Friday, September 18, 2009

The Regurgitation Of Kitty Pryde

[Plok concludes his epic and fun three part guest blog on lazy storytelling. This has been a truly exciting series, and Plok is welcome to come back any time he wants.]

Oh, sorry: I lied.

Bob just doesn't fit, after all.

Or...maybe he does?

Hmm...I think maybe Arthur C. Clarke might fit better, actually...

But the hell with it, I'm gonna make Bob fit, even if he doesn't, even if there are better options out there! Because Bob Hope was another one who came up through the cracks in the showbiz mantle, although of course he did get the million-dollar paycheques...but there was a reason for that. It was because he was both very good, and very seasoned. They say by the time he was thirty years old he had such command of his craft, that if a bomb had gone off somewhere in the theatre he would've just used it...subsumed it into his act like Zeus subsumed the Titanic powers, and no one the wiser. Did he write his own jokes? Well, no...because that was a job done by all the other Old Pros, who came up blinking into the sunlight along with him, the journeymen without "finer" careers, who could always get a job, so long as it was a job...

But we shouldn't get on Bob too much, just because he used other people's material.

Because after all, what do we do, if not that?

Beats and touchstones, touchstones and beats...they infect everything. We mock the aging Bob Hope who toured the continent in a Winnebago like Mentor without Billy...and never knew where he was, because it didn't matter: "Boy, that Mayor So-And-So sure is a pistol, isn't he?" The very template for every entertainer-figure in every SF satire from his day to ours...gimme a "C", a bouncy "C"...

But he had an excuse for it. He wasn't doing it in the dark. He was an old man by the time he started pulling that shit, for God's sake...an old man with a fifty-year career behind him. Absolutely, at a certain point he was just out there cashing the cheques...but what was he supposed to do, retire?

That's harder than dying and comedy.

And we don't have that excuse. Bob Hope spent his life doing what all the Old Pros spent their lives doing: picking sides, in order to finish up right. Pick a side, pick a side, pick a side...art's about making choices, that's what we tune into it for. Money, on the other hand, is about keeping your options open. But of course not all the New Pros are in it to Get Out, Get Paid, and Get Over, and it'd be very wrong of me to tar the whole world with that brush. People like Tim Burton -- and I'll just say up front that I do not particularly care for the works of Tim Burton, so there are my bona fides -- are quite as adept at picking a side as ever were any of the Old Pros, and they deserve credit for it...even, credit I myself ordinarily would prefer to withhold. Case in point: I consider myself pretty lucky to have a couple very sharp characters comment on my blog from time to time, and on one occasion I was fortunate enough to be set straight by one of them about Tim Burton's remake of Planet Of The Apes...which I thought was most laughable not for its ridiculous aesthetic misfiring in general, but for its inclusion of (uh...spoilers, I guess?) the TOTALLY NONSENSICAL scene featuring "Ape Lincoln". On the commentary track, Burton sounds positively sheepish when he says "well, I just had this, uh, this image in my head, and I, uh, I just wanted to get it out"...and what he means, of course, is that the Ape Lincoln bit didn't make any sense, and didn't fit, and was dumb, and blew to smithereens whatever meagre "sci-fi cred" the movie may have painfully assembled over the course of the three thousand years it seemed to take to watch it...but really it was the only reason he wanted to do the movie in the first place.

And I thought this was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen: perfect "New Pro" laziness.

But, I was wrong. Because, why in the hell would anyone ever want to remake Planet Of The Apes? What's the point? What would be the point? Hell, what could be the point? As my genius interlocutor informed me, "to have Ape Lincoln in it" is the only point possible, for the whole exercise. The only possible excuse, that any viewing audience could ever be expected to tolerate.

"I just wanted to see Ape Lincoln."

A fannish impulse, certainly: and we like to talk down fannish impulses. But as I was reminded, Jack Kirby did this all the time, produced the images he just uh, wanted to see at twenty pages a day or whatever it was...so it's no bad thing, we must conclude, to couple fannish impulses with talent! In fact somewhere down at the bottom of things, that's what makes the artist. Crazy Jack Kirby and his "Images"! Sunken NYC, girl with Super-Hair, tiny man with a Brain for a Body, orange Golem guy. All-Powerful Twisty Horn-Hat Geezer! Purple Space-Jehovah turns the Earth into cosmic Coca-Cola!

Death on skis!

The sincerity of it, like the sincerity of the young Debbie Gibson as perceived by the Buck Rogers or Rip Van Winkle version of Bill Hicks, alive and roaming today in our cluttered pop-cultural landscape, no doubt with permanently bloodshot eyes...is inescapable. Trash, yes; but the minimal requirement is that those who make it ought to care about it, ought to do the work of a journeyman to it. One can easily picture Tim Burton bursting into the editing suite screaming "what about my Ape Lincoln for God's sake?!", and having the editors tell him:

"But Tim, we agreed...it's too goddamn stupid, right? We can't put it in there. It blows all the sense of the picture."

And then Tim B. picks a side: "SCREW THE PICTURE!" he yells, perhaps. "WHO IN THE HELL GIVES A DAMN ABOUT THE PICTURE, IT'S STUPID ANYWAY!" And he drops the gavel on the table and forces everybody to shoehorn Ape Lincoln in, even though it is dumb, and there's no reason for it...

No reason, anyway, but the reason to get out of bed in the morning. Sincerity. I may not like Tim Burton, but I've got to admit he goes with his vision; he never gets in, gets out, gets paid, and gets over it. He's too committed for that. He may be stupid, but he ain't lazy...and the proof is, he insisted on something that made him look a little bit mentally-enfeebled, when if he'd just decided another way no one ever would've noticed, and they would've just thought he hacked it out, like you do. When you just go through the laundry list. Oh, it's okay for Bob Hope to have done in it his flippin' mid-nineties, all right...!

But youth is for the young. So, good for you, Mr. Burton. You didn't take the pass.

But now go tell J.J. Abrams, huh? You may consider these remarks a little bit provisional since I haven't yet seen the new Star Trek movie -- and I know it isn't really fair to judge the man without considering his latest work -- but they won't be too provisional, because since Mr. Abrams and I are of exactly the same vintage, I see my influences coming out in his work all the time. And so it's with this in mind that I note Jill Duffy's remark in one of her (always interesting) reviews of Twin Peaks: that it would've been interesting to see what Lynch might've done if he'd had access to the TV storytelling techniques of today...

Like: skipping a year!

On Twin Peaks, it might've worked: because Lynch does commit, and therefore it would've been, at least in some sense, revelatory. I mean, there would've been a reason for it. And maybe that he didn't do it is a pretty good sign to us that he was losing some interest in the show as it went on, and inconceivably started to drag...I mean, there were lots of things he didn't do in Twin Peaks, and skipping a year was only one of them. So that it wasn't there probably had a lot to do with why all that other stuff wasn't there either...when you can't think of anything you want to do, why do anything at all? But in Alias (I humbly submit) this equation was flipped on its head: to me, it was so obvious that skipping a year was just a way of saying "Earthquake! Scrabble game OVER...!" that it was disheartening to see, precisely because Jill is right -- it has become a technique.

Which is the place wherein is located: my problem with it. Because I'm pretty sure I know where it comes from.

I can only speak to Lost in the broadest sense, because I'm not (and never was) an avid viewer, but I've talked a bit about this before, in other places: the technique known as excessive procedural bullshit. It's a staple of your reality shows: Beauty And The Geek and Hell's Kitchen and their grandaddy Survivor, one-note johnnies all. Never were there shows so revoltingly filled-up with procedural bullshit, as these shows...and this is where I get left in the slack of the wave most of all, when shows are made so that nothing happens except during the 3-5 minute mark of each inter-commercial segment. This is not how the Old Pros used to do it, by the way: they used to make sure that before you cut to a commercial something happened, that would make the viewer interested enough in the show to come back of their own accord. But the New Pros tease everything, even the tiniest pseudo-event...and they never give anything away for free. Brian Michael Bendis, with your decade-long tease of an Ultimate Origin that really wasn't that clever anyway...sir, j'accuse.

And yet it isn't Brian's fault.

I think Jill would say: it's Mark Burnett's fault.

And maybe I would even agree with her, if she said that...but then again maybe she wouldn't, because am I really saying Alias was loaded with procedural bullshit? Well...yes, I am. Except I'm not just saying that, I'm also saying that Alias got to the end of what it could procedurally tease really, really fast -- just plain ran out of wigs! -- and was left with no other choice than to tip the board...

And then Lost went back and tried to do the same thing only right, didn't it?

Anyway, that's how it seem to me...

But then, even if that is the way I see it, was it still a question of "captioning", a failure of imagination? Well, it's a bit of a stretch I admit...but then again, what's captioning, voiceovers, whatever 3rd-person narrative as may be, except the opportunity to say what can't be said otherwise, from an elevated perspective? What's needful to say: and I don't think Alias had prepared anything of that caliber by the time Jennifer Garner ran out of wigs to wear. So, pray for rain, sun, night; pray it was just a dream, or pray for amnesia, or a power outage, or an earthquake. That's where I think they were. But, maybe they needn't have been so concerned? On the reality shows they say absolutely nothing that's needful, nothing at all, and if the perspective is elevated it's pointlessly elevated, just like (aha!) the perfectly-reversible elevations of the competitors on the show: the host is a pointless totem, the tasks are pointless pieces of exertion, it all sums to nothing, and after all what is needful to say, about what happens on a reality show? You watch, you watch, you watch, you just watch. So maybe Alias didn't have quite the technical nightmare on its hands that it thought it did...

But then again, maybe it did at that. Because even the most diligent of documentarians don't simply sit the camera down and then leave the film alone afterwards...in fact many of our more successful documentaries these days seem to have a profound impulse to show what the documentarian does to the film, how they cut it, how they arrange it. More and more, the documentarian of today makes themselves a subject, shows where their hand lies, puts it right on the lens for you. And is this "captioning"? I will argue yes...because when the seer makes note of the fact that who sees is a person, then a false transparency is cast away, and the 3rd person voice becomes something less than omniscient...becomes a 1st-person voice instead, which must throw us documentary viewers into a bit of a no-man's land as far as our hearing goes...

...However if Survivor did that, we'd all march on it with pitchforks and torches, if for no other reason than it would expose -- thoroughly expose -- just how badly they construct their narratives. How thinly they paint their canvas, and most horribly: why. I am sure Bill Hicks would see it: that "Reality TV" is nothing but a convenient distillation of hatefulness...cheap hate, easy to buy, with no side-effects, and so the ineptness of it all is part of its salesmanship. Well, haven't you always wanted to have a little useful low-calorie sugar-free HATE, people? Real hate is so complicated, after all! It has consequences. But fake hate is so much better, and it's even a BETTER kind of better when those you love turn into those you hate...when they move up the ladder to repulsiveness, and so it ends up that you can hate everybody equally, when real people collide with bad stories.

Because it's better, right?

But no, it isn't better. There are more edifying ways to hate, that go down just as smoothly -- House manages this in every episode, creating a necessity for the viewer to gradually peel themselves away from their identification with the characters, and indeed with the situations. And every show's the same! Every show, in fact, ends with nothing less than a music video...and yet we keep coming back to it (or I do, anyway), because it also proffers a genuine emotion with a genuine cost. A genuine truth.

So, you know...maybe they did need that year-skipping, on Alias. Maybe, at that time, that was the only truth they had ready to hand.

Hmm...

Okay, now let's do Joss Whedon!

Who will never need to skip any years, just because. Will he? Well, as possibly the smartest of the Third-Gen TV Writers, Joss is definitely acquainted with the location of acommitment...let's say that for him, at the very least. So he's never lost, even if it's because he's always going to the same place. And not for him the aimless Painkiller Jane-style Bad Eulogy For An Episode, either: he knows what he's doing when he has someone speak, he controls the intrusion of his own voice precisely into the voice of the character, and he knows why the character does all the things they do, and how it connects to theme and sight and meaning. And yet let's not praise him too much: because although Joss is pretty marvellous in a lot of ways, he adheres to the beat, too...just, he's a more thoughtful variety of adherent. Still: make you feel sad, make you feel happy...there's a formula for that. Make you feel awe, make your eyes swell with tears: there's a formula for that too. Those stirring feelings in your chest: that's not you feeling them. At its worst (and there's a lot of best in Whedon's body of work, but at its worst), it's programmatic.

Thematically, with Whedon it's always watertight. But unfortunately, at the extreme end of thematic seaworthiness is a place where choices can't be made anymore...where sides can't be picked, because it's all pre-sorted, it all has something of the attribute of Fate. Which is uncomfortably close to what happens on Survivor, for someone whose talent is as much a boon to mankind's as Whedon's is; even if Survivor's imposture of Fate is as ludicrously deformed and painfully lowbrow, as Whedon's is elegant and sound and more than occasionally uplifting. Geoff mentioned in the comments to the first installment of this misguided opus, that there has to be some way of achieving a lyrical style-over-substance voiceover in the modern style, that doesn't suck...and I'm sure quite a few examples of such could be found in Joss' work, now that I come to think of it. But of Ape Lincolns you will see not a hair, and perhaps those two effects arise from the same spring: it's only Whedon's mastery of theme that gives him the power to plausibly use words not as words, but as music -- that same mastery that (I think we can reasonably assume) precludes him ever having to bust into the editing suite and say "I never cared about this stuff making sense, I only cared about what I wanted to see!" Not that I would for one second say that Joss Whedon eschews the hard business of making choices for the shallow satisfaction of "keeping options open"...

...But I don't think it would be unfair to say that his style of commitment is one that never met a fannish impulse it couldn't domesticate. Which is why I was so excited about his Dollhouse, because I saw in it the potential to become a very much more subversive sort of Whedon project...a confusion of theme that probably only someone with his inclinations could assemble into a truly surprising ending. I anticipated that Joss had taken from his comics-writing experience a new impulse to drive himself to the next level; to do something a lot more ambitious, a lot less comfortable. To put his hand on the lens, as it were. I'm still not sure that wasn't what was going on there, either...I mean, I wanted to have Nikita mashed up with The Questor Tapesand ringed with Minority Report, and I'm still not sure I won't get it, when the dust all settles...

But this is a hard line to walk for anybody, this matter of massive authorial control, of thematic domestication...to have everything resolve itself almost naturally, without you having to do a thing to it except set it up properly to begin with. Elegance: the production of meaning as the falling of dominoes, that the absent deity looks down on from his distance and pronounces Good. The writer who doesn't know how to finish his story yearns for this, because he can't get it...but the hardworking writer who does know how to finish ought not to forget that there's a danger in this too: or why else would it be the Holy Grail of the lazy writer?

You know?

So: beats. They're pretty damn seductive. They offer a method of control, whether or not you've actually got anything to control or not. Maybe especially if you don't. But worst of all is surely when you do have something to control, but it's going just fine without the beats. And then you hit 'em anyway, and the thing is ruined because of it.

Like when I saw this show on the Discovery Channel...

...All about Japanese steelmakers. I don't know if you know this, but the history of Japanese steelmaking since the fifteenth century is pretty goddamn interesting...so you wouldn't think, then, that such an educational program would feel compelled to give over much of its time to eulogizing Clint Eastwood, Pete Townsend, and fucking Blade Runner, would you? I mean, hey: I like Blade Runner. I even like it a lot. Eastwood and Townsend: ditto. But what are they all doing here, in this show about ancient Japanese steelmaking methods? How are the audiences of Blade Runner, the Who, and High Plains Drifter presumed to cross over so intensively with the topic of steelmaking that you cannot fairly talk on the subject for an hour without mentioning them? Not that going from the sword to the samurai to the Man With No Name is at all illegitimate (the mention of how steel transformed popular music, and how in the world of Blade Runner quite a lot of things are made out of steel is perhaps less defensible as "hard to leave out"), in fact you could make quite an interesting hour-long show of its own out of the cinematic relationship between Japanese culture and the American Western -- which we know because people actually have done so -- and, okay, you could even (I hope against hope you will agree) make something of a meal out of the relationship between Japanese culture and the American SF movie too...

...And then you could quite naturally draw in the third side of that triangle on your way back down...

...But with the steelmaking show, once again it's rather like an undergraduate essay that is "basically done", because that argument is not made -- and in the absence of a beginning and end, the middle is relied upon too much to hold up its own weight, like a suspension bridge without ends. You can't just pile more shit on it and say it's working better just because it's still falling at the same rate! And yet that's just what they appear to be after, as though the viewer's boredom is a given and the show will always "fall"...because no one really cares about its content anyway...and is this not also the approximate flavour of the dreaded Painkiller Jane mistake? Or even, "the floral and the fauna"? For God's sake, must the Eastwood reference be in there, just because otherwise the person who is actively choosing to watch a show about Japanese steelmaking on the freakin' Discovery Channel after all might switch over to watching...oh, I don't know...

...The Mentalist, or something?

In mainstream superhero comics, it isn't any better than this. Well, how could it be? When even the show that might legitimately link steelmaking to the Western won't actually commit to making that link...I mean I saw a whole great big documentary on how the typical Shane-era Western was cleverly reinterpreting the plight of Russian Jews during the pogroms for American audiences...and that thing was fascinating, but only because it knew what it was doing, because it picked its side...it left no options open. The steelmaking special, on the other hand, just made a lot of noises like "Japanese culture is actually very interesting, why did you know they even influenced Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood?" And Blade Runnertoo, of course...but let's be honest, it's a bigger stretch even than any I've made in these essays to claim that the Blade Runner influence was all about the goddamned steel, isn't it? I mean either the thing is a Nazi coffeepot, or it is not a Nazi coffeepot, right?

And meanwhile, over in the comics...

It is scalable biz once again, I'm afraid, and therefore part of the same problem. The stupid money, that can make lazy writers of any of us. Get In, Get Out, Get Over...I can think of many a comics writer who might as well have that translated into Latin and tattooed on the inside of his ear: many a comics writer who can't even gesture meaningfully at the limited kind of closure that's appropriate to an ongoing serial narrative that's a work of many hands! So say what you will about Joss Whedon's X-Men, but one thing it managed was to recall to me those long ago days when Kitty Pryde was a character...because Whedon did what I thought had become impossible, forbidden, by telling an actual Kitty Pryde story. My God, when was the last time Kitty Pryde had an identifiably personal emotion, instead of a soullessly predetermined character beat? I think you have to go back a long way...a very long way. Kitty Pryde, last of the new Marvel characters of respectable creative pedigree, turned into a chess piece, a plot horse, a long time ago...something emptied her out, I think, made her into a sort of dried herb in a jar...

...Just another ingredient, in just another bland old vegetable soup of a moveable widget of a scalable art: a cheap copy of herself, the same actor brought out to play the same part in the same play, on the same night, over and over again for all eternity. Until the words "Kitty Pryde" might as well translate as "outsourced dialogue", jar of dried dialogue...you want this dialogue, you want this character beat, just pull down Kitty Pryde off the shelf and open her lid and there it is: it all comes spilling out. Collage, division of labour, representational storytelling...let "the things Kitty Pryde would say" wash over you, wash under you, as you drift...drift...

Drift...

Towards the finish line.

In a moment, we'll cross it. But first, courtesy of Joss Whedon...

Ape-bloody-Lincoln!

I think you know the scene I mean. And it's what made me think: hey, possibly Dollhouse will be a bit different, you know? Poor Joss Whedon, stuck doing Kitty Pryde vs. Dark Phoenix stories all those years! He just couldn't break the habit. But then finally he did: found a reason to break the formula, stop the music, revivify the implications of the subsumed past...end the story by including the silences, and make the circle bigger.

Maybe because he didn't need the money?

But it was something else that he needed. Well, we all need it. Because the thing about history is, it isn't discontinuous. However a funny thing about you and me and all of us, is that we find it a lot easier to deal with if we construe it as such. This happened, that happened, these were the watershed moments, these were the highs and the lows...it's a jigsaw puzzle, made of pieces, and our engagement with it all is that we're the ones who find the pieces their patterns.

But!

That's not the only level of engagement, that we have open to us. At a certain point (in my opinion, anyway), just fitting the same damn pieces into new configurations that are still basically (whatever you do to them) just pictures of sky...rather betrays the limits of biz's scalability. Because you can't just fake meaning with rhythm forever and ever, not even if it's pretty good rhythm.

Because closure's not what we need anymore, Dave. We don't need to be implicated in how a story ends...!

...But we need to be able to get involved with that, instead.

Which actually, to be honest, is not a thing that scales so well most of the time...

But man, nobody ever said the Eighties would last forever!

Hell, not even this post can do that.

12 comments:

Geoff Klock said...

Some Sympathy for the Poor Writer: you describe beats as seductive. Well I will tell you that I tried, with a friend, to write a TV show screenplay over the summer and those beats are crazy seductive -- you feel like the thing is writing itself and it is all very exciting, and you think of this kind of "automatic" writing, where it just comes pouring out of you, as a sign of maybe the opposite thing: that you are really GOOD at this. Very dangerous stuff, these structures and formulas, not the least because, like Satan, they present themselves as the most helpful friendly and positive signs.

Andrew Hickey said...

I'm reminded here of a story Frank Zappa used to tell, of getting a book on harmony from the library, and trying some of the exercises, and thinking they sounded horrible. So he dilligently worked through the entire rest of the book, committing all the rules in it to memory, so he could be sure he would never use any of them...

ba said...

Uh...named for the PLONE song? Because that's a fucking awesome song.

plok said...

Indeed they do! Very well-put. A few years ago I got heavy into writing TV and movie scripts, and discovered the learning curve is painful in terms of looking at what you've done and suddenly realizing it just isn't any good...I found it mercifully steep in a way though: if you care about being better at it, it doesn't take too long to improve.

By the end, I really enjoyed it, but then the problem was Biz, which I couldn't stand at all, even on a very small indie scale. I always say young writers should stay as far away from older ones as they can, because the older guys are too jealous, they'll always try to kill your dreams...something the same here, a friend of mine who used to be a studio ingenue years ago tells me that the business has gone rotten precisely because it is not about making movies anymore, it's about gatekeeping. As she put it: "people like Selznick, they wanted you to be able to give them something they could make into a movie...but these days it's all guys saying, well, I got an MBA and a Ph.D and an Fu.C.K, and I want you to show me why I should make your movie." If she's right or not, I can't comment, but it doesn't exactly seem far-fetched...Welles said his misfortune was that he chose to make his art out of this very expensive paintbox...Steve Gerber said if he'd been doing comics today he would've done them exclusively online, and screw anything that didn't have any Wild West component to it...

Sorry, off-topic: anyway I've beaten all my TV/movie scripts into either comics or books, and feel a lot better about it, that's the point of that. Though admittedly it's not much of one...

But yeah, crazy seductive indeed. Songwriting's like that too: to be able to flirt with cliche is a very important knack to get, if you want to write a proper ordinary melodic song...but when it just starts pouring out of you, it often turns to crap, and you need to be extra critical with yourself.

I tried to make the link (sorry about all the excess italicizing, by the way -- it was late) between Whedon's more programmatic tendencies and the possibilities of Dollhouse...I almost convince myself that he really was trying to work out some sort of self-criticism there, but maybe that too is just "automatic writing" on my part...still I think with his X-Men he did get the chance to try to settle with his influences, and stop trying to catch that lightning in the bottle.

But I hope everyone has noticed, I really do skirt the edge of "false closure" myself in this thing, it is always a temptation for me and I'm never 100% sure I've successfully avoided it...or even avoided it 100%. So to the degree I may've succumbed to it, the points I wanted to make may not have gotten properly made! So thank God it's just blogging, and not anything more serious. Eh?

And thanks for having me! End Chunk The Last!

plok said...

Oops, that fell out of order...

plok said...

PLONE?

This I don't know...if you mean the title of the post, I guess it's a reference to "The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud", but not really a reference because I don't really remember that movie...

...I just thought it sounded clever, he said sheepishly. Will go look up PLONE, though, and maybe in future claim some multivalence for the title...YES!!!!

ba said...

"plock" is a song by PLONE.

plok said...

Oh! Nah...it's just old computer-game high-score shorthand.

I'll still look for it, though.

plok said...

You could not script this stuff.

plok said...

Maybe my favourite comment-exchange ever.

Marc Burkhardt said...

Plok, you've been PLONED!

Nice series of posts. I know what you mean about cliched endings even infecting blog posts. It seems I always end up with some variation of "in a world gone mad..."

As far as Dollhouse goes, I do think Whedon is reaching for something ... although I'm not quite sure that even he knows what that is. The "unseen episode" on the DVD does play to some of your suspicions regarding Dollhouse technology though ,,,

Justin said...

A little late coming back here, but on the subject of J.J. Abrams, did you see Mission Impossible III? I've just happened to rewatch it after reading this and was struck by how much *technique,* as you say, there actually is. It's very "Hollywood Tarantino" and seems cleverer at first glance than it actually is.

Still, I find it incredibly entertaining. The acting is a lot of fun (and I do actually like Tom Cruise for his undeniable charm, and because he can give you an "stock action movie intensity" look like few others can), and although Abrams is doing nothing but hitting beats, he at least seems to be having a damn good time doing it.