The Magnar of Thenn

 I abandoned George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons this morning.  I read nearly eight hundred pages, only a few hundred left before I would've been done.  Dragons is the fifth and to date most recent entry in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, the basis for Game of Thrones, which concluded its television run amid ridicule after spending the vast majority of it amid wild acclaim.  Mostly, fans were upset that one of the major characters didn't end up on the Iron Throne, although to be fair, the final occupant was one of them, just not one of their favorites, instead the one who kind of combined King Arthur and Merlin (the whole series one long origin story!) without anyone bothering to notice.

Anyway, I abandoned it because it was terrible, and I was finally fed up with it.  Terrible, not because I disapproved of Martin's lust for sex and violence (the very things that brought so many fans to the TV series), but for his imagination being far more attuned to world-building world-building and world-building rather than anything resembling internal logic.

Granted, I'm not really a fan of fantasy.  My only real interests in fantasy are the Chronicles of Narnia (which is designed to be devoured by eager young readers) and Harry Potter (which began as such and then grew up along the way, like the characters).  While everyone else salivated over Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, I observed with restraint from a distance, and found it amusing that he brought the same, if not better, skill to his Hobbit films, and to considerably less acclaim.  I was never a fan of Excalibur, dull and dreary, flashy, desperate.  I liked my Arthur in prose, thank you.

I have a friend who's become increasingly casual over the years, who was a big fantasy fan in high school (I don't know if he still is), and the day I knew there was a massive difference between us was when I read just some of his favorite material, and had the extremely bad form to be honest about how I felt about it, in front of a whole English class (I absolutely still feel bad about it, but to be fair, I rarely know, when I'm actually talking, and it's not joking, if I'm saying the right thing or only what my introvert brain is processing as what I understand and what others probably won't, and my complete inability to bridge the gap between).

I did read the Tolkien books.  I actually read The Hobbit, in grade school, thanks to that friend (although I took greater interest in other recommendations he shared over the years, notably Maniac Magee and Jeff Smith's Bone, both of which remain treasured favorites).  I was reading the Lord of the Rings books in 2000, before the movies began premiering, and in one of the few instances where I care about adaptation fidelity, I will admit one of the problems I had with The Two Towers was Jackson's pointless deviations (although, again, I have no such problem with his inventive storytelling in the later Hobbit films).  I drew the line at The Silmarillion, the kind of Middle-Earth myth fiction that was Tolkien at his most indulgent.  Unreadable drivel.

Martin is Tolkien with about a tenth of the scholarly credentials, and even less imagination.  He's only really concerned with world-building, as I may have suggested earlier.  The whole of Dragons, which again is five books into the series, is a thousand pages of world-building!  Even the dialogue is endless world-building!  He scarcely seems to be aware that advancing the plot is even remotely necessary!  It's all foreboding!  It's every single character dreading what comes next!  Endlessly!  (Quite literally so, as Martin is a decade into writing the sixth book!  Of a projected seven!)

And so much of it is mindless drivel.  As I said, I never really got into fantasy, so it's largely a genre that's a foreign language to me.  As far as I can tell, it's composed almost entirely of the merging of another era's fiction and a fictional version of that era, so that the entire landscape is composed of a merging of fact and fiction.  And as that landscape has developed over the years, it apparently becomes less and less necessary for the fantasy to have any bearing in reality.

Such is Martin's imagination that I counted a number of eras in which his landscape might have seemed to have plausibly drawn from, and vast distances, and time, from which they would exist apart from each other.  Even the conceptions are difficult to reconcile in a context missing a key motivating factor from the real world (the existence of Christianity; if I were entirely cynical about the whole affair, I'd suggest it does exist in the series, but in a number of forms, including the dreaded White Walkers, so that it simultaneously informs the world that is being threatened and the world that threatens it).

But in two elements I did find something to admire.  One was Daenerys Targaryen at last taking flight on one of her dragons, the only sequence I read that wasn't exposition, and the other was a character name I found particularly charming: the Magnar of Thenn.

As a writer, I am particularly partial to cool names.  I love finding them in the real world, and I love using them, or creating them, in my fiction.  The main characters in Martin's work tend to have cool names, and then there's an avalanche of anonymous and yet laboriously named characters no one could ever possibly care about, few of which are interesting in any way except some which do have some interesting feature that will never be drawn on, when even the main characters spend all their time mulling over things rather than, y'know, doing anything.

The Magnar of Thenn gets married.  That's all he does.  But he has an evocative title, one of the few "wildlings" in this particular book to have been given any real depth (I imagine the wildlings represent native populations, whether the Druidic Britains the Romans encountered or, for example, any number of Native American tribes, so calling them wildlings is one of the many lazy copouts Martin is all too happy to settle for; his entire vision of Westeros, again, is all over the place and can never really be properly reconciled), even if only in that title.

I would've been happier to read a book with Dany riding her dragon and the Magnar of Thenn getting married somehow being important to that, and just about everything else being omitted.  Martin writes everything he thinks is interesting.  Most of the time it isn't, and he can't be bothered to tell the difference.

Jack Nicholson’s Final Role

How Do You Know was released in theaters December 2010.

My mother had just begun her battle with cancer. I was still working at Borders. My niece wasn’t born yet, but she was developing in uterus. 

And this was Jack Nicholson’s final film. It was also James L. Brooks’s final film.

I’m watching it for the first time as I write this. I lost track of Nicholson’s career, how long ago it ended. He’s 84 now, so he retired from acting in his 70s. Watching him in How is actually strange; even though I had seen him in plenty of movies from around that time, including one of my all-time favorites, The Departed, from four years earlier, he clearly seems older. It’s not hugely surprising that he decided he was done. He goes for the usual Nicholson gusto, but doesn’t really have it anymore. And it’s even a pretty small part. He plays at least fourth banana behind leads Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson (all three known for being extremely likable, and living up to it), and arguably behind even Kathryn Hahn, who at this point was still building her career of stealing scenes in supporting roles.

Nicholson famously dominated the screen. That was his whole thing. He wasn’t by any stretch a conventional leading man, but he ascended assuredly up the Hollywood ladder in the ‘70s until he was his own genre. Somehow he seemed like he’d do it forever, and then he was just gone. And he’s stayed gone for more than a decade.

How was received as a minor rom com, of little note. No one knew it would be Nicholson’s last film, although if you read between the lines you can tell Brooks knew it was his last. And probably even as he was filming, Nicholson did, too. 

The problem with a lot of critics is that they all too often take their job for granted. Witherspoon infuses her performance with the kind of determination to prove herself beyond the Legally Blonde reputation she had theoretically achieved with the Oscar win for Walk the Line, but she knew as well as anyone that when a mainstream leading actress wins one of those, it’s basically a gimme, and nobody really expects anything “good” from them again. And Rudd is Rudd, and Wilson of course is Wilson, which is to say reliably watchable. Rudd still gets taken for granted a decade later, and yeah, so does Wilson.

The thing about movies is that once an initial reception has been registered, it’s very hard to change (even cult films never really break out of cult status). I’m not saying that just because it’s Nicholson’s (and Brooks’) final film, you should consider it, I don’t know, a classic. But it didn’t deserve to be dismissed in 2010, and it does deserve a look in 2021. It’s a good movie with a great cast. But yeah, it’s now got a distinct historic sheen to it, and is well worth the effort of appreciating it for that.