How did you feel about Season 9?

[binkie]

(18-11-2010 12:03 AM)Kirayuki Wrote:  

(17-11-2010 11:12 PM)binkie Wrote:  History, I’m afraid. Even worse ... History of Ideas. Any questions about the manifestation of evolutionary theory in 19th-century visual culture, I’m the woman of the moment!!

You're not the only person here releasing their inner essay monster

Ha! I'm applying for History at university! (Not quite history of ideas but still).
I think liking History might be a common trait amongst people who pick apart absolutely everything.

Good luck with your application, Kirayuki. I heartily endorse your choice, obviously! Where are you hoping to go? You are quite right about History lending itself as an analytical tool to the service of those with restless interests. I’m convinced (though, admittedly, biased) that History is absolutely the humanities equivalent of Mathematics: the key to the resolution of the universe and its operation. If your favourite question is ‘Why?’, then you have made the right decision for your university career.

(18-11-2010 04:25 PM)femaleBertieWooster Wrote:  Binkie and Byatil, keep talking. Your conversation is very interesting.

I'm going to Google "History of Ideas" right now. Have any book recommendations?

I feel like a recruitment agent for my subject! Thanks for trusting me to recommend something. Aside from the many tonnes of multi-volume copy acting as ready-made libraries for people who just can’t get enough of The Enlightenment in context (!), it’s probably better to start with a classic overview like Berlin & Henry The crooked timber of humanity. If you prefer to go in feet first – and want to think your way around some really interesting propositions – any of these offers valuable commentary applicable in interdisciplinary terms: Barthes, Mythologies; Gellner, Words and things; Jung and Kerenyi, The science of mythology; Bachelard, The poetics of space; Sudjic, The language of things; Graves, The white goddess; Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces. If you are feeling brave, you could try Foucault, Discipline and punish, but be warned, he chooses some pretty nasty detail to argue his point. Let me know if you love or hate anything from the list

And now, so I don’t get banned for straying dramatically off-topic...

Byatil, there is a lot of really interesting stuff in your last post. I definitely want to address the points you raise regarding Lucas’ relationship with Oleg, the contribution to Lucas’ sense of self provided by the tattoos and his need to feel, and be perceived as, ‘normal’. These are areas of tremendous significance to the ways in which seasons 7 and 8 were situating the character in an increasingly dichotomous impasse with his experiences of self and history. Yet again, this was an arc of existential subtlety abandoned in season 9 in favour of what was, I thought, a disappointingly literal resolution. There are separate threads where my responses probably more properly belong, so I will post in these and link back (once I’ve worked out how to do it!).

(18-11-2010 02:53 AM)jimc Wrote:  Perhaps they just had to tell his story with more speed, than was intended?

As BravoNine, and others, have said there is no real, or defensible, objection to the idea explored in season 9 that Lucas was a character waiting to implode, and that he was more than likely to do so in a way that would require his colleagues to make difficult choices. I can honestly say that the first thought I had when the hood came off Lucas at the handover in 7.1 was: “Well, he’s going to end up shooting himself in the head.” Lucas was never going to come to a good or happy end. The problem some people (including me) are having, and will almost certainly continue to have, is not that the story was told too quickly, but that the end of the story we were shown was the end of a story different from the one that started with the handover in Bexley. Lucas’ expressions, motives and inner life were illustrated in classical narrative terms (with a short break for some magical realism in the first few minutes of 8.4, which has never been satisfactorily explained). If he seemed a suspicious and unknowable presence, that is because he was suddenly a stranger to himself. Look at the number of times we are shown footage of Lucas sleeping with his head flat on the mattress, rather than on a pillow. By the middle of season 8, he is living in an anonymous white-painted, steel-accessorised flat, even as he is engaged in what he fully believes to be a love affair that will save him from his own emotional absence. He is living in a prison cell. This is a man who never came home. The story of the-man-who-was-John is not a facet of the Lucas narrative. It is a projection onto that narrative of a story which played no structural part in it. A good literary example of the same problem is that of the children’s classic The wolves of Willoughby Chase, which begins as a brilliant other-London construct and ends as a version of the babes-in-the-wood trope. Both elements are well rendered and emotionally sound, but the one does not conclude the other. Spooks has denied the end of Lucas’ narrative and told instead the end of a story it had not begun.