Dreams and Fiction

Tuesday, September 14 2004

I was being held in either a hospital or a shopping mall against my will. As you can imagine, this is the quick explanation for a dream that I had last night. For the life of me, I can't reconstruct the strange restraining rig that someone put on me. Sometimes, dreams just take shortcuts. It was very bulky and heavy so I couldn't seem to remove it and escape. Dad showed up posing as one of the clerks/guards and helped me break out.

That's what I can piece together from the fragments that I can remember. It didn't really qualify as a nightmare because, after all, I won. On the other hand, it did seem to include my fears of confinement and shopping all in one impressive package. I think I'd enjoy having some of my nightmares on tape so that I could pick them apart with my conscious mind. When did I strip down to my underwear between the front door of the house and where the laughing started? Did the clothes just disappear or were they ever there?

It amuses me how dreams can be so terrifying when they happen yet seem so silly later. My personal theory is that we dream in symbols that mean far more to our subconscious mind than our conscious mind can portray. It's almost as if we dream in first drafts as the author who knows what it all really means.

That's how you make the best horror movies. You leave the appearance of the monster in the minds of your audience. The cast reacts as if they're seeing the most horrible thing that they can imagine so the audience believes it. Really, it's just a guy behind a camera and a director saying to look scared. That's what a dream is. You just get stage directions that something scary is going on.

In the past few weeks, I started watching a show that has restored a certain delight in television for me. Everyone else on the planet seemed to already watch but I just started with "Angel." It's a spinoff from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" that got canceled last year. When I saw it the first time, I didn't think all that much of it. After all, most of the characters are ones I didn't like before they were spun off.

So, what do I like about it? Like "Ed," an also canceled show, the writers seem to just go with it. Most successful shows become franchises where writers have to be careful to avoid breaking canon. Therefore, you go years waiting for the character development to move. "Angel" follows the principle of making the characters likeable by having them suffer. After an unpredictable amount of suffering, the audience gets a little of exactly what it wants.

Even better, nothing gets thrown away. You get episodes that have immediate effect on the plot arc and ones that seem a bit out there. Every time I've found myself thinking that the writers are just throwing something useful away, it comes back at the proper moment.

Usually, characters on TV stay the same until polls show that the audience is sickened. At that point, there is a sharp turn that makes absolutely no sense. The Joss Whedon shows have avoided both problems with characters who seem to develop naturally. Sometimes, characters do stupid things but even they tend to know it won't work out well. These characters learn from experience and do things for reasons.

Yesterday, Angelus (evil Angel) killed the Beast that has been kicking good guy ass for weeks. In doing so, he showed a completely expected trait of being a bad team player. Angelus has always been like this because he's completely incapable of subordinating his whims. It's his most dangerous quality and his weakness. In having Angelus, who was summoned to kill the Beast, do the killing, the writers managed to avoid the old trick of inventing some new spell that saved the day in the last five minutes.

I found myself asking why the Beast didn't go after Angel and Company right away. It seemed as though this was a silly plot device but it wasn't. A bigger bad guy was working on them from within as they had been warned. The Beast also didn't go after Angel because the bigger bad guy wanted Angelus. Everything happened for a reason.

With any luck, we'll see more sci-fi or fantasy work from Whedon. The genre allows him to create his own rules and then follow them carefully. As he admits, some of the rules were broken or changed over time because they became untenable. I'm ok with that since he avoids "miracle of the week" plots. Perhaps he will try something like the underrated "Firefly" again.