Sorcery in Media

[Judd]

Sorcerer is on my mind again as I look over the annotated edition and I'm finding sorcery in odd places in the media.

Yesterday, while driving out of upstate New York to move to NYC, the song, Call Me Maybe came on and this pop hit that took over the radio last summer hit me with this lyric:

I threw a wish in the well, Don't ask me, I'll never tell I looked to you as it fell, And now you're in my way
I'd trade my soul for a wish, Pennies and dimes for a kiss I wasn't looking for this, But now you're in my way

And then I was watching Big with Tom Hanks and the kid starts hitting the machine at the amusement park and its eyes light up red and I saw it as an act of Sorcery.

Just wondered if anyone else was seeing Sorcery around in the media.

[Justice Platt]

This happens to me all the time.  I saw two mid season 4 House MD episodes a couple nights back and started sorcer-izing in my head, and re-watched The King of Comedy the next day and had a reverie about a one-sheet based on that & Larry Sanders.  I thin it's a testimony to the power of the demon-relationship metaphor.

Top Hat is on now, and I figure that'll happen again, now I'm thinking on it.

[Steve Hickey]

I'm pretty sure the main character in the Oscar-nominated short Paperman (6 minute video) is summoning a demon.

[Judd]

I am reading A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham and it is so very Sorcerer. In the book, poets can summon and bind Andats, who are bits of poetry made real. Janaki read the first book last week and told me it reminded her of Sorcerer and she is so right.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60776562

Check it out!

[glandis]

I described the Abraham andat to a friend as the vat-grown offspring of Sorcerer and Nobilis.  Vat-grown, because neither parent could physically tolerate even the thought of an actual mating ...

I found myself drawn to the idea of running a demons-as-andat Sorcerer game, but it's tricky - seems like the andat all share the same Need (to not exist).  And there's a different take on the "demons don't exist" angle - I mean, the "these basterds defy reality" thing is there all right, but the andat are well known in the world in general as both key economic players and, essentially, a nuclear deterent for the city-states.

Actually, saying that, it occurs to me that the Long Price Quartet is also kinda like personal/character-driven Sorcerer meets economic/political-driven Spione/Shahida.  While I remember enjoying the books, there were times I felt like I lost track of how the series was tied together - a re-read may be called for.

[Ron Edwards]

I was planning to reply to this a while ago and apparently forgot ...

At one point in the core book annotations, I mention some of the influences on the game - only some of which concern sorcery and demons. Currently I think there are three distinct types of influential (or if you like, Sorcerer-like) stories.

1. The obvious: stories about people summoning and binding demons, or things which are so demonic as to be demons even if the specific word isn't employed. These are, no pun intended, legion, from The Exorcist to Stormbringer to all manner of stuff often mentioned here or in the older Adept forum. These stories are either explicitly occult or explicitly otherworldly, easily pegged as "fantasy." A little thought instantly puts a lot more hard-SF into this camp than one might think, such as the better Terminator stories. If I'd wanted to focus on this kind of story in the game, then the core book would have been Sorcerer & Sword, with a little expanded material to show how it applies to Gundam Wing and stuff like that.

2. The slightly less obvious: stories about human arrogance, desperation, and passion which are extremely surreal in one or more components - John D. MacDonald's The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything (his best book) and the film Onibaba are pretty good examples. These are "fantastic" in the technical sense of the word, although when it's not bookstore-defined SF or fantasy the literary world likes to dress it up as "magical realism" or "symbolic" or whatever to avoid genre labeling. I've tried hard to include these references in all my Sorcerer books in the interest of combating this obfuscation. It's also why I've resisted all attempts to promote Sorcerer as a genre-limited goetic or occult game.

3. The non-obvious: totally naturalistic stories about the same human issues with very strong contingent and consequential plot components, which is a very hard thing to pull off without the useful tools of fantasy or surrealism. Clearly my standout example is Ross MacDonald's detective fiction, which is the backbone of The Sorcerer's Soul, and more than once I've stated that the film Carne Trémula ("Live Flesh") is the Sorcerer film, which probably puzzles people who think I would choose something in #1 above for such a statement. Maybe a kind of halfway between #2 above and this category would be somewhat obscurantist, highly symbolic, and deeply passionate stories like Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

So I'm posting this to say that explicit demon-content (awesome though it is) is certainly not the defining feature for what I think of as Sorcerer in action. Justice, your post is right on target - those and similar stories give me the "Oooh Sorcerer!" chills too.

Um ... don't get me wrong. When you spot a "this is a demon" story and it's good, announce it in the thread, by all means. I'd like to get a decent reference list up at the website and it'd be cool to build it here; that purpose, the more demonic the better. Let's not become limited by that, is all.

Best, Ron

[Justice Platt]

Ron, can you clarify what you mean by "contingent" and "consequential" plot events, and why fantastic/surreal elements make them easier to do?  I can't really make sense of what those terms would mean, since it seems like all plot elements would necessarily be contingent, since they could have been written otherwise, for good or ill, and ditto on consequential (Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing so much as sharing how I'm trying to make sense of them).   So, yeah, puzzled.

Also, for bibliographic purposes, Breaking Bad seems as sorcerous as they come in terms of more recent fiction.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Justice,

Sure. By "contingent," I'm not talking about the real-world fact that the author might have made it go differently. I'm talking about the in-fiction circumstances which the reader interprets as a character potentially acting upon more than one viable choice, and whatever's happening that that moment that makes what he or she does seem exactly "right, " or inevitably what he or she "must" do. I'm also talking about the plot-relevant in-fiction circumstances which the reader interprets as "of course it must be that way, at this time and in this place," i.e., inevitable for that character. Obviously both of these are contrived by the author, but in the fiction - and in enjoying it - they can be done well, such that the reader does not experience them as contrived.

By consequential, I mean that the contingent feature forces a choice, or a successful or unsuccessful action, into a given outcome that really matters to the plot. (That's what I meant by "plot-relevant" above.) If Bob had made it to the deserted house first, then Jane wouldn't have been there lurking with a knife when he arrived, and he would have found the jade toad statue instead of being taken out of the story via fatal stabbing. But Jane got there first, and if one troubles to think about it, wow, with Bob still in the story, every other character would have acted totally differently from that point forward. Why did Jane get there first? In reality, the author said so. In the fiction, there's some in-story, experiential way in which this works for the reader as part of the story.

In the novel The Three Musketeers, the time it takes to ride on horseback through a given forest is absolutely crucial to the outcomes of at least two major scenes, if I remember correctly, and therefore to the entire plot of the second half of the book. I have no idea why in this case, this author-contrived in-fiction fact (i.e. that the characters must ride through it with exactly so much time on the "ticking clock" of their problems) is perfectly enjoyable and does not irritate me like equally author-contrived circumstances do in other stories. I do know that the difference in presentation, whatever it is, is one of the hard lines in my head separating a good story from a bad one.

I think fantastic elements, and especially demons, allow for such things to be put into place much more easily for an author. You can set up exactly how they work as "in-fiction rules" early in the story, which by the time a given consequential contingency arrives, the reader accepts them as valid influences on it. Since they are not anchored in the external reality, the author doesn't have do that ... thing, whatever it is, that makes Dumas' forest work. The author only must make the fantastic element (spell, demon, whatever) work a certain way and establish that well ahead of time. Done badly, the contrivance leaps up quite obviously in the reader's face, but it can be done well.

(Usually, I am unsympathetic to the fact that for most of the history of the modern novel, literary theorists and highbrow reviewers have sneered at fantastic elements, for example dismissing Wilkie Collins' books in comparison with Dickens'. This is the one tiny way in which I admit that they might, sometimes, have a point. Totally not as much as they think they do.)

Let me know if that makes sense to you. I'm not trying to convince you it's true. I'm not a literary theorist and could be horribly, horribly wrong about the whole thing. For better or worse, it's merely what has settled and silted down in my mind over the years.

Best, Ron

P.S. Please don't anyone say "suspension of disbelief." I hate that phrase and I'm tired of explaining why. I worked really hard here to choose words that really do mean what I want to say. That phrase isn't it.

[Justice Platt]

That makes sense.  If I can attempt to extend with an example, since I haven't read the Dumas, I figure that The Philadelphia Story, say, falls way the hell down on those standards, with the incredibly elastic treatment of time in the second act as the least of its offenses on these lines.   

I think this illuminates a bit of sorcer-ness for me as well, continuing with The Philadelphia Story (1940 Grant, Hepburn & Stewart movie version if anyone might possibly have been confused) as an example.  It's got lots of relationships for which sorcery makes an effective metaphor in it, but I'm not sure it works (in my mind anyway) as a Sorcerer story straight up, since all of Tracy's actions in the picture seem very strongly tracked to produce a kind of fable about Tracy-there's just no sens that things could have happened differently for Tracy.  I mean, obviously, she's not going to marry Kittredge, but a different movie with more of contingency & consequence have, I think, left up with a feeling that Stewart, Grant, or just staying single were live possibilities.  I think it's probably possible to do the same exercise for Jimmy Stewart & Cary Grant in that movie.

Or, at least, this what I'm doing with the categories you've outlined. 

I tend to wonder if it isn't like, stylized trappings in general don't serve some of the function of fantastic & surreal elements in other fiction as well.  Like, Jim Thompson's less extravagant novels, or Charles Willeford's crime stories. Or    mafia stories, or showbiz stories.  Lots of 'em are naturalistic only by a very broad stretch of the definition, but aren't category 2, either. 

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Justice,

That's a great post. I agree with you that Philadelphia Story especially; it's as if there were a rather edgy and thoughtful drama about how a genuinely independent woman chooses the right guy (or at all), but other conventions came along and hushed it up. In fact, I think She's Gotta Have It is Philadelphia Story "done right," or better, "thoroughly." (And SGHI is one hell of a definite member in the no-demons-just-people Sorcerer camp.)

Best, Ron