Soapy tricks, and how irritating they are

“Yes, you are better than my old boyfriend,” Donna Moss tells Josh Lyman in The West Wing, after a slightly flirtatious, bantering argument about whether he’s sufficiently concerned with her wellbeing or not.

The comparison with her former boyfriend isn’t that flattering. She’d been hospitalised after an car crash; on the way to see her, he’d stopped to have a drink with some friends. Josh does, indeed, feel obliged to relativise his superiority.

“I'm just saying if you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for a beer.”

“If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights,” she replies.

Bradley Whitford as Josh, Janel Moloney as Donna
in The West Wing

That strikes me as a pretty clear indication of where we're heading. However, this exchange takes place in episode 18 of season 2. And it isn’t until the closing episodes of the series, in season 7, that the couple finally forms.

The West Wing is one of my favourite series, so I’m not trying to run it down. But that piece of narrative strikes me as one of the worst devices that I associate with soaps: it’s deliberately intended to announce a destination which we’re then going to be delayed reaching for many, many hours more.

That happens a lot in series, where one of the major goals is to keep the story rolling for as long as possible, and you really don’t want to see things wrapped up too soon. One of the simplest devices used to extend the narrative is a failure to communicate. How often have you seen the scene where the male protagonist is seen out one night by the female, in the company of a particularly attractive woman? When they meet, she gives him no chance to explain himself, saying something like “you have nothing to explain. And I certainly don’t want to hear any lies.” 

That means it will be another 39 episodes before she realises that the attractive young woman was his sister.

One of the most annoying occurrences of this kind is at the of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The failure of the male to find out the real relationship between the female and the man he sees her with costs them some forty or fifty years of happiness. Fortunately, it takes only a few pages in the book, so the pain for the reader or the spectator of the film lasts less long.

That example shows that it isn’t only in series that the device appears. Even in a relatively short piece, like a film, it’s used fairly frequently. Have you seen The Holiday, a gentle little feel-good romantic comedy? Twice, to make sure we don’t miss the point, Cameron Diaz, playing Amanda, picks up Jude Law’s mobile to see that he has an incoming call from someone with a woman’s name.

“Sophie, Olivia, Amanda,” she says, “busy guy.”

Fortunately, this is a film so it’s only going to be a matter of minutes before she finds out that Sophie and Olivia are his daughters, from a marriage ended by widowhood, not divorce (leaving him still the perfect man). In a series, it would have been at least five episodes, by which time the spectator would have been screaming, “ask him who they are, for God’s sake.” That, after all, is what any normal person would do; it just doesn’t suit the fiction.

My heart sinks every time I meet this kind of trick. I think of it as “soapy” because I feel it belongs more to the soap genre. That makes it exasperating when it appears in something I otherwise regard as good.

At the moment, for instance, in Britain Channel 4 is showing a skilfully constructed series called Humans. The central theme is that society has developed highly sophisticated humanoid robots; some of them now have consciousness. It’s fun and it’s compelling.

Humans. Compelling.
Particularly when it's not being soapy

So I was sorry when the young man who truly knows the conscious robots, having failed to contact one through his computer, reacts to the young woman who suggests “why don’t we try it my way?” with an immediate rejection. He’s tried everything, and how could she possibly know more about the subject than he does.

Yeah, right. Some time soon we’re going to discover that her way works. But not until the writers have spun out the narrative a bit longer.

Cheap. Facile. Soapy. And I wish they hadn’t done it.

Sublime or silly: curious contrasts in cinema

Watched two films at the weekend.

The first fulfilled a wish I’d nurtured for over forty years. A bit sad, isn’t it? You can decide to watch a film when you’re fourteen or fifteen and finally get round to doing it when you’re getting close to sixty.

It’s like when you live in a place with a must-visit sight-seeing spot and you never go. Ten years I lived in London, and I’ve never been to the Courtauld Gallery.

The film I saw that affected me so much when I was in my teens was Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu. At the time I was still too young to have given up the illusion that I could pass myself off as tough – today I openly admit I’m just incurably sentimental. I’ll get a tear in my eye over episodes of The West Wing (remember when Toby organises a military funeral for a homeless man who died on a park bench but was a Marine Corps veteran? That one does it for me every time). Even as a teenager, though, I realised there was something special about The World of Apu and for the next couple of days bored my school friends telling them about it. Talk that helped me relive the poignancy while also working it off.

The World of Apu is the third film in the trilogy, and I promised myself back then that some day I’d see the other two. Well, on Sunday I finally watched the first, Pather Panchali.

What an extraordinary piece of work. The crew and cast were mostly unknowns, and though some went on to successful cinema careers, several never made another film. Ray financed it out of his own pocket at the outset, which meant it took three years to make – a few scenes here, a few scenes there, as he could afford them. He admits himself that the start is far from perfect – and there were times when I found it slow and unengaging. But then he learned the trick of timing and the film took off, with two moments of exquisite sharpness, and of course the extraordinary scene when the brother and sister wander through tall grass fronds in a field bordered by a railway and, for the first time, watch a train roll past. John Huston saw that scene before the film was finished and wrote home to announce the arrival of a cinematic genius.

Now another genius, I’ve frequently been told, is Quentin Tarantino. I get squeamish at the slightest tinge of horror or gore – I simply will not watch any more films about the Holocaust, and despite my unbounded admiration for Stanley Kubrick, I’ve never plucked up the courage to see The Shining or Full Metal Jacket – so given his reputation, I’ve made a point of not seeing Tarantino’s films either.

But Danielle has a colleague who told her she absolutely had to watch Kill Bill. ‘Much less gratuitously violent than Pulp Fiction, much more cleverly built’. So he lent her Volume 1. We watched it on Saturday.

Ironically, the aspect of the film that worried me most – the gore – simply turned out not to affect me at all. Why, I’ve seen worse in House M.D.: every time they plunge the blade into a patient’s throat for a tracheotomy, every time they make the first cut (neatly down the sternum) for open heart surgery, I frankly blanch. Kill Bill just gave us fountains of red water which, to me at least, felt about as close to the real effect of severing a head or a limb as fireworks are to an artillery bombardment.

At the end of the great fight scene, which had some smart choreography but very little else, there was some moaning from casualties, but at no other point do I remember anybody showing any pain from their wounds, or any distress over the loss of a friend or loved one. Why, the five-year old girl who has just watched her mother being murdered stands there looking no more than solemn, while the killer explains that ‘she really had it coming.’ I half expected the orphaned daughter to nod, sigh and go back to her dolls.

So is the genius in the clever writing? That ‘she really had it coming’ comment comes near the start and is delivered as though it was the best line in the film; sadly, by the time you get to the end you find it really was.

The story perhaps makes up for it all. But what is it? Just another revenge tale. The Count of Monte Christo builds the tension more, and even it is by no means Dumas’ best – it can’t hold a candle to The Three Musketeers.

You want a good revenge flick? See The Sting – now there’s a film that knows how to build suspense, how to keep you guessing, how to twist a plot, while at the same time creating brilliantly funny situations and delivering finely crafted dialogue full of wit. Even the horror is better handled: a distraught family, milling aimlessly around the weeping widow; the foreboding with which the character approaches the window to look out; the body spread-eagled on the paving stones below. That’s how to do violent death – make it believable, don’t spray coloured water around.

So a film I expected to frighten me or even sicken me, or otherwise perhaps entertain me, in the end just left me indifferent. It was simply insipid.

Tonight we watched the second Apu film, Aparajito. Tomorrow, we can complete the cycle and I can renew a joy from four decades ago (and then some) by watching The World of Apu again.

It’ll be like Champagne after lemonade.