Status. Hope.

5 transcripts done. 2 left. These, I think, will be shorter.

Also... my original proposal, the one that reached 28 pages including back matter (much of which I'll cannibalize for the paper), ran to only 6800 words. 6800 words. 50 pages sounds like a lot, but 14000 words sounds like not so much at all; a three-time winner of NaNoWriMo certainly *ought* to be able to write 14000 words (half original, or so) during the next three weeks. I mean, I'll have to write faster than that, because my advisor expects a rough draft. But if I finish my transcripts today--which is in the realm of possibility--and try to write 2000 original words per day... I should be all right.

Rock!

I finished all my transcripts.

--

So now I can post about something I've been thinking about lately, since seeing V for Vendetta. As I was watching it, just as when I was watching Fight Club, I felt discomfited that I didn't know what I was supposed to think, what I was supposed to feel. Once I got a handle on that--for V for Vendetta--I liked the movie much better.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that the movies that made me feel this way were both adaptations of very ideologically driven books. When you're adapting someone else's work, the ideology is much more likely to turn incoherent or muddled.

But there's a question that raises in my mind. And that is, should [books/movies/whatever] tell us what we are supposed to think in the first place?

Most of the time, the audience is positioned so that we know who to cheer for. Movies don't so much have antiheroes as they have adorable scampish rogues who do minor bad stuff but are still good people, or dark heroes who do things that seem clearly indefensible (to me) for the sake of what's right--but we're still supposed to buy them as good people doing the right thing. In the typical crime/police drama, we're supposed to cheer when the detective acts horribly towards the suspect, because otherwise you're on the side of the bad guys, and... it seems like there's a very thin line between 'This person is a good person. The seemingly horrible things he does are legitimated because he's a good person.' and 'This person is doing seemingly horrible things. So do you want to cheer for him or not?'

I think it's because the latter is rare that it's so disorienting. I try to match it up with 'This person is a good guy,' and that would mean legitimizing some indefensible things, and I try to match it up with 'This person is a bad guy,' and that makes even less sense.

Perhaps it's a difference between movies and novels, because movies are actually quite short--they have about as much story as a novella, not a novel. And explosions and running around and cool set pieces eat up a whole lot of your time. So in action movies, your only real alternatives are to hand out the white hats and black hats at the beginning of the movie, or else to create a movie that's at worst muddled and incoherent, at best open to a multiplicity of interpretations. I don't know if that's a bad thing, necessarily, but if everyone thinks you're saying something different you're probably not saying anything at all. Or saying it very well.

Or else you create a movie where there's no one to cheer for, and that's okay too--it probably won't be too popular, though.