Sunday ended thus: I ordered spaghetti carbonara at a local Italian place. Noodles, eggs, bacon, onion, maybe another ingredient or two. What I got was different: the noodles and eggs were there, which was great, but the restaurant decided to let the muses sing by adding shrimp and calcified bits of ham, presumably as a substitute for bacon – or “pancetta,” if you’re a foodie. There may have been other outrages in the ingredients, but I was too busy worrying about stabbing the rock-hard ham-lettes without shooting them across the room, endangering the other diners.
For the third time on the Lord’s Day, my expectations had been subverted. And I’m sick of it!
I intended for a day of leisure – read a few papers, then off to the flicks for a screening of Longlegs, then watch the finale of the admittedly execrable House of the Dragon, which I consume for reasons unknown to me, but likely out of a lack of imagination. Then the aforementioned dinner that, in the restaurant’s defense, was reasonably priced.
At least Longlegs, another indie flick on which moron film critics and put-upon filmgoers have agreed to disagree, wore its expectation-subverting bona fides on its sleeve; e.g., Nicolas Cage, Oz Perkins, weird ads, etc., etc. But why, Lord, must subversion always be so dull?
You know the drill with indie flicks. There are long stretches of pensive behavior by actors, long shots of nothing more than, say, a hallway - in this instance with the intention of being foreboding – and a long tradition of telling “show-not-tell” to go fuck itself with lengthy expositional conversations*. Then, on occasion, comes the loud part of the Nirvana song, where (in Longlegs) blood is spilled, sinew is spewed, and eardrums shattered by Dolby Surround Sound, which is I suppose is a nice break from the usual yelling and crying found in indie dramas.
All of this is in service of a serial killer story that could’ve been ladled out of a vat. In spite of that, there’s an improvisatory feel to the story’s twists that makes the narrative implausible, to put it nicely - one shocker piling upon another until the filmmakers throw up their hands and say, “well, it’s really all the product of supernatural mumbo jumbo.”
The subversion is entirely stylistic, thus dull, thus annoying.
The same could be said of the Dragon finale. The end of eight hours of nothing was more nothing, as many have noted, and the excuse given by the filmmakers is they wanted to “challenge” the audience’s “expectations.”
It’s safe to say the audience’s expectation, driven by every fantasy novel, television show, and movie ever created, is there’s a fight at the end of these affairs. Dragon didn’t have a fight at the end. Audience, consider yourself challenged!
But, as in Longlegs, the challenge is simply one of craft. There’s no crazy idea, no perceptual shift. There’s not even a surprise. The challenge is the fight being postponed for another 18 months when, I’m told, the next season begins. Does a postponement fall into the subset of challenge? See how you feel when your dinner date shows up an hour late. Are your expectations being challenged or is someone being an asshole?
There’s entirely too much of this subversion of protocol and here’s guessing it’s because protocol is all many filmmakers really know. On the other hand, the carbonara was a genuine surprise (though foreshadowed on the menu in the mysteries of the Italian language). I didn’t like it, but the subversion of my expectations wasn’t formalistic!
*-In the film’s defense, there are flashbacks, but they act as the loud part of the Nirvana song.
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