Neil Faulkner wrote:
From: Betty Ragan ragan@sdc.org
I'm still mulling over Neil's responses to this post of mine, btw. I must say, Neil's worldview appears to be quite alien to mine, and thus, while interesting, rather difficult to respond to. I think the main source of the difference in viewpoint, actually, may be that I don't regard "ideology" as representing anything *real*. Ideology just consists of ideas in people's heads. And those ideas can be very powerful, true, but they spring from people, not the other way around. But, like I said, I'm still mulling...
Well, if my worldview is alien to yours, then maybe yours is to mine:). Which is why I asked "Why characters?" in the first place.
This paragraph seems rather muddled.
Well, that doesn't surprise me. I've been mildly ill lately, and I'm afraid my thinking is even fuzzier than usual. :)
Ideology might not be 'real', but then an awful lot of things aren't. A decision to sit down and watch, say, Deliverance isn't 'real' either, and neither is a speculation on how Blake would have reacted to Meegat. But speculations never stopped a character junkie!
No, no, speculations are fine by me. I'm still not entirely sure how to express my own viewpoint properly, actually, but I certainly don't intend to convey the idea that just because something isn't "real" (whatever that means) that it's meaningless or useless. I think it's more that, from my point-of-view, it's *individual people* who are of primary importance. It seems to me that to talk about ideologies as if they were something concrete, something "out there" independent of individual humans is... strange. And rather dangerous. The sort of logic that sets up governments to work "for the good of the State" while losing sight of the fact that "the State" is simply composed of the individual human beings who live there. That's the sort of association that this "ideology vs characters" thing has for me, anyway. I regard it as very important not to lose sight of the individual, and not to forget that all people are different. They may be shaped by their societies (something I would never dream of disputing) but they are not merely representations of their society, but complex beings in their own right.
I'm not surprised that this is muddled because it seems very hard to work through and get answers. I've spent the past couple of days trying to work out just how much importance I place on the characters, and why, or how, or where it's located, and I've yet to come up with any answers.
Yes, I have much the same problem. Everything I've said about why I *am* a character junky is accurate, I think, but every time I stop and think about it a little more deeply, I realize that, well, it's a bit more complex than *that*.
What I do think, and I'm quite aware that this might be nothing more than a reflection of my own prejudices, is that my distaste for character junkieism (as opposed to those who practice it) lies in what I perceive as a superficial appraisal of the series. There is an exagerrated awareness of differences between individuals, whereas I tend to look for similarities, which in turn leads to the social or, dare I say, the ideological.
This probably has a great deal to do with what you value, and what you find interesting. To me, people are far more interesting than societies, and, in a sense, more important, because, after all, societies are only the higher-order product of interactions between individual humans. (Actually, I'm aware that that doesn't necessarily follow. Yes, human beings are the higher-order product of interactions between neurons, and I don't find neurons all that interesting. But, unlike neurons, individual human beings are incredibly complex, and thus, to me, incredibly interesting.)
There is also a focus on immediate impressions - what is said or done (or worn - now that is what I really do call superficial) - with an implied reluctance to look deeper than the cosmetic surface.
That's very interesting to me, because it *is* very different from my own view of things. Agreed that focusing on fashion is highly superficial (though it can sometimes be fun!). But, to me, exploring the characters' internal lives *is* to look deeper than the superficial. To not simply accept the things that are said and done, but to explore *why* this thing was said and that thing was done, and what meaning those words and actions have for the people involved, beyond their superficial part in the action-adventure plot. In fact, if anything, I probably tend to see the background -- including many of the sociological aspects -- as something superficial, something that only takes on a real depth when you investigate the effect it has on the lives of these individual people.
The ideological dimension (if we want to call it that) may be more *abstract*, in a way, than the character dimension, but it seems mistaken to me to call it "deeper." How deep something is, in a context like this, I think, depends a hell of a lot on just how deep you're willing to *look* at it.
And that devotion to 'playing the game' - discounting the external contribution of the process of production (writers, directors, actors, budget etc).
Me, I can slip back and forth between the two modes, as necessary (and interesting), but, to me, "playing the game" is far more rewarding. Possibly because it requires a real creative effort on the part of the viewer. It's like a puzzle: can you make everything work together consistently? And if you *can*, the result is a very rewarding subcreated world (to borrow Tolkien's term).
Which is fine for threads that confine themselves within those limits, but not so fine when it gets dumped on threads that try to step out of those narrow parameters.
Good point. This is certainly the sort of thread where the two viewpoints can get quite tangled up. (I admit that I've had a bit of difficultly, through parts of this discussion, deciding just which mode I ought to be in at any given time.)