I’m compelled to bring this up because there has been a certain amount of interwebs throat-clearing about Argo wining Best Picture this year and whether or not it was deserved, particularly in light of the fact that it purports to be a historical drama while egregiously distorting the historical record. Again, I see both sides of the arguments here but I’m not particularly committed to one view or the other. But I will say that I’m not at all surprised about Argo’s victory. I haven’t seen it for myself yet (though I want to) so I’m not basing my position on the merits of the film itself. It just speaks to something that I’ve only really come to understand and fully appreciate in the past couple of years: storytellers love stories about stories and storytellers. The people who vote on the Academy Awards are themselves storytellers, specifically movie-makers, and they are predisposed to heap accolades upon any movie which is itself about making movies and how awesome they are, up to and including “so awesome that they can be instrumental in rescuing American hostages from revolutionaries.” This is the same reason why The Artist won Best Picture in 2011, above and beyond how its creative expression stacked up against the other nominees; The Artist was a Hollywood story. If you are the kind of person who enjoys gambling on Oscar outcomes, I would strongly advise you to always pick the movie-about-movies for Best Picture in your pool.
(Tangent the First: I watched the first half of The Artist on the VRE this morning and plan to finish it on the way home tonight. Since it is about silent movies and the story begins in 1927, and it is on the 1001 Movies list, I had planned to incorporate it as a two-fer post-script to Roaring 20’s Month. At any rate, look for that review some time next week.)
(Tangent the Second: 2010 is an interesting year to try to make fit the case for my stories-about-stories theory. The King’s Speech won Best picture, and that is not a movie about movies. But it is a movie about a radio address, and that address was a form of expression that achieved an important result. In fact none of the Best Picture nominees from 2010 were movies about movies, although I would argue two more were stories about stories: Black Swan and Inception (which I’ve also seen, though never reviewed here, but if I had it would have been swoony). In Inception the storytelling medium is dreams, which is kind of abstract but there is a lot of focus on how the dreams are built and controlled. In Black Swan, the medium is ballet, more formalized but farther away on the technological spectrum from movies than radio is. It may be that when there are no movies about movies on the ballot, the safe bet is the movie about some other modern form of communication, particularly if it somehow ties in to history especially WWII. Discuss.)
So Argo won, and good for Ben Affleck, but really what it got me thinking about was Stephen King’s Dark Tower, which I know I was supposed to have comprehensively reflected on by now. Easier said than done, obviously, but the farther away I get from my second consecutive read-through of the whole Dark Tower cycle, the more I realize the category to which it belongs: stories about stories. (Spoilers follow! I mean it! I am going to give away the biggest possible secret of the books that can be given!)
I liked the whole Dark Tower saga, including its delayed-yet-rushed back half and especially its controversial ending, far more the second time than the first, and part of that had to do with knowing where it was all headed and appreciating the manner in which it got there, seeing how things which felt like annoying detours the first time were really meaningful steps forward, and so on. But even more than that, in the seven years or so that passed between one reading and the next, I picked up that key concept of storytellers loving stories about stories and storytellers, and that unlocked the whole series, or at least a whole new level of it. It’s not a string of books about a post-apocalyptic knight errant gunslinger and his adventures to save all reality from cosmic collapse. It’s a string of books about stories, about all the stories that ever were. The Dark Tower novels don’t just crib shamelessly from spaghetti westerns and The Wizard of Oz and the Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings and Fantastic Four comics and Harry Potter and The Stand (and many, many other works); they do that, in no uncertain terms, but they do it because they are inherently about those stories, about the power of every story to give shape to the universe by giving our lives meaning and sense.
The last reference point I mentioned up above was The Stand, significant because it’s another (very well-known and widely loved) work by Stephen King. The entire Dark Tower cycle is a colossal ego trip, of course it is, any 4000+ page work would have to be. And all the moreso because not only does King riff on his own previous works in large and small ways, right alongside riffs on unimpeachable classics, but he goes so far as to write himself into the saga as a reflexively crucial character; King finishing writing the Dark Tower (which in the real world took an agonizingly long time that King genuinely felt guilty about) is portrayed as an important component in keeping the structural underpinnings of an orderly universe intact. And either you buy into that level of hubris or you probably reject it pretty violently. For the sake of the other characters whom I loved fiercely before King shows up on the page with them, I bought it.
So the Dark Tower is King’s be-all-end-all final word on creative expression’s redemptive power, and specifically the author’s assertion that his own work is the most important work in the entire universe. Or at least (as well as at most) within the fictional universe he created, the personal universe. By the time the epic draws to a close, he has taken the argument to its zenith, just as Roland has climbed every black stone step to the top of the Dark Tower. And where is there to go from there? Back to the beginning.
And that of course is what infuriates about half the people who hung in there for the seven original books, that in the end Roland isn’t rewarded but punished, cursed to go all the way back to the start of his quest, caught in an inescapable loop. The last sentence of Book VII is literally the first sentence of Book I. It’s a neat vaguely po-mo trick, but it does feel like a trick, and a cruel one at that. Or so the argument goes, but I think there’s a bit more to it than that.
First of all, fairly overtly, it’s made clear in the brief span of the narrative between Roland going through the door at the end of his quest and his resumption of it in the mirror line “The man in black fled through the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” that this is not an exact duplicate pass through the same events. Roland has regained the Horn of Eld which he lost in his youth, a small but presumably critical difference which will have repercussions through this iteration of the quest. (I would love to have a book club of a half-dozen or so people brainstorm specific ways that might play out.) If the quest can change, even in small ways, from one turn to the next, then it’s not necessarily inescapable; the cycle can be broken, and a reader of an optimistic mindset can believe that one of these times, it will, and that Roland is not eternally damned.
Again, though, I think there’s another level to it as well. King can make all the definitive, self-aggrandizing statements he wants about the primal power of stories, but he’s doing it in his own modern lifetime using the medium of the novel. Novels may seem quaint and old-fashioned but they are technologically advanced compared to the folklore of oral tradition. When a novel is written, it more or less stays the same forever, every word captured in a certain order, preserved faithfully henceforth. As opposed to fairy tales and myths and ballads and so on, which can evolve organically in every re-telling, changing to reflect the times (or the teller). So I think it’s actually quite deft how King is able at the last moment to turn his meticulously curated novels into the equivalent of campfire stories, by declaring that (1) the story will be retold again and again and (2) it will vary a bit every time. Small wonder that the eighth volume, released last year, is almost entirely concerned with passed-down tales, bedtime stories and fairy tales from Roland’s world. The main question is, which run through the loop does the eighth volume properly belong to?
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