pastiche, homage, veiled allusions, pop and indie references = plagarism?

Cafe Society
1

Whew. Whole lotta big words in that thread topic.

I’m not precisely sure how I want to frame the following discussion, except to note that increasingly we can see how seemingly original creative works in films and television can be influenced by, in some instances, the works of other lesser known creators, [SEE: Matrix films, Star Wars films, Tarantino’s ouevere] and there appears to be a tendency to either allude to such works directly, either through homage and analogue [Alan Moore’s comic, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) or pastiche [non-canonical Sherlock Holmes], or use of a specific fictional archetype in mythology or legend [Arthurian legends. Greek myths, etc.]

Another tactice is the use of unusual pop culture references within a larger narrative, hoping your sharp-eyed viewers “get” the joke. (The Charlie Brown references in the most recent Arrested Development, or the redshirts discussion on the most recent episode of ‘Lost’.)

I suppose I’d like your opinions on whether this sort of creative cobbling is necessarily a good thing, or a deceptive thing, intellectually or creatively dishonest, or just pandering. Will it stand up over the test of time or become dated?

At what point, if any, does this veer into outright plagarism?

2

Ah, this is the postmodern world. For some reason, it is very prevalent in music, movies, etc. I just think that for some reason, the bar for originality has been lowered. Look at all the sampling in music and all those bloody awful remakes of movies. As if original ideas have suddenly been replaced with processed deja vu cheese food.

3

It’s plagiarism if you lift the work (or substantial portions of it ) in its entirety. It’s also a copyright violation if you use the characters without permission (so if you want to do a James Bond or Star Trek novel, you need to ask).

Pastiches and parodies are different: a parody ridicules the work and a pastiche is the opposite – it honors the work. But in neither case are they taking portions of the work (though a parody, by necessity, follows the original plot, but they are also exempt from copyright infringement suits).

A reference to a well-known work is allowed as part of another work. It’s not exactly a new phenomenon (Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac has a cameo appearance by d’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers), though it’s certainly done to a greater extent these days. It’s good for a joke, and is often creatively used.

4

RealityChuck – Not to mention that a bunch of Shakepeare’s plays are influenced by pre-existing narrative works – Virgil, Horace, and Ovid spring to mind - and that *Cyrano * and the *Three Musketeers * are largely original works (d’Artagnan’s cameo notwithstanding) that have stood the test of time for --what? 200, 250 years now?

How many of today’s movies, plays and television programs will have any sort of impact two centuries from now? Why the constant cross-referencing to contemporary works that may be forgotten in two or three generations? There are underlying United Kingdom mythologies that support Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but its inventive scripts, songs, races, languages, are largely invented.

It is doubtless effective to allude to an existing work, literary character or prop, even – but is it “art”? Is it the apex of creativity? Why?

These days, is it perhaps done too often?

5

As some gloomy gus a few millennia back observed, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

As to whether or not “this sort of thing will stand the test of time,” it already has.

Shakespeare’s plays are pastiche. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is in large part Boccaccio’s Decameron, retold.

Things will hold up if they’re done well, and bring their own life to the work. If they’re poor imitations, then they’ll go straight to the dustheap.

Tarantino’s films, in particular, stand up well because they don’t rely on the viewer catching the references in order to succeed as stories. The dialogue is satisfying and entertaining, and the stories move along quite well on their own merits. If the hyper-referential subtext of his films are hugely entertaining to filmgeeks, it’s put across in such a way that people who just want a good popcorn flick don’t feel for a second that they’re being left out of something.

Same with, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Someone who’s familiar with the Odyssey gets an extra level of enjoyment out of the book – but it can still be enjoyed without catching all the references, because it is peopled with fascinating characters and events.

Personally, as a consumer, this is the sort of stuff that gives me the most pleasure – because it engages your intellect and gives you the illusion of a more intimate relationship with the creator/author. It pulls you in and makes you pay more attention to little details.

When does it veer into plagiarism? When there’s a point-by-point correspondence between one work and another, and the later work is pure imitation, with no creative element to it.

Maybe I’m a bit biased (or downright defensive) about this question. I’ve been working on a book for a few years that takes this sort of thing to an extreme:

The events in the book are mostly original, (in as much as anything is ever “original,”) the characters are partly based on people that I have known and things that have happened to them. On the other hand, there are five glosses over the happenings in the books – five sort of archetypal frameworks. The idea is that anyone who’s intimate with any one of the frameworks will see that the book is obviously “based on” a certain mythology (ancient or modern) and feel that they have the “key” to its interpretation.

The thing is, it’s hard to do properly. You don’t want the references to be clumsy or obvious, or get in the way of your narrative. (Hell, I want them to be damned-near invisible-- every time I catch one stianding out at all, I go back and try to “subtle it up,” and there are never any direct references.) I really like the idea of five widely disparate deconstructions being made, all with convincing arguments for their validity-- “It’s all about this ancient Greek myth!” “Nah, you’re nuts. The subtext is strictly Jazz Age.” “Jazz Age? It’s all Victorian intrigue.” “What?! It’s about Alchemy!” “Cha, right. Chinese mysticism, more like.” – While most people shake their heads and say the other folks are reading way to much into it-- “Dude, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. You know, here and now. What the hell are you talking about?”

I guess what I’m saying is, I think that if the allusions are there because someone worked hard to make them fit in,and the whole thing works as a whole,then that’s all to the good. If they’re there simply because they saved the writer some time and mental energy, then that’s a bad thing.

6

Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, the first book in the four-book series Hyperion Cantos is a collection of traveler’s tales deliberately reminiscent of Chaucer. But he does far more than that. Each of the six long tales is told in a style allusive of a major science fiction writer. It’s a staggering stylistic challenge, but he pulls it off so well that the book may be the high point of 90s science fiction. (And yes, I know that it first appeared in 1989. It belongs to the 90s when considered as one book with The Fall of Hyperion.)

Did he need to do this for the sake of the story in the book? No. It was an homage to the field and its writers, just as pilgrim’s tales will always be an homage to Chaucer. Even so, the book stands on its own as a standout novel.

Askia, Writers do not write for the ages (well, maybe Joyce and a few others). They write to be read, now, by their peers and contemporaries. Nobody knows what will be read tomorrow, let alone centuries from now. You do what you think you have to do to make the work succeed. Contemporaneity is a huge part of our culture, so it’s not surprising that it shows up in our art. But it’s part of every culture to varying degrees. Shakespeare is so utterly stuffed with contemporaneous references and allusions that only the most learned scholar can understand more than half of them. He wrote for his audience, not for posterity.

This kind of “creative cobbling” isn’t any one thing. It’s not good or bad or honest or dishonest. It will stand up in some works and won’t in others. The work is always primary; the form always secondary.

7

Larry Mudd. Thanks for your very thoughtful post. I didn’t mean to put you on the defensive at all – it’s just that lately I seem to be catching myself whenever I’m reading a book or watching TV or a movie and catch an offhand literary allusion or pop culture reference – be it Maleuna Karenga’s afrocentric philosophy in Charles Johnson’s FAITH AND THE GOOD THING, Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK in the movie Anaconda or Dixon’s AFTER MAN in an issue of BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS. I used to think it was a good thing, that it showed how smart and well-read I was… but now I kind of wonder.

It occurred to me recently that a significant portion of my very favorite comic book writers are, to varying degrees, celebrated pastichists. Kurt Busiek, Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Roy Thomas, Warren Ellis, Jim Steranko, Frank Miller, Gilbert Hernandez, Garth Ennis, Darwyn Cooke, etc, all borrow significantly from pre-existing works in other genres, fields, disciplines in making their own works.

I suppose its most blatant in this genre because damn near EVERYTHING about superheroes since the Marvel Revolution has been about creating analogues rather than mining new territory: there’s not very many unique permutations on the origin story, the archenemy conflict, the superhero HQ, the sidekick, the costume, the superpowers, etc. that says anything particularly insightful or unique about the genre or the human condition. Looking at some of my old scripts, I am somewhat dismayed at how my own approach to world-building is: I can see my Frank Miller DARK KNIGHT influence, my I can-top-Grant Morrison influence, my Luke Cage miniseries spec scripts set in a 21st century NYC with a 1970s sensibility after reading a stack of Iceberg Slim novels and rewatching Superfly, Black Caesar and Penetentiary.

Is this creativity? Mixing and matching from other influences? Is this where I get my ideas? It’s somewhat unsettling to look at your best work and realize you just might be a hack with, perhaps, nothing particularly new to say.

Now granted, there’s lots of things around us that are essentially pastiche. There’s an essay floating around the internet that deconstructs Star Wars as essentially the King Arthurian legends set in space and borrowing key plot and character elements from the movies The Dam Busters and The Hidden Fortress – and argues rather persuasively that the movies didn’t come into their own until Vader steps out more as his own character and driving force in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

But when you step back and realize that CLUELESS is really a Jane Austen novel, and the first MATRIX suuuuure looks similar to Grant Morrison’s first volume of THE INVISIBLES, and somehow ALEX ROSS’ US plays almost like a word for word extropolation of Alan Moore’s proposed treatment of the Uncle Sam character in his TWILIGHT proposal… I gotta wonder how much creativity is out there.

Exapno Mapcase: I see your post as I preview… I’ll read it more carefully soon.

8

Larry Mudd, Exapno Mapcase. I see room for another axiom here. If “There is nothing new under the sun,” might it be because “90% of everything is crap?”

Is the fact that very few artists (not just writers, mind, but artists), work hard to make their work timeless and accessible to audiences years from now part of the problem with referencing other, often contemporaneous works? (I recall reading about Charles M. Schultz, how – on top of his insane work ethic, minimalist compositions and longevity – worked hard to make sure his strip could be understood 100 years from now. I think this was in his Rheta Grimesly Johnson bio )

I mean, if you’re going to frame your work to go with the classics, to some extent that’s fine. Chaucer, Milton, Sophocles, Aesop, the Gilgamesh epic, the Bible, The Torah, The Koran? Sure. West Side Syory is essentially Romeo & Juliet transported to a modern, urban backdrop – I can’t really have a problem with that.

It almost smacks of an intellectual and artistic failing to realize that the complete KILL BILL swipes a heretofore unimagined fourth generation character for Sonny Chiba’s character from one earlier Chiba film, and swipes the Pai Mei character from another film series, and resurrects the sheriff character (who supposedly died) from an earlier film you yourself wrote, use all that to marry your usual naked feet footage and Apple Cigarette ads and litter the film with dozens of pop culture references (including verbatim dialogue and the haunting whistling tune) for people to puzzle over. I’m not saying the plot, dialogue, casting choices weren’t inspired – I loved both parts of KILL BILL – but with so much detail cobbled from outside sources, is it still “art?” Or is it artificial?

9

I read Hyperion ages ago, but I never picked up on this at the time. Which writers?

10

Warning- long digressions ahead…

Kill Bill is a special case. It is a total mess of movie culture references. But that is because it is ultimately about movies. Through this movie Tarentino was trying to make sense of his personal facination with exploitation movies. Explotation movies are an interesting genre because they feature strong characters from often ignored minorities. But they are also exploitation, and rely on racism and stereotypes even as they fight them. Through Kill Bill, Tarentino was looking at the complicated portrayals of minorities and women in exploitation films, and ultimately writing a conclusion to various exploitation genres (in the sense that The Searchers was a critique and conclusion for the Western) that reclaims the generes by putting the control in the hands of the exploited and ultimately ending the cycle (which can also be read as a critique of the movie industry as well).

In this case Tarentino has used the very stuff of pop culture to talk about pop culture. He did something similar in Pulp Fiction (which I hated- I’m not a Tarentino fan by far) to show that we are living in such a post-modern world that it’s impossible to seperate our sense of reality (and time, history, meaning, etc) from pop culture- especially movies.

It’s a bit more complicated and interesting than throwing a bunch of cheap pop cultural references into the script of your animated film.

All art is about humanity and the world we live in. The world we live in is shaped by popular culture and increasingly the media. It’s impossible to pretend that we can distill something “pure” to make art out of that isn’t a product of our times and the culture around us.

At the same time, there are more interesting things to do with this than go for cheap laughs (although that can be done pretty masterfully- Death to Smoochey had whole sequences from The Manchurian Candidate and it was hilarious) or play it off as ironic and nihlistic.

The Matrix is an interesting counterpoint to Kill Bill. It was a mishmash of names and phrases that seemed like they were symbolic and meaningful (Trinity, Neo, the Oracle) but ultimately added up to nothing but a bunch of empty signifiers. The viewer walks away thinking for a moment they’ve seen something signifigant, but these references arn’t signifigant unless there is a unifying factor or they are a comment on themselves. Perhaps The Matrix is a commentary on the bankrupcy of pop philosophy or something overarching like that, but I’m pretty sure thats not the case.

I guess like anything else, it can be done well or it can be done poorly.

11

I’m interested too. Which writers?

12

It’s been fifteen years, guys. All I can remember off the top of my head is that the Sol Weintraub section is clearly a Silverberg pastiche. Let me ask around and see if I can find someone with a better memory for specifics.