Imagine for a moment that 30 Rock had been unexpectedly cancelled after Season 2. The series closes on somewhat of a cliffhanger: Jack has gone to work for the Pentagon, Kathy Geiss is in control of NBC. None of the subplots of the third, fourth, or fifth season would ever exist: no Jon Hamm as clueless doctor, no Selma Hayek, no Mamma Mia spoof, no Jack-Nancy-Avery love triangle.
In this alternate universe, would 30 Rock be as beloved and as mourned as Arrested Development is today?
And, the uncomfortable follow-up question: how much of Arrested Development’s critical and commercial cache springs directly from its early cancellation? Would an Arrested Development that ran for six seasons be better or worse, on the whole, than one that ran for three?
Action franchises often run up against what I call the Law of Escalating Crises: the tendency for the threats confronted by the hero to grow more outlandish as the franchise ages and the writers are forced to one-up their own canon. A classic example of this is the James Bond series: in Tomorrow Never Dies, 007 averted World War III; in The World Is Not Enough; he kept a nuclear bomb from exploding in Istanbul; and in Die Another Day, he foiled a plot to use an orbital sunlight deflector to burn down the Korean Demilitarized Zone and throw Asia into turmoil.
So when it came time to talk about a sequel to Die Another Day, the producers looked at the options for further escalation and wisely decided they were a touch improbableeven within the freewheeling confines of the Bond canon. So they broke the cycle: Casino Royale eschewed all of the established backstory, and the threat faced by Bond, while suitably heinous, was of something less than world-destroying proportions. A freedom was found in the paring down of tradition. 1
Now, allow me to propose the following analogy:
The Hazards of Love is to Die Another Day as The King is Dead is to Casino Royale.
The Hazards of Love and The King Is Dead are albums by the Portland folk-rock quintet The Decemberists. Hazards was released in 2008 and was the capstone of a five-album ascent to respectable popularity. The Decemberists had a love of allusion and poetry from the first, but they were somewhat unusual in that they trended toward greater experimentation as their popularity grew. As I put it in my review of Hazards of Lovetwo years ago:
“The Decemberists seem to have realized that pretension is somewhat expected of them at this point, and have found a sort of freedom in that expectation. The Hazards of Love is a full-fledged rock-opera. It is, in other words, the album that the Decemberists have always wanted to make, with all of the strengths and weaknesses implied therein.”
I gave The Hazards of Love a positive review, and it remains a significant musical achievement. But for me, the album has not aged well. The cohesion of the album actually works to its disadvantage: there are few individual songs that I find myself revisiting, and it turns out that I’m not often in the mood for a seventeen-song rock-opera about forest creatures. Like Die Another Day, The Hazards of Love was supposed to be the fullest expression of a particular artistic vision; like Die Another Day, it was ultimately forgettable.
The King is Dead, then, is a musical reboot. It’s musically ambitious but thematically conservative. The songs are short and loose. Colin Meloy, the lead singer, sounds better than he ever has, and guest-spots by R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Gillian Welch work splendidly. It’s just a lovely album, filled with lovely songs – like “Calamity Song”, “January Hymn”, and “All Arise”.
We sometimes put too much focus, I think, on innovation. There’s a tendency to think that each album in an artist’s oeuvre should make obvious their musical growth, that each release should be the most ambitious. Sometimes – like this time – it’s more important to excel at something humble than to reach for something grandiose, and miss.
My favorite example of the LOEC is 24. In Season 1, Jack Bauer saves the President from an assassination attempt and retrieves his kidnapped family. Ok. In season 4, Bauer averts no fewer than three nuclear-based terror plots – in a single day! ↩
One of the few valuable things about the Academy Awards is that they force moviegoers to consider the more subtle efforts that go into making a successful movie. It’s rare that people leave a film and say, “well, the story and the directing were mediocre, but the sound-editing was fantastic and well-worth the price of admission”. But when things work well, they’re almost always attributed to the director, even though it’s unlikely that David Fincher applied even a single daub of makeup during the filming of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which won Best Makeup in 2008).
I like that before you get to disagree with what the Academy thinks is the best film of the year, you have to sit and acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the countless Foley artists, special-effects artists, and costume designers who generally get no credit whatsoever.
So while you’re watching True Grit this holiday season, you should revel in the Coen brothers prodigious talent and Jeff Bridges’s phlegmy rasp. But you should also consider that the film is most accurately understood as the product of a razor-sharp team of adept craftsmen that the Coen brothers have gathered around them over the last thirty years, and that without their contributions the film would almost certainly be a lesser thing than it is.
These people can be buried far in the background - like Peter Kurland, who was a boom operator on the brothers’s first film, 1984’s Blood Simple and has worked on their production sound in some capacity on every of their efforts since.
But they can also be people key to the success of the film, like Carter Burwell. Burwell has composed the score to every one of the Coen brothers films and found the time to work on films like Where the Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich.
Burwell’s work on True Grit rivals any other score he has produced, though I think it falls short of his efforts for 1991’s Miller’s Crossing. I am biased, though, for Miller’s Crossing is one of my favorite films, and it shares with True Grit a love of genre and of its gentle tweaking.
Miller’s Crossing also marked the end of the brothers’s long collaboration with then-cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who would thereafter satisfy himself directing middling comedy films. But into the void left by Sonnenfeld stepped Roger Deakins, and through his work since — both with the Coen brothers and not — Deakins has cemented himself as the greatest cinematographer of our time.
He has worked on every Coen brothers film in the last twenty years save one: 2008’s Burn After Reading, during which he was otherwise engaged. That’s a run that includes Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and The Man Who Wasn’t There. He has also found the time to shoot The Shawshank Redemption, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Jarhead, among others. For this he has been studiously overlooked by the Academy, and if that streak continues with True Grit, it will be a tremendous shame. If the film contains a shot anything less than spectacular, I did not see it.
My point with all this is: film is a collaborative medium. And like Commander Shepard or Hannibal Smith, the Coen brothers have spent the last thirty years building themselves the best damn team they could find. The result is a film that finds not only the director but every crew member, from the top on down, working at the very height of their ability. And that’s a rare thing.
And just for kicks, here’s the trailer for the Deakins-shot The Shawshank Redemption — a trailer that I was surprised to learn featured the Burwell-composed main theme from Miller’s Crossing.
