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Kyra Smith ponders about moral ambiguity and moral complexity (and snipes at Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck).
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I loved BSG at first, but... I think very much in line with what you're saying here, I lost my connection with it because of a lack of... I'm not sure what the term is? World integrity? I think I was ranting about a similar thing responding to Dan's RPG article. In order to sustain your attention over a long period of time, I think a TV show has to have a setting that you can really believe in as being... not "real" in the sense of real-world-real but it has to kind of adhere to the conventions of what is... credible within that setting. And when a show does things to shock you or tantalise you or just generally "create an impact", in a way that breaks that world-integrity, I think you just lose your capacity to immerse yourself in that world... because suddenly you're thinking (or I am, anyway) "this is just a bunch of actors going through the motions of some scripted melodrama..." So, yeah, for example I think Futurama has really strong world-integrity, even though it's not in the least "realistic"... whereas BSG starts out trying quite hard to create it and then just throws it all away for no good reason. :( Anyway, somewhat relevantly, for my money the TV show with the highest degree of world-integrity around is The Sopranos, which happens to have at its centre a character who is definitely morally complex, although also fairly unambiguously A Bad Man. I think your point about the difference between complexity and ambiguity is a good one, though... in a way, I think moral ambiguity can be a really interesting and powerful element in drama if it's done well, but typically it's done badly and yes, as you say, just looks like slipshod writing. And including moral ambiguity or complexity as a kind of "checkbox feature" seems really dumb to me, too
Yes, I went through a very similar process. Until about the 5th episode of Season 2 I was madly enamoured of the show but you're right it's lost something, or it feels like it has. I think perhaps you might have nailed it with world integrity. I was thinking last night that it's almost like there are two 'personalities' at war in BSG - there's the quite low-key, fiercely character-centric show which tends to produce quite claustrophic, quite intense (quite wonderful) television which, despite its episodic format, tends to have big over-arcing character development plots ... and then there's hysterical melodrama which jettisons everything else in favour of cheap shocks and twists. It's like in Resurection Ship they go to all this effort to show what a massive impact being ordered to assassinate Cain has on Starbuck only to completely forget it next week. And there's this episode in which Tyrol builds a new fighter plane - which seems absolutely ludicrous given the general tight time-scale on which the good episodes are written. I was very into The Sopranos for about the first three seasons and then I sort of lost touch with it. Tony Soprano is a great character - there's a fabulous episode in there somewhere in which he's taking his daughter around potential colleges and generally playing the benevolent father - but while he's doing he murders this guy in a particularly brutal way. Here's sa challenging - can you think of any well-portrayed and convincing morally ambiguous characters?
I see many links with what you're saying about moral ambiguity versus complexity and my thinking on sympathetic characters. Lazy writers will abolish sympathy in a complex character by reducing them to ambiguity. Or they will cheat us of a sympathetic character by making them needlessly complex in a situation where it's a superfluous addition. It is a mighty great shame. :(
Yes, I'd been thinking about in general terms for a while and your last article inpsired me to write it down coherently. I don't know if you watch BSG but I thought Balter was a really well done, complex and sympathetic character. I thought he was the perfect poster boy for all the merits and flaws of humanity - he's incredibly selfish and self-obsessed, licentious and shallow, self-idulgent and self-deceiving ... and yet capable of amazing acts of empathy, brilliant and valour. He's his own worst enemy but full of potential. And then, having danced him on the edge of sympathy for about 1 and a half seasons, they suddenly made him read a letter from the President and flip out in this depressingly obvious way. I lament his fall.
I think the problem with moral ambiguity is that lazy writers find it very, very tempting to indulge in it. It gives the illusion of moral complexity without doing the work
Odd, the end of my comment got eaten... what I was going to say was: "because all a writer needs to do to create a `morally ambiguous' character is to have said character act according to no discernible moral compass, and for the writer to not think too hard about what they, as an author, think about that character's actions. The act of writing becomes a matter of simply recording a series of events in competent prose."
In answer to your challenge: this is probably cheating because firstly it's in a book and secondly because it's based on a real person, but John Brown in "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord". I'd argue that he's not at all morally complex, in that his entire personality is built around an incredibly rigid adherence to a few very simple ideas... but he is morally ambiguous because it's very hard (or at least, it was for me) to decide whether you think he's an "angel" or just a infuriatingly vain and self-righteous moron. The ambiguity, I think, comes out of the fact that his virtues are really inseperable from his flaws
This website has a bad habit of eating that latter half of comments. This time I had the foresight to Ctrl-C them before posting. :)
The ambiguity, I think, comes out of the fact that his virtues are really inseperable from his flaws
Fuck! ...inseperable from his flaws
:@:@:@:@:@:@
Hmmm. Do comments get eaten arbitrarily? Bear in mind that the length of comments is limited, so perhaps they're overrunning and that's why they get cut off?
Doesn't seem to do it to me, but then the ferret loves me.
I've read a couple of the Flashman books but not that one, Guy. I might look it out. As far as I recall he was a complete cad and a bounder, but the ambiguity grew out of trying to establish just how lost to all goodness he was.
Re: eaten comments, yes, it does seem to happen more with long comments than short ones, but short comments not entirely immune. See examples above. Aiming for terse. Kyra
:'(