The triumph of the future

[womzilla]

I do a lot of my blog-reading during slow minutes at work, and since I don't have a private office or headphones, I usually don't follow links to music and/or videos unless I'm at home; and I often forget to follow up on those links for a few days.

Thus, I missed most of the discussion of Jim Steinman's unspeakably evil, brain-destroying magnum opus* "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and its various versions and videos which erupted on Making Light early this month, spinning off a discussion of Hurra Torpedo's brilliant re-imagining of the song. "Hurra Torpedo is the world's leading kitchen appliance rock group", as their web site says; the video is here (WMV file).

*As I was contemplating this sentence, I realized that Jim Steinman has a lot in common with Jim Starlin: a compelling, technically proficient style wedded with an addiction to grand Romantic terms like "freedom", "madness", and "passion" divorced from the actual human moments that give them meaning; and an absolutely adolesent certainty that what they're doing is the most important thing evar. So if anyone ever feels the need to produce Thanos: The Musical, I think we have our composer/lyricist lined up.

Eventually, the discussion moved around to the original video for the Bonnie Tyler rendition of the song. Two spin-off comments amused me greatly (in addition to Teresa's valiant but doomed, DOOMED!, attempt to make narrative sense of the video). One was from my evil twin agrumer, who said this on his own LJ:

Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was the world’s first shojou manga music video. Seriously, you could probably redo 98% of it with footage out of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

It's scary how right he is.

The other, larger, comment is from Chad Orzel. After pointing to thirteen different homemade video versions on YouTube, he says:

Ultimately, this is the answer to Charlie Stross's query about why nobody writes near-future SF any more: because this is what you have to compete with. Presented with revolutionary, world-spanning communications technology, and the ability to instantly retrieve information from an astonishing array of sources, and send it to any of a truly mind-boggling number of people, this is what we use it for.

Futurism never stood a chance.

Two responses to that:

First, Vernor Vinge did sorta-kinda predict people using their networked home computers to make unauthorized videos; it was in his 1967 story "The Accomplice". But he wasn't quite predicting anything as batshit insane as upside-down chins lip-synching to overblown rock cantatas; I think you have to go to Bruce Sterling to get that, and he had the advantage of being a lot closer to the actual thing happening.

Second, it has become a commonplace of sf's self-congratulatory discourse over the last few years to say that science fiction has conquered the world. I believe it hasn't. I believe that the real victor in the battle for the minds of the world is surrealism. What catches the attention is not "the future"; it is "the novel". This explains why, even in the Golden Age when Real Men wrote Real Science Fiction for Real Readers with Real Cosmic Minds, Ray Palmer's Amazing consistently outsold John W. Campbell's Astounding and why the most popular writers in Astounding were, for long stretches, A. E. van Vogt and L. Ron H*bb*rd. It's not about the appeal of The Future; it's all about the appeal of The Shockingly New.

In the hands of lesser fabricators, of course, the appeal to the new becomes the hodge and the podge, nonsense of ninjas in schoolboy outfits. But that's the future.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Good lord. I never liked that song to begin with, but this is ... painful! (And I'm someone who voluntarily goes to concerts by Tool, King Crimson and Skinny Puppy.)

It seems to me that your next entry is an illustration of this one. Is that metablogging?