JPod

Today I picked up what's been called Microserfs 2.0 from the library and took it down to the Hiram M. Chittendon Locks for a sunny afternoon read. That was about seven hours ago, and I just finished JPod about 1/2 an hour ago.

To start, I felt a bit cheated by the ending — it was vaguely satisfying and non-depressing, but in a way, it felt a little hollow and like Coupland just hit the point where he was done with the novel and pencilled in the last chapter. That aside, I really did enjoy the bulk of JPod.

I was a little worried about it making me sad — Eleanor Rigby made me incredibly dispirited for a week, but after the first few pages, it was pretty obvious that wouldn't be the case here. It also became pretty obvious that while there were a few things it had in common with Microserfs, it was more different than it was similar.

Without getting too much into all the small things that made it good and spoiling the little moments that are really the best, there are a lot of small things that are fucked up in so many various ways, but the characters just roll with it — not even shrugging and saying, "Hey, that's life, eh?" — but just going with it.

And then you end up just rolling with it too, and not questioning it. Ballroom dancing, Coke, forced heroin addiction, people smuggling, killing, your mom's grow-op, Ronald McDonald as a psycho killer running amok trapped in video games — these I'm all OK with. They totally make sense in the context presented.

And you feel good to run with it, to partake in this world where people are accepting and non-judgemental about their fellow Podsters' fashion choices, sexual perversions, and messed up families.

It's really not as messed up as I just made it sound.

The one slightly off thing was when characters discussed Douglas Coupland, the author. And then Douglas Coupland, the author, becomes an asshole character in the book. It sort of pulls you back out of the book and breaks the suspension of disbelief, like when Stephen King pulled that stunt (more successfully, I think) towards the end of the Dark Tower series. It wasn't at all the literary crazy-type of thing that Jonathan Safran Foer did in Everything is Illuminated. That was something completely different and wonderful.

But yes, I was ok with it. And the crazy bits rolled in and were all good good stuff.

. . .

But to wander into other media and a contrasting example, I saw The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension yesterday and that was just crazy.

And I don't think I was completely ok with the crazy. I mean, the hero is a neurosurgeon and rocket scientist and rock star and comic book hero and action hero with his own team of junior agents?

That's just messed up.

And when the shit with Planet 10 and the 8th Dimension get rolled out, they just roll with it, like it makes perfect sense. And I'm all, "Wait, shouldn't there be some sort of set up involved here? Why isn't the President of the United States questioning this at all?"

I think it would have been a different story if Buckaroo had been played by an actor with the slightest bit of verve or charisma, but Peter Weller? The man is unattractive and about as exciting as a wet paper towel. He was in Naked Lunch so I'll give him credit for that, but ya know, . . . Jeff Goldblum would've done a much better job as Buckaroo, and yet he spends the movie as a second rate character from new Jersey who likes to dress up as a cowboy in wool chaps.

There are people out there who did and do enjoy this movie, so I'm not sure what exactly I'm missing here.

. . .

So why is the weird crazy rolling with it in Jpod ok, but not in Buckaroo?

It's not the sci-fi aspect of it, although that seems at first blush to be the biggest difference between the two. It's not the media they are presented on either.

It's the sheer flatness of the Buckaroo characters and that you just can't picture where they're coming from mentally. The characters in JPod? It's a lot more obvious where their mental cycles are going.

Although, this all probably says a lot more about me than the media creations themselves.