In Defense of The Mystery Box
Hello, everyone! Welcome to my first blogpost, post-graduation! I received my Master of Divinity back in May (which almost a year ago to the day is the one that made such an achievement seem to be completely impossible), and I moved from Richmond and left the multiple jobs I was working while in grad school at the end of August. So, since the beginning of September, I have been living back with my parents (which at 32 is a bit disheartening, but I actually am enjoying being back with two of the three people who know me best) and am currently unemployed. The job hunting has not been fun and it's been a bit humbling to realize that I have no marketable talents, despite graduating very well from seminary and having multiple jobs on my resume (most of which I worked for at least three years).
I had hoped to do a bit of writing in my spare time while I wait for more positive outcomes in my career life. (I've worked all my *jobs* a long time, but they were always just jobs and not potential careers. This time around I would really like to have a career and have it be something I can see myself doing [mostly] happily for the next 30 years.) As usual though, now that I have the time to write, I seem to lack the motivation or creativity.
However, over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed a trend in YouTube comments online that have sparked my inner indignation and argumentative nature. Now, as most everyone on my blog should know by now, I am a HUGE HUGE HUGE fan of JJ Abrams. For the last 18 years, I have watched, analyzed, debated, promoted, and philosophized his multiple projects in online forums, in fanfiction, in meta-analysis, and in face-to-face conversations with friends and family. Now, I am most ardent in my studies of Bad Robot Productions (JJ Abrams' production company) when Abrams is writing the script and is listed as one of the creators (Felicity, Alias, LOST, Fringe, Super 8, Undercovers, and Star Wars Episode VII), and only slightly less manic when I study his purely directorial work (Star Trek 2009 and Into Darkness, Mission Impossible 3, The Office season 3 episode 18). When it comes to his purely EP work or ones where he was one of many writers on a film: I watch all of the projects, but am far less likely to cite them in the following argument (Person of Interest, Almost Human, WestWorld, Roadies, Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Cloverfield Paradox, Mission Impossible 4-6, Star Trek: Beyond, The Play That Goes Wrong, the novel S., Forever Young (writer), Armageddon (writer), and various others.) For the last group, I have seen all of these projects and then some (yes, even Infinite Polar Bear), but despite Abrams' very hands-on approach as an executive producer, and his writing contributions to some great films, because of the point of this blogpost, we will stick with the works where he is the guiding force behind the story and its execution.
So, now that we have established that I truly love this man and his work and that those who wish to bash JJ Abrams' creativity should launch their vitriol in another direction because I refuse to listen to it or read it any longer, let's get into this argument.
Last week, JJ Abrams was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was far from the first time that Colbert had interviewed him, and as usual, I was dancing in my seat in excitement to see how Abrams would dance around giving any information away about his next big project. In this case, said project is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Now, as with most people, I grew up knowing Star Wars. I spent most of the time with my dad and my older brother (mom worked all day and dad worked from home), and because of that I grew up watching mainly action and adventure films -- Star Trek, Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, the 1970s Superman and the 1989 Batman -- these were the movies and characters I studied. My brother was more into Star Wars than I was, but when your house only has one tv in it (this was the late 80s and early 90s, after all), you learn to enjoy what the other people in your family enjoy or you just become plain miserable. I literally cannot remember a time when I did not know Star Wars and its characters. My brother and my dad were the types who waited in line for 7-8 hours when the movies were re-released in theatres in the mid-90s (I did not. I was content to watch the movies for free on the VCR at home.) I was 11 when Phantom Menace came out, and I remember being excited that a Star Wars movie was coming out that I could see in theatres. I had honestly never thought there would be anything new from the franchise. I also saw the rest of the prequel trilogy in theatres (though I wish I had not wasted money on seeing Episode II.) Naturally, when Episode VII was announced, I was ecstatic, and that was before I was told that my favorite tv creator/writer/director was going to be involved in it. I actually remember exactly where I was when I heard the news: I was sitting in Applebee's and my best friend texted me and I legit screamed in the middle of the restaurant. Before the new trilogy started, I had high expectations and high hopes, most of which weren't shared by the person I trust most when it comes to analyzing movies: my brother. My brother knows my love and obsession with all things Bad Robot, but for him, the projects are largely hit and miss. He loves Super 8 and Star Trek 2009 and Fringe, but detests Into Darkness (considers it fanfic, which is the reason why I love that particular film) and thinks LOST could have been better. Because of his mixed feelings on the Star Trek movies, he was hesitant to get excited about Star Wars, especially when he heard that the previously canon novels that had been released over the years were now being relegated to non-canonical. However, as we walked away from the first of what turned out to be three showings of Force Awakens that we would attend over its opening weekend, my brother was forced to admit that this particular project of JJ's fell into bro's "hit" column. After Rogue One, he was forced to move Force Awakens down a bit on his rankings list as Rogue One ended up directly under A New Hope in his favorites, but... I can understand that shift. Rogue One was a pretty awesome and original movie.
But there's a heavily brief write up of my history with Star Wars. Also, if you're wondering why I should care what my brother thinks about movies, he has a Bachelor's in Screenwriting from UNC Wilmington, and was in the top 1% of his film class. I do not always agree with my brother's critiques on movies (because I sometimes am looking for something very different than he is), but I do listen to them and give them the authority I feel his education on them has earned. And when I read off the comments and critiques from YouTube commenters that made me angry, my brother had the same auto responses that I did. To me, that just reinforced my rationale and proved to me that people had massive misconceptions about Abrams movies/shows and the Bad Robot method of story telling.
I am going to give a brief rundown of the main complaints I have read through comments over the years, and then my rebuttal.
1) In the most recent interview that JJ had with Colbert, he made the comment of "writing endings is really hard." There were a large number of comments below that which stated ideas along the general line of, "How would JJ know? He's never ended anything before." This is mainly making reference to JJ's method of handing off his created show projects to another show runner after the first one or two seasons while he goes and starts another project.
Rebuttal: I can see the basis of the starting point for this argument. JJ does not write the ending episodes for his shows -- not Felicity, Alias, LOST, or Fringe. In fact, for most of the shows he did not write any episodes after the first couple of seasons. HOWEVER, with the exception of LOST, he was heavily involved as the executive producer of his created tv shows throughout the entirety of the shows' runs. He read all of the scripts, sent in production notes, sat in on writer's meetings, and hand picked the show runners who would go on to the day-to-day production work of the show -- Jeff Pinkner, J.H. Wyman, Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelhof. People give him a lot of flack for this, but by actively trusting these people to do the jobs they are trained to do and by contributing his ideas to the scripts while writing and directing large scale pictures, he is in fact contributing to "the end" of the story. The one show where he admits he completely left production in the hands of the show runners was LOST, and then when the ending was bad, people blamed JJ for it. And he took that blame, along with Damon Lindelhof, who is now credited with writing one of the worst show endings (LOST) and one of the best (The Leftovers). And you know what? The hypocrisy on this point just drives me crazy. You can be angry about LOST's ending and blame JJ for it sucking, but you can't say you hate an ending and then claim in the same breath that the man has never done an ending before. Which is it? Has he never written an ending or does he write bad ones?
2) The Mystery Box sucks. He stole the idea from Alfred Hitchcock, and he never answers your question.
Rebuttal: Um...maybe you're not asking the right question? JJ has always answered the major questions I have -- what caused the Pattern on Fringe? Oh, it's tears in the fabric of reality because people in two realities are unknowingly playing with the fabric of reality. Why are they playing with the fabric of reality? Because twenty years ago a scientist lost his son to an incurable disease after discovering the cure too late to save his own son, but realized he could save an alternate version of his son, and then because of a crazy accident, he ended up taking the alternate version of his son to his own reality and couldn't get him home. That caused his alternate self to hate the other side and want to destroy the alternate universe that had stolen his son. Well, when the son finds out what happened, why doesn't he just go home and appease his father? Well, his father from his home universe now has dictatorial powers, the boy doesn't remember most of his childhood because of his sickness, and he fell in love with a girl in what he thought was his real universe. (And this is just an example from one of his shows.) And on and on the questions and answers go.
You start with one mystery: Why would a girl from Palo Alto go across the United States to a college in New York and stay there when she realizes the boy she followed there didn't remember her name? Why would the US government kill one of its own citizens just because a CIA agent told her fiance that she was in the CIA? Why do all the Pattern cases connect to Dr. Walter Bishop and a research and development group called Massive Dynamic? What happened to all these other now dead people on this island in the middle of the South Pacific, and can we learn to live together long enough to survive until help arrives? These are the starting questions, but a show cannot last a full season with them. In truth, most of these questions are answered in the pilot or the first six episodes of the first season on each of these shows. The answers: she stays at the school because she realizes her decision to go there was never about the boy anyway, but was about figuring out who she was in a place far away from her overly domineering parents; the US government killed the agent's fiance because she did not really work for the CIA; the cases connect to Dr. Bishop and Massive Dynamic because the leader of that company and Dr. Bishop conducted the experiments, with US government authorization, that led to the breakdown in the fabric of reality that made an inter-dimensional war possible; and what happened to those other groups is that they all died before help came because no one who did not previously know about the island was ever able to find it. These are easy answers to find in the show narratives, but they lead to other questions, and you need questions to keep a show going. When you reach the end of the questions -- the center of the mystery box -- your story is over!
In fact, one of the things I applaud Bad Robot for doing is never letting their shows run an obscenely long time. I mean, I love Supernatural and will be sad to see it end this year, but over half of their episodes since season 7 are "kill time" episodes. They're either monster-of-the-week (which I actually love in the SPN format) or they're attempts to kill the Big Bad that completely fail and leave them back at Square One. Of Abrams created shows, Felicity lasted 4 years, Fringe and Alias both lasted 5 (with shorter final seasons), and LOST was six (though the last few seasons did not have 22 episodes in them), and Undercovers was canceled after 8 episodes (though you can view the 12 filmed eps online). But even for shows of 4-6 seasons, your characters have to go through development and change, and what drives those developments are questions, the search for answers, the discovery of an answer, or *gasp* the discovery that there is *no* answer! Now, you may not like the answers to some of the mysteries in a Bad Robot show -- they were dead the whole time?! (By the way, this is a misunderstanding of the LOST ending. They were not dead the whole time, just in the flash sideways of the final season. They all either died on the island -- in which case, you saw them die throughout the episodes -- or they got off the island and died later. The flash sideways brought them all to the same place *after* they died so that they could "remember and let go.") Irina Derevko really was a bad guy who was out to make herself immortal at the expense of her family? Walter saves the child!Observer and makes it so that the Observers never invade and Peter and Olivia get to live happily ever after with Etta without knowing where Walter disappeared to? Felicity chooses Ben and still becomes a doctor despite running from that future in the show's beginning? I can understand why some people are against these endings, either for shipping reasons or because your favorite character dies, or maybe there was one question Bad Robot just DID NOT answer. Seriously, you would not believe how many people are salty over never finding out why there was a polar bear on the island in LOST. I still think a lot about Peter Bishop's past dealings with the mob and I wonder whatever happened to Peter's ex-girlfriend Tess who was apparently married to or dating a mobster who beat her. She's in season one, episode 9, and we see the mobsters letting their bosses know that Peter was in town and making ominous statements about it...and that's it. We never saw or heard from them again. And you know? I'm okay with that. Peter's past and the reasoning for polar bears is what the world of fanfiction is for; Bad Robot talked to fans and found out the questions they most wanted answers about and Peter's connection to the mob and the random images on the island were all considered of less interest to the people who were watching the show as it aired.
So stop complaining about the mystery box method. You know what another term is for the mystery box method? STORY TELLING. My brother and I are both story tellers -- I like to write short stories, fanfic, and novels, while my brother prefers to write screenplays. However, I never studied how to tell stories professionally (I studied history and then got a master's in theology), but my brother has imparted things he learned from his professors about story telling. The most important thing he taught me is that there are actually only three stories: A young person leaves home, a stranger comes to town, and overcoming the monster. The only thing that creates multiple works are derivations on these three. Therefore, the only thing that can drive a story into what feels like an original plot is to frame a question that drives the person to leave town, enter town, or fight the monster. People engage in these pursuits in search of an answer, which they will either find satisfactory or which will lead to dismay. However, a dislike of the answer or a misunderstanding of the answer does not mean that no answer was given.
3) I don't like the pseudo-religious undertone of LOST.
Rebuttal: First, this is a season 4-6 issue, and as I said before, do not complain about the ending of a JJ Abrams show while complaining that he never writes an ending. JJ Abrams did not write the religious parts of LOST; that was Damon Lindelhof, who, at the time of penning the later seasons of the show, had just lost his father and was searching for answers to the existential questions that most of us ask at such a time.
In addition, so what if there is religious talk within the story? Religious beliefs are world-wide and can be just as much part of a character as they are part of living, breathing people. I am one such person myself. Even back when LOST was originally airing, and I had no thoughts of entering seminary, I still had a religious background. My father is an ordained Baptist pastor with a Doctorate in pastoral care, and my mom has a Master of Divinity and is ordained as well. When we watched the show together, we all cringed at Mr. Eko's mistaken recitation of Psalm 23 when he said "As I walk through the shadow of the valley of death," as it should have been "As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Seriously, the order of those words is kind of an important tidbit when deciphering the meaning of scripture and those two sentences mean vastly different things. But I admired Mr. Eko's faith and I smiled at his christening of Claire's baby. Religious rituals mean something to communities of people, believer and non-believer alike, and they offer a feeling of unity in crisis situations; it makes perfect sense to me that the survivors of Oceanic 815 would take comfort in their various faiths. That is a perfectly human reaction when searching for hope and a purpose in the face of great tragedy and trauma.
Most people when they make this statement are referring to the final season of the show. Once again, religious ritual, or the lack of religious ritual, plays a large part in how people grieve. What LOST showed in its final episode was grief as a communal experience -- people who had suffered a tragedy together, congregated together to remember what they had been through and to let go of their shared trauma so that they could all move on to whatever awaited them next. (Which, by the way, we are never told what that is, so it is left open to whatever religious or non-religious belief structure you want to choose.) What I really enjoyed about that particular religious look is actually the scene with Ben Linus, who was my favorite character in the whole show. If you want to see a believable redemption arc for a character, look at Ben. Unlike the others, he does not cross over, but remains sitting on a park bench, even after apologizing to John Locke, whom he murdered simply because John was special and Ben was not. John forgave Ben, but Ben realized that he still had work to do -- his redemption arc was a beginning and not the end of his redemption. For me, this was the most true rendition of what penance looks like: he does not take the cheap grace way out, but actively continues on with the mission of the island, not because he thinks he can earn forgiveness, but because he knows that if he crossed over with everyone else, he would never truly understand the forgiveness they had given to him. He has to live into that forgiveness before he can accept its gifts.
Now, the next thing I believe people are referencing is the Man in Black vs. Jacob. One appears to be the force for good on the island, and the other is evil. People often call this the pseudo-Christian dogma, which they then characterize as annoying. I hate to break it to you, people... Good vs. Evil predates Christianity by thousands of years. In fact, the whole idea of a being of supreme good and a being of supreme evil doesn't even have its roots in Judeo-Christian beliefs at all. In the earliest Hebrew Scriptures (the Torah), it is God who creates and does both good and evil, and it's commonly believed that even Abraham acknowledged many gods, but chose to serve YHWH, though God never calls God's self that name until Moses. As my Old Testament and Ancient Hebrew professor once told us seminarians, even the Shema (the Hebrew profession that is stated at every synagogue worship) states "The Lord God is one." It does not say God is the *only* one. In truth, the monotheistic tenet of Judaism came about later, and the beliefs in a supreme being of evil only dates back to the Babylonian Exile (Second Temple Period) and was syncretized into Judaism during the Diaspora when they were exposed to what is now called Zoroastrianism. Previous to the Babylonian Exile, it was taught that YHWH controlled both order and chaos, light and dark, sweet and salty, land and water, dry and wet seasons, God rained down both blessing and calamity. Sin was caused by people choosing to go against God's will and by refusing to live into the Torah. As the people lived in exile, however, other theologies began to spring up that are now common thoughts: a controlling, perverse spirit known as "Satan," (Heb. trans. is "the adversary") or "the devil" or "the enemy" shows up in story narratives in scripture (see The Book of Job) and convinces humankind to choose ways other than God's ways. Instead of sin being a side effect of people's choices to pursue their own wills instead of God's, we begin to read ideas that lead to the excuse of "the devil made me do it." Evil becomes anthropomorphous and somehow equal in power to YHWH, the being that controls the very chaos evil thrives in manipulating. Has Christianity used such imagery over the years? Of course. But is it staunchly Christian? No. Hinduism has good and evil forms for its gods; the Greek and Roman gods had both benevolent and maleficent faces; YHWH did both good and evil (depending on which side you were asking), and the same can be said with Egyptian gods, Norse gods, Native American spirit gods, etc. Even if you ascribe to a religious faith, your faith and perception of your god(s) is subject to your personal experience and perspective. If you see good and bad things happening in your world, then either your god(s) are themselves both good and evil, or the good gods fight evil gods with Earth as their battle ground. The old school Jewish belief is something of an exception to this rule, but is rarely taught in most Christian circles. (Unless you're like me, and then you refuse to think of Satan as anything other than the being who will remind YHWH of all the sins you committed, and will try to force God to make you reckon for them. I do not think of Satan as the one who makes me do evil, nor do I see Satan as the one who tries to tempt me to do it. My tendency to go my own way and to make myself into my own God is what leads me to sin, and Satan is simply going to attempt to make me answer for it. Most Christian teachings simply state that Satan is a fallen angel and leads people to do evil and rules over Hell. This is a very late teaching in Judaism, however.)
You may not like the plot line of Man in Black vs. Jacob, but it is not pseudo-Christian by any means. Merely a good vs. evil story, which is present in 95% of any story ever told.
4. JJ Abrams ruined Star Wars.
Rebuttal: Pretty sure this is an entirely subjective view. I would argue that George Lucas ruined it a long time ago by constantly changing things on every release of the original trilogy and by having really crappy dialogue all throughout both the original trilogy and the prequels. The man had a great plot, but nobody talks like the characters in those movies, lol. Even the actors commented on it. And if Liam Neeson can't say what should be a serious line without me laughing (even at 11 years old), then there is something wrong.
Is the story on Force Awakens 100% original? No. I spotted the similarities with A New Hope just as quickly as anyone else, even if I was also keeping an eye and ear open for the #47 making an appearance and for Greg Grunberg to show up. (What can I say? I multitask.) But as I stated before, there are NO.ORIGINAL.STORIES. All you can do is tell a familiar story in such a way that it feels somewhat new. You create new personality types and put them in a familiar situation, but the different personality changes how they react to said situation. You change the background world for archetypal characters. You have known characters with new relationships added to them -- we see Han Solo with Chewie and Leia, yes, but we also see Han and Ben Solo (Han doesn't call him Kylo Ren when he's face to face with him, so I won't do it either in referencing this particular scene), we see Han and Rey and Han and Finn, we see Leia and Poe Dameron, we see Luke and Rey. By seeing how they treat these other characters differently to previously known ones, we see new facets to familiar characters.
Any problems that you have with the story line in The Last Jedi are not JJ Abrams' fault and I am more than happy to diss that film with you. He did not write or direct The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson is who you blame if you detest that film), and I am living in faith that Abrams can take all the problems I had with Episode VIII and either course correct or change answers to something more satisfactory. Have I loved every plot point in all of his shows? No. I could have lived without Lauren Reed showing up on Alias or the whole Bolivia/Peter drama on Fringe, Felicity cheating on Ben with Noel in Felicity, or watching most of my favorite characters die on LOST over the years. But he managed to do his job as an executive producer very well and make sure that the writers on his shows tied up all those show story lines to what was at least *my* satisfaction (I can't speak for everybody else.)
Now, JJ Abrams doesn't need me to defend him. Despite whining from the (very) toxic fandom that is Star Wars, his career will continue on being successful. Because those same people who are whining and complaining about how he has "ruined the franchise," were saying the same thing about George Lucas during the prequels, and they will still cough up money to go see the film, if for no other reason than so that they can complain about it afterward. This man has been writing scripts since I was barely old enough to understand them, and he will continue to write and executive produce and create for many years (and this time with Star Wars on his resume.) But well... there is a trend in popular culture these days to endlessly complain about anyone who is successful at what they do instead of just enjoying the product that is made for us. (I'll admit that I'm no saint when it comes to this trend. I complained a lot during the Moffat era of DW, despite continuing to watch it every week. In my defense, however, I kept my complaining here on my blog and didn't spam YouTube comment sections of people who enjoyed his era.)
So, people, on December 20, go to the movie (if you're a Star Wars fan), enjoy the story you're given, and then go home and either add to it, change it, or disregard it altogether for the movie you wanted in your head. Just stop ranting about it on YouTube comment sections for videos where I just want to find some people who admire the creativity of others, regardless of whether that story was the way *they* would have written it. Seriously, if you want a different story, that's what fanfiction is for.