EPISODE 731: VISERYS AFTER EVERY EPISODE

What is this, Tolstoy?

Sep 26, 2022

cats being weird little guys @weirdlilguys

tabby cat all cozily wrapped up in a fuzzy brown blanket, only its eyes visible through a little gap

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

It definitely did drop below 70 degrees here in New York. It was weird. Like, slow down, weather. Give us a chance to adjust our complaints.

A lot going on in fantasy/scifi TV right now. Here’s a round up:

So Five Energy Drinks Ago: Rings of Power

Hey, Rings of Power, if you want me to watch, you realize you actually have to have stuff happen, right?

So Five Actors Ago: House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon, you’re six episodes old. Stop changing your cast. Who do you think you are, The Crown? Show some respect!

So Five Jokes From Now: She-Hulk

She-Hulk, you’re like the TV version of the best friend we all wish we could hang out with. Plus you haven’t even mentioned the multiverse. The pinot grig is in the mail.

So Five Minutes from Now: The Good Fight

What’s that readers, The Good Fight isn’t scifi or fantasy? Have you looked outside your window the last six years? It’s all scifi out there now. Plus now Diane can fly. Go get some.

So A Long Time in a Galaxy Far Far Away Ago: Andor

Andor, you made us start with three episodes. What is this, Tolstoy? But you know what, it totally worked. I don’t know if you’re Star Wars or Blade Runner but either way I’m all in.

REST IN PEACE, MILDRED

Louise Fletcher died on Friday. Her name may not be familiar to you. Her face probably is:

Though she had a wide-ranging career, the thing Fletcher was most known for was playing maternal monsters, like Nurse Ratched or Deep Space Nine’s Kai Winn. Her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became something bigger than the movie, a sort of icon of totalitarianism. It also was quite clearly a symbol of a male fear of female power. Before casting Fletcher Director Milos Forman imagined the role as a “castrating monster.”

In doing some research on her I was fascinated to discover in her own life Fletcher had known her share of abuse from men. As Vanity Fair recounts, Robert Altman watched her translate sign for her deaf parents on the set of one of his movies. He was so inspired he asked Fletcher to work with a screenwriter on a project he was developing (which would become Nashville. But when it came time to make the movie, Altman cast Lily Tomlin in the starring role of the woman with two deaf children. Fletcher only found out because Altman’s wife accidentally mentioned it.

Around the same time as all this, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest started casting. They went to lots of leading ladies for someone to play Nurse Ratched, but no one would say yes (go figure). Fletcher agreed with them; the role was just cartoonishly villainous. But her thought was, the character should think she’s right, that she really is helping. She told Vanity Fair she’d seen a very similar attitude growing up in the South. “White people actually felt that the life they were creating was good for black people,” she says—a dynamic she recognized in Nurse Ratched and her charges. “They’re in this ward, she’s looking out for them, and they have to act like they’re happy to get this medication or listen to this music. And make her feel good about the way she is.”

When Fletcher came to set on the first day playing Ratched as soft spoken and sweet, Forman shut her down, saying it made her seem weak. But days later he realized his mistake.

Here’s a wild story from her experience on-set:

Something inside of Fletcher was itching to let loose, to show the guys she wasn’t the virginal killjoy she was playing. She was suffocating, she says, in “this hairdo, this dress, and everything I had on under it that I wore to be the way she was, the white stockings and the undergarments.” One day, she shocked herself—and everyone else on set—by stripping off her nurse’s uniform to reveal a slip and a bra underneath. “It was, like, Here I am. I’m a woman. I am a woman.” As a wrap gift, she gave them all a photo of herself topless, peeking over her naked back, Betty Grable-style, in her nurse’s cap.

Louise Fletcher, we pour one out for you.

EVERYWHERE IS A THEATER

It is very hard to explain 14th Street in Manhattan. While the island’s widest streets are the avenues that run northish/southish up and down the island, every 10 blocks or you’ll also find a major east west artery: 96th, 84th, 72nd, 59th, 42nd, 34th, 23rd, 14th, 4th, for example.

Oftentimes these are some of the least interesting streets in New York. It’s lots of fast-food places and dollar-type stores. And 14th is probably the worst among them. I don’t know what it is, but that street has a really bad vibe, and people often hate it.

I don’t really know how I ended up there on Saturday afternoon; I was sort of perplexed by that question myself as I walked. Or I was before I noticed a woman in a sort of a hoopy wedding dress standing up from what looked like a fur blanket that was laying on the sidewalk. As I got closer a second woman nearby wearing a black swimsuit and granny panties and a tail made of red and orange streamers poured a bottle of water over herself. Then slowly the two of them sort of wandered around this one small area of the sidewalk. The bride put a blue plastic bag over her head and walked up and down; the other started pulling on more clothes that would normally go underneath—more granny panties; fishnet stockings; a slip.

I couldn’t tell you what it “meant;” I tried for a while to find the story of it all or the underlying feeling; both seemed pretty lost, their actions a sort of absent expression of grief or trauma.

But what was fascinating was the way simply their presence here on this ugly, horrible street gave that space a kind of meaning and purpose. And not just 14th but all the streets like it. In New York (and in a lot of other places too) the space between where we begin a journey and where we end can become a sort of existential gap. They have no meaning in our lives; they’re the part between the meaningful parts, the part we forget or don’t even pay attention to.

Just by throwing on a hoopy dress and walking around portentously, this piece totally disrupted that mindset. Suddenly the sidewalk was a theater, a place of mystery and potentially wonder, space where literally anything might happen next.

At one point an older man coming down the street walked straight at the hoop dress bride, who was now wearing a blue plastic bag over her head. He had plenty of room to move and yet walked right at her, until at the very last minute he turned away.

As he passed me he looked back at the two of the and shook his head. “Well, that’s New York,” he said to me.

Yes, I thought. Thank God.

dc guevara 🗡💋 @dcgrodz

Lemme clear it up for you. Sci-fi is when your currency is called credits, and fantasy is when it's called coin.

CREDITS (THE OTHER KIND)

There’s a trend in TV shows these days not to show opening credits in the pilot. I think it’s a way of more immediately immersing people in the world. Credits sort of tell us “This isn’t real,” and whether they’re talking shows about space ships or lawyers, creators don’t want anything like that to get in the way of sucking people in.

The credits also then become a kind of extra gift you get for coming back (and another way of drawing press stories about a show).

The credits for “Game of Thrones” were some of the most distinctive and smart of the last 15 years. How do you deal with a story that’s going to take place over multiple and often shifting locations on two different continents? You build the credits around the locations and also the families. And the music combined a sort of medieval vibe with the pulse and drive of a unified drama unfolding. (I think there’s a really interesting article to be written about the theme’s use of repetition to convey both variety and sameness among the different stories of the show.)

“House of the Dragon” retains the same title creators, and uses the same hand-made-model form of its predecessor. But where the titles of “Thrones” aimed for coherence, the credits on “Dragon” are pretty challenging to follow. We’re in some kind of city, with stops along the way that might represent different families, but it’s kind of hard to say because we’re never given a clear look at their sigils (which is odd). And we follow a path of blood from one sigil to the next, with the blood growing until it is a raging river. But until almost the end the path never really opens up to enable us to understand where we are. The point seems to be, everyone who is touched by the Targaryens is going to drown in blood. A fine angle for opening credits, but as is it’s just the same point over and over.

The credits also use the music of “Thrones,” which is really bizarre. This is not the same kind of sprawling world story at all. It has none of the notes of violence and tragedy of the credits.

Buzzfeed did a piece earlier this month walking through the credits; the structure we’re in is actually the city of Old Valyria, where the Targaryens came from, and what we’re moving through is the model of the city that King “Always Sick but Refuses to Die” Viserys has in his room. But Old Valyria is not at all a character in the show. Nor are most of the sigils that we move among, each of them one of the Targaryens who ruled in Westeros. Which seems just…weird?

Eventually they do get to the characters we know in the series, and hint at where the story is going, but honestly it’s such an effort to put all that together, I’m going to guess there’s a lot of people skipping them entirely.

The most recent season of Evil had this great idea in a haunting episode to start the opening credits with a threat at the bottom of the screen that if you skip the credits you will be haunted. It actually freaked me out so much it was like four episodes before I decided to skip and see would happen. Now my bed sometimes levitates and spins. Not cool, Evil writers! Not cool!

THREE TWEETS

Maybe you really will be cool, New Avatar. But also…