

When the new security guy comments that the monsters are “what nightmares come from,” Amy Acker’s character says that it’s the opposite: the monsters in the cells are more like our nightmares made real. At the end of the movie, when the Director is explaining the background of the ritual, she concedes that the whole process is horrible. But she says that before the ritual, when the ancient ones ruled, it was much worse.

It’s obvious from the opening credits sequence — a sequence I still think should’ve been omitted, since it was so obvious that it undermined most of the subsequent reveals — and then made explicit several times over: horror stories fulfill the same role for modern societies that human sacrifices did in the earliest societies. What’s clever is the idea of what that role is, exactly. It’s to make us believe we have control over the uncontrollable.

The complex contains all of our nightmares, safely contained in their own individual cells, ready to be released whenever we need them. The ritual is what we’ve developed to reassure ourselves that we understand how our nightmares work: if we’re smart enough to know to yell “don’t go into the cellar!” or “don’t go into that room alone,” then we’re smart enough to avoid whatever horrible fate comes to the people up on the screen.

Watching young people getting ritualistically murdered is nothing compared to the horror of not knowing, never being able to predict exactly when and how terrible things will happen to us. It’s the difference between modern horror and Lovecraftian horror, which is why calling them “the ancient ones” is even more appropriate.

If you need evidence, just look at how much the Lovecraft mythos has been trivialized and commercialized — turned into board games, video games, bumper stickers, plush toys, and generally turned into an off-hand reference. The recurring theme of Lovecraft’s stories was the idea of the horror that comes from not knowing — something infinitely powerful but never seen, lurking just outside the realm of what we can control and civilize. Something so horrible that even to look at it is to go insane. So of course, we turn Cthulhu into dolls and jokes. We have to give The Nameless One a name.

There’s one thing we still can’t figure out, though: I can’t remember the exact dialogue, but during the party scene in the control room, part of the crew insists that the lack of a cave-in wasn’t a “glitch.” They say that it “came from upstairs.” Does the movie ever explain that?

Obviously, any time I find myself having an even more knee-jerk feminist reaction than a blog post on ThinkProgress, I become alarmed. After re-reading and then re-re-reading Rosenberg’s article, I think it comes down to an over-simplification of what the movie’s trying to do, and a stereotype that (like some plucky young college students) just refuses to die.

How Horror Movies Work

Rosenberg includes an extended quote from an interview with Joss Whedon on Vulture:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people.

The mechanics of slasher movies and horror movies in general are well-worn introduction-to-cinema-studies material, and one of the best aspects of Cabin in the Woods is how it exposes and criticizes those mechanics without being too obvious or too self-referential. (As Whedon says earlier in that interview, “A nod is fine, but a wink is not.”)

The screens in the control room remind us that both the filmmakers and we in the audience are voyeurs complicit in the suffering of these characters. When a slasher movie has the pretty blonde bare her breasts and then immediately afterwards be “punished” by the killer, it allows the filmmakers and the audience to get both the titillation of sex and the rush of violence, without having to feel guilty because we can claim both that it’s a primal study of basic morality and also that she had it coming to her for doing something wrong. Congratulations, here’s your B+, for next week deliver an essay on the use of window frames as movies-within-movies in Rear Window.

Whedon’s quote is in response to a question about including an exploitative scene in a movie that’s supposed to be skewering such exploitative scenes. And his response is, essentially, “Yes, it’s gross, but that’s how horror movies work.” (But worded much better than that, because he’s Joss Whedon).

How Not to Be a Whore

But instead of asking the questions the movie wants you to ask — Why do horror movies work like that? What is it really saying about us when we accept that that’s how they work? — Rosenberg (along with the Vulture interviewer) objects to unequal representation in subverting the stereotypes:

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I’ve got several problems with this, but what first set off my alarm is just how much the language Rosenberg uses here — the language, if not the overt intent — sounds like, “Did you see the way she was dressed? She was asking for it.”

Just from an Internet Feminist perspective — which I think is fair, since the article has the “feminism” tag attached to it — the argument sends a weird message. It’s enough to convince the audience that the big, ridiculously good-looking, football-tossing, letter jacket-wearing Curt isn’t just the giant jock, simply by having another character say “he’s a sociology major” and having him make a reference to a book that Dana is reading. But somehow, we don’t know enough about beautiful, dyed-blonde, short shorts-wearing pre-med student Jules to be properly convinced that she’s not just some whore.

For some reason, we don’t need to know Curt’s GPA to believe he’s not a dumb jock, but we do need to establish Jules’s base-line behavior before we can accept her as a positive representation of young women. We can assume that she and Curt are totally doin’ it, but is that supposed to make a difference? At the beginning of the movie, Jules isn’t “bugging Dana to be less of a prude,” she’s trying to convince Dana to get over an unhealthy, unreciprocated, and explicitly sexual relationship with one of her teachers. And yes, Jules is setting Dana up for some potential action in the woods — but with a smart, good-looking, and nice young man her own age, instead of fostering a misguided crush on an authority figure.

In what passes for morality in traditional slasher movies, all pre-marital sex (and illegal drug use) is bad and deserves to be punished. The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t devote much time to overt moralizing — if anything, it’s more interested in criticizing that over-simplistic “morality” — but it does distinguish between healthy sex and unhealthy sex. Sex is great! Just have some common sense about it.

Which leads to the game of truth-or-dare and the wolf make-out. In the update to her post, Rosenberg says that “both the sexy dance and the wolf makeouts read to me like plausible weekend away showing off, not wildly aberrant, since I had no sense at all of her prior personality.” Each viewer is going to have his or her own interpretation of a scene, of course, but I have to say I’m baffled as to how anyone could interpret that scene as a simple case of naughty girl’s night out.

The scene is tense, degrading, and creepy, even more than the murder that followed. The murder, we could all see coming, and it followed the standard rules of the Slasher Movie First Murder Template. But the make-out scene was a clear, even accusatory, condemnation of the Slasher Movie Titillation Scene. What we have is Whedon’s “perfectly nice and funny” young woman writhing about the room in front of her friends, making inappropriate come-ons that no one is comfortable with, and slowly — almost agonizingly slowly — french-kissing a decades-old stuffed and mounted wolf’s head. The camera cuts between the wolf’s snarling expression, its sharp teeth (is it going to suddenly come alive and attack?), the horrified expressions of Jules’s friends. And it ends with her tongue touching the dead wolf’s tongue. I thought it couldn’t be more clear what the filmmakers were saying: “You want a sexy, sexy drunk wild-girl make-out scene? How about she frenches a gross dead wolf head? How does that turn you on?”

Even if my prudishness is somehow showing, and the overall grossness of that scene weren’t enough of an indication that this was “wildly aberrant,” then how about the fact that each of the characters explicitly says that this is wildly aberrant? Or the scene that delivers the blatant punch-line, where Amy Acker’s character in the compound explicitly says that it’s chemicals in the blonde hair dye that are affecting Jules’s brain.

Rosenberg says that Whedon seemed “kind of irritated” when she raised her concerns at the movie’s screening at SXSW, but I’m not convinced she entirely understands the source of the irritation. Her post has an accusatory undercurrent to it, as does the question posed in the Vulture interview. To paraphrase: “You are one of the most vocal proponents of the positive portrayal of strong women in pop culture. But isn’t The Cabin in the Woods guilty of doing the exact kind of exploitation it supposedly criticizes? If the movie is intended to satirize the objectification and shaming of women in slasher movies, isn’t that undermined by having the sexy blonde bare her breasts and then immediately be punished for being a whore?”

But the question isn’t “Why didn’t the movie do more to show us that Jules wasn’t a whore?” The question is “Why would anyone in the audience assume that she was?” Horror movies work by playing off of the audience’s preconceptions; how much of your own preconceptions are you bringing to the movie?

Contrast the character of Jules, the kind and funny pre-med student, with Rose McGowan’s character in Scream, who played up the role of “blonde sexpot” from scene one (as she was supposed to). Or for that matter, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s non-Buffy role of the superficial ex beauty queen in I Know What You Did Last Summer. They have absolutely nothing in common apart from being pretty, blonde, and the friend of the non-blonde protagonist. Why did the people in the control room — and by extension, we in the audience — so quickly label Jules as “the whore” and not, say, “the scholar?”

It’s not particularly subtle that the control room assigns roles to the men based on their personalities and capabilities — athlete, fool, scholar — but assigns roles to the women based solely on their sexual history — virgin, whore. The message is clear: assigning value to a woman based solely on her sexual history is outdated and stupid.

Rosenberg never says exactly what the question was that she posed to Whedon, but regardless, I think his response is still very telling: “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb.” It’s clear where his priorities lie: Acker’s character says that the hair dye chemicals are affecting her brain by lowering her intelligence. In the Whedon universe, being stupid is the most unforgivable offense, not being sexy.

The question people should be asking isn’t whether or not Jules was sufficiently shown to be promiscuous or not in her “real life.” The question is why anyone should even care.

Being Like Buffy

Focusing on Cabin in the Woods as if it were an overtly feminist work misses the much larger point that the movie was overtly trying to make: what does it say about us in the audience that we’ll happily pay to watch characters suffer as long as they fit into simplified, well-defined roles?

Rosenberg says that the movie is in some ways a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because that series took the traditional horror- and action-movie stereotypes and subverted them.

…a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show is. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

But Buffy wasn’t about debunking simple tropes. It rarely, if ever (it’s been a while since I’ve watched any of it), took the American Beauty route of substituting one stereotype with a different, slightly less obvious one and passing that off as “depth.” “I’m not like this, I’m like that.” Instead, it said that its characters adhered to stereotypes, but weren’t limited to them. “I’m like this and also like that.”

At least for the first few seasons, Buffy remained sarcastic, flippant, and more interested in fashion than in schoolwork. She still wanted to be popular, and if I remember correctly, tried to get back on the cheerleading squad. Willow remained shy, bookish, and nerdy for most of the series. Xander stayed goofy and kind of dense. Giles was predominantly reserved and stuffy. Cordelia remained bitchy and self-absorbed. The show’s formula was to take familiar teen angst and not subvert it, but heighten it: slacking off on your studies could mean The End Of The World. Your mom dating a new guy could mean The End of the World. Losing your virginity could mean The End of the World.

It’s true that, as Rosenberg points out, Buffy had much more time to flesh out its characters. But it’s not the case that The Cabin of the Woods just made the best of what little time it had. It was trying to do something entirely different. Cabin isn’t a regression from Buffy; in a lot of ways, it’s a rejection of Buffy. Instead of showing the audience that there’s more to its characters than the most obvious stereotypes, it asks the audience why its characters need to be stereotyped at all.

To put it more simply: why should a perfectly smart and funny, beautiful young woman have to be a superhero before we’re willing to take her seriously?

The Black One

Criticizing the movie for not doing enough to subvert the audience’s own preconceptions is as much a case of reverse-stereotyping as, say, singling out the movie’s treatment of characters based solely on their race. As Rosenberg says: “(Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached).” But the only black man in the control room is the conscience of the entire group; he’s the only one who shows any sign of trepidation over what they’re doing. He’s the one character meant to represent the audience’s better nature! And he even gets his John Shaft moment when the control room is overrun.

And the only way that Holden doesn’t get a fair shake is that he’s never allowed to fit squarely into any of the predefined roles he’s supposed to fit in. He’s not The Black One, since he survives pretty late into the movie, and he’s the only one who’s presented as a suitable love interest for the white protagonist. He’s not The Action Man, since he yields that to Curt for most of the movie and spends most of the time afterwards just trying to get away. And he’s not The Scholar, both because Marty and Dana are the only characters who actually figure anything out, and because for all the trepidation over Jules taking off her shirt, Holden is the only character that the movie genuinely objectifies.

In the only overtly sexy scene that takes place in movie reality, as opposed to artificially manipulated control room reality, Dana watches as Holden takes off all his clothes, and the camera cuts between her should-I-look-or-shouldn’t-I naughtiness and his ridiculously perfect abs. Keep in mind that he’s stripping immediately after finding out that there’s a one-way mirror installed between the rooms, and he’s supposed to be The Smart One. And for that matter, The Virgin and The Scholar are the only characters who demonstrate any non-chemically-enhanced interest in sex.

And if it were the movie’s intention simply to subvert stereotypes, it did a far worse job with Curt and Marty. For most of the movie, Curt really is the group’s equivalent of Fred Jones, and Marty is the group’s Shaggy. One was the jock, right down to his final motorcycle leap over a canyon; the other was the group’s comic relief throughout. I’d be a lot more disappointed in their treatment, if I actually thought that they were trying to convince me that “but he’s a sociology major” and “but his conspiracy theories turned out to be true” were in any way insightful.

For most of the final act, I was absolutely convinced that I’d figured out the final plot twist. I just knew that the ritual was going to backfire once it was revealed that nerdy stoner Marty was the real virgin of the group, not Dana. And I’m so glad they didn’t go that route, because not only would it have been unforgivably stupid and obvious, it would’ve undermined the entire theme of the movie.

Give the People What They Want

Earlier I said that the group in the control room represented the audience. For most of the movie, that’s the case: just like them, we’re intently watching the carnage play out on a screen in front of us. We’re not invested in the lives of the people we’re spying on, but instead curious about how the spectacle is going to play out. We’re placing bets (figuratively) on what exactly the monster’s going to be, who’s going to die first, which of the characters will survive until the end. When we see a young woman get brutally murdered, we’ll make a token show of remorse, and then get right back to watching the rest of the story play out.

The Cabin in the Woods has been compared to Scream a lot, although they don’t intend to do the same thing at all. What’s clever about Scream (which is still a movie I like!) is that it calls out each of the familiar tropes of horror movies, and then carries them out while still getting a visceral reaction out of them. What’s clever about Cabin in the Woods is that it says, “Yeah, Scream, that’s cute and all, but it’s ultimately meaningless.” And it does so without being pedantic, and it actually manages to be funnier and more clever, although never quite as scary.

By the end of The Cabin in the Woods, we learn that the audience isn’t represented by the people in the control room — if anything, they represent the filmmakers. No, we in the audience are the horrible, never-seen monsters that live beneath. The ones who demand that the filmmakers put innocents through hell for our entertainment. We’re the ones who must be placated.

I don’t believe that Jules is the character we see suffer the most, as Rosenberg claims. In fact, I’d say that Jules’s death is the only one that the movie cinematically treats with anything approaching genuine compassion — it’s the most overtly horrific, and it’s the only one that shows us the reactions of the people in the control room. It’s the only one for which the movie seems to tell us: This is bad. You should feel bad about this.

I didn’t have my stopwatch handy, but I got the impression that the attack on Dana was much longer, more brutal, and more drawn out. We see her knocked to the ground over and over again, trying to crawl for help before being pulled back, coughing up blood, and repeatedly beaten.

The difference is that Jules’s death is filmed in the traditional slasher movie style, with all the ghoulishly mixed messages that implies: here’s the two-for-one tits and violence that you paid to see! Are you not entertained? The attack on Dana, however, is relegated to the background. It never leaves the frame, of course — we did pay good money to see this young girl get tortured, after all, and we’d better get our money’s worth! — but it’s not given the focus, since the people in the control room have stopped caring.

Because the rule is clear: the virgin can survive, but she doesn’t have to. The people in the control room have already broken out the champagne, because their job is done, and they’ve once again satisfied the demands of their masters. (Us, in case we’ve forgotten).

In other words: all the talk about the “rules” of horror movies, and all the attempts to describe them as modernized morality plays, are complete bullshit. It’s not about punishing the sinful or rewarding the pure, because ultimately, we don’t really care. The idea that these characters are being punished for something they did wrong is bogus; that’s just one of the ways that we distance ourselves from the realization that we want to watch them suffer.

And it’s why the characters have to be forced into a predefined set of stereotyped roles, even if those roles don’t fit. It’s so that we can remind ourselves that this isn’t real, these aren’t people, but types. That way, we don’t have to spend any time thinking about what is real: no matter whether the movie’s a masterwork of modern horror or a cheesy slasher flick, no matter how good we say we are at separating fiction from reality, the one thing that’s undeniably real is that we’ve demanded to be entertained by the sight of young people being tortured and murdered.

That’s why the suggestion of giving just a little more detail to Jules or Holden’s characters is ultimately ghoulish. Why would it be any more or less sad to see Jules being snared by a bear trap if only we knew whether she was a smart independent young woman or a promiscuous party girl? What does it matter whether she’s a positive representation of women in popular media when we know that she’s going to get slaughtered either way, because that’s what we came here to see? Why can’t we feel “real pain in the loss” of Holden getting a spike through the throat unless he gets more dialogue? How do we rationalize the idea that sex, race, or even whether we’ve gotten to like a character, makes their senseless murder any more or less poignant?

When Dana and Marty release all the monsters, that’s when the movie makes it explicit how much the “rules” actually matter. There aren’t any rules to any of this; it’s pure chaos. We laugh at it because it can’t hurt us, and we enjoy it because it’s movie justice — the bad guys are finally getting what’s been coming to them. But that sense of over-simplified morality is shown to be every bit as false here as it was above ground: the “conscience” of the control room is one of the first to get killed. And the monsters take out Amy Acker’s character just as easily, without stopping to think about whether or not she’s smart and how much sex she’s had. And more significantly, without stopping to consider whether she’s been complicit in all this.

The best horror stories are the ones that don’t make any half-assed attempt to justify what they do with a set of “rules,” or try to establish a safe distance between the audience and the characters. Real horror comes from the realization that horrible stuff happens for no reason at all. It’s not because you got drunk or stoned, or because you had sex, or because you’re a woman, or because you’re a minority, or because you’re the selfish guy who ran away from the rest of the group, or even because you’re particularly good or evil. Those are the things we tell ourselves, to reassure us we have some control over it. But we have absolutely no control over it. The catharsis we get from horror stories doesn’t come from seeing people being punished for bad behavior, it’s from seeing horrible things happen to people who aren’t us.

That, in itself, is pretty horrible. Which is why we’ll go to great lengths to keep from having to think about it.

Like Rosenberg, I went away from The Cabin in the Woods believing that the ending was something of a nihilistic cop-out — maybe this world isn’t worth saving. But after thinking about the movie (and writing what has become a novella about it), I now believe that’s too simplistic an interpretation. Obviously, the movie is an indictment of horror movie cliches — not the cliches themselves, but the need for them at all.

The message isn’t that life in a world like this isn’t worth living. The message, if anything, is that life is precious. None of the characters did anything to deserve having their identities stripped away from them so that they could be systematically murdered. And Dana refuses to kill Marty even though all of the “rules” of storytelling tell her she’d be justified in doing so. Sure, the monsters are going to be upset that they didn’t get the logical, expected outcome of their story, but satisfying that just isn’t worth the cost. It’s better for the virgin who slept with her teacher to sit and have a joint with the illegal drug user, while the outdated and morally bankrupt notion that there’s a just and proper method of murdering people crumbles around them.

So I had it on the to-read list, and I’d assumed I knew how it was going to play out just based on the premise: a bunch of kids living in an old, unfamiliar family house, discovering magic keys that open mysterious doors, each with its own power. I’d expected another urban fantasy comic, maybe similar to The Unwritten, inspired by The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe with some House of Mystery and House of Secrets mixed in.

That would’ve been fine. But what I found when I read the first volume was a lot more compelling and more layered than I’d imagined.

It goes for the slow burn. I’d already plotted out the first issue in my mind: get the kids to the house, one of them discovers the first key, they all get pulled into the mystery, they confront the bad guy, and they set up the rest of the series. But there’s no quick pay-off in the first issue. Writer Joe Hill gradually lets the prologue unfold over the entire first volume, devoting an issue to each of his characters instead of just having them serve as interchangeable protagonists.

It retains the style of the “classic” horror comics. I admit I was turned off by the art of Gabriel Rodriguez at first; it seemed too stylized to work well with the tone that the writing was trying to establish. But after a couple of issues, I grew to realize that it was perfect — the book frequently makes subtle and not-particularly-subtle references to William Gaines and the old EC horror comics, and the art keeps it rooted in that tradition. (In fact, Rodriguez’s art in Locke & Key reminds me of a particular comic artist from the late 70s and early 80s, but I’m drawing a complete blank on the name. Anyone have any ideas?)

It puts a modern spin on several different eras of horror stories. Locke & Key is unabashedly a horror comic, even more than I’d expected it to be — axes to the head, knives to the eyes, attacks with crowbars and bricks, all rendered in splash pages with gouts of blood. But while Hellblazer always seems firmly rooted in the 90s, DC’s horror comics rooted in the 70s, and Tales from the Crypt unmistakably from the 50s, Locke and Key‘s influences seem to span several decades — from gothic (with the creepy old house and the town name of Lovecraft) to modern.

I realize it’s probably bad form to draw comparisons to Stephen King when talking about Joe Hill‘s work, but the greatest achievement of King’s first novels was how well he took traditional horror stories and translated them into contemporary settings. Locke & Key does something similar for comics, but without feeling “millennial.” Looking back at the first few issues of The Sandman, the influences of EC Comics and Berni Wrightson are immediately apparent, and the introduction has the feel of a deliberate reinvention of classic horror. Right out of the gate, Locke & Key seems to acknowledge the influences without letting them become overwhelming. Classic horror comics provide the tone of the story, not the purpose.

Finally, It’s smart. Again, probably because the art grounds it in a heavily stylized, almost cartoonish atmosphere, the writing and plotting can be introspective and realistic without either coming across as mundane or as pretentious. Instead of lurid descriptions of horrific acts of violence, we get matter-of-fact descriptions of them. Instead of monologues or dramatic soliloquies, we get natural, realistic dialogue. Literary allusions — much of the back story revolves around a school production of The Tempest — don’t come across as forced. And while none of the characters is complex enough (so far) to be the focus of an entire story, they all work together well and are given enough depth to keep from collapsing into caricature. Somehow, Hill puts just enough spin on them that they seem to be characters who just happen to fit into a stereotypical role.

At this point, I’ve only gotten through the first issue of the second volume. (Possibly the best single issue of the series I’ve read so far). There’s still twenty-three issues for it all to completely fall apart, or worse, to turn into something as solid-but-predictable as I’d originally expected. For now, though, I’m happy that my first impressions are being proven wrong. And I’m reminded of being a freshman in college, just discovering The Sandman and Hellblazer and learning that there was a whole world outside superhero comics.

Edit: I forgot to mention that he does have a kid who lives in San Francisco call it “Frisco.” But apart from that, it’s all pretty good.

• I absolutely loved it.
• The official trailer seems like it spoils the entire premise of the movie, but I’ll assure you that it doesn’t.
• This is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that genuinely kept me guessing, so avoid watching or reading anything else about it before you see it.

Because Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s names are on the movie, it’s pretty much guaranteed an audience from fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Cloverfield. I hope it goes even wider than that, though, because it’s really smart and a hell of a lot of fun. It reminded me a little bit of Drag Me to Hell — a fairly slick Hollywood production that somehow retains the swagger of a low-budget indie.

So yeah, don’t watch or read anything about it, starting NOW.

For anyone who’s already seen it — or anyone who for whatever reason still needs to be convinced — my take on it is after the spoiler safety jump.

Even more than Drag Me to Hell, the tone of the movie reminded me of Angel. No big surprise there, of course, since Goddard directed and co-wrote it with Whedon. But what did surprise me is how they finally managed to make the schtick work.

Because I tried over and over to get into Angel, and I always went away disappointed. The concept was solid enough: taking the monsters of fantasy, religion, and folklore, and setting them against not just modern technology, but modern sensibilities. The problem was that they seemed so pleased with themselves for coming up with the concept, they never bothered to do anything with it. It was most often reduced to a clumsy joke: “you think demons are scary? You’ve never dealt with Hollywood lawyers!”

The Cabin in the Woods takes the idea that Whedon’s tried so many times (including with an entire season of Buffy) and finally gets it right: jaded members of a centuries-old shadow organization with advanced technology, pitted against a group of self-aware young people.

Even better, it’s not too self-aware. It hits a lot of the same points as Scream, but it’s almost casual about it: no explicit declarations of “Look how much life is imitating art because we have become characters in a horror movie.” Instead, the movie just assumes throughout that we’re all part of the same pop culture, we’ve all seen the same movies and TV shows, and the audience is plenty aware of what’s going on.

And after saying all this, I haven’t even spoiled the movie yet. I’d gone in convinced that I was smarter than the dopes advertising this movie, the big premise had already been revealed by the trailer, and I knew exactly how it was all going to play out. But instead of starting with the slow burn of college kids gearing up for spring break, we get two awesome character actors riding a golf cart through some kind of industrial complex. It’s like the movie is telling us from the first frame: “Yeah, we know exactly what you thought this was going to be. It’s not. Shut up and watch.”

And then, to drive the point home, a perfect B-movie title card.

The movie defied my expectations over and over again, giving a twist where I hadn’t expected one or denying one where I was sure I had it figured out. At no point did I feel like I could figure out how the movie was going to end.

And I get the sense that they couldn’t, either, since it just kind of peters out. Also, I got the impression that the big guest star reveal towards the end was supposed to have more weight than it did. (Especially since Paul already did the exact same thing, and it didn’t pay off there like they expected it to, either).

But that’s all I’ve got to complain about. It was genuinely scary in places, genuinely funny throughout. It finally delivered on the premise of Post Modern Horror Movie without sacrificing too much of the horror movie or being insufferably self-aware in the post-modernism. And best of all, it’s finally a fun horror movie that treats the characters and the audience as if we’re all at least as smart as the filmmakers.

Maybe he got the request from The New York Times to participate in a discussion about adults reading young adult fiction, and his reaction was: “Seriously? After 15 years of Harry Potter book releases, the Twilight franchise, and The Hunger Games being on the NYT best seller list for eighty-four weeks, you’re going back to that well again?” So to protest, he responded with a completely over-the-top caricature of the Pretentious Insecure Twat that would be too implausibly asinine for anyone to possibly take seriously.

Or maybe he was just bored and wanted to see how many people he could piss off on Facebook, to promote sales for his new book. Maybe he’s trying to establish himself as the edgy guy who tells it like it is. Whatever the case: screw that. Irony and sarcasm are old news; sincerity is the big thing now.

And reading that article made me feel defensive. Not for enjoying books, comics, games, movies, and TV shows for a younger audience. I’m feeling defensive for always acting like there’s a problem with that in the first place.

I’ve realized that every time I write about an animated series, or a comic book, or a young adult book, I’m careful to qualify it in my description. So I’ll write 600-1000 words about a comic book convention, or a video game, or a cartoon, but I’ll make sure that everybody knows that I’m not taking it seriously or anything. All these years I’ve been as guilty of contributing to the perpetuation of douchebaggery as pieces like Stein’s, with the only difference being that I’ve been doing it without realizing it.

The problem isn’t one of substance, because there’s no substance in Stein’s piece. Instead of talking about the merits of any adult fiction past “I’m in the target demographic,” he talks about scoffing at people he sees reading inappropriate material in public.

The problem isn’t substance, but relevance. Stein’s opinions are so outdated that he might as well be wearing a straw hat and singing to us about the dangers of pool. Almost 25 years after the publication of Watchmen and decades of resulting discussions of comics as literature, in an environment where the video game industry is bigger than the film industry, and where Pulitzer Prize-winning authors hold panels with comic book authors about the dissolution of the idea of “genre fiction” in literature, Stein’s blanket dismissal just makes him seem like a relic. Someone so clueless as to use Donkey Kong as his go-to example of a video game.

And for that matter: for someone so concerned with being taken seriously, Stein should probably be aware that claiming not to know anything about The Hunger Games apart from “games you play when hungry” doesn’t make him look as literate as he believes. It makes him look like an idiot, completely unaware of his surroundings. I have even less interest in reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than I do in reading Twilight or, for that matter, Freedom. But I could at least tell you what each is about.

Nature’s provided us with ways to quickly and easily identify things that will be toxic or dangerous. Brown spots on a piece of fruit indicate it’s unsafe to eat. Millions of pain receptors in our skin warn us when we’ve touched a hot surface. And whenever someone responds to a reference with the comment, “I don’t own a television,” it’s a clear signal to excuse yourself from the conversation and make as much distance as possible before they attempt to name-check Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

Because that is the real problem. Raging against legions of Twilight-reading moms not living up to their full intellectual potential is arguing against a straw man, all the while insisting that you’ve shared some sort of insight. It’s the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of complaining about airplane food, unaware that it’s been years since airlines regularly served food. The people reading “young adult” books to the complete exclusion of “adult” ones are reading them because they get something out of them, something they’re unlikely to get from material that someone else tells them is more appropriate.

Besides, they’re mostly imaginary in the first place. Just the most cursory survey of reviews on Goodreads shows that most readers are better off than Stein (and for that matter, me), because they’ll read whatever they can get their hands on. I’ve seen plenty of readers who’ll happily jump from The Hunger Games to a Sookie Stackhouse novel to a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. Suggesting that they’re wasting their time on junk food does nothing to expand their intellectual horizons, but only reveals yourself to be an ass showing impotent disdain.

And I’ve never actually encountered one of these Twilight moms, who’ll read nothing but Harry Potter and the occasional Harlequin romance. But I’ve encountered plenty of people who make gut responses to a book, or a movie, or any piece of media, based solely on its genre or its target demographic. It’s easier (and lazier) to claim that that’s a case of being discriminating. Or to claim that it’s encouraging people to challenge themselves, instead of just reassuring themselves that it’s okay to enjoy stuff that has no intellectual content. It’s bullshit.

And that’s where I’m complicit in it. I read The Hunger Games, but instead of just appreciating its masterful pacing and pointing out its clever spin on the traditional love triangle in an age of constant media exposure and awareness, I felt the need to explain that I knew it was just a kids’ book. I loved the technical artistry and economy of silent, expressive storytelling in Wall-E and Up, but still felt weird for being a 40-year-old man watching a kids’ movie. I’ve enjoyed the pulp-adventure storytelling and amazing concept design in The Clone Wars series, but I try to keep it on the down-low since it’s on Cartoon Network.

This could potentially be an amazing time to be an artist. The walls between genres and even media are dissolving, and we’re seeing cross-cultural mash-ups, literary re-interpretations of pulp material, and young adult mash-ups of mythology and social satire. One of the best books I’ve read recently was about comic books, and another was a post-apocalyptic novel. With this kind of media saturation, the whole notion of limiting yourself — I only have so much time to read all the world’s great literature! — is an overly sentimental and ultimately silly anachronism. If you haven’t read Moby Dick by now, then you probably won’t. And really, that’s fine, since it’s made its way through culture enough that its themes have been re-interpreted and reincorporated dozens of times over.

When I was growing up, I developed a real sense of the stuff I read and watched for fun as opposed to the stuff that was supposed to be “good for me.” And it’s hard to let that go. But it’s completely irrelevant nowadays. Thousands and thousands of people have something to share, and they finally have the means to share it. You can choose to take part in it, or you can get left behind.

Wizards of the Coast has recently released Lords of Waterdeep, which seems to be the reverse of Ravenloft and Ashardalon: instead of translating the D&D experience into a board game, they’ve translated a Euro-style strategy game into the D&D universe.

It’ll take a while to find out whether it’s able to hold my interest longer than the other games did, but so far after two plays of a two-player game, I absolutely love it.

For anybody not familiar with the term “Euro-style:” it’s become a catch-all term used by board game geeks to refer to the types of board games popular in Germany, one of the only places where “board games” and “popular” can be used together non-ironically. They generally rely heavily on abstracted game mechanics, avoid randomization like dice rolls, and tend to reward players for “solving” the mechanic more than for defeating other players. (The opposite is called “Ameritrash” for whatever reason, and it’s heavy on dice rolls and other randomization, and it encourages player interaction and direct competition, like combat).

Lords of Waterdeep fits the Euro definition by being focused on resource management instead of combat, and by depending on a set of complementary mechanics that reward players who figure out how to use them all together. It’s a worker placement game that’s frequently compared to a bunch of games I’ve never played before: Caylus, Stone Age, Agricola, and Le Havre. I’ve seen several reviews from people more experienced in board games that complain LoW is just a simplified mash-up of other games they’ve already played. But since the closest I’ve come to a worker placement game is Puerto Rico, and since I’m not familiar with the Waterdeep setting or characters in D&D, everything in the game is new to me.

In the game, you play as one of the titular Lords of Waterdeep, the people of influence who secretly control everything that goes on within the city. Each player has a number of agents that he or she can send to various locations within the city, to earn money, recruit adventurers to the lord’s chosen house, get new quests, or construct new buildings with greater rewards for the agent assigned there. Most of the locations can only be occupied by one agent at a time, so the players will be competing over the best rewards. Once a player has gathered enough adventurers in his tavern, he can send them off to complete a quest, which earns victory points and, sometimes, ongoing rewards that continue throughout the rest of the game. At the end of the game, each player reveals his identity and earns additional victory points for completing quests of certain types.

If that explanation made little sense to you, the Dice Tower review gives a much better idea of how the game plays out.

Uncanny Undermountain

But if that explanation sounded like a fantastic world of intrigue and adventure, then, well, that’s my first major complaint about the game. The “adventurers” you’re recruiting are actually tiny wooden cubes of a particular color. And the “quests” you’re sending them on are just cards that cost a certain number of cubes and gold, and return a certain number of victory points. The theme is there, but you have to work pretty hard to keep it alive — always say, “I’m sending two rogues and a wizard on a quest to defeat the Drow Uprising” instead of “I’m spending two black cubes and a purple cube to get 10 victory points.”

That’s not to say that the theme is poorly done, or that it’s useless. The designers came up with what I think is an extremely clever way to map the mechanics of a Euro game onto the theme and setting of a D&D campaign. And it’s a perfect example of how much theme makes a difference in board games. Most of the resource management games I’ve played simply translate the resources into real-world equivalents: corn, wood, stone, sheep, or occasionally star fighters. So there are lots and lots and lots of games about farming. And there’s only a certain number of times you can hear the “I’ve got wood for sheep” joke before it gets tiresome. (That number is 1).

Keeping in the mindset of shadowy figures sending adventurers on quests can do a lot to keep the game interesting. But that, indirectly, leads to my second biggest complaint: even though I’ve only played the game twice at this point, I still feel as though I was doing mostly the same things each time. I suspect that there’s something of an “uncanny valley” effect going on — I’ve played Puerto Rico, which has a much less interesting theme, dozens of times without its ever feeling repetitive. But because Lords of Waterdeep‘s quest and intrigue cards suggest stories that are more interesting than collecting cubes to pay for victory points, it just draws attention to the fact that that’s basically all you’re doing.

This is a UNIX System. I Know This!

Those complaints aside, I enjoy the game a lot. Each two-player game finished in about an hour, but felt every bit as “complete” as a much longer game. I felt as if I was making interesting choices with every move, including my first move — there’s little sense of wasting the first few turns trying to build up an engine. Even my current favorites Dominion and Ascension haven’t been able to achieve that.

Even better, the mechanics of the game are simple enough to make it easy to develop a strategy for winning, but not so simple that there’s any one “right way” to play every time. I tend to be very reactionary when I’m playing most board games — I don’t have the patience to try and think several moves ahead, so I’m a lot more likely to try a move, just to see how it plays out. But with Lords of Waterdeep, I can actually formulate a strategy at the beginning of the game (suggested by the randomly-selected Lord card, each with its own secret victory points) and keep it through to the end. It’s like the scene in Little Man Tate, where the boy looks at a pool table and sees each of the balls’ trajectories across the table, calculates the angle and the force of impact, and instantly knows how to play.

For the record: I also got an uncommonly lucky starting draw in my first game, where both of my starting cards and my Lord card all worked together in a self-perpetuating victory point-generating engine, with no effort required on my part. On top of that, I was more willing to play aggressively against my opponent than he was playing against me — one of the aspects of the game that’s unusual for “Euros” is the inclusion of an “Intrigue” deck filled with cards that can make life difficult for your opponent. Even with those advantages, though, the scores stayed pretty close throughout the game. It seems very difficult for a player to just run away with the game, leaving the other players with no chance to catch up.

I got soundly trounced on my second game, and I enjoyed every bit of it. I’m looking forward to playing with more players, where there’s more competition for the available agent positions, and it’s not as easy (or even possible) to accomplish everything you set out to do in a single turn.

It’s extremely well balanced, it has a good mix of strategizing along with player interaction, it’s simple enough to allow for planning ahead but not so simple that the decisions don’t require thought, it’s a very clever combination of theme and game mechanic, and it’s possible to complete a game in an hour and a half. Plus, I didn’t mention it earlier, but the box and the components are extremely well designed — the insert has a place for everything, and the gold coins have holes in them! I think they’ve done an outstanding job with this game, and I’m impressed all around.

Board Games And Me

I’ve had an interest in board games for several years now — a side effect of being friends with an award-winning game designer — but it’s really taken hold over the past few years, as I’ve started to really understand the appeal.

My interest in video games has been, for the most part, focused on how interactivity affects and enhances storytelling. I used to joke that a lot of game developers were failed filmmakers, but I’ve got to admit it’s basically how I got interested in game development in the first place. I get how movies work, essentially, so the question is how can you use that kind of language to resonate with the audience on a more active level? How do you involve them in the process of creating the story, not just watching it?

It’s only recently that I’ve begun to appreciate game mechanics as an art in and of themselves. I’d taken it for granted that video game mechanics had become solidified and codified, with the main question being how to take the preset shooter, platformer, or real-time strategy template and use it to tell more complex stories. But now I’m feeling that that’s not solidification, but stagnation. It’s rare for a video game to introduce something genuinely novel, and even then it’s most often an add-on to something else: a first person shooter plus portals and comedy; a third-person action game plus the ability to rewind time; a series of boss fights but you feel bad for killing the bosses.

Board games can be every bit as iterative, of course. But while an uninspired video game with outstanding presentation can still be a good experience, even the best theme imaginable can’t make a weak board or card game fun.

That’s because all the systems are exposed, and that’s exactly what makes them so exciting to a jaded video game developer. A good game design is a system of complementary machines, turning inputs into interesting outputs, fueled and balanced with risks and rewards. The best games combine those mechanics in a way that encourages the player to create his own engine with the available parts, not just once but each time he plays the game. In that sense, complaints that Lords of Waterdeep is “just” a mash-up of existing game mechanics are so irrelevant as to be meaningless. It’d be like complaining that a baker doesn’t grind his own flour.

For years I’ve been trying the think of ways that video games could allow players to not just tick off a list of objectives with a predetermined set of pieces that work well together, but to actually become involved in the process of putting the pieces together themselves. Because if we can do that with resources and victory points, we can should be able to extend that to plot developments and meaningful character interactions.

SimCity lets players build mostly inert variations on Conway’s Life simulator. Minecraft lets players build spaceships and computers, but not stories. Computer RPGs have no actual role-playing. Civilization veers between tedious micromanagement and rote memorization from version to version. And Starcraft has gotten so bogged down with cut-scenes and lists of objectives that there’s little room left for devising new ways for the pieces to work together.

I’d started to think that the problem was so insoluble that maybe it wasn’t even a problem at all. Maybe the current state of big-budget games and derivative, over-simplified indies really was the best we could do. Maybe the publishers were right: players just don’t want to be challenged to come up with something for themselves, since it’s never a case of satisfying problem-solving and always a case of “having to read the designer’s mind.”

But then every few weeks I’d go to Board Game Night, and I’d watch everyone casually coming up with new strategies, getting engaged with the game and with each other, and having fun doing it.