"Reading Mystery Science Theater 3000: Critical Approaches"

[Triple_sSs]

Not sure if this is in the right section, but I just came across a new book about MST3K which came out recently.

www.amazon.com/Reading-Mystery-Science-Theater-3000/dp/0810891409

From the description:

First broadcast in the not too distant past on a television station in Minnesota, Mystery Science Theater 3000 soon grew out of its humble beginnings and found a new home on cable television. This simple show about a man and two robots forced to watch bad movies became a cult classic, and episodes of the series continue to be packaged in DVD collections to this day. Before its final run, the show received Emmy nominations and a Peabody award for Television excellence, and in 2007, Time magazine declared MST3K one of “The 100 Best Shows of All-Time.”

In Reading Mystery Science Theater 3000: Critical Approaches, Shelley S. Rees presents a collection of essays that examines the complex relationship between narrative and audience constructed by this baffling but beloved television show. Invoking literary theory, cultural criticism, pedagogy, feminist criticism, humor theory, rhetorical analysis, and film and media studies, these essays affirm the show’s narrative and rhetorical intricacy. The first section, “Rhetoric and the Empowered Audience,” addresses MST3K’s function as an exercise in rhetorical resistance. Part Two, “Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Genre,” analyzes MST3K through distinct generic traditions, including humor studies, traditional science fiction tropes, and the B-movie. Finally, the third section addresses postmodern and intertextual readings of the show.

By providing an academic treatment of an iconic television phenomenon, these essays argue that Mystery Science Theater 3000 is worthy of serious scholarly attention. Though aimed at a discerning readership of academics, this collection will also appeal to the intellectual nature of the show’s well-educated audience.

Hmm, interesting. Sounds similar to that "In The Peanut Gallery" book which came out a few years ago, too. Anyone willing to get this and see how it is?

[Monophylos]

Hm. That does sounds interesting, although such collections of essays might be rather to someone who hasn't had a heavy-duty liberal-arts education. I have The Poo Perplex in mind when I say this. As someone who once had to write many long essays about subjects in classical history and literature, including a lengthy (and very dodgy) critical analysis of a number of Latin poems in my senior year, an academic dissection of MST3K will probably be quite funny. I imagine other readers might find it excruciating, though.

[TheNewMads]

i don't think this way of coming at MST3k requires explaining semiology, bakhtin, and so forth, in so much detail. The money shot is the bit about heteroglossia, and it's easy to come by. yeah, there are almost always two or more parallel voices in MST3k but it's far too cute, in my opinion, to use that as an excuse to carve this complicated path through bakhtin.

i have read a bit of this stuff in kollij and to me the book reexplains too much of it, though full disclosure, i just skimmed the Amazon bits. I went after MST3k through Bakhtin too, once, but it was through carnaval, to me the host segs and the whole premise of the show smack of the forgiveness of debts, both joel's to the mads and the mads to joel, and of the class negotiation between the entitled and subaltern, i mean if you wanted to get all jargony. Joel and the Bots are subject to Dr. F and Frank, who hold dominion, but in the interest of maintaining the class struggle both sides agree to restrain their efforts at resistance. Jay and the Bots implicitly agree not to resist their captivity too fervently, and Dr. F and Frank agree not to torture J and the Bs too zealously. You see it all the time in the show's mood and subtext.

I don't know, to me that would be the key to applying Bakhtin to MST3k, although when I tried it I did it by applying the idea of Carnaval to the "beach party" cycle of movies ... which never got mistied, i don't think, but they did do some knockoffs, like "horror of party beach" and "catalina caper," that are pretty brilliant at showing off Bakhtin's point about Carnaval. It's used as a way of forgiving the debts of the allegedly subaltern, and permitting them their bacchanalia, but it's done as a substitute for genuine revolution. Those whom Carnaval truly forgives are solely the next in line in the inheritance class, even if their youth and rebellion have temporarily cast them outside the realm of conventional acceptance, conventional norms.

You have to realize i'm pretty sure Bakhtin is Marxist. So I'm trying to do a Marxist reading of MST3k, which I think is fairly available and would be something like that. I could be wrong, but I feel that the heteroglossia aspect of Bakhtin's writing had to do with finding revolutionary avenues of resistance through the interstices of novelistic text, which in that time was the dominant mode of ideological expression. It had more to do with creating ways to resist the ruling class than it was meant as a technical way of reading multiple-voice media in the 21st century. I think Bakhtin might be a bit out of date for that.

[Triple_sSs]

I have absolutely no idea what you just said, NewMads.

Guess this isn't the kind of book for me.

[TheNewMads]

yeah, my bee, whenever i encounter something jargony i get a stimpson j. cat-style urge to help shout the big funny words. I do think someone here has a Ph.D. in philosophy, I'm sorta hoping he'll pipe in at some point to explain why everything I just said about Bakhtin is wrong.

i found another one!

books.google.com/books?id=YU_ibc2AwDkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false


(go to page 153.)

at first glance, the writing seems to be quite a bit better. although I'm sure most of these folks view the notion of "good writing" to be some sort of hegemonic construct of the dominant paradigm.

[Mike Flugennock]

Jul 22, 2013 21:14:07 GMT -5 TheNewMads said:

i don't think this way of coming at MST3k requires explaining semiology, bakhtin, and so forth, in so much detail. The money shot is the bit about heteroglossia, and it's easy to come by. yeah, there are almost always two or more parallel voices in MST3k but it's far too cute, in my opinion, to use that as an excuse to carve this complicated path through bakhtin...

...if you wanted to get all jargony. Joel and the Bots are subject to Dr. F and Frank, who hold dominion, but in the interest of maintaining the class struggle both sides agree to restrain their efforts at resistance. Jay and the Bots implicitly agree not to resist their captivity too fervently, and Dr. F and Frank agree not to torture J and the Bs too zealously. You see it all the time in the show's mood and subtext...

Phew. I had to trim that back a bit. But, aaaaaaanyway...

My education was in fine art, design, and a little bit of film rather than Poli Sci and, being a cartoonist -- a professional smart-ass -- by vocation, I was always impressed at the way MST3K legitimized something many folks like myself do, which is to creatively back-sass a movie which is obviously a stinkburger, but which nobody in the theater dares express themselves out loud about as they've all been conditioned to "be quiet"... and not only did MST3K legitimize this behavior, but raised it to a high art. Who knew that my roommate and I, back in college, were inventing an art form when we got blazed and went down to the student union rathskellar to heckle the annual fall semester showing of Reefer Madness, or sat up 'til 3am on Saturday nights passing the bong and making up our own dialogue and sound effex as we watched old Roger Corman clunkers on the local "Creature Feature"?

Still, a radical political analysis of MST3K is fascinating to me. I read the synopsis of the book at Amazon, and skimmed some of the sample chapters, and was taken by the idea of the "empowered audience" and "resistance" to media -- the idea of MST3K showing us that we didn't have to sit in helpless silence and endure any media being shoved at us, no matter how poorly-conceived or executed, no matter how insulting to our intelligence. I'm reminded of one evening at the movies about fifteen or twenty years ago; one of the trailers shown -- an absurdly turgid, overwrought little slab of bombast -- was for an ostensibly dramatic Western called Bad Girls involving a bunch of prostitutes banding together to fight an abusive pimp or a corrupt sherriff or some BS. The six women playing the titular characters were all the current mid '90s flavor-of-the-month cuties, entirely unbelievable as prostitutes, and especially as prostitutes packing guns. The trailer had barely gotten to the point where it introduces the cast before the sneers and giggles began rippling through the theater. The following trailer was for Starship Troopers, which elicited its own share of laughter. It was one of the most wonderful moments I'd ever spent at the movies. I couldn't even remember the movie I saw that night; all I could remember was how the audience mocked and laughed at a couple of pompous, loud, hype-soaked trailers for a couple of movies which were obviously rotten.

.


FOR THE RECORD: Actually, at the theater, I'm quite polite and respectful to the folks who are trying to watch the movie, maintaining my decorum even as I endured crap like Defending Your Life, Sleepless In Seattle, Moulin Rouge and Adaptations. Still, one night while viewing Sideways, towards the end of the movie, as the thoroughly unlikeable, spineless, beat-down "sympathetic" romantic protagonist shows up at the love interest's house and starts banging on her door, I could stand no more; I sat up and leaned forward in my seat and blurted out "Don't answer the door! For the love of God, DON'T ANSWER THE DOOR!

[mrsphyllistorgo]

I got this book last Christmas and found it refreshing and enjoyable! I drank it by mistake.

Seriously, I really liked it. The publishers could use a better line editor--lots of random spellings of names and some grammar boners--but as a collection it's very interesting.

[TheNewMads]

Jul 28, 2013 13:18:32 GMT -5 mrsphyllistorgo said:

I got this book last Christmas and found it refreshing and enjoyable! I drank it by mistake.

Seriously, I really liked it. The publishers could use a better line editor--lots of random spellings of names and some grammar boners--but as a collection it's very interesting.

hmm, i might have to check it out then. There was another MST3k crit-theory book a couple years ago, which i discovered on this very forum, that i wasn't bowled away by, but then again it was a collection and I have to be honest, I didn't read the whole thing.

So far the best critical-theory take I've seen on MST3k is the chris fujiwara anti-MST3k article "Shame of Mystery Science Theater 3000." I almost entirely disagreed with the article and fujiwara gets a lot of stuff about MST3k wrong (he seems to have been so repelled by the show that he never actually watched it) but fujiwara's definitely a smart guy and i read the article more than once with great interest. It looks like it's hard to find on the internet new, hermenaut.com appears to be kaput.

[Monophylos]

Aug 5, 2013 11:56:37 GMT -5 TheNewMads said:

So far the best critical-theory take I've seen on MST3k is the chris fujiwara anti-MST3k article "Shame of Mystery Science Theater 3000." I almost entirely disagreed with the article and fujiwara gets a lot of stuff about MST3k wrong (he seems to have been so repelled by the show that he never actually watched it)...

You just reminded me of one of the silliest things I've ever seen written about MST3K--not a whole article but just a short passage from an essay about Stanley Kubrick written by Mark Crispin Miller. It's not a bad essay actually when it sticks to talking about Kubrick but then Miller tosses in some derision about MST3K, which apparently is a show that demonstrates our utter surrender to artificiality or something:

Artificial Voices

Yet while television's most devoted ironists probably could not enjoy the film, in their plight they also prove the chilling prescience of 2001 -- for that pastime is just one more technical logical absorption, sold as a nice cold substitute for the warmth of actual others. On Comedy Central, "the only all-comedy cable channel", there is a very hot new show called "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which features hours and hours of bad old movies, 'watched' by a man and his two robots, who, appearing in silhouette along the bottom of the screen as if a row ahead of you, wisecrack throughout the dated spectacle. "A New Thanksgiving tradition" proclaims a recent ad in TV Guide. "Watching 32 straight hours of a human and his robot cohorts rag on cheesy movies while your relatives argue over the white meat." Thus those born since the release of Kubrick's film are jeeringly invited to surrender utterly to the machine. Like Frank Poole playing chess with HAL (and losing), and like Doctor Heywood Floyd, who also thinks he knows it all already. They would approach the future in their chairs, alone, needing no friends, since they have those artificial voices -- and the sponsors 'there' -- to crack the jokes, and to laugh along.

I'm not sure exactly why watching someone else make jokes is horrible--isn't that what happens when you watch any sort of comedy?

[TheNewMads]

I like Mark Crispin Miller quite a lot but that seems like it's always his thing, finding relatively innocuous popcult trivialities and attributing great forboding and menace to them. His point in thata paragraph is about the same as Fujiwara's--he thinks the riffs in the show sorta substitute for the internal monologue of the viewers at home, leaving us hapless viewers with nothing to do but drool vacantly at the screen. I never really got that critique, quite, since both Miller and Fujiwara seem to think watching TV in general is a vacant, mindless experience, so why would the addition of another level of dialogue change anything?

I actually like his comparing the SOL to HAL 9000/2001, but maybe that's part of why Fujiwara and Miller seem to feel so threatened by MST3k (although to be fair, Miller to me doesn't come off nearly as angry as Fujiwara). I take Joel Robinson's lonely, isolated life on the SOL as a sort-of ambiguous critique of pop culture, which joel hodgson et al. have a bit of a love-hate relationship with. Yes, it's fun, and yes our memories of pop culture are an important part of our childhood etc., but in MST3k there's something detached and sad about Joel Robinson's nostalgia, and the show even seems in part to be saying an infatuation with popcult leads to passivity, loneliness, attachment to imaginary friends, acceptance of a kind of captivity.

Well, this is just the sort of thing Mark Miller is always on about, and he seems to be saying MST3k is part of that phenomenon when I read MST3k as, in its own way, echoing Miller's critique. MST3k also acknowledges, and makes great fun out of, the fact that we have an internal monologue when we watch TV or movies, that we're mentally engaged and active, we interact with television, and that's an idea both Miller and Fujiwara would probably resist. They think TV is just a mindless activity, so MST3k would threaten them in this way as well.