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Mar. 3rd, 2007 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupI feel a need to talk about my two favorite things, TV and books. Yeap, no big surprises there.
Last night we finally got to '3' and 'One Breath' in the FGC re-watch of The X-Files. Unsurprisingly, 'One Breath' left us all a weepy mess. I simply can't comprehend how there is a rising generation of fannish-ly minded people who quite possibly have never seen The X-Files. When that show was at the top of its game it soared. Then we watched some Supernatural ('Nightmare', to be exact) and afterwards one of us (I name no names) may have gotten up to hug the television set and tell it how much we loved it.
I do, I love TV. People watch it for different reasons, some for mindless entertainment; others for the chance to become inextricably tied up in the story being told. For me when a television show is at the top of its game I'm completely caught up in what is going on, the characters are as real to me as the members of my own family and their trials and triumphs are as compelling as my own. It's hard to create a great television show and even harder to sustain it, as all fans unfortunately know. We've all watched favorite shows stumble and fall under their own weight but during their heyday they inspired creativity and curiosity and love in a way that is unique and irreplaceable.
Great television is about story and character, about action and emotion, about escape and commitment. I love TV and I'm not ashamed to say it.
Actually, it would probably be more correct to say that I love stories and television is one of the mediums used to in which great stories are told. This week I bought Guy Gavriel Kay's newest novel, Ysabel and was reminded, though I've never forgotten, that my love for the written transmission of stories is as great, or quite possibly greater, then my love for their visual transmission. Kay is one of my favorite authors, even his lesser works are of highest quality and eminently satisfying and when he is at the top of his game I'm routinely rendered tearful and speechless. He's one of the small category of potent post-Tolkien fantasists (a list that includes DeLint, Gaiman, Cooper, McKinley and LeGuin, amongst others) who instead of mechanically apeing Tolkien's style went beyond form to the root of the power of fantasy as a medium for rich storytelling and captured it to tell his own stories.
There are reasons why the oldest stories are always being retold in new contexts, why ancient myth is still as revealing today as it was 3000 years ago. We recognize and rejoice in it because the old stories are also our stories, our lives because time may move inexorably onward but the core of what makes us human is the same today as it was in the very beginning. Different forms of storytelling speak to us in different ways, the tropes and metaphors of fantasy are what do it for me where the structures of chicklit or regular fiction or non-fiction do it for others but in the end it all comes back down to the story and how it engrosses us and reflects a piece of our souls in new and familiar ways.
Stories are important because life is important and the beauty and desolation of it should always be extolled.
Last night we finally got to '3' and 'One Breath' in the FGC re-watch of The X-Files. Unsurprisingly, 'One Breath' left us all a weepy mess. I simply can't comprehend how there is a rising generation of fannish-ly minded people who quite possibly have never seen The X-Files. When that show was at the top of its game it soared. Then we watched some Supernatural ('Nightmare', to be exact) and afterwards one of us (I name no names) may have gotten up to hug the television set and tell it how much we loved it.
I do, I love TV. People watch it for different reasons, some for mindless entertainment; others for the chance to become inextricably tied up in the story being told. For me when a television show is at the top of its game I'm completely caught up in what is going on, the characters are as real to me as the members of my own family and their trials and triumphs are as compelling as my own. It's hard to create a great television show and even harder to sustain it, as all fans unfortunately know. We've all watched favorite shows stumble and fall under their own weight but during their heyday they inspired creativity and curiosity and love in a way that is unique and irreplaceable.
Great television is about story and character, about action and emotion, about escape and commitment. I love TV and I'm not ashamed to say it.
Actually, it would probably be more correct to say that I love stories and television is one of the mediums used to in which great stories are told. This week I bought Guy Gavriel Kay's newest novel, Ysabel and was reminded, though I've never forgotten, that my love for the written transmission of stories is as great, or quite possibly greater, then my love for their visual transmission. Kay is one of my favorite authors, even his lesser works are of highest quality and eminently satisfying and when he is at the top of his game I'm routinely rendered tearful and speechless. He's one of the small category of potent post-Tolkien fantasists (a list that includes DeLint, Gaiman, Cooper, McKinley and LeGuin, amongst others) who instead of mechanically apeing Tolkien's style went beyond form to the root of the power of fantasy as a medium for rich storytelling and captured it to tell his own stories.
There are reasons why the oldest stories are always being retold in new contexts, why ancient myth is still as revealing today as it was 3000 years ago. We recognize and rejoice in it because the old stories are also our stories, our lives because time may move inexorably onward but the core of what makes us human is the same today as it was in the very beginning. Different forms of storytelling speak to us in different ways, the tropes and metaphors of fantasy are what do it for me where the structures of chicklit or regular fiction or non-fiction do it for others but in the end it all comes back down to the story and how it engrosses us and reflects a piece of our souls in new and familiar ways.
Stories are important because life is important and the beauty and desolation of it should always be extolled.
