dipenates

This year I wrote Studio 60 fic in the shape of The Bend of Her Hair (3,000 words, Jordan/Danny, with a little Matt/Harriet, no warnings). It's bittersweet, and probably more bitter than sweet, because of all the relationships on the show, whether friendships or romantic relationships, I found theirs the least explicable.

The process of writing 'The Bend of Her Hair', and reading the other Studio 60 fic produced for the challenge, has prompted some thoughts on the show.

Studio 60 was the only Sorkin show that I've ever watched completely as it aired, and some of it was timeshifted thanks to my PVR. I watched the first few seasons of The West Wing as it aired, but the way the broadcaster shifted it about the schedule in the UK, made it more sensible to get the boxsets. Ditto for Sports Night, which I watched over the space of a few days.

There's a lot to like in Studio 60. Sorkin writes male friendships incredibly well, and I think that Danny Tripp and Matt Albie work beautifully together. There's a fantastic ensemble of characters, and the fact that Sorkin was tracing the details of his relationship with Kristin Chenoweth, doesn't detract from the glory that is Harriet Hayes, who is funny, smart, and decent. There's a pale reprise of Dan Rydell's issues with Jacob Rydell in Tom Jeter's relationship with his own father, and an episode exploring masculinity and performance. There is a fantastic double-bill called 'Nevada Day' that covers off city vs country, religious satire, international trade, business integrity, honour and war, and manages to skirt just the funny side of all-out farce. The show says some moderately interesting things about representation and patriotism, and tries to answer the question 'What is America?'.

( The things I liked less )

Apparently it's Fandom Love Day, and I ganked this celebratory meme from lusciousxander , despite the fact that I'm still not entirely sure whether I am, in fact, a shipper. 

Fave Ship: Dan Rydell / Casey McCall.

Canon Scene: My favorite moment between Casey and Danny, in a show absolutely full of Ho Yay, is the pause at the end of Dan's apology in 1.02 "Apology". Dan is forced by the show to apologise for a comment he made in a magazine interview, which suggested that he was not entirely in line with the policy behind the War on Drugs. He apologises to his brother Sam, who was killed while driving a car drunk and stoned, for the bad example he set in smoking so much dope.

After Dan finishes talking, Casey moves in, and reaches out to him, but then cuts himself off and goes back to talking about the Starland Vocal Band, which they had been discussing earlier. It's a tiny moment, but I like Casey's understanding that Dan couldn't bear his sympathy, or his touch, and the way that he metaphorically lets Dan lean on their banter as a way of making it through the next few minutes. (It is possible that I have overthought this.)

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I have a bit of a weakness for films and documentaries about corporate mendacity, but, like a true Sorkin fangirl, would pretty much go and see anything he writes. The Social Network, then, hit at least two of my buttons.

Given that so much of the exposition happens around a sequence of boardroom tables, during a succession of depositions, and that most of the characters are desperately unlikeable, it was one of the most engaging films I've seen this year.

I did find it strangely un-Sorkin-like in tone, and the righteousness of The West Wing, and (to a greater extent) Studio 60, is largely missing. What Sorkin does write beautifully, though, is relationships between men, and the central love/friendship triangle is exquisitely rendered. You can almost taste the bile rising in his throat when Eduardo Saverin realises that he has been comprehensively fucked over by Mark Zuckerberg, in favour of Justin Timberlake's truly hideous Sean Parker.

There has been much commentary around the fact that facts and individuals have been blurred and elided in the script, and there are certainly other views of the central characters than Sorkin's. Parker, particularly, is portrayed as a pretentious, malicious playboy, whose chief value to Zuckerberg is his rolodex and ability to spout business truisms. A recent Vanity Fair piece has him as a renaissance man, whose genius and insight transcend disciplines. The truth, probably, is somewhere in the middle.

The film's opening sequences feature Zuckerberg insulting his girlfriend's school (Boston University); blogging about her stupidity, her ethnicity, and her breast size; blogging about creating a website to compare female undergraduates with farm animals; and then creating a website to allow male Harvard students to compare the relative attractiveness of female undergraduates. This latter sequence is intercut with scenes of the 'Fuck Bus' (bringing attractive female undergrads from other schools) arriving for a final club party, and then women kissing each other, and dancing in their underwear for the benefit of the privileged male club members.

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I'm writing (incredibly slowly) a post-Chosen Riley fic, and watched Dead Things again for reference. Of course, watching a single episode of Buffy is almost impossible, so I ended up watching through to Entropy. I always remember Entropy as a series of plot points; mini-explosions throwing some things together and blowing others apart, but there are some beautiful (and enraging) moments, which gave me some thoughts.

It's not you, it's me

It's in this episode that it becomes evident that, despite some tap-dancing and hand-waving, the show does not intend to satisfactorily explain Xander's decision to dump Anya on their wedding day.

Obsessed, as I am, with family dysfunction and origin stories, I might have been tempted to lean more heavily on Xander wigging out because he grew up in a house chock full of toxic relationships and emotional (at least) abuse. Or, the show could have used Anya's point-of-view to critique marriage and relationships, and reveal that after a lifetime of smiting errant suitors / husbands / boyfriends, Xander was afraid of meeting her expectations.

What we get instead is a confused mish-mash of Xander wanting a relationship but not being ready for marriage, and not letting Anya know about this soon enough. It feels almost like it's tapping in to that 'men are afraid of commitment' trope, which is a very conventional place for the show to go, as well as seeming a little bit incongruous within their relationship's arc. 

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