Johnny Bacardi (who, like his namesake, gets better and better the more you imbibe) has posted a response-to-cum-defense-against my lengthy ruminations on Brian Wood’s Demo and the larger issues of coherence and explainability in fiction, genre fiction in particular (said post being a response to the opposing viewpoint, as voiced by Johnny B. earlier). I guess the first thing I’d like to say in response to his response to my response (aside from “gee, don’t you just love the blogosphere?”) is he really doesn’t need to defend himself against misinterpretation, because I wasn’t really trying to interpret what he said. I just kind of used his post (which voiced a sense of frustration with the fact that the disparate single-issue stories that comprise Demo aren’t tied together in any tangible way aside from theme) as a springboard an excuse to riff on some ideas I’d been kicking around on faux antiauthoritarianism and closed-system storytelling. In other words, I didn’t necessarily believe that Johnny wanted a Professor X type to show up and whisk the Demo kids off to the Danger Room–I just thought that Johnny’s frustration and the Professor X/secret-conspiracy syndrome evolved out of the same outlook.
Anyway, in his new post Johnny expands upon his frustration, now taking on “ambiguous” fiction generally as a potential refuge for lazy authors. It certainly can be that–I for one remember thinking very vividly, after watching Lost Highway for the first time, “Is David Lynch a genius, or just a really crappy storyteller?” (I think you all know which way I eventually went on that one.) Ultimately ambiguity-as-bad-writing is like pornography: I know it when I see it. Problem is, everyone thinks that, which is why half the world thinks the ending of The Birds is chilling and brilliant and the other half thinks its the biggest cop-out in film history. (Next to sparing the dog in the tunnel in Independence Day, of course.)
The other problem is that if you say you like ambiguous, messy fiction, fiction where it isn’t all spelled out neatly, you inevitably come across as a pretentious git. Every time I defend (here it comes again) season four of The Sopranos, and believe you me I defend it quite often, there’s always a part of me that hesitates–“am I sounding pedantic? ‘You really thought it was boring? I thought it was the best thing that’s ever been on television!'” I assure you that’s not my intention at all. It’s just the way my tastes run. Quite frankly there’s so little of this type of fiction–The Sopranos takes it further than just about anything I’ve ever come across, though Morrison’s New X-Men and Charles Burns’s Black Hole are contenders–that I’m just so delighted to find any of it, I’ll talk your ear off about it.
Ultimately, it’s not going to be to everyone’s liking, and that’s fine, but I suppose my goal is to get people to acknowledge the validity of the approach. (Which is a tough gig, you know. We live in a world where people will tell you in absolute seriousness that Alfred Hitchcock is an objectively terrible director. Common ground on art, even great art, is hard to find.)