YouTube link here. I’m so cute!
This week was fun. We discuss some show finales, some creepy aspects of otherwise normal exercise video games, and Tony gets REALLY mad and REALLY detailed about a particular movie. No questions, so that’s a bummer. But we had fun, and laughed a lot, which should be the point, really. Right? Enjoy!
QUESTIONS:
NONE
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So I was listening to the episode, taking in all this information about the Wanda finale, and surprisingly good movie, and a terrible movie, and this analytic discussion about narrative–just waiting for the question to be pulled from the hat that was going to tie everything together–and then….there…was…no…question. What?!!! It’s all about the two of them having a good time?!!! What?!!!
Yay! We did it! 🙂
I was pretty let down by Wandavision. The worst episode for that was actually the penultimate one. I really didn’t like that one for the most part. The earlier episodes had drawn us into this very interesting world, and then that one took us step by step through a revelation process that I disliked for two reasons: because the solution was the obvious one and the least interesting, and its bad writing when you have to explain things to your audience in that way rather than just show them. Then the final episode was just, eh… There was one more revelation there that was kinda awful, but the previous episode had already lowered my expectations.
I think Lost did come to a resolution–too much of one in my opinion. The whole show kept throwing more information and more mystery at us, and what turned out to be great about that is the creativity of the viewers in coming up with narratives that were fairly morally complex to tie things together. And then the end of the show revealed that the big secret was that this was only about selling a consumable product that would resolve in a simplistically moral way. Mysteries that resolve into divisions of good guys and bad guys–the high fructose corn syrup of story-telling.
Can anyone give some example of good What What stories. I recently watched the German show Dark and even though it was very good, I still felt the second What didn’t meet the level of the initial story. It is one of the best things I’ve seen on TV for a while, but it is very disturbing. In fact I watched the first episode initially and it was so depressing I gave up. Then during lockdown my son heard good things about it and wanted to try it so we decided to give it one more episode to get better and then it hooked us with the mystery which made the depressing stuff a bit easier to take.
I think I agree with your assessment of WandaVision. I defer to your knowledge of Lost, of course. 🙂
For a good What What, we must look back to the earliest What Whats. The successful ones that everyone else decided to copy. We must go back to…..
…..
… *shrug* I dunno.
The best “What What” movie is Oldboy. The Korean one of course. Parasite also fits so maybe it’s just something Americans are bad at, or it’s easier to what what people outside your own culture?
Oh yeah, Parasite is a good example. I know of the movie Oldboy but after hearing the description from my son, I didn’t think I could watch it.
Good one, Parasite.
Also haven’t seen Oldboy. I occasionally try and get up the courage to do so, but never have.
Oldboy is one of my favorites of all time and an absolute masterpiece, BUT I totally understand not being able to stomach it. It’s a lot. We use to watch a ton of horror, B, and Foreign movies… basically anything outside the mainstream… and raz them brutally. and Oldboy is one of the few that left us shut the hell up through the entire film and beyond.
Watching my wife play Control and wondering how we missed mentioning what-what video games.
I think what-what stories have been more numerous and successful in video games than in any other medium. But I suspect that such stories originated in detective fiction.
Jas?
Yeah, I was thinking about that when I wrote up the description about LOST.
I’m sure there have been these kinds of narratives every since there were stories, but I think they really took off because of (at least) two things:
1) The idea of the investigator as hero which is related to Enlightenment ideas and the Scientific Revolution.
2) Population growth and movement to urban areas with the Industrial Revolution–which increased a sense of paranoia because of the sense of living among strangers. This led, by the way, to a lot of the pseudoscience of the 19th century wherein people were supposed to be able to read morality in physical features (which of course had a lot of built-in racism and sexism).
So then you get a lot of stories where the first What is loaded with suspicions of various characters in the story, and the only one who is immune is the (usually first-person narrator) investigator. And the second What has the satisfaction of showing us that gathering enough knowledge will protect us from evil and separate the good guys from the bad guys.
It’s actually a very similar narrative in horror fiction. Gathering enough evidence about what the monster is, is often the way to defeat it.
Re: such stories going back a ways…
Now that you mention it, it’s a popular thing in fairy tales to have the hero meet several strange characters and/or experience very strange things as they wonder the world, only for all of those characters/experiences to assist the hero in important ways in the climax of the story.
I don’t think those stories fit as they pretty much set up the reappearance of those helpers–so there’s no second What. I think fables with a twist ending would probably work better.
Oh.
Maybe I’m the only one who had a second what with those kinds of stories! 😀
Point! Video games do LOTS of What Whats. And sometimes very well.
Watched a movie last night that’s a bit of a What What… maybe. It’s complicated. Will discuss next week.
I think the original Matrix film was a good what-what story.
I was just talking about the Matrix to Pete last night. We were talking about why “taking the red pill” has become such a strong meme connected with conspiracy theories and how I’m sure that was not part of the Wachowski’s intent in making the film. But I do think the film fits perfectly into a type of narrative (which again one finds a lot in detective fiction) in which the entire world is corrupt and you cannot trust what seems to be true. What I was wondering was if creators aimed for more moral complexity, in the closure of their stories particularly, would they wind up not supporting that type of narrative which seems really prevalent in the modern world, and which I think winds up having negative social effects? I should clarify that I don’t think most creators set out with any kind of ideological or political agenda. But I think market forces tend to support the more easily digestible and more simplistic closure of these stories, even if the earlier parts suggest more complexity (as was the case with LOST).
Sorry… for some reason I can’t stop thinking about this…
So… what-what stories go way back, but are almost “proto-what-what” until the 19th century comes along and gives them a significant boost. But it seems like some other thing must have happened to boost the genre again before today. Hitchcock, maybe? Psycho is definitely what-what.
Hmmm…
I think the reason they’ve become more popular has to do with what I was saying above in regard to LOST. Mysteries that resolve into easy moral solutions are the high fructose corn syrup of story-telling, and as the need to sell stories has increased, that kind of formula shows up more and more.
Right, but any kind of story can offer easy moral solutions. I can’t think of a reason for people who want easy moral solutions to crave what-what stories in particular.
Let’s consider LOST, actually… it was hugely popular while it was still morally ambiguous, which was almost its entire run. I’ll grant that part of that was some viewers who enjoyed “picking a side” and arguing over which side would “win”, but there were plenty of viewers who didn’t do that, who loved the show because it allowed them to find their own answers, letting them consider questions like, “What if the Others are the good guys?” or “What if the Dharma Initiative actually got it right?” or “What if John/Jack has a point?”. I think LOST actually proves that moral ambiguity is more in demand than easy moral solutions, since not only did LOST gain all of its popularity while it was morally ambiguous, but, also, all of its cultural cachet evaporated when, in the end, it picked a side.
But, back to the main point… I don’t think the popularity of what-what shows in general is significantly coupled to the demand for stories that have easy moral solutions. We can’t explain the popularity of Pop Rocks (the quintessential what-what “food”!) simply by observing, “It’s candy. Everybody loves candy.”
Oh yeah, I agree that LOST was actually much more morally ambiguous before its conclusion and that’s one thing people were drawn to in it. And honestly, I’m talking more about what people think is marketable in concluding a story than what the viewers might actually like if given a chance. It’s very similar to the binary division of gender in order to market products.
But what I remember people being upset with in the ending of LOST was not that it came to a simplistic moral conclusion. People were upset that the mysteries that got set up were not resolved. I do think there’s something very tied to Enlightenment ideas of investigation which sets up anxieties in the first part of the what that are resolved through knowledge. And people didn’t like that LOST did such a poor job of bringing about a resolution through knowledge.
To illustrate what I’m taking about, I’ll use the Holmes stories ’cause they’re the ones I’m most familiar with. A lot of the Holmes stories suggest that adultery is a motive (the first what) and that suggestion is kind of scary for people of the time; it completely contradicts beliefs about marriage, but then at the end you find out, oh, hey it wasn’t about that at all–it was about the second what. And that second what is something much more palatable and less anxiety-provoking–there was no adultery; the husband died of natural causes which turns out to be his just desserts! So, see, marriages are still fine, and a benevolent providence makes sure that bad guys get what’s coming to them. I think that same pattern is going on in what/what stories now–I think the first what raises anxieties and the second resolves them through solution of the mystery. The anxious part tends to be more morally ambiguous because its playing on social conflicts that aren’t clear-cut. But the resolution tends to go back towards a norm. As I’m thinking back through literature, that resolution in a “norm” doesn’t seem to be the case in a really strong way until you get to the novel.
Ah, I think I have a better idea of what you’re saying.
Even so…
I’m thinking of shows like Broadchurch, that is sort of a what-what show that does what you’re saying (a very popular thing for shows like this to do), which is to have the investigation go many directions that reveal all of the terrible secrets that are harbored in a community, moving suspicion of the crime from one person to the next until WHAAAAAAT? It was someone we could never have suspected! But all of those terrible revelations during the first what? They’re all still true. And still terrible. If the show has a second season, all of those families who had their dirty laundry aired are shown to be irreparably broken. The second what doesn’t fix anything. The entire story seems designed to say, “Yeah, the actual criminal is a perverted monster, but what do you expect since they lived in a town as messed up as this??”
SO many shows like this. I think The Sinner is the one I’ve watched most recently (its second season, that is). That one’s pretty morally ambiguous, I think. Unless I don’t understand it. Which, as we all know, is very possible.
I’ve just had an epiphany that might explain why fact truly is stranger than fiction.
So you’re playing with Newton’s equations and things aren’t adding up. Experiment results aren’t working out as predicted. What is going on?
Then someone comes along and demonstrates that the solution to these conundrums reveals that time and space are actually one thing, and it’s all relative! WHAAAAAT???!!!
Science is what-what.
Yeah, the problem develops in thinking that the second What is final.
Ain’t that the truth!
Heh, I’ve run out of replies there. But anyway re: Broadchurch –
Often the resolution is far from perfect and a lot of the tensions remain. It’s more like you can see that that’s what the resolution is aiming for but it fails–and the failures are really quite interesting. My favorite example there would be Dracula–which begins with lots of anxiety about men’s new roles as professionals and then goes off into an older and easier story about women as sexual objects or women as “angels in the house”. But it doesn’t quite work, and the way it doesn’t work is pretty interesting.
Moving from Holmes to later detective stories–the ones usually characterized as “hard-boiled”–those don’t have nearly the cozy sense of resolution. All the corruption brought up in the earlier part persists. And you have this kind of cynical view that the only source of honor/virtue is the detective (who is often the narrator and so our POV character), but the detective, unlike Holmes, is pretty helpless to do anything about the mess of a world that he’s in.
(Broadchurch spoilers ahead)
Although Broadchurch isn’t a hard-boiled detective story, it still has that sense of corruption and a world-weary detective (the Tennant character) and then the Coleman character begins naive and gets pulled into that cynical view in a fairly horrific way. (There was a second season, btw, not nearly as good.)
Oh, and just to clarify, there doesn’t seem to be anything morally ambiguous about the endings there, even though they aren’t cozy like the Holmes’ ones are. The whole world is corrupt with the exception of the helpless but honorable protagonists.
Yeah, I see your point. Although, in the case of The Sinner in particular, not sure that the protagonist comes across as particularly honorable. At least not by the end of the second season. But, again, maybe I just didn’t get it.
The truth is… what-what shows are often harder for me to understand than other kinds of fiction, which is saying something. For the first what, I can’t often tell if it’s a first what or if I’m just being dense. And since one often has to sufficiently grasp the first what for the second what to be a WHAAAAAT??, my shaky sense of the first what can ruin the second what by no fault of the show.
I haven’t seen that show, but the thing about all this is that these are generalizations and, as I said, interesting when something happens to make a particular story not fit. But it may be that even that model that I described is morphing somewhat such that protagonists themselves are not the center of virtue in the text. I’d say in hard-boiled detective fiction you do see that happening as the genre gets older. Phillip Marlowe is honorable, Mike Hammer much less so. Sometimes you’re supposed to feel sympathy for the sins of the protagonist though (but not for others so much) because who could escape being touched by the evil in the world?
Funny you say that about your difficulty understanding these types of stories ’cause you always seemed to be quite good at analyzing LOST.
I think with LOST there was a benefit in being unable to go too deep. My resistance to getting drawn into the weeds was less about intellectual discipline and more about an inability to comprehend the weeds! 😀
Some LOST theorists really REALLY loved their weeds.
So I’m very behind on podcasts and only just listening to this episode. Project Cassandra was part of zinequest where it’s customary to run projects for only 2 weeks. It’s not anything to do with Cortex, it uses its own unique system that I call the Precognition Engine. It will be available for general sale once the kickstarter backers have received their copies, I’ll try and remember to let you know when we get to that, for off it’ll probably be late May/early June based on current progress.