I finished reading Halo: The Fall of Reach in Barnes and Noble, which is a bit different than the usual stuff I read, I think, but I’ve gotten a bit more into Halo recently and so I thought it might be good to read that book. I’ve also been re-reading The Ship of the Dead, the last Magnus Chase book, and while I still don’t think it’s Riordan’s best work, I actually think I like it better this time around? That may change by the time I get to the end though.
I’m still really annoyed by Kill the Farm Boy, but I’m not furious anymore, so that’s an improvement I guess.
---
On American Pop Culture in Other Countries' Fiction
I began watching Ministerio del Tiempo (that’s Ministry of Time) on Netflix pretty much as soon as it popped up, though I’ve been going very slowly because I don’t get through television shows very quickly. That’s changing now, because the sister is also watching the series now, and she watches much faster than I do and I have a psychological need to stay ahead of her on this.
Anyhow, the show tells the story of the Spanish Ministry of Time, a secret government organization that sprouted up to protect history through time travel. The time travelling works through these special doors called the Doors of Time, each of which lead to a different point in Spanish history. The Ministry is dedicated to making sure no one screws up history or finds out about the Doors of Time. To this end, they recruit people from all over history; their sketch artist, for instance, is renowned Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.
Of course many of the characters are from modern day, or closer to the modern day, or spend a lot of time in the modern day. And of course, dealing with history and with time travel, there are quite a few pop culture references. And quite a few of them are allusions to American media, something that is somewhat surprising.
So for instance, there is an episode concerning a specific door that works differently than the others, in that it’s always stuck on a particular day. And so when the patrol’s mission fails, and they keep going back to the beginning of the day and keep failing over and over again until they get it right. Julian, the protagonist from modern day, compares the whole thing to Groundhog Day, which confuses his coworkers Amelia (from the late 1800’s) and Alonso (from the 1500’s) that have no way of having ever seen this movie.
Or in the second season, one of the characters is a disgraced detective from the 80’s who goes by his nickname Pacino, on account of how he sort of looks like the actor Al Pacino and he’s a massive fan of the actor and is sort of a cowboy cop. Again, no one from the past understands this.
And I think something that we Americans sort of don’t realize is just how much American entertainment dominates world media. Yes, the show has references to Spanish pop culture too--to soccer, to reality shows, game shows, and in the first episode more than one person compare Alonso to Captain Alatriste. But the vast majority of the allusions to fictional media, especially science fiction media, are to American movies and shows.
It reminds me a little of the anecdote in The Kite Runner in which the protagonists are huge fans of John Wayne movies growing up, and then are astonished to realize that John Wayne doesn’t speak their language at all, but that his movies are dubbed for foreign audiences. Which seems like a ‘duh’ but if you’re a small child that might not occur to you. It took me a while to realize that a lot of the anime and video game media I consumed wasn’t actually originally dubbed in English, after all, which is why I imagine lip-synching dubbed animated material is so important, so as to not break that illusion.
[squints] I got kind of side-tracked, but here’s the point I was making, I think: do not underestimate how much of a chokehold American entertainment has on global media. There are actual laws on the books in France about the ratio of French movies to American movies a theater is required to have, in order to make sure that there is at least more of a chance for French films to compete with American ones. When I TA’d for a film professor, when the Italian film festival rolled into town an Italian director who told us that his film, which was a smaller-budget drama, had to compete with Jurassic World in the theater.
I’ve talked a lot about how when you’re writing another culture, you should do homework so that the characters feel like they’re part of that culture, and doing otherwise feels wrong. For instance, the ancient Irish Druid in The Iron Druid Chronicles has all of Shakespeare’s plays memorized, but he apparently doesn’t have any care for the history of Irish literature at all. Characters from a culture should be well-acquainted with that culture if you want them to feel genuine.
But when talking about the modern day, we cannot dodge the fact that we Americans are sort of the big kids on the block in pop culture. We’re the ones shipping the big budget blockbusters all over the world, and so everyone around the world knows exactly what movies are big and what they’re about. Sure they might be released at a different time in other countries, but if they’re big enough they’re released there.
One of the problems with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (other than that Alan Moore decided that Harry Potter was a school shooter) was that it still clung rather tightly to British popular culture, ignoring anything that wasn’t British. Which was fine for a story set mostly in London in the last 1800’s, as the original was, but this one was across the 20th century and beyond, and ends in 2009, and yet British popular culture is the only one that matters in the League universe.
“But what about foreign films in the US! Those get Oscar nominations all the time! And all that British media!” Yeah, when’s the last time you watched a film in a different language with a friend? Unless you’re a hipster, probably not too often. And maybe the BBC’s gained some international acclaim, sure, but nowhere near as much outside of the English-speaking world, especially because I don’t know if historical dramas centering around English history or literature are really the sorts of things people care about in China. Or even France.
Time travel dramas set in modern Spain obviously reference American sci-fi movies that deal with similar themes. Likewise, a story set in modern Mexico would obviously have characters who know something about American media. I’m not suggesting that writers have to throw pop culture references at the page all the time; Lord knows I’m against that. But where it makes sense, and it fits with the characters and story, it’s not bad. Because the American entertainment industry is a massive juggernaut that shouldn’t be underestimated when discussing its influence on people around the world.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment